Stand Tall

by Dewey Bozella

  “This is going to be a long process,” he said. “We’ll be in touch.”

  “Art Regula,” I reminded him.

  I longed to share the good news with Trena, but we were still estranged, and the possibility of divorce was slowly pressing down on us. The only reason we hadn’t actually discussed it was that we still weren’t speaking.

  TRENA STAYED AWAY FOR SIX MONTHS. My old friend Allen Thomas, who had been such a mentor to my late brother Leon, came by to visit and offer his wisdom. Allen knew I would listen to him even if I acted like I wasn’t, that I would at least take what he had to say out to ponder later, in the quiet of my cell. Now he sat across from me and shook his gray head.

  “Boy, you’re making a big mistake,” he said with a sigh. Marriage to a good woman like Trena wasn’t something to discard when things weren’t perfect. I had better find a way to set things right, he warned, or I would regret it for the rest of my life. I stewed in my own juices for a while, but I knew Allen was right. Not long after he left, I reached out to a friend’s wife, someone Trena would answer the door to, and asked her to go urge Trena to come talk to me. She obliged, but I didn’t get the response I’d hoped for.

  “Nah, tell him to have a great life,” was the answer Trena relayed back.

  I wrote a letter saying I knew I had made a mistake, I was sorry, and I wanted to apologize face-to-face. I asked her to bring Diamond so I could apologize to her, too, for the turmoil I had caused in our family. This time the letter didn’t come back unopened, and when the guards told me one day that I had a visitor, I felt a rush of joy. Maybe we could rebuild what we once had. Trena showed up alone, in a little black dress that neatly hugged every stunning curve of her. She had lost more than fifty pounds, and her svelte figure made my jaw drop.

  “Oh my,” I spluttered like a dumbstruck teenager picking up his date for the prom. “You look really beautiful.” She gave me a look that told me she knew it and didn’t need my endorsement.

  Humbled, I asked her to come back, for her and Diamond to be my family again. Trena played it cool and distant.

  “I gotta think about it,” she said before unfolding herself like Audrey Hepburn from the sorry plastic chair. I gaped after her as she sailed through the door back into the real world. A month passed before she showed up again. She forgave me, but she also laid down the law.

  “That was your last time,” she warned. “I don’t know what it was you had to find out, but you better be sure you know what you know.”

  I knew I couldn’t live without this woman in my life, that she was worth the sacrifice I would have to make. I would be a husband, not a father.

  IN 2007, I CAME UP FOR PAROLE FOR A THIRD TIME.

  Do you have any remorse for the murder of Emma Crapser?

  I’m sorry she was murdered, she didn’t deserve to die that way, but I didn’t do it.

  Parole denied.

  Two more years tacked on. I looked at the listless young men dozing away their days at Otisville and knew I was about to snap. I could feel a fury building inside me, pushing its way to the surface, and it scared me. I felt overwhelmed by a despair that finally had me on the ropes. My gut told me to isolate myself and I asked to be sent to solitary so I could have time to work my way through this fresh, raw pain. It was the primal need of a wounded animal, to find a safe hiding place where the vultures couldn’t smell defeat. This request, too, was denied. The box was supposed to be a form of punishment, not some personal Zen retreat for introspective inmates.

  One morning, a sergeant drove up in his van while I was on my way to rec, fixated on finding a way to get out of Otisville. When he stopped to ask me something, I asked him what I had to do to get sent to the box.

  “All you gotta do is refuse to work, disobey a direct order,” he shrugged.

  “That’s what I’m doing, then.” I climbed into his van.

  “Let’s go, let’s go,” I said.

  “What’re you doing, Bozella? Get the hell out,” he ordered me.

  I disobeyed.

  “Are you serious?” the sergeant demanded.

  “I’m serious, man. I gotta be around people who are serious, man. These kids are killing me.”

  He drove me to the administrative building, where I was charged for disobeying a direct order. From there, I was taken to Fishkill for a hearing. The supervisor at Fishkill was surprised to see one of his model prisoners and wondered what I was doing.

