Though Murder Has No Tongue (14 page)

With Gerber's official determination that he had committed suicide, Frank Dolezal dropped from the pages of city dailies and faded from Cleveland's collective memory. His key role in Kingsbury Run lore and legend, however, had been firmly established. His family buried him quietly in an unmarked grave, but he did not rest easily. Uncertainty about his alleged guilt continued to fester. On the one hand, it was pointed out that the torso killings stopped after his death; but on the other, it was argued that they had already stopped in August 1938—almost a full year before his arrest. Shortly after his death, suspicion arose that his “suicide” was not as cut and dried as Coroner Gerber's official judgment suggested, that there were still nagging, uncomfortable questions. In time those questions would coalesce and grow
into a dark urban legend that possibly, just possibly, Frank Dolezal had been murdered. And if that were, indeed, the case, who had done it, and why? His specter, with its blank, unfocused stare, would haunt his family for decades; and he would eventually splinter his coffin and rise from his grave, more than sixty-five years after his death.

N
OTES

Most of the information in this chapter was gleaned from the coverage in Cleveland's three daily newspapers. The dates and names of the papers are provided in the text.

The official autopsy protocol reporting on Frank Dolezal's death bears the case number 49869 and is on file in the Cuyahoga County Coroner's Office.

Part 2

R
EVELATIONS

Chapter 5

A
N
I
NTERLUDE
: M
ARY
D
OLEZAL

“W
hy the
hell should I tell you anything?” rasped the voice at the other end of the line, between bouts of heavy coughing. Momentarily flustered by the speaker's unanticipated vehemence, I rummaged for an appropriate response that would not add to her obvious distrust and anger. At the time, I was still doing the research for
In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland's Torso Murders;
all I wanted was a little information about Frank Dolezal—the only man ever arrested and charged in the brutal series of killings, the man who may or may not have committed suicide to avoid prosecution.

Whether guilty or innocent, a murder victim or a suicide, at that point I regarded the history of Frank Dolezal as only one of the later, longer, though very disquieting, chapters in the entire Kingsbury Run murders saga. But his story was a chapter I thought deserved closer scrutiny than it had received before. Certainly there must still be Dolezal descendants living in Cleveland, I reasoned—people who could give me their perspective on this dark, painful episode of family history.

My probes in the Cleveland telephone book ultimately led me to Los Angeles and Mary Dolezal, Frank's great-niece, the unofficial family historian who had learned the ugly story of her grandfather Charles's brother from her mother before she hit her teen years, in spite of the rest of the family's determination to keep silent about the entire affair. Working below the radar of older relatives, she unearthed as much information as she could find—inquiries that revealed to her virtually unacknowledged reservoirs of family anger, grief, and shame. Suddenly the reasons for her father's obsessive, aggressively defiant pride in the name “Dolezal” became clear: the name was something of which to be proud, not ashamed. She finally became convinced that her great-uncle was innocent of the crimes with which he had been charged and, far from having committed suicide, had been murdered while in the county sheriff's custody, by a person or persons unknown. Ultimately, however, there seemed some sort of curious, old-world attitude toward public humiliation at work among her older relatives, including her father—something that dictated that one bore one's shame,
deserved or undeserved, in stoic silence. The tragic story of Frank Dolezal and everything connected with it became the proverbial elephant in the room—something that could not be ignored but, by tacit agreement, was never discussed or openly referred to. Senior members of the clan may have believed in Frank's innocence without question; however, they resented her determination to prove it publicly. Now, suffering with a terrible cold, she found herself potentially sparring over the phone with an unknown writer who seemed poised to pick at the scab covering her family's deepest wound for purely selfish reasons. I would later joke that those of us whose gyroscopes spin at odd angles have ways of recognizing each other, so, in spite of that phone call's shaky beginnings, Mary Dolezal and I ended our first conversation on amicable terms; and we have been the best of friends ever since. In December 2003, we endured biting winds and cold temperatures as we trudged through Cleveland's West Park Cemetery together looking for the exact spot of her great-uncle's grave. We gave up our search as darkness began to close in but found the cemetery gates locked when we tried to leave. Somehow we had managed to miss closing time, and I had to drive over the curb through cemetery grounds, sincerely hoping there would be no grave markers in the way, until I could get back to city streets. It was a hilarious excursion; it seems 'tis ever thus when Mary and I are together.

I am running a little late; and by the time I pull up in front of my house in the Tremont neighborhood on Cleveland's near southwest side, Mary is already there—perched comfortably on the top step outside my front door, waiting, languidly puffing a cigarette, her long hair sprawling across her shoulders. “Hey there!” she croons as I hop out of my hastily parked Grand Am. The smile on her face flickers characteristically between wry humor and genuine pleasure as she rises to her full five feet, ten inches. Her grace and height always come as a mild surprise, at least initially. The images of her short, burley, stocky great-uncle Frank have been deeply engraved in my mind for well over a decade; it is difficult for me to imagine a Dolezal looking any other way.

