The case against Frank Dolezal had been unraveling in fits and starts almost from the day he was arrested, July 5. By the end of the month, almost all of the allegations concerning his guilt in the Kingsbury Run murders had evaporated, leaving behind a single charge of manslaughter in the death of Flo Polillo. As Merylo watched from the sidelines, he probably reasoned the entire case would collapse completely when presented to the Grand Jury in September and Dolezal would be released, an assumption probably shared by Eliot Ness. There was, therefore, no need to publicly intervene on his behalf; the slow grinding of justice’s wheels would ultimately solve the whole problem. It must have come as a very nasty surprise to both men when, on August 24, Dolezal turned up dead. Peter Merylo’s daughter Winifred Buebe remembers that Dolezal’s unexpected death left her father deeply disheartened. As one who believed in the system of American law enforcement and had worked in that field most of his professional life, he found it hard to understand and impossible to accept that such a glaring miscarriage of justice could be allowed to happen.
Eliot Ness did not attend the inquest Gerber convened on August 26. It’s questionable he even had the legal right to do so, but it is probably safe to assume someone there reported back to him. In January 1942, Francis Sweeney was discharged from the Sandusky Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home; and at the end of April Ness resigned his position as safety director and left Cleveland for Washington, D.C. Whether he was still having his operatives track the doctor’s movements during this brief period is impossible to say now; but there can be little doubt that any lingering interest in keeping Sweeney under surveillance would have faded rapidly after Ness’s departure.
“Ya know what you get when you cross a scientist with a prostitute?” grumbled a burly ex-cop in spring 2004. “A fuckin’ know-it-all! And that was Sam Gerber. Everyone hated the guy.” Samuel R. Gerber was a Cleveland institution and celebrity, indeed, a veritable monument. He served as Cuyahoga County coroner for fifty years. Until his 1986 retirement, the man and the office were inseparable in the minds of most county residents. And he did have his detractors and enemies. He could be haughty, combative, arrogant, and protective of his turf—as his high-handed behavior during the Sheppard murder case of 1954 clearly demonstrated. But he was also a highly respected author and lecturer on forensic matters. He had, and continues to have, a legion of loyal supporters and admirers, some still employed at the coroner’s office.
Accurately assessing Gerber’s behavior and determining the exact nature of the role he played in the Dolezal affair and Ness’s suspicions about Francis Sweeney are at once difficult and illuminating. In 1936, when Gerber was elected coroner of Cuyahoga County, the official body count in the torso murders stood at six—seven if the Lady of the Lake is included. His predecessor, Arthur J. Pearce, had handled those first victims and had been the guiding force behind the groundbreaking torso clinic. No doubt Pearce’s shadow loomed oppressively over the new coroner as he assumed his responsibilities, and Gerber was quick to put his own stamp on the forensic side of the investigation largely through statements to the press. At the time of Dolezal’s death, he was a few months shy of his third year into his tenure. When he arrived at the jail on August 24, he probably made a snap judgment about the cause of death, based on a cursory glance at the scene and what he heard from the sheriff and his deputies: a dead body with a wound on the neck, the remnants of a noose hanging from the hook in the cell, and assurances from everyone present that Dolezal had been found hanging. It all added up to a suicide.
If Gerber experienced any sort of epiphany, any moment of startling clarity as to exactly what had happened to Frank Dolezal, it undoubtedly occurred during the autopsy in the early morning hours of August 25. When the chest was opened and he saw those broken, partly healed ribs on both sides of the rib cage, he very likely realized that Dolezal had, indeed, been severely beaten, that those press rumors about mistreatment were true, in spite of the sheriff’s office’s official claims to the contrary. Gerber would then have found himself in an extraordinarily difficult, perhaps even dangerous, position. He had already unofficially declared the death a suicide. To equivocate now, to raise the mere possibility that there may have been more to the death than initially met the eye, would be to publicly cast doubts on his own professional judgment (not something he would do lightly) and to incur the wrath of the sheriff—one of the most politically powerful men in the county. Now wrestling with some very real doubts about Dolezal’s death, he would have to convene and officially preside over an inquest the next day (August 26) under the exceedingly stern and watchful eye of Sheriff Martin L. O’Donnell.
