By early January 1939, the Lyons brothers had hit an impasse. They found it impossible to proceed without some kind of outside financial assistance, so Pat began shopping his ideas around to various city agencies in search of monetary backing and, perhaps, some sort of official sanction. He tried the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, which apparently expressed interest but declined to back him with any funds. Here matters get a little murky; regrettably, Lyons’s account of his actions and with whom he may have talked at this point is not entirely clear. In his memoirs, Lyons reports that he next “talked to the City Safety Department without success.” He does not specify with whom he talked: Eliot Ness himself, or, perhaps, an assistant? He then writes, “I next went to the County Coroner.” But again, he does not specify whether he dealt with Sam Gerber directly or with someone else. Lyons, however, ultimately found himself presenting his plans for apprehending the killer to Sheriff Martin O’Donnell: “The sheriff referred me to the Police Department. This was accomplished on January 9, 1939. I started on a part time job in the civil branch as a Real Estate Appraiser.” (Again, the exact nature of this sequence of events remains unclear. What exactly did he mean by “The sheriff referred me to the Police Department?” Subsequent events make it obvious that the police—especially Peter Merylo—were totally unaware of his activities.)
Sometime in the first half of 1939, an informant pointed Lyons and his brother—now working with deputies Jack J. Gillespie and Paul McDevitt of the sheriff’s department—toward a suspicious character named “Frank.” Thus, like Merylo and Zaleweski before him, Pat Lyons picked up a trail that ultimately led to Frank Dolezal.
That path began while Lyons was trying to establish the movements of Edward Andrassy—traditionally identified as the Butcher’s first victim—in the days before his murder and decapitation. Andrassy had been sticking to his room and appeared reluctant to leave his parents’ Fulton Avenue home. When his sister pressed him for an explanation of his behavior, he confided to her (in Pat Lyons’s words): “He finally admitted that he had stabbed a man by the name of Frank over near East 20th Street[,] and he was afraid he had killed him.” Further, Andrassy’s sister told Lyons that her brother knew “a fellow with a cast in his left eye” who “might be able to tell us something of Ed’s activities that the family didn’t know.” ( Was “cast” a reference to Frank Dolezal’s wandering eye? In Lyons’s memoirs, the reference would seem to be to two different people; is it possible, however, that the “Frank” Andrassy had stabbed and the man “with a cast in his left eye” were a single individual?) Yet another lead pointed toward a “pervert,” also named Frank, who had the strange habit of borrowing butcher knives from his neighbors and who had occupied a Cedar Road apartment from 1935 to roughly early September 1938, when he abruptly moved out—suspiciously, just as Eliot Ness’s forces were working their way through the same neighborhood. (A third “Frank,” or, are these all the same person? And is this individual Frank Dolezal?)
When Lyons and his brother gained access to the apartment once occupied by the mysterious Frank number three, G.V.’s on-the-spot examination—as well as subsequent tests run on samples collected from various surfaces—indicated the presence of human blood. One of the confiscated knives once apparently used by their suspect also showed the presence of blood. Thus it came to pass that in the early summer of 1939, Pat Lyons and his associates finally set their sights firmly on Frank Dolezal. Tracking him down in his current address on East 22nd proved no problem. As the days rolled by, Lyons watched and waited patiently. Finally, one day Frank Dolezal, with the fruits of his paycheck clutched in his hand, went on a shopping expedition. The account of his behavior that Pat Lyons left in his memoirs shows a pathetic, lonely, and troubled man.
He purchased a sailor-type hat, two white shirts, a pair of white pants, white shoes, and white socks. By the time he returned to his room with these purchases he had stopped into many places for drinks. He returned to his room and spent about two hours changing clothes. When he again came upon the street, I was hardly able to recognize him. It was about 1 P.M. He staggered a little, but he appeared very pleased with himself. He took a streetcar to Bolivar Road and East 9th Street and stood before a store window admiring himself for about ten minutes. He would change the angle of his hat and turn sideways to get a side view.
