Though Murder Has No Tongue

by James Jessen Badal

  One particularly shocking photograph—an eleven-by-fourteen-inch copy of a shot that had made it into the pages of the Press in August 1939—set off every alarm bell imaginable. The size and clarity of the original print revealed things that the cheap paper and the relatively poor photo reproduction techniques of the time had obscured. Frank Dolezal lay on the jail floor, his body partly covered by a sheet. His eyes were open and glazed; a hand resting on his head had turned his face toward the right of the picture. The noose with which he had allegedly hanged himself looked as if it had been hurriedly placed on his left shoulder, apparently for the sake of staging a powerfully compelling photograph—a circumstance that strongly suggests that a Press photographer had indeed taken the original picture. In the sheeting or toweling of the makeshift noose, however, curled a length of thin rope or twine. A second and much smaller photo of the death, taken at the same time but from a different angle, not only revealed the hitherto unnoticed piece of twine but showed that it seemed to be a part of an intricate series of lengths of rope or cord wrapped in sheeting. (See page 87. It is almost impossible to determine what this contrivance actually is, given the size of the original; the image degrades badly under magnification.) There was a single, fleeting, reference to the twine in one of the newspaper stories, but this curious rope failed to appear in any other photographic record of the scene, nor was it ever referred to or even mentioned in any of the surviving paperwork covering the case. Newspaper photographs—copies of which were among the morgue collection—showed a length of towels or rags hanging from the clothes hook in the death cell. If the rather fragmentary newspaper coverage of the inquest could be taken at face value, no one ever mentioned that twine during those official proceedings; all the testimony centered on “cleaning rags”—how Dolezal had gotten a hold of them, how he had secreted them. Yet that mysterious length of rope seemed more consistent with the wound on his neck than did the noose of rags. Why did only two photographs show it? What happened to this piece of rope? Coroner Gerber had, somewhat reluctantly, convened the inquest on August 26, two days after Dolezal’s death. For over six decades, the only surviving accounts of those proceedings available to the public remained the fragmentary coverage in Cleveland’s newspapers—stories that offered only a dim reflection of what transpired during two solid days of occasionally explosive testimony.

  A piece of the noose hanging from the cell hook. It has obviously been placed there to stage a compelling photograph. All the visible edges seem frayed, not freshly cut. Courtesy of the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office.

  In spring and early summer 2000, Marjorie Merylo Dentz, sent me copies of all her father’s papers relating to the case—a staggering pile of documents over a foot high containing police reports spanning several years, tip letters, the manuscripts for two projected but unpublished books, close to one hundred photographs (many unseen by the public for over sixty years), and various other pieces of official documentation. As the lead detective on the Kingsbury Run murders, Merylo was present during the inquest, though he did not testify, and his papers fleshed out some significant details of the proceedings and recorded his negative assessment of some of the principal players involved. Those memoirs pointed to the hitherto unknown lawsuits buried in the archives of Cuyahoga County court proceedings: two causes of action undertaken by Frank Dolezal’s brother Charles against the county, Sheriff Martin L. O’Donnell, and several others involved in his brother’s arrest and death. Both sets of documents ended with the tantalizing statement, “Settled at defendants’ cost.” Exactly what that meant remained unclear. At the time, no one still alive in the Dolezal family seemed to know of the double-barreled legal assault initiated by Frank’s brother. Did money change hands? If so, why didn’t any of Charles’s descendants know about it? Were the actions regarded at the time by local officials simply as nuisance suits to be settled as quickly as possible, or in all this legal sparring was there an implied recognition of Frank Dolezal’s innocence? Or, perhaps more important, was the county acknowledging, however indirectly, that his death may not have been a simple suicide? Mark and I began to shop our concerns and doubts about his death around to various individuals in local officialdom whose training potentially made them far better judges of what we thought we were seeing in those revealing old photographs than we were. Everyone was polite, pleasant, and cooperative; but . . . was it a tinge of paranoia on our part, or were we being ever so elegantly stonewalled with a nod and a smile? And why? What was the point of being evasive? The crime—if that is what Dolezal’s death actually had been—was nearly three quarters of a century in the past. Everyone we talked with conceded that, based on all the new recently unearthed evidence, Dolezal had been subjected to a brutal old-fashioned “third degree” interrogation by his captors—that he had been physically abused by a person or persons unknown and that his rights as a potential defendant, even by the far looser standards of the 1930s, had, indeed, been seriously violated. (An individual in the Cleveland Police crime lab—who, naturally enough under the circumstances, requested anonymity—even went so far as to speculate that Dolezal had been driven to take his own life by all the mistreatment meted out to him by his captors.) But no one seemed willing to question Coroner Gerber’s suicide verdict; it was allowed to stand unchallenged.

