Authors: Joanna Connors
The nurse calls my husband, but only tells him I’m in the ER, that I was in an accident and that I’m OK. They leave it to me to tell him what happened.
I am alone yet again in the ER room, lying on the exam table, looking at the ceiling, when the nurse brings him in. I sit up. The nurse almost tiptoes out.
“What happened?” He looks and sounds panicked.
I feel weird that I’m not crying, but I cannot produce tears. After all my panic, I feel numb.
“I,” I say, and stop. I can’t utter the words. I said them to the parking lot attendant, to the cops and social worker and nurse and doctor. But I do not want to say them to my husband. Why didn’t the nurse tell him, or the cops? Are the cops gone?
“I …”
Now I’m standing. He hugs me. My throat burns and clutches up, the way it did when the rapist grabbed me from behind.
“I was raped.” I whisper it into his shoulder.
“Oh no.” He hugs me tighter. “Are you OK?”
I am alive. But I don’t think I’m OK. I won’t know if I am for a long time. Years.
There in the ER, two hours after I was raped, I begin what will become my pattern with everyone close to me: I reassure him. Instead of crying, “No, I’m not OK!” and asking for his help, I speed past my own needs and arrive at his. He needs me to be OK.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m OK.”
It’s dark by the time they finish with me. They give me green scrubs with drawstring pants to wear home. Walking to my husband’s car in the oversized scrubs and my high heels, I still feel watched. I’m still performing in a movie about a young woman, much like me, who has been raped.
We don’t talk as my husband drives home, to the house in Shaker Heights we just bought. I haven’t put up curtains yet, or laid rugs on the hardwood floors, or unpacked all the boxes. The house is dark when we pull in. When we open the back door, it feels like we’re breaking in. In the stillness, my husband whispers that he will run a bath for me.
I don’t want a bath, I want a shower, hot and hotter still, to scald my skin. I say nothing and step into the tub, easing my body into the warm water. I close my eyes and lean back. When I don’t say anything, he goes downstairs.
I am alone.
I don’t want to be alone. But I don’t want to talk, either. I want to be comforted, but I don’t want to hug or touch. I
hear him in the kitchen, opening cabinets. I scrub myself with a washcloth and sit in the water as it grows cold.
He makes dinner for me. Broiled shrimp. I take a couple of bites, like a polite dinner guest, washing the faintly metallic taste out with a cold beer. When we finish, we climb the stairs to our bedroom. I tell him I can’t call my sisters or my mother. My excuse is that I’m too tired. I’ve already told too many people.
He doesn’t know what to do, or how to ask me if he can touch me. I get into bed and tell him to get in, too. I hug him in bed. Then he holds me, spooned against my back.
When the tidal rhythm of his breathing tells me he’s asleep, I inch away from him. I move to the edge of the bed, curling into myself like one of those insects that rolls into a tight ball when it senses danger.
I lie awake, listening to the rhythmic counterpoint of my husband’s breath and the chirping sounds of the summer night.
Safe. Here I am supposed to be safe. But I can’t believe it anymore. I’ve lost the illusion, the pretty, dangerous illusion, that the world is safe. The woman who woke up in this bed fourteen hours ago—the woman who was five minutes late to everything, the woman who thought bad things happened to other people, if she thought about it at all—is gone.
Tuesday, July 10, 1984.
The next day, DAVE does something no one can quite believe.
He returns to the scene of the crime. Not only that, he returns at the same time of day, wearing the same clothes. He must have believed me when I said I wouldn’t go to the cops. Maybe he even thought I’d come back.
At 4:53 p.m., he saunters into the quad near Eldred Theater, walking north, past a wino sitting on a bench with his bottle in a paper bag. He passes a small waterfall sculpture. The wino watches him, but DAVE doesn’t notice. He stops at a bench, sits down. Across the quad, the wino takes a drink. After a minute or two, DAVE gets up and walks west, toward Severance Hall. The wino follows him from a distance. He lifts his paper bag to his mouth again.
