Though Murder Has No Tongue Read online

  I am running a little late; and by the time I pull up in front of my house in the Tremont neighborhood on Cleveland’s near southwest side, Mary is already there—perched comfortably on the top step outside my front door, waiting, languidly puffing a cigarette, her long hair sprawling across her shoulders. “Hey there!” she croons as I hop out of my hastily parked Grand Am. The smile on her face flickers characteristically between wry humor and genuine pleasure as she rises to her full five feet, ten inches. Her grace and height always come as a mild surprise, at least initially. The images of her short, burley, stocky great-uncle Frank have been deeply engraved in my mind for well over a decade; it is difficult for me to imagine a Dolezal looking any other way.

  Over the next few days, we will hang out, chat over drinks, and catch up over a series of superb meals in Tremont’s incomparable collection of first-rate restaurants. And, of course, we will carefully walk the ground we have traversed so many times before; we will talk about her great-uncle Frank—a palpable presence in her life even though he met his cruel fate decades before she was born. We will sift through her memory for any tiny bits of additional information—any stray, unguarded comment dropped by an older relative she may have neglected to mention before, any bit of family legend that could be remotely tied to her great-uncle. With fairy-tale regularity, the story of how she came to know this shadowy presence in her family always begins with its own “Once upon a time.” Her mind wanders back to the late 1970s, when she was ten years old, to the time her mother, Joan—for no reason that Mary could discern—rummaged through a bureau drawer and retrieved a collection of Plain Dealer articles marking the fortieth anniversary of the Kingsbury Run murders. In a hushed voice, from her limited perspective, she laid out the history of the city’s most gruesome series of killings and the role Mary’s great-uncle had been forced to play in the terrible drama. “I had no idea that these killings had taken place,” she muses softly. Her expression begins to alter almost imperceptibly; her eyes turn strangely vacant, as if something inside her were retreating into itself, curling into a ball for protection. Her voice drops to virtual inaudibility: “I did not know he [Frank Dolezal] existed up to that.” Why was it, she wondered, that no one in her family ever spoke about this hitherto unknown and unidentified relative. “My grandmother [Frank Dolezal’s sister-in-law Louise Vorell] in her life never spoke about it. She passed away in 1984, never saying a word. I became very curious about it, curious why my family would not speak of a relative—where I clearly knew all my other relatives at that point—and started digging into it, and really for the last twenty-five years have been extremely interested in it, and found out as much about Frank Dolezal as I possibly could.” She does not remember specifically the first time she saw his picture. It may have been during her mother’s introduction to the family’s link with violent and terrible crime, but she remains unsure. But the haunted, unshaven face had been caught and chronicled many times over by Cleveland’s press photographers in the summer months of 1939, and she has long been familiar with the vacant, unfocused, disturbing gaze that still stares from the pages of the city’s old newspapers. During our first face-to-face meeting, in 1999, she handed me an old, lovingly framed family photograph from 1920, showing her grandfather Charles and her grandmother Louise formally posed with their wedding party. At the picture’s extreme left stood a Frank Dolezal that 1939 Clevelanders never knew existed, neat and almost dapper in his quaint formal attire, polished shoes, and glasses. Marriage was a serious business in those days; there is no hint of joy on any of the faces—only a stiff severity.