Over the next few days Lyons watched patiently as Dolezal wandered aimlessly around to his favorite drinking spots in the downtown area, apparently trying to pick up male companionship. In just one evening, Lyons counted eighteen unsuccessful attempts at apparent seduction. (Dolezal did have a job, but Lyons does not record him going to work.) While the Lyons team kept him under surveillance, they dug into his background—just as Merylo and Zaleweski had three years before. Among the potentially damning discoveries they made was that Dolezal apparently knew all the murder victims who had either been positively or tentatively identified: Edward Andrassy, Flo Polillo, and Rose Wallace. In the early days of July 1939, the long, winding paths of the bricklayer, the cop, and the private eye finally came together in a violent clash that would leave one man dead and the lives of the other two irrevocably altered, spawn a host of damning charges and countercharges, and carve streams of bitterness that would persist into the twenty-first century.
The trio responsible for Frank Dolezal’s arrest. From left: Sheriff’s Deputies Paul McDevitt and John J. (Jack) Gillespie; Special Sheriff’s Deputy Pat Lyons. Cleveland Press Archives, Cleveland State University.
The desolate reality of day-to-day life in Cleveland’s inner city during the Great Depression. A crowd gathers outside Frank Dolezal’s apartment. Courtesy of the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office.
At 6:00 P.M. on July 5, 1939, Pat Lyons, along with sheriff’s deputies John Gillespie and Paul McDevitt, arrested Frank Dolezal, presumably on the order of and in the name of Sheriff Martin L. O’Donnell. The only account of this climactic moment in the unfolding drama that survives is in Pat Lyons’s memoirs: “At 6 P.M. on July 5, 1939, Jack, Paul and I drove to his rooming house. As we stopped in front of his place, Frank was just coming around the corner of his house. We didn’t get out of our car but opened the door and called to him. He came out to the car, got in, and we drove to the County Jail. All of this time Frank didn’t say a word. He didn’t ask who we were or where we were taking him.” The behavior Lyons describes seems utterly incomprehensible. Why would Dolezal, or anyone else for that matter, docilely and without question enter a car occupied by three strangers and remain silent while the trio drove him off to an undisclosed location? Could the curtain really have descended that softly on the first act of the unfolding tragedy?
Exactly what prompted Sheriff O’Donnell into action at that precise moment is unclear. The only point upon which the accounts from Pat Lyons and Peter Merylo agree is that the Cleveland Police Department—specifically Merylo—somehow got wind of the Lyons team’s activities, and Merylo does record in a police report dated April 2, 1940, that he learned that Pat Lyons was preparing to arrest Frank Dolezal the day before it occurred. At first blush, the fact that serious disagreements remain over who did or said what leading up to Frank Dolezal’s arrest seventy years ago may seem of little consequence; but the torso butcheries had been the most sensational ongoing story in Cleveland history—a veritable feast for the city’s three competing daily newspapers. After five years of intense coverage, the arrest of a suspect—the only arrest made in the case—was more than just big news; it meant, potentially, that it was all over, that the city could rest easy at last. But during the weeks following Frank Dolezal’s arrest, the media circus would roll on with the inevitable force of a juggernaut. There would be a ransacking of Frank Dolezal’s past and current lifestyle, acrimonious charges of mistreatment leveled at the sheriff’s staff, resulting in ACLU involvement, a high-profile lie detector test, two alleged suicide attempts, three separate confessions, wrangling and squabbling in the courts over the legality of the system’s conduct toward the su
spect before charges were even leveled against him, a suspicious death, and a rancorous public inquest. When, on March 27, 1940, Frank Dolezal’s brother Charles sued Sheriff O’Donnell and members of his staff for their treatment of their prisoner in two separate petitions, the conduct of everyone involved in the bricklayer’s arrest and death came under intense legal scrutiny.
