Though Murder Has No Tongue Page 5

  On the one hand, the suggestion that Lyons was drunk when he came into her place of business appears a couple of times in the Merylo report, and some of the behavior Mrs. Merrills described could only be attributed to intoxication. The charge of intoxication was obviously also central to Lyons’s drunk driving arrest in 1940. And there were at least two other arrests for intoxication in his past—one in 1918 and another in 1933. Coincidentally, the later incident also involved charges of perjury on the part of the arresting officers. On the other hand, it is difficult to believe that anyone with a drinking problem could have conducted the sort of calculated investigation Lyons and his team had, while also keeping it out of the papers and away from the attention of the police department for so long. In his memoirs, Lyons states that he was careful never to say he was a policeman; he always went simply by his first name, as did the sheriff’s deputies working with him. (In his report to Ness, however, Merylo does write that Helen Merrills saw a gold badge.) He adopted this strategy essentially for two reasons: outright fabrications and falsehoods can come back to haunt a careless investigator; and the people from whom he was trying to extract information lived in the destitute, run-down neighborhoods on the fringes of society and—given the nature of their lives, experiences, and color—were not about to trust the police. Thus, Lyons walked a thin line—presenting himself as an authority figure of some sort who was also a “regular guy” who could be counted on to spring for a round of drinks. It is possible to read at least some of the boisterous behavior that Mrs. Merrills reported to Merylo as a heavy-handed attempt on Lyons’s part to ingratiate himself to the poor, black regulars that hung out at the Forest Café.

  The Pat Lyons who survives in old newspaper stories and official documents, both public and private, is an imperfect reflection of the father and grandfather his family remembers. It was an important lesson, one I had already learned and of which I would be reminded several times during the course of my research. From all of this diverse and incomplete evidence, two seemingly different portraits of Pat Lyons emerge: on the one hand, a careless would-be detective who couldn’t hold his liquor; on the other, a shrewd investigator trolling for significant information in the murky, dangerous swamps of tenement life in Depression-era Cleveland.

  NOTES

  Frank Dolezal’s great-niece Mary Dolezal Satterlee provided the details relevant to Frank Dolezal’s family background and his early days in Cleveland—as well of those of his brother Charles. Other details were culled from public documents, such as the city directories and government census reports.

  When he died in 1958, Detective Peter Merylo left behind two extensive, unpublished manuscripts detailing his work on the Kingsbury Run murders. The longer of the two comes in at 155 typed legal-sized pages, and the dry formality of its prose strongly suggests that Merylo was the document’s sole author. Though the second manuscript, 107 typed legal-sized pages, bears the name Frank Otwell—a Cleveland News reporter as well as Merylo’s personal friend—on its first page, Merylo’s hand is still evident; and Otwell’s participation in this version may have been an attempt to lighten the rigidly official tone of the veteran cop’s style, thus producing a far more reader-friendly account. Both of these manuscripts are part of the vast collection of documents related to the case in the possession of Peter Merylo’s daughter Marjorie Merylo Dentz. Though most of these papers are copies of Merylo’s official police reports, the assemblage also includes tip letters from a variety of sources, many of them unsigned, and other pieces of official and personal correspondence. Totaling well over two thousand pages of diverse material, the Merylo papers constitute the largest single collection of documents pertaining to the Kingsbury Run murders.

  Pat Lyons’s daughter, Carol Fitzgerald, graciously provided me with copies of all her father’s papers dealing with his role in the torso investigation. Though nowhere near as voluminous as the Merylo collection, the random notes, lists of people to be interviewed, various letters, and Lyons’s formal manuscript, “A Discussion of the So-called Torso Cases,” provide significant insight into the thinking behind his working methods and flesh out a considerable number of the significant details leading up to Frank Dolezal’s arrest in July 1939. The song “Mary Not Contrary,” for which Lyons supplied lyrics, was composed by A. Leopold Richard and published by Legters Music Company of Chicago.

