Politics does, indeed, make strange bedfellows. On October 21, 1938—two months after the discovery of victims nos. 11 and 12, Ness’s shantytown raid, and Francis Sweeney’s admission to the Sandusky Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home—two sworn political enemies, Mayor Harold Burton and Congressman Martin L. Sweeney, appeared together before the Veterans Administration in Washington, D.C., to lobby for the construction of a new VA hospital in Cleveland. The timing of this unlikely alliance will no doubt tweak the noses of the conspiratorially minded, prompting them to catch the faintest whiff of a deal. Why, they will ask, would Martin Sweeney cooperate with Harold Burton unless he were forced to somehow? But the motivation behind this uneasy partnership could conceivably be far more innocent. Those hearings had most likely been set up months in advance—long before the events of August 1938; no doubt both men saw the potential for their own personal political gain and the city’s economic gain in such a rapprochement. It was a win-win situation; after all, who could possibly object to a project that would benefit the country’s servicemen? If there was a deal to keep suspicions about Francis Sweeney quiet, it was most likely not struck in August of 1938.
WAS FRANK DOLEZAL ARRESTED AND CHARGED TO DEFLECT ATTENTION FROM FRANCIS SWEENEY?
The only set of circumstances that would support such an allegation is the apparent desperation on the part of Sheriff O’Donnell and his office to get a confession out of Dolezal and have him officially charged as quickly as possible once he had been arrested, in July 1939. But there had to be a reason for this haste; something would have had to have happened in spring or summer 1939 that would have provoked the need for a scapegoat. There is, however, no surviving evidence that there was such a trigger. Francis Sweeney had been safely tucked away in Sandusky for almost a year and would not be discharged until July 30, 1940; if he left on his own, he would be shadowed by the Ness office; there had not been any new torso victims for almost a year—since August 1938. The Butcher had never allowed a gap that long to lapse between victims—save for the period between the Lady of the Lake, assuming she was one of the Butcher’s targets (September 1934), and the deaths of Edward Andrassy and his never-identified companion (September 1935). What reason would there be for a scapegoat in July 1939? The Plain Dealer did resuscitate the Kingsbury Run story on April 2 of that year, with a full-page piece, complete with pictures, exploring the question of what type of person the perpetrator must be; but that retrospective rumination hardly seems sufficient in itself to provoke the Dolezal affair a couple months later. There had to be something else.
Pat Lyons began digging into Kingsbury Run independently of the sheriff’s office and the Cleveland Police Department around April 1938; and, according to his own written account, he did not have any contact with Sheriff O’Donnell or identify Frank Dolezal as a potentially viable suspect until sometime after January 1939. Exactly when did Martin L. Sweeney learn that his down-and-out cousin was Eliot Ness’s prime suspect? If that decidedly unpleasant revelation dawned on the congressman sometime during the first six months of 1939, it could possibly serve as the event that triggered a determinedly desperate hunt for a suitable patsy. If such were the case, that Pat Lyons was independently offering up Frank Dolezal as the Mad Butcher during the same period, it would be among the very happiest of coincidences. And all the surviving evidence suggests it was, indeed, a coincidence. Lyons’s papers make it clear that he considered a wide range of potential suspects; his notes give no sense that he was zeroing in on Dolezal or anyone else because of outside pressure. The evolution of his interest in the bricklayer clearly grows out of his own investigation. The notion, however, of possible collusion between two high-ranking public officials such as Sweeney and O’Donnell to take advantage of a possible suspect—conveniently fingered at just the right moment by an independent investigator—for the sole purpose of protecting a relative is certainly the sort of insidious plot that whets the appetite of the most determined conspiracy buff. But there is no proof that anything like this scenario actually took place. It would be just as easy, and perhaps more logical, to argue that Sheriff O’Donnell, a Democrat, latched on to Frank Dolezal because he saw an opportunity to score major political points against Republican rivals Mayor Harold Burton and Safety Director Eliot Ness. During the 1930s, the sheriff’s office was not seriously involved with criminal investigations, per se; its purview was running the county jail. It would, therefore, be seen as a stunning political victory if O’Donnell and company could succeed where Ness and the police department had failed.
