Though Murder Has No Tongue (32 page)

If Gerber experienced any sort of epiphany, any moment of startling clarity as to exactly what had happened to Frank Dolezal, it undoubtedly occurred during the autopsy in the early morning hours of August 25. When the chest was opened and he saw those broken, partly healed ribs on both sides of the rib cage, he very likely realized that Dolezal had, indeed, been severely beaten, that those press rumors about mistreatment were true, in spite of the sheriff's office's official claims to the contrary. Gerber would then have found himself in an extraordinarily difficult, perhaps even dangerous, position. He had already unofficially declared the death a suicide. To equivocate now, to raise the mere possibility that there may have been more to the death than initially met the eye, would be to publicly cast doubts on his own professional judgment (not something he would do lightly) and to incur the wrath of the sheriff—one of the most politically powerful men in the county. Now wrestling with some very real doubts about Dolezal's death, he would have to convene and officially preside over an inquest the next day (August 26) under the exceedingly stern and watchful eye of Sheriff Martin L. O'Donnell.

“He [Gerber] didn't really point out any discrepancies at all, which is interesting,” reflected Dennis Dirkmaat after studying the inquest transcript. “Maybe, it's just . . . you can attribute that to not being totally prepared or a more cynical thing that's going on—that he's trying not to get too much out in the open.” Time and again, discrepancies arise in the testimony; and, as Dirkmaat correctly observed, Gerber simply allows them to bloom (or fester) without comment. But was Gerber deliberately trying to conceal information, or was he doing his best to ensure that some of the more significant contradictions in the testimony at least made it to the official record? Assuming he harbored any nagging doubts about Frank Dolezal's death, the coroner was truly picking his way across a minefield during the entire inquest. The sheriff and the deputies who had been on the scene had already “told” him what had happened; he had been given the “correct” version of events when he arrived at the jail; he had already made a determination that the death was a suicide—all he had to do at the inquest was allow the entire story to be officially confirmed. The most significant moments in the proceedings, of course, occur at the end of the second day's testimony, when Gerber officially adjourned, only to reconvene forty-five minutes later for the sole purpose of getting the extraordinarily damning testimony of the Jones sisters into the official record. The adjournment was obviously a ploy to get O'Donnell, as well as any of his deputies who may also have
been present, out of the room so the testimony could be taken without the sheriff's knowledge and free from any worries or questions about intimidation. If Gerber's conduct during the entire inquest is judged in the light of this very obvious maneuver to ensure at least some secrecy, then it becomes clear that all through the proceedings he was doing his best to make sure the discrepancies in the testimony were at least on the official record, even if he never tried to have them resolved. Mindful that O'Donnell was looking on, Gerber pushed matters as far as he dared. He worked fairly diligently to establish through sworn testimony that Frank Dolezal had no prior injuries and that the damage to his ribs and the bruising on his face had to have occurred while he was in the sheriff's custody. Similarly, he unsuccessfully tried to badger an exceedingly reluctant Dr. L. J. Sternicki into making some kind of statement as to Dolezal's mental condition.

Finally, there is the matter of that elegantly bound volume of the inquest testimony, as well as those huge photographs documenting Frank Dolezal's corpse in the county jail and on the autopsy table. Today, personnel at the morgue—including those who worked under Gerber—confirm that it was not standard procedure in the 1930s to take pictures of such monstrous size, nor was it common practice to lavish such elaborate care on the preservation of inquest testimony. Gerber only gave such extra attention to high-profile cases that he regarded as special. As Mark and I worked our way through the box of material in the morgue relating to Dolezal's death, we both experienced the somewhat eerie feeling that we were walking a path that had already been laid out for us. On August 24, 1939, Coroner Sam Gerber made a snap judgment about the cause of Dolezal's death, based on what he saw in the county jail and was told by the sheriff and his deputies. One day later, Dolezal's chest was opened during the formal autopsy; Geber could see the broken ribs—perhaps realizing for the first time that the charges of abuse that had been persistently made in the press were true and that his initial suicide verdict, made on the scene, may not have been accurate. But the damage had been done. Mindful that he could not retract that informal pronouncement of suicide without calling into question his own professional judgment and, at the same time, publicly challenging the sheriff and his office, he bowed to political realities and dutifully wrote a formal verdict that would conform to the “official” version of events. But he left enough signposts behind to ensure that someone, sometime, could follow and set the record straight.

