Though Murder Has No Tongue (22 page)

Thanks to Frank Dolezal's “timely” death, the cloud of guilt that had hung over him since his arrest early in July 1939 was never resolved legally and, therefore, literally became frozen in time; he would be forever known as the man who was arrested for the Kingsbury Run murders, who may or may not have been guilty and who may or may not have committed suicide to avoid prosecution. Thanks to the willing cooperation of a host of highly educated individuals, Mark and I had come as close as we possibly could to verifying that he was murdered. But that sense of accomplishment proved short-lived and oddly unfulfilling. It seems a truism of cold case research that hard-fought-for answers only lead to more questions. And so it was with the death of Frank Dolezal. Assuming he was murdered, who did it? And why? Granted, the already shaky case against him would have probably collapsed entirely when the Grand Jury scrutinized closely in September 1939 what little evidence that existed—an eventuality that would leave the sheriff with egg on his face and send local law enforcement off on yet another determined quest for the real perpetrator. Obviously, such a scenario would be embarrassing in the extreme to both O'Donnell and his office if it had occurred; but is avoiding public embarrassment in a high-profile case a sufficient reason for committing a murder? The “who” will most likely always remain a mystery, but the “why” is another matter. If one looks closely at the accumulated tangle of Kingsbury Run fact and legend, it is possible to discern vague hints of a plausible motive for Dolezal's death. There is a dark presence, silent and ominous, looming behind the bricklayer's vacant stare—the shadow of another man. Our journey was still not over; there were more chapters that needed to be written.

N
OTES

All the quotations attributed to Mercyhurst faculty and students have been culled from the three sessions taped by Dave Brodowski.

Marcella Fierro's judgment is from one of her e-mails to me in winter 2008.

Part 3

R
ECKONING

Chapter 8

A
LL IN THE
F
AMILY

W
hen Eliot Ness died of
a massive heart attack at his Pennsylvania home in 1957, he was a largely forgotten man in rather desperate financial circumstances. In the years just before his untimely death at the age of fifty-four, Cleveland's former safety director shared stories about his exploits in law enforcement with writer Oscar Fraley, a collaboration that ultimately resulted in Fraley's two books
The Untouchables
and
Four against the Mob.
During their wide-ranging conversations, Ness broke his silence on the twenty-year-old torso case and confided to Fraley that, while the very public police investigation was pressing forward largely under the guidance of Detective Peter Merylo, he had had his eye on man whom he felt was a viable—perhaps, the most viable—suspect in the officially unsolved murders, though exactly what led to these suspicions remains rather murky. At some undisclosed point in time, according to Ness, he had his operatives pick up the suspect and bring him in for questioning. Ness insisted that he administered a lie detector test that unequivocally pointed to his suspect's guilt, but he could do nothing due to the total lack of any supporting evidence. Once released from custody, the suspect entered a mental institution (where he subsequently died), a move that seemed to put him beyond the long arm of the law's reach. Ness called this mysterious figure Gaylord Sundheim: obviously not the suspect's real name and an extraordinarily curious pseudonym for a no-nonsense lawman like Ness to employ. Why not simply use the standard “John Doe”? Hovering over this entire cloak-and-dagger tale was the implication that the suspect was somehow connected to someone with political clout and that that connection, coupled with the facts that he was already institutionalized and the hard evidence against him was virtually nonexistent, ultimately saved him from the full wrath of the law. Over the years, variations of this intriguing tale, some of them embellished to the point of ridiculousness, have made the rounds in various true crime books.

At the time, Ness remained the only source for this curious coda to the city's most infamous murders; there seemed no other way to verify it. Some
commentators insisted his story just did not add up. First of all, where did the lie detector come from? The East Cleveland Police Department owned the only polygraph in the Cuyahoga County area at the time; and, though Sheriff O'Donnell had—with great press fanfare—escorted Frank Dolezal there for a much ballyhooed test, there was no evidence that anyone else in city law enforcement, especially Safety Director Ness, had ever hauled out a suspect on a similar mission or that the East Cleveland Police Department had ever loaned the machine to Cleveland proper. And who would have administered the test? Certainly not Ness! His law enforcement credentials did not include polygraph expertise. For decades, the story remained either a plausible but unverifiable explanation for the Kingsbury Run horror or an imaginative flight of fancy on the part of the man who had once been the country's most famous law enforcement officer.

