Though Murder Has No Tongue (15 page)

August 21, 1999: Mary and I are at the library of Cleveland State University, sitting in the room devoted entirely to the
Cleveland Press
collection of photographs and clippings—a treasure trove of documentation that had somehow eluded her in the past. In those days, there were two different groups of old
Press
photographs chronicling the Kingsbury Run horror—one devoted exclusively to Frank Dolezal. She had never seen so many photos of her great-uncle in one place before. By fleeting turns, her eyes grow vacant, apprehensive, sad, even angry as she slowly works her way through the stack of yellowing, fading pictures: Frank Dolezal, dazed and frightened, with Sheriff Martin L. O'Donnell and his deputies; Frank Dolezal, looking tired and in pain, hand on his side, as law enforcement personnel escorted him in front of assembled press photographers—what old-time cops called a “perp walk”; Frank Dolezal stretched out on the backseat of an official automobile, pathetically trying to hide from the prying camera lenses by holding his hands over his face. “There's something about the 1930s and 1940s I identify with,” Mary reflects in a barely audible whisper. “The style of the clothes, everything.” She winces at some of the more graphic depictions of her great-uncle's humiliation and distress; at times, her entire expression turns strangely inward, as if she were trying desperately to recover memories that were not really hers to command. I learned more from Mary Dolezal than simple family history and the details marking the steps in her own personal odyssey of discovery; I learned what it meant to be a survivor. In monstrous crimes, especially murders, we generally think of “a survivor” as someone who had a direct tie to the victim or who had narrowly escaped being a victim him or herself. But, like her father and other relatives, Mary is also a survivor. She didn't ask for that black cloud that always hovers in her background, but she inherited it as surely as she did the color of her eyes and hair. And it is always there—a deep, haunting shadow that whispers, “I am here; I am a part of you.” It's a lesson I would learn again many times over—from Peter Merylo's daughters, Marjorie and Winifred; from Pat Lyons's daughter, Carol; from the surviving relatives of those traumatized children who stumbled upon dismembered body parts or a rotting corpse more than a half century ago; and from the daughter and granddaughters of Edward Andrassy, traditionally thought of as the Butcher's
first victim. His daughter was only six when her father's grisly murder catapulted the aristocratic Hungarian name “Andrassy” into public notoriety, and her daughters knew their grandfather only through his reputation. And that reputation was nothing of which to be proud: runins with the police for drunken brawling, a spotty employment history, an arrest for carrying a concealed weapon, allegations of all sorts of low-level criminal activity, and dark rumors of sexual deviancy. “Everything is so negative,” lamented granddaughter Tomi Johnson when I first spoke with her.

Uncovering a painful past. Mary Dolezal and the author look through the material related to her great-uncle in the
Cleveland Press
Archives at Cleveland State University. Photograph by Denise Blanda.

In spring 2001, the Kent State University Press and the Cleveland Police Historical Society cosponsored the official release of
In the Wake of the Butcher
with a reception, book-signing, and dinner at the Great Lakes Brewing Company in Ohio City on Cleveland's near west side, the oldest continuously operating bar and restaurant in Cleveland and one of Eliot Ness's favorite
local watering holes. The ever-cautious Ness reportedly sat at a booth in the rear, where he could keep an eagle eye on those who came and went. (To honor their famous former customer, the present owners, the Conways, have named one of their excellent brews “Eliot Ness.”) Mary flew in from LA for the event. It was quite an occasion. Peter Merylo's daughter Marjorie Merylo Dentz was there, with two of her daughters and other members of the family, as were two of Edward Andrassy's granddaughters. It was the first time any of the descendents of the major players in Cleveland's most notorious murders had ever been in the same place, let alone had the opportunity to meet and speak with each other. “These are people I never thought I would meet,” reflected Marjorie Dentz, almost in awe. Mary and I scanned the large party room and caught sight of the two Andrassy granddaughters speaking to one of the trustees of the Cleveland Police Historical Society. “I'd love to talk with them,” she murmured, “but what do I say?” It was perhaps the first and only time during our acquaintance that I have ever known Mary to be hesitant or even remotely at a loss for words. I kneed her in the rump. “You go up to them and say, ‘Hi! My great-uncle was accused of murdering your grandfather and cutting off his head.' How often does life hand you an opening like that?”

N
OTE

Some of the quotations I attribute to Mary Dolezal were culled from a videotaped interview that Mark Stone conducted in 2003.