Assessing what Gerber may have known or suspected about Francis Edward Sweeney's potential guilt in the torso murders is equally problematic.
Cleveland News
reporter Howard Beaufait and his wife, Doris, knew Gerber well and socialized with him frequently. In recent years, Doris O'Donnell Beaufait—
herself, a crack reporter on the local scene—has remained somewhat dubious about the notion that Sweeney may have been the Butcher. “If Sam Gerber had known anything, he would have told Howard,” she insists. Yet there is no doubt that the coroner knew who the derelict physician was and was fully aware of his status as a prime suspect. When the
Cleveland News
announced on April 9, 1938, that police had their sights on “a once-prominent Clevelander, described as a physician in disrepute with his profession” who “is middle-aged, has some surgical skill and is described as being a powerfully built, chronic alcoholic,” Gerber verified the story and declared, “We are watching him, as well as two or three others.” In 1984, when former
Plain Dealer
columnist George Condon was preparing a retrospective piece on the murders for
Cleveland Magazine,
he reminded the coroner that he had once described the killer as a “broken-down doctor who becomes frenzied with drugs or liquor.” Though Gerber indignantly denied he had ever said such a thing, it is interesting to note that this brief portrait Condon alleges he painted matches Frank Sweeney perfectly. Exactly why Gerber would have maintained his silence about Sweeney for the rest of his life is difficult to say. The coroner was not part of Ness's inner circle of associates and confidants. Royal Grossman and David Cowles may have kept quiet for years about the identity of Ness's prime suspect out of loyalty to the former safety director, but such considerations would not have restrained Gerber. Could his silence be attributed to loyalty to the Democratic Party in general or to Martin L. Sweeney in particular? There is simply no way to know. And, of course, it must be remembered that there was no hard evidence against Francis Sweeney: only an elaborate web of circumstances and coincidences, an inadmissible-in-court lie detector test, and the suspicions of Eliot Ness. As a public official, Gerber may have refrained from casually dropping any unguarded comments about a suspect in Cleveland's most notorious string of killings simply out of his sense of professional ethics.

Accurately assessing the conduct of both Congressman Martin L. Sweeney and Sheriff Martin L. O'Donnell during the period of the Frank Dolezal affair, from arrest to inquest, remains an extraordinarily difficult proposition. If city papers accurately reflect the congressman's behavior while these events were unfolding, Sweeney remained uncharacteristically silent. Considering that he rarely passed up an opportunity to make political hay on the local scene, and realizing that Sheriff O'Donnell was both political ally and friend, the congressman's silence seems absolutely deafening and utterly perplexing—especially
when the case against Dolezal began to publicly unravel and the sheriff came under increased fire from the local press, the courts, and the ACLU. Why would Sweeney allow a close political ally to twist slowly in the wind without coming to his defense? If one is willing to give any credence to the notion that Sweeney may have come to some sort of gentleman's agreement with city administration (protection of his cousin Francis's identity in exchange for his good conduct on the local political stage), then his silence becomes understandable and reasonable. He was simply sticking by his word and keeping his nose clean.

Sheriff O'Donnell obviously had a huge personal, professional, and political stake in Frank Dolezal's guilt, so it is hardly surprising that he would fight hard to establish it and strike back with a vengeance at those who would tear down his case. Once he committed himself and publicly bought into that notion of Dolezal's guilt, he would have found it increasingly difficult and embarrassing—perhaps, totally impossible—to back off when circumstances turned against him. Though the conspiratorially inclined would love to believe that the sheriff was deeply involved in every aspect of Dolezal's death, from planning to execution, it is just as likely that some of his more aggressive deputies did the deed without his knowledge or consent, thus putting him in the undeniably difficult position of having to clean up a terrible mess left by others.

Francis Sweeney's future wife, Mary Josephine Sokol, moved to Cleveland with her family sometime just prior to 1920 and settled in the large working-class Hungarian neighborhood on the city's east side. She trained and worked as a nurse at St. Vincent's Charity Hospital, an institution in the midst of several significant Kingsbury Run sites: the area in which Frank Dolezal lived, where the initial set of Flo Polillo's remains were discovered, near the bar on the corner of East 20th and Central Avenue where the few officially identified players in the Kingsbury Run drama often drank. When her firstborn son, Francis Edward Sweeney Jr., of the U.S. Marine Corps, was killed in an automobile accident at a Cleveland railroad crossing in 1947, she was living in New York State. At the time, her younger son, James, was still residing in Cleveland, most likely with his mother's relatives, while he finished high school. In 1949, Mary apparently moved as far away from Cleveland as she could possibly get; in that year St. Vincent's transferred all her educational and professional records to the State Medical Board in California. Did James follow his mother to the West Coast upon graduation from high school, the same year? A likely
scenario, perhaps, but there is no way to know. At the time, Francis Sweeney would have still been a resident at the Ohio Soldiers' and Sailors' Home. Did his ex-wife and surviving son know anything about his possible involvement in Cleveland's most gruesome series of murders? Probably, but, again, it is impossible to know. There is a single photograph of Mary Josephine Sokol's 1926 graduating class in nursing in the archives of St. Vincent's Charity Hospital. No one in the formal picture is identified, however; so there is no accurate way of picking her out from the sea of fresh, serious, eager faces.