Though Murder Has No Tongue (16 page)

The two pre-autopsy photographs showing the deep, narrow wound on Frank Dolezal's neck. They were taken eighteen hours after his alleged suicide. If Dolezal had died from asphyxiation due to hanging from a cloth noose for a couple of minutes, the mark would have been faint and would have disappeared long before these pictures were taken. Courtesy of the Cuyahoga County Coroner's Office.

When Mark and I made our initial visits in the winter of 2003–04, the archivist at the morgue had gathered every surviving photograph, document, and artifact related to the arrest and
death of Frank Dolezal that lay hidden away in the coroner's old files. Some photos were duplicates of police or press shots familiar to anyone who has studied the Kingsbury Run murders; others, however, proved entirely new. (A substantial number showed Dolezal in the custody of the county sheriff's men, thus again raising the admittedly rather minor issue of who had taken them: the press, law enforcement personnel?) Some photos were difficult to identify, in spite of their huge size. One showed what looked like bone fragments. What were they? Dolezal's broken ribs? It was hard to be certain, because there was nothing else in the picture, no measurement scale that gave any indication of size. It was impossible to tell how large or how small these bones were.

One particularly shocking photograph—an eleven-by-fourteen-inch copy of a shot that had made it into the pages of the
Press
in August 1939—set off every alarm bell imaginable. The size and clarity of the original print revealed things that the cheap paper and the relatively poor photo reproduction techniques of the time had obscured. Frank Dolezal lay on the jail floor, his body partly covered by a sheet. His eyes were open and glazed; a hand resting on his head had turned his face toward the right of the picture. The noose with which he had allegedly hanged himself looked as if it had been hurriedly placed on his left shoulder, apparently for the sake of staging a powerfully compelling photograph—a circumstance that strongly suggests that a
Press
photographer had indeed taken the original picture. In the sheeting or toweling of the makeshift noose, however, curled a length of thin rope or twine. A second and much smaller photo of the death, taken at the same time but from a different angle, not only revealed the hitherto unnoticed piece of twine but showed that it seemed to be a part of an intricate series of lengths of rope or cord wrapped in sheeting. (See page 87. It is almost impossible to determine what this contrivance actually is, given the size of the original; the image degrades badly under magnification.) There was a single, fleeting, reference to the twine in one of the newspaper stories, but this curious rope failed to appear in any other photographic record of the scene, nor was it ever referred to or even mentioned in any of the surviving paperwork covering the case. Newspaper photographs—copies of which were among the morgue collection—showed a length of towels or rags hanging from the clothes hook in the death cell. If the rather fragmentary newspaper coverage of the inquest could be taken at face value, no one ever mentioned that twine during those official proceedings; all the testimony centered on “cleaning rags”—how Dolezal had gotten a hold of them, how he had secreted them. Yet that mysterious length of rope seemed more consistent with the wound on his neck than did the noose of rags. Why did only two photographs show it? What happened to this piece of rope? Coroner
Gerber had, somewhat reluctantly, convened the inquest on August 26, two days after Dolezal's death. For over six decades, the only surviving accounts of those proceedings available to the public remained the fragmentary coverage in Cleveland's newspapers—stories that offered only a dim reflection of what transpired during two solid days of occasionally explosive testimony.

A piece of the noose hanging from the cell hook. It has obviously been placed there to stage a compelling photograph. All the visible edges seem frayed, not freshly cut. Courtesy of the Cuyahoga County Coroner's Office.

