Though Murder Has No Tongue (2 page)

The veins of information that make up the full story of Kingsbury Run lie deeply buried: some of them simply lost; many hidden beneath layers of secrecy and private shame. Mining them successfully has turned out to be an arduous long-term, ongoing process. Like a massive nineteenth-century Russian novel, the unfolding story presented here embraces a huge, disparate cast of characters and stretches over decades; like Orson Welles's
Citizen Kane,
the narrative sometimes moves forward with a series of flashbacks during which different witnesses explore the same territory from their own vantage points. And, like Welles's groundbreaking screen classic, there is a
Rosebud
at its core—a mystery, seemingly just out of reach, demanding elucidation—a crucial piece to the puzzle that may explain everything. At its base, this is also the story of two men of widely differing backgrounds, who, as far as I know, never met. One was a common laborer, the other a respected professional. They shared nothing beyond their first names; but their lives and ultimate fates became tangled in and inextricably linked with the most infamous and gruesome murder case in Cleveland history.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

F
irst,
I would like thank the powers that be at Cuyahoga Community College for granting me time off from teaching to do some of the necessary research and the editorial staff of the Kent State University Press for their steady patience as I stubbornly and repeatedly dug in my heels, insisting there was more work that needed to be done before I could submit the manuscript.

I owe an enormous debt to documentary filmmaker Mark Wade Stone of Storytellers Media Group. Our collaboration began in 2003 with the TV documentary project
The Fourteenth Victim: Eliot Ness and the Torso Murders
(obviously based largely on
In the Wake of the Butcher
). The program reaped high ratings and good reviews when it aired on local PBS stations. When Mark began taping
Dusk and Shadow: The Mystery of Beverly Potts,
my research into the Beverly Potts disappearance was already well underway and my notions about that case were more or less set. This second documentary repeated the critical and ratings success of
Fourteenth Victim
and picked up an Emmy Award as well. Throughout the research and writing of
Though Murder Has No Tongue,
he remained a dedicated partner and a reliable sounding board. At the time of this writing, he is working on a documentary—tentatively titled
Broken Rosary: The Frank Dolezal Affair
—that will serve as a companion piece for this book.

I also owe a major debt of gratitude to Dr. Cathleen Cerny for her insightful afterword to this book.

I remain extremely grateful to the following for their assistance, cooperation, and support: Dr. Elizabeth K. Balraj, former coroner of Cuyahoga County; Marilyn Bardsley; Doris O'Donnell Beaufait; Winifred Merylo Beube; David Ciocca, PC network technician, Cuyahoga Community College, Eastern Campus; Marjorie Merylo Dentz; Dr. Dennis C. Dirkmaat, associate professor of anthropology, Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute, Mercyhurst College; Sgt. Dennis Donovan, Pennsylvania State Police, retired, and adjunct professor in the Department of Applied Forensic Sciences, Mercyhurst College; Carol Fitzgerald; Dr. Marcella F. Fierro, former chief medical examiner for the
Commonwealth of Virginia; Charlotte Ilc, coordinator of continuing medical education and research, St. Vincent's Charity Hospital; John Kemmerling, media technician I, Learning Resource Center, Cuyahoga Community College, Eastern Campus; John Neundorfer, supervisor VI, Learning Resource Center, Cuyahoga Community College, Eastern Campus; Robin Odell; John Panza; Donald Rumbelow; Mary Dolezal Satterlee; Mary Suva, Copy & Print Service Center, Cuyahoga Community College, Eastern Campus; Dr. Steven A. Symes, Department of Applied Forensic Sciences, Mercyhurst College; Jennifer Thomas; and Kenneth A. Zirm, attorney at law, Ulmer & Berne, Cleveland, Ohio.

Considering the sheer brutality and sensational nature of the Kingsbury Run murders, the crimes have attracted remarkably little attention outside of Cleveland. In the city on the shore of Lake Erie, however, they remain a powerful legend. Even today, no Clevelander can look at that blighted industrial landscape at the heart of the city without feeling a chill. For the descendents of those individuals who were swept up in that four-year nightmare of seventy years ago, that chill can still be especially haunting and oppressive. I owe a considerable debt to a number of individuals who, by their own request, must remain anonymous.

I also gratefully acknowledge the assistance provided by staff members from the following organizations and institutions: the Western Reserve Historical Society library, the
Cleveland Press
Archives at Cleveland State University, the Cleveland Police Historical Society Museum, the Cuyahoga County Archives, the Cuyahoga County Coroner's Office, the main branch of the Cleveland Public Library, and the Ohio Soldiers' and Sailors' Home in Sandusky. I also would like to express my gratitude to the students in the Forensic Sciences program at Mercyhurst College for their willingness to participate in this endeavor and fellow members on the board of trustees of the Cleveland Police Historical Society for their continuing interest, support, and encouragement.

