I initially informed Mary Dolezal in 1999 that her grandfather Charles had brought two separate causes of action against the sheriff and his deputies and that both those legal attacks had been settled in her grandfather’s favor. At the time, she was surprised and confused. It seems that the Dolezals had hunkered down and built an impregnable wall of silence around themselves in reaction to the veritable explosion of negative publicity generated by Frank's arrest. No one in the family seemed to know about Charles’s suits; and as far as anyone knew, no money had ever changed hands. It was not until 2007 that one of the older members of the family broke the code of silence in a fit of pique and alleged that money had, indeed, been paid to Charles Dolezal for his suits and that someone on the Vorell side of the family had tricked him out of it by taking advantage of his poor English and even poorer understanding of American legal procedures. The devious Vorell allegedly used the money to invest in real estate. (Mary asserts that her father worked for Frank Vorell as an apprentice in the late 1940s, when the latter built apartments either in Bedford or Bedford Heights.)
At the time of Frank Dolezal’s incarceration and death, his family undoubtedly felt unfairly besieged by events; and there is an obvious, though wholly understandable, touch of paranoia in both tales. Unfortunately, given what little evidence remains, it is extremely difficult to verify or dispute either story. Frank Vorell did, indeed, have a brother Charles, seven years his junior; but the patrolman’s recorded actions and words do not suggest that he was protecting anyone at the expense of his sister’s beleaguered brother-in-law Frank Dolezal. He visited him in the county jail—the only family member to do so—and testified on his behalf at the inquest. In June 1940, acting on his long-held belief that the Butcher was a transient who rode the rails between Cleveland and other nearby industrial cities, Detective Peter Merylo finally got Chief of Police George Matowitz’s permission to go underground as a “bum” in search of evidence that could point to the killer. Believing that Frank Vorell might want to avenge his relative’s death and redeem his shattered reputation, Merylo asked the patrolman to ride the rails with him, a proposition to which Vorell readily agreed. None of his known actions suggest that Vorell was secretly maneuvering to focus potential attention away from his brother Charles at the expense of Frank or anyone else.
The question of whether money had been paid to Charles Dolezal as a result of his lawsuits against the sheriff and his office is more complex. The paperwork in probate court for both suits ends with the statement, “settled and dismissed at defendants’ cost,” but whether that meant that Charles Dolezal actually got the $125,000 for which he was asking is impossible to say. On March 28, 1942, however, the law firm of Minshall & Mosier wrote Pat Lyons—one of the named defendants—asking him to contact their office in order to discuss “the expense [to Lyons] involved in connection with this lawsuit.” Both these evidentiary fragments suggest very strongly that money was somehow involved, though there is no way to verify it or ascertain how much. But the Dolezals remain adamant: Charles never saw a penny; and, though he did not exactly die in abject poverty, he was never financially well off. It remains, however, a huge leap in logic to insist that someone on the Vorell side of the family tricked him out of whatever money he may have been awarded.
Family legends of this sort, however, don’t just grow from nothing; somewhere there is a grain of truth that gave birth to the story in the first place. Records in the Cuyahoga County Recorder’s Office do show that between 1944 and 1950 there were fifteen real estate transactions involving the Vorells, eleven of them with either Frank Vorell or his wife, Lillian. Whatever the facts may be, there is no doubt that bad blood still festers between the two branches of the family descended from Charles and Louise (née Vorell) Dolezal; and whatever the causes, real or imagined, they clearly grew out of the tragic series of events that unfolded seventy years ago.
Today, the area—now known as Slavic Village—that borders the south side of Kingsbury Run and surrounds the Broadway and East 55th neighborhood struggles against the twin urban blights of general decay and crime. St. Alexis Hospital, where Francis Sweeney served his internship, was closed and eventually torn down—in spite of a lot of political noise and posturing; and the buildings that once housed the medical offices he shared with Dr. Edward Peterka and the Raus funeral home (where David Cowles alleges Sweeney practiced some sort of surgery or dissection on the corpses of unidentified indigents) have also been demolished. But if you spend enough time haunting the bars and hanging out on the streets in that old neighborhood, you can still pick up the vague remnants of a local legend that maintains—in some unknown or, perhaps, forgotten way—that the neighborhood had some sort of connection with the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.
