Though Murder Has No Tongue

by James Jessen Badal

  Gerber: Well, do you know any reason why Frank Dolezal should commit suicide?

  Lillian Jones: Did I know?

  Gerber: Do you know any reason why?

  Lillian Jones: Because they were worrying him to death, and they were punching him and beating him and everything like that.

  Gerber: How do you know that?

  Lillian Jones: I heard a conversation.

  Gerber: You don’t have any actual knowledge of it? You just heard a conversation, is that right? . . . Now, you say that you heard that they were abusing him, is that the word you used?

  Lillian Jones: Yes, I heard that.

  Gerber: Who did you hear talk?

  Lillian Jones: A white lady and a white fellow talking in front of me at County Jail.

  Gerber: A white lady and white fellow talked in front of you?

  Lillian Jones: Yes.

  Gerber: Do you know their names?

  Lillian Jones: No, I don’t.

  Gerber: When was this, you heard it?

  Lillian Jones: I guess it was a week before [August 17?], it was about a week before he did this.

  Gerber: You mean by “this” the suicide?

  Lillian Jones: Yes.

  Whether or not Frank Dolezal committed suicide, Lillian Jones’s testimony provides independent verification from a disinterested party that he was, indeed, being severely abused while in the sheriff’s custody. The testimony offered by her sister proved far more damning.

  Danaceau: Did he [Pat Lyons] say anything at any other time about Frank Dolezal?

  Ruby Lee: Yes. He wasn’t talking to me, though, but he was talking to another girl.

  Danaceau: Did you hear him?

  Ruby Lee: Yes, I heard him, and he told the other girl, he said—I told the other girl, I said, “Ask him is Frank Dolezal the man,” and he said, “Sure, we got the right man,” and he said, “He might—” I asked him was he going to all get the Chair, and he said, “No, he going to get the ‘hot seat.’ He will never come out of the County Jail alive.” He said, “He will never walk out of the County Jail.”

  Gerber: Was this before or after Frank Dolezal died? [Note that the word “suicide” has been replaced by “died.”]

  Ruby Lee: Just before he died, a week.

  Danaceau: He said he was going to get the “hot seat”?

  Ruby Lee: Yes.

  Gerber: Did he say anything about abusing Frank Dolezal?

  Ruby Lee: Yes, he said, yes, they were beating him to death, making him say he was the man. They was making him say he was the man, he said, whether he is or not.

  Gerber: You heard that?

  Ruby Lee: Yes, I heard it.

  Lillian and Ruby Lee Jones, as well as a third woman, had been arrested in connection with a robbery on Friday, August 25. Somehow, William Edwards got wind of this arrest and took the opportunity to question Lillian further. Perhaps he remembered that she was the woman who told reporters that she had once been in Frank Dolezal’s apartment and had been forced to jump through a window to safety when he came at her with a knife. As the lead investigator in the torso murders, Detective Peter Merylo was assigned to accompany Edwards during his meeting with the Jones sisters in the evening of Monday, August 28; and he included an abbreviated version of their story in his special report to Eliot Ness dated April 2, 1940. Responding to questions and, no doubt, pressure from the two men, Lillian immediately retracted the lurid tale she had shared with the press back in July, insisting it was something she made up to satisfy Pat Lyons and get him off her back. (Lillian and Lyons frequented some of the same dives, and she apparently regarded him as something of a nuisance.)

  At the conclusion of the Jones sisters’ testimony, Edwards asked to be officially sworn in as a witness and proceeded to make the following statement. To be completely fair, I have reproduced that section of Edwards’s statement in its entirety.

  I first talked to Lillian Jones, whose transcript you have or, rather, whose testimony you have, and after that talked to this present witness, Ruby Lee Jones. I found her, at the outset, very reluctant to talk about the case at all. After a short time I ascertained what her difficulty was. In the first place she, at least, subjectively speaking, seems to have some concern about her welfare if she did talk. Secondly, and being of paramount importance, apparently, the fact that she was scared to death of a dead body. [The inquest was held at the county morgue.] You have my word for it that she was only asked to tell the truth and invited to come down here and tell the truth here, and, then, of course, there were no measures of persuasion other than to get her over this idea of coming down to where dead people were kept, and my only appeal to her was if she would come down and speak the truth, as she related it to me.