Chapter 6

B
EHIND THE
V
EIL

I
n the late 1960s, Michelangelo Antonioni's film
Blowup
caught the fancies of
both the art-house crowd and the average movie buff. One of the great Italian auteur's few popular successes, it told the story of a beat-generation photographer, played by David Hemmings, who seems to stumble across evidence of a murder through a close-up examination of a recent batch of his photos. The immensely popular television drama
CSI
picked up on the same premise during its 2003–04 season, and, ironically, it was a series of old photographs of Frank Dolezal's corpse, long tucked away and forgotten in the musty archives of the Cuyahoga County morgue that provided the first inklings that Coroner Sam Gerber's 1939 determination that Dolezal had committed suicide, that he had died of asphyxiation by hanging himself from a jailhouse clothes hook with a noose fashioned from cleaning rags, was suspect.

In late 1999 and early 2000, as I was completing the final revisions to the manuscript of
In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland's Torso Murders,
the morgue archivist unearthed the original photographs taken of Frank Dolezal's corpse in the county jail at the time of his death and in the morgue just prior to and during the formal autopsy—huge documents of stunning clarity, easily eleven by fourteen inches or larger. Since the coroner's office did not start taking its own photographs until the 1950s, there is a real question as to who took these—especially the ones documenting the autopsy. City newspapers printed a few of the pictures taken at the jail, but there is no indication in any of the coverage at the time that photographers from Cleveland's dailies were ever present. The Scientific Investigation Bureau (the 1930s precursor to the modern Ballistics Bureau or CSI Unit) may have been responsible for some of the photos—perhaps all of them, including those taken in the morgue. (Was it standard procedure at the time for police to share their photographs with city papers or vice versa?) In the 1930s, it certainly was not common practice in the coroner's office to document a case with photos of such size, and my initial surmise was that they had served simply as visual aids at the August 26–29 inquest into Frank Dolezal's death. And, indeed,
that may have been their original purpose; but when the full transcript of those official proceedings materialized in winter 2004, it became clear that the vast majority of those photos had played no role in the inquest. Except for one or two, they were never shown, nor did any of the testimony deal with them, even remotely. Two of the photographs taken just before the formal autopsy procedure clearly showed the mark on Frank Dolezal's neck supposedly left by the homemade noose. Among the first to get a look at these new finds were my good friends and research partners Rebecca McFarland (the Cleveland expert on Eliot Ness) and Andrew Schug. Both reported that the narrow wound seemed inconsistent with the instrument of his alleged suicide—a bulky-looking length of toweling that a stone-faced Coroner Gerber displayed to a
Press
photographer on August 24, 1939. At the last minute, I incorporated their views and reservations in the manuscript before turning it over to the Kent State University Press. And there the matter rested, at least for the time being.

In the final months of 2002, I teamed up with Mark Wade Stone of Storytellers Media Group to produce a TV documentary,
The Fourteenth Victim: Eliot Ness and the Torso Murders,
based in part on my recently published book. Our collaboration eventually took us to the Cuyahoga County morgue for an intense reexamination of Frank Dolezal's death. We studied the pictures taken right after the alleged suicide as well as those taken before and during the subsequent autopsy—a treasure trove of documents that included the two photos that had aroused McFarland and Schug's suspicions three years before. To say they were disquieting, even upsetting, ranks as the proverbial understatement; the alarm bells that had sounded for McFarland and Schug in 1999 began to ring for us as well. Things just did not look right. A huge close-up of Frank Dolezal's head and the wound on his neck showed his open, vacant, dead eyes starring fixedly toward the ceiling. In a second photograph, a rubber-gloved hand descends from the upper right, obscuring a portion of the face, to pull his head slightly to the side to better reveal the telltale mark. For the first time since 1939, students of the Kingsbury Run murders could see what that wound looked like. The deep, narrow mark on Dolezal's neck just did not match up—at least to our untrained eyes—with photographs of the toweling or sheeting with which he was alleged to have taken his life.

All sorts of admittedly amateur notions about hanging and the nature of injuries to the neck intruded on our assessments of what we were seeing. The few photos I had ever seen documenting a lynching or a state execution by hanging showed a
V
-shaped mark that pulled upward behind the ears to the noose's coil at the back of the head. Also, if memory served, the wound left by the rope at the front of the neck was invariably positioned fairly high up,
virtually right under the chin. Frank Dolezal's wound appeared to circle his neck about midway between the shoulders and head, with no sign of the characteristic
V
-shaped pattern. And those two revealing photographs were only the beginning.