  An extensive account of Pat Lyons’s 1933 arrest for intoxication and being a “suspicious person” can be found in the clipping files of the Cleveland Press housed in the library of Cleveland State University. The document is not a published story clipped from the pages of the Press; rather it is a typed, three-page manuscript for a story that apparently was never printed.

  Chapter 3

  HISTORY THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

  Frank Dolezal was arrested on Wednesday, July 5, 1939; on August 24 he would lie dead on the jailhouse floor. Until the beginning of the twenty-first century, the only record available to the public of what happened in the county jail on those hot summer days and during the rancorous aftermath would be the bits and pieces recorded in Cleveland’s three daily newspapers—fragments of history hurriedly gathered to meet a deadline, with little, if any, in-depth investigation—offered to a public hungry for details. A predictable wave of local excitement and relief washed over the city after Sheriff Martin L. O’Donnell’s public announcement on July 6 that the torso killer had finally been apprehended. The city was now safe from the elusive killer who had prowled through its neighborhoods and haunted its blighted interiors since late 1934. Clevelanders could now breathe their collective sigh of relief and celebrate the crack investigators under the sheriff’s command who had finally tracked down the Butcher—a man O’Donnell luridly described to the Cleveland News as “gorilla-like”—and put him behind bars.

  THURSDAY, JULY 6, 1939

  “Find Human Blood in Torso Hunt,” blared the headline in the Press that afternoon. Thus murder-weary Clevelanders first learned that the cycle of mutilation and blood-letting might finally be over. Sheriff Martin O’Donnell announced that a chemical analysis performed by G. V. Lyons—brother of Pat Lyons—of stains found on the walls and under the bathroom baseboard at the 1908 Central Avenue apartment where Dolezal had lived in August 1938 proved they were human blood. He then continued to outline what the Plain Dealer termed the “strong circumstantial case” that he and his office had built against Frank Dolezal so far. Allegedly, Dolezal’s initial explanation for the telltale blood in his Central Avenue apartment was that he had bought a pig at the central market and had butchered it in his bathroom. When informed that the central market did not sell pigs, he immediately insisted it was a chicken he had bought and killed. Though he had at first denied he had been acquainted with any of the torso victims, Dolezal ultimately confessed he had known Flo Polillo (victim no. 3) and had been drinking with her in his apartment the night before the first set of her remains turned up behind Hart Manufacturing, less than a block away, on January 26, 1936, thus potentially making him the last person to have seen her alive. Allegedly, Dolezal had borrowed “a large knife” from a neighbor and later returned it stained with human blood. He had suspiciously moved from his apartment to a Scranton Road address (to get cheaper rent, he insisted) on the near west side following the discovery of victims no. 11 and no. 12 in August 1938—just as Eliot Ness was sending teams of police and firemen to search the dilapidated dwellings in the run-down east side neighborhoods close to downtown—and had just as suspiciously moved back to the east side to 2491 East 22nd Street a few months before his arrest. In spite of his constant denials that he knew any of the Butcher’s victims other than Flo Polillo, unidentified witnesses, most likely Dolezal’s neighbors, had assured the sheriff’s men that they had seen him with a man who strongly resembled the first officially recognized victim, Edward Andrassy, and another man, clearly a sailor. (Because of his distinctive tattoos, authorities had always surmised that the unidentified victim no. 4—discovered on June 5,
1936—may have been a navy man or, at the very least, a sailor.) He reportedly also had a “passionate craving for knives.” A thorough search of Dolezal’s apartment had turned up a notebook filled with names and addresses, as well as a photo album from which pages had obviously been torn. According to the sheriff, Dolezal would not or could not offer any explanation for these missing pages. Finally, he had worked as a “sticker” and then a “stamper” in a slaughterhouse for three months twenty years before, apparently around 1918, thus potentially providing him with the necessary experience to disarticulate a human corpse with surgical precision. A very circumstantial case, indeed! But it all added up to an incriminating picture, and it was certainly a promising beginning. Dolezal, however, had so far confessed to nothing beyond the alleged facts that he had known Flo Polillo and had been drinking with her the night of January 25, the day before some of the pieces of her corpse turned up in the snow behind Hart Manufacturing on East 20th.

