Though Murder Has No Tongue (8 page)

Apparently, some unidentified members of the press corps decided it might be a good idea to check with Peter Merylo and ask what he thought of all this. After all, the torso murders had been the exclusive property of the Cleveland Police Department since the beginning, whether one officially marked that beginning at September 1934 or September 1935. Merylo had worked the case virtually full time since September 1936 under the guidance of Safety Director
Eliot Ness. And the police had repeatedly come up empty; the most massive investigation in city history had seemingly crashed against an impregnable wall of mystery. Yet the county sheriff's office, with the aid of Pat Lyons, had blown the case open in a bit less than a year. Though the
Press
reported on July 6 that Merylo was “angered by the sheriff's intrusion into his specialty,” the wily detective played his cards carefully and close to the vest—at least, for the time being. He pointed out to the
Plain Dealer
that Dolezal's alleged assertion that he had been drinking with Flo Polillo the night of January 25 could not possibly be true, since then-coroner Pearce had determined she had been dead two to three days before January 26, when her partial remains were found. At this point, Merylo's shot across the bow did little damage to the sheriff's case, but the veteran cop was silently and deliberately arming his torpedoes.

F
RIDAY
, J
ULY
7

That evening, Sheriff O'Donnell announced with great fanfare that he had obtained a confession—at least a confession of sorts. “Dolezal said he killed Mrs. Polillo and I believe him,” Pat Lyons told the
Plain Dealer.
“Suspect Says He Struck Woman with Fist When She Threatened Him with Butcher Knife in Quarrel,” proclaimed the
Press.
Deputy Harry S. Brown, Chief Deputy Clarence M. Tylicki, and Chief Jailer Michael F. Kilbane had subjected Dolezal to a continuous and brutally intense interrogation—no less than forty hours, according to the
Cleveland News
—since his arrest two days before, and the suspect had finally broken. “We were in my room drinking Friday night. . . . She was all dressed up and wanted to go out. She wanted some money. She grabbed for $10 I had in my pocket. I argued with her because she tried to take some money from me before. . . . She came at me with a butcher knife. . . . Yes, I hit her [Flo Polillo] with my fist,” the
Plain Dealer
reported the next day. “She fell into the bathroom and hit her head against the bathtub. I thought she was dead. I put her in the bathtub. Then I took the knife—the small one, not the large one—and cut off her head. Then I cut off her legs. Then her arms.” (The
Press
also “quoted” Dolezal's narrative; and although the story is the same, the wording is rather different, thus raising a significant issue: how accurate were these reporters when it came to quoting a source? Just how rigorous—or casual—were press standards when it came to the use of quotation marks? The problem is further compounded in this case by the suspect's reportedly very poor command of the English language; by all accounts from friends and family, he spoke broken English at best. Just whose words were those that the eager press establishment was quoting?) Dolezal placed this deadly confrontation at 2
A.M
.
on January 25, the day before the initial set of her remains was discovered. Following his confession, the sheriff and his men whisked their prisoner off to the lakeshore at East 49th just so he could point to the exact spot where he allegedly tossed Flo Polillo's head into the frigid waters; then they headed back to Hart Manufacturing so he could similarly indicate where he had deposited the produce baskets containing the initial set of Polillo's body parts. That evening, Cleveland's press corps got their first look at the alleged Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run—the monstrous fiend who had terrorized the inner city for four years, given Cleveland a black eye in the national press, and stumped Ness and his legion of detectives and other law enforcement personnel. The most massive investigation in Cleveland history had resulted in the arrest of a short, stocky man in a sweat-stained shirt who gazed blankly into space as the assembled photographers snapped his picture.

