Free Though Murder Has No Tongue by James Jessen Badal Page A

poorly.” Again, the issue of Dolezal’s command of the language becomes crucial. It’s far more than a matter of whether newspapers were quoting him accurately or rewriting his utterances in Standard English. Did he fully understand the nature of his interrogators’ questions? Also, his signature later appears on some extremely significant, not to say incriminating, documents; did he actually understand what he was signing?
    In the midst of all this excitement, veteran
Cleveland News
reporter Howard Beaufait pulled off a major scoop. He seemed to enjoy access to some levers of power beyond the reach of his colleagues: in the early hours of the morning, he was allowed to spend fifteen minutes with Frank Dolezal. Rather than merely outline the sheriff’s case against him as his colleagues from rival papers had done, Beaufait gave his readers a graphic portrait of a pathetic, terrified, and deeply confused man. “I saw a man on the verge of hysteria,” he wrote. “He sat in his small, hot cell at County Jail, wringing a dirty handkerchief in his coarse, thick hands. . . . As he sat in his cell, his watery blue eyes heavy from a sleepless night, Dolezal drank glass after glass of water. . . . He was drenched in perspiration. It came through his soiled blue work shirt in dark spots. . . . His eyes are filled with fear, and he moves his head from side to side in quick, nervous jerks.” In a clear echo of the vain behavior Pat Lyons described on the day of Dolezal’s arrest, Beaufait commented, “He seemed rather ashamed of his ragged appearance. He said he wanted a shave and a haircut and a clean shirt. He was wearing dark, unpressed trousers and white kid shoes with fancy, pointed toes. These were soiled. He looked at them frequently and tried to tuck them out of sight under his bunk. Now he looks at all men as if they were his enemies. Each stranger who enters his cell brings a threat to his safety.” “It is a curious fact that rarely does a murderer look like one,” Beaufait mused in closing. “This is particularly true of Frank Dolezal. If he hadn’t said so, you would find it rather preposterous to believe that he could turn his humble home into a slaughter house.”

    Cuyahoga County sheriff Martin L. O’Donnell. He was a friend and close political ally of Congressman Martin L. Sweeney. He had formerly been mayor of Garfield Heights, a Cleveland suburb.
Cleveland Press
Archives, Cleveland State University.
    S UNDAY , J ULY 9
    â€œWoman Says She Jumped Seeing Knife” proclaimed the lead of a page one
Plain Dealer
story. A twenty-two-year-old—later identified as a black prostitute named Lillian Jones—insisted that she had been in Frank Dolezal’s East 22nd apartment a week before his arrest and had been forced to jump out of the window when he came at her with a knife. “I was in Dolezal’s room when he came at me with a knife. I jumped out of a second-story window to get away from him. The heel of one of my shoes was broken when I landed.” Though the morning daily wondered how the woman could hurl herself out of a second-story window and fall to the ground without breaking anything else,Sheriff O’Donnell seized on the sensational tale as further evidence that Dolezal was connected to the killings. The story “strengthens my suspicions that Dolezal was connected with other torso murders,” he insisted to the
Plain Dealer.
    M ONDAY , J ULY 10
    It would be a very busy day, marked by stunning revelations and troubling questions. Sheriff O’Donnell began the morning by showing reporters a letter he had received from Mrs. Nettie Taylor of Wheaton, Illinois. The woman, who identified herself as Frank Dolezal’s sister-in-law, alleged that his sister Mrs. Anna Nigrin had apparently been murdered in July 1931 on the Geauga County farm near Chardon, Ohio, that she shared with her husband. When her son, Joseph,