Though Murder Has No Tongue Read online

  See notes at the end of chapter 2 for a full discussion of Peter Merylo’s and Pat Lyons’s papers.

  Chapter 4

  VIOLENT DEATH ON A HOT AFTERNOON

  Hitler was on the march. By the end of August 1939, the erupting crisis that would lead directly to Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1 was in full swing. All over Europe heads of state postured, ambassadors negotiated, and armies mobilized. Thus, it should be no surprise that, with the very real and ominous threat of world war looming darkly on the horizon, the death of Frank Dolezal in the county jail on August 24 stirred minimal interest in the Cleveland press. Kingsbury Run and everything connected with it seemed to belong to a different age. Even a compellingly gruesome series of decapitation murder-dismemberments seemed relatively unimportant, indeed parochial, in the face of growing world tragedy. But Dolezal’s fate prompted Cleveland’s legal machinery into swift action, and—behind the news curtain of the gathering European storm—it rolled inexorably forward into a hornets’ nest of bitter allegations, whose shock waves would reverberate throughout the city for years.

  Initially, it all seemed rather cut and dried. Left alone for a few minutes, Dolezal had hanged himself from a coat hook in a jail cell. When deputies discovered him, they cut his body down and called for medical assistance. Efforts to revive him, however, failed; and when Coroner Gerber arrived on the scene a little later, he officially pronounced the death a suicide and declared—since he saw no evidence of criminal activity—that a formal autopsy would not be required. As far as Sheriff O’Donnell was concerned, the suicide was nothing less than a tacit admission of guilt on Dolezal’s part; he simply did not want to face the Grand Jury and the subsequent rigors of the justice system. Reportedly despondent over his desperate situation, Dolezal had made two previous attempts on his life over a month before; this time, he had succeeded. But as the details of the “suicide” trickled in, the troubling questions mounted. Reportedly, he had hanged himself with a noose he had fashioned from muslin rags or cloths. Where had he gotten them? Ever since his two failed attempts on his life, Dolezal had been kept on suicide watch; his belt and shoelaces had even been taken away from him. An unidentified deputy volunteered that Dolezal had constantly badgered his captors for something to do, so they gave him the rags to clean his cell. Assuming this explanation is true, had no one taken notice of the fact that he was obviously stockpiling them? Apparently not! Why were additional rags found wound around Dolezal’s waist underneath his pants? No explanation was forthcoming. If he was on suicide watch, why, and for how long, had he been left unguarded? Reportedly, Deputy Hugh Crawford had left him alone for no more than three minutes while he informed visitors in another part of the jail that the visiting period was over. But was a mere three minutes long enough for what Gerber officially termed “asphyxiation caused by strangulation” to occur? Gerber reasoned it was but conceded he thought it would have taken longer, perhaps fifteen minutes. How could this time discrepancy be explained? There was no immediate answer. Were there no signs that Dolezal had been depressed? Couldn’t this suicide have been prevented if he had been more closely watched? Sheriff’s deputies insisted he was far from being depressed, rather, in a good, indeed, jovial mood. They even alleged he played cards with them. Where was the coat hook from which he hanged himself? It was located about five feet, seven inches above the floor of the cell. Frank Dolezal, however, measured five feet, eight inches in height; how did he manage to hang himself from a hook so close to the floor? How was that even possible? By simply crouching down and letting his weight do the job, insisted the sheriff. But could that explanation be reconciled with the sheriff’s statement that Dolezal’s toes were barely touching the floor when he first saw his hanging body? (Gerber speculated he could have stepped off the toilet directly below the hook and swung free.)

