Though Murder Has No Tongue (9 page)

At the time of his arrest on July 5, Dolezal had been sharing his apartment for a month with Harold Kiersner, a twenty-three-old ex-con who had served two years in Leavenworth for liquor-law violations. On July 8, Kiersner wrote an article for the
Press
recounting his experiences with his recently arrested roommate. (Though Kiersner's name appears at the top of the piece, it is extremely doubtful he actually wrote it. Attributing the article to him was probably an editorial ploy to increase circulation; an article actually written by someone who had lived with the accused would obviously be seen as a major scoop.) “I slept with him the night before he was arrested for the torso murders,” the article declares. “I don't know whether he killed that woman. Sometimes I don't think he did. He liked a pretty face, but he never did go for women.” Kiersner painted a disturbing portrait of a troubled man who drank at least twenty bottles of beer a day, angered easily when intoxicated, and was overwhelmed by frequent crying jags. Almost as an afterthought, Kiersner noted, “He speaks English very poorly.” Again, the issue of Dolezal's command of the language becomes crucial. It's far more than a matter of whether newspapers were quoting him accurately or rewriting his utterances in Standard English. Did he fully understand the nature of his interrogators' questions? Also, his signature later appears on some extremely significant, not to say incriminating, documents; did he actually understand what he was signing?

In the midst of all this excitement, veteran
Cleveland News
reporter Howard Beaufait pulled off a major scoop. He seemed to enjoy access to some levers of power beyond the reach of his colleagues: in the early hours of the morning, he was allowed to spend fifteen minutes with Frank Dolezal. Rather than merely outline the sheriff's case against him as his colleagues from rival papers had done, Beaufait gave his readers a graphic portrait of a pathetic, terrified, and deeply confused man. “I saw a man on the verge of hysteria,” he wrote. “He sat in his small, hot cell at County Jail, wringing a dirty handkerchief in his coarse, thick hands. . . . As he sat in his cell, his watery blue eyes heavy from a sleepless night, Dolezal drank glass after glass of water. . . . He was drenched in perspiration. It came through his soiled blue work shirt in dark spots. . . . His eyes are filled with fear, and he moves his head from side to side in quick, nervous jerks.” In a clear echo of the vain behavior Pat Lyons described on the day of Dolezal's arrest, Beaufait commented, “He seemed rather ashamed of his ragged appearance. He said he wanted a shave and a haircut and a clean shirt. He was wearing dark, unpressed trousers and white kid shoes with fancy, pointed toes. These were soiled. He looked at them frequently and tried to tuck them out of sight under his bunk. Now he looks at all men as if they were his enemies. Each stranger who enters his cell brings a threat to his safety.” “It is a curious fact that rarely does a murderer look like one,” Beaufait mused in closing. “This is particularly true of Frank Dolezal. If he hadn't said so, you would find it rather preposterous to believe that he could turn his humble home into a slaughter house.”

Cuyahoga County sheriff Martin L. O'Donnell. He was a friend and close political ally of Congressman Martin L. Sweeney. He had formerly been mayor of Garfield Heights, a Cleveland suburb.
Cleveland Press
Archives, Cleveland State University.

S
UNDAY
, J
ULY
9

“Woman Says She Jumped Seeing Knife” proclaimed the lead of a page one
Plain Dealer
story. A twenty-two-year-old—later identified as a black prostitute named Lillian Jones—insisted that she had been in Frank Dolezal's East 22nd apartment a week before his arrest and had been forced to jump out of the window when he came at her with a knife. “I was in Dolezal's room when he came at me with a knife. I jumped out of a second-story window to get away from him. The heel of one of my shoes was broken when I landed.” Though the morning daily wondered how the woman could hurl herself out of a second-story window and fall to the ground without breaking anything else,
Sheriff O'Donnell seized on the sensational tale as further evidence that Dolezal was connected to the killings. The story “strengthens my suspicions that Dolezal was connected with other torso murders,” he insisted to the
Plain Dealer.

M
ONDAY
, J
ULY
10

It would be a very busy day, marked by stunning revelations and troubling questions. Sheriff O'Donnell began the morning by showing reporters a letter he had received from Mrs. Nettie Taylor of Wheaton, Illinois. The woman, who identified herself as Frank Dolezal's sister-in-law, alleged that his sister Mrs. Anna Nigrin had apparently been murdered in July 1931 on the Geauga County farm near Chardon, Ohio, that she shared with her husband. When her son, Joseph, came to Cleveland from Chicago seven years later to clear up details related to his mother's estate, he stayed with his uncle Frank—never to be seen again! (There is some confusion here. The
Cleveland News
reported that the letter had actually come from Sheriff E. R. Burkholder of Wheaton, Illinois.) The implications of all this remained unstated; clearly, though, O'Donnell saw Nettie Taylor's suggestions of a mysterious death and an unexplained disappearance in the family as further proof that Frank Dolezal was a vicious murderer. But, cautioned the
Press,
“Neither the sheriff's office in Chardon nor the county prosecutor could find any record of the death of a Mrs. Nigrin.” Alarm bells of some sort should have sounded at this point, but they apparently didn't. (See the epilogue for a full discussion of the Taylor letter and the fates of Anna and Joseph Nigrin.)

