by Kyle Swenson
Teasing out Loper’s own testimony yielded another crop of inconsistencies. First, the old man had testified he watched the boy get off the bus and walk up Fairhill, crossing in front of Loper’s house. His house was connected to the store, so had Vernon crossed the lawn, he would have been steps away from in front door of the Cut-Rate. But Vernon testified he didn’t get so close. Loper also told the court he’d heard three shots, then saw Franks fall to the ground. But according to all other accounts—including the medical examiner’s report—Franks was thrown onto the ground, then shot.
One or two inconsistencies could be explained away. Your mind misfires, recollection sputters like a bad engine. But taken together, they showed that the foundation of the state’s case wasn’t firm but constantly shifting, details jockeying into new position. I realized that it would have been impossible for a juror to catch many of these errors in real time.
My understanding of the case deepened significantly when I got access to the police file. Again, this was a bit of a miracle. In my reporting career in Cleveland, I’d never been given access to a complete investigative record—mostly because the cases I was writing about were fresh. So when my office phone buzzed one afternoon with a call from city hall relaying that my public records request was ready, I literally gagged on my coffee. Waiting for me at the records department was a thick folder with 101 pages of notes, photos, and duplicate reports, the tick-tock of the police investigation into Harry Franks’s death.
At the time of the murder, cases were assigned to two main detectives, but the entire homicide squad worked each killing on different shifts. The daily reports from detectives not only detailed daily findings, they also communicated messages from one shift to another about what new routes needed to be explored.
On the day of the crime, May 19, the lead detectives, Eugene Terpay and James T. Farmer, logged five pages of careful notes sketching the outlines of the murder. The write-up was exhaustive, covering everything from what eyewitnesses reported to how much money Franks had in his billfold when he died. My radar pinged here. None of the witnesses in the early case notes—including Loper—mentioned Ed’s presence at the scene.
In fact, Ed doesn’t turn up in the file until the next day, but only after a suspect is named. On May 20, the day-shift detectives on the case, John Staimpel and Frank Stoiker, reported that they’d made contact with a woman from the neighborhood named Doris Gardenhire who “feels that her son, PAUL, may be involved in this crime.” The mother told the detectives Paul had been at her house with a gun.
The afternoon-shift detectives—Terpay and Farmer—showed a photo of Paul Gardenhire to Karen Smith. She identified “this male someone she has seen but not one of the suspects,” the detectives wrote. In the same report, the detectives stated that after speaking with Robert Robinson they “were able to locate a young citizen” who revealed he’d seen the killing.
“THIS INFORMANT DEFINITELY STATED THAT HE CAN’T IDENTIFY BECAUSE HE DIDN’T GET A LOOK AT THE FACES AND APPEARS TO BE VERY SCARED,” the detectives wrote in attention-snagging all-caps. “WE COULD ONLY GET THIS INFORMATION AFTER PROMISING THE SUBJECT THAT HIS NAME WOULD NOT BE USED.” The detectives did not mention the informant’s name. “WE ALSO FEEL THAT HE KNOWS MORE AND WILL MAKE ARRANGEMENTS TO TALK WITH HIM ON OUR NEXT TOUR.”
A surprise arrived for the detectives the next day gift-wrapped from the local FBI: a message from a local field agent about possible suspects. The unnamed agent relayed that “several of his informants” believed the Franks murder was the work of a robbery crew headed by brothers Willie Joe “Skip” King and Arthur Lee “Railroad” King. Both men had past arrests for armed robbery and also were suspects in a 1969 murder, the note stated.
The same shift yielded another possible avenue. Detectives learned from Franks’s employer that it was not common for the victim to be carrying so much cash. The reason: the stop before the Robinsons’ store, the Maxwell Cut-Rate, had paid Franks $429.12 in bills. “This is very unusual since the owner has done business with them for eight years and always pays with bank receipts.” Detectives also learned the store’s owner, Earl Rogers, had three young daughters “and it is rumored that these girls consort with shady characters.” When Terpay and Farmer talked with Rogers “he appeared very nervous and evasive.” The officers concluded someone could easily have followed Franks from the Maxwell location.
The notes from May 22 and May 23 are where the written record got even more interesting. On a write-up dated May 23, Rickey made his first appearance. According to the afternoon recap filed by Terpay and Farmer, at 10:45 P.M. the detectives met with their informant again. The informant identified one of the suspects as “Rickey.” He rode in a car with detectives that night, pointing out Rickey’s house as well as the house of another suspect on Arthur—Wiley. An afternoon report from the same detectives dated May 24 started off with “SUSPECTS,” and went on to list Wiley and Rickey’s full names and birth dates. Yet the homicide file I’d been given had two copies of this report. One copy looked normal. But in the second duplicate set, the dates had been scribbled out by hand; May 23 was crossed out and May 22 was written beneath. The second copy of May 24 report was similarly backdated one day by hand to read May 23.