In early spring 2004, Mark Stone and I met with then Cuyahoga County coroner Elizabeth Balraj to discuss the Frank Dolezal affair. At that time, she saw no reason to question any of the official conclusions Sam Gerber—her immediate predecessor and mentor—had arrived at in 1939 concerning Dolezal’s death.
Epilogue
THE TRAGIC STORY OF ANNA AND JOSEPH NIGRIN
Did Frank Dolezal murder his sister Anna Nigrin and perhaps even her son (his nephew), Joseph? The charge—or, at least, the suggestion—that he may have done so contributed to the swirl of ugly rumors and poisonous allegations that hung over his head at the time of his arrest. The only source for this damning charge came in a letter from Nettie Taylor of Wheaton, Illinois, a woman who identified herself as Frank Dolezal’s sister-in-law. The document no longer exists, but it remains one of the more perplexing enigmas in the entire Dolezal affair. The first public reference to this mysterious piece of correspondence appeared on July 10, 1939, in a front-page article of the Press. Though there is no way to be certain, the letter had apparently been sent directly to Martin O’Donnell, for the sheriff showed the document in question to assembled reporters—presumably that day. We will never know for certain everything that letter contained; the Press account provides only the briefest summary of its contents: Frank Dolezal’s sister, Anna Nigrin [wife of Gottlieb Nigrin], had been found dead—presumably murdered—on a Geauga County farm near Chardon in July 1931. Further, her twenty-two-year-old son, Joseph Allan Nigrin, had come to Cleveland in April 1938 to stay with his Uncle Frank while he cleared up his mother’s affairs. Reportedly, Joseph was never seen again. O’Donnell verified some of the letter’s basic allegations through Adam Crumpton, a printer and friend of Dolezal’s, who resided on Wade Park Avenue. The Press quoted Crumpton on July 10 as having said, “One day [the exact time frame is not clarified] Dolezal came to me crying and said his sister had been found dead. He said her head had been cut off and he thought she had been murdered. He said he thought a farmhand did it.” Whether the detail concerning decapitation actually appeared in the original Taylor letter or was added by Crumpton is not at all clear, but the damage was done. Once the trigger is pulled, the bullet cannot be recalled. Pat Lyons repeats the allegation in his notes that Anna Nigrin had, indeed, been murdered and decapitated: “Affidavid [sic] by person states Frank told him Frank’s sister was murdered[:] had her head cut off. Mrs. Anna Nigrin in Geauga County near Chardon, July 1931.” Now, almost seventy years after the fact, it is difficult to gauge exactly how much impact the Taylor letter may have had on public perceptions of Dolezal’s guilt in the torso killings. The sheriff, however, obviously regarded it as a major link in the chain of evidence he was forging against his prisoner, and the allegation of decapitation would obviously have been seen as conspicuously damning under the circumstances.
But were any of these very serious charges true? Exactly who was Nettie Taylor? She identified herself as Frank Dolezal’s sister-in-law, but the only set of circumstances that would explain such a relationship would be to assume she was one of Gottlieb Nigrin’s (Frank Dolezal’s brother-in-law) siblings. There is no doubt, however, that Anna Nigrin existed. She and her husband, Gottlieb, first appear in the 1919–20 Cleveland c
ity directory at an East 79th address, and the census records for 1920 confirm this. Further, the 1930 Geauga County census places the family on a Geauga County farm in Huntsville Township. Husband and wife immigrated to the United States in 1903 or 1904 from Czechoslovakia. There is, however, no record in Cuyahoga County of any woman with the last name “Dolezal” being married to a man with a name even remotely close to Gottlieb Nigrin. (Public records, of course, are certainly not infallible; the 1920 census mistakenly enumerates him as “Kottlieb Negrin” and identifies his wife as “Annie.”) The marriage obviously must have taken place out of state, possibly even in Europe. Their son, Joseph Allan, however, was born in Ohio in 1917.
