Though Murder Has No Tongue (4 page)

The dog days of July 1939 settled over an emotionally battered and exhausted city. There had been no horrific killings and dismemberments since August of the preceding year, but any mention in the Cleveland press of an unearthed bone, abandoned clothing, or a missing person sent the public's collective hearts surging into their throats with Pavlovian predictability. The most massive, intense, and publicized police investigation in city history had snared hundreds of potential suspects, shined an embarrassingly revealing light on the deplorable living conditions in and around the downtown area, presented local citizens with an astonishing array of deviants and mentally ill residents subsisting in their midst, exposed the seeming inadequacy of local law enforcement, and tarnished the image of Cleveland's safety director, Eliot Ness.

The legendary lawman may have been able to clean up the police department, muzzle labor racketeering, and cripple the gambling industry; but the Kingsbury Run murders seemed to have stymied him. The term “serial killer” did not appear in the index of the Federal Agent's Handbook; and the brutal cycle of killings simply remained a phenomenon outside his experience, indeed, outside the experience of any contemporary lawman. Law enforcement training in those days didn't cover tracking down and rounding up psychopaths who murdered and dismembered perfect strangers for their own murky, twisted personal reasons. Initially, Ness seems to have wisely adopted a hands-off policy toward the murders and allowed his police department to bear the brunt of both the investigation and press scrutiny. In summer of 1936, however—given the city's full calendar, Mayor Harold Burton advised his safety director that he had to get more directly involved. After the eleventh and twelfth canonical victims turned up in a city dump in August 1938, Ness led a well-publicized raid of the shantytown sprawl in the Flats and Kingsbury Run, rounding up its impoverished, desperate residents and reducing their hovels to ashes. He saw and defended his action as a valid response to an unprecedented situation; he was clearing out the hunting grounds where the unknown Butcher apparently tracked his prey. The local
press, however, tended to characterize his actions as cruel and draconian. And the crumbling inner city still lived in a constant state of barely suppressed panic; the gnawing fears had spread to the outlying suburbs, as well. Cleveland was a city under siege, groaning under the weight of a frightening enemy no one could see. The public wanted answers; officialdom and law enforcement craved redemption; the city needed closure. It seemed that the answer to all those prayers came in early July 1939 when agents acting under orders from Cuyahoga County sheriff Martin L. O'Donnell arrested a fifty-two-year-old Slavic immigrant named Frank Dolezal for the most savage and heinous murders in Cleveland history.

N
OTES

Captain Floyd O'Neil's account of his arrival at the county jail on the afternoon of August 24, 1939, is drawn from his sworn deposition taken by the city's Criminal Investigation Bureau and dated that same day at 6:45
P.M
.

The summary of the local political scene comes from several different articles in
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History
(edited by David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987]) and my conversations with Doris O'Donnell Beaufait, formerly a reporter with both the
Cleveland News
and the
Plain Dealer.
(She is also the niece of then county sheriff Martin L. O'Donnell.)

The account of Coroner A. J. Pearce's torso clinic of September 1936 is drawn from the reports in Cleveland's three daily newspapers.

Chapter 2

T
HE
B
RICKLAYER
,
THE
C
OP
,
AND THE
P
RIVATE
E
YE

I
t's
impossible to say exactly when Frank Dolezal took those first tentative steps on the path that would inevitably lead to his destruction; but by summer 1939, he was a deeply troubled man. Our understandable desire to see the world of law enforcement and crime in simple terms of black and white, of villains and heroes, can sometimes lead us to view those who potentially suffer injustice at the hands of the establishment as totally innocent of any wrongdoing; but the fifty-two-year-old bricklayer was hardly an angel. There is no way to know when his serious drinking problems began; but by July 1939, Frank Dolezal battled full-blown alcoholism and a Jekyll-Hyde personality. When he was sober, he could be gentle, even sweet; his nephews and nieces, children of his brother Charles, treasured fond memories of a kind uncle who, on those rare occasions when he visited, invariably brought them candy and readily treated all the neighborhood youngsters to ice cream. Similarly, his neighbors recalled a gregarious man who enjoyed company—someone who would happily spring for steaks when he had the money and treat his friends to a cookout. But when he had had too much to drink, Dolezal wrestled with a legion of frightening personal demons. Crying jags would consume him, only to be replaced by deep black depressions, intense—almost paranoid—fears, and occasional violent rages. Whisperings about the exact nature of his sexuality also hung over him, and there were vague reports alleging he had been seen loitering around the Terminal Tower on Public Square trying to lure young men to his apartment. A common laborer who never married, by 1939, Dolezal supported himself by practicing his bricklaying trade on a variety of WPA projects. Except for some rumored casual on-again, off-again living arrangements with both men and women, he seems to have spent most of his life alone in a series of small, dilapidated apartments in the crumbling neighborhoods on Cleveland's near west and east sides. At five feet, eight inches, he was a relatively short, though stocky, man. He was hardly the sort of individual people would notice; he was just
another nondescript working stiff trying to put together a meager living in the middle years of the Great Depression. He was, however, also plagued by what was then commonly referred to as a wandering eye, a condition that gave him a vacant, blank, distracted stare—as if he were never quite focusing on the objects and people in front of him. He had glasses to correct the problem but seems to have rarely worn them.

