CHAPTER 15

WITHIN DAYS OF THE DISCOVERY OF BOLO DOVISHAW’S BODY IN the basement of the West 21st Street house, the murder probe turned even more bizarre. On Saturday, January 8, Dom DiPaolo got what turned out to be one of the most startling telephone calls of his long police career. Just when DiPaolo was starting to believe he had seen it all, that nothing could surprise him, he was once more dumbfounded by unpredictable human behavior.

The call came from Michael Orlando, director at Orlando’s Funeral Home at West 22nd and Raspberry Streets in Erie’s Little Italy. Bolo’s family selected the funeral home not far from Bolo’s house to handle Dovishaw’s funeral and burial arrangements. That Friday night before Orlando’s call to DiPaolo and nearing the conclusion of calling hours, Raymond Ferritto had approached Orlando, he told DiPaolo.

“And?” DiPaolo asked when Orlando paused. “What did Ray want?”

“I want to stay after everyone leaves,” Ferritto said to the funeral director. It was obvious to Orlando that Ferritto’s remark was not a request.

“Well, I would like to close at 9 p.m. It’s been a long day,” Orlando weakly responded. Most funeral homes ended calling hours at 9 o’clock.

“I’ll only be a few minutes,” Ferritto assured Orlando. “I just want to check out Bolo’s body.”

Now, funeral directors and undertakers are often accustomed to being on the receiving end of strange requests from families and friends of the deceased. But this one was clearly off the grid. Orlando blanched. Finally he managed to stammer to Ferritto, “Well, ah, er, don’t you think we better check with his wife?”

“It’s okay. She knows,” Ferritto snapped.

The mob hit man was getting impatient with the funeral director. And Orlando knew better than to argue with an acknowledged killer. With a silent sigh, the funeral director resigned himself to staying after hours. Yes, undertakers, as a built-in occupational hazard, experience many weird activities. But during all his years in the bereavement business, even Orlando was not prepared for what came next. Neither was Dom DiPaolo.

It was part fascination, part horror, part revulsion. The three strong emotions kept contradicting themselves within Funeral Director Michael Orlando’s mind as he watched mob hit man Raymond Ferritto systematically examine the murdered man’s body. With much exertion and great effort, Ray Ferritto managed to lift Frank “Bolo” Dovishaw’s heavy remains from the satin-lined coffin. Ferritto then, in a rolling movement, maneuvered the body onto the open coffin lid. No one will ever know, but Ferritto might have been thinking to himself at the time that his effort with Dovishaw’s lifeless body was giving an extremely accurate meaning to the term, “dead weight.”

Slowly, and with purpose, Ferritto began to undress the corpse. First Bolo’s shoes came off, then his socks, then the blue suit – the jacket and the trousers – and then the natty tie and starched white shirt. Finally, Ferritto stripped the bloated body of its underwear. And then, Frank “Bolo” Dovishaw, in all his unholy and frumpy and embalmed glory, was stark naked as Raymond Ferritto stood over him.

Orlando could only squeeze shut his eyes, rather than watch Ferritto examine the body with almost the precision of an overly-eager pathologist. When the undertaker opened his eyes, Ray Ferritto, apparently not finding whatever it was he had been searching for, was attempting to re-dress Frank Dovishaw’s lifeless and dead weight body. And not doing a good job of it. Orlando, now too shaken to even speak, simply helped with the re-dressing in silence.

When they had finished the task at hand and Bolo was re-dressed and comfortably back inside his final resting place, Orlando managed to breathe a deep sigh of relief.

“Hey, I just wanted to check Bolo,” Ferritto attempted to reassure him. “Thanks for your help.”

Orlando could only stand there and nod weakly. When Ferritto was gone, Orlando looked around to make sure all was as it should have been, then turned off the funeral parlor’s lights and left. Most others, probably, would not have handled such a situation as well as Orlando managed to. The next morning, fulfilling what he knew to be his civic duty, Michael Orlando telephoned DiPaolo to relate this very strange tale.

Even though it was Saturday and a rare day off, DiPaolo was not about to wait for Monday morning to confront Ferritto about this new development. He drove to Ferritto’s Brown Avenue home.

DiPaolo didn’t beat around the bush. There were no pleasantries as the veteran cop got immediately to the point.

“Ray, you’ve got to figure I have surveillance on the funeral home,” DiPaolo bluffed. There had been no such surveillance, but the funeral would be photographed later that morning. DiPaolo knew it made sense to let Ferritto think the cops were watching everything and everyone – especially Ferritto. Besides, at this point it would have served no purpose to bring Orlando’s telephone call into the conversation.

“Why the hell did you stay so long last night after the funeral home closed?”

Ferritto smirked that famous, snide and withering Ray Ferritto smirk.

“Fuck, you don’t miss a trick, do you?”

“No games, Ray,” DiPaolo cautioned.

He needed to let Ferritto know who was in charge of the investigation.

“I told you from the start I was going to do this right. Why were you there so long?”

Ray Ferritto actually seemed to soften somewhat, perhaps as much as was humanly possible for him, and then he just shrugged as he was thinking it wouldn’t harm anything to tell DiPaolo what had happened. At least his version of what had happened.

“Hey, I just wanted to check out Bolo. You know, to see if he was tortured. If he was, that might have been meant as a message to me, y’know?”