Up ahead, a University Circle patrol car pulls into a lot. DAVE sees it and changes direction, heading east toward the
hospital, where two hospital security guards stop him. Within a minute, three University Circle cops converge.
The wino arrives next, still carrying his bag. He notes that DAVE’s zipper is open.
I did not know the wino story until I read the trial transcript in 2007.
The wino testified on the third day of the trial in October of 1984. His name was Larry Donovan, and he was an investigator for the University Circle Police Department, a security force created for and paid by Case Western and all the other institutions in University Circle. I had met him, briefly, outside of court when he came to testify during the trial, but I was sequestered outside the courtroom and didn’t hear his testimony.
When we met for coffee in 2007, I almost didn’t recognize him. He still had the big Irish smile and ruddy cheeks I remembered, but he was much heavier than he had been back in 1984 and he limped, a state of affairs he blamed on a bum knee. He told me he had gone back to school not long after the arrest to get a degree in engineering while still working as a cop. He worked in computer technology for a while and then went to law school. Now he practices intellectual property law, where a background in engineering is useful.
I asked him if he remembered the case.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “That was a big one for us. We were all proud of how it came out.”
Even then, so many years later, I was pleased to hear that the case was a big one for them, that this cop remembered it. I thought of the cut on my neck. I wanted it to be big, I wanted it to leave a scar, and I was disappointed when it was small and didn’t show. Yet back then, within days I had minimized my rape, insisting that I was fine and denying, even to myself, that I had been wounded in other ways, and that the wound was deep. I made sure no one could accuse me of the grave feminine sins of self-pity and victim-playing. Now that a cop—a man familiar with violence—said it was big, maybe I could admit it to myself.
“Who came up with the wino disguise?” I asked.
“That was mine,” he said. “I called it my Belker outfit. Remember the detective on
Hill Street Blues
, the one who was always undercover and dressed like a bum? That was the look.” He smiled at the memory.
He was assigned to work undercover when he came on duty on July 10, he said. He changed into the Belker, wrapped a walkie-talkie in a paper bag to look like a bottle, and headed over to the campus. He got to the quad near Eldred at 4:15.
“I figured I’d be there for hours and come up empty, but I was there less than forty-five minutes when he came strolling by,” he said, laughing. “Right past me. I couldn’t believe it. That thing about criminals always returning to the scene of the crime? That isn’t true—they usually don’t. But there he was. Dressed in the exact same clothes, even. I almost felt guilty, it was so easy to get him.”
Tuesday, July 10, 1984.
When they catch him outside the hospital, Donovan knows this is the guy. The messy “DAVE” tattoo on his upper right arm is just as I described. The University Circle cops read him his Miranda rights and search him. In one pocket, they find a screwdriver with a sharpened blade, along with a porn magazine called
Black Cherry
. In the other, they find the gold cross that had swayed over my face as he raped me, a pack of Kools, and some marijuana.
“What are you doing on campus?” one of the cops asks.
“I came over here to jog,” DAVE says.
They cuff him and take him to the University Circle police station. Donovan reads him his Miranda rights again and tells him he’s been arrested for the rape he committed the day before.
DAVE says, “I wasn’t even over there yesterday.”
Donovan asks about the marijuana in his pocket.
“I’m dying of bone marrow cancer,” DAVE says. “I drink beer and smoke weed for the pain.” Then he remembers he shouldn’t be talking to the cops, and shuts up. He doesn’t ask for a lawyer.
The Cleveland police, who will handle the case from here on out, pick him up and take him downtown to the county jail for booking.
Tuesday, July 10.
The day after the rape, hours before DAVE returned to the campus, the case was officially transferred to the Cleveland Police Department’s Fifth District, where it landed on the desks of two detectives working the day shift. Both detectives were men; their female partner had the day off.