Frank Dolezal was born on May 4, 1887, in what was then simply referred to as Bohemia, to Vaclav and Mary, née Spinka, Dolezal, one of ten children. In 1910 at the age of twenty-three, he immigrated to the United States, apparently making the long sea journey alone. (Over time, Cleveland would absorb three major waves of Czech immigrants, the largest occurring between 1870 and the onset of World War I.) Whatever may have prompted, or forced, him to leave his homeland remains a mystery. Grinding poverty, high taxes, and lack of work drove many of his countrymen to the United States during this period; and as, perhaps, one of the older males in a large family, he may have seen it as his duty to lessen the financial burdens on his beleaguered parents by seeking his fortune on the other side of the Atlantic. In the early years of the twentieth century, Cleveland was a thriving and growing industrial center with a reputation as an ethnic melting pot that rivaled New York's. These circumstances alone would have been sufficient to attract a young Czech man on his own for the first time in his life. Frank Dolezal, however, was following an older sister, Anna, who had already come to America, in 1903 or 1904, and made her home in Cleveland. (An obscure piece of Dolezal family legend maintains a second sister, Antonia, or, perhaps, Antonie Dolezal Lesky, had also made the journey to the United States, though when she came and where she may ultimately have settled are unknown. There is no record of her in Cuyahoga County, which raises the possibility that “Anna” and “Antonie/Antonia” may have been the same person.) In 1913, on the eve of the Great War, one of Frank's younger brothers, Charles, became the third or fourth Dolezal sibling to cross the Atlantic. (Charles's given name was actually Karel. “Frank,” therefore, may have been a similarly Anglicized version of something else, possibly Franz.)

Apparently, the two brothers lived quietly together for the next seven years, though exactly where is difficult to determine. None of the several Charles and Frank Dolezals listed in the Cleveland city directories between 1913 and 1919 would seem to fit the bill. It was not until 1920 that directory compilers took note of the brothers, both bricklayers, living at 3217 West 56th. In 1920, Charles married Louise Vorell, and from that point on, Frank was essentially on his own. In the years immediately following Charles's marriage, the first signs of a curious introverted silence—something akin to estrangement—developed
between the two brothers. They saw each other rarely and remained steadfastly oblivious to the mundane details of each other's lives. This same emotional distance and unwillingness, even inability, to communicate openly would characterize Dolezal family relationships in succeeding generations. Little or nothing of the family past was ever discussed openly; everything Mary Dolezal Satterlee (Charles's granddaughter and Frank's great-niece) learned about her family history came to her in vague whispers or through her own determined digging.

The Frank Dolezal that Cleveland never knew. This photograph documents the 1920 marriage of his brother Charles to Louise Vorell. From left: Frank Dolezal, Louise Dolezal, Charles Dolezal, unidentified child, Lillian Vorell, Frank Vorell, and unidentified female. Courtesy of Mary Dolezal Satterlee.

Whether one marks the beginning of the Kingsbury Run murders sometime in 1934 (when the Lady of the Lake turned up on the shore of Lake Erie) or September 1935 (the deaths of Edward Andrassy and his never identified companion), by late summer 1936, the string of gruesome atrocities had propelled Cleveland into an embarrassing national spotlight. Cleveland's movers and shakers dreaded the constant stream of negative publicity the city was attracting internationally. The Great Lakes Exposition was also scheduled to open that summer—potentially attracting thousands of visitors—and the
Republicans were holding their 1936 national convention here, as well. All this activity could add up to a major economic shot in the arm for an old industrial city still reeling from the disastrous effects of the Great Depression. The torso killings were stretching law enforcement to beyond the breaking point and testing its institutions as they had never been tested before. Every sector of public safety—even the fire department—was mobilized to fight the elusive menace who perpetrated such grisly horrors in the middle of one of the nation's larger cities. Something had to be done, and quickly. In early September 1936, Mayor Harold Burton placed his safety director, the legendary crime fighter Eliot Ness, at the head of the investigation and ordered his chief of police, George Matowitz, to assign his best detective to work the case full time. Every city resident who had been marked as an odd character or a sexual deviant came systematically under intense official scrutiny. And that virtually unending tally of weird and strange Clevelanders would come to include the bricklayer with the severe drinking problem and uncertain sexual orientation who lived alone in a shabby apartment building in a dying neighborhood on Cleveland's near east side.

Detective Peter Merylo could have come straight from Central Casting; he was everyone's image of the ideal Depression-era cop—tough, smart, dedicated, scrupulously honest, a crack shot with his pistol, and obsessively thorough (he boasted the police department's most impressive arrest record). On the one hand, he was a team player who respected the lines of authority (even when he didn't particularly care for the individuals in authority) and did his job without complaint or fanfare; on the other hand, there was just enough of the maverick, the lone gunman, in his personality and professional conduct to endear him to an American public that worshipped individuality, personal initiative, and the Hollywood cowboy. Generally, he worked within the rules, but he remained more than willing to bend procedural guidelines when necessary to get the job done. Clevelanders saw only the dedicated professional, the tough cop who could sometimes be the proverbial bull in the china shop. But there lurked a gentle, even tender side to his personality that few outside his immediate family ever saw. He once considered joining the priesthood and harbored an abiding love for the sound of a violin. Crimes against the helpless, especially children, sparked his personal rage and drove him to give his all to the job. Ironically, his background was remarkably similar to that of Frank Dolezal, the man who would ultimately become his quarry. Born in 1895 in the Ukraine, Merylo immigrated to the United States sometime around 1915, joined the army—though he saw no active service—and gravitated to police work in 1919. By the mid-1930s, he had been a detective in the Cleveland Police Department for several years and had built a reputation for handling difficult and dangerous assignments.