Authors: Joanna Connors
The reverend had a lot to hide.
At lunchtime on Monday, August 29, 1977, the Reverend Thomas Gallagher answered the door to the rectory of St.
Philip Neri Church on St. Clair Avenue in Cleveland, where he was the priest. A young man stood in front of him. Gallagher thought he recognized him, maybe from his old church, St. Agatha on St. Clair and East 109th Street.
The young man asked the priest a couple of questions about church youth programs, then asked, “Can I use your bathroom?”
Gallagher hesitated. Did he really recognize this young man? Maybe he shouldn’t let him in. But Gallagher ignored his instincts. He had worked in the inner city for years, it was his calling, and it did not feel right to suspect the young man. He let him in and pointed to the bathroom.
A minute later, the man came out of the bathroom holding a .38-caliber blue steel revolver. “I have a present for you,” he said, pointing the gun at the priest’s head. The man was David Francis.
Francis opened the rectory door and let in a slightly older man. Russell Harrison.
“Where is your housekeeper?” Francis asked.
The rectory had no housekeeper. Julie Casey was in the kitchen, making hot dogs for lunch. Julie was a volunteer, and only fifteen years old. It was her last day of summer vacation. Gallagher called to her, and when she came into the room and saw the two men and the gun, Gallagher was surprised by her reaction. She didn’t seem to be afraid; she was angry.
“This is the third time I’ve been robbed this month,” she said.
Francis turned to Gallagher. “You have three minutes to show me where all the money is.”
Gallagher took them upstairs to his bedroom safe. Harrison stayed with him. Francis took the girl into another bedroom. After a few minutes, Harrison went to find them and discovered Francis holding the girl down on the bed. She was crying. Harrison ordered him back to the priest’s room. “And bring the girl,” he said.
As Gallagher opened the lock, Francis stepped behind him and cocked the gun at his head with a loud
click
. Gallagher would remember the sound of that click more than thirty years later, as clearly as he heard it that day. He took it as a warning: Don’t try pulling a gun out of the safe.
Harrison heard the click, too. “Don’t shoot the minister unless you have to,” he said.
When the safe was open, the men made Gallagher and the girl lie facedown on the floor and bound their hands and feet. Then they took Gallagher’s briefcase and filled it with the cash in the safe: $1,201 that had been collected at a bingo game and raffle the night before.
Harrison went through the priest’s pockets, then the girl’s, taking their cash. He took the watches off their wrists, a turquoise ring from Julie, and a gold pocket watch from the priest’s dresser—a railroad watch inscribed “A.G.”
They pulled the priest and the girl to their feet and ordered them into the closet. The priest remembered that with their ankles bound, they had to hop in. The men barricaded the closet with a dresser and some chairs and left. Later, two nuns said they saw them walk out of the rectory as though they belonged there. The priest waited a while after he heard
them leave before he pushed out of the closet, cut his and Julie’s hands free with scissors, and called the police.
Four and a half months after the robbery, the case was unsolved and Russell Harrison and David Francis were still free. Records don’t show where Francis was, but Harrison was living on the east side of Cleveland with his new girlfriend, a woman he’d known for seven months.
The blurred microfilm copies of the police reports told the story of her two-year-old daughter, Jasmine.
On January 16, 1978, Jasmine wouldn’t eat her dinner. Russell ordered her to eat, and when she wouldn’t mind him, he slapped the toddler’s forehead, making her fall back and hit her head. Jasmine’s mother told the police that after this she went into the kitchen and said, “Jasmine, eat your food so your daddy won’t get mad at you,” which got her daughter to eat.
“He came in, and seen that she was eating her food for me,” the girlfriend said, which made him even angrier. “And that’s when he tied her up with a clothesline rope, and he picked her up and shook her and he said, ‘Damn it, girl, you’re going to mind me!’ if he had to whip her butt every time she turned around.”
This was at 7 in the evening, Jasmine’s mother said.
The next morning, Jasmine lay unresponsive on the floor of her bedroom, which police later found empty of everything but a few pieces of her clothing, a potty-training chair, and a suede belt, which one of Jasmine’s aunts told them Harrison
used to tie the child to the potty. At the hospital, the emergency crew reported that he said, “If she lives, I promise I will never beat her again.”
She did not live. In the five months that Russell Harrison had lived with his girlfriend, Jasmine, and her brother, “He whipped her about ten or eleven times,” the girlfriend told police. “She would always make him mad, but he said that he liked the child.”