  She reflects on her teenage years and her first trip downtown to the Cleveland Police Historical Society Museum. The display devoted to Kingsbury Run was smaller and considerably less graphic than it is today, but it still conveyed the sheer horror of what had taken place fifty years before. For the first time, she saw the grisly visual record of the mayhem to which her mother had cautiously introduced her several years before. She stood silently before the old masks representing four of the Butcher’s victims. Cast in the 1930s by the Scientific Investigation Unit, they bore the combined signs of age and neglect. Above them hung a single large picture frame containing a sickening series of old police photos: decapitated naked corpses, heads in various stages of decomposition, rotting body parts. She stared in mingled wonder and revulsion. Her eyes closed; a realization—a terrible recognition that could not yet be put into words or even molded into coherent thought—suddenly rose within her. Someone related to me was accused of doing this! The museum’s then curator, Anne Kmieck, provided more details about the reign of terror that went on in the city for over four years and directed her to the accounts of the crimes chronicled by Cleveland’s daily newspapers. Slowly, painfully, Mary began to understand the reasons behind the family reticence to speak openly of Frank Dolezal. “If the family name is shamed and accused of a crime, you would go back to the bunker, hunker down, and keep your face out of the public. And I think the biggest shame was that the Dolezal name became headline news. My aunts and uncles were anywhere from ten to twenty-two at the time, and they heard about it. They were ashamed; they were asked questions; they were jeered at. Several of my aunts were schoolaged. Can you imagine going to school during that time?”

  Suddenly, her eyes flash with determined resolution. “And I started from there, started to work my way back through a lot of the articles that Cleveland newspapers had at that time, and kind of putting my own scrapbook together.” But the great wall of family silence had yet to be breeched. “I didn’t ask my father any immediate questions. He felt it was something that still disgraced the family. It was shameful to the family. It was taboo to speak about.” But the more she dug into the history of the crimes and her great-uncle’s part in the investigation, older aunts and uncles began to relent; the formidable wall developed cracks. Bit by bit, small pieces of the story as family members remembered, understood, and experienced it began to materialize. “You go, girl,” cheered one of her elderly aunts from the sidelines. It was not just some understandable blood-is-thicker-than-water family loyalty that left the Dolezals convinced of Frank’s innocence and angered over his fate; it was their memories of the gentle uncle who always brought them candy when they were children. “The guy would never hurt a fly,” grumbled Mary’s father on those few occasions when he even mentioned his uncle. But family loyalty was not blind, nor was it even compromised by the proverbial rose-colored glasses. “I believe my grandparents thought he was an odd character,” Mary declares. “That he did live alone. That he did go to bars every night. He worked hard, but he also drank hard. That is how he is remembered within the family.”

  August 21, 1999: Mary and I are at the library of Cleveland State University, sitting in the room devoted entirely to the Cleveland Press collection of photographs and clippings—a treasure trove of documentation that had somehow eluded her in the past. In those days, there were two different groups of old Press photographs chronicling the Kingsbury Run horror—one devoted exclusively to Frank Dolezal. She had never seen so many photos of her great-uncle in one place before. By fleeting turns, her eyes grow vacant, apprehensive, sad, even angry as she slowly works her way through the stack of yellowing, fading pictures: Frank Dolezal, dazed and frightened, with Sheriff Martin L. O’Donnell and his deputies; Frank Dolezal, looking tired and in pain, hand on his side, as law enforcement personnel escorted him in front of assembled press photographers—what old-time cops called a “perp walk”; Frank Dolezal stretched out on the backseat of an official automobile, pathetically trying to hide from the prying camera lenses by holding his hands over his face. “There’s something about the 1930s and 1940s I identify with,” Mary reflects in a barely audible whisper. “The style of the clothes, everything.” She winces at some of the more graphic depictions of her great-uncle’s humiliation and distress; at times, her entire expression turns strangely inward, as if she were trying desperately to recover memories that were not really hers
to command. I learned more from Mary Dolezal than simple family history and the details marking the steps in her own personal odyssey of discovery; I learned what it meant to be a survivor. In monstrous crimes, especially murders, we generally think of “a survivor” as someone who had a direct tie to the victim or who had narrowly escaped being a victim him or herself. But, like her father and other relatives, Mary is also a survivor. She didn’t ask for that black cloud that always hovers in her background, but she inherited it as surely as she did the color of her eyes and hair. And it is always there—a deep, haunting shadow that whispers, “I am here; I am a part of you.” It’s a lesson I would learn again many times over—from Peter Merylo’s daughters, Marjorie and Winifred; from Pat Lyons’s daughter, Carol; from the surviving relatives of those traumatized children who stumbled upon dismembered body parts or a rotting corpse more than a half century ago; and from the daughter and granddaughters of Edward Andrassy, traditionally thought of as the Butcher’s first victim. His daughter was only six when her father’s grisly murder catapulted the aristocratic Hungarian name “Andrassy” into public notoriety, and her daughters knew their grandfather only through his reputation. And that reputation was nothing of which to be proud: runins with the police for drunken brawling, a spotty employment history, an arrest for carrying a concealed weapon, allegations of all sorts of low-level criminal activity, and dark rumors of sexual deviancy. “Everything is so negative,” lamented granddaughter Tomi Johnson when I first spoke with her.

