Though Murder Has No Tongue

by James Jessen Badal

  This editorial has to deal with the strange case of Frank Dolezal, the extralegal tactics of Sheriff O’Donnell, and civil liberties. Without attempting to determine the guilt or innocence of Frank Dolezal, The News does not believe the cause of justice is being served in a high degree by the apparent political campaign which has claimed headlines of newspapers throughout the nation. Sheriff O’Donnell has had one week in which to make up his mind as to the guilt or innocence of Prisoner Frank Dolezal. So far he has shown no indication of this intent. He has detained a prisoner without risking a formal charge against the prisoner. He has presented no evidence to the County Prosecutor’s office. He has made no contacts with the Cleveland police department with a view to turning the prisoner over to this department. [As nearly as I can determine, this is the first and only time this jurisdictional issue was ever raised by the press or anyone else.] Frank Dolezal happens to be a derelict without money or influence. He has lived in a half-world of clouded and rather shady surroundings. But the Constitution of this land states that he may not be deprived of his liberty without due process. Sheriff O’Donnell knows as well as any one what due process means. Dolezal has been in the custody of Sheriff O’Donnell one week without any charge filed against him. It is time for some tangible legal action.

  The legal chickens were, indeed, coming home to roost! Sheriff’s detective Harry S. Brown, however, obligingly fell on his sword for his boss, insisting that O’Donnell had, indeed, wanted to press formal charges against Dolezal but that he, Brown, had counseled against the move until they had what they deemed a more solid case. In spite of the News’s very public and deliberate slap in the face, it would seem that the sheriff finally had reason to celebrate; after nearly a week of on-again, off-again interrogation and endless statements to the press, the case against Frank Dolezal had finally come together: his guilt had been confirmed through lie detector examination; the possibility of an insanity defense had been headed off; and O’Donnell finally had a confession he felt was legitimate. Exactly what that confession said, however, remained something of a mystery. “The confession will be for the grand jury’s consumption and will not be made public,” the sheriff told the Plain Dealer. The next step would be an arraignment on a charge of murder. At 3:30 that afternoon, Dolezal appeared in court before Justice of the Peace Myron J. Penty and was formally charged with first degree murder in the death of Flo Polillo. The onetime bricklayer entered no plea and was held without bail; his case was handed over to the Grand Jury, which would reconvene on July 24. The Plain Dealer indignantly reported that while the formal proceedings were moving forward, state senator William J. Zoul stood outside Penty’s door flagging down passersby and inviting them “to come inside—the torso killer’s in there.”

  But questions about the case against Frank Dolezal stubbornly persisted. After the sheriff had arrested him, Peter Merylo complained to his superior, Police Chief George Matowitz, that the bricklayer was innocent, that he had investigated him thoroughly and questioned him on two separate occasions. He never would have released him, he insisted, if he had any lingering suspicions about him. Counseled by Matowitz that political realities dictated the sheriff must be allowed to build his case without interference, Merylo initially stayed in the background and, for the most part, reluctantly held his tongue. But the entire affair had further lowered the veteran detective’s already abysmal assessment of the sheriff and his office, and he began to grumble openly. If no one in the press took his protestations too seriously at this point—in spite of their own doubts about some aspects of the Dolezal drama—it was probably because circumstances had cast Merylo in the unenviable role of sore loser. The sheriff and his men had invaded his territory and succeeded where he had failed. Anything Merylo said at this juncture ran the risk of being branded as simply sour grapes on his part. In his unpublished memoirs, however, Merylo pointed out that Dolezal’s third explanation regarding Polillo’s head was as ludicrously absurd as the previous two. Dolezal’s WPA time card not only showed that he had been working at East Technical High School at the time of the Polillo murder but clearly proved he had never even been assigned to the Lake Shore Drive project. “This same record was open to inspection to the Sheriff or any member of his staff,” he snorted contemptuously, “but no such attempt was made to examine those records.” And, once having admitted to the murder-dismemberment of Flo Polillo, why would Dolezal lie, apparently twice, about what he had done with her head? At that point, what difference did it make? (In fairness, however, I must point out that the sheriff and his office considered the possibility that Dolezal remained reluctant to reveal the location of Flo Polillo’s head because it would have led to the discovery of other heads, thus implicating him in the other murders, in spite of his adamant refusal to admit that he had anything to do with them.)