In the dining room, the police found a gun and a splintered wooden paddle.
And in the closet in the room where Russell Harrison slept, they found items that had been reported stolen in August, six months earlier: a Timex watch with a gold band and a blue face, and a gold Illinois Central pocket watch inscribed “A.G.”
Four months later, when Russell Harrison was in county jail for the murder of Jasmine, the police asked him about the gold pocket watch and the Timex they’d found in his closet.
Apparently, Harrison did not take the fall for David Francis, as he’d claimed. Five days later, police tracked Francis down. When they arrested him, he gave them an alias, Kevin Brown, and so it remains, to this day, in the county criminal database. He pleaded guilty to all the counts but kidnapping, went to prison, and was paroled. When that was is not clear in the records, but in 1982, he was back in prison for violating that parole. The next time he was paroled was in July of 1984.
When the prosecutor compiled the criminal record for David Francis’s file, preparing to try him for my rape, the report on the robbery and kidnapping at the church rectory was not there. It was still in the record for “Kevin Brown,” though that record does note that Brown sometimes used the alias Daniel Allen.
Harrison pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter for the death of Jasmine, and guilty to aggravated robbery for holding up Father Gallagher. He was sentenced to seven to twenty-five years on each count, to run consecutively. I could not find records of his release date, but I was stunned to see that he served less time for murdering a child than Francis did for raping me. Harrison was out by 1995, when he was arrested for drug abuse with violence specifications. On that charge, the court offered probation, with several requirements for drug rehabilitation. When he tested positive for cocaine in 1998, he was sent to prison. He was out again in 2000.
Father Thomas Gallagher, seventy-seven years old and retired, was worried when I told him that one of the men who tied him up back in 1977 was still alive and out of prison.
“When all this happened, I was thinking they might come after me because I was a witness,” he said. Before we talked, he said, he needed to ask me: “If I say anything now, will he come after me?”
We were having coffee in the food court of Summit Mall, near Gallagher’s retirement home in Akron. It was January of 2008. On the phone, Gallagher had told me to look for the
“short Irish guy in the collar.” I would have known him anyway, from the photo that ran with the story in
The Plain Dealer
the day after the robbery.
Father Gallagher told me he stayed on at St. Philip Neri after the robbery, leaving in 1990 only because he was reassigned to the Veterans Affairs hospitals in Cleveland. He retired in 2000 at the age of seventy, having spent more than twenty-five years ministering to the poor in inner-city parishes.
“Even before I was a priest, I felt strongly about interracial justice,” he said. “I just happened to be ordained at the right time, when John the 23rd was pope. I was ordained in 1961, and Vatican II was right after that. It was a time when a lot of us in the Church were really fired up about integration and social justice. Changes were just starting to come.”
When he was a seminarian he took urban studies courses at Case Western, and later he entered a four-year program created to teach clergy of all faiths how to organize for social changes in their communities.
“We did all kinds of radical things,” he said. “Now, of course, we’re thought of as too radical.” In the decades of conservative popes who came after John the 23rd, the activist social justice and liberation theology movements in the Church had receded.
Father Gallagher took a sip of his coffee and looked around the mall. It was 10:30 in the morning, and except for us, the place was empty.
“I remember going to jail one time for ten days, so we could experience the conditions of our prisoners,” he said. “It was my radicalization year.”
In 1965, the bishop of the diocese forbade his priests to join in the civil rights actions in the South. Gallagher and another young priest defied his order and went anyway, boarding a plane on March 23, 1965, heading for Alabama to join the last leg of the third Selma-to-Montgomery march. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was on the same plane. He had taken leave of the march for one day to come to Cleveland as the guest of honor at a Nobel Peace Prize dinner organized by local clergy for the benefit of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and was heading back.
I asked if they’d talked. “Oh yes,” Gallagher said. “He wanted to talk theology with us.”
After that, Gallagher asked the diocese for assignments in the inner city, and got them, leading three churches in poor, mostly black neighborhoods. He joined the Council of Christians and Jews and the NAACP, and was on the board of the Urban League in Akron.
What David Francis and Russell Harrison did to him didn’t stop him from his mission. I asked him if he was scared to be alone in the rectory after that.
At first he said no. “I was so happy they didn’t kill us. At the time, with that big gun pointed at my head, I did think they would end up killing us. It seemed to me they were debating whether or not to do it.”
The recording of our conversation lapses into several moments of silence.
“Did you pray during the break-in?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I wasn’t praying. I was worried. I was thinking that I didn’t have a will prepared.”