  Uncovering a painful past. Mary Dolezal and the author look through the material related to her great-uncle in the Cleveland Press Archives at Cleveland State University. Photograph by Denise Blanda.

  In spring 2001, the Kent State University Press and the Cleveland Police Historical Society cosponsored the official release of In the Wake of the Butcher with a reception, book-signing, and dinner at the Great Lakes Brewing Company in Ohio City on Cleveland’s near west side, the oldest continuously operating bar and restaurant in Cleveland and one of Eliot Ness’s favorite local watering holes. The ever-cautious Ness reportedly sat at a booth in the rear, where he could keep an eagle eye on those who came and went. (To honor their famous former customer, the present owners, the Conways, have named one of their excellent brews “Eliot Ness.”) Mary flew in from LA for the event. It was quite an occasion. Peter Merylo’s daughter Marjorie Merylo Dentz was there, with two of her daughters and other members of the family, as were two of Edward Andrassy’s granddaughters. It was the first time any of the descendents of the major players in Cleveland’s most notorious murders had ever been in the same place, let alone had the opportunity to meet and speak with each other. “These are people I never thought I would meet,” reflected Marjorie Dentz, almost in awe. Mary and I scanned the large party room and caught sight of the two Andrassy granddaughters speaking to one of the trustees of the Cleveland Police Historical Society. “I’d love to talk with them,” she murmured, “but what do I say?” It was perhaps the first and only time during our acquaintance that I have ever known Mary to be hesitant or even remotely at a loss for words. I kneed her in the rump. “You go up to them and say, ‘Hi! My great-uncle was accused of murdering your grandfather and cutting off his head.’ How often does life hand you an opening like that?”

  NOTE

  Some of the quotations I attribute to Mary Dolezal were culled from a videotaped interview that Mark Stone conducted in 2003.

  Chapter 6

  BEHIND THE VEIL

  In the late 1960s, Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blowup caught the fancies of both the art-house crowd and the average movie buff. One of the great Italian auteur’s few popular successes, it told the story of a beat-generation photographer, played by David Hemmings, who seems to stumble across evidence of a murder through a close-up examination of a recent batch of his photos. The immensely popular television drama CSI picked up on the same premise during its 2003–04 season, and, ironically, it was a series of old photographs of Frank Dolezal’s corpse, long tucked away and forgotten in the musty archives of the Cuyahoga County morgue that provided the first inklings that Coroner Sam Gerber’s 1939 determination that Dolezal had committed suicide, that he had died of asphyxiation by hanging himself from a jailhouse clothes hook with a noose fashioned from cleaning rags, was suspect.

