Though Murder Has No Tongue (7 page)

Pat Lyons's children and grandchildren vigorously dispute Peter Merylo's account of his actions in the Ness report of April 2, 1940, arguing that the obnoxious, raucous behavior the detective described is totally out of keeping with the father and grandfather they remember (especially the man who penned the charming lyrics to a song called “Mary Not Contrary”) and further pointing out that Merylo harbored deep animosity against Pat Lyons for intruding in “his” investigation and being successful where he had failed. And there is some evidence to suggest that this could be, to a certain degree, the case. Merylo clearly saw the sheriff and his team as interlopers, and it was no secret that he could react with pit-bull ferocity when guarding what he perceived as his territory. (Pat Lyons gives due credit to Merylo in his memoirs for his talents as an investigator and his impressive arrest record; nothing in Peter Merylo's papers reciprocates that respect.) A newspaper article from early 1940 brands Lyons as the veteran cop's “arch-rival and favorite abomination.” A second, undated clipping describes a meeting between the two men, apparently in early 1940, during which Merylo reportedly lectured his rival on the inadequacy of his investigative methods. “You've got the wrong technique. Don't believe everything drunks tell you. Furthermore, I hope you know that you bungled up everything when you arrested Frank Dolezal.” Yet Merylo assured the press, “I bear the man no ill will. None whatsoever.” The political storm swirling around Pat Lyons's arrest, trial, and conviction on drunk driving charges in January 1940 further clouds and complicates an accurate assessment of Merylo's attitude toward him. Though the exact
circumstances leading to the arrest remain in dispute, Municipal Court judge Frank C. Phillips tossed out the original conviction when Lyons's attorney, Charles W. Sellers, produced sworn affidavits alleging that the two arresting officers had perjured themselves. Sheriff O'Donnell injected a heavy dose of local politics into the resulting legal wrangling when he wrote Lyons on June 22, 1940: “I considered your arrest and the flimsy circumstances which surrounded the charge as being the spleen of an envious police department [Peter Merylo?], whom you had bested in solving the Dolezal case. Further, when they [word illegible] before Detective Merylo, who questioned you on the Dolezal case rather than the traffic case, is positive proof that you were the victim of their jealousy.” A point well taken? Perhaps—but Martin O'Donnell accusing others of acting out of political motivation is a prime example of the proverbial pot calling the kettle black. Also, in 1940 Sheriff O'Donnell was heavily invested in the notion of Frank Dolezal's guilt, since the lawsuits Charles Dolezal brought were still being litigated and the integrity of the sheriff and his office clearly hung in the balance. And why did the sheriff wait almost six full months after Lyons's January arrest before writing this token of support to his former special deputy?

Pat Lyons's account of the events that precipitated Frank Dolezal's arrest is sketchy enough to suggest that he is, indeed, hiding or at least glossing over something; and the behavior Merylo describes and attributes to Lyons in his report to Ness—if true—would easily explain Lyons's seeming evasiveness. One must also consider the nature and ultimate purpose of the two manuscript accounts Merylo left behind. Though they were never published, both sets of his personal memoirs were intended for public consumption; therefore, his relative and somewhat uncharacteristic reticence to name names and provide specifics could be read as reflecting his desire to protect the reputations of those involved. The report of April 2, 1940, however, was an entirely different matter. It was an official police document specifically requested by his superior, Eliot Ness; and as such, it would probably never have been seen by anyone aside from the Ness circle and Chief of Police Matowitz. Every little detail had to be nailed down and fully explained. The chances that anyone else would ever see it were virtually nil. The notion that a detective of Peter Merylo's reputation and stature would lie knowingly in an official report to his superior—even though he did not particularly like Ness—is untenable, especially when the details of that report could have been so easily checked. But Merylo was repeating what others, specifically Helen Merrills, reported to him; and it is possible that the good proprietress of the Forest Café was simply misinterpreting some of what she was seeing.

