Though Murder Has No Tongue Read online

  Over the next several months, we would push that cart of TV equipment down the hallway—past the shelves lined with human skulls and the banks of cabinet drawers containing bones—twice more. On the second visit, August 31, 2004, Dirkmaat again sat before the camera and poured out his thoughts. By then, he had gone through the inquest thoroughly several times over and studied the photos in detail, comparing what he saw in them with the recorded testimony in the inquest. It became quickly apparent he was more interested in discussing the inquest testimony than in commenting on the photographs; this was understandable. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in this case—no matter how big and clear they might be—they were, after all, no substitute for the actual presence of the physical body. “I hate two-dimensional evidence,” roared James Starrs, professor of law and forensic science at George Washington University, when I showed him the same pictures after he had spoken at a Jack the Ripper conference in Baltimore.

  Our third visit to Mercyhurst, on March 3, 2005, however, turned out to be the most fascinating and productive by far. On this occasion, we were met by Dr. Steven A. Symes—a tall, Lincolnesque professor sporting an impressive resume of teaching experience, professional accomplishments, research activities, and job-related interests. Dirkmaat and Symes had agreed to turn the questions about Frank Dolezal’s death into a hands-on exercise for two of their classes in forensics. In late morning, I gave the small group of students a brief overview of the Kingsbury Run murders and a fairly detailed accounting of the Dolezal chapter. I stuck to the facts, keeping my narrative as neutral and objective as possible so as not to prejudice anyone before they had had a chance to examine the material. After Mark and I had handed out all the photographs and other official documents relating to Dolezal’s death, we left them to their own devices and went off to lunch with Symes at the school cafeteria. An hour later, we returned to the classroom, suggested they might want to pick a spokesperson, and then—in spite of the intimidating presence of the TV camera—asked for their reactions. In the afternoon, we repeated the process, with one major difference, with a more advanced class. I told them nothing; we simply gave them the material, then asked them to look it over and offer up their conclusions. After downing a couple cups of coffee, we returned and repeated the morning taping process.

  Realistically, we did not expect any grand, decisive “Eureka!” moments to come from this relatively brief period of study; the evidence was simply too fragmentary. In fact, one of the first lessons we learned was exactly how incomplete and fragmentary it was. “Unless there’s a tremendous amount of other documentation,” mused Dennis Donovan, adjunct professor in the Department of Applied Forensic Sciences and retired Pennsylvania State Police sergeant, “this is a very, very poorly documented case. Very poor! But considering, again, the historical context, I’m not sure what the normal procedure and protocol would have been seventy years ago either.” And we did not have the body. (We had, indeed, tossed around the “E” word—exhumation—somewhat darkly and rather cavalierly, but that was never a realistic option. I knew Mary, as a next of kin, would readily grant family permission for the procedure, but the cost would be prohibitive and the probable results even less than inconclusive. “I’ve seen exhumed bodies that have been buried for only a few years show marked decomposition,” Donovan remarked. Frank Dolezal had been in the ground for almost seventy years, and it remains doubtful that his family could have afforded the best undertaking services available.) But, at the very least, with the help of the best and the brightest among Mercyhurst faculty and students, we hoped to detect any small hints that would validate our misgivings about the official explanation of Frank Dolezal’s death. And thanks to their learned assessment of our rather meager pile of documentation—all of it preserved on tape—our suspicions were confirmed. We can now say with absolute certainty that, at the very least, the official version of Dolezal’s death—put forward and sworn to by Sheriff O’Donnell and his deputies, and, in part, supported by Coroner Gerber’s suicide verdict—is simply not accurate, that both the official manner of death and the circumstances surrounding it are far more than simply questionable. “It stinks to high heaven,” grumbled Donovan.

