Though Murder Has No Tongue (33 page)

On September 21, 1939, almost exactly one month after the death of Frank Dolezal, Francis Sweeney's sole surviving brother, Martin Joseph Jr., died of internal injuries sustained when he fell from the roof of a house at 2674 East 53rd. The house was not his, nor did he even live there as a renter. (The death certificate states he was living with his sister Mary on East 65th.) The house belonged to Angelo and Mary DeCaro—wine dealers, according to the city directory. Just what Martin Joseph was doing on the roof of a house in which he did not live is anyone's guess. That the owners had something to do with wine sales could explain why he was there in the first place. Francis wrestled unsuccessfully with the demons of alcohol; perhaps Martin Joseph fought similar battles. In fact, one of my research partners initially attributed his deadly plunge to the “Irish disease.”

Was his death an accident or something more sinister? He could easily have been doing something completely innocent, such as repairing the roof. He was, after all, a common laborer and seems to have spent most of the 1930s without steady employment. Odd jobs would be one way to survive. A photograph of the house at the Cuyahoga County archives shows the pitch of the roof to be uncommonly steep, so it is easy to believe he simply lost his footing. But that his deadly fall so closely followed the death of Frank Dolezal does, at the very least, raise an eyebrow. Conspiracy aficionados would love to allege that Martin Joseph knew or suspected something, either about his younger brother Francis's involvement in Kingsbury Run or perhaps even Frank Dolezal's death and had decided to cash in on his suspicions through blackmail. But he underestimated the brutality and determined efficiency of his potential targets. Rather than buying his silence, someone with an agenda simply decided to end the whole matter by arranging an “accident.” An engaging and attractive conspiracy, indeed, and one whose timing would dovetail precisely with the broader theory of Eliot Ness's secret suspect! But
there is not a shred of hard evidence to support it. Having identified Francis Sweeney as a viable suspect, Ness would have thoroughly investigated his background. He would, therefore, have been familiar with Francis's siblings—their names, employment circumstances, family situations, and so forth. Ness would certainly have known who Martin Joseph Sweeney Jr. was. There is, however, no surviving evidence to suggest that the safety director saw anything suspicious in the death of Frank Sweeney's brother. However, there is nothing that proves he didn't. We just don't know. All one can say with certainty is that Martin Joseph's demise, coming so soon after the death of Frank Dolezal, is a bizarre, perhaps, even a convenient, coincidence.

When I first met Mary Dolezal in 1999, I was aware of the significant pieces of the family genealogy: Frank Dolezal's brother Charles had married Louise Vorell, and Louise's brother Frank Vorell was a Cleveland cop and one of the few people to visit Frank in jail. I was, however, not prepared for the almost virulent animosity the Dolezals harbored toward the Vorells, especially as there had apparently been no personal contact between the two branches of the family for years. As far as Mary knew then, the palpable hatred directed at the Vorells stemmed from an obscure Dolezal family legend that the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run was actually Frank Vorell's brother Charles. (It remains a little confusing to be dealing with two sets of brothers, both named Frank and Charles.) Those in the Dolezal clan who remembered Charles Vorell described him as a brutal, violent man who on two separate occasions had ordered Mary's father and his siblings to wash blood off the backseat of his car. According to family lore, Frank Vorell had allowed his brother-in-law Frank Dolezal to be arrested and murdered to shield his brother Charles Vorell from prosecution. The errant Vorell was packed off to the merchant marine during World War II, during which he was accidentally, and conveniently, washed overboard.

I initially informed Mary Dolezal in 1999 that her grandfather Charles had brought two separate causes of action against the sheriff and his deputies and that both those legal attacks had been settled in her grandfather's favor. At the time, she was surprised and confused. It seems that the Dolezals had hunkered down and built an impregnable wall of silence around themselves in reaction to the veritable explosion of negative publicity generated by Frank's arrest. No one in the family seemed to know about Charles's suits; and as far as anyone knew, no money had ever changed hands. It was not until 2007 that one of the older members of the family broke the code of
silence in a fit of pique and alleged that money had, indeed, been paid to Charles Dolezal for his suits and that someone on the Vorell side of the family had tricked him out of it by taking advantage of his poor English and even poorer understanding of American legal procedures. The devious Vorell allegedly used the money to invest in real estate. (Mary asserts that her father worked for Frank Vorell as an apprentice in the late 1940s, when the latter built apartments either in Bedford or Bedford Heights.)

At the time of Frank Dolezal's incarceration and death, his family undoubtedly felt unfairly besieged by events; and there is an obvious, though wholly understandable, touch of paranoia in both tales. Unfortunately, given what little evidence remains, it is extremely difficult to verify or dispute either story. Frank Vorell did, indeed, have a brother Charles, seven years his junior; but the patrolman's recorded actions and words do not suggest that he was protecting anyone at the expense of his sister's beleaguered brother-in-law Frank Dolezal. He visited him in the county jail—the only family member to do so—and testified on his behalf at the inquest. In June 1940, acting on his long-held belief that the Butcher was a transient who rode the rails between Cleveland and other nearby industrial cities, Detective Peter Merylo finally got Chief of Police George Matowitz's permission to go underground as a “bum” in search of evidence that could point to the killer. Believing that Frank Vorell might want to avenge his relative's death and redeem his shattered reputation, Merylo asked the patrolman to ride the rails with him, a proposition to which Vorell readily agreed. None of his known actions suggest that Vorell was secretly maneuvering to focus potential attention away from his brother Charles at the expense of Frank or anyone else.

