Read Online Though Murder Has No Tongue by James Jessen Badal - Free Book Online Page A

Run—the monstrous fiend who had terrorized the inner city for four years, given Cleveland a black eye in the national press, and stumped Ness and his legion of detectives and other law enforcement personnel. The most massive investigation in Cleveland history had resulted in the arrest of a short, stocky man in a sweat-stained shirt who gazed blankly into space as the assembled photographers snapped his picture.
    The main problem with the Dolezal confession was that the rest of his story simply did not match the documented and widely publicized details of the Polillo murder. After carefully packing some of her remains in produce baskets and depositing his handiwork in the snow behind the manufacturing company, Dolezal supposedly told his captors that he transported the remaining pieces of her corpse to the foot of East 49th, where he unceremoniously tossed them into Lake Erie. But it had been widely reported that the second set of Polillo’s body parts had been located at 1419 Orange on February 7; and, working cautiously behind the scenes so as avoid attracting the attention of either Sheriff O’Donnell or Chief of Police George Matowitz, Merylo pointed out to the press that Dolezal could not have disposed of Flo Polillo’s remains in Lake Erie on the night of January 26, 1936, in the manner alleged because the biting winter cold had frozen lake waters well beyond the breakwall. All reporters had to do was check with the U.S. Weather Bureau to verify the claim. The press also reported that Dolezal had claimed he burned Flo Polillo’s clothing, save for her coat and shoes; those, he is alleged to have insisted, he left behind the Hart Manufacturing Company building on East 20th with the first set of her remains. If that were the case, why weren’t they found? They don’t appear in either of the two official photographs of the scene, nor are they mentioned in any of the surviving police reports. Merylo wryly reflected on the situation in his memoirs: “This was my first experience where a man is making a confession to a murder or any other serious crime and does not know the details of the crime which he is alleged to have committed.” Thus, at the very moment the juggernaut began rolling inexorably forward and gathering speed, the wheels started to fall off. “There are some discrepancies between what Dolezal says he did and what are known facts in the Polillo case,” the sheriff acknowledged to the
Plain Dealer.
“We want to get a confession that willhold up in court before we place any charges against him.” According to the
Press,
the sheriff was far more specific. “But I still want him to confess that he actually murdered Mrs. Polillo.” Though serious allegations of mistreatment at the hands of the sheriff and his deputies would materialize later, at this point there was no way for the reading public to tell what had happened to Frank Dolezal behind the jailhouse walls in the two days since his arrest. But some of the wording in the
Press
made it clear that he must have been subjected to a horrendous ordeal: “questioned all night” (July 6); “the suspect . . . has been grilled for two days,” “suspect is weakening under the long hours of grilling” (July 7); “the questioning continued thus, in relays” (July 8). According to the
Cleveland News
on July 6, Dolezal endured “more than twenty hours of intermittent grilling”; and the
Plain Dealer
casually informed its readers that the prisoner had not been allowed to sleep from the time he was arrested on July 5 until 9:00 P.M . on July 7. It was a different time, and law enforcementoperated under a much looser set of rules than it does in the early twenty-first century. The rights of possible defendants didn’t count for much, and obtaining a confession by any possible means was often the norm.

    Western Reserve University chemist Dr. Enrique Ecker (kneeling) looks