  During this second morning session, the combined testimony of the Jones sisters and William Edwards covers seventeen pages in the official inquest transcript (202–19), and it certainly couldn’t have taken more than a half an hour to an hour to get it recorded. At the end of his testimony, Edwards asks, “If we may go off the record for a moment?” To which Gerber responds, “Yes, off the record.” These are the last four words spoken in the transcript. Yet Gerber did not officially bring proceedings to a close until 8:30 P.M. Could there actually have been an off-the-record discussion that went on for the rest of the day, for virtually eight hours? Even assuming they took breaks, what could they possibly be talking about for such an extended period? It is pure conjecture on my part, but it would seem likely that they wrestled with, among other things, the vexing dilemma of how to handle—officially—the testimony offered by the Jones sisters, how to incorporate the information they provided into the record while protecting them from possible reprisals. Just possibly, they also considered the full implications of that testimony when seen in the light of all the allegations of mistreatment presented during the inquest. If they suspected foul play, they may have deliberated on whether to go public with those suspicions.

  This was heady stuff—contradictory testimony, personal agendas, frayed tempers, a near fistfight, all culminating in a procedural maneuver that resulted in a secret session. It was all very intoxicating, disturbing, perplexing, exciting, and a little frightening. It was obvious that, at the very least, Frank Dolezal’s death was far more complicated than the sheriff’s official version implied. Armed with our cache of photographs and the inquest testimony, Mark and I stood ready to rewrite history. But the real world of criminal investigation and forensic analysis requires far more exactness and specificity than TV’s fantasy crime-solving arena. It also gradually became clear to us that those historical revisions could only come at a very high price for some Cleveland families. Questions over Frank Dolezal’s guilt and death may have been an integral part of Kingsbury Run murder lore for close to seventy some years, but to prove with anything approaching scientific certainty that he had been murdered would automatically raise the question “By whom?” And to pursue that question would inevitably lead to other equally explosive issues. Was it an accident—an interrogation that got out of hand—or had it been a premeditated act? If premeditated, why had that drastic course of action been deemed necessary? Who had made the decision? Who had set the wheels in motion? How many people were involved? How many knew the truth; what, indeed, was the truth? Was there any kind of official cover-up, and, if so, how deep did its roots go and to how high a level of authority did the branches reach? Political warfare and posturing had been an ugly component of the official investigation of the Kingsbury Run murders virtually from the beginning, and one did not have to dig into the murders very deeply to uncover a tangle of political alliances and agendas infiltrating every aspect of the case, including the questionable death of Frank Dolezal.

  None of these questions could be explored without casting deep suspicions on the character and integrity of men long dead—some in public life—but whose children, grandchildren, and other relatives still lived in and around Cleveland. The lure of potentially having uncovered a conspiracy t
o commit murder shined undeniably brilliantly and attractively, but we had to proceed slowly, and with tremendous caution. On the one hand, reputations were, after all, at stake. On the other hand, members of Frank Dolezal’s family also still lived in the area; and they had quietly endured the stain on the family name for almost seventy years. The public sometimes tends to forget that a murder is not a clean, swift bolt of lightning striking down a lone individual; it is a continuing storm that wounds or destroys other lives in its wake. And, indeed, the summer 1939 events and their aftermath had punished the Dolezals for decades and had blasted their family tree to splinters.