  A tin cup handle, clearly visible in one of the official death scene photographs, was found in his pocket. How did he get it, and what was it for? It could have been fashioned into a dangerous weapon, deputies hinted ominously, but no explanation of its provenance was offered. There were rumors that Dolezal had asked for and been given medicine of some kind just before his death. Exactly what was it, and who gave it to him? And, perhaps most troubling, where had the length of relatively thin rope clearly visible in the photographs of his corpse come from? Not only did this question slip by without comment, the telltale length of rope or twine was never mentioned again. “I had a hunch something like this would happen before he ever came to trial,” raged attorney Fred Soukup to Chief Deputy Sheriff Clarence M. Tylicki, according to the Plain Dealer on August 26. “What kind of jail are you running here, anyway? I thought you were keeping a 24-hour watch on him.” Sergeant James Hogan and Inspector Joseph M. Sweeney of the Cleveland Police Department, both with long torso case experience, showed up at the jail to look into the incident around 3:00, about an hour after it occurred. Whether they regarded Dolezal’s death as suspicious at this point is not clear. Everyone involved, however, including the sheriff, was invited down to the department’s main headquarters to make formal statements. Maybe it was just procedure; maybe—in contemporary parlance—the veteran cops were sticking it to the sheriff and his deputies.

  Frank Dolezal dead on the jailhouse floor. The cloth noose with which he allegedly hanged himself has been placed on his left shoulder. The black, stringlike object to the left of his head is his broken rosary. Its presence on the mattress raises questions. Why was it broken, and why was it not on his person? Since the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office did not take its own photographs in the 1930s, it is somewhat unclear whether this shot should be attributed to the police or the press. Courtesy of the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office.

  It all proved too much for William E. Edwards, operating director of the Cleveland Crime Commission. Edwards had become involved in the Dolezal affair rather as former judge David Hertz had several weeks before: as an objective outside party concerned solely with making sure proper procedures were followed and Dolezal’s rights under the law were protected. Hertz, however, had been so outraged at the manner in which the sheriff’s office was handling their prisoner that he abandoned his initial neutrality and joined forces with Fred Soukup. Now Edwards seemed ready to follow a similar path. “In view of all the street corner rumors and other reports of brutal treatment of Dolezal,” Edwards told the Plain Dealer on August 26, “I think it only fair to the sheriff and the public to make as thorough as possible an investigation to ascertain the truth or falsity of these reports.” And as far as Edwards was concerned, that thorough investigation must include a formal autopsy, in spite of Gerber’s initial pronouncement that it was not necessary. Such a “demand”—as the Plain Dealer termed it—surely rankled someone as touchy and protective of his turf as Coroner Gerber, but he held his tongue and bowed to Edwards’s wishes on the condition that the Dolezal family formally granted permission for the procedure. Edwards immediately obtained the necessary affidavit from Charles Dolezal, who gave his consent, with the proviso that Edwards be allowed to designate a neutral and “recognized pathologist” to be present during the autopsy. It is hard to believe that such a legally sophisticated request could have come from someone whose command of English was elemental at best and who remained as naïve about the workings of the American justice system as Charles Dolezal; undoubtedly, either Fred Soukup or David Hertz had prompted him. The two-and-one-half-hour procedure was scheduled to take place approximately eighteen hours after Dolezal’s death, on August 25 at 6:30 A.M. Harry Goldblatt, assistant professor of pathology at Western Reserve University (obviously the “recognized pathologist” Edwards chose per Charles Dolezal’s request), joined Samuel Gerber and Reuben Straus, himself a veteran of several torso victim autopsies. In spite of the war hysteria howling in the press, the entire city of Cleveland turned its attention to the official procedure at the Cuyahoga County morgue. Arguably, this ranked as potentially one of the most important autopsies in city history.
The reputations of some very prominent Clevelanders were on the line. Before the formal procedure began, someone on the coroner’s staff took two photographs of the wound around Frank Dolezal’s neck. (These were not shown nor even mentioned at the subsequent inquest. Even more perplexing is the photo taken of the empty cranial cavity after Dolezal’s brain had been removed. No doubt Gerber, Straus, and Goldblatt would have examined Frank Dolezal’s brain closely, looking for any suspicious abnormalities, but why photograph an empty skull?)

