Though Murder Has No Tongue

by James Jessen Badal

  SATURDAY, JULY 8

  Frank Dolezal amended his story: as the Press so quaintly put it, “Dolezal Amplifies Confession.” It seems he was mistaken when he initially told his interrogators that he had dumped Flo Polillo’s head into Lake Erie along with other parts of her body. Upon further reflection, he remembered that he had actually burned her head under an East 34th bridge after pouring gasoline over it. The press dutifully reported these changes in the basic story, but the stark contrast between the two versions of the head’s fate passed by without editorial comment—at least for the time being. The sheriff and some of his deputies immediately and, apparently, in relative secrecy—the few photographs that document the excursion show only Dolezal, the sheriff, and his men—whisked their prisoner over to East 34th so he could point out the exact spot where this minor conflagration had taken place. A half-hour search turned up only a few bones, later identified by Coroner Gerber as having come from a dog, cat, or sheep.

  Dolezal’s adamant refusal to admit he had been responsible for any of the torso killings other than Flo Polillo’s murder raised the issue of whether those victims may have been dispatched and disarticulated by someone else, that Frank Dolezal’s guilt only extended to the death of victim no. 3, Flo Polillo. Could there be two perpetrators? Consequently, Coroner Sam Gerber announced that he would restudy all the autopsy protocols and related evidence since the killings began. Gerber was something of a Johnny-comelately to the Kingsbury Run murders. He had been elected to the coroner’s office in 1936. The first six victims—seven if one includes the Lady of the Lake killed in 1934—had been murdered on A. J. Pearce’s watch; and, thanks to his activist, hands-on approach, Gerber’s predecessor had already placed his own indelible stamp on all the evidence in the coroner’s office related to those murdered during his tenure. The groundbreaking torso clinic had also been Pearce’s brainchild, not Gerber’s. By publicly announcing his intention to reexamine all the killings—not just those that had occurred since his election—Gerber was, in a sense, taking ownership of the entire murderous cycle. Whether he realized it or not, his first public statements tended to damage the sheriff’s case against Frank Dolezal. “Our records show some slight differences in the manner in which Mrs. Polillo’s body was dismembered and the manner in which others were,” he told the Plain Dealer, “but I still feel that the murderer of Mrs. Polillo is responsible for all the crimes. While it is possible that two men committed the crimes, it is unlikely that one would pick up where the other left off or that the manner of dismembering would be so similar. It is more probable that, as the murder series continued, the torso murderer changed his style.” Dolezal’s refusal to admit he killed the other victims now became an obstacle for the sheriff. O’Donnell’s first step was to shore up Dolezal’s confession to Flo Polillo’s murder and then try to link him to the others, but the notion that he was only responsible for the death of Polillo had been established and would stubbornly persist.

  Always mindful of how useful city newspapers could be in publicizing—even supporting—his crime-battling initiatives, Eliot Ness courted the press with the practiced finesse of a Hollywood press agent. Perhaps taking a page from the safety director’s playbook, Sheriff O’Donnell now began trying to exploit and manipulate the press to the advantage of both his office and its case against Frank Dolezal. Unfortunately, he lacked the safety director’s suave style, and his approach to reporters was considerably more heavy-handed. To O’Donnell’s credit, he staged some of the scenes in the unfolding Dolezal drama for maximum public effect, allowing reporters and photographers full access to his activities; but when newspapermen turned too nosy or belligerent in his estimation, or when he could not control the situation, he turned defensive, often displaying a petulance that simply convinced the press corps that he was hiding something, that here was something deliberately left unsaid worth digging for. One of O’Donnell’s more successful operations, however, was a very visible, highly publicized return visit to the scene of the supposed crime, Frank Dolezal’s former residence at 1908 Central Avenue, for a thorough reexamination of its bathroom. His men tore out the bathtub and examined the stains and filth underneath and along the bathroom walls. Western Reserve University chemist Enrique E. Ecker scrapped samples of the various stains for further analysis. The coroner’s office promised to search through the collected evidence of the Polillo murder to see if there was anything with her blood on it that could be compared to the samples gathered at the Central Avenue apartment; there were even some rather pointed comments about exhuming her body if necessary.

