Though Murder Has No Tongue (10 page)

Cleveland's press corps and legal fraternity became increasingly alarmed over the conduct of the sheriff and his office toward their prisoner and began
to air their concerns openly. “Is Frank Dolezal the torso murderer? Or is he a harmless psychopath who has been forced into admitting a crime he did not commit?” asked
Press
reporter William Miller. “Lawyers agree Dolezal's rights have been infringed on,” the paper declared. “He has been held six nights and five days without charge. Courts have held that 72 hours is the reasonable length of time a man may be held without charges.” The civil liberties committee of the Cleveland Bar Association fired off a formal letter to Sheriff O'Donnell asking him to appear at their noon meeting at the Hotel Allerton on July 12 and explain, according to the
Plain Dealer,
“why the usual procedure of preferring charges against confessed criminals had not been followed in this case.” In an unsigned, page one editorial, titled “The Sheriff and the Law,” the
Cleveland News
openly questioned the legality of O'Donnell's conduct.

This editorial has to deal with the strange case of Frank Dolezal, the extralegal tactics of Sheriff O'Donnell, and civil liberties. Without attempting to determine the guilt or innocence of Frank Dolezal,
The News
does not believe the cause of justice is being served in a high degree by the apparent political campaign which has claimed headlines of newspapers throughout the nation. Sheriff O'Donnell has had one week in which to make up his mind as to the guilt or innocence of Prisoner Frank Dolezal. So far he has shown no indication of this intent. He has detained a prisoner without risking a formal charge against the prisoner. He has presented no evidence to the County Prosecutor's office. He has made no contacts with the Cleveland police department with a view to turning the prisoner over to this department. [As nearly as I can determine, this is the first and only time this jurisdictional issue was ever raised by the press or anyone else.] Frank Dolezal happens to be a derelict without money or influence. He has lived in a half-world of clouded and rather shady surroundings. But the Constitution of this land states that he may not be deprived of his liberty without due process. Sheriff O'Donnell knows as well as any one what due process means. Dolezal has been in the custody of Sheriff O'Donnell one week without any charge filed against him. It is time for some tangible legal action.

The legal chickens were, indeed, coming home to roost! Sheriff's detective Harry S. Brown, however, obligingly fell on his sword for his boss, insisting that O'Donnell had, indeed, wanted to press formal charges against Dolezal but that he, Brown, had counseled against the move until they had what they deemed a more solid case. In spite of the
News
's very public and deliberate slap in the face, it would seem that the sheriff finally had reason to celebrate; after
nearly a week of on-again, off-again interrogation and endless statements to the press, the case against Frank Dolezal had finally come together: his guilt had been confirmed through lie detector examination; the possibility of an insanity defense had been headed off; and O'Donnell finally had a confession he felt was legitimate. Exactly what that confession said, however, remained something of a mystery. “The confession will be for the grand jury's consumption and will not be made public,” the sheriff told the
Plain Dealer.
The next step would be an arraignment on a charge of murder. At 3:30 that afternoon, Dolezal appeared in court before Justice of the Peace Myron J. Penty and was formally charged with first degree murder in the death of Flo Polillo. The onetime bricklayer entered no plea and was held without bail; his case was handed over to the Grand Jury, which would reconvene on July 24. The
Plain Dealer
indignantly reported that while the formal proceedings were moving forward, state senator William J. Zoul stood outside Penty's door flagging down passersby and inviting them “to come inside—the torso killer's in there.”

But questions about the case against Frank Dolezal stubbornly persisted. After the sheriff had arrested him, Peter Merylo complained to his superior, Police Chief George Matowitz, that the bricklayer was innocent, that he had
investigated him thoroughly and questioned him on two separate occasions. He never would have released him, he insisted, if he had any lingering suspicions about him. Counseled by Matowitz that political realities dictated the sheriff must be allowed to build his case without interference, Merylo initially stayed in the background and, for the most part, reluctantly held his tongue. But the entire affair had further lowered the veteran detective's already abysmal assessment of the sheriff and his office, and he began to grumble openly. If no one in the press took his protestations too seriously at this point—in spite of their own doubts about some aspects of the Dolezal drama—it was probably because circumstances had cast Merylo in the unenviable role of sore loser. The sheriff and his men had invaded his territory and succeeded where he had failed. Anything Merylo said at this juncture ran the risk of being branded as simply sour grapes on his part. In his unpublished memoirs, however, Merylo pointed out that Dolezal's third explanation regarding Polillo's head was as ludicrously absurd as the previous two. Dolezal's WPA time card not only showed that he had been working at East Technical High School at the time of the Polillo murder but clearly proved he had never even been assigned to the Lake Shore Drive project. “This same record was open to inspection to the Sheriff or any member of his staff,” he snorted contemptuously, “but no such attempt was made to examine those records.” And, once having admitted to the murder-dismemberment of Flo Polillo, why would Dolezal lie, apparently twice, about what he had done with her head? At that point, what difference did it make? (In fairness, however, I must point out that the sheriff and his office considered the possibility that Dolezal remained reluctant to reveal the location of Flo Polillo's head because it would have led to the discovery of other heads, thus implicating him in the other murders, in spite of his adamant refusal to admit that he had anything to do with them.)

Frank Dolezal, in a clean shirt, being escorted to his arraignment hearing. The bruising around his eye is still obvious. Pat Lyons and Sheriff O'Donnell are to the left.
Cleveland Press
Archives, Cleveland State University.

Frank Dolezal's deeply worried brother Charles (third from left) and his wife, Louise (second from right), at the arraignment hearing.
Cleveland Press
Archives, Cleveland State University.