  In late 1999 and early 2000, as I was completing the final revisions to the manuscript of In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland’s Torso Murders, the morgue archivist unearthed the original photographs taken of Frank Dolezal’s corpse in the county jail at the time of his death and in the morgue just prior to and during the formal autopsy—huge documents of stunning clarity, easily eleven by fourteen inches or larger. Since the coroner’s office did not start taking its own photographs until the 1950s, there is a real question as to who took these—especially the ones documenting the autopsy. City newspapers printed a few of the pictures taken at the jail, but there is no indication in any of the coverage at the time that photographers from Cleveland’s dailies were ever present. The Scientific Investigation Bureau (the 1930s precursor to the modern Ballistics Bureau or CSI Unit) may have been responsible for some of the photos—perhaps all of them, including those taken in the morgue. (Was it standard procedure at the time for police to share their photographs with city papers or vice versa?) In the 1930s, it certainly was not common practice in the coroner’s office to document a case with photos of such size, and my initial surmise was that they had served simply as visual aids at the August 26–29 inquest into Frank Dolezal’s death. And, indeed, that may have been their original purpose; but when the full transcript of those official proceedings materialized in winter 2004, it became clear that the vast majority of those photos had played no role in the inquest. Except for one or two, they were never shown, nor did any of the testimony deal with them, even remotely. Two of the photographs taken just before the formal autopsy procedure clearly showed the mark on Frank Dolezal’s neck supposedly left by the homemade noose. Among the first to get a look at these new finds were my good friends and research partners Rebecca McFarland (the Cleveland expert on Eliot Ness) and Andrew Schug. Both reported that the narrow wound seemed inconsistent with the instrument of his alleged suicide—a bulky-looking length of toweling that a stone-faced Coroner Gerber displayed to a Press photographer on August 24, 1939. At the last minute, I incorporated their views and reservations in the manuscript before turning it over to the Kent State University Press. And there the matter rested, at least for the time being.

  In the final months of 2002, I teamed up with Mark Wade Stone of Storytellers Media Group to produce a TV documentary, The Fourteenth Victim: Eliot Ness and the Torso Murders, based in part on my recently published book. Our collaboration eventually took us to the Cuyahoga County morgue for an intense reexamination of Frank Dolezal’s death. We studied the pictures taken right after the alleged suicide as well as those taken before and during the subsequent autopsy—a treasure trove of documents that included the two photos that had aroused McFarland and Schug’s suspicions three years before. To say they were disquieting, even upsetting, ranks as the proverbial understatement; the alarm bells that had sounded for McFarland and Schug in 1999 began to ring for us as well. Things just did not look right. A huge close-up of Frank Dolezal’s head and the wound on his neck showed his open, vacant, dead eyes starring fixedly toward the ceiling. In a second photograph, a rubber-gloved hand descends from the upper right, obscuring a portion of the face, to pull his head slightly to the side to better reveal the telltale mark. For the first time since 1939, students of the Kingsbury Run murders could see what that wound looked like. The deep, narrow mark on Dolezal’s neck just did not match up—at least to our untrained eyes—with photographs of the toweling or sheeting with which he was alleged to have taken his life.

  All sorts of admittedly amateur notions about hanging and the nature of injuries to the neck intruded on our assessments of what we were seeing. The few photos I had ever seen documenting a lync
hing or a state execution by hanging showed a V-shaped mark that pulled upward behind the ears to the noose’s coil at the back of the head. Also, if memory served, the wound left by the rope at the front of the neck was invariably positioned fairly high up, virtually right under the chin. Frank Dolezal’s wound appeared to circle his neck about midway between the shoulders and head, with no sign of the characteristic V-shaped pattern. And those two revealing photographs were only the beginning.

  The two pre-autopsy photographs showing the deep, narrow wound on Frank Dolezal’s neck. They were taken eighteen hours after his alleged suicide. If Dolezal had died from asphyxiation due to hanging from a cloth noose for a couple of minutes, the mark would have been faint and would have disappeared long before these pictures were taken. Courtesy of the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office.

  When Mark and I made our initial visits in the winter of 2003–04, the archivist at the morgue had gathered every surviving photograph, document, and artifact related to the arrest and death of Frank Dolezal that lay hidden away in the coroner’s old files. Some photos were duplicates of police or press shots familiar to anyone who has studied the Kingsbury Run murders; others, however, proved entirely new. (A substantial number showed Dolezal in the custody of the county sheriff’s men, thus again raising the admittedly rather minor issue of who had taken them: the press, law enforcement personnel?) Some photos were difficult to identify, in spite of their huge size. One showed what looked like bone fragments. What were they? Dolezal’s broken ribs? It was hard to be certain, because there was nothing else in the picture, no measurement scale that gave any indication of size. It was impossible to tell how large or how small these bones were.