Though Murder Has No Tongue by James Jessen Badal Page B

remains had been found so neatly and tidily packed into those half-bushel produce baskets. And, of course, city dailies ran photos of Frank Dolezal himself, making his blank, unfocused gaze instantly recognizable.
    Few, if any, noticed during those first heady days of excitement in early July that there was a problem; the portrait of the killer that had emerged from the careful deliberations of former coroner A. J. Pearce’s torso clinic seemed to have been largely forgotten. Few, if any, among law enforcement, members of the press, or the public seemed to notice that Dolezal came nowhere near fitting the profile that had been so carefully crafted almost three years earlier. True, the press had grumbled about problems and inconsistencies in the official version of the Dolezal saga in the days following his arrest; but those doubts had been prompted by the immediate circumstances, not any lingering memories or respect for the torso clinic’s profile. There had been unanimous agreement among the clinic participants that the Butcher had to be large and powerful. Though a stocky, strong working man, Frank Dolezal was smaller than some of the victims; how did he overpower them—especially Edward Andrassy, who, besides being a taller man, was rumored to have carried an ice pick? Dolezal had been a bricklayer for most of his working life; where did he learn to cut up a corpse with the surgical precision noted by the medical men at the torso clinic? Would three months of employment in aslaughterhouse give him the necessary skill? Though he lived in a succession of shabby apartments in run-down buildings in the central city’s crumbling core, he would seem to lack the necessary familiarity with Kingsbury Run. There was nothing that specifically tied him to the desolate industrial landscape or the adjacent shantytowns. Dolezal certainly had no car, nor is there any indication anywhere he even knew how to drive; how did he transport the remains? Certainly not on a public conveyance. It is ludicrous to imagine him sitting on a bus with his sack of body parts beside him. Complicating the transportation issue considerably more is the fact that some of the male bodies were intact except for their heads. Edward Andrassy and his never-identified companion had been discovered at the base of Jackass Hill near East 49th on the south side of Kingsbury Run. Frank Dolezal’s apartments and drinking haunts were all on the north side, closer to East 20th. Given the distance between these two spots and assuming—as the sheriff and his allies did—that Dolezal carried out the murders where he lived, it is impossible to imagine him lugging two heavy male corpses (minus heads and sex organs) across the Run without someone having noticed something out of the ordinary. And where was his laboratory—the isolated spot where he supposedly carried out his murderous activities and subsequent dismemberments free from any worries of detection? The only locations that came close to fitting the bill were the bathtubs in the various apartments in which he had resided. Even if he possessed the necessary anatomical expertise, could he have accomplished such exacting work while trying to maneuver the dead weight of a bulky human corpse in the narrow confines of an old tub?
    There was also an additional, significant aspect of the Butcher’s methodology that everyone in the late 1930s, including the hand-picked experts who had participated in the torso clinic, missed. The manner in which the Butcher had left the remains of some of his victims clearly indicated a severely warped sense of humor—the artist-joker proudly displaying his handiwork for all to see while at the same time thumbing his nose at the authorities. The heads of Edward Andrassy and victim no. 2 had been buried so as to ensure that the police could find them; some of Flo Polillo’s remains had been carefully wrapped, packed, and covered with burlap bags; the