Authors: Joanna Connors
She moved back in with Gus and started going to her church, Emmanuel Christian, but just off and on. She still didn’t really believe. Then one day the drug demon came back and pulled her back out on the streets. The next night, she was walking along East 55th Street when a car pulled up and two women got out. It was the First Lady of their church—the pastor’s wife—and Sister Janice. “I don’t know how they found me, but First Lady said to me, ‘God is working through me to bring you home.’”
She was almost three months pregnant and didn’t know it. Gus was the one who figured it out. “He said, ‘Laura, I can’t lose another one of my babies. You got to figure this out.’”
She went to a Christian place for pregnant women and stayed away from home, away from the neighborhood and the drugs and the temptations, until Keishaun was born. Three hours later, a social worker came into her room and said they
didn’t find drugs in his system or her system, but, because of her history, they didn’t think the baby could go home with her.
She was shattered. That’s when she was finished with drugs at last.
“When I finally decided I wanted to get myself together, I asked the Lord if he helped me to stay clean and sober, I would raise my baby up in his house.” Her pastor went to court with her to get Keishaun back.
Keishaun had fallen asleep on Laura’s lap, slumped forward on her chest. Now, on cue, he woke up and started crying.
“There’s a lot I’ve forgotten and blocked out,” Laura said. “You start using drugs and drinking, you’re burying that stuff.”
In the days before he found me, breathless and late for an appointment, David Francis had tried to make someone else his victim: his baby sister, Laura.
I put the pieces together as she told me about the last time she saw him, my adrenaline flooding as her memory took her closer and closer to July 9, 1984.
“Last time I seen him I had just had my first child,” Laura said. “I was about nineteen. He had just got out of prison and he had been out about a month. The only time he came around and called, he called himself a pimp. He wanted me to meet him downtown, in a hotel. He had these guys down there, they was Mafia, he said, and he was going to turn me out and I was going to make money for him. And [he said] if I didn’t do what he said, that he was going to kill me. And I could tell he was serious—he wasn’t talking to me like a brother talks to a sister. And I told my mother, and the next time he called her she said to leave me alone or she would have him locked up again.”
“Do you remember when that was?” I asked.
“It was right before my mother died. About 1984.”
“Nineteen eighty-four. You’re sure?”
“Yeah. She was still up here in Cleveland at the time, before my sisters took her back to Boston.”
“Laura, that had to be in July, when he raped me. But he couldn’t have been out of prison for that long. He was only out of prison for a week, and then they caught him the day after he raped me and he was back in jail. So he called you right before he found me. Then your mother died in August.”
“They brought him in shackles to my mother’s funeral,” she said.
“I don’t think so. He was here, in Cleveland, in the county jail. I think I would have heard if they let him go to Boston. Though actually, I’ve found out they didn’t tell me everything, so he might have been there.”
One of the things they didn’t tell me was that they discovered a weapon on him in the county jail.
“It must have been Philip then,” she said. “Yeah, it was Philip. They brought him with chains on his legs and arms, and three guards. That was the last time I saw my father, at my mother’s funeral. It was awful. The city had to bury her because we didn’t have the money. My father came, and sat right in the family row, right in front of my mother’s casket. The exact words out of his mouth were, ‘The bitch got what she deserved.’ I told him, ‘When you die, I’m coming to your grave long enough to spit on it.’ And I never saw him again.”
I was far more riveted by the way our orbits aligned back in 1984 than Laura was. She escaped her brother; I didn’t. It
made me wonder about David Francis’s other victims. The cops had told me that rapists tend to be serial criminals, escalating the violence with each rape. They were speaking from anecdotal stories and their own observations, but the recent results of rape kit testing and research back them up.
In 2002, David Lisak of the University of Massachusetts and Paul M. Miller of Brown University School of Medicine reported: “Studies that use long follow-up periods tend to show alarming rates of sexual reoffending among rapists … (and) several studies have shown that among incarcerated rapists the actual number of sexual crimes committed far exceeds the number of adjudicated charges against these men.”
Who else did David Francis rape or assault? I went back to see if I missed something in the criminal files from the prosecutor’s office.
When he was seventeen, David Francis was arrested in Boston and charged with “unnatural acts.” But because he was a juvenile, with more privacy protections under the law than adults, I could not get any more information on it from Massachusetts. Nor could I get information on another charge, made a week before the unnatural acts, for “assault in the 2nd degree” in West Hartford, Connecticut.