The report had no leads: no suspect name, other than a tattooed DAVE; no license plate number; no witnesses but the victim—nothing to help them find the rapist right away. They were busy with several other cases, so they put my case aside.
The detectives didn’t go over to the crime scene on the Case campus that day, or the next, one of them later testified in court. They didn’t call me or ask me to come in and give a statement. They didn’t talk to the University Circle police. They went home at 3:30 p.m., the end of their shift, without touching my case.
That night, the University Circle police made the arrest and informed the lead Cleveland detective. He put off calling me, the victim, until the following morning, he testified in court.
When I read this testimony in 2007, I discovered how insignificant my case was to those detectives. I was not surprised. Anyone paying attention in 2007 was well aware of the failures of the Cleveland Police Department, especially when it came to investigating rape. In later years, thousands of rape kits, containing evidence collected from victims but never sent to the state crime lab for DNA testing, would be found stacked in the evidence room. When they were finally tested, starting in 2011, the results would show that more than two hundred serial rapists roamed the city during the 1990s, attacking women while the police set the cases aside.
What if the University Circle police had treated my case with the same disinterest the Cleveland police showed? What if they had decided, when the case went over to the Cleveland police, that it was not their problem anymore, so why bother with a stakeout?
And what if DAVE, never caught, found out I had gone to the cops and decided to follow through on his promise? What if he came to find me?
Wednesday, July 11, 1984.
The phone rings. My husband, who is already screening calls to protect me, answers.
I listen to his side of the conversation, and when I hear him say “officer” I want to grab the phone out of his hands and hear whatever the cop has to say myself. Instead I wait, vibrating, every sense lit up, while he talks and listens. Finally he says, “OK,” and “Thanks,” and hangs up.
“They got him last night,” he says. “They want us to come in to view a lineup. He went back to the campus, looking for another victim.”
No
, I think.
He was looking for me
. I picture him in jail, pacing the perimeter of the cell, enraged.
The bitch promised she wouldn’t go to the cops!
He wishes he had killed me when he could have, when he had the point of his homemade dagger at my throat. He vows again that he will find me, someday.
When we’d come to
The Plain Dealer
the year before, I was already slated to be the theater critic and my husband was assigned to news. The first beat they gave him was cops, so he could learn the city. He’s spent several months working out of the grungy
Plain Dealer
office at police headquarters, known as the cop shop. He knows his way around the place. He knows people there, the right people, the people who can do things for you.
This will later prove to be as much a bad thing as a good one.
That day, he drives me to the Fifth District station to meet the two detectives, who look like knockoffs of Dennis Franz in
NYPD Blue
, from the $3 ties and the shirt buttons pulling open over their guts to the way they wince and look away when I give them the details of the rape.
I am one of the 1 in 6 women in Cleveland who will report a rape this year. I am one of the 3,734 people who will report a forcible rape in Ohio in 1984. The Cleveland Police Department will not form a sex-crimes unit and institute procedures to deal with rape victims until the following year.
They want me to view the lineup. We drive downtown to police headquarters, a brick fortress pocked with windows so narrow they look like sniper posts. The elevator smells like cigars, with a faint scent of urine underneath.
We wait outside the room while they bring in men from the county jail for my inspection. When they’re in place, the detectives usher me into a small room with a one-way mirror, a row of chairs facing it. The lights behind the glass are off, obscuring the men for now while the lieutenant running the procedure explains that seven men matching my description are standing behind the glass. He will turn on the lights, call each one to step forward, turn to the right, then the left, face forward again, and then step back.
He notices my agitation. “You can see them, but they can’t see you,” he says. “Don’t worry.” Then he tells me that even if I see the attacker right away, I can’t say anything. I have to wait for each man to come forward. “Do not blurt it out,” he says. “Take your time and look at each man carefully.”
When he turns on the light, I see DAVE at once. He might as well be standing under a spotlight, or be the only man in the lineup. I know he can’t see me, but I feel him staring at me through the glass. He tilts his head back, just a bit, and sneers at me. For a few seconds I think I might throw up, right there
in front of all the policemen, but I force the nausea back down as the lieutenant calls the first man to step out.
