Though Murder Has No Tongue (12 page)

Few, if any, noticed during those first heady days of excitement in early July that there was a problem; the portrait of the killer that had emerged from the careful deliberations of former coroner A. J. Pearce's torso clinic seemed to have been largely forgotten. Few, if any, among law enforcement, members of the press, or the public seemed to notice that Dolezal came nowhere near fitting the profile that had been so carefully crafted almost three years earlier. True, the press had grumbled about problems and inconsistencies in the official version of the Dolezal saga in the days following his arrest; but those doubts had been prompted by the immediate circumstances, not any lingering memories or respect for the torso clinic's profile. There had been unanimous agreement among the clinic participants that the Butcher had to be large and powerful. Though a stocky, strong working man, Frank Dolezal was smaller than some of the victims; how did he overpower them—especially Edward Andrassy, who, besides being a taller man, was rumored to have carried an ice pick? Dolezal had been a bricklayer for most of his working life; where did he learn to cut up a corpse with the surgical precision noted by the medical men at the torso clinic? Would three months of employment in a
slaughterhouse give him the necessary skill? Though he lived in a succession of shabby apartments in run-down buildings in the central city's crumbling core, he would seem to lack the necessary familiarity with Kingsbury Run. There was nothing that specifically tied him to the desolate industrial landscape or the adjacent shantytowns. Dolezal certainly had no car, nor is there any indication anywhere he even knew how to drive; how did he transport the remains? Certainly not on a public conveyance. It is ludicrous to imagine him sitting on a bus with his sack of body parts beside him. Complicating the transportation issue considerably more is the fact that some of the male bodies were intact except for their heads. Edward Andrassy and his never-identified companion had been discovered at the base of Jackass Hill near East 49th on the south side of Kingsbury Run. Frank Dolezal's apartments and drinking haunts were all on the north side, closer to East 20th. Given the distance between these two spots and assuming—as the sheriff and his allies did—that Dolezal carried out the murders where he lived, it is impossible to imagine him lugging two heavy male corpses (minus heads and sex organs) across the Run without someone having noticed something out of the ordinary. And where was his laboratory—the isolated spot where he supposedly carried out his murderous activities and subsequent dismemberments free from any worries of detection? The only locations that came close to fitting the bill were the bathtubs in the various apartments in which he had resided. Even if he possessed the necessary anatomical expertise, could he have accomplished such exacting work while trying to maneuver the dead weight of a bulky human corpse in the narrow confines of an old tub?

There was also an additional, significant aspect of the Butcher's methodology that everyone in the late 1930s, including the hand-picked experts who had participated in the torso clinic, missed. The manner in which the Butcher had left the remains of some of his victims clearly indicated a severely warped sense of humor—the artist-joker proudly displaying his handiwork for all to see while at the same time thumbing his nose at the authorities. The heads of Edward Andrassy and victim no. 2 had been buried so as to ensure that the police could find them; some of Flo Polillo's remains had been carefully wrapped, packed, and covered with burlap bags; the head of victim no. 4 had been neatly rolled up in his pants and placed at the foot of a small tree. All such staging suggests someone with a high degree of intelligence deliberately taunting and mocking the police even as he horrified the public. “Look at what I can do!” “Catch me if you can.” Such twisted but sophisticated antics hardly seemed to fit the personality of someone so simple as Frank Dolezal.

Had the torso clinic profile that had been so carefully fashioned and so proudly trumpeted by the press really been so readily forgotten? It would
seem so. Granted, this crucial conference had occurred almost three years before Dolezal's arrest, and it hardly strains credulity to suggest that public and official relief was great enough to banish any nagging doubts or lingering suspicions about his guilt stemming from the conclusions drawn at that meeting. Perhaps politics had reared its ugly head. Coroner Sam Gerber would have certainly been acutely aware of both the conference and its findings, but he was a staunch Democrat, and the clinic had been the brainchild of his predecessor, A. J. Pearce. Political squabbling and brawling had been a nasty sideshow attraction of the entire investigation. There is no evidence to suggest that Gerber deliberately turned his back on clinic findings for political or even personal considerations; but even though he was only three years into his fifty-year tenure as Cuyahoga County coroner, he had already earned a reputation for zealously guarding his turf against encroachment from other official agencies and for publicly and vociferously defending the sanctity of his medical judgments—behavior that would be devastatingly apparent fifteen years later, during the high-profile investigation into the murder of Marilyn Sheppard. Yet some of Gerber's reported public utterances did reinforce the torso clinic's profile. On Saturday, July 8, the
Plain Dealer
told its readers, “Coroner Samuel R. Gerber asserted the expertness with which the cutting away of the organs had been done made it seem more than ever convincing that the slayer was a person trained in surgery and anatomy.”

No one seems to have taken issue with Paul Beck's determination of guilt via polygraph examination in 1939. Even seventy years later, those who believe Dolezal innocent of the charges leveled against him have not challenged the results of the Keeler polygraph examination directly. And it is not necessary to impugn either Beck's integrity or experience with the machine to question the accuracy of the examination or his interpretation of it. Dolezal had, by his own admission to Monsignor Zlamal, tried to commit suicide twice before the interrogation; and, if he is to be believed, someone in the sheriff's office had beaten him severely. In either or both cases, he would have been in pain, tired, frightened, and, no doubt, extremely agitated—precisely the wrong state of mind and body for an accurate assessment of his veracity via the polygraph! Victor Kovacic, former head of the Cleveland Police Department's Scientific Investigation Unit, stressed that the subject of a polygraph examination must be well rested and as calm as possible to ensure accurate results.