“He [Gerber] didn’t really point out any discrepancies at all, which is interesting,” reflected Dennis Dirkmaat after studying the inquest transcript. “Maybe, it’s just . . . you can attribute that to not being totally prepared or a more cynical thing that’s going on—that he’s trying not to get too much out in the open.” Time and again, discrepancies arise in the testimony; and, as Dirkmaat correctly observed, Gerber simply allows them to bloom (or fester) without comment. But was Gerber deliberately trying to conceal information, or was he doing his best to ensure that some of the more significant contradictions in the testimony at least made it to the official record? Assuming he harbored any nagging doubts about Frank Dolezal’s death, the coroner was truly picking his way across a minefield during the entire inquest. The sheriff and the deputies who had been on the scene had already “told” him what had happened; he had been given the “correct” version of events when he arrived at the jail; he had already made a determination that the death was a suicide—all he had to do at the inquest was allow the entire story to be officially confirmed. The most significant moments in the proceedings, of course, occur at the end of the second day’s testimony, when Gerber officially adjourned, only to reconvene forty-five minutes later for the sole purpose of getting the extraordinarily damning testimony of the Jones sisters into the official record. The adjournment was obviously a ploy to get O’Donnell, as well as any of his deputies who may also have been present, out of the room so the testimony could be taken without the sheriff’s knowledge and free from any worries or questions about intimidation. If Gerber’s conduct during the entire inquest is judged in the light of this very obvious maneuver to ensure at least some secrecy, then it becomes clear that all through the proceedings he was doing his best to make sure the discrepancies in the testimony were at least on the official record, even if he never tried to have them resolved. Mindful that O’Donnell was looking on, Gerber pushed matters as far as he dared. He worked fairly diligently to establish through sworn testimony that Frank Dolezal had no prior injuries and that the damage to his ribs and the bruising on his face had to have occurred while he was in the sheriff’s custody. Similarly, he unsuccessfully tried to badger an exceedingly reluctant Dr. L. J. Sternicki into making some kind of statement as to Dolezal’s mental condition.
Finally, there is the matter of that elegantly bound volume of the inquest testimony, as well as those huge photographs documenting Frank Dolezal’s corpse in the county jail and on the autopsy table. Today, personnel at the morgue—including those who worked under Gerber—confirm that it was not standard procedure in the 1930s to take pictures of such monstrous size, nor was it common practice to lavish such elaborate care on the preservation of inquest testimony. Gerber only gave such extra attention to high-profile cases that he regarded as special. As Mark and I worked our way through the box of material in the morgue relating to Dolezal’s death, we both experienced the somewhat eerie feeling that we were walking a path that had already been laid out for us. On August 24, 1939, Coroner Sam Gerber made a snap judgment about the cause of Dolezal’s death, based on what he saw in the county jail and was told by the sheriff and his deputies. One day later, Dolezal’s chest was opened during the formal autopsy; Geber could see the broken ribs—perhaps realizing for the first time that the charges of abuse that had been persistently made in the press
were true and that his initial suicide verdict, made on the scene, may not have been accurate. But the damage had been done. Mindful that he could not retract that informal pronouncement of suicide without calling into question his own professional judgment and, at the same time, publicly challenging the sheriff and his office, he bowed to political realities and dutifully wrote a formal verdict that would conform to the “official” version of events. But he left enough signposts behind to ensure that someone, sometime, could follow and set the record straight.
