A Documentary About the Cleveland Torso Murders From Storytellers Media Group Featuring James Jessen Badal
A Documentary About the Cleveland Torso Murders From Storytellers Media Group Featuring James Jessen Badal
JAMES JESSEN BADAL IN THE WAKE OF THE BUTCHER: CLEVELAND'S TORSO MURDERS
By Craig McDonald
McDonald: It’s far-fetched, at best.
Badal: Other than that, the autopsy reports also — the wording of them — makes it clear that they assumed it was the work of the same culprit. You would find phrases like, “more hesitation remarks than in previous cases.” “Cutting somewhat dissimilar,” or, “cutting the same as.” Not to say they were accurate, either. The big one is victim #11, who the anatomist at the Reserve said was a pre-embalmed body. And Gerber and Reuben Straus, who performed the autopsy said, no, no, it was probably murder.
McDonald: Now, the bricklayer —
Badal: — Frank Dolezal.
McDonald: You found his —
Badal: — Great niece.
McDonald: She obviously never would have crossed paths with her ancestor. How much came down through the family regarding what happened to him?
Badal: She first learned about this when she was 10-years-old. Mary is a hoot. She is one of my very favorite people. It occurred to me that nobody had ever called the Dolezal family. Certainly there must be Dolezal’s relatives left in Cleveland. So I flipped open the phone book and began calling Dolezals. The first one I got was Anne Louise, who is Mary’s sister and she said, “Oh yeah, that’s us. You’ve got the right family. People ask me about my background and I say, I’ve got a mass-murderer and a nun.” She said, “The person you really want to talk to is my sister Mary. She’s the family historian. She is the one who really took an interest in this and has done a lot of research.” So I called Mary out in California. I think initially she was cautiously distrustful. But I joke about it and say those of us who have gyroscopes that spin at weird angles, we recognize each other very quickly. So we were buddies by the end of that first conversation. She produced a wedding photograph that just blew my mind. It was a photograph of her grandmother’s — which would have been Frank Dolezal’s sister-in-law’s — wedding. He was in the wedding party and it was taken in 1916, something like that, and he was the poster boy for the immigrant in America. Nothing like the photographs you see of him in my book. She did say the family had been very very reluctant to talk about this. That it was a taboo subject and that everything came out in bits and pieces and she had to pull it together. Her father was the youngest of Charles Dolezal’s children — Charles was Frank Dolezal’s brother. He was maybe five-years-old, but he remembers Frank to a degree. But her uncles, most of whom are now in their mid- to late-80s, remember him quite well. So no, all she could tell me was how this affected the family. Such things as her father, uncles and aunt would be taunted at school by kids. We talked about why the family is so reticent about it. If this were a contemporary American family, they would have said, “You know, I’m going to raise as much hell about this as possible.” There would have been law suits. The only thing we could come up with is that this was the Old World-mentality and you bore your shame.
McDonald: Somehow, in researching and reading about these crimes, I missed the Walter Winchell broadcast you write about it....
Badal: I did, too. That was in one of the two Merylo manuscripts.
McDonald: Was there any mention of who Winchell’s source was?
Badal: Winchell says he will not identify his source, but they did trace the story to a guy by the name of Hinkle, I think the name was, in Indiana.
McDonald: There’s a guy who has been pushing a connection for about 10 years between the Kingsbury Run Murders and that of The Black Dahlia. He even got a piece about his theory produced on “Unsolved Mysteries.”
Badal: I don’t mention him by name in the book, but I know who you are talking about. That’s what I thought might have gotten this retired policeman that I talked to on it, but the “Unsolved Mysteries” piece linking Kingsbury Run and The Black Dahlia came afterwards. But he said he had been asked by the Cleveland police chief to look into a possible connection and that this request had been made by unidentified officials in L.A.
McDonald: Now, that would go back to the alleged letter from The Butcher saying he had gone out to “sunny California” and then alluded to a body supposedly buried near the eventual dump site of The Black Dahlia.
Badal: I don’t profess to be a criminologist, but I think anybody who knows even a little bit about criminal behavior would seize on the fact that she (Elizabeth Short) was not decapitated, and with all of the Cleveland victims that was the one thing he did do. And sometimes it was nothing more than that but he always took the heads off. She (Short) had cigarette burns and she had been tortured. And all of the evidence except for the rope burns on Andrassy’s wrists suggest that death came pretty quickly for the Butcher’s victims. I’ll tell you, the roughest part of this, other than the sheer gruesomeness of the case, and I’m not kidding when I say there were times when I just had to drop it and back away for awhile. Some of my friends would say why don’t you apply for a sabbatical, and I said, “A., I don’t think the college would give me one to do this,” and “B., even if they did, I need the contact, I need real people, daily, just to keep me centered.” Then I would flagellate myself sometimes because I would find myself becoming somewhat inured to it. People would come up to me and say, “Oh, you worked on it for so long, it must be a real labor of love.” No, that’s not the word for it. Labor of obsession maybe, but not love.
