Good Kids, Bad City

by Kyle Swenson

  The elderly shop owner claimed this wasn’t the case when the prosecution questioned him. But when Milano began his cross, he battered Robinson on why he hadn’t mentioned it in Wiley’s previous trial. Robinson also wasn’t clear at all on when he had offered the boy the money. If it was before Ed identified the defendants, Wiley’s attorneys suggested the fifty dollars was tempting enough for a greedy little boy to name three random neighborhood guys.

  But ultimately the strategy depended on cracking Ed Vernon, and the Ed Vernon who walked into the Justice Center was much different than the Ed Vernon who had originally testified.

  He was now fifteen. His arms and legs had sprouted. His voice had gravel in it. And whatever stress he’d been experiencing over the case, by now it had ground away his patience. Gone was the spooked little boy who mumbled before a courtroom of adults; here was a teenager, combative and surly, telling a new jury all about how he’d left school early on May 19, 1975, taken a city bus home alone, spotted Wiley behind the wheel of a green car at the stoplight before witnessing Rickey and Ronnie kill Harry Franks.

  “You told the prosecutor, you just told me, that you got out of school and you caught the bus and went to Fairhill,” Milano asked as he began his cross-examination.

  “I didn’t say that,” Ed cut him off.

  “Tell us what you did.”

  “I have to tell you what I did every day?” the witness shot back.

  “No, sir,” Milano answered. “Now, listen to me, Edward. You said you got out of the school at two forty-five and arrived at Fairhill and Petrarca at a quarter to four. What did you do for that hour?”

  “You want to know?”

  “No, these ladies and gentlemen want to know.”

  “I told you, I was playing around.”

  “What do you mean by ‘playing around’?”

  “Can’t I play?”

  “Yes, you can. With whom were you playing?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  The attorney and Ed continued the hostile salvos. Eventually, Ed admitted he had gone over his previous testimony with police and prosecutors before the retrial. Milano’s patience seemed to give. “Now, to you this might be funny,” the attorney snapped. “This man could be sent to the electric chair.”

  In a final blitz on the boy’s story, Milano again slashed at the inconsistencies in Ed’s various accounts; the differences between Ed’s original statement to police and his testimony; the changes to his testimony; his reluctance to tell his friends or family about what he claimed to have witnessed; even the boy’s debunked boasts about straight As.

  “Tell us how many times you lied to the jury or lied to the police and lied to your friends in this case,” Milano ripped. “Would twenty be a fair estimate?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You lied, that’s not true, Edward?”

  “No.”

  “You admit that you have lied in this case to the police, to the lawyers, and to the investigator, haven’t you? And to your dad, haven’t you?” Milano said. “Do you deny admitting in this court that you have lied in the case on many occasions?”

  “No.”

  “Do you admit, sir, that you were offered fifty dollars to do something in this case?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t deny that, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you admit to this jury that you never mentioned anyone’s name in this case to any police until after you were offered fifty dollars? Is that the truth? Isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No.”

  “When did you tell the police who you say committed this crime?”

  “It was Wednesday.”

  “Wednesday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t you tell the jury that the day of the crime you went back and talked to Mr. Robinson and he said that he’d give you fifty dollars?”

  “True.”

  These heated exchanges were a gamble. They could confuse the jury more than spotlight the holes in Ed’s story. Or, once again, the twelve panelists may have felt sympathy for a young boy being slapped around by questions coming from an aggressive lawyer. Behind the courtroom testimony, a rift was also breaking open between Milano and McCarthy. The criminal trial vet felt the state had failed to put together a strong enough case to seal a conviction. He decided there was no need to mount a strenuous defense. McCarthy, however, wanted to develop Wiley’s alibi as originally intended. Wiley was jammed between the two. He knew enough of the law to see that if you announced to the court and jury that you were going to present an alibi defense, you had to—if you didn’t, you looked guilty. But although the defense put on Angela Bennett to counter Ed Vernon’s story, they didn’t nail down the alibi. Wiley could see that his attorneys were clearly furious with each other by the trial’s close. The defendant wasn’t hopeful.

