Though Murder Has No Tongue (17 page)

Gerber had convened the inquest into Frank Dolezal's death on Saturday, August 26, 1939, at 10:30
A.M
.—the day after the formal autopsy and two days following the bricklayer's death. The most obvious explanation for his initial reticence is that he saw no need for the formal procedure; his investigation of the scene at the county jail, coupled with statements from Sheriff O'Donnell and his deputies, had convinced him that Dolezal had, indeed, taken his own life with a noose he had secretly fashioned from “cloths” jail personnel had given him to clean his cell. Unfortunately, the reporters in attendance at the formal proceedings probably viewed inquest testimony in the same light as trial testimony—long, dry, and often rather dull. What interested them most were obviously the conclusions. They perked up and took more than casual interest, however, whenever something out of the ordinary occurred, such as when Sheriff O'Donnell almost got into a fistfight with William Edwards, crime commissioner, or when he lost his temper and challenged Gerber during the testimony of Patrolman Frank Vorell. But, for the most part, the gentlemen of the press establishment remained totally oblivious to the intricacies of the delicate dance going on before them. Thus, the public only got a vague, generalized notion of what was going on behind those closed doors.

Reading and absorbing the full inquest transcript was a monumental task. Though the troubling undercurrents rumbling beneath the placid surface of official question and answer were readily apparent even on a first read-through, gaining a full understanding of what was actually being said or inferred would require me—as well as the other members of the research team, principally Mark Stone—to comb through the testimony many times over, all the while taking voluminous notes and endlessly hashing out our impressions over gallons of coffee and uncountable boxes of doughnuts. Mark and I traded frantically dashed-off e-mails and shared our intense and rapidly developing excitement over the phone. This was real! This was
Cold Case
plus all the
CSI
and
Law & Order
shows rolled together and catapulted from the TV screen into real life; from all appearances, we seemed on the brink of making tantalizing, potentially explosive, entirely new discoveries in the accepted record of one of Cleveland's most notorious and gruesome murder cases. Gradually, the inconsistencies, the irregularities (at least by contemporary standards), the personal agendas, and the sometimes awkward procedural maneuvering came into focus.
It just did not add up; and everyone who has studied the document has come away deeply troubled and with serious misgivings.

Most of the testimony dealt with such issues as the physical injuries Dolezal had apparently sustained (the bruising and broken ribs), his two suicide attempts, his state of mind, and the exact time line of events leading up to his death and the immediate aftermath: Who did what, where were they when they did it, and when did they do it? The first witness to testify on that Saturday morning was A. V. Fried, the Cuyahoga County jail physician—a position he had held for seven years at that point—and the first person on the scene to declare Dolezal officially dead. In his fifties at the time, Fried had once had his sights set on the coroner's office but had lost out to Gerber. Whether his then current position at the county jail was a consolation prize is impossible to say. Since he was the first to take the stand and there was no other testimony on the record to which his could be compared, it would not become clear until later in the day that Fried had dropped a troubling little bombshell regarding the official time of death. According to all the sworn depositions taken on August 24, Dolezal's death had occurred around 2:00 in the afternoon. Fried had been called immediately at his Broadway office and had arrived at the jail, according to his inquest testimony, about eight minutes later. At this point, Dolezal had supposedly been dead for less than a half an hour, yet Fried insisted the corpse was cold.

Fried: . . . and he was cold. The entire body was cold.

Gerber: Now, had he been given any resuscitation before you examined him, to your knowledge? Schaeffer resuscitation? Any method of resuscitation, to your knowledge?

Fried: I don't know anything about it.

Gerber: How long do you think Frank Dolezal was dead, when you examined him?

Fried: Well he must have been dead about half an hour.

Gerber: And you examined him at what time?

Fried: Well this is about 2:25 I guess or 2:28, around there. Exactly, I would—

Gerber: Two-twenty in the afternoon?

Fried: Sometimes [
sic
] in there.

Gerber: Two-twenty to 2:25, is that it?

Fried: I guess it was about that, wasn't it? I didn't pay too much attention to the time.

Gerber: Did you determine the condition of rigor mortis of the body at that time?

Fried: Beg your pardon?

Gerber: Did you determine the condition of rigor mortis in the body at that time?

Fried: Life?