Pat Lyons’s account of the events leading up to the arrest in his memoirs is regrettably brief and sketchy. He alleges that one of his team’s prime informants witnessed a robbery, totally unrelated to the torso killings, during which the victim received a viciously severe beating. “And thinking we should know of this, he called the local office of the F.B.I. and asked for Jack [Gillespie], Paul [McDevitt] or Pat [Lyons], the investigators on the Torso Case. Naturally, they didn’t know us and told him we must be from the Police Department. To make a long story short, the license plate number of Paul’s car was obtained and Paul was identified as a deputy sheriff.” With the proverbial cat out of the bag, at a subsequent meeting with Sheriff O’Donnell, the team decided to bring Dolezal in for questioning—perhaps before the police department, specifically Peter Merylo, could interfere.
Merylo’s papers, however, contain two separate accounts of his version of events. In his memoirs he writes, “On June 12, 1939 [almost a full month before Dolezal’s arrest], a license number was furnished us by a woman who was residing and conducting a place on Central Avenue, only a stone’s throw from the locality where Florence Polillo’s body was found, that a man was in her place of business who was very much intoxicated, telling her that he was working on the torso murder[s] and he was the investigator from the Chicago Herald. . . . We advised this woman that in the event this investigator ever showed up, to give us a telephone call, as we thought that he may be a good suspect.” Apparently, almost a month went by before “this woman” furnished Merylo and Zalewski with the license plate number; on July 4—one day before Pat Lyons arrested Frank Dolezal—Merylo was checking out the individual (unidentified in his memoirs) to whom the license plate number belonged. Merylo’s memoir is as vague as Pat Lyons’s; his recapitulation of events does not provide any specifics. Neither the woman nor the intoxicated investigator is identified; her place of business remains unnamed; the type of business she owned (or, perhaps, only ran) is not even specified. All of that changes, however, in an official police report, dated April 2, 1940, that Eliot Ness specifically requested from Merylo. At the top of the three-page, singlespaced document (totaling approximately sixteen hundred words), Merylo has typed, “Report requested by Eliot Ness, Director of Public Safety.” It is no coincidence that Ness asked for this report six days after Frank Dolezal’s brother Charles filed his two lawsuits against Sheriff O’Donnell and five others, including Pat Lyons. Charles Dolezal was asking for $125,000 in damages, an astronomical sum by the standards of the early 1940s. Though Cuyahoga County itself was not specifically liable financially since the sheriff and his deputies were covered either by the Massachusetts Bonding and Insurance Company or the National Surety Corporation of New York, local reputations and the integrity of Cleveland’s legal system were at stake. The safety director was crossing his Ts and dotting his Is with a vengeance.
If Merylo demurely pulled his punches in his memoirs, the gloves were off in the report of April 2, 1940. All the participants in the unfolding drama, left unidentified in his memoirs, are named in his report; and the events that occurred are spelled out with much greater specificity. “On June 12, 1939, one Helen Merrills, at that time living at 1963 Central Ave. called our office and informed Detective Peters that she wanted the Detectives working on [the] Torso Murders.” Mrs. Merrills was the proprietress of the Forest Café, a run-down neighborhood joint that served lunches and operated with a license for beer and wine. When Merylo and Zalewski arrived at her establishment, Mrs. Merrills had a tale to tell. “She then stated,” Merlyo writes, “that a man came to her place several days previously with a small brief case under his arm, and who was in an intoxicated condition, and he introduced himself to her as being Sergeant Pat Lyons of the Chicago Herald, and that he was working on the torso murders.” Then, according to Mrs. Merrills, Lyons opened his briefcase and displayed a series of photos and newspaper clippings relevant to the murder-dismemberments and bought “everybody a drink who were [sic] in the place; who consisted mainly of prostitutes and ‘pimps’ from that vicinity, most of them colored.” “Mrs. Merrills further stated that she had seen a gold badge on Pat Lyons, and that she was ‘convinced’ that he was a police officer, and that on a different occasion he came there with another man in [a] Ford automobile, and at that time Mrs. Merrills promised us she would procure the license number of this auto and call our office: which she did at a later date.” At this point, the two differing accounts come together in agreement: Pat Lyons concedes that Paul McDevitt was identified as a deputy sheriff by the police through the number on his license plate, and Merylo concurs, noting a “license number as being BU954, same being listed to Paul McDevitt.” Before the summer was out, Frank Dolezal would lie dead on the fourth floor of the county jail.