It had been an extraordinary time for Cleveland: two weeks in July boiling over with intense, high-level legal wrangling; damning charges and countercharges;
vicious name-calling and character assassination; and a dramatic, ongoing story that seemed propelled from one sensational event to the next by some furious, demonic drive of its own. It all added up to a major newspaper feeding frenzy; and terrified Clevelanders, hungry for the raw meat being served, instantly devoured every scrap of information provided by the three obliging city dailies. As the ferocity of the media storm abated toward the middle of the month, some significant questions were left dangling—not only unanswered but seemingly unnoticed as well. Why had so many of the major players in both the torso saga and city politics remained curiously, even inexplicably, silent? Granted, the only surviving sources of utterances from public figures would be the city newspapers; but—given the sensational nature of this high-profile, ongoing story and the level of competition among Cleveland's major papers—one would think the armies of reporters might beat the bushes with a vengeance for every possible scrap of information, especially pungent quotes from the city's power elite. Yet, surprisingly little commentary from the involved politicians and law enforcement personnel survives. Merylo had been muzzled by his boss, Chief Matowitz; and the angry detective, convinced of Dolezal's innocence, had stood outwardly silent on the sidelines while at the same time secretly feeding information to the press to torpedo the sheriff's case. Matowitz himself had had nothing to say to the press, even though it was the men under his direct command who had struggled unsuccessfully for five years to crack the terrible series of murder-dismemberments. Ness seems to have limited himself to a single public comment. “The sheriff is to be commended for his investigation,” he told the
Plain Dealer
on July 8. “The leads he has uncovered will, of course, be followed up to see what possible connection the Polillo case may have with any others. My department and I stand ready to make available to the sheriff any information or facilities that he might feel could be of assistance.” Surely as neutral, politically safe, and empty a public statement as any crafted by a modern-day spin doctor! Mayor Harold Burton did not make any public comments, at least none that have survived. Coroner Gerber did make pronouncements relevant to the anatomical findings of his office; but he was strangely silent about Dolezal during the period he was in the sheriff's custody—although he would have much to say about him and his “guilt” in the years to come. Democratic congressman Martin L. Sweeney watched the entire brouhaha in utterly uncharacteristic silence. In the past, he had never passed on an opportunity to bash the Republican administration with its failure to save the city from the torso killer. Also, O'Donnell had been elected sheriff of Cuyahoga County in 1936 as part of an independent Sweeney-led coalition of local maverick Democrats; thus, the congressman's reticence to speak on the record about Dolezal's alleged guilt or to publicly
defend his close political ally and personal friend when he was being besieged by events and battered by the press would seem absolutely inexplicable.

Dolezal had been indicted for the murder of only Flo Polillo, and even that single charge had been reduced to manslaughter. All of O'Donnell's repeated efforts to link him to the other torso killings had failed. During those rancorous two weeks in July, circumstances had created the notion that Flo Polillo may not have been a part of the murder-dismemberment series; and in spite of Gerber's insistence to the contrary—his repeated assurances that all the torso victims had been dispatched by a single perpetrator, that notion persisted. “I have never said or claimed the late Frank Dolezal committed all the so-called Torso crimes,” wrote Pat Lyons in his memoirs. “By his suicide, he deprived himself [of ] his day in court. Likewise, he denied the state its right to prove its charge.” Obviously, if Frank Dolezal was not responsible for all those other grisly deaths, someone else was. The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run was still out there somewhere hidden in the shadows of inner-city grime and decay. Peter Merylo certainly thought so; in the coming weeks, months, even years, he would press his own personal, solitary investigation forward. After his second arraignment on July 19, Frank Dolezal faded from the front pages of city newspapers and then dropped out of them entirely. His case would never go before the Grand Jury when it convened in September, nor would Frank Dolezal ever see the inside of another Cleveland courtroom. But the two-week storm was not over; by the end of August, Cleveland would learn it had merely passed through the eye of the hurricane.

T
HURSDAY
, A
UGUST
24, 1939

Frank Dolezal was dead.

N
OTES

To fill in some of the gaps in the newspaper reports of Frank Dolezal's first weeks in the sheriff's custody, I have included some information gleaned from the formal transcript of the coroner's inquest held on August 26. Similarly, I have fleshed out the account of ACLU involvement with documents originally obtained from the organization's national archives and provided to me by Frank Dolezal's great-niece Mary Dolezal Satterlee.

The small collection of ACLU documents relevant to Frank Dolezal comes from the organization's archives, volume 2136.

See notes at the end of
chapter 2
for a full discussion of Peter Merylo's and Pat Lyons's papers.

Chapter 4

V
IOLENT
D
EATH ON A
H
OT
A
FTERNOON

H
itler
was on the march. By the end of August 1939, the erupting crisis that would lead directly to Germany's invasion of Poland on September 1 was in full swing. All over Europe heads of state postured, ambassadors negotiated, and armies mobilized. Thus, it should be no surprise that, with the very real and ominous threat of world war looming darkly on the horizon, the death of Frank Dolezal in the county jail on August 24 stirred minimal interest in the Cleveland press. Kingsbury Run and everything connected with it seemed to belong to a different age. Even a compellingly gruesome series of decapitation murder-dismemberments seemed relatively unimportant, indeed parochial, in the face of growing world tragedy. But Dolezal's fate prompted Cleveland's legal machinery into swift action, and—behind the news curtain of the gathering European storm—it rolled inexorably forward into a hornets' nest of bitter allegations, whose shock waves would reverberate throughout the city for years.