McDonald: Is this the end of it for you?
Badal: You know damn well if I said yes, this is the end of it, something would break that would require me to take it up again.
McDonald: Well, in the sense that unless you got access to more material, I don’t know what else you do. Maybe a biography of Merylo since you have all this new material.
Badal: Somebody did suggest that maybe a biography of Merylo is in order. He is quite a character. God.
McDonald: He certainly is a cinematic character. There is not another character like him, or another set of crimes such as these, in Ohio. And this is the book.
Badal: Well, I think this is the book. I went to the publisher and I said as far as I am concerned we have to get as many pictures in this book as possible to give a feel for the times and what the city was like. To give a feel for the investigators, the victims. Everything. There are 51 photographs in the book, so they went along with it.
McDonald: I wish there 100. You allude to photos, or describe photos I want to see. Those pictures of the shantytowns are haunting.
Badal: Some of these photos are mind-blowers. I learned so much about the day-to-day life of Cleveland. The sort of things that the history books never tell you. There was a newspaper boy whose brother watched the police gather up the second set of Flo Polillo’s remains. He said he delivered papers in the shantytowns, and I said, “What?” And he said, “Oh yeah, there were people who lived down there who had jobs. They just couldn’t afford to live anywhere else.”
McDonald: That explains some of the outrage when Ness ordered the shacks burned. You can see why people would be outraged when they lost what few possessions they had in the burnings. It affords a different context.
Badal: Yes. He said the one smell you always had over the shantytowns was chickens. He said the poultry farmers would come into town twice a week and they would pack these chickens into these crates and sell them along stalls on Carnegie. He said some would not survive the trip so they would take them and they would throw them in the alleys off of Carnegie and the shantytown residents didn’t care — they would take them. He said every shantytown resident had a butcher knife, because they were cutting up chickens. He said the one smell, besides the smell of cooking chickens, was the smell of blood. He said he remembered his mother buying chickens, and the dealer would ask, “Do you want it alive or dead?” and if she said dead, he would take the head off and held it by the feet and let it bleed into the street and into the sewer. He said he could still remember that smell. Things like that, historians don’t record.
McDonald: Of course, some of the pictures are extremely graphic.
Badal: We had some pretty heavy duty discussions about the pictures themselves. I’ve been asked a couple of times, didn’t we go overboard? And I said NO. If we wanted to make this a gore-fest, we could have made it three or four times as bad. There are more. I won’t say there are worse, but if we wanted a gore-fest, we could have printed hundreds of photos of body parts from different angles. They were terrible crimes. Awful crimes.
McDonald: Well, if you are going to presume there is a value in the book, then you do have to depict the subject matter. I remember when I was a kid, you would read about Jack the Ripper, and never really get it. You always wondered, why still dwelling on these crimes? Then, in my teens, I was a page in a library and shelved a copy of Rumbelow’s “Complete Jack the Ripper” and there was that picture of Mary Kelly laying on the bed and I was just horrified. It was this feeling of, “Now I get it. This was the monster.”
Badal: Then, all of the sudden, you know what it was when they broke down that door and saw her. Or, even if you see that picture of Lizzie Borden’s father. You see.
McDonald: The History Channel recently built a program around your book. Did they seek you out?
Badal: It was part of the series, “Perfect Crimes.” Somewhere, somehow, the producer’s research assistant got wind of the book and called the Cleveland Police Historical Society and they immediately said, “Call Badal.” So she called me. She had the typical West Coast attitude: “Gee, I didn’t know anything interesting ever happened in Cleveland.” So I had her on the phone spending 45-minutes filling her head with every gruesome detail I could think. You never heard anyone say “Oh God!” and “Yuck!” so many times in your life. She said, “You certainly convinced me, but I’m going to have to pitch it to my bosses.” So she called me back and said at one point, “We’re going to go with it.” So immediately me and the people I worked with became extraordinarily protective and said, “Alright, what are you going to do? Don’t sensationalize, duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.” I talked to the producer and he said, “Don’t worry, this is The History Channel, not the Fox Network.” I said, “Point well taken.”
McDonald: It seemed to be done rather well.
Badal: I could have bitched in the sense that sometimes they showed film footage of things not of what we were talking about, because they were not the Cleveland shantytowns being burned down —
McDonald: — No, it looked like the Great Chicago Fire.
Badal: Well, you’ve got to have a visual. By the way, do you know about the Merylo scholarship fund?
McDonald: No....Funded through the book?
Badal: Yes. All of the proceeds from the first 5,000 copies of the book will go toward the fund. It is a scholarship in law enforcement. When I got hold of Merylo’s daughter she was so cooperative. She sent me 2,500 pages of material, Xeroxed, with no restriction on what I did with it. None. So, I felt well, let’s do something for her dad.
McDonald: Were you shocked that Merylo had so much material?