The question of whether money had been paid to Charles Dolezal as a result of his lawsuits against the sheriff and his office is more complex. The paperwork in probate court for both suits ends with the statement, “settled and dismissed at defendants' cost,” but whether that meant that Charles Dolezal actually got the $125,000 for which he was asking is impossible to say. On March 28, 1942, however, the law firm of Minshall & Mosier wrote Pat Lyons—one of the named defendants—asking him to contact their office in order to discuss “the expense [to Lyons] involved in connection with this lawsuit.” Both these evidentiary fragments suggest very strongly that money was somehow involved, though there is no way to verify it or ascertain how much. But the Dolezals remain adamant: Charles never saw a penny; and, though he did not exactly die in abject poverty, he was never financially well off. It remains, however, a huge leap in logic to insist that someone on the Vorell side of the family tricked him out of whatever money he may have been awarded.

Family legends of this sort, however, don't just grow from nothing; somewhere there is a grain of truth that gave birth to the story in the first place. Records in the Cuyahoga County Recorder's Office do show that between 1944 and 1950 there were fifteen real estate transactions involving the Vorells, eleven of them with either Frank Vorell or his wife, Lillian. Whatever the facts may be, there is no doubt that bad blood still festers between the two branches of the family descended from Charles and Louise (née Vorell) Dolezal; and whatever the causes, real or imagined, they clearly grew out of the tragic series of events that unfolded seventy years ago.

Today, the area—now known as Slavic Village—that borders the south side of Kingsbury Run and surrounds the Broadway and East 55th neighborhood struggles against the twin urban blights of general decay and crime. St. Alexis Hospital, where Francis Sweeney served his internship, was closed and eventually torn down—in spite of a lot of political noise and posturing; and the buildings that once housed the medical offices he shared with Dr. Edward Peterka and the Raus funeral home (where David Cowles alleges Sweeney practiced some sort of surgery or dissection on the corpses of unidentified indigents) have also been demolished. But if you spend enough time haunting the bars and hanging out on the streets in that old neighborhood, you can still pick up the vague remnants of a local legend that maintains—in some unknown or, perhaps, forgotten way—that the neighborhood had some sort of connection with the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.

In early spring 2004, Mark Stone and I met with then Cuyahoga County coroner Elizabeth Balraj to discuss the Frank Dolezal affair. At that time, she saw no reason to question any of the official conclusions Sam Gerber—her immediate predecessor and mentor—had arrived at in 1939 concerning Dolezal's death.

Epilogue

T
HE
T
RAGIC
S
TORY OF
A
NNA AND
J
OSEPH
N
IGRIN

D
id Frank
Dolezal murder his sister Anna Nigrin and perhaps even her son (his nephew), Joseph? The charge—or, at least, the suggestion—that he may have done so contributed to the swirl of ugly rumors and poisonous allegations that hung over his head at the time of his arrest. The only source for this damning charge came in a letter from Nettie Taylor of Wheaton, Illinois, a woman who identified herself as Frank Dolezal's sister-in-law. The document no longer exists, but it remains one of the more perplexing enigmas in the entire Dolezal affair. The first public reference to this mysterious piece of correspondence appeared on July 10, 1939, in a front-page article of the
Press.
Though there is no way to be certain, the letter had apparently been sent directly to Martin O'Donnell, for the sheriff showed the document in question to assembled reporters—presumably that day. We will never know for certain everything that letter contained; the
Press
account provides only the briefest summary of its contents: Frank Dolezal's sister, Anna Nigrin [wife of Gottlieb Nigrin], had been found dead—presumably murdered—on a Geauga County farm near Chardon in July 1931. Further, her twenty-two-year-old son, Joseph Allan Nigrin, had come to Cleveland in April 1938 to stay with his Uncle Frank while he cleared up his mother's affairs. Reportedly, Joseph was never seen again. O'Donnell verified some of the letter's basic allegations through Adam Crumpton, a printer and friend of Dolezal's, who resided on Wade Park Avenue. The
Press
quoted Crumpton on July 10 as having said, “One day [the exact time frame is not clarified] Dolezal came to me crying and said his sister had been found dead. He said her head had been cut off and he thought she had been murdered. He said he thought a farmhand did it.” Whether the detail concerning decapitation actually appeared in the original Taylor letter or was added by Crumpton is not at all clear, but the damage was done. Once the trigger is pulled, the bullet cannot be recalled. Pat Lyons repeats the allegation in his notes that Anna Nigrin had, indeed, been murdered and decapitated: “Affidavid [
sic
] by
person states Frank told him Frank's sister was murdered[:] had her head cut off. Mrs. Anna Nigrin in Geauga County near Chardon, July 1931.” Now, almost seventy years after the fact, it is difficult to gauge exactly how much impact the Taylor letter may have had on public perceptions of Dolezal's guilt in the torso killings. The sheriff, however, obviously regarded it as a major link in the chain of evidence he was forging against his prisoner, and the allegation of decapitation would obviously have been seen as conspicuously damning under the circumstances.