To this day, Democratic congressman Martin L. Sweeney of the 20th District ranks as one of the most colorful political figures Cleveland has ever seen. He was always good press, and the city's three dailies loved him. With Martin
Sweeney around, there was no such thing as a slow news day. In 1932 he had broken—very publicly and very noisily—with the county party organization and put together his own alliance of disaffected and independent-minded Democrats. From then on, he battled vigorously on two different political fronts: Cuyahoga County's traditional Democratic Party structure and the city's Republican administration. His deep and obvious affection for his Irish forebears and their country was coupled with a predictable, virulent, and equally obvious hatred of the British. He was a noisy populist who prided himself on standing up for the working man. Every year he hosted a Cuyahoga River–Lake Erie excursion on the
Goodtime
for his rebel band of cronies and loyalists. Rather like Orson Welles's famous newspaper czar, Charles Foster Kane, Congressman Sweeney took a well-defined position on every public and party issue that came his way. It would not be an exaggeration to say that he personified “marching to the beat of a different drummer.” The torso murders obviously provided him with the most potent and deadly political hand grenades any opposition party politician could ask for; and the seeming inability of Harold Burton's Republican administration, specifically Safety Director Eliot Ness, to make any real headway in solving the case ensured the maverick congressman an endless supply of fiery missiles to lob at city hall. Never one to turn away from a political brawl, time and again Sweeney railed at the Burton-Ness regime for wasting valuable time, manpower, and tax dollars on what he saw as relatively insignificant problems, such as the occasional city cop who might accept a dollar or two under the table to turn a blind eye to some bit of minor local corruption when a still unidentified murderer was raging through the decaying inner city, leaving behind human body parts as calling cards. In a typically virulent diatribe before the League of Independent Voter Clubs on March 6, 1937, he blasted Eliot Ness as Mayor Harold Burton's “alter ego.” “We don't need ‘Ness men' or yes men in City Hall,” he raged in the
Press
on August 16. Over the months and years, Sweeney no doubt watched the endless parade of suspects hauled in by the police for interrogation with as much interest as any other Clevelander: the mentally deranged, the down-and-out, the violent and dangerous, the low-level criminals, the boozers and brawlers, those around whom any rumors of bizarre behavior swirled. There is no extant document of any sort or any bit of oral legend to confirm the discovery; but somehow, somewhere, sometime Congressman Martin L. Sweeney must have learned that Eliot Ness had his eye on a secret suspect in the grisly series of decapitation murders, and that man was not Frank Dolezal or anyone like him. The man upon whom Ness was focusing his attention and the full resources of his office, the man whom the safety director suspected had terrorized the city from the mid-1930s until
the end of the decade was Sweeney's own cousin—the son of his father's younger brother—Dr. Francis Edward Sweeney.

A young man on the way up. Martin L. Sweeney in the early years of his political career.
Cleveland Press
Archives, Cleveland State University.

Cleveland has always been a melting pot, boasting of one of the largest and most diverse immigrant populations in the country, perhaps second only to New York. The first Irish began to trickle into the city during the early 1820s; abandoning the traditional agrarian occupations of their homeland, many found work in the steel mills or as laborers building the Ohio & Erie Canal. However, it was not until the great potato famine of the 1840s that the Irish began settling along the southern shore of Lake Erie in substantial numbers. The exact genealogical history of the Sweeney family (or families) in Cleveland remains almost impossible for an outsider to untangle. As is the case for most common laborers of no particular civic distinction in the nineteenth century, very few traces of them survive in public records; the army of census enumerators, city directory compilers, and other public officials also commit a host of errors involving birth dates, ages, addresses, places of birth, and the proper spelling of names. A relatively small handful of first names, such as John, Joseph, Martin, Francis, Mary, occur over and over again. Middle names or initials that could help to distinguish one “John” from another are rare; and there are even variant spellings of the name Sweeney—“Sweeny” being the most common, “Swaany” the most creatively botched. (The “Swaany” version appears on the record of Francis Edward's birth. The name would have been provided by Francis's parents, and it is easy to imagine that, when uttered with a thick Irish brogue, “Sweeney” could easily have sounded like “Swaany” to whomever was recording the information.)