  Samuel Gerber was, of course, a Cleveland icon and legend; he had been Cuyahoga County coroner from 1936 to 1986. For many locals in and out of government, Gerber and the coroner’s office were inseparable. His image, however, had already been marred by at least one major black eye: his high-handed and arrogant behavior during the Sheppard murder case of 1954. And during the Butcher’s reign of terror, one of the county pathologists, Reuben Straus, had committed a major blunder during the autopsy of victim no. 11, a female, and Coroner Gerber had blithely signed off on his wildly inaccurate results in the official autopsy protocol. Straus had judged the death a probable homicide, though he could not be certain about the exact cause. The disarticulated remains of the victim ultimately wound up in the medical school of Western Reserve University, where anatomy professor T. Windgate Todd examined them closely. This was not a legitimate torso victim, the anatomist later fumed to David Cowles, head of the Cleveland Police Department’s Scientific Investigation Bureau and member of Safety Director Ness’s inner circle. Not only had the unidentified woman been dead before disarticulation, she had already been embalmed. Whoever had placed her remains in the trash dump at the corner of East 9th and Lake Shore Drive had taken the time to cut up a body that had been previously prepared at an undertaking establishment. This tale of apparent sloppiness run amok in the coroner’s office was never leaked to the press or even made public until 1983, when David Cowles talked about it in a taped interview with police lieutenant Tom Brown and Florence Schwein, the first director-curator of the Cleveland Police Historical Society Museum; but certainly such a serious blunder in such a high-profile case could not be kept entirely secret at the time. There had to be some who knew, whether in the county coroner’s office or the Western Reserve Medical School, but no one seemed willing to say anything publicly. Was there still some sort of local good-ole-boy network left over from the Great Depression intact in the city in the twenty-first century, or was official Cleveland still simply unwilling to compromise Gerber’s shining reputation further by conceding that in 1939 he had committed a couple of major mistakes in judgment in regard to one of the city’s most notorious cases? There were no obvious answers to those troubling questions; and for the moment, at least, we were stymied.

  A stone-faced coroner, Dr. Samuel Gerber, holding the alleged instrument of Frank Dolezal’s suicide for the assembled newspaper photographers. Note that none of the edges look as if they had been freshly cut with a knife. Cleveland Press Archives, Cleveland State University.

  Then in winter 2004, the archivist at the morgue located the original record of the inquest testimony, all 220 elegantly bound pages of it. Included with the impressively hefty tome was a
sheaf of other extraordinary papers—the depositions taken by Cleveland police, late in the afternoon of Frank Dolezal’s death, from everyone present and otherwise involved in his alleged suicide and its immediate aftermath. This was a find of enormous significance; the material added up to a huge missing piece in the puzzle that no one had seen since 1939. With our enthusiasm rekindled, Mark and I obsessively pored over copies of the original documents for weeks—reading and rereading, noting questions in the margins, underlining key bits of testimony, and comparing the various statements offered by different witnesses. It was a daunting task; the combined total of all the typed material easily topped 250 pages. Suddenly, the alarm bells that had sounded in 1999 when Rebecca McFarland and Andrew Schug first saw those autopsy photos became a jarring cacophony. The tension present in that room was immediately obvious, and gradually some of the discrepancies in the testimony only vaguely hinted at by the original 1939 newspaper coverage began to take shape. There seemed to be something sinister flowing just beneath the surface. But what?