In spring and early summer 2000, Marjorie Merylo Dentz, sent me copies of all her father's papers relating to the case—a staggering pile of documents over a foot high containing police reports spanning several years, tip letters, the manuscripts for two projected but unpublished books, close to one hundred
photographs (many unseen by the public for over sixty years), and various other pieces of official documentation. As the lead detective on the Kingsbury Run murders, Merylo was present during the inquest, though he did not testify, and his papers fleshed out some significant details of the proceedings and recorded his negative assessment of some of the principal players involved. Those memoirs pointed to the hitherto unknown lawsuits buried in the archives of Cuyahoga County court proceedings: two causes of action undertaken by Frank Dolezal's brother Charles against the county, Sheriff Martin L. O'Donnell, and several others involved in his brother's arrest and death. Both sets of documents ended with the tantalizing statement, “Settled at defendants' cost.” Exactly what that meant remained unclear. At the time, no one still alive in the Dolezal family seemed to know of the double-barreled legal assault initiated by Frank's brother. Did money change hands? If so, why didn't any of Charles's descendants know about it? Were the actions regarded at the time by local officials simply as nuisance suits to be settled as quickly as possible, or in all this legal sparring was there an implied recognition of Frank Dolezal's innocence? Or, perhaps more important, was the county acknowledging, however indirectly, that his death may not have been a simple suicide? Mark and I began to shop our concerns and doubts about his death around to various individuals in local officialdom whose training potentially made them far better judges of what we thought we were seeing in those revealing old photographs than we were. Everyone was polite, pleasant, and cooperative; but . . . was it a tinge of paranoia on our part, or were we being ever so elegantly stonewalled with a nod and a smile? And why? What was the point of being evasive? The crime—if that is what Dolezal's death actually had been—was nearly three quarters of a century in the past. Everyone we talked with conceded that, based on all the new recently unearthed evidence, Dolezal had been subjected to a brutal old-fashioned “third degree” interrogation by his captors—that he had been physically abused by a person or persons unknown and that his rights as a potential defendant, even by the far looser standards of the 1930s, had, indeed, been seriously violated. (An individual in the Cleveland Police crime lab—who, naturally enough under the circumstances, requested anonymity—even went so far as to speculate that Dolezal had been driven to take his own life by all the mistreatment meted out to him by his captors.) But no one seemed willing to question Coroner Gerber's suicide verdict; it was allowed to stand unchallenged.

Samuel Gerber was, of course, a Cleveland icon and legend; he had been Cuyahoga County coroner from 1936 to 1986. For many locals in and out of government, Gerber and the coroner's office were inseparable. His image,
however, had already been marred by at least one major black eye: his high-handed and arrogant behavior during the Sheppard murder case of 1954. And during the Butcher's reign of terror, one of the county pathologists,
Reuben Straus, had committed a major blunder during the autopsy of victim no. 11, a female, and Coroner Gerber had blithely signed off on his wildly inaccurate results in the official autopsy protocol. Straus had judged the death a probable homicide, though he could not be certain about the exact cause. The disarticulated remains of the victim ultimately wound up in the medical school of Western Reserve University, where anatomy professor T. Windgate Todd examined them closely. This was not a legitimate torso victim, the anatomist later fumed to David Cowles, head of the Cleveland Police Department's Scientific Investigation Bureau and member of Safety Director Ness's inner circle. Not only had the unidentified woman been dead before disarticulation, she had already been embalmed. Whoever had placed her remains in the trash dump at the corner of East 9th and Lake Shore Drive had taken the time to cut up a body that had been previously prepared at an undertaking establishment. This tale of apparent sloppiness run amok in the coroner's office was never leaked to the press or even made public until 1983, when David Cowles talked about it in a taped interview with police lieutenant Tom Brown and Florence Schwein, the first director-curator of the Cleveland Police Historical Society Museum; but certainly such a serious blunder in such a high-profile case could not be kept entirely secret at the time. There had to be some who knew, whether in the county coroner's office or the Western Reserve Medical School, but no one seemed willing to say anything publicly. Was there still some sort of local good-ole-boy network left over from the Great Depression intact in the city in the twenty-first century, or was official Cleveland still simply unwilling to compromise Gerber's shining reputation further by conceding that in 1939 he had committed a couple of major mistakes in judgment in regard to one of the city's most notorious cases? There were no obvious answers to those troubling questions; and for the moment, at least, we were stymied.

A stone-faced coroner, Dr. Samuel Gerber, holding the alleged instrument of Frank Dolezal's suicide for the assembled newspaper photographers. Note that none of the edges look as if they had been freshly cut with a knife.
Cleveland Press
Archives, Cleveland State University.

Then in winter 2004, the archivist at the morgue located the original record of the inquest testimony, all 220 elegantly bound pages of it. Included with the impressively hefty tome was a sheaf of other extraordinary papers—the depositions taken by Cleveland police, late in the afternoon of Frank Dolezal's death, from everyone present and otherwise involved in his alleged suicide and its immediate aftermath. This was a find of enormous significance; the material added up to a huge missing piece in the puzzle that no one had seen since 1939. With our enthusiasm rekindled, Mark and I obsessively pored over copies of the original documents for weeks—reading and rereading, noting questions in the margins, underlining key bits of testimony, and comparing the various statements offered by different witnesses. It was a daunting task; the combined total of all the typed material easily topped 250 pages.
Suddenly, the alarm bells that had sounded in 1999 when Rebecca McFarland and Andrew Schug first saw those autopsy photos became a jarring cacophony. The tension present in that room was immediately obvious, and gradually some of the discrepancies in the testimony only vaguely hinted at by the original 1939 newspaper coverage began to take shape. There seemed to be something sinister flowing just beneath the surface. But what?