  Mark and I were certainly no casting director’s dream of the ideal cold case unit or CSI team. Forget the glamor! We simply did not possess the necessary training and experience to adequately judge what we were seeing. We could count ourselves skilled researchers from an academic point of view. Beyond that, with two successful true crime books behind me, I knew my way around police reports and autopsy protocols; and experience had prepared me for working through and around the inevitable vagaries and occasional outright inaccuracies of public documents. But we were not forensic experts. We knew nothing about analyzing photographs of soft tissue damage or of a healed bone fracture, and we skated on very thin ice when it came to judging in-depth medical testimony. And, however fiercely our enthusiasm and dedication may have burned, we were, after all, just amateur sleuths looking at very old and fragmentary evidence with amateur eyes. We needed minds and eyes far more trained in the science and art of forensics than our own to pore over the huge pile of photographs and documents unearthed and pulled together by the archivist at the Cuyahoga County morgue. And perhaps it would be best if those minds and eyes were fresh and unburdened by the heavy baggage of Cleveland history.

  There was at least one well-publicized precedent for the sort of cold case forensic reexamination we were proposing. In 2000, popular author Patricia Cornwell—armed with her stint in the Richmond, Virginia, crime lab; her experience as a crime reporter for the Charlotte Observer; and several million dollars of her own money—aimed the entire arsenal of modern forensics at the surviving Jack the Ripper evidence, including the infamous letters that may or may not have come from the perpetrator’s hand, in hopes of finding and proving the identity of the world’s most notorious slasher. For whatever reason, however, Cornwell chose to go solo. She did not consult or work with any of the long-standing experts in the established Ripperology community, and her defiant, in-your-face attitude toward them guaranteed her enemies from the start. When she fingered noted Victorian painter Walter Sickert as the culprit, the Ripper world merely shrugged its collective shoulders and rolled its eyes. Not only had Sickert been tried in other, older theories of the crimes, Cornwell had, so ran the arguments, ignored facts that did not fit her thesis. (Apparently, the determined author also had not bothered to consult anyone conversant with the biographical details of Walter Sickert’s life.) Unfortunately, the resulting brouhaha of charges and countercharges in the media, national and international, obscured the significance of what Cornwell had attempted. For one of the first times in modern history, high-tech forensic tools and welleducated professional minds had been marshaled in the bright glare of the public arena to work on crime evidence over a century old.

  May 26, 2004: a comfortable, sunny day—spring blooming rapidly into summer. On that pleasant morning, Mark and I helped Dave Brodowski load all his camera equipment into a rented van for our drive to Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania, where we would present our collection of diverse material to a team of forensic experts. Now we continued in earnest the journey that had started in 1999, when Rebecca McFarland and Andrew Schug first looked at Frank Dolezal’s autopsy photos. Every so often, life presents an opportunity to live out a well-worn cliché: on that morning our journey into our personal cold case truly began; and we had no idea where it would ultimately take us.

  NOTE

  The complete transcript of the coroner’s inquest and all the photographs referred to in the text are on file at the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office.

  Chapter 7

  CSI MERCYHURST AND BEYOND

  For beleaguered Clevelanders smarting from national jokes about the city that have arisen from a plethora of local civic issues—the river that caught fire, the Howdy Doody lookalike mayor who steered the city into default, the mayoral spouse who allegedly turned down a presidential invitation to visit the White House because it conflicted with her bowling night—nearby Erie, Pennsylvania, seemed a godsend: a convenient whipping boy whose regional reputation ranked lower than our own. “Dreary Erie: The mistake on the lake!” About the city itself, I cannot comment since we saw so little of it on our drive to Mercyhurst College. The campus, however, would be a jewel in any city’s crown: beautifully and spaciously laid out with no glaring clashes of architectural style. But it wasn’t the palpable sense of collegiate nostalgia that brought Mark, Dave, and me here; the institution’s applied forensic sciences department had been glowingly recommended by forensic anthropologists at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.; and after some preliminary phone and e-mail discussions, members of the faculty agreed to look over our material.