Gerber: Rigor—rigor mortis?

Fried: Oh, absolutely.

Gerber: Was there any rigor mortis present?

Fried: He was dead as a doornail, and that is all.

It is a curious exchange. Gerber keeps hammering at Fried (who seems somewhat belligerent, even combative) because neither could the body simply be entirely “cold” nor could rigor mortis have set in after only a half an hour. The unstated implication of Gerber's badgering is clear:
Are you absolutely sure about the time? Are you absolutely sure the body was cold and rigor had set in?
If Fried is accurate about the state of the corpse, death must have occurred far earlier than 2:00 in the afternoon. And to whom was Fried's “wasn't it?” directed? Would it be reading too much into this part of the exchange to suggest that Fried's question makes him sound like an actor checking with the prompter to make sure he had delivered his lines correctly?

Gerber obviously attached crucial importance to the broken ribs and other injuries that Dolezal had sustained, according to the sheriff's office, during his two botched suicide attempts on Monday, July 10—and which the autopsy on August 25 had so graphically confirmed. Both Frank Dolezal's brother Charles and Charles's brother-in-law Patrolman Frank Vorell testified that the prisoner had not suffered any prior injuries nor had he been in the hospital, thus firmly establishing that the bruising on the face and arms (clearly visible in newspaper photographs taken on and after July 10) and the broken ribs (confirmed by the autopsy) had occurred while Frank Dolezal was in the sheriff's custody, sometime between early July and late August. Were these injuries caused by beatings? Absolutely not, insisted Sheriff O'Donnell. “He was questioned in the regular way by myself and Mr. Brown, and no force, no threats or no promises or anything made whatever. . . . I never raised my voice or threatened, and never heard Mr. Brown threaten or raise his voice in any way, shape or form all the time we talked to him.” In fact, asserted the sheriff, “and if anything, treated him better than the average prisoner we had there, and he knew that and he appreciated it a whole lot[!?]. . . . treated him better than any prisoner who was ever in the jail in my time arrested for a like offense.”

Called to testify immediately after his boss, sheriff's detective Harry S. Brown concurred. “Now, more than once there has been a lot said about lickings and beatings and all that sort of thing. I was there all the time up to
the time this man got hurt [presumably, a reference to Dolezal's two suicide attempts], and some time a little after he got hurt. I know positively that there was no beating of any kind.”

Witnesses more or less in the Dolezal camp, however—those outside the sheriff's office—had far different stories to tell. David Hertz recalled: “He said that at one time he was bound, blindfolded and gagged, and that he was kept in that condition . . . that he was bound, his hands bound and his legs bound, and blindfolded and gagged, and considerably punched throughout a period of time.” George Palda (an attorney brought in by David Hertz because he was of the same nationality as Dolezal and could talk to him in his native language) said: “A cloth was suddenly thrown over his head, over his eyes and over his mouth, and he was jerked back onto the cement floor and while there on the cement floor he was kicked and punched.”

Patrolman Frank Vorell remembered: “I spoke to him at the County Jail, and I asked him how he come with the injuries. And he said that he was beaten up. And I says ‘Who done the beating?' He says ‘I don't know,' he says. ‘Well,' I says, ‘didn't you see him?' He says, ‘No,' he says, ‘I was blindfolded and gagged when I came to.' And I says, ‘Where were you at, at the time?' He says ‘I was laying on the cement, in the jail.'”

Fred P. Soukup, the attorney obtained by the family to represent Frank Dolezal recalled:

He told me practically the same story that you have already heard . . . and he said they commenced to punch him as they were taking him down to the County Jail in the car from his residence . . . and then he said that there were crews of men, seven or eight deputies kept shouting at him in turn day after day and night after night that he did it, he committed this crime, it was no use, that he should confess. . . . [H]e complained to me that people in the jail were taunting him, calling him vile names. . . . He had an obsession that someone was going to do something to him all the time.

