Though Murder Has No Tongue

by James Jessen Badal

  The summary of the local political scene comes from several different articles in The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (edited by David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987]) and my conversations with Doris O’Donnell Beaufait, formerly a reporter with both the Cleveland News and the Plain Dealer. (She is also the niece of then county sheriff Martin L. O’Donnell.)

  The account of Coroner A. J. Pearce’s torso clinic of September 1936 is drawn from the reports in Cleveland’s three daily newspapers.

  Chapter 2

  THE BRICKLAYER, THE COP, AND THE PRIVATE EYE

  It’s impossible to say exactly when Frank Dolezal took those first tentative steps on the path that would inevitably lead to his destruction; but by summer 1939, he was a deeply troubled man. Our understandable desire to see the world of law enforcement and crime in simple terms of black and white, of villains and heroes, can sometimes lead us to view those who potentially suffer injustice at the hands of the establishment as totally innocent of any wrongdoing; but the fifty-two-year-old bricklayer was hardly an angel. There is no way to know when his serious drinking problems began; but by July 1939, Frank Dolezal battled full-blown alcoholism and a Jekyll-Hyde personality. When he was sober, he could be gentle, even sweet; his nephews and nieces, children of his brother Charles, treasured fond memories of a kind uncle who, on those rare occasions when he visited, invariably brought them candy and readily treated all the neighborhood youngsters to ice cream. Similarly, his neighbors recalled a gregarious man who enjoyed company—someone who would happily spring for steaks when he had the money and treat his friends to a cookout. But when he had had too much to drink, Dolezal wrestled with a legion of frightening personal demons. Crying jags would consume him, only to be replaced by deep black depressions, intense—almost paranoid—fears, and occasional violent rages. Whisperings about the exact nature of his sexuality also hung over him, and there were vague reports alleging he had been seen loitering around the Terminal Tower on Public Square trying to lure young men to his apartment. A common laborer who never married, by 1939, Dolezal supported himself by practicing his bricklaying trade on a variety of WPA projects. Except for some rumored casual on-again, off-again living arrangements with both men and women, he seems to have spent most of his life alone in a series of small, dilapidated apartments in the crumbling neighborhoods on Cleveland’s near west and east sides. At five feet, eight inches, he was a relatively short, though stocky, man. He was hardly the sort of individual people would notice; he was just another nondescript working stiff trying to put together a meager living in the middle years of the Great Depression. He was, however, also plagued by what was then commonly referred to as a wandering eye, a condition that gave him a vacant, blank, distracted stare—as if he were never quite focusing on the objects and people in front of him. He had glasses to correct the problem but seems to have rarely worn them.

  Frank Dolezal was born on May 4, 1887, in what was then simply referred to as Bohemia, to Vaclav and Mary, née Spinka, Dolezal, one of ten children. In 1910 at the age of twenty-three, he immigrated to the United States, apparently making the long sea journey alone. (Over time, Cleveland would absorb three major waves of Czech immigrants, the largest occurring between 1870 and the onset of World War I.) Whatever may have prompted, or forced, him to leave his homeland remains a mystery. Grinding poverty, high taxes, and lack of work drove many of his countrymen to the United States during this period; and as, perhaps, one of the older males in a large family, he may have seen it as his duty to lessen the financial burdens on his beleaguered parents by seeking his fortune on the other side of the Atlantic. In the early years of the twentieth century, Cleveland was a thriving and growing industrial center with a reputation as an ethnic melting pot that rivaled New York’s. These circumstances alone would have been sufficient to attract a young Czech man on his own for the first time in his life. Frank Dolezal, however, was following an older sister, Anna, who had already come to America, in 1903 or 1904, and made her home in Cleveland. (An obscure piece of Dolezal family legend maintains a second sister, Antonia, or, perhaps, Antonie Dolezal Lesky, had also made the journey to the United States, though when she came and where she may ultimately have settled are unknown. There is no record of her in Cuyahoga County, which raises the possibility that “Anna” and “Antonie/Antonia” may have been the same person.) In 1913, on the eve of the Great War, one of Frank’s younger brothers, Charles, became the third or fourth Dolezal sibling to cross the Atlantic. (Charles’s given name was actually Karel. “Frank,” therefore, may have been a similarly Anglicized version of something else, possibly Franz.)