My radar was screaming now—why were these reports altered? Was it an honest mistake? Or were they backdated in order to make it look like the investigators closed in on Rickey and Wiley a full day before they actually did? Throughout the trials, the defense attorneys repeatedly dug into both Ed and the detectives about when the boy first made allegations against the defendants. It was a moving target in all three trials, and this paperwork only sank the issue in more fog.
Another suspect also emerged in the May 22/May 23 space. Detectives interviewed a witness who claimed he’d spotted the green auto fleeing the scene. The man provided a license plate number, which led back to a 1965 Buick owned by Ishmael Hixson. This hit was big news. Hixson’s record included robbery and arson arrests, among others. By 3:30 P.M. on May 24, detectives were waiting outside the suspect’s house, where he was arrested for the Franks murder.
Despite taking Hixson into custody, detectives, with their informant driving the investigation, pushed forward on Wiley and Rickey. At 5:45 A.M. on May 25, police banged on the Bridgemans’ door on Arthur Avenue. The follow-up report from the raid contained the first mention of Ed Vernon’s name. The paperwork noted that Ed did not pick anyone out of the lineup, but later made a statement to police. Hixson was also among the seven men with Rickey and Wiley during the lineup. Neither Ed nor Karen Smith identified the suspect, and he was apparently let go. Rickey, Wiley, and Ronnie—the younger Bridgeman’s name never appeared in the case file until after the May 25 arrest—went on to face formal murder charges.
But the detective work didn’t stop there. In the days following the arrests, the homicide squad was contacted by a woman from the neighborhood who reported that the actual killers “were still in the area and are operating a pea green convertible.” In early June, detectives wrote up a report about a separate tip from Edward Garrett, a neighborhood guy with his own past record for armed robbery. Garrett told police the Bridgemans and Rickey Jackson “had nothing to do with the crime.” Paul Gardenhire, the same teenager whose mother had contacted police the day after Franks’s death, was the actual killer, Garrett claimed. The tipster also told police Gardenhire was driving a green convertible Oldsmobile and brandishing a .38 revolver he’d stolen from his grandfather. Police thought enough of Garrett’s information to actually go looking for the car, locating it parked where Garrett said it would be. The write-up noted officers should keep an eye open for the car on the street so the driver could be questioned and the vehicle searched. But the file didn’t mention any follow-ups.
None of these other suspects were mentioned in the trials. I wondered whether the defense teams actually knew if they existed. From what scraps of the law I knew, I understood that in 1975 police and prosecutors had less incentive
to turn over their case files. On the defense side, alternative suspects were not part of the strategy to secure Ronnie, Wiley, and Rickey’s freedom. Curious, I plugged the names into the court system. Less than six months after being picked up in the Franks murder, Ishmael Hixson was charged with eighteen counts of aggravated robbery in a separate case. In 1978, Gardenhire was sent to prison for his part in another brutal robbery-homicide.
* * *
I’ll be honest: I would not jump out at you as a natural chronicler of the African American urban experience. I’m white and suburban, my stats chart vanilla and marked by socioeconomic stability. Growing up, my two-parent household pitched around the middle class, some years good, others spotty, but I was never in material want.
Home was an exurb nowhere, on the southeastern edge of the county, farmland that had been plowed under by interlocking grids of residential developments, the houses all copy-paste replays of one another. It was nice and uneventful. Some people like to graft depth to such neighborhoods by claiming the banal front hides weirdness and ennui. In my experience, it was a boring a place to grow up.
Despite that background, as a reporter, my work has always zeroed in on race and class and their impact site, the U.S. criminal justice system. I was drawn to stories that looked at inequality. Not to go deep-sea Freudian fishing, but I believe this has a lot to do with growing up alone and oddball, and being from the Cleveland area. The first quality is textbook: we moved a lot growing up, so I was usually edged out of the social norms. I was also awkward, acne-marked, speech-impeded, and wired with an ADHD streak that instead of shooting me out into the world had me obsessively tunneling into my own head. By the time I was a teenager, I was so used to being harassed and picked on, I developed a standard skate punk underdog ethos. I used a lot of four-letter words, dyed my hair red my senior year, and had a surly attitude toward most everything. Being a news reporter—a paid professional agitator—was a natural fit.
Then there was Cleveland. The American city is nothing if not a hard-knuckle demolition derby of interest and muscle pitted against one another, and I enjoyed reporting on the places where those scores were fought in the open. Although I grew up a thirty-minute drive from the city proper, my dad worked on Public Square, and our family was in Cleveland nearly every weekend. Race was there in Cleveland, a surface play, its energy aboveground, not neatly channeled into dog whistles or innuendo. People discussed it openly. I came to appreciate that honesty, but the familiarity also put me in a self-congratulatory bind. I grew up believing that because I was from a diverse city where race relations were an open battle, I had somehow soaked up an enlightened stance on the topic.
