Though Murder Has No Tongue (34 page)

But were any of these very serious charges true? Exactly who was Nettie Taylor? She identified herself as Frank Dolezal's sister-in-law, but the only set of circumstances that would explain such a relationship would be to assume she was one of Gottlieb Nigrin's (Frank Dolezal's brother-in-law) siblings. There is no doubt, however, that Anna Nigrin existed. She and her husband, Gottlieb, first appear in the 1919–20 Cleveland city directory at an East 79th address, and the census records for 1920 confirm this. Further, the 1930 Geauga County census places the family on a Geauga County farm in Huntsville Township. Husband and wife immigrated to the United States in 1903 or 1904 from Czechoslovakia. There is, however, no record in Cuyahoga County of any woman with the last name “Dolezal” being married to a man with a name even remotely close to Gottlieb Nigrin. (Public records, of course, are certainly not infallible; the 1920 census mistakenly enumerates him as “Kottlieb Negrin” and identifies his wife as “Annie.”) The marriage obviously must have taken place out of state, possibly even in Europe. Their son, Joseph Allan, however, was born in Ohio in 1917.

When I first raised the entire Anna Nigrin story with Mary Dolezal in 1999, she met my enquiries with raised eyebrows, an uncomprehending stare, and a defiantly uttered “Who??” No one in her immediate family, not even her father, had ever heard of Anna Dolezal Nigrin. So far as they knew, of the ten Dolezal children, only Charles (Mary's grandfather) and Frank had come to the United States. When they learned the details of the Anna Nigrin story, Mary's entire family regarded it as a hoax, a vicious piece of slander concocted to further incriminate an innocent man. In late 2004, however, I conclusively verified the existence of the Nigrins through the 1930 census, so I raised the issue with Mary a second time. By then her father had died, and the only living relative she could approach who might know was her father's older brother, Al—a man from whom she was virtually estranged, since he had not taken kindly to his rebel niece digging around in the family's not-so-secret shame. The first line of Mary's subsequent e-mail to me virtually screamed from the computer screen: “Why didn't I know about these people?!” Uncle Al had, indeed, confirmed the existence of Anna Nigrin,
but his explanation for her death proved far different from the allegations made in the Nettie Taylor letter and repeated in the
Press.
Supposedly, her son, Joseph—then fourteen—had simply discovered her dead body in the driveway of the family farm. There is no mention of murder or decapitation. Joseph, however, had apparently learned how to drive a car in 1925, at the age of eight, and those very few Dolezal family members who even knew the Nigrin story suspected he had accidentally run over his mother in July 1931. (Why Al had kept this rather lurid and compelling piece of family lore to himself all these years is almost impossible to explain, beyond the fact that it is yet another conspicuous example of the total, almost pathological, lack of communication that seems characteristic of Dolezal family relationships. Charles and Frank had minimal contact with each other after the former's 1920 marriage, and at the time of his arrest, Frank insisted to authorities that he had no siblings.) As it turns out, Al Dolezal's recounting of buried family legend is remarkably close to what actually happened. Fourteen-year-old Joseph Nigrin did kill his mother, Anna, when he ran over her with a car on July 3, 1931. (Reportedly, he did not see her.) Geauga County coroner Philip Pease attributed her death to a combination of internal injuries and a fractured skull caused by the accident; there was no murder and obviously no decapitation. Unlike the
Press,
the
Plain Dealer
got the details of the actual story straight on July 11, but the paper buried the revelation on the back pages, at the tail end of a very long story. The truth, if anyone even noticed it, seems to have had little or no impact on the much more lurid myth of mysterious death that had been born the day before.