The main problem with the Dolezal confession was that the rest of his story simply did not match the documented and widely publicized details of the Polillo murder. After carefully packing some of her remains in produce baskets and depositing his handiwork in the snow behind the manufacturing company, Dolezal supposedly told his captors that he transported the remaining pieces of her corpse to the foot of East 49th, where he unceremoniously tossed them into Lake Erie. But it had been widely reported that the second set of Polillo's body parts had been located at 1419 Orange on February 7; and, working cautiously behind the scenes so as avoid attracting the attention of either Sheriff O'Donnell or Chief of Police George Matowitz, Merylo pointed out to the press that Dolezal could not have disposed of Flo Polillo's remains in Lake Erie on the night of January 26, 1936, in the manner alleged because the biting winter cold had frozen lake waters well beyond the breakwall. All reporters had to do was check with the U.S. Weather Bureau to verify the claim. The press also reported that Dolezal had claimed he burned Flo Polillo's clothing, save for her coat and shoes; those, he is alleged to have insisted, he left behind the Hart Manufacturing Company building on East 20th with the first set of her remains. If that were the case, why weren't they found? They don't appear in either of the two official photographs of the scene, nor are they mentioned in any of the surviving police reports. Merylo wryly reflected on the situation in his memoirs: “This was my first experience where a man is making a confession to a murder or any other serious crime and does not know the details of the crime which he is alleged to have committed.” Thus, at the very moment the juggernaut began rolling inexorably forward and gathering speed, the wheels started to fall off. “There are some discrepancies between what Dolezal says he did and what are known facts in the Polillo case,” the sheriff acknowledged to the
Plain Dealer.
“We want to get a confession that will
hold up in court before we place any charges against him.” According to the
Press,
the sheriff was far more specific. “But I still want him to confess that he actually murdered Mrs. Polillo.” Though serious allegations of mistreatment at the hands of the sheriff and his deputies would materialize later, at this point there was no way for the reading public to tell what had happened to Frank Dolezal behind the jailhouse walls in the two days since his arrest. But some of the wording in the
Press
made it clear that he must have been subjected to a horrendous ordeal: “questioned all night” (July 6); “the suspect . . . has been grilled for two days,” “suspect is weakening under the long hours of grilling” (July 7); “the questioning continued thus, in relays” (July 8). According to the
Cleveland News
on July 6, Dolezal endured “more than twenty hours of intermittent grilling”; and the
Plain Dealer
casually informed its readers that the prisoner had not been allowed to sleep from the time he was arrested on July 5 until 9:00
P.M
. on July 7. It was a different time, and law enforcement
operated under a much looser set of rules than it does in the early twenty-first century. The rights of possible defendants didn't count for much, and obtaining a confession by any possible means was often the norm.

Western Reserve University chemist Dr. Enrique Ecker (kneeling) looks for bloodstains on the bathtub in Frank Dolezal's apartment. Also present are Sheriff Martin L. O'Donnell (second from left) and Head Jailer Michael Kilbane (fourth from left).
Cleveland Press
Archives, Cleveland State University.

Dolezal added a nail to his own coffin when he finally “admitted” that he socialized and drank with Edward Andrassy and Rose Wallace (the tentative identification assigned to victim no. 8). Though the
Plain Dealer
reported that the case against Dolezal had obviously been strengthened by his admission, the fissures in the dam continued to spread. Edward Andrassy's father, Joseph, insisted to the
Press,
“I never saw that fellow [Frank Dolezal] in my life.” (The official assumption was that the two were at least acquainted.) Also, without providing any explanation, the
Plain Dealer
cautiously indicated, “There appear to be some question [
sic
] as to whether Dolezal is the ‘mad butcher of Kingsbury Run' and is responsible for all twelve of the torsos discovered in Cleveland between September, 1935, and last August.” In the meantime, Sheriff O'Donnell occupied himself by arranging for his prisoner to take a lie detector test at the police department in East Cleveland (the only municipality to own one), lining up chemist Dr. Enrique E. Ecker of Western Reserve University to validate G. V. Lyons's analysis of the supposed bloodstains in Dolezal's bathroom, and checking hospital records to see if the scar on Dolezal's arm could be linked to the knife fight Edward Andrassy told his sister about in the days before his death.

