Though Murder Has No Tongue Read Online Free PDF

killings were stretching law enforcement to beyond the breaking point and testing its institutions as they had never been tested before. Every sector of public safety—even the fire department—was mobilized to fight the elusive menace who perpetrated such grisly horrors in the middle of one of the nation’s larger cities. Something had to be done, and quickly. In early September 1936, Mayor Harold Burton placed his safety director, the legendary crime fighter Eliot Ness, at the head of the investigation and ordered his chief of police, George Matowitz, to assign his best detective to work the case full time. Every city resident who had been marked as an odd character or a sexual deviant came systematically under intense official scrutiny. And that virtually unending tally of weird and strange Clevelanders would come to include the bricklayer with the severe drinking problem and uncertain sexual orientation who lived alone in a shabby apartment building in a dying neighborhood on Cleveland’s near east side.

    Detective Peter Merylo could have come straight from Central Casting; he was everyone’s image of the ideal Depression-era cop—tough, smart, dedicated, scrupulously honest, a crack shot with his pistol, and obsessively thorough (he boasted the police department’s most impressive arrest record). On the one hand, he was a team player who respected the lines of authority (even when he didn’t particularly care for the individuals in authority) and did his job without complaint or fanfare; on the other hand, there was just enough of the maverick, the lone gunman, in his personality and professional conduct to endear him to an American public that worshipped individuality, personal initiative, and the Hollywood cowboy. Generally, he worked within the rules, but he remained more than willing to bend procedural guidelines when necessary to get the job done. Clevelanders saw only the dedicated professional, the tough cop who could sometimes be the proverbial bull in the china shop. But there lurked a gentle, even tender side to his personality that few outside his immediate family ever saw. He once considered joining the priesthood and harbored an abiding love for the sound of a violin. Crimes against the helpless, especially children, sparked his personal rage and drove him to give his all to the job. Ironically, his background was remarkably similar to that of Frank Dolezal, the man who would ultimately become his quarry. Born in 1895 in the Ukraine, Merylo immigrated to the United States sometime around 1915, joined the army—though he saw no active service—and gravitated to police work in 1919. By the mid-1930s, he had been a detective in the Cleveland Police Department for several years and had built a reputation for handling difficult and dangerous assignments.

    Detective Peter Merylo. The veteran cop could boast of the Cleveland Police Department’s finest arrest record. He was placed on the torso murders full-time in 1936 by Chief of Police George Matowitz.
Cleveland Press
Archives, Cleveland State University.
    Following orders from Mayor Harold Burton, Chief of Police George Matowitz assigned Merylo to work the torso killings full time in the early days of September 1936—just as transients who lived in the city’s sprawling shantytowns spotted the first grisly piece of the Butcher’s sixth victim floating in a fetid waterway at the heart of Kingsbury Run. Along with his partner, veteran detective Martin Zalewski, Merylo began reviewing the voluminous pile of police reports that had been accumulating since the torso killings began. Even for a cop of Merylo’s vast experience and intelligence, absorbing and classifying all the diverse pieces of information gathered and recorded by the men who had worked the case from the beginning was a daunting task. A couple of days after Chief Matowitz gave his lead investigator his marching orders, Safety Director Ness