He was no longer a juvenile when he followed his mother to Cleveland in 1976 or 1977. He was twenty-one when his arrests in Cleveland started, nonviolent crimes that came one after the other. He would draw some jail time, get out, and do it again. Like his brother Philip, he changed his identity with nearly every arrest.
When he was arrested for receiving stolen property, he was Dalin Allen. When he was arrested for aggravated burglary, robbery, and carrying a concealed weapon, he was Daniel Allen. When he was arrested for breaking and entering, he was Tony Wayne. And he was Kevin Brown when he was arrested in Cleveland on January 22, 1978, for aggravated robbery, aggravated burglary, carrying a concealed weapon … and kidnapping.
I had missed the kidnapping charge the other times I looked at his records. As David Francis, he had limited his crimes to stealing cars and breaking into buildings. Except for the assault and unnatural acts charges when he was a juvenile in Boston, the kidnapping was his first crime against a person—at least, the only one I could find. What had he done to draw that charge?
I learned about the aliases in the file the prosecutor’s office gave me, but in all of that, I could find nothing more about the kidnapping charge. There was no trial transcript, because he pleaded guilty. The police department couldn’t find the thirty-year-old arrest report.
What exactly did Kevin Brown do? I decided to go back to see Russell Harrison, Ida Taylor’s son, the one who said he couldn’t remember David Francis on my first visit. Maybe his memory was bad, but records showed that the two had been arrested together in the fall of 1977 for a crime that carried more than a tinge of irony.
On the evening of October 11, 1977, the two broke into the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Society, founded and run by Icabod Flewellen.
Flewellen worked as a janitor at Case Western Reserve University, where he earned a BA in history at the age of seventy-six. Long before that, however, he began amassing a collection of items reflecting his life’s passion, African-American history. He was single-minded but wildly indiscriminate, collecting valuable African art and significant historic artifacts and displaying them alongside unremarkable household memorabilia he gathered going door to door in Hough. His house looked like a hoarder’s warehouse, the story goes, but he called it a museum and opened its doors in 1953. Though he moved it to several other locations over the years, he never quite achieved his dream of establishing an important cultural institution for the study of black history. Money to pay staff and fix leaky roofs was a constant problem, as was his habit of conducting one-sided feuds with his supporters.
He reported the break-in to the police, whose report does not show what, if anything, Russell Harrison and David Francis stole. I was disappointed to find that the report also did not record what Flewellen had to say about two young African-American men breaking into a museum dedicated to their own history.
I decided to see if Harrison’s memory had improved since the first time I’d met him.
In the months in between, I had gone to see Ida in the hospital following her knee surgery, hoping she could tell me a little more about David Francis. She couldn’t, but I stayed awhile to talk and she remembered my visit when I called to set up another meeting.
Lisa, who was not yet working with me the first time I went, came with me. Ida led us into the dining room. Russell was there, and so was Gregory, the brother I met on the first visit. They sat at the table with another son and a daughter, watching
The Twilight Zone
on a very large TV.
Ida sat at the head of the table, next to her daughter, who told us she was Gloria. The other son never spoke. They kept the TV on while we talked, adding a sci-fi sound track to the proceedings.
I asked them how long they had lived in this house.
“Oh, they call me the ‘Queen of the Street,’ I’ve lived here so long,” Ida said. “We moved here in 1969. I’ve lived here longer than anyone else.”
“This was a live street, back in the day,” Gloria said.
“Yeah, them were the good old days,” Russell said. “Partying, partying, partying.”
“Everybody else is gone now,” Ida said. “They died, they moved. More died than moved.”
I asked if anyone else in the family had nicknames like Queen of the Street.
“We call her Big Momma, too,” Russell said. “I’m the Godfather. If you want to write a book about me, you’d have to call it ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still.’”
Everyone laughed. I didn’t get it.
“I’m Mae West,” Gloria said. “And Gregory there is Hubba Bubba.”
Now I wondered if they were putting me on.
A young woman came in, gave Ida some cash, kissed her on the cheek, and sat down. “My granddaughter,” Ida said with
pride. The money must have been lottery winnings, because this set off a conversation that I recorded in my notebook only as “long discussion of lottery.”
When they finished, I asked if they had remembered any more about David Francis since my first time there. I was saving what I knew about the 1977 arrest for later, if I needed it, but Russell surprised me.
Right off, he said, “Yeah, we ran together.”
“Yeah, I saw that you were arrested together in 1977,” I said.