  “Listen, I don’t want to go back to Otisville,” I confided. My infraction carried a penalty of thirty days of solitary in the Special Housing Unit, but I knew that wasn’t severe enough to change my status back to the higher-risk status I needed to get back to Fishkill for good. “Can I get back in population here?” I implored the supervisor. “Give me the time I need to be disqualified from going back. Give me forty-five days.” To my relief, he agreed. Fishkill wasn’t Sing Sing, but at least it had some opportunities that Otisville didn’t for school, volunteer work, and Christian ministry programs once I came out of solitary.

  But it turned out that the peace I craved was the last thing I found in my self-imposed exile. A twenty-one-year-old Blood had just been brought in and was putting up a nonstop racket, screaming and hollering to his homeboys locked up on the same block. The COs finally had enough of it and decided that it might calm him down to put him in a cell with me. So much for solitary. I was mad as shit. Who made me Daddy Day-Care? As soon as the kid stepped into my cell—our cell, now—he was mouthing off, in my face, and angling for a fight.

  “Yo, man, I gotta sleep on the top bunk?” he complained, climbing up. “I don’t want to sleep on no top bunk.” He started up with his hollering again, calling out to his homeboys in other cells till they got their own little gangster shit chorale going.

  Oh my God, don’t tell me I’m gonna have to kick this kid’s ass, I thought miserably.

  “Yo, you get down. I gotta talk to you,” I said calmly, but with enough command to let the punk know it would be a bad idea to cross me.

  The kid slid down and glared at me.

  “Listen, all this hollering and screaming is not going to solve the problem,” I explained reasonably. “I been doing this for nearly twenty-five years. I got twenty years to life, man. At night, you need to be respectful. At night, no hollering and screaming at your people. The reason I’m in the bottom bunk, man, is because I was here first. You know how it is. So let’s stop with the bullshit, man. I’m trying to go home.”

  Home. Young and belligerent as he was, I saw that he grasped the meaning of that word to me, the chance he was taking away if he picked a fight and got the both of us written up. He fell quiet then.

  “Man, I understand,” he finally replied, though I doubt he really got it. “I understand, I understand. Twenty-five years?”

  We spent the next two weeks together in that cell, talking. I never asked why he was in prison and he never told me. He did tell me that he had cut a guy across the face to get in a gang and had gotten three years added on to his sentence. That was the price he was willing to pay for the life insurance policy of sorts that gang membership bought him. I talked about boxing and he’d listen like a kid at library story hour, wanting to hear about my bouts, about my brief stint at Floyd Patterson’s camp when I was young. When we weren’t talking, he saw me reading all the time. “Yo, man, you think you could help me with this?” he asked, showing me the GED workbook he’d been given. I walked him through the exercises. “Don’t give up, man,” I urged the kid when he got frustrated. “I was a school dropout in the tenth grade, no better than you. I did all the wrong things. If I can change, you can do it. It’s going to be hard, but you can’t give up. Just work on your weak points every day for one hour. One hour. If you don’t understand a word, ask me and I’ll help you to the best of my abilities.” I spoke to him as an equal, knowing too well how easy it was to make a street kid feel stupid and worthless just by the tone of your voice. There was no more hollering and carrying
on. One night I heard his voice drift in a near whisper from the top bunk: “Man, I’m thinking about throwing down my flag.”

  I’d never know whether he left the Bloods or what became of him after he left the box, but the COs stopped by to thank me for calming him down.

  “This kid is looking for attention, for a father figure,” I told them. “I know why you put him in the cell with me. I don’t like it, but I understand.”

  TRENA GOT PERMISSION TO VISIT WHILE I WAS IN THE BOX. She had never seen me in shackles and handcuffs. She immediately burst into tears.

  “What is going on?” she cried.

  “Trena, please don’t cry,” I tried to soothe her. I was frustrated that we were allowed no contact, that I couldn’t hug her even briefly. “I’m okay. Just know I’m okay.”

  “They got you like an animal, Dewey,” she sobbed.