DAVE, second in line, saunters forward when called. He keeps staring at me, a challenge in his expression. The other six men take their turns, but I don’t bother to exam them the way the lieutenant instructed. I do notice that DAVE is the only one with a tattoo on his arm. He’s also the only one with any energy. The other men look spent, like they’ve already used up their youth and are expecting nothing from life anymore. When they have all shown themselves, the detective asks me if I see the man who attacked me.
“Yes, I do,” I say. “Number Two.”
“How certain are you?”
“A hundred percent,” I answer, with a quaver in my voice that must have made him wonder how sure I really was. “That’s him.”
Outside the lineup room, the detectives tell us that they’re still getting information on him, but that his name is David Francis and that he was just released from prison on parole the week before.
We head back to the Fifth District station so they can take my statement. One of the detectives moves a pile of papers from a chair, deposits it on top of another pile on the desk, gestures for me to sit down.
“So tell us what happened,” he says, rolling a report form into an electric typewriter. I tell him the same thing I told the cop who took me to the hospital, and the second cop who came to interview me there.
He types with his index fingers, concentrating hard, lifting a hand when he wants me to slow down. When I get to the part where I tried to hold the rapist off by telling him I was having my period, he stops typing.
“Were you?” he whispers, flushing a deep red but keeping his eyes on the keys. His partner, sitting across the desk, pretends he didn’t hear any of it.
Act by act, I shepherd the detectives through their deep embarrassment about my rape. The lead detective then takes Polaroids of my neck and my hands, which were cut when I tried to push the dagger away, and asks my husband to hold up the back of my shirt so he can photograph what turn out to be my worst injuries: mottled bruises and red, scraped skin across my entire back.
On Thursday, July 12, three days after the rape, the lead detective goes to Eldred Theater. Though the crime scene was never secured and anyone could have disturbed the evidence, he takes twenty-four photographs and collects samples of the dirty red carpet at the back of the stage. He finds a tag from an item of clothing and a small piece of paper, creased and ripped. On it, someone has scrawled three telephone numbers.
The detective takes the evidence to headquarters, tags it, and enters it into the property book. Then he goes over to the county jail to see David Francis.
Twenty-three years later, when I read through the prosecutor’s file, the report he writes will tell me about their conversation.
The detective first reads Francis his Miranda rights, then asks him about the rape.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Francis tells him. “I didn’t have nothing to do with no rape.”
The detective tells him the victim identified him.
“I can’t even have sex,” Francis says. “I have bone cancer. I haven’t had an erection for six months.”
“Can you climax?” the detective asks.
“No. I told you, I can’t get hard because of the cancer. The doctors told me I have six months to live. That’s why they let me out of prison early.”
“What were you doing over on the Case campus?”
“I was jogging.”
Francis is still in his street clothes. The detective gives him some jail clothes and takes his black pants, the black nylon shirt, the undershorts, a pair of black socks, and a pair of blue-and-white tennis shoes, which he submits to the department’s forensic lab to be tested for carpet fiber.
Two days later, on Saturday, July 14, the detective calls the only local number on the piece of paper he found on the stage. A man answers, and when the detective asks, “Who is this?” he answers, “Ed.”
“Is David Francis there?” the cop asked.
“No,” Ed answers.
“Do you know David Francis?”
“Call back later,” Ed says, and hangs up.
Later on in the day, the detective asks his female partner to call the number, hoping a less threatening voice might get more information.
Earlie B. Giles answers the phone.
“Do you know David Francis?” the partner asks.
“Yeah, I know him,” Giles says. “I’m his mother’s man.”
“What is his mother’s name?”
“Matia Rodriques.”
“Do you know where David Francis is?” the partner asks.
“We heard he was down at the Justice Center, arrested for a rape or something,” Giles says.