  In spite of a number of witnesses and a lot of verbiage, the inquest testimony failed to resolve satisfactorily one of the most crucial issues in the case: the injuries to Dolezal’s face and trunk; all that testimony simply added up to a classic “he-said, he-said” standoff between the Dolezal camp and the sheriff’s office. But in spite of all the fervid denials of mistreatment on the part of the sheriff and his staff, there can be no doubt that Frank Dolezal had been severely abused physically by his captors. Though he admitted to Father Zlamal that he had, indeed, tried to take his life twice, the injuries he had sustained—especially the broken ribs—could not have resulted from falls to the floor or on to the bench in his cell when his makeshift nooses failed. The damage was simply too great. “The issue is whether falling two or three or four feet to the ground—whether you would fracture all those ribs, and that’s very unlikely,” insisted Dirkmaat during August 31 taping. “This was a fairly robust individual,” he continued. “He wasn’t just skin and bones. He had fractured these ribs. There’s one shot [a morgue photograph of what appears to be a section of a rib taken during the autopsy]—it’s rather inconclusive; there’s no scale or anything—but [it] appears that the ribs are fractured and, in fact, displaced a bit; and there’s a little healing going on. So that’s a pretty traumatic fracture. . . . These were significant fractures, and it’s very unlikely that it was from a fall and from that distance. . . . But one or two falls: you’re not going to have that amount of damage to the body.” But, of course, that sort of damage could result from a swift, hard, sharp blow—a good, strong kick, for example. “I’m sure in that day and age, prisoners weren’t treated as they are today,” Dirkmaat reflected. “The fact that they were beaten and coerced to give information was not uncommon. From all the different angles to the evidence, it seems that he [Frank Dolezal] was. . . . From my point of view: high-profile case; they bring in somebody; they want to solve it; they want to look good. So they get a confession. They get a confession by beating him up. I don’t know how they found this guy. I didn’t really look into that. But they had somebody that they could pin it on.”

  There are also clear discrepancies in the inquest testimony as to who was where and when he was there. “In many respects, stories [ presented by the sheriff and his deputies] changed and sequences were mixed around,” reflected Dirkmaat,

  Part of that might be explained away by the fact that a lot is happening, and so the memories of exact details are a little fuzzy. But upon reading, for example, when people get into elevators and who they’re seeing and who’s in the elevators with them . . . you should remember those facts. But when you recount, or relate, that you got into the elevator [and] you told somebody to come in with you; you went up to a particular floor, and you went out. It’s [the elevator] not stopping. But then you have other accounts saying, “I stepped into the elevator, and these guys were here. They took me up.” So there were a lot of discrepancies there. . . . When Crawford found Dolezal, he told the woman up there [Catherine Krial]—who was in the stockroom—to call down to Burns. And so Burns almost immediately went up; and then, all of a sudden, the sheriff was there. Whereas Smart doesn’t describe the sheriff getting on [the elevator] at all; Burns doesn’t describe him getting on. But the sheriff says that he got on, and here’s Burns but not Smart. You think something like that would stick out in your mind. I’m going up in the elevator. Who’s with me and where did we go?

  Donovan’s similar observation was more brutally succinct. “Some of the statements were just flat out contradictory.”

  There is virtually unanimous agreement that the mark on Frank Dolezal’s neck is not consistent with either the cloth noose or the amount of time he reportedly was left hanging before being cut down. “No brainer!” smirked one of the students after
a casual glance at the photographs. Asphyxiation by hanging with a cloth ligature can, indeed, occur within a few minutes—as the sheriff and his deputies alleged, but the mark left on the neck would be rather faint and would disappear in a couple of hours. The injury on Dolezal’s neck is clearly visible in the two pre-autopsy photographs, and they were taken eighteen hours after his death. The mark is also far too narrow (one centimeter wide, according to Gerber’s autopsy protocol) and far too deep to have been caused by a cloth ligature. “In my opinion, from what I’ve seen in my career,” observed Greg Olson (a staff sergeant with the York Regional Police in Canada, and one of the older students) as he pointed to the mark on Dolezal’s neck, “using cloth—unless it’s wound real tight, and the circumference is very small—I don’t think it would cause something like that. But I’m not a medical examiner; I base it on what I’ve done in the past as an investigator.” Symes concurred: “The photographs, to me right now, don’t seem consistent with the story being told.” “All the descriptions [at the inquest] are of these muslin dust cloths,” commented Dirkmaat. “And that’s what’s shown in the pictures; that’s what’s shown hanging from the hook. But then when you look at the pictures at [the] autopsy,” he continued, “it is a very thin, one-centimeter-in-size line—which is not really possible for that cloth to create. So something else was going on. . . . So something is amiss there. If it was part of the hanging, and the description is only of these cloths, then that doesn’t make sense at all. That doesn’t seem to be the truth.”