  The jury received the case on October 12. There was little deliberation. They believed Ed. Once again, Wiley listened as the foreman announced that the defendant had been found guilty on all counts. He felt himself shrink under the weight of the sentence, saw the final end lying there under the words. A powerful twenty-three-year-old was now something tiny enough to be crushed between two fingers. He felt himself slip to nothing. Erased.

  Wiley’s sentencing was wired for picture and sound. In a macabre move, perhaps calibrated to show off the new Justice Center to the swath of Northeast Ohio who didn’t regularly fill its hallways, the court broadcast the hearing live on television, reportedly for the first time in local history.

  “Send me to the chair,” Wiley told the courtroom before the judge ruled, his dark face cemented in a stern and stoic look.8 “I don’t want to be reminded each day of my innocence.” Judge Zingle had little choice. Wiley didn’t slot into any of the mitigating circumstances outlined in the 1974 capital punishment law. Once again, the state of Ohio condemned Wiley Bridgeman to Old Sparky. His execution date was set for July 3, 1978.

  Wiley managed a final word. He went back to his legal pads. A few days after he was condemned, Wiley posted a letter to Cleveland’s Call and Post. In his chiseled handwriting, he maintained his innocence. Yet the message also betrayed a mind struggling to fit everything he wanted to say, needed to say, into simple words. “My insinuation was clear that I believed the jurors were inflamed, rather than (the verdict) honestly decided,” his prose trumpeted. “The fact stands plain to see, I will give out before giving up. It’s only the getting up [that] counts anyway. Not the fall—I fell … I know.”9

  * * *

  Back in Lucasville, hope buzzed J Block like a static charge.

  On the day Wiley’s case went to the jury in October 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court announced the list of cases accepted for review in the second half of the 1977–1978 term.10 Two Ohio petitions challenging the death penalty were on the stack.

  As the justices mulled a decision, the death row inmates in Ohio watched closely, discussing the points of the cases like baseball fans weighing batting averages. The first case was on behalf of an Akron woman named Sandra Lockett who had been convicted for her role in a 1975 robbery-homicide. Although Lockett was waiting in the getaway car while her two accomplices killed a store owner, she was sentenced to die under the statute.11

  The second case pulled Ronnie Bridgeman away from his chessboard and Koran. Many of the details mirrored his own. Like Ronnie, Willie Lee Bell had only been a minor when he allegedly tagged along on a robbery that ended with an accomplice killing a pawnshop owner. Like Lockett, Bell wasn’t directly involved in the killing, and as such shouldn’t be executed, his attorneys argued. And, also like Lockett, Bell didn’t meet the mitigating standards because the Ohio statute was so narrowly written. “Only a psychotic, a moron, an imbecile, or an idiot has a chance to survive,” Bell’s lawyer argued before the eight U.S. Supreme Court justices.

  The radio on J Block announced the news before Wiley had been processed back into
Lucasville. Screams edged with joy filled the range, raw and wild. The voices crashing against the ceiling were now celebrating. Toilet paper rolls thrown from the cells twisted across the range’s stale air like July Fourth rockets.12

  Of the eight U.S. Supreme Court justices who reviewed the Lockett and Bell cases, seven ruled the law was unconstitutional under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Only Justice William Rehnquist upheld the statute. Once again, the law was blown from the books. Following procedure, each Ohio capital sentence was to be remanded to its original trial court, where the death sentence would be converted to life in prison—fifteen years inside before the possibility of parole. By the time the ruling was announced, 101 men and women were waiting to die in Ohio. The men on J Block—including Rickey and Ronnie—would be sent out into the Lucasville general population. But not Wiley. The timing of his retrial placed his current sentencing in bureaucratic limbo. Rickey and Ronnie couldn’t be sure when they’d see him again. They couldn’t enjoy the moment together. But the date of the decision, the day when seven strangers in Washington saved their lives with a complex bit of constitutional interpretation, had double weight for the oldest Bridgeman. The court decision was announced on the first Monday in July—the same day Wiley was scheduled to be executed.