  At the time of his arrest on July 5, Dolezal had been sharing his apartment for a month with Harold Kiersner, a twenty-three-old ex-con who had served two years in Leavenworth for liquor-law violations. On July 8, Kiersner wrote an article for the Press recounting his experiences with his recently arrested roommate. (Though Kiersner’s name appears at the top of the piece, it is extremely doubtful he actually wrote it. Attributing the article to him was probably an editorial ploy to increase circulation; an article actually written by someone who had lived with the accused would obviously be seen as a major scoop.) “I slept with him the night before he was arrested for the torso murders,” the article declares. “I don’t know whether he killed that woman. Sometimes I don’t think he did. He liked a pretty face, but he never did go for women.” Kiersner painted a disturbing portrait of a troubled man who drank at least twenty bottles of beer a day, angered easily when intoxicated, and was overwhelmed by frequent crying jags. Almost as an afterthought, Kiersner noted, “He speaks English very poorly.” Again, the issue of Dolezal’s command of the language becomes crucial. It’s far more than a matter of whether newspapers were quoting him accurately or rewriting his utterances in Standard English. Did he fully understand the nature of his interrogators’ questions? Also, his signature later appears on some extremely significant, not to say incriminating, documents; did he actually understand what he was signing?

  In the midst of all this excitement, veteran Cleveland News reporter Howard Beaufait pulled off a major scoop. He seemed to enjoy access to some levers of power beyond the reach of his colleagues: in the early hours of the morning, he was allowed to spend fifteen minutes with Frank Dolezal. Rather than merely outline the sheriff’s case against him as his colleagues from rival papers had done, Beaufait gave his readers a graphic portrait of a pathetic, terrified, and deeply confused man. “I saw a man on the verge of hysteria,” he wrote. “He sat in his small, hot cell at County Jail, wringing a dirty handkerchief in his coarse, thick hands. . . . As he sat in his cell, his watery blue eyes heavy from a sleepless night, Dolezal drank glass after glass of water. . . . He was drenched in perspiration. It came through his soiled blue work shirt in dark spots. . . . His eyes are filled with fear, and he moves his head from side to side in quick, nervous jerks.” In a clear echo of the vain behavior Pat Lyons described on the day of Dolezal’s arrest, Beaufait commented, “He seemed rather ashamed of his ragged appearance. He said he wanted a shave and a haircut and a clean shirt. He was wearing dark, unpressed trousers and white kid shoes with fancy, pointed toes. These were soiled. He looked at them frequently and tried to tuck them out of sight under his bunk. Now he looks at all men as if they were his enemies. Each stranger who enters his cell brings a threat to his safety.” “It is a curious fact that rarely does a murderer look like one,” Beaufait mused in closing. “This is particularly true of Frank Dolezal. If he hadn’t said so, you would find it rather preposterous to believe that he could turn his humble home into a slaughter house.”

  Cuyahoga County sheriff Martin L. O’Donnell. He was a friend and close political ally of Congressman Martin L. Sweeney. He had formerly been mayor of Garfield Heights, a Cleveland suburb. Cleveland Press Archives, Cleveland State University.

  SUNDAY, JULY 9

  “Woman Says She Jumped Seeing Knife” proclaimed the lead of a page one Plain Dealer story. A twenty-two-year-old—later identified as a black prostitute
named Lillian Jones—insisted that she had been in Frank Dolezal’s East 22nd apartment a week before his arrest and had been forced to jump out of the window when he came at her with a knife. “I was in Dolezal’s room when he came at me with a knife. I jumped out of a second-story window to get away from him. The heel of one of my shoes was broken when I landed.” Though the morning daily wondered how the woman could hurl herself out of a second-story window and fall to the ground without breaking anything else, Sheriff O’Donnell seized on the sensational tale as further evidence that Dolezal was connected to the killings. The story “strengthens my suspicions that Dolezal was connected with other torso murders,” he insisted to the Plain Dealer.