When I first raised the entire Anna Nigrin story with Mary Dolezal in 1999, she met my enquiries with raised eyebrows, an uncomprehending stare, and a defiantly uttered “Who??” No one in her immediate family, not even her father, had ever heard of Anna Dolezal Nigrin. So far as they knew, of the ten Dolezal children, only Charles (Mary’s grandfather) and Frank had come to the United States. When they learned the details of the Anna Nigrin story, Mary’s entire family regarded it as a hoax, a vicious piece of slander concocted to further incriminate an innocent man. In late 2004, however, I conclusively verified the existence of the Nigrins through the 1930 census, so I raised the issue with Mary a second time. By then her father had died, and the only living relative she could approach who might know was her father’s older brother, Al—a man from whom she was virtually estranged, since he had not taken kindly to his rebel niece digging around in the family’s not-so-secret shame. The first line of Mary’s subsequent e-mail to me virtually screamed from the computer screen: “Why didn’t I know about these people?!” Uncle Al had, indeed, confirmed the existence of Anna Nigrin, but his explanation for her death proved far different from the allegations made in the Nettie Taylor letter and repeated in the Press. Supposedly, her son, Joseph—then fourteen—had simply discovered her dead body in the driveway of the family farm. There is no mention of murder or decapitation. Joseph, however, had apparently learned how to drive a car in 1925, at the age of eight, and those very few Dolezal family members who even knew the Nigrin story suspected he had accidentally run over his mother in July 1931. (Why Al had kept this rather lurid and compelling piece of family lore to himself all these years is almost impossible to explain, beyond the fact that it is yet another conspicuous example of the total, almost pathological, lack of communication that seems characteristic of Dolezal family relationships. Charles and Frank had minimal contact with each other after the former’s 1920 marriage, and at the time of his arrest, Frank insisted to authorities that he had no siblings.) As it turns out, Al Dolezal’s recounting of buried family legend is remarkably close to what actually happened. Fourteen-year-old Joseph Nigrin did kill his mother, Anna, when he ran over her with a car on July 3, 1931. (Reportedly, he did not see her.) Geauga County coroner Philip Pease attributed her death to a combination of internal injuries and a fractured skull caused by the accident; there was no murder and obviously no decapitation. Unlike the Press, the Plain Dealer got the details of the actual story straight on July 11, but the paper buried the revelation on the back pages, at the tail end of a very long story. The truth, if anyone even noticed it, seems to have had little or no impact on the much more lurid myth of mysterious death that had been born the day before.
On July 10, 1939, the Press reported that the sheriff’s office in Chardon could not find any record for the death of Anna Nigrin in Geauga County. Very loud alarm bells should have sounded at that point for everyone involved. While it remains possible to accept that a death by natural causes might slip through the bureaucratic cracks of a rural area, it is simply inconceivable that a supposed murder, especially one that involved a decapitation, could pass by without some sort of official record. Certainly, no community of reasonable size and civic organization in mid-twentieth-century America could commit such a large bureaucratic blunder. If there was no death record, there had to be a reason; and the inability of the sheriff’s men in Chardon to track down that reason casts very grave doubts on either their investigative abilities or their willingness to investigate in the first place. It would also seem that the Cuyahoga County sheriff’s office was not all that interested in decisively nailing down all the details alleged in the Taylor letter; O’Donnell seems to have accepted with a mere shrug of his shoulders that his Geauga County counterparts could not find a death certificate. Anna Nigrin’s husband, Gottlieb, however, died in 1930 of diabetes; and there is record of his death in Geauga County. Obviously, a widow with a young son—then twelve or thirteen—would find it extremely difficult to manage a farm by herself; so, shortly after Gottlieb’s death, Anna married her second husband, Charles Zak. (There is a record of the Nigrin-Zak marriage in Cuyahoga County.) The record of her accidental death is, therefore, to be found under “Zak,” not “Nigrin.” When the sheriff’s men did not find a death certificate under Nigrin, they obviously looked no further.