  The autopsy results were shocking—so shocking, in fact, that the official report jockeyed for position with war fears on the front pages. Dolezal had six broken ribs: the third, fourth, eighth, and ninth on the left side; the first and seventh on the right. “The fractures are not of recent date,” Gerber told the Press, “that is they were not suffered within the past two or three weeks. There will be no definite verdict rendered until all sections [of the broken ribs] have been put through the laboratory and examined under the microscope.” To help “determine whether the fractures are old or new ones,” the coroner’s office turned pieces of the broken ribs over to David Cowles, head of the Police Scientific Laboratory, and his assistant, Lloyd Trunk, for X-ray examination. But Soukup was convinced those breaks had to be new, and he didn’t have to wait for any scientific verification of the obvious to say so publicly. “It is absurd to imagine that he could do the work he did [bricklaying] if he had received the fractured ribs before he went to jail,” he scoffed to the Plain Dealer on August 25. O’Donnell stuck to his guns and insisted the injuries resulted from a fall during one of Dolezal’s well-documented July 10 suicide attempts; but that seemed highly unlikely, as ribs are not easy to crack and Dolezal had suffered breaks on both sides of his body and in different places up and down his rib cage. It takes a very hard, direct blow to break a rib; a single fall to the floor of his jail cell, even if he also struck the bench on his way down, would not be sufficient to cause that much damage in so many different places. Without naming his source—though it was most likely Patrolman Frank Vorell, brother of Charles Dolezal’s wife, Louise—Edwards told the Press on August 26 that he had evidence “that he [Dolezal] had been gagged, blindfolded and beaten until he became unconscious. . . . When he regained consciousness he was lying on the cement floor.” In response to a reporter’s inquiry as to who could have been responsible, Edwards wryly commented, “I suppose by inference we have to assume it was the sheriff’s office.” Battle lines were being drawn, and Edwards clearly seemed to be moving over into the Dolezal camp with Soukup and Hertz.

  On August 25, Coroner Gerber bowed to intense pressure from Hertz and Edwards and called for a formal inquest. That evening twenty-two separate parties were served subpoenas ordering them to appear the next day—Saturday, August 26—to testify. The proceedings would commence at 10:30 A.M. at the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office with Coroner Gerber presiding. The machinery of local justice had moved forward with remarkable speed—perhaps because the whole issue of Dolezal’s death had become so contentious, complicated, and controversial, within hours of it being reported in the press. To allow such a poisonous morass of contradictions and questions to fester publicly could raise major doubts about the competence, even the integrity, of city officialdom. The proceedings had four serious issues to address: the broken ribs, bruising on Dolezal’s face and arm, and the attendant charges of brutality; the time line of events leading up to the discovery that he had apparently attempted suicide; how he had gotten a hold of the material with which he allegedly hanged himself; and the amount of time he had been left hanging before being cut down. The last of these questions was potentially the most vexing. The disparities surrounding this crucial bit of time had been covered by the press. Questions dealing with the nature of some of the other disagreements, however (who may have said what), were not specifically addressed publicly by city dailies.

  Gerber issued his official verdict on Dolezal’s death on September 5. Of all the cases over which he would preside in his long tenure as Cuyahoga County coroner, probably no other forced him into such a delicate, politically sensitive dance as this one did. In September 1939 Gerber was just ending his third year on the job; his position was touchy, to say the least. Though a Democrat, he was a Jew in a town where some of the most powerful politicians were Irish. Even allowing for the fact that Martin L. O’Donnell had endured a very public dressing-down in Judge Day’s court on July 15 over his handling of the Dolezal case, the sheriff still wielded considerable power; and his oft-stated position that neither he nor his deputies had ever physically abused the prisoner could not be casually ignored. And yet, the Dolezal team of Hertz, Soukup, and Edwards—men with considerable clout of their own—were insisting their client had been repeatedly beaten; and Gerber could not afford to snub them, either. In an uneasy compromise between the allegations of the two opposing camps, he concluded that the suspect had, indeed, taken his own life as the sheriff and his deputies maintained. The broken ribs and other injuries, however, proved a vexing and politically sensitive problem, and the coroner juggled this hot potato as deftly as he could. After admitting that the broken ribs and other physical injuries had occurred while Dolezal was in the sheriff’s custody, he immediately equivocated and speculated that they could have resulted from the alleged beatings, the previously noted suicide attempts, or even a combination of the two. The soldiers on both sides of the battlefield probably gritted their teeth but remained silent. A partial victory was better than none at all.