And O’Donnell badly needed a public victory in the early months of 1939. He had won election to the sheriff’s office in 1936 (previously, he had been mayor of Garfield Heights); and in less than two years, he suffered two major public relations disasters. In September 1937, he endured a savage lambasting in city papers over what the Press termed “Cleveland’s worst prison break.” On September 23, in an editorial titled “Sheriff O’Donnell’s Carelessness,” the paper reported that three bank robbers and an accused murderer armed with guns, apparently smuggled to them by family members and friends during totally unsupervised visits, broke out of the county jail. “The desperados capture five deputies, lock them up and get out of the modern, well-equipped jail without a shot being fired by deputies or guards on duty,” raged the city daily. “They jump into automobiles, begin a mad dash through congested downtown streets, manhandle a city judge, take his car from him, [and] run down a woman waiting for a street car in a safety zone.” The revelation that the bank robbers had already broken out of one prison and that the sheriff had been warned they would likely try it again only compounded the embarrassment.
Already sporting one black eye, the sheriff acquired another in late 1938. From the very beginning of his administration, O’Donnell let it be known publicly that he was a staunch believer in home rule when it came to matters of law enforcement. The practical implications of this rather vague but innocuous-sounding legal philosophy, however, put him and his office on a direct collision course with the Cleveland Crime Commission and its operating director, William E. Edwards. O’Donnell adopted a hands-off policy when it came to enforcing gambling laws in Cuyahoga County, believing that any crackdown on known illegal gambling establishments should come from the local municipalities in which they operated, not the sheriff’s office. Fed up with O’Donnell’s apparent refusal to move against entrenched gambling interests in the county, the Crime Commission launched a petition drive to have him ousted from office in early June 1938—a move that enjoyed the active vocal support of both County Prosecutor Frank T. Cullitan and Safety Director Eliot Ness. Within a week of the commission’s action, the Federation of Women’s Clubs and the Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee joined the crusade; by August, Labor’s Non-Partisan League also threw its support behind the ouster movement. The entire gambling issue, coupled with the ouster drive, grew so contentious that it wound up on the agenda of the fourth annual meeting of the Interstate Commission on Crime—an organization that included attorneys general from thirty-five states—held at the Hotel Cleveland in early July. By the end of August, organizers behind the drive, growing more and more confident that their attempt to boot the sheriff out of office would be ultimately successful, were even planning an “ouster O’Donnell” rally at Public Hall. In early September, however, the entire movement fizzled when organizers proved unable to secure the necessary twenty-five thousand petition signatures to force the issue.
By the end of 1938, O’Donnell had endured three months of intense, relentless battering in city newspapers. When Pat Lyons approached him in January 1939 with his carefully worked out plans to finally apprehend the elusive Mad Butcher, the beleaguered sheriff—no doubt still smarting from negative press coverage—leapt at the chance to both score a major triumph in the city and rehabilitate his badly damaged public image. And, indeed, in the heady early days after Frank Dolezal’s arrest on July 5, 1939, the sheriff’s image shone brightly with a renewed luster, o
nly to tarnish again when questions over Dolezal’s arrest, treatment, and death mushroomed over the next month.
In late March 1940, in probate court, Charles Dolezal filed his two lawsuits against O’Donnell and his deputies over his brother’s death—an event that may have been a major catalyst in the rebirth of the ouster drive in early May. Headed by the Cleveland Bar Association, a coalition of various organizations and individuals again banded together and dedicated itself to forcing Martin O’Donnell out of office. The scrappy sheriff shot back by threatening to subpoena every individual who signed an ouster petition. The entire legal brouhaha ended suddenly in June 1941 when O’Donnell died of a massive heart attack.
WAS FRANK DOLEZAL MURDERED?