  Apparently, some unidentified members of the press corps decided it might be a good idea to check with Peter Merylo and ask what he thought of all this. After all, the torso murders had been the exclusive property of the Cleveland Police Department since the beginning, whether one officially marked that beginning at September 1934 or September 1935. Merylo had worked the case virtually full time since September 1936 under the guidance of Safety Director Eliot Ness. And the police had repeatedly come up empty; the most massive investigation in city history had seemingly crashed against an impregnable wall of mystery. Yet the county sheriff’s office, with the aid of Pat Lyons, had blown the case open in a bit less than a year. Though the Press reported on July 6 that Merylo was “angered by the sheriff’s intrusion into his specialty,” the wily detective played his cards carefully and close to the vest—at least, for the time being. He pointed out to the Plain Dealer that Dolezal’s alleged assertion that he had been drinking with Flo Polillo the night of January 25 could not possibly be true, since then-coroner Pearce had determined she had been dead two to three days before January 26, when her partial remains were found. At this point, Merylo’s shot across the bow did little damage to the sheriff’s case, but the veteran cop was silently and deliberately arming his torpedoes.

  FRIDAY, JULY 7

  That evening, Sheriff O’Donnell announced with great fanfare that he had obtained a confession—at least a confession of sorts. “Dolezal said he killed Mrs. Polillo and I believe him,” Pat Lyons told the Plain Dealer. “Suspect Says He Struck Woman with Fist When She Threatened Him with Butcher Knife in Quarrel,” proclaimed the Press. Deputy Harry S. Brown, Chief Deputy Clarence M. Tylicki, and Chief Jailer Michael F. Kilbane had subjected Dolezal to a continuous and brutally intense interrogation—no less than forty hours, according to the Cleveland News—since his arrest two days before, and the suspect had finally broken. “We were in my room drinking Friday night. . . . She was all dressed up and wanted to go out. She wanted some money. She grabbed for $10 I had in my pocket. I argued with her because she tried to take some money from me before. . . . She came at me with a butcher knife. . . . Yes, I hit her [Flo Polillo] with my fist,” the Plain Dealer reported the next day. “She fell into the bathroom and hit her head against the bathtub. I thought she was dead. I put her in the bathtub. Then I took the knife—the small one, not the large one—and cut off her head. Then I cut off her legs. Then her arms.” (The Press also “quoted” Dolezal’s narrative; and although the story is the same, the wording is rather different, thus raising a significant issue: how accurate were these reporters when it came to quoting a source? Just how rigorous—or casual—were press standards when it came to the use of quotation marks? The problem is further compounded in this case by the suspect’s reportedly very poor command of the English language; by all accounts from friends and family, he spoke broken English at best. Just whose words were those that the eager press establishment was quoting?) Dolezal placed this deadly confrontation at 2 A.M. on January 25, the day before the initial set of her remains was discovered. Following his confession, the sheriff and his men whisked their prisoner off to the lakeshore at East 49th just so he could point to the exact spot where he allegedly tossed Flo Polillo’s head into the frigid waters; then they headed back to Hart Manufacturing so he could similarly indicate where he had deposited the produce baskets containing the initial set of Polillo’s body parts. That evening, Cleveland’s press corps got their first look at the alleged Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run—the monstrous fiend who had terrorized the inner city for four years, given Cleveland a black eye in the national press, and stumped Ness and his legion of detectives and other law enforcement personnel. The most massive investigation in Cleveland history had resulted in the arrest of a short, stocky man in a sweat-stained shirt who gazed blankly into space as the assembled photographers snapped his picture.