The glaring contradictions among the accounts as to Frank Dolezal's state of mind during the period leading up to the early afternoon of August 24 were equally wild and jarring. Sheriff's detective Harry S. Brown, Deputy Sheriff Hugh Crawford, and elevator operator Clarence Smart maintained that he never complained to them about anything; and O'Donnell actually claimed he was so “satisfied” and “happy” that he played cards with the deputies. Brown insisted Dolezal was not depressed and was, in fact, “very, very, very, very friendly.” Some of this testimony borders on absurdity. Did
anyone present at the inquest really think for one moment that Dolezal would have complained openly about beatings or pain to the very people he alleged were mistreating him? In fact, he had grown so wary of everyone he saw in the jail that he initially refused to confide in either Fred Soukup or George Palda. “He was so confused,” snorted Frank Vorell, “he didn't know a doctor from a deputy sheriff.”

Interestingly, Gerber ran into some rather stubborn resistance when he tried to illicit some comment about Dolezal's state of mind from L. J. Sternicki, the physician brought in by David Hertz to examine the prisoner in the evening of July 11 and again on July 20.

Gerber: What was his mental condition?

Sternicki: Well, I don't know whether I should—I wasn't called in there to testify as to his mental condition. I would just as soon not say anything about the mental condition.

Gerber: Well, as a physician in the practice of medicine for a considerable length of time, you have a definite idea as to a man's mental attitude, so you have every reason in the world to tell me and the general public what type or what attitude your patient had at that time.

Sternicki: I was called in, though, to examine him physically, and I would prefer not to discuss his mental condition, or psychiatric—

Gerber: I am not asking you to discuss his mental condition, from a psychopathic standpoint. Just as an ordinary observation, was Frank Dolezal dazed, or was he depressed or something like that? I would like to know your observations on that point.

In spite of Gerber's hammering, Sternicki refused to budge beyond recounting that during the examination Dolezal had said he was not in any pain. (It's hardly surprising that Dolezal would say this, considering Sheriff O'Donnell was in the same room.) The coroner returned to the issue of Dolezal's mental state later in Sternicki's testimony, but the doctor still flatly refused to comment. Obviously, any trained medical professional with a sense of propriety would be reluctant to comment officially on anything beyond his areas of expertise, but Sternicki's adamant refusal to respond to Gerber's request for a simple “ordinary observation” remains both interesting and troubling.

When it came to the broad, general outline of the events that had led to the alleged suicide and what had transpired in the immediate aftermath, Sheriff O'Donnell, his deputies, and other jail personnel were mostly on the same page; and what emerged from their collective testimony was essentially
a more detailed version of the account that had appeared in the press. Dolezal had been given his lunch in block B, cell 4 around 12:00. At 1:48
P.M
., Deputy Sheriff Hugh Crawford found him hanging from the clothes hook in cell 11. (Crawford—who had been assigned to make his rounds of the fourth floor every ten minutes—testified that he had last seen the prisoner about three minutes before, at 1:45, and he seemed fine.) Immediately, he called out to stockroom worker Catherine Krial. “‘Kate,' I says, ‘call the jailor [Assistant Chief Jailor Archie Burns]. Dolezal is hanging.'” He tried to hold Dolezal up with one arm while, at the same time, attempting to loosen the knot of the noose around his neck. Hearing someone in the corridor, he yelled, “Number 11 cell.” Burns and elevator operator Clarence Smart arrived on the scene; and
while Burns ordered Krial to call the rescue squad, Smart tried to help Crawford hold Dolezal up and untie the noose's obviously very stubborn knot. Burns then encountered Sheriff O'Donnell at the elevator. “Just as I stepped in the elevator, Mr. Burns was in there, and he said, ‘Come on right away to the fourth floor.' I said, ‘What's the matter?' He said, ‘Mr. Dolezal has tried to hang himself.'” Finding the knot impossible to loosen, someone called out, “Got a knife?” O'Donnell then passed his knife to Burns, who cut Dolezal down. According to Burns, they placed Dolezal on his bunk and “worked on him” until Del Young (the day nurse on call at the jail) arrived on the scene and gave him a hypodermic, apparently of adrenaline. The rescue squad showed up about 1:58—at which point Dolezal was removed from the cell and placed in the outside corridor on the floor. Fried, the jail physician, arrived around 2:15 and, after examining the prisoner, declared Frank Dolezal dead. The entire episode took less than a half an hour. (Curiously, neither Del Young nor Captain Floyd O'Neil of the rescue squad were called to testify at the inquest. And, though the police did obtain a deposition from O'Neil—which was accepted into evidence, Young was apparently not asked to give one.)