On the one hand, the suggestion that Lyons was drunk when he came
into her place of business appears a couple of times in the Merylo report, and some of the behavior Mrs. Merrills described could only be attributed to intoxication. The charge of intoxication was obviously also central to Lyons's drunk driving arrest in 1940. And there were at least two other arrests for intoxication in his past—one in 1918 and another in 1933. Coincidentally, the later incident also involved charges of perjury on the part of the arresting officers. On the other hand, it is difficult to believe that anyone with a drinking problem could have conducted the sort of calculated investigation Lyons and his team had, while also keeping it out of the papers and away from the attention of the police department for so long. In his memoirs, Lyons states that he was careful never to say he was a policeman; he always went simply by his first name, as did the sheriff's deputies working with him. (In his report to Ness, however, Merylo does write that Helen Merrills saw a gold badge.) He adopted this strategy essentially for two reasons: outright fabrications and falsehoods can come back to haunt a careless investigator; and the people from whom he was trying to extract information lived in the destitute, run-down neighborhoods on the fringes of society and—given the nature of their lives, experiences, and color—were not about to trust the police. Thus, Lyons walked a thin line—presenting himself as an authority figure of some sort who was also a “regular guy” who could be counted on to spring for a round of drinks. It is possible to read at least some of the boisterous behavior that Mrs. Merrills reported to Merylo as a heavy-handed attempt on Lyons's part to ingratiate himself to the poor, black regulars that hung out at the Forest Café.

The Pat Lyons who survives in old newspaper stories and official documents, both public and private, is an imperfect reflection of the father and grandfather his family remembers. It was an important lesson, one I had already learned and of which I would be reminded several times during the course of my research. From all of this diverse and incomplete evidence, two seemingly different portraits of Pat Lyons emerge: on the one hand, a careless would-be detective who couldn't hold his liquor; on the other, a shrewd investigator trolling for significant information in the murky, dangerous swamps of tenement life in Depression-era Cleveland.

N
OTES

Frank Dolezal's
great-niece Mary Dolezal Satterlee provided the details relevant to Frank Dolezal's family background and his early days in Cleveland—as well of those of his brother Charles. Other details were culled from public documents, such as the city directories and government census reports.

When he died in 1958, Detective Peter Merylo left behind two extensive, unpublished manuscripts detailing his work on the Kingsbury Run murders. The longer of the two comes in at 155 typed legal-sized pages, and the dry formality of its prose strongly suggests that Merylo was the document's sole author. Though the second manuscript, 107 typed legal-sized pages, bears the name Frank Otwell—a
Cleveland News
reporter as well as Merylo's personal friend—on its first page, Merylo's hand is still evident; and Otwell's participation in this version may have been an attempt to lighten the rigidly official tone of the veteran cop's style, thus producing a far more reader-friendly account. Both of these manuscripts are part of the vast collection of documents related to the case in the possession of Peter Merylo's daughter Marjorie Merylo Dentz. Though most of these papers are copies of Merylo's official police reports, the assemblage also includes tip letters from a variety of sources, many of them unsigned, and other pieces of official and personal correspondence. Totaling well over two thousand pages of diverse material, the Merylo papers constitute the largest single collection of documents pertaining to the Kingsbury Run murders.

Pat Lyons's daughter, Carol Fitzgerald, graciously provided me with copies of all her father's papers dealing with his role in the torso investigation. Though nowhere near as voluminous as the Merylo collection, the random notes, lists of people to be interviewed, various letters, and Lyons's formal manuscript, “A Discussion of the So-called Torso Cases,” provide significant insight into the thinking behind his working methods and flesh out a considerable number of the significant details leading up to Frank Dolezal's arrest in July 1939. The song “Mary Not Contrary,” for which Lyons supplied lyrics, was composed by A. Leopold Richard and published by Legters Music Company of Chicago.

An extensive account of Pat Lyons's 1933 arrest for intoxication and being a “suspicious person” can be found in the clipping files of the
Cleveland Press
housed in the library of Cleveland State University. The document is not a published story clipped from the pages of the
Press;
rather it is a typed, three-page manuscript for a story that apparently was never printed.