Pat Lyons’s children and grandchildren vigorously dispute Peter Merylo’s account of his actions in the Ness report of April 2, 1940, arguing that the obnoxious, raucous behavior the detective described is totally out of keeping with the father and grandfather they remember (especially the man who penned the charming lyrics to a song called “Mary Not Contrary”) and further pointing out that Merylo harbored deep animosity against Pat Lyons for intruding in “his” investigation and being successful where he had failed. And there is some evidence to suggest that this could be, to a certain degree, the case. Merylo clearly saw the sheriff and his team as interlopers, and it was no secret that he could react with pit-bull ferocity when guarding what he perceived as his territory. (Pat Lyons gives due credit to Merylo in his memoirs for his talents as an investigator and his impressive arrest record; nothing in Peter Merylo’s papers reciprocates that respect.) A newspaper article from early 1940 brands Lyons as the veteran cop’s “arch-rival and favorite abomination.” A second, undated clipping describes a meeting between the two men, apparently in early 1940, during which Merylo reportedly lectured his rival on the inadequacy of his investigative methods. “You’ve got the wrong technique. Don’t believe everything drunks tell you. Furthermore, I hope you know that you bungled up everything when you arrested Frank Dolezal.” Yet Merylo assured the press, “I bear the man no ill will. None whatsoever.” The political storm swirling around Pat Lyons’s arrest, trial, and conviction on drunk driving charges in January 1940 further clouds and complicates an accurate assessment of Merylo’s attitude toward him. Though the exact circumstances leading to the arrest remain in dispute, Municipal Court judge Frank C. Phillips tossed out the original conviction when Lyons’s attorney, Charles W. Sellers, produced sworn affidavits alleging that the two arresting officers had perjured themselves. Sheriff O’Donnell injected a heavy dose of local politics into the resulting legal wrangling when he wrote Lyons on June 22, 1940: “I considered your arrest and the flimsy circumstances which surrounded the charge as being the spleen of an envious police department [Peter Merylo?], whom you had bested in solving the Dolezal case. Further, when they [word illegible] before Detective Merylo, who questioned you on the Dolezal case rather than the traffic case, is positive proof that you were the victim of their jealousy.” A point well taken? Perhaps—but Martin O’Donnell accusing others of acting out of political motivation is a prime example of the proverbial pot calling the kettle black. Also, in 1940 Sheriff O’Donnell was heavily invested in the notion of Frank Dolezal’s guilt, since the lawsuits Charles Dolezal brought were still being litigated and the integrity of the sheriff and his office clearly hung in the balance. And why did the sheriff wait almost six full months after Lyons’s January arrest before writing this token of support to his former special deputy?
Pat Lyons’s account of the events that precipitated Frank Dolezal
’s arrest is sketchy enough to suggest that he is, indeed, hiding or at least glossing over something; and the behavior Merylo describes and attributes to Lyons in his report to Ness—if true—would easily explain Lyons’s seeming evasiveness. One must also consider the nature and ultimate purpose of the two manuscript accounts Merylo left behind. Though they were never published, both sets of his personal memoirs were intended for public consumption; therefore, his relative and somewhat uncharacteristic reticence to name names and provide specifics could be read as reflecting his desire to protect the reputations of those involved. The report of April 2, 1940, however, was an entirely different matter. It was an official police document specifically requested by his superior, Eliot Ness; and as such, it would probably never have been seen by anyone aside from the Ness circle and Chief of Police Matowitz. Every little detail had to be nailed down and fully explained. The chances that anyone else would ever see it were virtually nil. The notion that a detective of Peter Merylo’s reputation and stature would lie knowingly in an official report to his superior—even though he did not particularly like Ness—is untenable, especially when the details of that report could have been so easily checked. But Merylo was repeating what others, specifically Helen Merrills, reported to him; and it is possible that the good proprietress of the Forest Café was simply misinterpreting some of what she was seeing.
Though Murder Has No Tongue Page 4