  Weeks later, Rickey was wading into life in general population at Lucasville, the adventure he’d contemplated from the isolation of death row. Here we go. It was movie night for the inmates. Turns out, they were showing one of his favorites, Bullitt, the Steve McQueen crime caper from ’68. The car chase scene was reason enough to watch. He was excited. Just before Rickey walked into the room where the film was being shown, he darted into a bathroom, eyeing the prison guard at the door as he passed. There was an inmate standing at a urinal. His face was slack, eyes empty holes. A surgical syringe was plunged into the skin on his forearm. Rickey suddenly understood, seeing this guy shoot dope, that the adventure he was on now was no trip to the museum or hooky jaunt downtown.

  They canceled movie night a few weeks later. During the last screening, one inmate shanked another as the film rolled.

  Part II

  FLAT TIME

  6

  MENS REA

  Cleveland, 2002

  Sure, hard living had carved him up, nearly twenty years facedown in the street. The body bore the signs. Both cheeks sagging like tents knocked down by wind, the grin strung between them a defeated rictus. His shoulders and joints hung at cubist angles from so many nights sleeping in places people weren’t meant to sleep in. And when he spoke, the voice that whispered through was the scorched-earth aftereffect of long-term pipe use. Nearly twenty years.

  Yet for the homeless, the addicts, and the parolees walking through the door of the City Mission in 2002, Ed Vernon was actually a billboard for the kind of lifestyle U-turn a guy could make. There he was behind the shelter’s security desk, checking IDs and signing folks in—newly sober, committed to God, and even kicking around a healthy flirtation with the pretty divinity student assigned to the mission. In the bloodshot eyes of the last-chancers coming for help, here was a positive example, a survivor, a winner.

  Ed wouldn’t balk at the praise. He felt good for the first time, the Lord knew, in twenty-seven years. But he also knew nothing could be trusted. Sobriety didn’t change that. As always, there was Ed, and then there was everything else. No assurance bridged the two—ever. He couldn’t trust his family and friends with his real feelings. He couldn’t trust the law, of course not. He couldn’t even really trust the Lord, in whom he had sought but failed to find forgiveness. And finally, most of all, he couldn’t even trust himself.1

  So yes, Ed had pulled a second act from the streets, Lord be praised; but he also knew from experience that all this hung on the weakest of threads.

  And then Wiley Bridgeman walked into the City Mission.

  * * *

  He may not have been in a cell, but during the criminal trials in 1975, Ed Vernon felt locked up like a prisoner, stuck for three months in a hotel room at the downtown Holiday Inn. He couldn’t go anywhere, per the strong words from the police detectives who were paying the room bills. But Ed was such a mess of anxiety and fear, often he’d catch himself sitting on the hotel bed, looking at the balcony, thinking about taking a kamikaze header over the railing.

  All alone. His mother couldn’t come down to spend the hours with him. She was wrestling through a bout of cervical cancer that kept her in diapers and made walking impossible. His father—James Cannon, a no-bullshit six-foot-five-inch, 250-pound man who never wanted his son mixed up in this criminal trial business to begin with—was working two jobs, days at Franklin Tire on St. Clair, nights at a gas station on East Fifty-fifth; he would come to the hotel for the night after his last shift ended, around 11:30 P.M. Otherwise, Ed was by himself. Only one friend from the neighborhood occasionally came down to visit. Everyone else’s mother wouldn’t let them. They thought he was a snitch. But the visits from his buddy kept Ed sane, the rare occasions he was allowed out of the room. Then he could be a boy again, a thirteen-year-old swimming in the pool and playing pinball in the lobby, not the state’s main witness in a murder trial.