  Apparently, the two brothers lived quietly together for the next seven years, though exactly where is difficult to determine. None of the several Charles and Frank Dolezals listed in the Cleveland city directories between 1913 and 1919 would seem to fit the bill. It was not until 1920 that directory compilers took note of the brothers, both bricklayers, living at 3217 West 56th. In 1920, Charles married Louise Vorell, and from that point on, Frank was essentially on his own. In the years immediately following Charles’s marriage, the first signs of a curious introverted silence—something akin to estrangement—developed between the two brothers. They saw each other rarely and remained steadfastly oblivious to the mundane details of each other’s lives. This same emotional distance and unwillingness, even inability, to communicate openly would characterize Dolezal family relationships in succeeding generations. Little or nothing of the family past was ever discussed openly; everything Mary Dolezal Satterlee (Charles’s granddaughter and Frank’s great-niece) learned about her family history came to her in vague whispers or through her own determined digging.

  The Frank Dolezal that Cleveland never knew. This photograph documents the 1920 marriage of his brother Charles to Louise Vorell. From left: Frank Dolezal, Louise Dolezal, Charles Dolezal, unidentified child, Lillian Vorell, Frank Vorell, and unidentified female. Courtesy of Mary Dolezal Satterlee.

  Whether one marks the beginning of the Kingsbury Run murders sometime in 1934 (when the Lady of the Lake turned up on the shore of Lake Erie) or September 1935 (the deaths of Edward Andrassy and his never identified companion), by late summer 1936, the string of gruesome atrocities had propelled Cleveland into an embarrassing national spotlight. Cleveland’s movers and shakers dreaded the constant stream of negative publicity the city was attracting internationally. The Great Lakes Exposition was also scheduled to open that summer—potentially attracting thousands of visitors—and the Republicans were holding their 1936 national convention here, as well. All this activity could add up to a major economic shot in the arm for an old industrial city still reeling from the disastrous effects of the Great Depression. The torso killings were stretching law enforcement to beyond the breaking point and testing its institutions as they had never been tested before. Every sector of public safety—even the fire department—was mobilized to fight the elusive menace who perpetrated such grisly horrors in the middle of one of the nation’s larger cities. Something had to be done, and quickly. In early September 1936, Mayor Harold Burton placed his safety director, the legendary crime fighter Eliot Ness, at the head of the investigation and ordered his chief of police, George Matowitz, to assign his best detective to work the case full time. Every city resident who had been marked as an odd character or a sexual deviant came systematically under intense official scrutiny. And that virtually unending tally of weird and strange Clevelanders would come to include the bricklayer with the severe drinking problem and uncertain sexual orientation who lived alone in a shabby apartment building in a dying neighborhood on Cleveland’s near east side.

  Detective Peter Merylo could have come straight from Central Casting; he was everyone’s image of the ideal Depression-era cop—tough, smart, dedicated, scrupulously honest, a crack shot with his pistol, and obsessively thorough (he boasted the police department’s most impressive arrest record). On the one hand, he was a team playe
r who respected the lines of authority (even when he didn’t particularly care for the individuals in authority) and did his job without complaint or fanfare; on the other hand, there was just enough of the maverick, the lone gunman, in his personality and professional conduct to endear him to an American public that worshipped individuality, personal initiative, and the Hollywood cowboy. Generally, he worked within the rules, but he remained more than willing to bend procedural guidelines when necessary to get the job done. Clevelanders saw only the dedicated professional, the tough cop who could sometimes be the proverbial bull in the china shop. But there lurked a gentle, even tender side to his personality that few outside his immediate family ever saw. He once considered joining the priesthood and harbored an abiding love for the sound of a violin. Crimes against the helpless, especially children, sparked his personal rage and drove him to give his all to the job. Ironically, his background was remarkably similar to that of Frank Dolezal, the man who would ultimately become his quarry. Born in 1895 in the Ukraine, Merylo immigrated to the United States sometime around 1915, joined the army—though he saw no active service—and gravitated to police work in 1919. By the mid-1930s, he had been a detective in the Cleveland Police Department for several years and had built a reputation for handling difficult and dangerous assignments.

  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 n
ewspaper 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.