On July 10, 1939, the
Press
reported that the sheriff's office in Chardon could not find any record for the death of Anna Nigrin in Geauga County. Very loud alarm bells should have sounded at that point for everyone involved. While it remains possible to accept that a death by natural causes might slip through the bureaucratic cracks of a rural area, it is simply inconceivable that a supposed murder, especially one that involved a decapitation, could pass by without some sort of official record. Certainly, no community of reasonable size and civic organization in mid-twentieth-century America could commit such a large bureaucratic blunder. If there was no death record, there had to be a reason; and the inability of the sheriff's men in Chardon to track down that reason casts very grave doubts on either their investigative abilities or their willingness to investigate in the first place. It would also seem that the Cuyahoga County sheriff's office was not all that interested in decisively nailing down all the details alleged in the Taylor letter; O'Donnell seems to have accepted with a mere shrug of his shoulders that his Geauga County counterparts could not find a death certificate. Anna Nigrin's husband,
Gottlieb, however, died in 1930 of diabetes; and there is record of his death in Geauga County. Obviously, a widow with a young son—then twelve or thirteen—would find it extremely difficult to manage a farm by herself; so, shortly after Gottlieb's death, Anna married her second husband, Charles Zak. (There is a record of the Nigrin-Zak marriage in Cuyahoga County.) The record of her accidental death is, therefore, to be found under “Zak,” not “Nigrin.” When the sheriff's men did not find a death certificate under Nigrin, they obviously looked no further.

The only part of the Nettie Taylor letter that Al Dolezal came close to confirming was the unknown fate of Anna's son, Joseph Allan Nigrin. Uncle Al had no idea what happened to him. Taylor alleges that Joseph came to Cleveland from Chicago in April 1938, planning to stay with his uncle Frank while he cleaned up his mother's affairs and that he had never been seen again. At least part of her account makes sense, even if it cannot be conclusively verified. Joseph would have been fourteen at the time of his mother's death and, therefore, incapable of clearing up anything connected to the family estate legally. That he would come to Cleveland from Chicago in 1938 at the age of twenty-two to do so is also clearly plausible. It is not much of a reach to assume that Joseph may have joined his father's relatives in Illinois, from where Nettie Taylor had mailed her letter, after the death of his mother. In 1938, he would have been at least twenty-one and thus in a position to act legally in regard to his parents' estate. But he did not, as Nettie Taylor alleges—and as Al Dolezal seems to confirm—vanish without a trace after April 1938. There was no mysterious disappearance that could be laid at his Uncle Frank's feet. The unspoken but clearly inferred allegation that Frank Dolezal had probably murdered his nephew is simply untrue. Joseph returned to Geauga County, though it is virtually impossible to ascertain when, and married Mildred Souvey. (If Joseph did have relatives living in Illinois, he seems to have severed his connections with them completely at this point for reasons unknown.) Joseph and Mildred Nigrin had two children: Gertrude Ann (dubbed Sue by relatives and friends, since her father called her Susie-Q), born in 1939, and Joseph Allan II, born in 1942. Sadly, Joseph Nigrin died of cancer in 1945, at the age of twenty-eight.

In the summer of 2004, I spoke to the absolutely flabbergasted Sue Nigrin Marks on the phone. Since she was only six when her father, Joseph, died, she remembered little about him; she knew virtually nothing of her grandparents Gottlieb and Anna Nigrin, beyond their names. She still harbored some extremely vague memories of the name “Dolezal” floating about in family lore, but the history of Frank (her great uncle) and his connection to the Kingsbury Run murders came as an utterly shocking surprise. I subsequently
set up a phone meeting between Mary Dolezal and Sue Marks, and the two have eagerly—and with a certain sense of awe—traded family photos, names, and stories. In the 1930s, a series of tragedies had quite literally blasted their family tree apart. Now, almost three quarters of a century later, two women—neither of whom had known previously the other existed—gathered up the shattered branches.

No doubt, Nettie Taylor believed everything she wrote to the sheriff (What conceivable reasons could she have had for lying?), and O'Donnell, aided by the press, clearly used the contents of that letter to strengthen his case against Frank Dolezal. Nothing was ever stated publicly or directly, and no charges were ever leveled, but the inference was clear: Dolezal must be guilty of the torso killings, for he had allegedly murdered members of his own family in the same viciously gruesome manner. But the truth about the deaths of both Anna Nigrin and her son, Joseph, proved far more poignant than the surviving lurid myth of murder. A fourteen-year-old boy had accidentally hit his mother with an automobile, and he had to carry with him the impossibly heavy burden that he was responsible for her death until his own passing a mere fourteen years later.

