Fans of true crime stories and the intricacies of police work will enjoy the Cleveland Police Historical Society and Museum, which details the city's police force from 1866 to the present. Exhibits cover various aspects of policing, and feature some of the "firsts" originally developed by Cleveland's force, including the police call box and the closed circuit camera. Over a thousand photographs and artifacts document the history of the Motorcycle, Canine, and Mounted Units, as well as the Ports & Harbors Unit, which features the recovered black box of the Air Force Thunderbird that crashed into Lake Erie in 1981, and photos of the search and rescue effort.
Visitors will find the most chilling display, however, in the collection of Death Masks and the story of the infamous 1935 Kinsbury Run Murders, a spree which left twelve people dead over the course of three years. Death masks were made of the victims in 1938 and placed on display in an effort to discover their identities, but neither the victims nor the murderer were ever identified, and the case remains one of Cleveland's most notorious unsolved mysteries.