  “But I’m okay,” I kept insisting. “This is not going to stop anything.” I knew my sudden reappearance in Fishkill, in lockdown, was scary and confusing to her, especially because she didn’t know how and why I got there.

  “Listen, baby, there ain’t no sense in crying, this is how it is,” I told her. “I’d rather be here than where I was, and you’re only five minutes away now.”

  She looked at me through swollen eyes.

  “Why’d you leave in the first place, Dewey? Why’d you leave?”

  I shook my head, full of regret. “Trena, I was dealing with my own demons,” was all I could say. “I didn’t make the best decisions.”

  Things were going to be different now, I promised her.

  WilmerHale had found Art Regula.

  11

  I COULD TELL THAT THE WILMERHALE LAWYERS LISTENING TO MY STORY were young, but I had no idea that first day back in Otisville that they were as green as they were. In fact, they had zero trial experience. They specialized in commercial and securities law. But while he was in college at Amherst, Ross Firsenbaum, the team leader, had attended a presentation by Innocence Project cofounder Peter Neufeld and one of the prisoners the Project had gotten exonerated, and the experience had ignited a passion in him. When the Innocence Project had referred my case to WilmerHale, Ross had pounced on the chance to crusade against injustice, and he lobbied the law firm’s partners to let him represent me pro bono. Ross had looked at the forty-five hundred pages of transcripts from both my trials and had reached the same conclusion about the case as the Innocence Project, but the full impact of what he was undertaking, he would later admit, didn’t hit him until the long drive back to the city from Otisville that snowy winter day, when one thought lodged frozen in his mind: How in the world did anyone in the United States of America get convicted with this? And how, he had to wonder, would a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer with no criminal experience ever undo such a grave injustice? Whatever confidence my new legal team lacked at the outset, though, Trena and I more than made up for with our own dogged optimism. I could tell Ross truly cared by the intent way he listened to me, asking all the right questions, while we were scrunched up in the humiliating kiddie-sized wooden chairs kept in the tiny room Otisville used for attorney-client meetings. That Ross was a smart man was obvious enough, but just as important to me, looking at him straight in the eye as I told my story, I believed that he was a good man. The cruelty of what had happened to me seemed to hit him on a personal level, and I knew right then I would never be a case number to him.

  Back in Manhattan, Ross had formed a team of four attorneys and a project assistant. He and his team started digging. First off, they would need to get hold of all the old case files, pore over every single page, and interview every witness they could still find thirty years after the murder, all in the hope of ferreting out new evidence that might exonerate me or be grounds, at least, for a third trial. I was a legal jigsaw puzzle with countless scattered pieces. WilmerHale began seeking access to police and D.A. records pertaining to the Crapser case and the very similar murder of Mary King, only to be ignored for months at a time. What did they have to hide? The fierce resistance only made Ross and his team more curious, and all that much more determined. There were also questions about what records even still existed, and what had been destroyed since the cases were considered solved and so much time had passed—the Internet and its potential for infinite storage in cyberspace didn’t exist when I was convicted, and no bureaucracy has the physical space to hang on to the mountains of material from every old case indefinitely.

  The team hunkered down to compile a list of witnesses, then hired a private investigator to try and track them down. WilmerHale discovered that some of the witnesses had died, others were in prison, and still others were in the wind and couldn’t be found, but a few were still around. The Poughkeepsie police detective I considered my archenemy, Art Regula, had long since retired. Ross was pleased but surprised when Regula agreed to a meeting and invited the WilmerHale team to come visit him at his home in Dutchess County. My lawyers sat around the former cop’s dining room table and explained what they were doing. Ross asked Regula if he could walk him through the Crapser murder and my arrest to the best of his memory.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Regula rasped in the sandpaper voice that had grilled me for hours at a time when I was just eighteen, “but I refreshed my recollection before you got here.”

  Ross was taken aback but tried not to show it. Had Regula called his old buddies on the force or compared notes with the D.A.’s office? I had warned Ross that Regula had always had a vendetta against me.