He nodded and shrugged. “I wouldn’t have a lot negative to say about him.”
He flashed a smile at Lisa, who was standing in a corner with her camera. “Aren’t you going to take my picture?” He managed to turn the question into a pickup line.
“Not yet,” Lisa answered.
Russell looked back at me. “He used to be my protégé at the time.”
Ida broke in to say that she hadn’t remembered much about David when I first asked, but after I left she remembered more. “He was in and out of the house ’cause his mother lived here,” Ida said. “His mom stayed here, he stayed here, Laura stayed here….” She gazed off into the distance.
“So, was he your protégé in crime?” I asked Russell.
“Yeah,” he said. “He was my protégé in crime—and the ladies.” He winked at Lisa. His brothers laughed.
“What else did you do together?” I asked.
“I can give you information about myself, but I’ll sell my story because my life is worth something,” he said.
Then he looked at Lisa again and smiled. “But I can tell you that even when I was bad, I was good,” he said, drawing out the last word so it came out “gooooooood.” Now everyone laughed.
“See, I saw David as a diamond in the rough,” he said. “I was basically schooling him. I went to prison for one robbery we did, and I didn’t tell on him. I took the fall for it.” He sat up straighter. “I was locked up for several years.”
“Back in the day they was different than where they are now,” Ida said, looking around at her sons. Gloria patted her mother on the arm and smiled. “You love your boys no matter what,” she said.
“I was in Lima, I was in Mansfield,” Russell said, ticking off Ohio prisons. “I been to a number of them. Last time I got out of the penitentiary, I said, ‘I need a vet.’”
“A vet?”
“Yeah, you know, a veteran. An older woman who would take care of me,” he said. “I had one once. She was a preacher.”
He winked again at Lisa.
“Did you know David went to prison for rape?” I asked.
“No,” Russell said, his tone neutral. “Last time I got out, I never saw him again.”
“Are you surprised he was convicted of a rape?”
“Nope,” he said. “In the process of doing this one robbery, there was a young girl, and next thing I know he’s in the bedroom with her. In the bed. I said, ‘C’mon now,’ and he said ‘No.’ I had to get him out of there. So I knew it was inevitable.”
“So you protected the girl?”
“Yeah. See, he might have had to rape, but I was an ex-player. Real good with the women. For me it was like apples in an orchard: I just reached up and plucked them off the tree.”
He looked over at Lisa once more.
“It’s just that I was charming, as you can well see.”
“How long were you in prison?”
“Several years,” he said. “See, I don’t mind telling you I was in a penitentiary. A lot of people try to forget their past, but I think that’s a mistake. ’Cause if you forget where you came from, you could go down that same path again.”
His brothers and sister nodded in agreement. Russell repeated that I’d have to pay him to talk more. I closed my notebook. Lisa hadn’t taken any photos yet, but she started to pack up her bag.
“You should come to my church,” Russell said while I waited. He gave me the address. “I’m usually there, but if I’m not, just tell them Reverend Harrison sent you.”
In the car, I said to Lisa, “Jesus, I thought he was going to ask you to go upstairs with him.”
Lisa laughed. “Did you see the hands on that guy dressed as a woman?”
“What?”
“Gloria,” she said. “That was a guy.”
How could I have not seen that? I was focusing on Russell, but still. I was embarrassed I had missed something that was so obvious to Lisa. Gloria was the one who said she was called Mae West. All through the conversation, she sat close
to Ida, patting her arm. I’d thought,
That’s a good daughter
, and turned my attention to the wayward son.
“Her whole family accepts her,” I said. “Wow. That’s great—it’s no big deal to them.”
“I know,” Lisa said. “Amazing.”
When I looked Gloria up in the county’s criminal database, I found something interesting. In both 1986 and 2004, when she was arrested for theft and, later, drug possession, the records identified her as male. But in 1986, the court sentenced her for the theft to the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville.
I found it hard to believe the Ohio corrections system was that tolerant and forward-thinking in 1986, or even today, for that matter. It’s possible Gloria had gotten sexual reassignment surgery, but I doubted it, given the expense. Later, Laura told me they might have sent her to Marysville before they realized she was a man, at least anatomically.
The next day I went to the Justice Center to see if I could find in the police department’s records what Russell Harrison had been hiding. I left with copies of decades-old microfilmed documents from his police files. They were dark and blurred, as though they had been printed in disappearing ink. It took me hours to read it all, not just because of the dark copies but because my hands were shaking as I read.