Though Murder Has No Tongue (11 page)

T
HURSDAY
, J
ULY
13

The test results were in! Ecker had submitted his findings relevant to the stains and other material found in the bathroom of Dolezal's former apartment at 1908 Central to O'Donnell but adamantly refused to make them public. “That is up to the sheriff,” he told the
Press.
But O'Donnell was silent. “O'Donnell Keeps Torso Test Secret,” shouted the headline of the paper's page one story. “Sheriff Martin L. O'Donnell today was keeping secret the results of chemical tests on stains found in the alleged ‘murder den' of Frank Dolezal, accused torso killer.” In spite of silence the evening before, attorney Fred Soukup leaked some of the details of Sternicki's examination of Dolezal to the press: injuries to the ribs, a black eye, and a number of bruises to the body. “There is no doubt in my mind the man has been pushed around,” he declared unequivocally.

The moment Frank Dolezal was arrested on July 5, Sheriff O'Donnell had gone on the offensive, courting and teasing the press with the details of his office's ongoing interrogation of their prisoner and its efforts to build a solid case, but events had turned against him. Increasingly, the sheriff found himself and his office retreating and taking up defensive positions. The ACLU committee that had tried unsuccessfully to see O'Donnell on Tuesday afternoon issued a statement claiming in no uncertain terms that he had clearly violated the law when he initially refused Fred Soukup permission to see his client, thus—
according to committee member Edgar S. Byers—opening himself up to a possible fine of between twenty-five and one hundred dollars, thirty days in jail, or both. Further, Byers asserted, the arraignment before Judge Penty on July 11 had not only been meaningless but downright illegal as well, since Dolezal had not had an attorney present and Penty had failed to inform him of his right to have one. (In a grim stroke of irony, at the very moment Dolezal was being arraigned Soukup was actually waiting for the sheriff to grant permission to see him.) Like many a politician under fire, Sheriff O'Donnell responded to the legal onslaught by adopting a code of silence and charging the media with mounting a viciously biased campaign against him. “I am convinced that the newspapers intend to misconstrue everything I say,” he angrily declared to the
Press.
“I will have nothing more to say on the case until the Grand Jury takes action [on July 24].” He further declared that he would present the case himself, with no help from the Cleveland Police Department or the prosecutor's office.

The case against Frank Dolezal was in deep trouble; at the very least it was falling apart at the seams. Virtually the only remaining reasonably solid planks upon which the sheriff could conceivably build his case were the suspect's three confessions—of which two had been discredited and the third retracted—and the still undisclosed test results submitted by Ecker. And that plank would collapse the next day.

F
RIDAY
, J
ULY
14

“Scientist's Test Fogs Torso Case,” proclaimed the
Plain Dealer
that morning. “W.R.U. Pathologist Reports Stains Are Not Blood.” “Chemists Disagree on Torso ‘Blood' Stains,” shouted the
Press
later in the afternoon. Ecker dismissed as nothing more than “plain dirt” the stains that chemist G. V. Lyons had pronounced human blood at the time of Frank Dolezal's arrest on July 5. Oddly, Lyons chose not to respond publicly to this curt rebuttal of his professional opinion. He may have been waiting for a more serious forum than the city press for a scientific exchange with Ecker—something like a formal trial; but his silence at this juncture further damaged the sheriff's already faltering case. In recent years, questions have been raised over whether Ecker and Lyons may have collected their samples from different places, but the question is moot. Given the age of the building and the nature of its occupants, it does not strain credulity to assume there could have been some blood present, though it would be impossible to determine whose. Moreover, the whole blood debate again raises the issue of exactly how many of the victims, if any,
Frank Dolezal actually dispatched and dismembered. According to his trio of confessions, he had killed Flo Polillo before he disarticulated her corpse. If she were already dead, the blood flow would have been minimal. But some of the victims—Edward Andrassy, for example—were still alive when the killer removed their heads; in fact, the coroner determined that the cause of death in some cases actually was decapitation. If the heart were still beating when the Butcher's knife sliced through the neck, there would have been a veritable geyser of spurting blood. Traces of it would be everywhere, no matter how diligently Dolezal tried to clean up the mess: on the walls, in the grouting of the floor, in the cracks of the tub surface, and around the drain.