  MONDAY, JULY 10

  It would be a very busy day, marked by stunning revelations and troubling questions. Sheriff O’Donnell began the morning by showing reporters a letter he had received from Mrs. Nettie Taylor of Wheaton, Illinois. The woman, who identified herself as Frank Dolezal’s sister-in-law, alleged that his sister Mrs. Anna Nigrin had apparently been murdered in July 1931 on the Geauga County farm near Chardon, Ohio, that she shared with her husband. When her son, Joseph, came to Cleveland from Chicago seven years later to clear up details related to his mother’s estate, he stayed with his uncle Frank—never to be seen again! (There is some confusion here. The Cleveland News reported that the letter had actually come from Sheriff E. R. Burkholder of Wheaton, Illinois.) The implications of all this remained unstated; clearly, though, O’Donnell saw Nettie Taylor’s suggestions of a mysterious death and an unexplained disappearance in the family as further proof that Frank Dolezal was a vicious murderer. But, cautioned the Press, “Neither the sheriff’s office in Chardon nor the county prosecutor could find any record of the death of a Mrs. Nigrin.” Alarm bells of some sort should have sounded at this point, but they apparently didn’t. (See the epilogue for a full discussion of the Taylor letter and the fates of Anna and Joseph Nigrin.)

  The real bombshell of the morning, however, was the sheriff’s announcement that Frank Dolezal had made two unsuccessful suicide attempts overnight. At around 12:30 A.M., he tried to hang himself with his shirt from a hook in the wall of his cell, only to be foiled when Chief Jailer Michael Kilbane discovered him and pulled him down, ripping the shirt in the process. Reportedly, Dolezal tried again at about 4:30 A.M., this time fashioning a noose from his shoelaces. Apparently, however, they weren’t sufficiently strong to bear his weight; Deputies Nick Miller and John Mulroy found him lying, stunned, on the cell floor. Again, though no public statements were made, the unspoken subtext was clear: withering under an unrelenting series of nonstop interrogations, a guilty, desperate man had decided to end it all rather than face the rigors of the justice system. (Among the coroner’s papers, there is a signed deposition dated July 10 in which Dolezal admits his attempts at suicide, but the document remains troubling for several reasons. Had he been coerced into signing it? Given his questionable command of English, did he even understand what he was signing? Was it standard procedure to take such a deposition under the circumstances? If so, it would logically follow that there would be some sort of official form. The existing document, however, is not an official form; it is simply a typed statement with the heading “Criminal Courts Building” appearing at the top.)

  But the story that Dolezal would be given a lie detector test in the late afternoon under the stewardship of the East Cleveland Police Department became the most newsworthy event of the day. The east side municipality owned an early version of the Keeler polygraph—named for Leonard Keeler of Northwestern University, the man who had perfected the machine and was widely regarded as the best in the business at administering the tests and interpreting the results. At around 3:00 P.M., sheriff’s deputies escorted a dazed Frank Dolezal out of the county jail to an official car for the drive out to the municipality on the city’s east side. Until this ceremoniously staged appearance, reporters hadn’t had many opportunities to get a look at the sheriff’s prisoner; staring vacantly ahead and stumbling slightly, Dolezal allowed himself to be steered toward the waiting automobile while flashes exploded around him as press photographers jockeyed for position. Suddenly, alarmed murmurs began to spread through the crowd of onlookers. Where had the clearly visible black eye come from, and why was he holding his side in obvious discomfort and pain? Dolezal had injured himself, explained the sheriff, when he had fallen on his face during his second suicide attempt. But the Press was dubious. “This seemed unlikely in view of the instinctive and automatic reflex action which makes anyone falling forward throw his arms out before him to protect his face.” And when reporters realized that Dolezal’s shirt—the same sweat-stained garment he had been wearing since his arrest—was intact, they began to wonder openly why there was no sign of the rip that had supposedly occurred during the first attempt at taking his life. Even as it relayed the sheriff’s tale of his two suicide attempts, the Press looked at the report with a jaundiced and skeptical eye. “Not completely convincing,” it declared.