“Isn’t it convenient that he should kill himself just before going on trial?” mused the high-ranking official in the Cleveland Police Department—who asked for, indeed demanded, anonymity—when Mark Stone and I consulted with him. In fact, as he lounged back in his chair and allowed a knowing smile to wander across his face, he said it again. “Isn’t it convenient that he should take his own life before going to trial?” And that, of course, is precisely the issue. It seems too convenient that Dolezal should commit suicide about a week before his case was to be presented to the Grand Jury, especially since the case against him had been in a state of collapse almost since his arrest on July 5. At the very least, it can be said with total certainty that his death remains highly suspicious and that it did not occur in the manner so meticulously laid out in the official record.
As I dealt with this question at length in chapter 6, here I will confine myself primarily to a brief review of the most pertinent facts that challenge the official version of events, as well as Coroner Gerber’s suicide verdict. The time of death is at issue. Dolezal supposedly hanged himself around 1:55–2:00 P.M., yet Dr. Fried testified at the inquest that when he examined the body less than a half an hour later, “he was entirely cold. The entire body was cold.” In response to Gerber’s prompting, Fried even implied that rigor mortis had already set in. A corpse could not be “entirely cold” after only a half an hour—especially on the fourth floor of a building on an eighty-some-degree day, and full rigor would not occur for several hours. If Fried is correct, death occurred far earlier in the day than 2:00 P.M. Inquest testimony records that sheriff’s deputies Hugh Crawford and Clarence Smart cut the noose around Dolezal’s neck with a pocketknife provided by Sheriff O’Donnell. But none of the extant photos of the noose material show the kind of jagged edge that would result if the sheeting were cut in such a fashion. All visible ends of the cloth appear frayed and worn, not freshly cut. Inquest testimony from those deputies present also agrees that Dolezal was left hanging for only a few minutes—sufficient time to cause asphyxiation, perhaps, but nowhere near long enough to cause the deep mark on his neck visible in the pre-autopsy photographs taken eighteen hours later, which, in his official verdict, Gerber described as being one centimeter in width. According to Marcella F. Fierro’s July 24, 2007, e-mail to me, “A cloth ligature would not leave a 1 cm mark on his neck. It was caused by something else”—something like the rope clearly visible in two of the extant photos, the existence of which is never referred to in any of the official documents dealing with Frank Dolezal’s death.
Charles Dolezal filed his two petitions in the Court of Common Pleas on March 27, 1940, charging Sheriff O’Donnell and his deputies with gross misconduct in their handling of his brother Frank’s arrest and incarceration. The first listed seven different causes of action—primarily false arrest and mistreatment—against O’Donnell, Pat Lyons, and four of the sheriff’s deputies. The second accepts Gerber’s suicide verdict for purely legal reasons and then charges O’Donnell with negligence for failing to prevent it, even though his prisoner had been reportedly placed on suicide watch following the two unsuccessful attempts on his own life. Within days of Dolezal’s filing, Eliot Ness requested a formal report from Detective Peter Merylo detailing Pat Lyons’s activities in the whole affair. (Ness would obviously be quite familiar with O’Donnell and the four deputies charged in the suits, but he may not have known anything about Pat Lyons and his role beyond what the newspapers had reported at the time of Frank Dolezal’s arrest.) Clearly Ness was trying to put together an overall picture of the episode; after all, the reputations of some in law enforcement—indeed, the city itself and all of Cuyahoga County—were at stake. Merylo turned in his less-than-flattering report on Lyons’s conduct—discussed at length in chapter 2—to the safety director on April 2, 1940. In June 1941, Sheriff Martin L. O’Donnell suddenly died of a heart attack. On March 28, 1942, the law offices of Minshall & Mosier contacted Pat Lyons by mail: “The above entitled case [the first of Charles Dolezal’s suits] in which you are a party defendant has finally been adjusted satisfactorily. Will you please get in touch with me [partner W. E. Minshall] upon receipt of this letter so that I may discuss with you the expense involved in connection with this lawsuit?” Exactly what this summons means for Pat Lyons, especially from a financial point of view, is unclear; but the final pages of the paperwork for both of Charles Dolezal’s suits contain the following: “settled and dismissed at defendants’ cost.” As county employees, O’Donnell and his deputies would have been covered financially by the Massachusetts Bonding and Insurance Company and the National Surety Corporation; but Pat Lyons’s onetime status as a special deputy or agent to the sheriff may not have guaranteed him any such protection.