S
ATURDAY
, J
ULY
8

Frank Dolezal amended his story: as the
Press
so quaintly put it, “Dolezal Amplifies Confession.” It seems he was mistaken when he initially told his interrogators that he had dumped Flo Polillo's head into Lake Erie along with other parts of her body. Upon further reflection, he remembered that he had actually burned her head under an East 34th bridge after pouring gasoline over it. The press dutifully reported these changes in the basic story, but the stark contrast between the two versions of the head's fate passed by without editorial comment—at least for the time being. The sheriff and some of his deputies immediately and, apparently, in relative secrecy—the few photographs that document the excursion show only Dolezal, the sheriff, and his men—whisked their prisoner over to East 34th so he could point out the exact spot where this minor conflagration had taken place. A half-hour search turned up only a few bones, later identified by Coroner Gerber as having come from a dog, cat, or sheep.

Dolezal's
adamant refusal to admit he had been responsible for any of the torso killings other than Flo Polillo's murder raised the issue of whether those victims may have been dispatched and disarticulated by someone else, that Frank Dolezal's guilt only extended to the death of victim no. 3, Flo Polillo. Could there be two perpetrators? Consequently, Coroner Sam Gerber announced that he would restudy all the autopsy protocols and related evidence since the killings began. Gerber was something of a Johnny-comelately to the Kingsbury Run murders. He had been elected to the coroner's office in 1936. The first six victims—seven if one includes the Lady of the Lake killed in 1934—had been murdered on A. J. Pearce's watch; and, thanks to his activist, hands-on approach, Gerber's predecessor had already placed his own indelible stamp on all the evidence in the coroner's office related to those murdered during his tenure. The groundbreaking torso clinic had also been Pearce's brainchild, not Gerber's. By publicly announcing his intention to reexamine all the killings—not just those that had occurred since his election—Gerber was, in a sense, taking ownership of the entire murderous cycle. Whether he realized it or not, his first public statements tended to damage the sheriff's case against Frank Dolezal. “Our records show some slight differences in the manner in which Mrs. Polillo's body was dismembered and the manner in which others were,” he told the
Plain Dealer,
“but I still feel that the murderer of Mrs. Polillo is responsible for all the crimes. While it is possible that two men committed the crimes, it is unlikely that one would pick up where the other left off or that the manner of dismembering would be so similar. It is more probable that, as the murder series continued, the torso murderer changed his style.” Dolezal's refusal to admit he killed the other victims now became an obstacle for the sheriff. O'Donnell's first step was to shore up Dolezal's confession to Flo Polillo's murder and then try to link him to the others, but the notion that he was only responsible for the death of Polillo had been established and would stubbornly persist.

Always mindful of how useful city newspapers could be in publicizing—even supporting—his crime-battling initiatives, Eliot Ness courted the press with the practiced finesse of a Hollywood press agent. Perhaps taking a page from the safety director's playbook, Sheriff O'Donnell now began trying to exploit and manipulate the press to the advantage of both his office and its case against Frank Dolezal. Unfortunately, he lacked the safety director's suave style, and his approach to reporters was considerably more heavy-handed. To O'Donnell's credit, he staged some of the scenes in the unfolding Dolezal drama for maximum public effect, allowing reporters and photographers full access to his activities; but when newspapermen turned too nosy or belligerent in his estimation, or when he could not control the situation,
he turned defensive, often displaying a petulance that simply convinced the press corps that he was hiding something, that here was something deliberately left unsaid worth digging for. One of O'Donnell's more successful operations, however, was a very visible, highly publicized return visit to the scene of the supposed crime, Frank Dolezal's former residence at 1908 Central Avenue, for a thorough reexamination of its bathroom. His men tore out the bathtub and examined the stains and filth underneath and along the bathroom walls. Western Reserve University chemist Enrique E. Ecker scrapped samples of the various stains for further analysis. The coroner's office promised to search through the collected evidence of the Polillo murder to see if there was anything with her blood on it that could be compared to the samples gathered at the Central Avenue apartment; there were even some rather pointed comments about exhuming her body if necessary.