Though Murder Has No Tongue (21 page)

Donovan's similar observation was more brutally succinct. “Some of the statements were just flat out contradictory.”

There is virtually unanimous agreement that the mark on Frank Dolezal's neck is not consistent with either the cloth noose or the amount of time he reportedly was left hanging before being cut down. “No brainer!” smirked one of the students after a casual glance at the photographs. Asphyxiation by hanging with a cloth ligature can, indeed, occur within a few minutes—as the sheriff and his deputies alleged, but the mark left on the neck would be rather faint and would disappear in a couple of hours. The injury on Dolezal's neck is clearly visible in the two pre-autopsy photographs, and they were taken eighteen hours after his death. The mark is also far too narrow (one centimeter wide, according to Gerber's autopsy protocol) and far too deep to have been caused by a cloth ligature. “In my opinion, from what I've seen in my career,” observed Greg Olson (a staff sergeant with the York Regional Police in Canada, and one of the older students) as he pointed to the mark on Dolezal's neck, “using cloth—unless it's wound real tight, and the circumference is very small—I don't think it would cause something like that. But I'm not a medical examiner; I base it on what I've done in the past as an investigator.” Symes concurred: “The photographs, to me right now, don't seem consistent with the story being told.” “All the descriptions [at the inquest] are of these muslin dust cloths,” commented Dirkmaat. “And that's what's shown in the pictures; that's what's shown hanging from the hook. But then when you look at the pictures at [the] autopsy,” he continued, “it is a very thin, one-centimeter-in-size line—which is not really possible for that cloth to create. So something else was going on. . . . So something is amiss there. If it was part of the hanging, and the description is only of these cloths, then that doesn't make sense at all. That doesn't seem to be the truth.”

During the inquest, Sheriff O'Donnell and Deputies Clarence Smart, Hugh Crawford, and Archie Burns testified that Burns used the sheriff's pocketknife
to cut through the cloth ligature when they were unable to work the knot loose. Assuming Burns was right-handed, he would have steadied the bunched noose with his left, while Smart and Crawford held Dolezal's body erect, and cut or sawed through the cloth. (Admittedly, a lot would depend on the sharpness of the sheriff's knife.) If the noose had been cut this way, however, one would expect to see very sharp, jagged edges at the two points where the cloth had been severed; but none of the existing photographs show this. In all the photos, the edges look frayed and worn—not freshly cut. But if the cloth ligature, so loudly trumpeted in both the Cleveland press and the inquest, did not cause Dolezal's death, what did? The twine visible in one of the photos taken in the county jail is obviously far more consistent with the thin, deep mark on his neck. But why would the sheriff's men leave it with the body to be photographed? If the twine were somehow wrapped in with or tied to the length of cloth, it would be extremely difficult to disentangle the whole affair before photographers arrived on the scene. “I don't know if we can attribute that particular ligature mark to that twine,” mused Dirkmaat. Thus, in what may be one of the supreme ironies in the entire case, the length of rope that first began to call into doubt the official suicide verdict may not actually have been the instrument of death.

Mercyhurst College: The best and brightest. Dr. Dennis C. Dirkmaat, Mercyhurst Anthropological Institute; Dr. Steven A. Symes, Department of Applied Forensic Sciences; Sgt. Dennis Donovan, Pennsylvania State Police, retired, and adjunct professor of applied forensic sciences. Images courtesy of Storytellers Media Group.

The afternoon session at Mercyhurst College. Image courtesy of Storytellers Media Group.

Does all this learned assessment and analysis add up to a definitive conclusion that Frank Dolezal was killed, either accidentally or on purpose, by one or more of his captors? The experts at Mercyhurst who studied the bits of surviving evidence have one of society's most serious and demanding jobs. They deal with death, the end of life—what causes it and what happens to the physical remains under a wide range of environmental circumstances once life has ceased. They treated the whole issue of Dolezal's death with the serious caution of seasoned professionals preparing to testify in court, and they had obviously passed that seriousness of purpose on to their students. Whatever casual comments they may have let slip during the period of examination, they all stopped short of making such a definitive, one might even say naked, pronouncement for the record. In spite of such understandable reticence, however, it would seem that no other conclusion is possible. There is no other reasonable scenario that can explain away all the discrepancies, the charges and countercharges, and the obvious maneuvering recorded in the inquest. “
Again, the best explanation is that he was done in by some individuals,” pondered Dirkmaat, “that it wasn't just a hanging.” “It's pretty clear,” he went on, “that something was going on to cover somebody's tracks. Let's say he did commit suicide and did hang himself. . . . But if that were the case, then the witnesses should line up somehow as to the sequence of events. And none of them do.” (One would logically assume, of course, that if there was a concerted effort to cover up a crime, the parties involved would have done a better job of coordinating their stories. But Gerber convened the inquest less than forty-eight hours after Dolezal's death—enough time for the subpoenaed deputies to agree on the general outline of their story, but wholly insufficient to satisfactorily nail down all the pesky details.) “From what I can see in the photographic evidence and the documented evidence, it does not truly appear to me that the individual [Frank Dolezal] died as a result of a suicide,” concurred Donovan. “There's some inconsistencies, both physical and in the documentation, that would lead me to think that the cause of death might have been other.”

Serendipity will always play its inevitable, unpredictable role in this sort of cold case research, and that elusive quality made a grand entrance one day over the faculty lunch table when Marge Geiger, one of my English department colleagues, casually announced that she had gone to college with Patricia Cornwell's fictional medical examiner, Kay Scarpetta. Dr. Marcella Fierro, former medical examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia, had
supposedly served as a model for Cornwell's popular crime solving forensic detective; and, with the path to her old classmate cleared by Geiger, Fierro consented to look at some of the evidence surrounding Frank Dolezal's death, primarily the pre-autopsy photographs and Gerber's formal verdict; and her succinct judgment provided a wonderfully satisfying coda to our Mercyhurst experience. “A cloth ligature would not leave a 1 cm mark on his neck. It was caused by something else”—she determined and then subsequently clarified. “A cloth ligature like a sheet (unless it was wound very tight and he had hung for hours) would leave a faint mark that would fade. Any narrow discrete mark would have to be from something else.”

Dr. Marcella F. Fierro, former chief medical examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia. Courtesy of Marcella Fierro.