  “Refreshed with what?” Ross wondered.

  “I kept my case files,” Regula answered.

  This revelation hit Ross as strange, if not a little suspicious. Why in the hell would a retired cop hang on to old files? Especially cases considered closed nearly twenty years ago? Ross was keen to see what Regula had, but he didn’t want to put him on the defensive by coming on too strong.

  “Did you keep other case files after you retired?” he asked casually.

  “No,” Regula replied. “It’s the only one.”

  “Why did you keep this one?” Ross pressed. Regula didn’t miss a beat.

  “Because I knew someone like you would be at the door someday, because he didn’t do it.”

  Regula told the lawyers he believed I was innocent once he had learned that the fingerprint found on Ms. Crapser’s bathroom window was found to be that of Donald Wise, who by then was serving time for the murder of Mary King and the beating of her two sisters. The Kings lived just three blocks away from Emma Crapser. Although Regula had testified for the prosecution in both my trials, he explained that as a police officer, his testimony was supposed to be limited to the facts, not his opinion about my innocence or guilt, so his doubts had never been revealed. If Regula felt at all responsible for my fate, however, he didn’t let on. He was matter-of-fact, not at all emotional, about sharing his conclusions with Ross. The jury, he reasoned, had had the same information about the fingerprint as he did and was aware of Wise’s conviction in Mary King’s murder.

  Regula did, however, recall something that hadn’t come out in trial: he told Ross how his partner, Pete Murphy, had interviewed a next-door neighbor who had heard trash cans banging around in the back alley under Emma Crapser’s bathroom window the night of her murder. That crucial bit of information had never been written down, Regula said, and was not included in the district attorney’s report. My defense had always contended that the mysterious “plumber” who talked his way into Emma Crapser’s apartment earlier in the day to check a leak she knew nothing about was, in fact, Donald Wise casing the place and making sure the bathroom window was unlocked so he could slip in later via the side alley, using the trash cans below to boost himself to the second-floor bathroom window. The banging the neighbor reported hearing fit that scenario. Our theory was reinforced by yet another key revelation the WilmerHale team discovered in pages of a police report in the file Regula had given them: Emma Crapser’s upstairs neighbors had had company that summe
r night, with people coming and going through the front door on North Hamilton at the very time that the burglary was taking place if you believed Moseley and Smith. Four separate people reported being up and having eyes on the street during the time frame of the murder, and not a single one of them saw anyone out in front of 15 North Hamilton, though the testimony that convicted me from Lamar Smith and Wayne Moseley would have had five black teenagers supposedly loitering there—the Smith brothers watching from across the street, Pittman walking up and down the sidewalk as lookout, and Moseley and me allegedly breaking in through the front door (Moseley said he kicked it until it “just busted open”) and then breaking into Ms. Crapser’s apartment door just inside. No one but the Smith brothers reported seeing two guys run out of the building around the time of the murder, or hearing me supposedly holler at the lookout, Sweet Pea Pittman, for failing to warn us that the old lady had been dropped off and was heading inside.

  A seventeen-year-old neighbor girl interviewed in Regula’s police report even said she personally knew the Smiths and Pittman and had not seen any of the three that night while she was sitting outside on a bench on Ms. Crapser’s block. She remembered being there until eleven o’clock.

  Statements in the Regula report also directly contradicted the dubious get-out-of-jail-free testimony by Lamar Smith and Moseley that two doors were broken to get inside the Crapser apartment. By their own account, Moseley and Smith were hardly in any shape to have been keen observers: Moseley estimated on the stand that he had been “pretty high” on marijuana and “pretty drunk” after downing “anywhere in between from eight to fourteen quarts of beer” in Mansion Park with Smith, Pittman, and me before supposedly going to rob Emma Crapser that night. During trial, both Ms. Crapser’s niece and the officer who first responded to the niece’s emergency call said there was no apparent damage to either the outside door or the apartment door. In Regula’s report, the neighbors, who had been letting their guests in and out all evening, said the same.