  Frank Dolezal being escorted to a car that will take him to East Cleveland for a lie detector test. This photograph was taken hours after his two suicide attempts. His pain is palpable. Cleveland Press Archives, Cleveland State University.

  Frank Dolezal pathetically tries to hide from newspaper reporters and photographers. Cleveland Press Archives, Cleveland State University.

  Once in East Cleveland, the sheriff and his men were greeted by that city’s police chief, L. G. Corlett. Dolezal was escorted to a basement soundproof room, where Paul F. Beck, a recent graduate of the Western Reserve University Law School, would administer the test. The formal questioning started around 3:30 P.M. and continued uninterrupted until shortly after 6:00, at which point everyone took a supper break. The grueling interrogation began again at 8:15 and ran until Dolezal was returned to the Cuyahoga County jail at 10:30—a staggering five-and-a-half-hour ordeal. At first, Dolezal retracted his murder confession and insisted he had not killed Flo Polillo. When the machine indicated he was lying, he reverted to his initial claim that he had killed her when she came at him with a knife and had dismembered her corpse in his bathtub. Whenever the words “murder” or “blood” came up during the examination, Dolezal’s “pulse and respiration jumped,” the Press reported the next day. According to Beck, the final results of this interrogation were clear. Frank Dolezal was, indeed, guilty of Flo Polillo’s murder.

  At the end of what had to be an extraordinarily exhausting day for the prisoner, Dolezal finally got some medical attention for the pain in his side. After duly examining him, the male nurse on duty couldn’t find anything specific wrong with him, but he proceeded to tape his side anyway.

  TUESDAY, JULY 11

  The day began with Frank Dolezal finally receiving his first visitor—his sister-in-law’s brother Patrolman Frank Vorell of the Cleveland Police Department. (Whether Sheriff O’Donnell allowed Vorell to see his prisoner because he was a relative or because he was a policeman is not clear. Though Cleveland’s dailies took scant notice of the patrolman’s appearance, Vorell would later provide damning testimony relevant to the sheriff office’s treatment of Dolezal.) In a move calculated to head off any insanity defense on Dolezal’s part, the sheriff had two psychiatrists, K. S. Kent and S. C. Lindsay, examine him for about an hour and a half. “Dolezal Ruled Not Insane after Psychiatrists’ Test,” proclaimed the lead in the Press. O’Donnell now offered yet a third confession, a new version of what Dolezal had allegedly done with Flo Polillo’s still missing head. It seems he had not thrown it into Lake Erie at the foot of East 49th as he had initially claimed, nor had he poured gasoline over it and burned it at East 34th; rather he had taken it to the WPA Lake Shore Drive project (on which he said he had been working) and discreetly buried it where he knew a steam shovel would further cover it with endless loads of dirt. O’Donnell lamented that trying to find it under those circumstances would be a typical needle-in-a-haystack proposition, so he regretfully called off the h
unt.

  Cleveland’s press corps and legal fraternity became increasingly alarmed over the conduct of the sheriff and his office toward their prisoner and began to air their concerns openly. “Is Frank Dolezal the torso murderer? Or is he a harmless psychopath who has been forced into admitting a crime he did not commit?” asked Press reporter William Miller. “Lawyers agree Dolezal’s rights have been infringed on,” the paper declared. “He has been held six nights and five days without charge. Courts have held that 72 hours is the reasonable length of time a man may be held without charges.” The civil liberties committee of the Cleveland Bar Association fired off a formal letter to Sheriff O’Donnell asking him to appear at their noon meeting at the Hotel Allerton on July 12 and explain, according to the Plain Dealer, “why the usual procedure of preferring charges against confessed criminals had not been followed in this case.” In an unsigned, page one editorial, titled “The Sheriff and the Law,” the Cleveland News openly questioned the legality of O’Donnell’s conduct.