With Sheriff O’Donnell’s death, a political obstacle had been conveniently removed; and the Cuyahoga County Commissioners cleaned house. “I think that what I can remember of the sheriff’s department in those days,” mused Thomas G. Matowitz Sr. (son of the then police chief George J. Matowitz), “it left a little bit to be desired.” And the Dolezal affair was only the tip of the iceberg. Bad blood had been brewing between the sheriff’s office and the county government for years, primarily over the issue of illegal gambling. On December 4, 1940, as part of a Grand Jury probe, Common Pleas judge Frank D. Lausche ordered the sheriff’s office to search the Harvard Club in Newburgh Heights (an infamous gambling den already busted once by Eliot Ness) and seize any and all gambling equipment and devices. In an incredibly brazen act of defiance, sheriff’s deputy Harry Brown entered the establishment, looked around for approximately sixty seconds, and left empty-handed. Absolutely furious over what he saw as obvious and deliberate disobedience, Judge Lausche ordered Brown to appear in court and explain why he had ignored a direct order from the bench. When Brown refused to show up, Lausche cited him for contempt. Thomas Matowitz characterized O’Donnell’s deputies as political “hacks and thugs.” The prevailing patronage system “just dragged them in, pinned a star on them, turned them loose.” In the hunt for a new sheriff, commissioners turned to the Cleveland Police Department and appointed Inspector Joseph M. Sweeney (no relation to Martin L. and Francis) to the position—an action that signaled a real change in legal philosophy as to how the sheriff’s office would be managed. O’Donnell had not been a lawman; he was a politician. And those who remember the sheriff’s office in those days insist the real power in the county jail was Deputy Clarence Tylicki. All of this legal sparring, culminating in the settling of Charles Dolezal’s two lawsuits in his favor and the commissioners’ draconian move on the sheriff’s office, adds up to a tacit admission on the part of county officialdom that the mess at the county jail had to be cleaned up and, at the very least, something was seriously amiss with the official version of Frank Dolezal’s death.
Was Dolezal murdered? A preponderance of the existing evidence would suggest that he was—though precisely when, by whom, under what circumstances, and exactly why are difficult to say. At one end of the scale is the Grand Conspiracy Theory explanation: like a mafia don, Martin L. Sweeney put out a contract on Frank Dolezal, and Sheriff Martin L. O’Donnell passed the order down to his deputies, who then carried out their instructions with the ruthless efficiency of mob soldiers. By t
he end of August 1939, the case against Frank Dolezal was in deep trouble. The Grand Jury was scheduled to reconvene in September; Frank Dolezal’s death occurred on August 24. That this alleged suicide should occur so close to his scheduled appearance before that august legal body suggests that someone was in a mighty hurry to resolve the entire affair—through either another confession or some other means—before the Grand Jury reconvened. At the other end of the spectrum stands the Accidental Death Theory: an attempt to extract a more definitive confession from him that would stand up under press and legal scrutiny simply got out of hand. The jailhouse personnel who daily dealt with their prisoner face-to-face were obviously the sheriff’s deputies. Given Thomas Matowitz Sr.’s characterization of them as “hacks and thugs,” it is not difficult to believe one or more of them took matters into their own hands, out of either frustration or sheer meanness. At the inquest, Gerber gave O’Donnell the chance to distance himself from his gang of deputies. After the sheriff asserted that his office “treated him [Dolezal] better than the average prisoner,” Gerber asked, “Do you think it would have been possible, without your knowledge, for any Deputy to have taken advantage or disadvantage of your instructions?” Though he chose not to walk through the door that had just been opened for him, O’Donnell at least kept it ajar. “Do I think it is possible? Well, I can’t say what goes on in there, but I know this, my Deputies do follow orders.”
Though Murder Has No Tongue Page 19