“Did you ever get robbed again?”
“Well, after that we put bars on the lower windows but not on the upper ones. And one night someone put a ladder up and crawled in and took a TV and some clothes. I slept through it, and I was glad I did. But I was never mugged, and I took a lot of walks in the neighborhood. At another church, someone stole my car. On Ash Wednesday.”
He paused. “You asked me if that break-in scared me,” he said. “I didn’t think I had any fears, but now that I’m thinking about it, I was always worried. There was always stress under the surface, and the stress lingers, and when you’re driving around, you’re always wondering,
Are they going to see me? Are they going to come find me? Are they going to do something to me so I won’t talk?
I think that’s when my diabetes started.”
“What about forgiveness?” I asked. “Isn’t that what a priest would tell someone, to forgive them?”
“Oh, I forgave them right away, when they didn’t kill me,” he said. “It didn’t change my attitude about working and living in the inner city. I wanted to be there.”
I had saved one question for last because I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable. “Did you ever counsel any women in your churches who had been raped?” I asked.
It did make him uncomfortable. “I don’t think so,” he said. Then he looked down at his hands. “In seminary, we were taught to fear women,” he went on. “We were taught to stay far away from them. They told us women are out to get you, they’re out to get you in bed.”
As I drove back to Cleveland, I felt light. Sitting there in that ordinary mall on an ordinary morning, drinking coffee
with this short Irish man in a collar, I had that otherworldly feeling that sometimes comes in the presence of the extraordinary. I am not Catholic, or a believer in any other religion. But I felt as though I was meant to find Gallagher. We had glimpsed our own deaths in the face of the same man. I was meant to talk to him about fear and dying and forgiveness.
When Judge Harry Hanna told David Francis, “I shall bury you in the bowels of our worst prison for as long as I can,” he was referring to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. No one outside the offices of a state government building calls it that, though. Everyone calls it Lucasville, the name of the closest town.
The Appalachian South starts in southern Ohio, bracketed by West Virginia on the east and Kentucky to the south. It is Ohio’s poorest and least-educated region, with poverty levels about double that of the rest of the state. In Lucasville and the surrounding area, the prison is one of the biggest employers.
This was where David Francis went in November of 1984, and this is where he stayed until the spring of 1993, when the longest and third-deadliest prison riot in the country’s history erupted on Easter Sunday. For eleven days, about 450 inmates took over an entire cell block, holding a dozen guards hostage. When it was over, one guard and nine inmates were dead, and dozens injured.
It started when a group of Sunni Muslim inmates refused to undergo a tuberculosis test because it violated their religious beliefs. The warden had ordered that all prisoners would be tested, and decided to lock down the entire prison for the tests. Before the lockdown happened, though, the inmates responded to his order with violence.
But the TB tests were just the flash point that ignited the riot. The conditions had been smoldering for several years. The reports that came out in the wake of the riot noted a slew of troubling issues. The prison was overcrowded to the point that cells designed for one inmate housed two. The warden allowed phone calls only on Christmas Day. The inmate-to-guard ratio of 9 to 1 was dangerously tilted. Though smaller gangs existed, the Aryan Brotherhood and the Muslims ruled, and violent disputes between them flared often. The warden had eliminated the practice of inmates choosing their own cellmates, and randomly put together blacks and whites, lifers and short-timers, Aryan and Muslim. Though it was a maximum-security prison, it was run more like a medium- to low-security one, with guards moving hundreds of inmates to meals and work assignments at any time through the halls.
Former inmates told newspaper reporters about the conditions. “It’s a hard joint,” one of them said. “You have to live one day at a time at Lucasville. Everybody has a knife. And if you don’t have one, you better get one.” Then he demonstrated how to make a knife with a gallon-size plastic milk container and a piece of metal.
When I started my search, I wanted to know what paths David Francis and I had taken to bring us to our collision on
July 9, 1984, and where our lives went afterward. For him, the first nine years after the rape were spent living in a cramped cell, quite possibly with a member of the Aryan Brotherhood.
After the usual weeks of letters and phone calls asking for permission to visit the prisons where David Francis lived during the sixteen years after my rape, I went to Lucasville at the end of 2007. I hoped someone there might remember him.
I talked first with the warden, a man who had started his career as a guard and worked his way up the corrections ladder.
“It’s important to understand the mission of Lucasville,” he told me. The mission boiled down to this: Lucasville is the time-out chair for the problem children of the Ohio prison system. When an inmate at another prison is violent or disruptive, they ship him to Lucasville.
