Hell's Wasteland by James Jessen Badal

Author:James Jessen Badal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kent State University Press

NOTES

Frank Dolezal remains the only man arrested and charged in the torso murders. He was arrested by agents of Cuyahoga County Sheriff Martin L. O’Donnell in July 1939, but the flimsy case against him began to deteriorate almost immediately. Six weeks after his arrest, Dolezal was found hanging in his cell. Coroner Gerber’s official ruling of suicide has been questioned ever since that judgment was handed down in August 1939. In Though Murder Has No Tongue: The Lost Victim of Cleveland’s Mad Butcher (Kent State University Press, 2010), I argue that Frank Dolezal’s death was most likely murder. Patrolman Frank Vorell’s sister Louise was married to Frank Dolezal’s younger brother Charles. Vorell was, therefore, related to Frank Dolezal by marriage.

As I indicated in the text, the documentation of this particular chapter in the torso murder investigation is by far the most detailed. Merylo discussed his and Vorell’s undercover activities extensively in both sets of memoirs, while his report, at nearly ten thousand words, minutely covers their movements and experiences day by day. As noted previously, whenever discrepancies arose between the memoirs and the sixteen-page, single-spaced report, I took the latter as the more reliable, it having been written immediately after the events being covered.

Interestingly enough, Merylo does not mention in either set of memoirs his harrowing plunge into the smoldering muck during his undercover exploration of the swamp. The only documentation of this particular occurrence appears in Paul McClung’s article in the July 1952 issue of Front Page Detective.

The material I used concerning the last officially recognized Pennsylvania victim, found in November 1940 was drawn from the New Castle News. The discovery of the two single legs in May 1941 was covered by the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph and the Pittsburgh Press.

As stated in the text, Merylo’s plan for continuing the investigation appears in both his memoirs and in his final report, which he submitted upon retiring from the Cleveland Police Department in March 1943.

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