Badal: Yes and no. There were hints that when he retired that he had taken stuff with him. There was a newspaper article that said something like, “his files are never very far away from his hand,” and I thought, ooooooh. I tried to locate Merylo descendants in Cleveland with no luck, and I would like to say it’s because I am such a fantastic researcher that I found them, but the then-curator of the Cleveland Police Museum called me one day and said here it is, Pete Merylo’s daughter.
McDonald: You obviously formed a strong attachment to Det. Merylo while working on this.
Badal: Until the day he died he was working on it. His files had copies of letters he was writing to other jurisdictions until the 1950s. He would scan newspapers. There was a story about a body part floating down the Hudson, and, boy, he had a letter out to those police right away asking, “What can you tell me?”
McDonald: You write about the fact that these crimes actually became World War II propaganda for Nazi Germany and for Italy?
Badal: Yes, “how lucky you are to live here, where we look after you.” You know, the big event spinning out of this book was on May 3 (2001). The Great Lakes Brewery Company, which was one of Eliot Ness’ favorite watering holes hosted a dinner and two of Edward Andrassy’s granddaughters came. Mary Dolezal came all the way from California.
McDonald: That’s spooky. Anyone video tape this assemblage?
Badal: We’ve got photographs. And of course Merylo’s daughter came and she brought her two daughters and one of her granddaughters. His nephew, who lives in Cleveland, brought his wife and their daughter and his mother, who was Merylo’s wife’s sister. You know, Merylo’s wife just died about two months ago. She was 94.
McDonald: I guess the thing that always strikes me when you read about this case is that there was such a wealth of really sick suspects. Apparently, at that time, you couldn’t swing a dead cat in Cleveland without hitting a psychopath.
Badal: That’s one of the things that bothers me a little bit, that I can’t quite understand. They came so close in that Torso Clinic that they had in September of 1936 — I mean, that was so ground breaking. And yet, the conclusions they came to which seemed to have been right on, don’t seem to have affected what the police were looking for. Because, some of the people that Merylo was looking into were just wild. Way-out-there. Crazy, sick, wacked-out people.
McDonald: Merylo had just come on the case about the time of the clinic, hadn’t he?
Badal: He had just come on. In fact, that is one of the most interesting line-ups of dates, shall we say. (Cleveland Police Chief) Matowitz put Merylo on the case Sept. 10, 1936, which was the day the first part of victim #6 showed up. Mayor Burton put Ness on the case on Sept. 12, two days later. I am assuming that probably what happened is that Burton called Matowitz into his office and said, “You put your best man on and I’ll get the safety director on it.” That’s just too close.
McDonald: And, unfortunately, they clashed.
Badal: (Nodding) They (Ness and Merylo) did not get along well. The day after Ness was appointed he was calling Merylo in to ask “How much progress have you made?”
McDonald: That was a stick in the eye. Graceless. But I guess an indication of the pressure to solve the case.
Badal: Unfortunately, Merylo has gotten an unfortunate reputation in some quarters. There are some people who have looked into the case who regard him as being something of a nut. I think part of it is the stories about him that get repeated endlessly and endlessly and become so blown-out of proportion. But when I saw how close the appointment of Ness and Merylo came to one another, I decided Burton called Matowitz in and said “put your best man on this.” Matowitz was not going to respond by putting this idiot on the case. The funniest thing about Merylo I came across was when he went underground between New Castle and Pennsylvania. He got into looking for marijuana pushers. And he busted a few. But when he submitted his expense reports, down at the bottom was $1.40 for marijuana cigarettes. He accounted for every dime. I showed some of his reports to a friend of mine who is a police officer and he just roared. He said, “all of these reports are filled with speculations and editorial comments.” He said you couldn’t do any of that today.
McDonald: Do you discount the alleged letter from The Butcher about how he has left Cleveland for “sunny California” — the letter that has prompted some to tie the case to the murder of Elizabeth Short?
Badal: Based on the information that came back to me I do discount it because they found the guy who wrote the letter. I didn’t go into all this in the book, but he was a wacked-out doctor of some kind. They caught him with body parts in jars in the back end of his car and they went absolutely ballistic. It turned out the body parts had been obtained from a biological supply house, but somehow California authorities picked up on it and that’s what tied it all into the Black Dahlia case.
McDonald: Wrapping up, you now have copies of all the Merylo papers: Will they be archived somewhere?
Badal: Eventually. I’ve got the Xeroxes of it all. Eventually, we will do something like that— archive it in some way. I am on the board of trustees of the Cleveland Police Historical Society and they are looking for a bigger space. They literally took apart, board by board, an old Third District, 1930s captain’s office and labeled everything so if they ever get a big enough space they can rebuild it. We’ll do something with all of that. Merylo worked on a lot of other cases while he worked on the Torso killings, so there are bits and pieces of a lot of other things in those reports.
McDonald: Thank you for your time.
Badal: Thank you.
— © Craig McDonald, May, 2001
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