Though Murder Has No Tongue: The Lost Victim of Cleveland's Mad Butcher

The unfortunate victim of a frightened city desperately in need of a scapegoat.

Though Murder Has No Tongue tells the story of Frank Dolezal, the only man actually arrested and charged with the infamous "Torso Murders" in Cleveland, Ohio, during the late 1930s. Dolezal, a fifty-two-year-old Slav immigrant, came to the attention of sheriff 's investigators because of his reputation as a strange man who possessed a stockpile of butcher knives. According to rumors, he threatened imagined transgressors and had a penchant for frequenting bars in the seedy neighborhood where the dismembered bodies of victims had been discovered. Dolezal was arrested in July 1939 and never saw freedom again.

Convinced that they had captured the "Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run," sheriff's deputies interrogated Dolezal for two days under harsh conditions. Sheriff Martin O'Donnell called a press conference and announced that the long hoped-for break in the torso killings had finally come: Dolezal had admitted to the January 1936 murder and dismemberment of Flo Polillo, one of the early victims of the Mad Butcher. During the next six days, Dolezal was questioned further, given a lie detector test, beaten, and generally mistreated. Ultimately he was arraigned on firstdegree murder charges that were quickly dropped because he was denied legal representation.

At his second arraignment in July, Dolezal was bound over on manslaughter charges. Within a month, he was dead--found hanged in his cell. His mysterious death was ruled a suicide. But was it?

In Though Murder Has No Tongue, James Jessen Badal tells a gripping tale of justice gone wrong. It is also a modern story of forensic analysis as compelling as an episode of CSI. Using police and sheriff reports, inquest testimony, autopsy and archival photographs, unpublished notes from the primary investigators, and analyses from some of today's top forensic anthropologists and medical examiners, Badal establishes the facts, dispels rumors, and presents a thorough examination of the real reasons behind Frank Dolezal's mysterious death.

Author: James Jessen Badal
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Published: 08/13/2010
Pages: 223
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.74lbs
Size: 8.96h x 6.60w x 0.63d
ISBN: 9781606350621

About the Author
James Jessen Badal is an assistant professor of English and journalism at the Eastern Campus of Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland. He has served on the board of trustees of the Cleveland Police Historical Society since 2001. His previous books for The Kent State University Press include Twilight of Innocence: The Disappearance of Beverly Potts (2005), Though Murder Has No Tongue: The Lost Victim of Cleveland's Mad Butcher (2010), and Hell's Wasteland: The Pennsylvania Torso Murders (2013). He is currently working on a book devoted to the unsolved 1964 murder of 16-year-old Beverly Jarosz in Garfield Heights just outside of Cleveland


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