  The main problem with the Dolezal confession was that the rest of his story simply did not match the documented and widely publicized details of the Polillo murder. After carefully packing some of her remains in produce baskets and depositing his handiwork in the snow behind the manufacturing company, Dolezal supposedly told his captors that he transported the remaining pieces of her corpse to the foot of East 49th, where he unceremoniously tossed them into Lake Erie. But it had been widely reported that the second set of Polillo’s body parts had been located at 1419 Orange on February 7; and, working cautiously behind the scenes so as avoid attracting the attention of either Sheriff O’Donnell or Chief of Police George Matowitz, Merylo pointed out to the press that Dolezal could not have disposed of Flo Polillo’s remains in Lake Erie on the night of January 26, 1936, in the manner alleged because the biting winter cold had frozen lake waters well beyond the breakwall. All reporters had to do was check with the U.S. Weather Bureau to verify the claim. The press also reported that Dolezal had claimed he burned Flo Polillo’s clothing, save for her coat and shoes; those, he is alleged to have insisted, he left behind the Hart Manufacturing Company building on East 20th with the first set of her remains. If that were the case, why weren’t they found? They don’t appear in either of the two official photographs of the scene, nor are they mentioned in any of the surviving police reports. Merylo wryly reflected on the situation in his memoirs: “This was my first experience where a man is making a confession to a murder or any other serious crime and does not know the details of the crime which he is alleged to have committed.” Thus, at the very moment the juggernaut began rolling inexorably forward and gathering speed, the wheels started to fall off. “There are some discrepancies between what Dolezal says he did and what are known facts in the Polillo case,” the sheriff acknowledged to the Plain Dealer. “We want to get a confession that will hold up in court before we place any charges against him.” According to the Press, the sheriff was far more specific. “But I still want him to confess that he actually murdered Mrs. Polillo.” Though serious allegations of mistreatment at the hands of the sheriff and his deputies would materialize later, at this point there was no way for the reading public to tell what had happened to Frank Dolezal behind the jailhouse walls in the two days since his arrest. But some of the wording in the Press made it clear that he must have been subjected to a horrendous ordeal: “questioned all night” (July 6); “the suspect . . . has been grilled for two days,” “suspect is weakening under the long hours of grilling” (July 7); “the questioning continued thus, in relays” (July 8). According to the Cleveland News on July 6, Dolezal endured “more than twenty hours of intermittent grilling”; and the Plain Dealer casually informed its readers that the prisoner had not been allowed to sleep from the time he was arrested on July 5 until 9:00 P.M. on July 7. It was a different time, and law enforcement operated under a much looser set of rules than it does in the early twenty-first century. The rights of possible defendants didn’t count for much, and obtaining a confession by any possible means was often the norm.

  Western Reserve University chemist Dr. Enrique Ecker (kneeling) looks for bloodstains on the bathtu
b in Frank Dolezal’s apartment. Also present are Sheriff Martin L. O’Donnell (second from left) and Head Jailer Michael Kilbane (fourth from left). Cleveland Press Archives, Cleveland State University.

  Dolezal added a nail to his own coffin when he finally “admitted” that he socialized and drank with Edward Andrassy and Rose Wallace (the tentative identification assigned to victim no. 8). Though the Plain Dealer reported that the case against Dolezal had obviously been strengthened by his admission, the fissures in the dam continued to spread. Edward Andrassy’s father, Joseph, insisted to the Press, “I never saw that fellow [Frank Dolezal] in my life.” (The official assumption was that the two were at least acquainted.) Also, without providing any explanation, the Plain Dealer cautiously indicated, “There appear to be some question [sic] as to whether Dolezal is the ‘mad butcher of Kingsbury Run’ and is responsible for all twelve of the torsos discovered in Cleveland between September, 1935, and last August.” In the meantime, Sheriff O’Donnell occupied himself by arranging for his prisoner to take a lie detector test at the police department in East Cleveland (the only municipality to own one), lining up chemist Dr. Enrique E. Ecker of Western Reserve University to validate G. V. Lyons’s analysis of the supposed bloodstains in Dolezal’s bathroom, and checking hospital records to see if the scar on Dolezal’s arm could be linked to the knife fight Edward Andrassy told his sister about in the days before his death.