  When the last guilty verdict came down in October 1975, Ed figured it was over, that he could push a reset button returning him to his old life—back delivering the morning Plain Dealer and pedaling his bike around with his friends. But before Ed checked out of the hotel, Detective Terpay wanted to talk. Terpay—the older white man who told Ed to call him “Gene,” a bulky man who could flip from friendly to angry so quickly—informed Ed and his parents that the boy needed to go into hiding. The police, he explained, had learned the Bridgemans’ brother was planning to kill Ed in retaliation for his testimony. The boy couldn’t stay in Cleveland. Through tears, Ed’s mom tried to explain they had heard nothing about any threats. But Terpay was adamant. Ed had to go.

  The sudden escape was a heartbreaker—a boy pulled from his family after already undergoing the frightening ordeal of the criminal trials. But Ed felt it all the more because it was him causing all the trouble. It wasn’t supposed to be like that. He was the good son. The three older Vernon daughters were always stirring up the household, especially when they got to be teenagers and started, as their mother put it, smelling them boys. But little Ed? He was polite and respectful, especially to adults. When any of the 140 daily and Sunday customers on his Plain Dealer route asked him to put the paper in the door slot instead of the mail chute, he did it. When his parents told him to be home before the streetlights snapped on, he was. Yet Ed was now ripping the family up right as his mother was so sick.

  The only option the family had was to send the boy to live with his actual namesake, Mrs. Vernon’s brother, Edward. He lived in Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife Mary, his own son Edward, and his grandson, another Edward—whenever Aunt Mary called the name, four people came running. Princeton might as well have been Mars for Ed. His uncle was one of the head chefs at the Ivy League university; the East Side Cleveland kid often found himself on the leafy, groomed campus, going to basketball and football games or whacking golf balls with his buddies. His own classroom was filled with faculty members’ children, not just white boys and girls, but kids from all over the globe—Germany, France, Italy, China. Ed was in the middle of this worldwide melting pot; not everyone could speak great English, yet they could communicate enough to have fun.

  Friends or no, Ed’s New Jersey life was standing on lies. The police had been clear: if anyone discovered where he was now living, the Bridgemans could wreak their revenge. Ed was instructed not to tell anyone outside his family where he was really from. When he accidentally slipped, telling classmates he was from Cleveland, he quickly recovered by telling everyone it was Cleveland, Florida, not Ohio. He added a further flourish, telling his friends his father was a doctor. He didn’t know whom to trust, so he trusted no one.

  That strong current of fear—of being discovered, of being killed, of whatever e
lse could be coming—was always running full speed through him; the only competing sentiment was the hard, immobile guilt that had settled in since the trials. He had wanted to tell the truth. He had needed to tell the truth. But he had not been able to tell the truth. Rickey, Ronnie, Wiley—he’d done those guys wrong. He had. It stayed with him. Guilt over the past, fear of the future—the two feelings hugged him so close, he felt completely paralyzed.

  Cleveland kept reeling him back, homesickness outweighing everything else. In 1976, when his father died of a collapsed lung, Ed returned for the funeral. The next year, he was called back to tell his story in Wiley’s retrial. Ed felt he was ready to come home for good. He was tired of hiding.

  And at first, it was a good homecoming. His mother, now cancer-free, had moved to a different part of the East Side, and the family was financially steadied by the Social Security checks arriving following his father’s death; after bills there was enough left over for Ed to enter a private Catholic high school at fifteen. His report card was mainly Bs. He liked school. Science, history, and math were his favorite subjects.

  Ed couldn’t steer completely clear of the old neighborhood. His maternal grandmother still lived on Colonial Court, and when he visited her, he ran across folks with vivid memories of the Franks murder and the trials. Everyone on the block knew Ed lied when he climbed on the witness stand. All those kids—including Kim Dickson and Tommy Hall—had been on the bus with him. Back home they wouldn’t stop talking about how Ed was a liar. But the real acid behind the neighborhood’s contempt was that no one understood why he’d done it. Was it for the fifty dollars? A grudge? To make nice with adults? Suck up to white cops? The familiar faces Ed saw were all stitched with anger and disgust. These run-ins only increased when his private school closed in 1979, meaning Ed had to finish up at John Hay High School, where many of the Arthur Avenue kids went as well.