Part 1

C
HAOS

Chapter 1

T
HE
M
AELSTROM

A
ugust 24, 1939, was a typical late summer day in Cleveland, Ohio: hot, with temperatures well into the mid-eighties, with the kind of humidity that brought handkerchiefs to faces and sweat spots to shirt fronts, the sort of humidity that could wilt a man by late afternoon. For Captain Floyd O'Neil, member of the Cleveland Fire Department assigned to Rescue Squad No. 1 at Engine House No. 23, it was a relatively routine day—until early afternoon. At 1:52
P.M
. the call came in: emergency at the county jail, fourth floor, cell no. 11! Six minutes later, O'Neil rushed into the imposingly grim building and the familiar dank humidity of the jail, with its characteristic institutional smell of bodies and disinfectant. On the fourth floor, the stark prison lighting cast a harsh, impersonal glow; the heat and humidity had become an oppressive wall. Later that day, Captain O'Neil would relate to Cleveland police what had happened that afternoon in a formal deposition: “When I arrived at the County Jail I was informed by Sheriff [Martin L.] O'Donnell that the Torso Murderer had hung himself.”

Frank Dolezal had hanged himself! Was it even remotely possible that it was all over? Could the grisly series of brutalities that had lurched through Cleveland for five years and made the city an embarrassing target of national attention really be at an end? It had been going on since September 1934—a series of mind-numbing, gruesome decapitation-dismemberment murders that could have come straight from Shakespeare's
Titus Andronicus.
Referred to locally as either the torso murders or the Kingsbury Run murders—named after the desolate stretch of industrial land near the downtown where some of the first victims were found—the killings had both fascinated and frightened the city populace for almost half a decade. As the violent crime scenes in this sickening drama succeeded each other over the years, the intensity of local press coverage and the pressure placed on law enforcement institutions
to do something about them increased substantially, straining resources and tempers to the breaking point. It was truly a catalog of horrors, nearly without precedent in the history of American crime.

A grim, desolate corridor in the Cuyahoga County Jail.
Cleveland Press
Archives, Cleveland State University.

It had started in September 1934. The lower half of a rotting female corpse had washed up on the shores of Lake Erie east of the city. Determined searching on the part of authorities had uncovered only a couple more of the body's pieces. Dead for six months and in the water for about four, the woman frustrated all attempts at identification. The Lady of the Lake, as she was known to law enforcement personnel, would have faded into history had it not been for a similarly grisly discovery a year later in a different part of the city. In September 1935, two neighborhood boys happened upon the decapitated, emasculated remains of two men, dumped at the base of a sixty-foot elevation known as Jackass Hill close to East 55th. Four months later, the severed remains of a woman, minus her head, turned up: two different sets of body parts discovered about ten days apart in two different downtown locations. The Butcher's
pace increased markedly during summer of 1936, just as Cleveland was playing host to the Republican National Convention and the city's movers and shakers were hoping to offset some of the Great Depression's more debilitating economic consequences by attracting visitors to the Great Lakes Exposition. Between June and September, the remains of three more male victims were found—variously mutilated but all decapitated. And so it was through the rest of 1936, 1937, and most of 1938: unwary Clevelanders making exceptionally gruesome discoveries—stumbling across the severed body parts of men and women, white and black, distributed all over the Cleveland area though usually in the blighted industrial landscapes in and around the Flats and Kingsbury Run. By August 1938, the official body count stood at twelve, thirteen if the Lady of the Lake from 1934 is added to the tally. Operating on the long-held assumption that men and women were invariably murdered by people they knew for such understandable reasons as revenge and greed, Cleveland police made almost superhuman attempts to identify the butchered victims. But their Herculean efforts added up to only two positive identifications: Edward Andrassy (found on September 23, 1935, and generally considered victim no. 1) and Florence Polillo (victim no. 3, the initial set of her remains having been discovered on January 26, 1936), both sporting police records and judged low-lifes by authorities. The others passed into oblivion unknown and, as far as anyone knew, unmourned.

As time went on and disarticulated body parts accumulated to a disturbing degree, public fear, especially in the near-downtown neighborhoods where the pieces of many of the murdered victims had turned up, spread with the deadly inexorability of a plague. The seeming inability of the police to make any real progress in the case generated as much apprehension as the gruesome crimes themselves, and Cleveland's three competing daily papers frantically fanned the hysteria whenever a new victim turned up.