  Frank Dolezal, in a clean shirt, being escorted to his arraignment hearing. The bruising around his eye is still obvious. Pat Lyons and Sheriff O’Donnell are to the left. Cleveland Press Archives, Cleveland State University.

  Frank Dolezal’s deeply worried brother Charles (third from left) and his wife, Louise (second from right), at the arraignment hearing. Cleveland Press Archives, Cleveland State University.

  Suddenly, the local legal tangle became a Gordian knot of national proportions: enter the American Civil Liberties Union! The involvement of the ACLU’s national office in the Dolezal affair attests to the nationwide press coverage the entire torso case was receiving and shines an embarrassing light on the laxity of Sheriff O’Donnell’s office in safeguarding its prisoner’s rights under the law. A July 8 article in the Nashua (New Hampshire) Telegraph—originally carried by the Associated Press—reported that Frank Dolezal had been held without charges for days by Cleveland authorities. The revelation prompted Mrs. Sidney Knight (presumably a Nashua native) to fire off a letter of alarm and protest to the ACLU’s national office. “If true,” Mrs. Knight wrote, “it would appear that Cleveland has reverted to barbarism and has disregarded the hard-won rights of us all—that they have ignored the principle that ‘A man is innocent until he is proved guilty,’ they have violated the right of habeas corpus, and they have usurped the powers of judge and jury.” Strong words, indeed, and no doubt fighting words to the ACLU. The office in Cleveland was duly alerted that a gross miscarriage of justice festered on its doorstep, but, coincidentally, the local chapter already had the sheriff and his office lined up in its crosshairs. At around 2:00 in the afternoon of July 11, a six-man legal team—including former Common Pleas judge David R. Hertz, former assistant U.S. district attorney Martin A. McCormack, and acting chairman of the local ACLU chapter Russell W. Chase—went to the county jail to meet with the sheriff and demand an explanation for his office’s conduct toward their prisoner. O’Donnell, however, pleaded that he was tied up in meetings, so the members of the ACLU committee were left to stew in their indignation and twiddle their collective thumbs for the rest of the afternoon. “After a considerable wait,” reported Chase angrily to the national office in a letter dated July 17, “it became clear that the Sheriff refused to meet with our committee.” The disgruntled team left around 5:00 or so, leaving only David Hertz to battle with the sheriff’s office.

  The good judge found himself cooling his heels and sharing his frustration with attorney Fred P. Soukup, who had apparently been hired, somewhat belatedly, by Charles Dolezal to represent his brother. Unfortunately, there is no record of how or exactly when Soukup became involved in the case, but he had been as unsuccessful as Judge Hertz and the ACLU committee in gaining access to his beleaguered client and the sheriff. Though O’Donnell finally granted Soukup permission to meet with Dolezal for the first time, he insisted Hertz would have to stay put unless he was a member of the defense team. “I am not interested in this case beyond whether this man was mistreated in the jail,” the judge told the Plain Dealer. When Soukup left the county jail later that evening, after finally meeting with his client for thirty-five minutes, he informe
d the press that Frank Dolezal “did not act like a normal person” and had retracted his third confession. “He denies the killing [of Flo Polillo],” Soukup told the Plain Dealer. “He denies he is the torso murderer. He says he was in a daze when he made the confession. I know a lot about how the confession was obtained, but I’m not prepared to say anything yet.” In a move that spoke volumes about what Soukup knew, or at least suspected, about “how the confession was obtained,” the lawyer arranged—with the sheriff’s consent—for an independent physician, L. J. Sternicki, to examine his client at 10:00 that night.