  During the inquest, Sheriff O’Donnell and Deputies Clarence Smart, Hugh Crawford, and Archie Burns testified that Burns used the sheriff’s pocketknife to cut through the cloth ligature when they were unable to work the knot loose. Assuming Burns was right-handed, he would have steadied the bunched noose with his left, while Smart and Crawford held Dolezal’s body erect, and cut or sawed through the cloth. (Admittedly, a lot would depend on the sharpness of the sheriff’s knife.) If the noose had been cut this way, however, one would expect to see very sharp, jagged edges at the two points where the cloth had been severed; but none of the existing photographs show this. In all the photos, the edges look frayed and worn—not freshly cut. But if the cloth ligature, so loudly trumpeted in both the Cleveland press and the inquest, did not cause Dolezal’s death, what did? The twine visible in one of the photos taken in the county jail is obviously far more consistent with the thin, deep mark on his neck. But why would the sheriff’s men leave it with the body to be photographed? If the twine were somehow wrapped in with or tied to the length of cloth, it would be extremely difficult to disentangle the whole affair before photographers arrived on the scene. “I don’t know if we can attribute that particular ligature mark to that twine,” mused Dirkmaat. Thus, in what may be one of the supreme ironies in the entire case, the length of rope that first began to call into doubt the official suicide verdict may not actually have been the instrument of death.

  Mercyhurst College: The best and brightest. Dr. Dennis C. Dirkmaat, Mercyhurst Anthropological Institute; Dr. Steven A. Symes, Department of Applied Forensic Sciences; Sgt. Dennis Donovan, Pennsylvania State Police, retired, and adjunct professor of applied forensic sciences. Images courtesy of Storytellers Media Group.

  The afternoon session at Mercyhurst College. Image courtesy of Storytellers Media Group.

  Does all this learned assessment and analysis add up to a definitive conclusion that Frank Dolezal was killed, either accidentally or on purpose, by one or more of his captors? The experts at Mercyhurst who studied the bits of surviving evidence have one of society’s most serious and demanding jobs. They deal with death, the end of life—what causes it and what happens to the physical remains under a wide range of environmental circumstances once life has ceased. They treated the whole issue of Dolezal’s death with the serious caution of seasoned professionals preparing to testify in court, and they had obviously passed that seriousness of purpose on to their students. Whatever casual comments they may have let slip during the period of examination, they all stopped short of making such a definitive, one might even say naked, pronouncement for the record. In spite of such understandable reticence, however, it would seem that no other conclusion is possible. There is no other reasonable scenario that can explain away all the discrepancies, the charges and countercharges, and the obvious maneuvering recorded in the inquest. “Again, the best explanation is that he was done in by some individuals,” pondered Dirkmaat, “that it wasn’t just a hanging.” “It’s pretty clear,” he went on, “that something was going on to cover somebody’s tracks. Let’s say he did commit suicide and did hang himself. . . . But if that were the case, then the witnesses should line up somehow as to the sequence of events. And none of them do.” (One would logically assume, of course, that if there was a concerted effort to cover up a crime, the parties involved would have done a better job of coordinating their stories. But Gerber convened the inquest less than forty-eight hours after Dolezal’s death—enough time for the subpoenaed deputies to agree on the general outline of their story, but wholly insufficient to satisfactorily nail down all the pesky details.) “From what I can see in the photographic evidence and the documented evidence, it does not truly appear to me that the individual [Frank Dolezal] died as a result of a suicide,” concurred Donovan. “There’s some inconsistencies, both physical and in the documentation, that would lead me to think that the cause of death might have been other.”

  Serendipity will always play its inevitable, unpredictable role in this sort of cold case research, and that elusive quality made a grand entrance one day over the faculty lunch table when Marge Geiger, one of my English department colleagues, casually announced that she had gone to college with Patricia Cornwell’s fictional medical examiner, Kay Scarpetta. Dr. Marcella Fierro, former medical examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia, had supposedly served as a model for Cornwell’s popular crime solving forensic detective; and, with the path to her old classmate cleared by Geiger, Fierro consented to look at some of the evidence surrounding Frank Dolezal’s death, primarily the pre-autopsy photographs and Gerber’s formal verdict; and her succinct judgment provided a wonderfully satisfying coda to our Mercyhurst experience. “A cloth ligature would not leave a 1 cm mark on his neck. It was caused by something else”—she determined and then subsequently clarified. “A cloth ligature like a sheet (unless it was wound very tight and he had hung for hours) would leave a faint mark that would fade. Any narrow discrete mark would have to be from something else.”

  Dr. Marcella F. Fierro, former chief medical examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia. Courtesy of Marcella Fierro.

  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 accumulat
ed 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.

  NOTES

  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

  RECKONING

  Chapter 8

  ALL IN THE FAMILY

  When 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.