Afterword

G
AYLORD
S
UNDHEIM

C
ATHLEEN
A. C
ERNY
, M.D.

B
y now you
are aware that Eliot Ness had a secret suspect in the torso killings investigation, a man by the name of Gaylord Sundheim. In his first book on the topic,
In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland's Torso Murders,
James Badal outlined how he concluded that Gaylord Sundheim and Francis E. Sweeney were one and the same. After establishing Sundheim was really Sweeney, the next question naturally is, “Was Francis Sweeney the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run?” It is a fascinating proposition, but not a question a forensic psychiatrist like me can answer. “Did Francis Sweeney suffer from a mental illness?” Yet another question I am unable to answer. “So why keep reading?” you are asking yourselves. “What does this psychiatrist have to offer?” I can explain a bit about forensic psychiatry and the usual roles of forensic psychiatrists in criminal contexts. I also hope to give some insights into the possible mental illness of Eliot Ness's secret suspect and whether his known history contains any indicators of violence risk.

I want to start with a disclaimer. Psychiatrists must practice in accordance with ethical guidelines and standards. The 2009 American Psychiatric Association's
The Principles of Medical Ethics with Annotations Especially Applicable to Psychiatry
provides the following instruction: “On occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his or her expertise about psychiatric issues in general. However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.”

In a way, Francis Sweeney falls under this guideline. Through the writings of James Badal and others, Sweeney was brought into the public consciousness as a torso killer suspect. In fact, Sweeney is named as a suspect on a display at the National Museum of Crime and Punishment in Washington, D.C. He
died more than ten years before my birth, so I've obviously never personally evaluated him. In addition, there are a limited number of historical documents for me to review. Medical records are especially scarce. It would, therefore, be unethical for me to offer any definitive mental health diagnoses here. That Sweeney is long deceased does provide some room to maneuver with regard to the ethical standards of my profession. It allows for “psychohistory,” the application of psychological models in historical research.

There is also another ethical consideration. Sweeney has living descendents. Because of the stigma associated with mental illness, not to mention the stigma of being a suspect in one of the most notorious unsolved serial murder cases of all time, I want to be as sensitive to the remaining family members as possible. For that reason, I will create a little psychological distance from Francis E. Sweeney by using Eliot Ness's pseudonym, Gaylord Sundheim, for him.

For the purposes of this “analysis,” I relied on the source material James J. Badal gathered during the writing of his books on the torso killer.
¹
Badal obtained copies of actual historical documents, including birth certificates, death certificates, divorce proceedings, probate court papers, postcards from Francis Sweeney/Sundheim to Eliot Ness, and correspondence between individuals working for Ohio's Veterans Administration. I summarized all of the documents in the same way I would for a modern forensic assessment (see the appendix). If the copies or writing were unclear in any way, I've indicated so in the summary rather than guessing at the content. Evidence from these historical documents supports all of my statements about Sweeney/Sundheim.

A little background on forensic psychiatry will help you understand the limitations of what I can say about Gaylord Sundheim and give an appreciation for the work forensic psychiatrists do. I am not the world's foremost authority on forensic psychiatry. My intent is not to describe every aspect and nuance of the field but only to convey some general information about forensic psychiatry.

I am willing to bet that most of what you think you know about forensic psychiatry comes from the world of fiction. That's not a criticism! I was drawn to my career path by popular culture. More specifically, I wanted to be Clarice Starling from Thomas Harris's
Silence of the Lambs.
I had great visions of joining the FBI and using my knowledge of psychopathology to track down cunning serial killers. Even now, I watch
Law & Order: SVU
and long to be Dr. Emil Skoda or Dr. George Huang with their skillful criminal profiles and direct assistance to the police. Although the reality of forensic psychiatry and psychology is not nearly as glamorous and exciting as that seen on TV or in the movies (most of the time—there are exceptions!), it is a fascinating field and its practitioners provide valuable services.