Though Murder Has No Tongue (5 page)

Detective Peter Merylo. The veteran cop could boast of the Cleveland Police Department's finest arrest record. He was placed on the torso murders full-time in 1936 by Chief of Police George Matowitz.
Cleveland Press
Archives, Cleveland State University.

Following orders from Mayor Harold Burton, Chief of Police George Matowitz assigned Merylo to work the torso killings full time in the early days of September 1936—just as transients who lived in the city's sprawling shantytowns spotted the first grisly piece of the Butcher's sixth victim floating in a fetid waterway at the heart of Kingsbury Run. Along with his partner, veteran detective Martin Zalewski, Merylo began reviewing the voluminous pile of police reports that had been accumulating since the torso killings began. Even for a cop of Merylo's vast experience and intelligence, absorbing and classifying all the diverse pieces of information gathered and recorded by the men who had worked the case from the beginning was a daunting task. A couple of days after Chief Matowitz gave his lead investigator his marching orders, Safety Director Ness incurred Merylo's displeasure—if not his wrath—by summoning
him to his office and demanding to know how much progress he had made on the case. Merylo fixed Ness with an incredulous stare and most likely bit his tongue; he was still sifting through all the files, he replied, though he had come to the conclusion that the killings were sex crimes. The meeting was a clash of opposites: on the one hand, the tough, older, streetwise cop who personally ranked his colleagues by their gritty determination, willingness to give their all to the job, as well as their demonstrated competence and accomplishment; on the other hand, the younger, dapper, ex-G-man (already a legend) who courted the press, hobnobbed with the society set, and could usually call on enough political savvy to deal effectively with the ruling elites of the city. It was not an auspicious beginning; the professional relationship between Merylo and Ness would follow a strained and difficult path for the duration of the investigation.

In late November 1936, just two months after having been assigned to the Kingsbury Run murders, Merylo and Zalewski pulled Frank Dolezal into the central station for questioning. The bricklayer had come to their attention through an unidentified “pervert” they had rounded up and interrogated thanks to a tip. The suspect admitted frequenting a dive at the corner of East 20th and Central, a sleazy neighborhood watering hole where both Edward Andrassy and Flo Polillo—the only two victims to be positively identified—often drank. He also fingered Frank Dolezal as an establishment regular, branded him a pervert, and said he had spent a lot of time in the bricklayer's run-down apartment at 1908 Central Avenue. For the two veteran cops, the possible link between the mysterious Dolezal and the only two victims to whom a name could actually be attached was enough. It was a simpler time for law enforcement officials; the procedural guidelines dealing with the arrest and questioning of potential suspects were considerably more lax in the 1930s than they are today. Merylo and Zalewski simply barged into Dolezal's apartment and surprised their uncomprehending quarry sitting at his kitchen table. With only a slight nod to any sort of legal ceremony, the pair identified themselves as detectives, searched his apartment for weapons (they found nothing), arrested him (apparently without charges), and hauled him in for interrogation. Unfortunately, neither of the two different sets of memoirs Merylo left behind provides much evidence as to their line of questioning and also fails to give any indication as to how they handled Dolezal (the good, old-fashioned third degree? or something more gentle and humane?) or how long they held him. Dolezal, however, maintained that he did not know Edward Andrassy at all and insisted he knew Flo Polillo only “slightly.” “We went over his background,” Merylo wrote; “we talked to his friends and neighbors. We investigated his job record; we found out
where he had worked before he went to work for the WPA; we talked to the 21-year-old pervert who lived with him as his ‘lover,' and we talked to prostitutes who had visited his apartment.” Merylo also checked with police officers who had known Dolezal for years; and, though they maintained he was a pervert, they reported his relatively clean record, declaring him an honest man. Though the two detectives subsequently cut Dolezal loose, they continued to keep him under some sort of surveillance. “We kept pretty close tab on Frank during those days,” Merylo declared in his memoirs. “We knew where we could find him—whenever we wanted.” In August 1938, Merylo pulled Dolezal in for questioning a second time. Unfortunately, the details surrounding this second interrogation are extremely sketchy; there is virtually nothing in Merylo's memoirs or his surviving official reports that provides any of the details—the reasons behind this reexamination, how or in what circumstances they snared him, or what form their line of questioning took. This reinterrogation of Frank Dolezal, however, seems to have occurred in the days following the discovery of victims nos. 11 and 12 on August 15 and Eliot Ness's high-profile shantytown raid three days later.

Just why Merylo and Zalewski kept Frank Dolezal under continued surveillance for close to two years after their first recorded encounter with him is hard to say. Merylo does not provide any explanation in either set of memoirs or any of his extant police reports for their ongoing interest in him. On the one hand, it would seem that the pair still harbored suspicions about the bricklayer in spite of the lack of any solid evidence against him. On the other hand, after Dolezal's arrest by the sheriff and his forces in July 1939, Merylo insisted to his superiors and anyone else in officialdom that approached him that he was convinced of the bricklayer's innocence. “I advised the Prosecutor that I had this man in custody on two different occasions, that if I had a case against him I would never have turned him loose.” If Merylo was so convinced of Dolezal's innocence, why the continued surveillance? The most likely explanation is that, as a more-or-less admitted homosexual, Dolezal would have contact with other “perverts” and those contacts might ultimately lead to the killer. Law enforcement during the 1930s seems to have been operating on the assumption that perverts—like ducks and geese—gathered in flocks.