  The extraordinarily hectic and dramatic day ended with Frank Dolezal receiving his second visitor: Monsignor Oldrich Zlamal of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church on East 53rd. Dolezal’s religious affiliation had not been of any particular interest to the men of Cleveland’s press corps as they pieced together their portrait of the alleged sexual deviant and torso killer, but whatever Dolezal’s beliefs may have been, he was finally granted some sort of spiritual comfort in the sixth day of his incarceration. Reportedly, Dolezal admitted to Zlamal that he had, indeed, attempted suicide twice in the early morning hours of Monday, July 10, citing sheer desperation and feelings of abandonment by his family and friends as his rationale. (Up to this point Charles Dolezal had apparently made no attempt to visit his beleaguered brother since his arrest.) Obviously, the admission was not a formal penitent-to-priest confession recognized by the church; if it had been, Zlamal could never have revealed its contents to the press. But that a man raised a strict Catholic would even think of taking his own life testifies to the incredible level of distress Dolezal must have been enduring. And the problem of the visible injuries noted by onlookers on the afternoon of July 10 remained: Were they caused, as the sheriff insisted, by his botched suicide attempts or by something far more sinister?

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 1 2

  East Cleveland police chief L. G. Corlett dropped his own bombshell on top of this ever-developing legal imbroglio. “Says Dolezal Told of Beating,” screamed the Press. At one point, the sheriff left the room in which Paul F. Beck was conducting the lie detector test; Dolezal quickly turned to Corlett and desperately insisted that he had been beaten by men in the sheriff’s office. According to Corlett, Dolezal had bitterly complained that his ribs hurt. “They made me. They kept at me until I got crazy. They beat me up.” Though Corlett was inclined to dismiss what he regarded as wild allegations, a bell had been rung, and there was no way to un-ring it. Two days before, the entire city had watched as sheriff’s men led a dazed Frank Dolezal to a waiting car for his trip to East Cleveland; everyone had noticed the fresh black eye and the obvious signs of pain as the prisoner gripped his side. Add to this both Soukup’s having called in an independent medical man to examine his client and his own ominously chilling words to the press the night before: “I know a lot about how the confession was obtained.” But Soukup refused to disclose the conclusions about Dolezal’s physical condition that Sternicki had arrived at following his examination the previous evening, nor would he clarify or expand on what he implied he knew about the sheriff’s methods in extracting the string of confessions from his client. “He [Dolezal] has to stay in jail and if he has been beaten it won’t do him any good to say so,” Soukup told the Press. “I won’t say whether he has or whether he hasn’t.”

  THURSDAY, JULY 13

  The test results were in! Ecker had submitted his findings relevant to the stains and other material found in the bathroom of Dolezal’s former apartment at 1908 Central to O’Donnell but adamantly refused to make them public. “That is up to the sheriff,” he told the Press. But O’Donnell was silent. “O’Donnell Keeps Torso Test Secret,” shouted the headline of the paper’s page one story. “Sheriff Martin L. O’Donnell today was keeping secret the results of chemical tests on stains found in the alleged ‘murder den’ of Frank Dolezal, accused torso killer.” In spite of silence the evening before, attorney Fred Soukup leaked some of the details of Sternicki’s examination of Dolezal to the press: injuries to the ribs, a black eye, and a number of bruises to the body. “There is no doubt in my mind the man has been pushed around,” he declared unequivocally.

  The moment Frank Dolezal was arrested on July 5, Sheriff O’Donnell had gone on the offensive, courting and teasing the press with the details of his office’s ongoing interrogation of their prisoner and its efforts to build a solid case, but events had turned against him. Increasingly, the sheriff found himself and his office retreating and taking up defensive positions. The ACLU committee that had tried unsuccessfully to see O’Donnell on Tuesday afternoon issued a statement claiming in no uncertain terms that he had clearly violated the law when he initially refused Fred Soukup permission to see his client, thus—according to committee member Edgar S. Byers—opening himself up to a possible fine of between twenty-five and one hundred dollars, thirty days in jail, or both. Further, Byers asserted, the arraignment before Judge Penty on July 11 had not only been meaningless but downright illegal as well, since Dolezal had not had an attorney present and Penty had failed to inform him of his right to have one. (In a grim stroke of irony, at the very moment Dolezal was being arraigned Soukup was actually waiting for the sheriff to grant permission to see him.) Like many a politician under fire, Sheriff O’Donnell responded to the legal onslaught by adopting a code of silence and charging the media with mounting a viciously biased campaign against him. “I am convinced that the newspapers intend to misconstrue everything I say,” he angrily declared to the Press. “I will have nothing more to say on the case until the Grand Jury takes action [on July 24].” He further declared that he would present the case himself, with no help from the Cleveland Police Department or the prosecutor’s office.