Suddenly, the local legal tangle became a Gordian knot of national proportions: enter the American Civil Liberties Union! The involvement of the ACLU's national office in the Dolezal affair attests to the nationwide press coverage the entire torso case was receiving and shines an embarrassing light on the laxity of Sheriff O'Donnell's office in safeguarding its prisoner's rights under the law. A July 8 article in the
Nashua (New Hampshire) Telegraph
—originally carried by the Associated Press—reported that Frank Dolezal had been held without charges for days by Cleveland authorities. The revelation prompted Mrs. Sidney Knight (presumably a Nashua native) to fire off a letter of alarm and protest to the ACLU's national office. “If true,” Mrs. Knight wrote, “it would appear that Cleveland has reverted to barbarism and has disregarded the hard-won rights of us all—that they have ignored the principle that ‘A man is innocent until he is proved guilty,' they have violated the right of habeas corpus, and they have usurped the powers of judge and jury.” Strong words, indeed, and no doubt fighting words to the ACLU. The office in Cleveland was duly alerted that a gross miscarriage of justice festered on its doorstep, but, coincidentally, the local chapter already had the sheriff and his office lined up in its crosshairs. At around 2:00 in the afternoon of July 11, a six-man legal team—including former Common Pleas judge David R. Hertz, former assistant U.S. district attorney Martin A. McCormack, and acting chairman of the local ACLU chapter Russell W. Chase—went to the county jail to meet with the sheriff and demand an explanation for his office's conduct toward their prisoner. O'Donnell, however, pleaded that he was tied up in meetings, so the members of the ACLU committee were left to stew in their indignation and twiddle their collective thumbs for the rest of the afternoon. “After a considerable wait,” reported Chase angrily to the national office in a letter dated July 17, “it became clear that the Sheriff refused to meet with our committee.” The disgruntled team left around 5:00 or so, leaving only David Hertz to battle with the sheriff's office.

The good judge found himself cooling his heels and sharing his frustration with attorney Fred P. Soukup, who had apparently been hired, somewhat belatedly, by Charles Dolezal to represent his brother. Unfortunately, there is no record of how or exactly when Soukup became involved in the case, but he had been as unsuccessful as Judge Hertz and the ACLU committee in gaining access to his beleaguered client and the sheriff. Though O'Donnell finally granted Soukup permission to meet with Dolezal for the first time, he insisted Hertz would have to stay put unless he was a member of the defense team. “I
am not interested in this case beyond whether this man was mistreated in the jail,” the judge told the
Plain Dealer.
When Soukup left the county jail later that evening, after finally meeting with his client for thirty-five minutes, he informed the press that Frank Dolezal “did not act like a normal person” and had retracted his third confession. “He denies the killing [of Flo Polillo],” Soukup told the
Plain Dealer.
“He denies he is the torso murderer. He says he was in a daze when he made the confession. I know a lot about how the confession was obtained, but I'm not prepared to say anything yet.” In a move that spoke volumes about what Soukup knew, or at least suspected, about “how the confession was obtained,” the lawyer arranged—with the sheriff's consent—for an independent physician, L. J. Sternicki, to examine his client at 10:00 that night.

The extraordinarily hectic and dramatic day ended with Frank Dolezal receiving his second visitor: Monsignor Oldrich Zlamal of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church on East 53rd. Dolezal's religious affiliation had not been of any particular interest to the men of Cleveland's press corps as they pieced together their portrait of the alleged sexual deviant and torso killer, but whatever Dolezal's beliefs may have been, he was finally granted some sort of spiritual comfort in the sixth day of his incarceration. Reportedly, Dolezal admitted to Zlamal that he had, indeed, attempted suicide twice in the early morning hours of Monday, July 10, citing sheer desperation and feelings of abandonment by his family and friends as his rationale. (Up to this point Charles Dolezal had apparently made no attempt to visit his beleaguered brother since his arrest.) Obviously, the admission was not a formal penitent-to-priest confession recognized by the church; if it had been, Zlamal could never have revealed its contents to the press. But that a man raised a strict Catholic would even think of taking his own life testifies to the incredible level of distress Dolezal must have been enduring. And the problem of the visible injuries noted by onlookers on the afternoon of July 10 remained: Were they caused, as the sheriff insisted, by his botched suicide attempts or by something far more sinister?

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EDNESDAY
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ULY
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East Cleveland police chief L. G. Corlett dropped his own bombshell on top of this ever-developing legal imbroglio. “Says Dolezal Told of Beating,” screamed the
Press.
At one point, the sheriff left the room in which Paul F. Beck was conducting the lie detector test; Dolezal quickly turned to Corlett and desperately insisted that he had been beaten by men in the sheriff's
office. According to Corlett, Dolezal had bitterly complained that his ribs hurt. “They made me. They kept at me until I got crazy. They beat me up.” Though Corlett was inclined to dismiss what he regarded as wild allegations, a bell had been rung, and there was no way to un-ring it. Two days before, the entire city had watched as sheriff's men led a dazed Frank Dolezal to a waiting car for his trip to East Cleveland; everyone had noticed the fresh black eye and the obvious signs of pain as the prisoner gripped his side. Add to this both Soukup's having called in an independent medical man to examine his client and his own ominously chilling words to the press the night before: “I know a lot about how the confession was obtained.” But Soukup refused to disclose the conclusions about Dolezal's physical condition that Sternicki had arrived at following his examination the previous evening, nor would he clarify or expand on what he implied he knew about the sheriff's methods in extracting the string of confessions from his client. “He [Dolezal] has to stay in jail and if he has been beaten it won't do him any good to say so,” Soukup told the
Press.
“I won't say whether he has or whether he hasn't.”