The
Press
now turned against the sheriff and openly criticized his behavior, branding him “Lone Hand O'Donnell” and questioning his conduct during the entire Dolezal affair. “The conduct of Sheriff Martin L. O'Donnell in the torso case grows more amazing day by day,” the paper declared. “Is the sheriff interested in furthering the ends of justice or is he interested in making a grandstand play for personal glory and acclaim? . . . His conduct of the case arouses the suspicion that however sincere he and his deputies were in making the arrest, the desire to put one over on the Cleveland police has played a strong part in his subsequent behavior.” To add to the sheriff's growing list of woes, later in the day, attorney Fred Soukup and former judge David Hertz—now officially a member of the Frank Dolezal defense team—went before Common Pleas judge Frank S. Day asking him to void the July 11 arraignment, since Dolezal had not been represented by an attorney. If Day granted their writ, O'Donnell would have to appear in court as a defendant—certainly a new role for the sheriff of Cuyahoga County.

S
ATURDAY
, J
ULY
15

And so it was. “To deny this man the right to counsel is to abrogate all civil liberties and the bill of rights which is the law in every state of this union,” Day thundered, with all the weight of his high office behind him. According to the
Plain Dealer,
the judge decreed that his colleague Myron Penty had seriously erred in presiding over an arraignment in which the accused stood before the law without legal counsel. Then, turning his outrage on the sheriff, Day declared O'Donnell had “adopted a procedure [of ] which this court does not approve.” As a county official, O'Donnell stood before Day represented by Acting County Prosecutor John J. Mahon. Apparently, the sheriff endured this dressing-down in grim-faced, stony silence and left the courthouse without making any comments to the press. Penty accepted his colleague's censure and
scheduled a second arraignment for Frank Dolezal at 9:30 on the following Friday, July 21. David Hertz exploded: “A hearing as late as next Friday would make a laughing stock of this procedure.” After a rancorous legal skirmish—during which Penty unsuccessfully asked to be removed from the case—the re-arraignment was moved up to Monday morning, July 17.

M
ONDAY
, J
ULY
17

Detective Harry S. Brown, one of the more important witnesses and apparently the only member of the sheriff's team called to testify, was nowhere to be found. Reportedly, he was fishing near Sandusky. There is no proof that anything conspiratorial should be read into his failure to appear, but it remains ironic that Brown's absence necessitated rescheduling the arraignment to Wednesday—two days earlier than the original date Penty had specified, but also two days later than the date David Hertz had forced on him in Judge Day's court.

W
EDNESDAY
, J
ULY
19

Detective Brown was still numbered among the missing, but Frank Dolezal's second arraignment proceeded without him. By all accounts, events moved smoothly in Judge Penty's court. The parade of witnesses, including Coroner Gerber and members of the police department, passed in review without incident. As he had done in the past, Gerber cast some doubt on Dolezal's guilt in the murder of Flo Polillo by testifying that only an individual who commanded extensive knowledge of human anatomy could have performed such a skillful dismemberment. For David Hertz—now dubbed “chief of defense counsel” by the
Plain Dealer
—it was a day of both frustration and satisfaction. On the one hand, that no one from Sheriff O'Donnell's office offered testimony prevented him from probing such contentious issues as his client's multiple confessions and the allegation that he had been beaten; but, on the other hand, Penty dropped the first degree murder charge down to manslaughter, insisting, according to the
Plain Dealer,
that “the testimony failed to show Mrs. Polillo's slaying was purposeful or premeditated.” Frank Dolezal was duly bound over to the Grand Jury, and bond was set at fifteen thousand dollars, an astronomical sum by the financial standards of the late 1930s. Hertz later tried to get the amount lowered to five thousand dollars, so he could take his client to a psychiatrist, but Common Pleas judge Hurd blocked the move, declaring, “A bond of fifteen thousand dollars for a man
accused of cutting up a woman is low.” Hertz had obviously undergone a major personal odyssey of conscience in the week since he stood outside the county jail. On that Tuesday evening, he had described himself simply as a representative of the ACLU, concerned only with the question of Frank Dolezal's rights under the law; now he was actively participating in his defense with attorney Fred Soukup before Judge Penty.