“We’ve got everybody’s maladjusted here,” the warden said. “That’s all we have. And they come to Lucasville for serious things. They don’t come here for singing poorly in the choir.”
I was curious about how David Francis fit in with this rough crowd. “Is it true that other inmates treat the rapists worse than anyone else?” I asked.
“Well, that’s kind of correctional lore, and in the past it was accurate,” he said. “Sex offenders were not very well received by the other inmates. Now, though, so many more sex offenders are in prison, there’s some normalcy to it.”
I have been in prison visiting areas, rooms filled with inmates sitting with their wives or girlfriends, eating snack food purchased from the long rows of vending machines. They fiddle with their stacks of quarters and avoid looking at the other inmates and their visitors. No one has much to say.
This time I was going beyond the public area for a look inside what everyone considered the meanest prison in Ohio. Lisa was not with me—no photographers allowed. The spokesman guided me down the main corridor, where a line of inmates walked single file along the wall in silence.
“This is a lot calmer that I expected,” I said.
My guide positioned himself between me and the inmates and shook his head. “Understand we’re in a prison,” he said. “It’s deceptive. It’s calm and orderly, but things do happen. It’s no way to live.”
No one could determine which cell, or even cell block, had once housed David Francis, so we went into a typical cell block. The cells, on two levels, surrounded an open control area. The guide told me that about half of the 1,460 inmates remained locked in these cells twenty-three hours a day, getting out only to shower and to exercise, alone.
We walked past the exercise area. In a small wire cage that brought to mind an animal display at the world’s worst zoo, a man was doing pull-ups. As he went up and down, biceps ballooning, I saw he had a tattoo that curved around his neck, one word inked in elaborate Olde English lettering, the style of the Aryan Brotherhood: “NEFARIOUS.”
The other, luckier inmates can leave their cells daily for jobs within the prison, and with good behavior are permitted group recreation time and meals in the dining hall. The average length of stay at Lucasville is about seven years.
I wore loose jeans and the baggiest sweatshirt I owned for this visit, an outfit that did nothing to stop the stares I drew everywhere we went. The attention unnerved me. I found
myself calculating how many of these men might be in for rape, and moved closer to my guide.
We walked through the dining hall and the gym, and when we finished the tour, the guide surprised me with a question. “Do you want to see the Death House?” His voice was casual, like he was offering to show me the library. It surprised me. I knew Ohio executed its condemned prisoners at Lucasville and that reporters witnessed these executions. But I didn’t know they let reporters all the way inside, past the designated viewing area.
Ohio, along with Oklahoma and Arizona, has become notorious for botching lethal injections, so much so that in 2015 the Supreme Court agreed to review the constitutionality of the procedures. The standard method involves three drugs, but a shortage of one of the drugs—created when the European supplier refused to sell it for use in executions—had led to improvisation.
In 2014, Ohio tried a controversial two-drug injection on one prisoner, a method never before used in the United States. The condemned man, sentenced to die for the rape and murder of a woman in 1989, died a slow and agonizing death, according to witnesses.
The most famous of Ohio’s botched executions happened in 2009, when the executioners poked around for two and a half hours trying to find a usable vein in Romell Broom, who was sentenced to die for the rape and murder of a fourteen-year-old girl in Cleveland in 1984. Witnesses reported that Broom, who was grimacing and in pain, tried to help with the needle placement several times, pointing out possible veins and
rubbing his arms. The governor finally called the execution off. In 2015, Broom was still on death row.
All of this happened in the years after 2008, the year of my tour. My guide led me across the yard to the door of a small, unmarked brick building and opened it. When I entered, I half expected to feel the presence of ghosts. I thought a place called the Death House had to be haunted by the spirits of unspeakable sorrow and dread.
But what struck me was how mundane it was. The institutional-beige walls and floors, the gurney, the medical equipment—these imitations of a hospital setting stripped the place of its power and meaning. They sterilized the act of killing a human being, transforming the enormity and mystery of death into a common medical procedure.
First we looked at side-by-side viewing areas, each the size of a walk-in closet, one for the inmates’ witnesses and one for the victims’. They were separated by a thin wall, and in each, three worn vinyl office chairs faced the glass window that revealed the execution chamber. A hospital gurney outfitted with straps sat center stage, like a set piece in a play—an effect amplified by the curtains that could be drawn across the window when the drama ended.