Chapter 3

H
ISTORY THROUGH A
G
LASS
D
ARKLY

F
rank
Dolezal was arrested on Wednesday, July 5, 1939; on August 24 he would lie dead on the jailhouse floor. Until the beginning of the twenty-first century, the only record available to the public of what happened in the county jail on those hot summer days and during the rancorous aftermath would be the bits and pieces recorded in Cleveland's three daily newspapers—fragments of history hurriedly gathered to meet a deadline, with little, if any, in-depth investigation—offered to a public hungry for details. A predictable wave of local excitement and relief washed over the city after Sheriff Martin L. O'Donnell's public announcement on July 6 that the torso killer had finally been apprehended. The city was now safe from the elusive killer who had prowled through its neighborhoods and haunted its blighted interiors since late 1934. Clevelanders could now breathe their collective sigh of relief and celebrate the crack investigators under the sheriff's command who had finally tracked down the Butcher—a man O'Donnell luridly described to the
Cleveland News
as “gorilla-like”—and put him behind bars.

T
HURSDAY
, J
ULY
6, 1939

“Find Human Blood in Torso Hunt,” blared the headline in the
Press
that afternoon. Thus murder-weary Clevelanders first learned that the cycle of mutilation and blood-letting might finally be over. Sheriff Martin O'Donnell announced that a chemical analysis performed by G. V. Lyons—brother of Pat Lyons—of stains found on the walls and under the bathroom baseboard at the 1908 Central Avenue apartment where Dolezal had lived in August 1938 proved they were human blood. He then continued to outline what the
Plain Dealer
termed the “strong circumstantial case” that he and his office had built against Frank Dolezal so far. Allegedly, Dolezal's initial explanation for the telltale blood in his Central Avenue apartment was that he had bought a pig at the central market and had butchered it in his bathroom. When informed that
the central market did not sell pigs, he immediately insisted it was a chicken he had bought and killed. Though he had at first denied he had been acquainted with any of the torso victims, Dolezal ultimately confessed he had known Flo Polillo (victim no. 3) and had been drinking with her in his apartment the night before the first set of her remains turned up behind Hart Manufacturing, less than a block away, on January 26, 1936, thus potentially making him the last person to have seen her alive. Allegedly, Dolezal had borrowed “a large knife” from a neighbor and later returned it stained with human blood. He had suspiciously moved from his apartment to a Scranton Road address (to get cheaper rent, he insisted) on the near west side following the discovery of victims no. 11 and no. 12 in August 1938—just as Eliot Ness was sending teams of police and firemen to search the dilapidated dwellings in the run-down east side neighborhoods close to downtown—and had just as suspiciously moved back to the east side to 2491 East 22nd Street a few months before his arrest. In spite of his constant denials that he knew any of the Butcher's victims other than Flo Polillo, unidentified witnesses, most likely Dolezal's neighbors, had assured the sheriff's men that they had seen him with a man who strongly resembled the first officially recognized victim, Edward Andrassy, and another man, clearly a sailor. (Because of his distinctive tattoos, authorities had always surmised that the unidentified victim no. 4—discovered on June 5, 1936—may have been a navy man or, at the very least, a sailor.) He reportedly also had a “passionate craving for knives.” A thorough search of Dolezal's apartment had turned up a notebook filled with names and addresses, as well as a photo album from which pages had obviously been torn. According to the sheriff, Dolezal would not or could not offer any explanation for these missing pages. Finally, he had worked as a “sticker” and then a “stamper” in a slaughterhouse for three months twenty years before, apparently around 1918, thus potentially providing him with the necessary experience to disarticulate a human corpse with surgical precision. A very circumstantial case, indeed! But it all added up to an incriminating picture, and it was certainly a promising beginning. Dolezal, however, had so far confessed to nothing beyond the alleged facts that he had known Flo Polillo and had been drinking with her the night of January 25, the day before some of the pieces of her corpse turned up in the snow behind Hart Manufacturing on East 20th.