  The notion that something was amiss with the official explanation of Frank Dolezal’s death has been, of course, an integral part of the Kingsbury Run story since 1939. But it could not be explored beyond the contemporary newspaper coverage and a few bits of unverifiable oral legend until 1999, when the Cuyahoga County morgue archivist pulled the original autopsy photographs from the files where they had lain undisturbed for sixty years. Other significant pieces of the puzzle soon followed: Detective Peter Merylo’s memoirs and official reports, Pat Lyons’s memoirs and other miscellaneous papers, the complete record of Charles Dolezal’s two lawsuits against the sheriff and his office, depositions taken at the time of Frank Dolezal’s death, and, perhaps, the most crucial piece of all—the full transcript of the inquest proceedings.

  We steered the department-provided cart, loaded with heavy TV camera equipment, down the well-scrubbed hallways, passed all the usual signs of modern college life—posters advertising up-coming events, all sorts of colorful messages from campus organizations, neatly arranged lounge chairs, a succession of office doors. When I glanced down at one of the cart’s rattling wheels, I noticed for the first time the label placed on the cart’s edge with its grim magic-marker message: “For Human Remains Only.” As we entered the elevator to descend to the forensic department on the building’s bottom floor, I entertained a whole series of pop culture–CSI notions: images of highly trained and attractive professionals who use the microscope and the test tube to solve heinous crimes in their always dark, space-age laboratories, all aglow with intriguing lights and outfitted with bright, shiny devices representing the last word in crime-solving technology. When the elevator doors opened, all those fantasy high-tech images vanished in the face of a long, brightly lit corridor lined with specimen display cases decidedly more reminiscent of a natural history museum than TV-land’s glittering laboratories.

  We were met by the director of the applied forensic sciences department, Dr. Dennis C. Dirkmaat—his striking professorial demeanor leavened by an affable smile and a pair of well-worn blue jeans. A highly regarded forensic anthropologist, his impressive resume includes working with coroners, medical examiners, and state police all through the Pennsylvania–Ohio–West Virginia area, as well as the FBI. On this visit, Dennis had graciously—and bravely—consented to sit down with me and allow his initial gut, though obviously learned, reactions to our pile of troubling photographs and other documents to be videotaped and recorded in their entirety.

  Though we had e-mailed him copies of the crucial photos earlier, given him an overview of the entire Dolezal story, and spelled out our misgivings about Gerber’s official verdict, this was the first time he was seeing much of the relevant material. As the camera hovered above us and rolled silently, he examined one photo after the nex
t—constantly asking me questions about the contexts and circumstances surrounding what he was seeing, sometimes looking up to respond to one of Mark’s inquiries, occasionally offering guardedly cautious comments. He carefully studied the two pre-autopsy morgue photographs showing the wound on Frank Dolezal’s neck. His brow knitted somewhat when he encountered the various shots of the bulky length of rags, the alleged instrument of the suicide: a stone-faced Sam Gerber holding the cloth up for newspaper photographers at the morgue, a lengthy piece of the same material dangling from the clothes hook in the cell where the death allegedly occurred, the tangled pile of cloth on the chest of Frank Dolezal’s corpse. And, of course, the final photo clearly showed curled in with the rags or sheeting the telltale piece of rope—whose presence was never questioned or explained back in 1939. In every sense of the term, this was a crap-shoot. Would Dirkmaat’s highly trained and experienced eyes pick up on the discrepancies in the official version of events that we thought we had uncovered? Would he find any reason to question Sam Gerber’s sixty-five-year-old suicide verdict, anything that could prompt a deeper, more detailed analysis on his part? If not, the adventure was over; and we might as well pack up our material and equipment and head back to Cleveland. For nearly an hour, the camera hovered silently over the pile of photographs as we rummaged through them and moved slowly between Dirkmaat and me as the microphones pinned to our shirts caught the stray bits of conversation, the comments, and the questions. Finally, Mark broached the crucial issue: “First impressions?” “Yes, first impressions,” Dirkmaat responded as he raised his eyes from the material scattered on the table before us. “I think there are a lot of issues that have to be addressed. You know, it could turn out that all these things are legitimate; but there are enough questions here to have to do a little more research.” Our suspicions were validated; the journey would continue.