Though Murder Has No Tongue by James Jessen Badal Page A

an important lesson, one I had already learned and of which I would be reminded several times during the course of my research. From all of this diverse and incomplete evidence, two seemingly different portraits of Pat Lyons emerge: on the one hand, a careless would-be detective who couldn’t hold his liquor; on the other, a shrewd investigator trolling for significant information in the murky, dangerous swamps of tenement life in Depression-era Cleveland.
    N OTES
    Frank Dolezal’sgreat-niece Mary Dolezal Satterlee provided the details relevant to Frank Dolezal’s family background and his early days in Cleveland—as well of those of his brother Charles. Other details were culled from public documents, such as the city directories and government census reports.
    When he died in 1958, Detective Peter Merylo left behind two extensive, unpublished manuscripts detailing his work on the Kingsbury Run murders. The longer of the two comes in at 155 typed legal-sized pages, and the dry formality of its prose strongly suggests that Merylo was the document’s sole author. Though the second manuscript, 107 typed legal-sized pages, bears the name Frank Otwell—a
Cleveland News
reporter as well as Merylo’s personal friend—on its first page, Merylo’s hand is still evident; and Otwell’s participation in this version may have been an attempt to lighten the rigidly official tone of the veteran cop’s style, thus producing a far more reader-friendly account. Both of these manuscripts are part of the vast collection of documents related to the case in the possession of Peter Merylo’s daughter Marjorie Merylo Dentz. Though most of these papers are copies of Merylo’s official police reports, the assemblage also includes tip letters from a variety of sources, many of them unsigned, and other pieces of official and personal correspondence. Totaling well over two thousand pages of diverse material, the Merylo papers constitute the largest single collection of documents pertaining to the Kingsbury Run murders.
    Pat Lyons’s daughter, Carol Fitzgerald, graciously provided me with copies of all her father’s papers dealing with his role in the torso investigation. Though nowhere near as voluminous as the Merylo collection, the random notes, lists of people to be interviewed, various letters, and Lyons’s formal manuscript, “A Discussion of the So-called Torso Cases,” provide significant insight into the thinking behind his working methods and flesh out a considerable number of the significant details leading up to Frank Dolezal’s arrest in July 1939. The song “Mary Not Contrary,” for which Lyons supplied lyrics, was composed by A. Leopold Richard and published by Legters Music Company of Chicago.
    An extensive account of Pat Lyons’s 1933 arrest for intoxication and being a “suspicious person” can be found in the clipping files of the
Cleveland Press
housed in the library of Cleveland State University. The document is not a published story clipped from the pages of the
Press;
rather it is a typed, three-page manuscript for a story that apparently was never printed.

Chapter 3
    H ISTORY THROUGH A G LASS D ARKLY
    F rankDolezal was arrested on Wednesday, July 5, 1939; on August 24 he would lie dead on the jailhouse floor. Until the beginning of the twenty-first century, the only record available to the public of what happened in the county jail on those hot summer days and during the rancorous aftermath would be the bits and pieces recorded in Cleveland’s three daily newspapers—fragments of history hurriedly gathered to meet a deadline, with little, if any, in-depth investigation—offered to a public hungry for details. A predictable wave of local excitement and relief washed over the city after Sheriff Martin L. O’Donnell’s public announcement on July 6 that the torso killer had finally been apprehended. The city was now