The only part of the Nettie Taylor letter that Al Dolezal came close to confirming was the unknown fate of Anna’s son, Joseph Allan Nigrin. Uncle Al had no idea what happened to him. Taylor alleges that Joseph came to Cleveland from Chicago in April 1938, planning to stay with his uncle Frank while he cleaned up his mother’s affairs and that he had never been seen again. At least part of her account makes sense, even if it cannot be conclusively verified. Joseph would have been fourteen at the time of his mother’s death and, therefore, incapable of clearing up anything connected to the family estate legally. That he would come to Cleveland from Chicago in 1938 at the age of twenty-two to do so is also clearly plausible. It is not much of a reach to assume that Joseph may have joined his father’s relatives in Illinois, from where Nettie Taylor had mailed her letter, after the death of his mother. In 1938, he would have been at least twenty-one and thus in a position to act legally in regard to his parents’ estate. But he did not, as Nettie Taylor alleges—and as Al Dolezal seems to confirm—vanish without a trace after April 1938. There was no mysterious disappearance that could be laid at his Uncle Frank’s feet. The unspoken but clearly inferred allegation that Frank Dolezal had probably murdered his nephew is simply untrue. Joseph returned to Geauga County, though it is virtually impossible to ascertain when, and married Mildred Souvey. (If Joseph did have relatives living in Illinois, he seems to have severed his connections with them completely at this point for reasons unknown.) Joseph and Mildred Nigrin had two children: Gertrude Ann (dubbed Sue by relatives and friends, since her father called her Susie-Q), born in 1939, and Joseph Allan II, born in 1942. Sadly, Joseph Nigrin died of cancer in 1945, at the age of twenty-eight.
In the summer of 2004, I spoke to the absolutely flabbergasted Sue Nigrin Marks on the phone. Since she was only six when her father, Joseph, died, she remembered little about him; she knew virtually nothing of her grandparents Gottlieb and Anna Nigrin, beyond their names. She still harbored some extremely vague memories of the name “Dolezal” floating about in family lore, but the history of Frank (her great uncle) and his connection to the Kingsbury Run murders came as an utterly shocking surprise. I subsequently set up a phone meeting between Mary Dolezal and Sue Marks, and the two have eagerly—and with a certain sense of awe—traded family photos, names, and stories. In the 1930s, a series of tragedies had quite literally blasted their family tree apart. Now, almost three quarters of a century later, two women—neither of whom had known previously the other existed—gathered up the shattered branches.
No doubt, Nettie Taylor believed everything she wrote to the sheriff (What conceivable reasons could she have had for lying?), and O’Donnell, aided by the press, clearly used the contents of that letter to strengthen his case against Frank Dolezal. Nothing was ever stated publicly or directly, and no charges were ever leveled, but the inference was clear: Dolezal must be guilty of the torso killings, for he had allegedly murdered members of his own family in the same viciously gruesome manner. But the truth about
the deaths of both Anna Nigrin and her son, Joseph, proved far more poignant than the surviving lurid myth of murder. A fourteen-year-old boy had accidentally hit his mother with an automobile, and he had to carry with him the impossibly heavy burden that he was responsible for her death until his own passing a mere fourteen years later.
Afterword
GAYLORD SUNDHEIM
CATHLEEN A. CERNY, M.D.
By now you are aware that Eliot Ness had a secret suspect in the torso killings investigation, a man by the name of Gaylord Sundheim. In his first book on the topic, In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland’s Torso Murders, James Badal outlined how he concluded that Gaylord Sundheim and Francis E. Sweeney were one and the same. After establishing Sundheim was really Sweeney, the next question naturally is, “Was Francis Sweeney the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run?” It is a fascinating proposition, but not a question a forensic psychiatrist like me can answer. “Did Francis Sweeney suffer from a mental illness?” Yet another question I am unable to answer. “So why keep reading?” you are asking yourselves. “What does this psychiatrist have to offer?” I can explain a bit about forensic psychiatry and the usual roles of forensic psychiatrists in criminal contexts. I also hope to give some insights into the possible mental illness of Eliot Ness’s secret suspect and whether his known history contains any indicators of violence risk.
Though Murder Has No Tongue Page 23