  With Gerber’s official determination that he had committed suicide, Frank Dolezal dropped from the pages of city dailies and faded from Cleveland’s collective memory. His key role in Kingsbury Run lore and legend, however, had been firmly established. His family buried him quietly in an unmarked grave, but he did not rest easily. Uncertainty about his alleged guilt continued to fester. On the one hand, it was pointed out that the torso killings stopped after his death; but on the other, it was argued that they had already stopped in August 1938—almost a full year before his arrest. Shortly after his death, suspicion arose that his “suicide” was not as cut and dried as Coroner Gerber’s official judgment suggested, that there were still nagging, uncomfortable questions. In time those questions would coalesce and grow into a dark urban legend that possibly, just possibly, Frank Dolezal had been murdered. And if that were, indeed, the case, who had done it, and why? His specter, with its blank, unfocused stare, would haunt his family for decades; and he would eventually splinter his coffin and rise from his grave, more than sixty-five years after his death.

  NOTES

  Most of the information in this chapter was gleaned from the coverage in Cleveland’s three daily newspapers. The dates and names of the papers are provided in the text.

  The official autopsy protocol reporting on Frank Dolezal’s death bears the case number 49869 and is on file in the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office.

  Part 2

  REVELATIONS

  Chapter 5

  AN INTERLUDE: MARY DOLEZAL

  “Why the hell should I tell you anything?” rasped the voice at the other end of the line, between bouts of heavy coughing. Momentarily flustered by the speaker’s unanticipated vehemence, I rummaged for an appropriate response that would not add to her obvious distrust and anger. At the time, I was still doing the research for In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland’s Torso Murders; all I wanted was a little information about Frank Dolezal—the only man ever arrested and charged in the brutal series of killings, the man who may or may not have committed suicide to avoid prosecution.

  Whether guilty or innocent, a murder victim or a suicide, at that point I regarded the history of Frank Dolezal as only one of the later, longer, though very disquieting, chapters in the entire Kingsbury Run murders saga. But his story was a chapter I thought deserved closer scrutiny than it had received before. Certainly there must still be Dolezal descendants living in Cleveland, I reasoned—people who could give me their perspective on this
dark, painful episode of family history.

  My probes in the Cleveland telephone book ultimately led me to Los Angeles and Mary Dolezal, Frank’s great-niece, the unofficial family historian who had learned the ugly story of her grandfather Charles’s brother from her mother before she hit her teen years, in spite of the rest of the family’s determination to keep silent about the entire affair. Working below the radar of older relatives, she unearthed as much information as she could find—inquiries that revealed to her virtually unacknowledged reservoirs of family anger, grief, and shame. Suddenly the reasons for her father’s obsessive, aggressively defiant pride in the name “Dolezal” became clear: the name was something of which to be proud, not ashamed. She finally became convinced that her great-uncle was innocent of the crimes with which he had been charged and, far from having committed suicide, had been murdered while in the county sheriff’s custody, by a person or persons unknown. Ultimately, however, there seemed some sort of curious, old-world attitude toward public humiliation at work among her older relatives, including her father—something that dictated that one bore one’s shame, deserved or undeserved, in stoic silence. The tragic story of Frank Dolezal and everything connected with it became the proverbial elephant in the room—something that could not be ignored but, by tacit agreement, was never discussed or openly referred to. Senior members of the clan may have believed in Frank’s innocence without question; however, they resented her determination to prove it publicly. Now, suffering with a terrible cold, she found herself potentially sparring over the phone with an unknown writer who seemed poised to pick at the scab covering her family’s deepest wound for purely selfish reasons. I would later joke that those of us whose gyroscopes spin at odd angles have ways of recognizing each other, so, in spite of that phone call’s shaky beginnings, Mary Dolezal and I ended our first conversation on amicable terms; and we have been the best of friends ever since. In December 2003, we endured biting winds and cold temperatures as we trudged through Cleveland’s West Park Cemetery together looking for the exact spot of her great-uncle’s grave. We gave up our search as darkness began to close in but found the cemetery gates locked when we tried to leave. Somehow we had managed to miss closing time, and I had to drive over the curb through cemetery grounds, sincerely hoping there would be no grave markers in the way, until I could get back to city streets. It was a hilarious excursion; it seems ’tis ever thus when Mary and I are together.