We proceeded to the cell where the inmate waits for his execution, a small room with a bed, a sink, a toilet, and, hanging in an upper corner, a small TV. The TV made me want to cry. I pictured a condemned man spending the final hours of his life watching
Cops,
or
Judge Judy,
distracted to the very end.
“It is approximately seventeen steps from the cell to the execution chamber,” the spokesman said. As we entered
the chamber, bare but for the gurney, I saw a wall telephone installed for last-minute reprieves, and a microphone for the inmate to deliver his last words. The IV line and assorted medical devices were hidden in an adjacent room, which served as the equivalent of the blindfold over the eyes of men facing a firing squad.
I thought I detected the odor of gas in the chamber. I almost remarked on it, but I decided I’d imagined it, since they had never used gas for executions here. At one time Ohio gave the condemned a choice between death by lethal injection or death in the electric chair, but the chair had been removed several years before and donated to the Ohio Historical Society. They displayed it in 2011, in an exhibit that also included a wooden cage used on state mental patients in the late 1800s. It was called “Controversy Pieces You Don’t Normally See.”
I tried to picture the men who lay on this gurney and comprehended the inescapable and imminent certainty of their own death. Did they leave their bodies and hover above, watching and waiting? Did they think of their victims?
David Francis might have died here. My mother, my sisters, and my husband might have watched through the glass. My children might have never existed.
I could still smell the phantom gas as we left the building, still smell it as I said goodbye to the spokesman and walked to my car for the long drive back to Cleveland. The dark feeling I had expected in the Death House remained with me the entire drive north, as the late afternoon gave way to night and I passed the twin billboards of the Five Commandments.
David Francis remained at Lucasville for eight and a half years, until the Lucasville Uprising in 1993. Francis was not part of the revolt. On the fourth day of the rioting he was among the eighty-seven inmates who were evacuated to the now-closed prison in Lima. At the time, Lima warden Harry Russell said that the group included the most psychologically disturbed of Lucasville’s inmates.
Francis, who was not a model prisoner, was moved from prison to prison when he got into trouble. A year after the move to Lima he was sent to the prison in Warren, and four years later, in May of 1998, he landed at his last prison, Lebanon, located between Cincinnati and Dayton.
In early 2008 I drove to Lebanon, traveling on an interstate with a legendary roadside attraction: Touchdown Jesus. He faced west toward the highway, positioned on an island between a megachurch’s amphitheater and its baptismal pool, a magnificent sixty-two-foot Styrofoam-and-fiberglass sculpture. He appeared to be emerging from the earth, his arms raised to heaven in the gesture that referees use to signal a touchdown. Three years later, a bolt of lightning struck the statue, which went down in flames.
When I arrived at Lebanon, the warden had arranged for me to meet with three low-security inmates to talk about prison life. One of them, Holman, had been in Lucasville at the same time as Francis, but he didn’t remember him.
“Now, rape is not considered that bad,” he said, echoing what the Lucasville warden told me. “But back then, it was looked upon as the worst of the worst. On kids especially, but even on grown women. I would say his time was probably quite
rough for that type of crime. He would have gotten no respect, and I’m sure he was preyed upon, just as he preyed upon you.”
I knew Holman was trying to make me feel better, but it didn’t work. I felt hollow. What difference did it make to me if other prisoners hurt David Francis? What was the point of any of it? American prisons and jails hold 2.3 million men and women. Counting various forms of community supervision outside of prison, 1 in 35 Americans was under some form of correctional supervision at the end of 2013, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
They serve their time, most of them keeping their heads down or looking over their shoulders, just trying to make it through the threats and fights and dull routines of daily prison life. And then after a few years we let them out. But to what? What awaited David Francis when he was paroled in 1984? His mother was dying, his father was worthless, he had not finished high school, and he had a rap sheet that ran for pages and pages. What did anyone think he would do when he got out?
I couldn’t stop thinking about the utter waste of that life, and all those lives, and when I visited Mansfield, another of David Francis’s stops on his tour of Ohio’s prisons, I said something to that effect to the warden.
“Don’t feel sympathetic toward him,” the warden said, looking at me with a stern expression. “Lots of people have hard lives, but they don’t rape and murder other people. The guys in here? They deserve to be here.”
Well, that was true, too. If they had not caught him after he raped me, the cops and the judge were sure he would have raped again, and possibly escalated to murder. He deserved to go back to prison.
Still, I kept thinking about what Philip said: “I didn’t ask to be born. It’s not my fault I was born. I still try to figure it out to this day: What did we do wrong to deserve such a tragic life?”