Though Murder Has No Tongue by James Jessen Badal Page B

safe from the elusive killer who had prowled through its neighborhoods and haunted its blighted interiors since late 1934. Clevelanders could now breathe their collective sigh of relief and celebrate the crack investigators under the sheriff’s command who had finally tracked down the Butcher—a man O’Donnell luridly described to the
Cleveland News
as “gorilla-like”—and put him behind bars.
    T HURSDAY , J ULY 6, 1939
    â€œFind Human Blood in Torso Hunt,” blared the headline in the
Press
that afternoon. Thus murder-weary Clevelanders first learned that the cycle of mutilation and blood-letting might finally be over. Sheriff Martin O’Donnell announced that a chemical analysis performed by G. V. Lyons—brother of Pat Lyons—of stains found on the walls and under the bathroom baseboard at the 1908 Central Avenue apartment where Dolezal had lived in August 1938 proved they were human blood. He then continued to outline what the
Plain Dealer
termed the “strong circumstantial case” that he and his office had built against Frank Dolezal so far. Allegedly, Dolezal’s initial explanation for the telltale blood in his Central Avenue apartment was that he had bought a pig at the central market and had butchered it in his bathroom. When informed thatthe central market did not sell pigs, he immediately insisted it was a chicken he had bought and killed. Though he had at first denied he had been acquainted with any of the torso victims, Dolezal ultimately confessed he had known Flo Polillo (victim no. 3) and had been drinking with her in his apartment the night before the first set of her remains turned up behind Hart Manufacturing, less than a block away, on January 26, 1936, thus potentially making him the last person to have seen her alive. Allegedly, Dolezal had borrowed “a large knife” from a neighbor and later returned it stained with human blood. He had suspiciously moved from his apartment to a Scranton Road address (to get cheaper rent, he insisted) on the near west side following the discovery of victims no. 11 and no. 12 in August 1938—just as Eliot Ness was sending teams of police and firemen to search the dilapidated dwellings in the run-down east side neighborhoods close to downtown—and had just as suspiciously moved back to the east side to 2491 East 22nd Street a few months before his arrest. In spite of his constant denials that he knew any of the Butcher’s victims other than Flo Polillo, unidentified witnesses, most likely Dolezal’s neighbors, had assured the sheriff’s men that they had seen him with a man who strongly resembled the first officially recognized victim, Edward Andrassy, and another man, clearly a sailor. (Because of his distinctive tattoos, authorities had always surmised that the unidentified victim no. 4—discovered on June 5, 1936—may have been a navy man or, at the very least, a sailor.) He reportedly also had a “passionate craving for knives.” A thorough search of Dolezal’s apartment had turned up a notebook filled with names and addresses, as well as a photo album from which pages had obviously been torn. According to the sheriff, Dolezal would not or could not offer any explanation for these missing pages. Finally, he had worked as a “sticker” and then a “stamper” in a slaughterhouse for three months twenty years before, apparently around 1918, thus potentially providing him with the necessary experience to disarticulate a human corpse with surgical precision. A very circumstantial case, indeed! But it all added up to an incriminating picture, and it was certainly a promising beginning. Dolezal, however, had so far confessed to nothing beyond the alleged facts that he had known Flo Polillo and had been drinking with her the night of January 25, the day before some of the pieces of her corpse turned up in the snow behind Hart Manufacturing on East