The real bombshell of the morning, however, was the sheriff's announcement that Frank Dolezal had made two unsuccessful suicide attempts overnight. At around 12:30
A.M
., he tried to hang himself with his shirt from a hook in the wall of his cell, only to be foiled when Chief Jailer Michael Kilbane discovered him and pulled him down, ripping the shirt in the process. Reportedly, Dolezal tried again at about 4:30
A.M
., this time fashioning a noose from his shoelaces. Apparently, however, they weren't sufficiently strong to bear his weight; Deputies Nick Miller and John Mulroy found him lying, stunned, on the cell floor. Again, though no public statements were made, the unspoken subtext was clear: withering under an unrelenting series of nonstop interrogations, a guilty, desperate man had decided to end it all rather than face the rigors of the justice system. (Among the coroner's papers, there is a signed deposition dated July 10 in which Dolezal admits his attempts at suicide, but the document remains troubling for several reasons. Had he been coerced into signing it? Given his questionable command
of English, did he even understand what he was signing? Was it standard procedure to take such a deposition under the circumstances? If so, it would logically follow that there would be some sort of official form. The existing document, however, is not an official form; it is simply a typed statement with the heading “Criminal Courts Building” appearing at the top.)

But the story that Dolezal would be given a lie detector test in the late afternoon under the stewardship of the East Cleveland Police Department became the most newsworthy event of the day. The east side municipality owned an early version of the Keeler polygraph—named for Leonard Keeler of Northwestern University, the man who had perfected the machine and was widely regarded as the best in the business at administering the tests and interpreting the results. At around 3:00
P.M
., sheriff's deputies escorted a dazed Frank Dolezal out of the county jail to an official car for the drive out to the municipality on the city's east side. Until this ceremoniously staged appearance, reporters hadn't had many opportunities to get a look at the sheriff's prisoner; staring vacantly ahead and stumbling slightly, Dolezal allowed himself to be steered toward the waiting automobile while flashes exploded around him as
press photographers jockeyed for position. Suddenly, alarmed murmurs began to spread through the crowd of onlookers. Where had the clearly visible black eye come from, and why was he holding his side in obvious discomfort and pain? Dolezal had injured himself, explained the sheriff, when he had fallen on his face during his second suicide attempt. But the
Press
was dubious. “This seemed unlikely in view of the instinctive and automatic reflex action which makes anyone falling forward throw his arms out before him to protect his face.” And when reporters realized that Dolezal's shirt—the same sweat-stained garment he had been wearing since his arrest—was intact, they began to wonder openly why there was no sign of the rip that had supposedly occurred during the first attempt at taking his life. Even as it relayed the sheriff's tale of his two suicide attempts, the
Press
looked at the report with a jaundiced and skeptical eye. “Not completely convincing,” it declared.

Frank Dolezal being escorted to a car that will take him to East Cleveland for a lie detector test. This photograph was taken hours after his two suicide attempts. His pain is palpable.
Cleveland Press
Archives, Cleveland State University.

Frank Dolezal pathetically tries to hide from newspaper reporters and photographers.
Cleveland Press
Archives, Cleveland State University.

Once in East Cleveland, the sheriff and his men were greeted by that city's police chief, L. G. Corlett. Dolezal was escorted to a basement soundproof room, where Paul F. Beck, a recent graduate of the Western Reserve University
Law School, would administer the test. The formal questioning started around 3:30
P.M
. and continued uninterrupted until shortly after 6:00, at which point everyone took a supper break. The grueling interrogation began again at 8:15 and ran until Dolezal was returned to the Cuyahoga County jail at 10:30—a staggering five-and-a-half-hour ordeal. At first, Dolezal retracted his murder confession and insisted he had not killed Flo Polillo. When the machine indicated he was lying, he reverted to his initial claim that he had killed her when she came at him with a knife and had dismembered her corpse in his bathtub. Whenever the words “murder” or “blood” came up during the examination, Dolezal's “pulse and respiration jumped,” the
Press
reported the next day. According to Beck, the final results of this interrogation were clear. Frank Dolezal was, indeed, guilty of Flo Polillo's murder.

At the end of what had to be an extraordinarily exhausting day for the prisoner, Dolezal finally got some medical attention for the pain in his side. After duly examining him, the male nurse on duty couldn't find anything specific wrong with him, but he proceeded to tape his side anyway.

T
UESDAY
, J
ULY
11

The day began with Frank Dolezal finally receiving his first visitor—his sister-in-law's brother Patrolman Frank Vorell of the Cleveland Police Department. (Whether Sheriff O'Donnell allowed Vorell to see his prisoner because he was a relative or because he was a policeman is not clear. Though Cleveland's dailies took scant notice of the patrolman's appearance, Vorell would later provide damning testimony relevant to the sheriff office's treatment of Dolezal.) In a move calculated to head off any insanity defense on Dolezal's part, the sheriff had two psychiatrists, K. S. Kent and S. C. Lindsay, examine him for about an hour and a half. “Dolezal Ruled Not Insane after Psychiatrists' Test,” proclaimed the lead in the
Press.
O'Donnell now offered yet a third confession, a new version of what Dolezal had allegedly done with Flo Polillo's still missing head. It seems he had not thrown it into Lake Erie at the foot of East 49th as he had initially claimed, nor had he poured gasoline over it and burned it at East 34th; rather he had taken it to the WPA Lake Shore Drive project (on which he said he had been working) and discreetly buried it where he knew a steam shovel would further cover it with endless loads of dirt. O'Donnell lamented that trying to find it under those circumstances would be a typical needle-in-a-haystack proposition, so he regretfully called off the hunt.