The prosecutor's office was faced with what appeared to be an almost insurmountable obstacle—at best, Herculean, at worst, absolutely impossible. The Grand Jury would reconvene on Monday, July 24 for a week; and Acting Prosecutor John J. Mahon was reluctant to take the remaining shreds and tatters of the Dolezal affair before that legal body without some sort of review. He, therefore, announced to the press he would personally be going over the police records of the torso killings in—what the
Plain Dealer
described as—a search “for clews not generally known by persons outside the police department which would tend to give credence to Dolezal's reported confession.” It was the sort of reassuring but ultimately meaningless pronouncement public officials often make when they find themselves caught in a bind. The hunt for the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run ranked as the most massive and intense police investigation in Cleveland history; the combined departmental records coupled with the papers from the coroner's office would total literally thousands upon thousands of pages. (Peter Merylo's surviving reports alone add up to a stack of paper over a foot high.) The notion that anyone in the prosecutor's office not already deeply immersed in the details of the case could sift through this veritable Everest of documentation in time for a presentation before the Grand Jury five days later is ludicrous. It would take legions of clerks and other legal personnel months to process all the existing information, and Mahon finally conceded that his office would have to wait until the Grand Jury reconvened in September to outline its case and seek an indictment.

Mahon clearly knew he was in trouble. “It was about this time that I was called into the county prosecutor's office and asked what I knew about Frank Dolezal,” Merylo writes in the memoirs he coauthored with
Cleveland News
reporter Frank Otwell. “I told the prosecutor [apparently John Mahon, although Merylo does not specifically name him at this point], and I suspect he knew it already, that I had Frank Dolezal in on two occasions and that if I had thought there was enough to make a case on him, I would not have turned him loose.” When Mahon cautioned the detective that he would probably be called to testify before the Grand Jury, Merylo fired back, “I can't tell the grand jury much more than I have already told you about the suspect.” Then he stormed out of the office thundering indignantly that when he arrested anyone, he didn't need to subpoena the sheriff to help him make the case.

In the two weeks following his arrest, Frank Dolezal was the city's biggest story. All three Cleveland dailies followed and reported on every new development in the emerging case against him; Sheriff O'Donnell and his deputies initially became instant celebrities courted, quoted, and photographed by a press establishment eager for details. Everything about Dolezal became grist for the voracious newspaper mill. Reporters dug into his background, explored his work history, ransacked his personal life, and canvassed his acquaintances in an ongoing campaign to keep the story of him and his alleged connections to the Kingsbury Run murder-dismemberments on the front pages of city papers. They mulled over his apparent jovial sociability when he was sober and leered at his rages and crying jags when the demons of alcohol possessed him; they examined his reported craving for knives and traced in detail all the lurid tales of his odd behavior willingly supplied by his neighbors. Newspapers ran photographs of the dilapidated East 20th–Central Avenue neighborhood to show the suspicious proximity of some of the relevant sites in the Kingsbury Run murder cycle: Frank Dolezal's old apartment on Central, the bar at the corner of East 20th and Central where he and Flo Polillo both drank, the spot behind Hart Manufacturing where the initial set of her remains had been found so neatly and tidily packed into those half-bushel produce baskets. And, of course, city dailies ran photos of Frank Dolezal himself, making his blank, unfocused gaze instantly recognizable.