Lawrence J. (Pat) Lyons had worked for years as a special investigator—sometimes for various official agencies, sometimes on his own. He had put in a stint for the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce and had worked for former mayor
Ray T. Miller during his term as Cuyahoga County prosecutor. Sometime before April 1938, when the Butcher's body count stood officially at nine, Pat Lyons became deeply interested in the torso case. “As a criminal investigator it was natural that I was interested,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I decided to assemble all of the known facts and make a comprehensive study of them. I enlisted the aid of my brother, GV, and together we gathered facts from every reliable source.” Consequently, Lyons and his brother trolled through the newspaper accounts, gained access to morgue records, and studied—what he simply refers to, somewhat cryptically, as—“written statements of the county coroner.” In a high-profile case such as this, the possibility of turf warfare among the competing law enforcement agencies always looms large—especially in a city like Cleveland where the police department was controlled by Republican safety director Eliot Ness and the Cuyahoga County sheriff's office was ruled by Democrat Martin L. O'Donnell. By early 1938, Sam Gerber (also a Democrat) had occupied the coroner's office for a little over a year, having beaten out his predecessor—A. J. Pearce—in the November 1936 elections. The new coroner guarded his territory with the vengeful ferocity of a dragon sitting on a pile of gold in the bowels of a cave. Yet the Lyons brothers apparently explored the string of murders without attracting any unwanted official attention or animosity—at least, not at first.

Among his papers related to the investigation, Lyons left a formal, relatively detailed summary of his methods and procedures that he titled simply “A Discussion of the So-Called Torso Cases.” This precise account of his methodology reveals him to have been considerably more than an amateur private sleuth amusing himself by poking around in a sensational series of grotesque killings. He clearly approached the task with the methodical thoroughness of a seasoned professional; and if, in hindsight, some of his assumptions prove questionable, the carefully reasoned logic behind them is unassailable. The Lyons brothers decided to explore the run-down areas around Kingsbury Run searching for telltale signs of the Butcher's base of operations. “We were of the opinion,” Lyons wrote, “that a person could not dismember this many bodies and not leave some traces, regardless of the care he exercised in cleaning up.” Thus the brothers went from door to door with a prepared list of questions, passing themselves off as workers making a survey of population trends and taking a real estate inventory. (Lyons does not give a precise date for the initiation of this house-to-house search, but in his memoirs he states he and his brother were already “underway” when the first piece of victim no. 10 appeared on the shores of the Cuyahoga River in early April 1938.) If something about the resident or his abode set off any alarm bells in their minds, they marked that individual down for a return visit. “As I
would hold the attention of the resident under pretense, GV would go [to] the bathroom, shut the door and give the entire room the preliminary chemical test for blood.” By August 1938, Pat and G. V. Lyons had revisited a total of twenty-three dwellings, but G.V. found blood in only one—which, unfortunately, turned out not to be human. Eliot Ness launched a similar search for the Butcher's lair through the same geographical area employing identical tactics in late August 1938. Six three-man teams—two detectives and a fire warden (who could check dwellings without a warrant)—moved methodically through the dilapidated neighborhoods surrounding Kingsbury Run. Astoundingly, neither the Ness forces nor the Lyons brothers seemed aware of each other's activities at the time. Because the element of surprise was so crucial to his entire operation, for obvious reasons Ness kept the whole business away from the press as long as he could, but it is still difficult to believe that two separate well-organized, carefully planned search efforts could proceed over the same ground at roughly the same time and remain oblivious of each other.

By early January 1939, the Lyons brothers had hit an impasse. They found it impossible to proceed without some kind of outside financial assistance, so Pat began shopping his ideas around to various city agencies in search of monetary backing and, perhaps, some sort of official sanction. He tried the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, which apparently expressed interest but declined to back him with any funds. Here matters get a little murky; regrettably, Lyons's account of his actions and with whom he may have talked at this point is not entirely clear. In his memoirs, Lyons reports that he next “talked to the City Safety Department without success.” He does not specify with whom he talked: Eliot Ness himself, or, perhaps, an assistant? He then writes, “I next went to the County Coroner.” But again, he does not specify whether he dealt with Sam Gerber directly or with someone else. Lyons, however, ultimately found himself presenting his plans for apprehending the killer to Sheriff Martin O'Donnell: “The sheriff referred me to the Police Department. This was accomplished on January 9, 1939. I started on a part time job in the civil branch as a Real Estate Appraiser.” (Again, the exact nature of this sequence of events remains unclear. What exactly did he mean by “The sheriff referred me to the Police Department?” Subsequent events make it obvious that the police—especially Peter Merylo—were totally unaware of his activities.)

Sometime in the first half of 1939, an informant pointed Lyons and his brother—now working with deputies Jack J. Gillespie and Paul McDevitt of the sheriff's department—toward a suspicious character named “Frank.” Thus, like Merylo and Zaleweski before him, Pat Lyons picked up a trail that ultimately led to Frank Dolezal.