“And? What did you learn?”

“No, he wasn’t tortured. But, you know, I had to fuckin’ see for myself,” Ferritto nonchalantly shrugged again, as though he was accustomed to and completely comfortable tampering with corpses.

Ice for blood, the detective so very aptly remembered the description. DiPaolo did not mention that it was Orlando who came to him with the story about Ferritto’s body search. And as far as DiPaolo knew, Ferritto never discovered Orlando had been the source of the information, and not any police surveillance. But Ferritto wasn’t done talking, either.

“Y’know, now I’m thinking maybe it was that punk Caesar and his buddy, The Hawk,” Ferritto began to speculate about the killing.

That Ferritto would finger Montevecchio and Serafini, even in a hypothetical, speculative way, didn’t surprise DiPaolo. Both names had made the cop’s short list several days ago. Ferritto then related a meeting he had with Montevecchio in a basement sitting room of the Orlando Funeral Home several days earlier.

“Fuckin’ Caesar tells me he had nothing to do with the hit because he liked Bolo.” When DiPaolo raised his eyebrows, Ferritto added, “I told him, ‘If I knew you had something to do with it, you would fuckin’ know. Because you’d be upstairs – and you wouldn’t be standing up.’”

Weeks passed. As DiPaolo had feared, the trail grew faint and cold. Detectives branched out in their search for clues, any clues, anything that might help to get the murder investigation back on track. The official autopsy report showed that Bolo had died from a single bullet wound to the right side of the back of his head. There also were minor cuts and bruises on the right side of Dovishaw’s plump face. The presiding forensic pathologist, Halbert E. Fillinger, Jr., M.D., speculated the facial abrasions and contusions might have been sustained during a struggle. Yet, no actual “defensive wounds” were found. In the initial autopsy report, the stab wound to Dovishaw’s left eye was not even reported. It was only later, much later, when DiPaolo learned the truth that Fillinger, a world-renowned medical examiner from Philadelphia nicknamed “Homicide Hal,” would amend his post mortem report to read: “Laceration of left eye consistent with stab wound of eye.” But that wasn’t until four years later in 1987.

In any event, the official cause of death was still listed as “gunshot wound of head.” Dovishaw’s was the only blood found at the scene, including the blood on the broken paring knife. The shell casing DiPaolo found on the scene was from a .32 caliber pistol, with Norma brand ammo. Norma ammo was extremely rare as criminals’ preferred ammunition of choice, DiPaolo knew. Perhaps the uniqueness of the ammo would now make it easier for police to eventually find a match and ultimately, Bolo’s killer. The time of death, according to the pathologist, was pegged at 24-to-28 hours before Dovishaw’s body was discovered – roughly 6:30 to 7 p.m. on January 3. Based on his interviews with the Wisinskis, DiPaolo believed he already had ascertained a much more accurate time of death – 6:15 p.m.

Detectives DiPaolo and Gunter now set about the mundane tasks of contacting virtually every firearm dealer in Erie County. They learned none stocked Norma brand ammo. Too little interest in the brand, the dealers said. The reason, they said, was that Norma ammunition cost at least double, probably even more, than that of the most popular ammo available to customers. Norma ammo was made in Sweden, distributed to only one wholesale dealer in the U.S. located in Dayton, Ohio. But the wholesaler did not send any Norma to retail dealers in Ohio, leading DiPaolo to suspect the ammo was taken in a break-in.

The days turned to weeks and weeks became months as the murder probe bogged down in futile dead ends and hopeless interviews with every Erie wise guy, along with all the wannabes. Sadly, what DiPaolo had learned was what he already knew: Bolo Dovishaw ran the biggest and most lucrative gambling book around. He also had the largest capacity for bragging. Eyewitnesses, as the cop expected, were non-existent, either at Dovishaw’s house or the hotel parking lot where his car was found. One day, in frustration and just to prove a point, DiPaolo drove from Bolo’s house to the Holiday Inn, a distance of 2.3 miles. The trip meter on Bolo’s Caddy had recorded seven miles. From Ray Ferritto’s statement, DiPaolo knew that before they stopped at Damore’s Pizza that Monday night, Bolo filled the tank and reset the trip odometer. What DiPaolo learned from this exercise was that Bolo’s murderer most likely drove directly from the house to the Holiday Inn. If there had been another stop, it would have had to have been between Dovishaw’s house and the hotel. It appeared that the location to ditch the vehicle was chosen in advance. But, was it?

With leads running out, the time was now for the dreadfully tedious examination of the many recent home robberies and burglaries in Erie and surrounding northwestern Pennsylvania. From the large stack of cases before DiPaolo, he narrowed the possibilities and focused on only seven robberies/burglaries from May 1978 to May 1982, the most recent crimes fitting his criteria. Maybe surprising to DiPaolo, in retrospect, was that Caesar Montevecchio’s name did not appear in any report as a possible suspect. Not only was Montevecchio not charged, but he was not even mentioned in any of the crimes examined by DiPaolo.

Montevecchio. While Caesar might not have been on the cop’s radar scope, somewhere in the recesses of DiPaolo’s mind the name would always have a familiar ring to it. As DiPaolo labored on this case, he began to develop an instinctual feeling deep in his gut. He still had no real evidence. But his gut was rarely wrong.