Assessing what Gerber may have known or suspected about Francis Edward Sweeney’s potential guilt in the torso murders is equally problematic. Cleveland News reporter Howard Beaufait and his wife, Doris, knew Gerber well and socialized with him frequently. In recent years, Doris O’Donnell Beaufait—herself, a crack reporter on the local scene—has remained somewhat dubious about the notion that Sweeney may have been the Butcher. “If Sam Gerber had known anything, he would have told Howard,” she insists. Yet there is no doubt that the coroner knew who the derelict physician was and was fully aware of his status as a prime suspect. When the Cleveland News announced on April 9, 1938, that police had their sights on “a once-prominent Clevelander, described as a physician in disrepute with his profession” who “is middle-aged, has some surgical skill and is described as being a powerfully built, chronic alcoholic,” Gerber verified the story and declared, “We are watching him, as well as two or three others.” In 1984, when former Plain Dealer columnist George Condon was preparing a retrospective piece on the murders for Cleveland Magazine, he reminded the coroner that he had once described the killer as a “broken-down doctor who becomes frenzied with drugs or liquor.” Though Gerber indignantly denied he had ever said such a thing, it is interesting to note that this brief portrait Condon alleges he painted matches Frank Sweeney perfectly. Exactly why Gerber would have maintained his silence about Sweeney for the rest of his life is difficult to say. The coroner was not part of Ness’s inner circle of associates and confidants. Royal Grossman and David Cowles may have kept quiet for years about the identity of Ness’s prime suspect out of loyalty to the former safety director, but such considerations would not have restrained Gerber. Could his silence be attributed to loyalty to the Democratic Party in general or to Martin L. Sweeney in particular? There is simply no way to know. And, of course, it must be remembered that there was no hard evidence against Francis Sweeney: only an elaborate web of circumstances and coincidences, an inadmissible-in-court lie detector test, and the suspicions of Eliot Ness. As a public official, Gerber may have refrained from casually dropping any unguarded comments about a suspect in Cleveland’s most notorious string of killings simply out of his sense of professional ethics.
Accurately assessing the conduct of both Congressman Martin L. Sweeney and Sheriff Martin L. O’Donnell during the period of the Frank Dolezal affair, from arrest to inquest, remains an extraordinarily difficult proposition. If city papers accurately reflect the congressman’s behavior while these events were unfolding, Sweeney remained uncharacteristically silent. Considering that he rarely passed up an opportunity to make political hay on the local scene, and realizing that Sheriff O’Donnell was both political ally and friend, the congressman’s silence seems absolutely deafening and utterly perplexing—especially when the case against Dolezal began to publicly unravel and the sheriff came under increased fire from the local press, the courts, and the ACLU. Why would Sweeney allow a close political ally to twist slowly in the wind without coming to his defense? If one is willing to give any credence to the notion that Sweeney may have come to some sort of gentleman’s agreement with city administration (protection of his cousin Francis’s identity in exchange for his good conduct on the local political stage), then his silence becomes understandable and reasonable. He was simply sticking by his word and keeping his nose clean.
Sheriff O’Donnell obviously had a huge personal, professional, and political stake in Frank Dolezal’s guilt, so it is hardly surprising that he would fight hard to establish it and strike back with a vengeance at those who would tear down his case. Once he committed himself and publicly bought into that notion of Dolezal’s guilt, he would have found it increasingly difficult and embarrassing—perhaps, totally impossible—to back off when circumstances turned against him. Though the conspiratorially inclined would love to believe that the sheriff was deeply involved in every aspect of Dolezal’s death, from planning to execution, it is just as likely that some of his more aggressive deputies did the deed without his knowledge or consent, thus putting him in the undeniably difficult position of having to clean up a terrible mess left by others.
Francis Sweeney’s future wife, Mary Josephine Sokol, moved to Cleveland with her family sometime just prior to 1920 and settled in the large working-class Hungarian neighborhood on the city’s east side. She trained and worked as a nurse at St. Vincent’s Charity Hospital, an institution in the midst of several significant Kingsbury Run sites: the area in which Frank Dolezal lived, where the initial set of Flo Polillo’s remains were discovered, near the bar on the corner of East 20th and Central Avenue where the few officially identified players in the Kingsbury Run drama often drank. When her firstborn son, Francis Edward Sweeney Jr., of the U.S. Marine Corps, was killed in an automobile accident at a Cleveland railroad crossing in 1947, she was living in New York State. At the time, her younger son, James, was still residing in Cleveland, most likely with his mother’s relatives, while he finished high school. In 1949, Mary apparently moved as far away from Cleveland as she could possibly get; in that year St. Vincent’s transferred all her educational and professional records to the State Medical Board in California. Did James follow his mother to the West Coast upon graduation from high school, the same year? A likely scenario, perhaps, but there is no way to know. At the time, Francis Sweeney would have still been a resident at the Ohio Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home. Did his ex-wife and surviving son know anything about his possible involvement in Cleveland’s most gruesome series of murders? Probably, but, again, it is impossible to know. There is a single photograph of Mary Josephine Sokol’s 1926 graduating class in nursing in the archives of St. Vincent’s Charity Hospital. No one in the formal picture is identified, however; so there is no accurate way of picking her out from the sea of fresh, serious, eager faces.