  Gerber had convened the inquest into Frank Dolezal’s death on Saturday, August 26, 1939, at 10:30 A.M.—the day after the formal autopsy and two days following the bricklayer’s death. The most obvious explanation for his initial reticence is that he saw no need for the formal procedure; his investigation of the scene at the county jail, coupled with statements from Sheriff O’Donnell and his deputies, had convinced him that Dolezal had, indeed, taken his own life with a noose he had secretly fashioned from “cloths” jail personnel had given him to clean his cell. Unfortunately, the reporters in attendance at the formal proceedings probably viewed inquest testimony in the same light as trial testimony—long, dry, and often rather dull. What interested them most were obviously the conclusions. They perked up and took more than casual interest, however, whenever something out of the ordinary occurred, such as when Sheriff O’Donnell almost got into a fistfight with William Edwards, crime commissioner, or when he lost his temper and challenged Gerber during the testimony of Patrolman Frank Vorell. But, for the most part, the gentlemen of the press establishment remained totally oblivious to the intricacies of the delicate dance going on before them. Thus, the public only got a vague, generalized notion of what was going on behind those closed doors.

  Reading and absorbing the full inquest transcript was a monumental task. Though the troubling undercurrents rumbling beneath the placid surface of official question and answer were readily apparent even on a first read-through, gaining a full understanding of what was actually being said or inferred would require me—as well as the other members of the research team, principally Mark Stone—to comb through the testimony many times over, all the while taking voluminous notes and endlessly hashing out our impressions over gallons of coffee and uncountable boxes of doughnuts. Mark and I traded frantically dashed-off e-mails and shared our intense and rapidly developing excitement over the phone. This was real! This was Cold Case plus all the CSI and Law & Order shows rolled together and catapulted from the TV screen into real life; from all appearances, we seemed on the brink of making tantalizing, potentially explosive, entirely new discoveries in the accepted record of one of Cleveland’s most notorious and gruesome murder cases. Gradually, the inconsistencies, the irregularities (at least by contemporary standards), the personal agendas, and the sometimes awkward procedural maneuvering came into focus. It just did not add up; and everyone who has studied the document has come away deeply troubled and with serious misgivings.

  Most of the testimony dealt with such issues as the physical injuries Dolezal had apparently sustained (the bruising and broken ribs), his two suicide attempts, his state of mind, and the exact time line of events leading up to his death and the immediate aftermath: Who did what, where were they when they did it, and when did they do it? The first witness to testify on that Saturday morning was A. V. Fried, the Cuyahoga County jail physician—a position he had held for seven years at that point—and the first person on the scene to declare Dolezal officially dead. In his fifties at the time, Fried had once had his sights set on the coroner’s office but had lost out to Gerber. Whether his then current position at the county jail was a consolation prize is impossible to say. Since he was the first to take the stand and there was no other testimony on the record to which his could be compared, it would not become clear until later in the day that Fried had dropped a troubling little bombshell regarding the official time of death. According to all the sworn depositions taken on August 24, Dolezal’s death had occurred around 2:00 in the afternoon. Fried had been called immediately at his Broadway office and had arrived at the jail, according to his inquest testimony, about eight minutes later. At this point, Dolezal had supposedly been dead for less than a half an hour, yet Fried insisted the corpse was cold.

  Fried: . . . and he was cold. The entire body was cold.

  Gerber: Now, had he been given any resuscitation before you examined him, to your knowledge? Schaeffer resuscitation? Any method of resuscitation, to your knowledge?

  Fried: I don’t know anything about it.

  Gerber: How long do you think Frank Dolezal was dead, when you examined him?

  Fried: Well he must have been dead about half an hour.

  Gerber: And you examined him at what time?