Over the next few days, we will hang out, chat over drinks, and catch up over a series of superb meals in Tremont's incomparable collection of first-rate restaurants. And, of course, we will carefully walk the ground we have traversed so many times before; we will talk about her great-uncle Frank—a palpable presence in her life even though he met his cruel fate decades before she was born. We will sift through her memory for any tiny bits of additional information—any
stray, unguarded comment dropped by an older relative she may have neglected to mention before, any bit of family legend that could be remotely tied to her great-uncle. With fairy-tale regularity, the story of how she came to know this shadowy presence in her family always begins with its own “Once upon a time.” Her mind wanders back to the late 1970s, when she was ten years old, to the time her mother, Joan—for no reason that Mary could discern—rummaged through a bureau drawer and retrieved a collection of
Plain Dealer
articles marking the fortieth anniversary of the Kingsbury Run murders. In a hushed voice, from her limited perspective, she laid out the history of the city's most gruesome series of killings and the role Mary's great-uncle had been forced to play in the terrible drama. “I had no idea that these killings had taken place,” she muses softly. Her expression begins to alter almost imperceptibly; her eyes turn strangely vacant, as if something inside her were retreating into itself, curling into a ball for protection. Her voice drops to virtual inaudibility: “I did not know he [Frank Dolezal] existed up to that.” Why was it, she wondered, that no one in her family ever spoke about this hitherto unknown and unidentified relative. “My grandmother [Frank Dolezal's sister-in-law Louise Vorell] in her life never spoke about it. She passed away in 1984, never saying a word. I became very curious about it, curious why my family would not speak of a relative—where I clearly knew all my other relatives at that point—and started digging into it, and really for the last twenty-five years have been extremely interested in it, and found out as much about Frank Dolezal as I possibly could.” She does not remember specifically the first time she saw his picture. It may have been during her mother's introduction to the family's link with violent and terrible crime, but she remains unsure. But the haunted, unshaven face had been caught and chronicled many times over by Cleveland's press photographers in the summer months of 1939, and she has long been familiar with the vacant, unfocused, disturbing gaze that still stares from the pages of the city's old newspapers. During our first face-to-face meeting, in 1999, she handed me an old, lovingly framed family photograph from 1920, showing her grandfather Charles and her grandmother Louise formally posed with their wedding party. At the picture's extreme left stood a Frank Dolezal that 1939 Clevelanders never knew existed, neat and almost dapper in his quaint formal attire, polished shoes, and glasses. Marriage was a serious business in those days; there is no hint of joy on any of the faces—only a stiff severity.

She reflects on her teenage years and her first trip downtown to the Cleveland Police Historical Society Museum. The display devoted to Kingsbury Run was smaller and considerably less graphic than it is today, but it still conveyed the sheer horror of what had taken place fifty years before. For the
first time, she saw the grisly visual record of the mayhem to which her mother had cautiously introduced her several years before. She stood silently before the old masks representing four of the Butcher's victims. Cast in the 1930s by the Scientific Investigation Unit, they bore the combined signs of age and neglect. Above them hung a single large picture frame containing a sickening series of old police photos: decapitated naked corpses, heads in various stages of decomposition, rotting body parts. She stared in mingled wonder and revulsion. Her eyes closed; a realization—a terrible recognition that could not yet be put into words or even molded into coherent thought—suddenly rose within her.
Someone related to me was accused of doing this!
The museum's then curator, Anne Kmieck, provided more details about the reign of terror that went on in the city for over four years and directed her to the accounts of the crimes chronicled by Cleveland's daily newspapers. Slowly, painfully, Mary began to understand the reasons behind the family reticence to speak openly of Frank Dolezal. “If the family name is shamed and accused of a crime, you would go back to the bunker, hunker down, and keep your face out of the public. And I think the biggest shame was that the Dolezal name became headline news. My aunts and uncles were anywhere from ten to twenty-two at the time, and they heard about it. They were ashamed; they were asked questions; they were jeered at. Several of my aunts were schoolaged. Can you imagine going to school during that time?”

Suddenly, her eyes flash with determined resolution. “And I started from there, started to work my way back through a lot of the articles that Cleveland newspapers had at that time, and kind of putting my own scrapbook together.” But the great wall of family silence had yet to be breeched. “I didn't ask my father any immediate questions. He felt it was something that still disgraced the family. It was shameful to the family. It was taboo to speak about.” But the more she dug into the history of the crimes and her great-uncle's part in the investigation, older aunts and uncles began to relent; the formidable wall developed cracks. Bit by bit, small pieces of the story as family members remembered, understood, and experienced it began to materialize. “You go, girl,” cheered one of her elderly aunts from the sidelines. It was not just some understandable blood-is-thicker-than-water family loyalty that left the Dolezals convinced of Frank's innocence and angered over his fate; it was their memories of the gentle uncle who always brought them candy when they were children. “The guy would never hurt a fly,” grumbled Mary's father on those few occasions when he even mentioned his uncle. But family loyalty was not blind, nor was it even compromised by the proverbial rose-colored glasses. “I believe my grandparents thought
he was an odd character,” Mary declares. “That he did live alone. That he did go to bars every night. He worked hard, but he also drank hard. That is how he is remembered within the family.”