On September 21, 1939, almost exactly one month after the death of Frank Dolezal, Francis Sweeney’s sole surviving brother, Martin Joseph Jr., died of internal injuries sustained when he fell from the roof of a house at 2674 East 53rd. The house was not his, nor did he even live there as a renter. (The death certificate states he was living with his sister Mary on East 65th.) The house belonged to Angelo and Mary DeCaro—wine dealers, according to the city directory. Just what Martin Joseph was doing on the roof of a house in which he did not live is anyone’s guess. That the owners had something to do with wine sales could explain why he was there in the first place. Francis wrestled unsuccessfully with the demons of alcohol; perhaps Martin Joseph fought similar battles. In fact, one of my research partners initially attributed his deadly plunge to the “Irish disease.”
Was his death an accident or something more sinister? He could easily have been doing something completely innocent, such as repairing the roof. He was, after all, a common laborer and seems to have spent most of the 1930s without steady employment. Odd jobs would be one way to survive. A photograph of the house at the Cuyahoga County archives shows the pitch of the roof to be uncommonly steep, so it is easy to believe he simply lost his footing. But that his deadly fall so closely followed the death of Frank Dolezal does, at the very least, raise an eyebrow. Conspiracy aficionados would love to allege that Martin Joseph knew or suspected something, either about his younger brother Francis’s involvement in Kingsbury Run or perhaps even Frank Dolezal’s death and had decided to cash in on his suspicions through blackmail. But he underestimated the brutality and determined efficiency of his potential targets. Rather than buying his silence, som
eone with an agenda simply decided to end the whole matter by arranging an “accident.” An engaging and attractive conspiracy, indeed, and one whose timing would dovetail precisely with the broader theory of Eliot Ness’s secret suspect! But there is not a shred of hard evidence to support it. Having identified Francis Sweeney as a viable suspect, Ness would have thoroughly investigated his background. He would, therefore, have been familiar with Francis’s siblings—their names, employment circumstances, family situations, and so forth. Ness would certainly have known who Martin Joseph Sweeney Jr. was. There is, however, no surviving evidence to suggest that the safety director saw anything suspicious in the death of Frank Sweeney’s brother. However, there is nothing that proves he didn’t. We just don’t know. All one can say with certainty is that Martin Joseph’s demise, coming so soon after the death of Frank Dolezal, is a bizarre, perhaps, even a convenient, coincidence.
When I first met Mary Dolezal in 1999, I was aware of the significant pieces of the family genealogy: Frank Dolezal’s brother Charles had married Louise Vorell, and Louise’s brother Frank Vorell was a Cleveland cop and one of the few people to visit Frank in jail. I was, however, not prepared for the almost virulent animosity the Dolezals harbored toward the Vorells, especially as there had apparently been no personal contact between the two branches of the family for years. As far as Mary knew then, the palpable hatred directed at the Vorells stemmed from an obscure Dolezal family legend that the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run was actually Frank Vorell’s brother Charles. (It remains a little confusing to be dealing with two sets of brothers, both named Frank and Charles.) Those in the Dolezal clan who remembered Charles Vorell described him as a brutal, violent man who on two separate occasions had ordered Mary’s father and his siblings to wash blood off the backseat of his car. According to family lore, Frank Vorell had allowed his brother-in-law Frank Dolezal to be arrested and murdered to shield his brother Charles Vorell from prosecution. The errant Vorell was packed off to the merchant marine during World War II, during which he was accidentally, and conveniently, washed overboard.
Though Murder Has No Tongue Page 22