  Fried: Well this is about 2:25 I guess or 2:28, around there. Exactly, I would—

  Gerber: Two-twenty in the afternoon?

  Fried: Sometimes [sic] in there.

  Gerber: Two-twenty to 2:25, is that it?

  Fried: I guess it was about that, wasn’t it? I didn’t pay too much attention to the time.

  Gerber: Did you determine the condition of rigor mortis of the body at that time?

  Fried: Beg your pardon?

  Gerber: Did you determine the condition of rigor mortis in the body at that time?

  Fried: Life?

  Gerber: Rigor—rigor mortis?

  Fried: Oh, absolutely.

  Gerber: Was there any rigor mortis present?

  Fried: He was dead as a doornail, and that is all.

  It is a curious exchange. Gerber keeps hammering at Fried (who seems somewhat belligerent, even combative) because neither could the body simply be entirely “cold” nor could rigor mortis have set in after only a half an hour. The unstated implication of Gerber’s badgering is clear: Are you absolutely sure about the time? Are you absolutely sure the body was cold and rigor had set in? If Fried is accurate about the state of the corpse, death must have occurred far earlier than 2:00 in the afternoon. And to whom was Fried’s “wasn’t it?” directed? Would it be reading too much into this part of the exchange to suggest that Fried’s question makes him sound like an actor checking with the prompter to make sure he had delivered his lines correctly?

  Gerber obviously attached crucial importance to the broken ribs and other injuries that Dolezal had sustained, according to the sheriff’s office, during his two botched suicide attempts on Monday, July 10—and which the autopsy on August 25 had so graphically confirmed. Both Frank Dolezal’s brother Charles and Charles’s brother-in-law Patrolman Frank Vorell testified that the prisoner had not suffered any prior injuries nor had he been in the hospital, thus firmly establishing that the bruising on the face and arms (clearly visible in newspaper photographs taken on and after July 10) and the broken ribs (confirmed by the autopsy) had occurred while Frank Dolezal was in the sheriff’s custody, sometime between early July and late August. Were these injuries caused by beatings? Absolutely not, insisted Sheriff O’Donnell. “He was questioned in the regular way by myself and Mr. Brown, and no force, no threats or no promises or anything made whatever. . . . I never raised my voice or threatened, and never heard Mr. Brown threaten or raise his voice in any way, shape or form all the time we talked to him.” In fact, asserted the sheriff, “and if anything, treated him better than the average prisoner we had there, and he knew that and he appreciated it a whole lot[!?]. . . . treated him better than any prisoner who was ever in the jail in my time arres
ted for a like offense.”

  Called to testify immediately after his boss, sheriff’s detective Harry S. Brown concurred. “Now, more than once there has been a lot said about lickings and beatings and all that sort of thing. I was there all the time up to the time this man got hurt [presumably, a reference to Dolezal’s two suicide attempts], and some time a little after he got hurt. I know positively that there was no beating of any kind.”

  Witnesses more or less in the Dolezal camp, however—those outside the sheriff’s office—had far different stories to tell. David Hertz recalled: “He said that at one time he was bound, blindfolded and gagged, and that he was kept in that condition . . . that he was bound, his hands bound and his legs bound, and blindfolded and gagged, and considerably punched throughout a period of time.” George Palda (an attorney brought in by David Hertz because he was of the same nationality as Dolezal and could talk to him in his native language) said: “A cloth was suddenly thrown over his head, over his eyes and over his mouth, and he was jerked back onto the cement floor and while there on the cement floor he was kicked and punched.”

  Patrolman Frank Vorell remembered: “I spoke to him at the County Jail, and I asked him how he come with the injuries. And he said that he was beaten up. And I says ‘Who done the beating?’ He says ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Well,’ I says, ‘didn’t you see him?’ He says, ‘No,’ he says, ‘I was blindfolded and gagged when I came to.’ And I says, ‘Where were you at, at the time?’ He says ‘I was laying on the cement, in the jail.’”