  The case against Frank Dolezal was in deep trouble; at the very least it was falling apart at the seams. Virtually the only remaining reasonably solid planks upon which the sheriff could conceivably build his case were the suspect’s three confessions—of which two had been discredited and the third retracted—and the still undisclosed test results submitted by Ecker. And that plank would collapse the next day.

  FRIDAY, JULY 14

  “Scientist’s Test Fogs Torso Case,” proclaimed the Plain Dealer that morning. “W.R.U. Pathologist Reports Stains Are Not Blood.” “Chemists Disagree on Torso ‘Blood’ Stains,” shouted the Press later in the afternoon. Ecker dismissed as nothing more than “plain dirt” the stains that chemist G. V. Lyons had pronounced human blood at the time of Frank Dolezal’s arrest on July 5. Oddly, Lyons chose not to respond publicly to this curt rebuttal of his professional opinion. He may have been waiting for a more serious forum than the city press for a scientific exchange with Ecker—something like a formal trial; but his silence at this juncture further damaged the sheriff’s already faltering case. In recent years, questions have been raised over whether Ecker and Lyons may have collected their samples from different places, but the question is moot. Given the age of the building and the nature of its occupants, it does not strain credulity to assume there could have been some blood present, though it would be impossible to determine whose. Moreover, the whole blood debate again raises the issue of exactly how many of the victims, if any, Frank Dolezal actually dispatched and dismembered. According to his trio of confessions, he had killed Flo Polillo before he disarticulated her corpse. If she were already dead, the blood flow would have been minimal. But some of the victims—Edward Andrassy, for example—were still alive when the killer removed their heads; in fact, the coroner determined that the cause of death in some cases actually was decapitation. If the heart were still beating when the Butcher’s knife sliced through the neck, there would have been a veritable geyser of spurting blood. Traces of it would be everywhere, no matter how diligently Dolezal tried to clean up the mess: on the walls, in the grouting of the floor, in the cracks of the tub surface, and around the drain.

  The Press now turned against the sheriff and openly criticized his behavior, branding him “Lone Hand
O’Donnell” and questioning his conduct during the entire Dolezal affair. “The conduct of Sheriff Martin L. O’Donnell in the torso case grows more amazing day by day,” the paper declared. “Is the sheriff interested in furthering the ends of justice or is he interested in making a grandstand play for personal glory and acclaim? . . . His conduct of the case arouses the suspicion that however sincere he and his deputies were in making the arrest, the desire to put one over on the Cleveland police has played a strong part in his subsequent behavior.” To add to the sheriff’s growing list of woes, later in the day, attorney Fred Soukup and former judge David Hertz—now officially a member of the Frank Dolezal defense team—went before Common Pleas judge Frank S. Day asking him to void the July 11 arraignment, since Dolezal had not been represented by an attorney. If Day granted their writ, O’Donnell would have to appear in court as a defendant—certainly a new role for the sheriff of Cuyahoga County.

  SATURDAY, JULY 15

  And so it was. “To deny this man the right to counsel is to abrogate all civil liberties and the bill of rights which is the law in every state of this union,” Day thundered, with all the weight of his high office behind him. According to the Plain Dealer, the judge decreed that his colleague Myron Penty had seriously erred in presiding over an arraignment in which the accused stood before the law without legal counsel. Then, turning his outrage on the sheriff, Day declared O’Donnell had “adopted a procedure [of ] which this court does not approve.” As a county official, O’Donnell stood before Day represented by Acting County Prosecutor John J. Mahon. Apparently, the sheriff endured this dressing-down in grim-faced, stony silence and left the courthouse without making any comments to the press. Penty accepted his colleague’s censure and scheduled a second arraignment for Frank Dolezal at 9:30 on the following Friday, July 21. David Hertz exploded: “A hearing as late as next Friday would make a laughing stock of this procedure.” After a rancorous legal skirmish—during which Penty unsuccessfully asked to be removed from the case—the re-arraignment was moved up to Monday morning, July 17.