I was knocked out of that mind-set in college. I went to a leafy liberal arts school in rural Ohio, isolated as a desert island. The student body was overwhelmingly white and upper middle class, yet a hefty slice of the curriculum was devoted to issues of race and diversity and the worldwide legacies of imperialism and American bigotry. There were a lot of -isms and deconstructions and heady theories jumping in the air. The coursework, however, never seemed to touch the actual problems infecting urban areas. And my own feelings on race weren’t altered by high-minded theory or historical analysis, but by an American literature class. Go figure. I was a junior. The course was taught by a small but intimidating southern man. We were reading Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It wasn’t a book I enjoyed too much. In the final lecture, the professor brought up a test we’d taken earlier in the week: the essay prompt was to explain the character arc of one of the main figures in the novel. No one in the class, he told us, had chosen to write about Jim, the runaway slave who spends the final chapters locked in a cell, believing he’ll soon be returned to his plantation. The professor waited a few beats, then pointed out that none of us—fifty academically savvy, progressive young Americans—seemed to have considered that during the whole last act of the novel, Tom Sawyer knows Jim has already been freed. Yet, instead of sharing the good news with Jim, Tom keeps it to himself so he and Huck can go on with their “adventures.” Two southern boys getting their fun in while a grown man sits in a cell, his thoughts no doubt nailed to the brutality waiting for him back home. “In my experience,” the professor said, “racism isn’t just institutional, or even outright, blatant expressions of bigotry. It is a lack of empathy.”
It’s tidy to think you have the correct opinions on equality and civil rights and the systemic predations on African Americans—especially when you’re doing it from a place of relative privilege, as I was. What that professor had exposed was the failure of some fifty highly educated Americans to think beyond themselves, to sink a connection outside their own borders, and that lack of empathy to me was a deep moral failing.
Fast-forward to 2011: the cold slap of the same revelation hit me while I sat on my apartment floor in Cleveland, the towers of transcripts now scattered in piles, nicked with margin notes and exclamation points. Days earlier, I’d stood on the street corner with Kwame, watching the bus make the turn that shifted my thoughts on the case. Now the documents at my knees blurted the same message: the men who had been imprisoned were innocent, they had been wrongfully convicted. I’d gone into Kwame’s case as a reporter looking for a possible story. I’d worked on it as a side project I tinkered with when I had the time. Journalism required such compartmentalization. But that professional detachment was as comfy as my socially correct opinions had been in college—an easy perch to stand on, but with little action required on my part. I finally also realized my initial inability to empathize was exactly because of my background. I had been suspicious that the justice system could jail the wrong men because I had never been on the wrong end of the justice system. No one I was close to had ever even been arrested. It was easy from my perspective to let those jailhouse letters pile up in a desk drawer.
There is responsibility in our perspectives. We’re accountable for what we see in the world, and more importantly, we’re responsible for what we don’t see. At some point in reading through those transcripts, I had stepped from the safe enclosure of journalism. This was real life. Three lives. It was all much more important than just another story.
9
WHAT THE BOY SAW
Cleveland, Spring 2011
One morning in April, I climbed into my car, the ghost of a dead fifty-four-year-old salesman riding shotgun. I was making a copycat run of Harry Franks’s last drive, scraping my Buick down roads that were now buckled like storm-wild surf.
In spring, Cleveland explodes with vegetation, an overnight express delivery of green. I drove east, away from downtown. Fresh bushes and shrubs were already spilling from lots. The sidewalks were parted by tufts of grass like liquid bubbling from below. The sudden splashes of color were a shock after so many months of gray, but the vivid contrast was greatest in the neighborhoods where abandoned buildings, weatherbeaten to a kind of noncolor, marked the streetscape. Spring polished up the city. A weak sun was doing its best to push through tissue-paper cloud cover. People were on the streets, walking and gliding on bikes.
Franks’s weekly run went right through the main vein of black Cleveland—then and now. Pulling south onto East Fifty-fifth took you past Central, the city’s first black neighborhood. The domed and stone eminences of powerful black churches ran along the strip, from Shiloh Baptist to St. Paul’s Zion. Nearby stretched the cherry-brick Outhwaite Homes, the first public housing development to break ground in the U.S., dating from 1935, when the idea of government housing was a radical New Deal proposal. East on Quincy Avenue drilled you deeper into the Fairfax area; Woodland Cemetery, the final resting place of Cleveland’s nineteenth-century elite, including two former Ohio governors, broke the monotony of empty fields, tow yards, and scrap outfits tucked along the base of the heights. Dip south a few blocks and you hit Buckeye Avenue, which climbed the heights to towering, well-kept mid-century homes dwarfed under huge oaks. South and east a little more brought Kinsman: fast-food grease pits, off-bra
nd cell phone stores, beauty supply stores. Circling back south, east, and up, the route continued along Cedar Avenue, where the Maxwell Cut-Rate still sat on the first floor of a three-story apartment building, a blue neon Colt .45 sign humming behind the grated front windows. A bunker-looking strip club—the Wolf’s Den—perched across the street. Almost all the other stores on Franks’s regular route were gone—either physically obliterated, covered in boards, or under new ownership. Yet in the 1970s, these were properties like the Robinsons’ store, black-owned neighborhood anchors. Harry Franks, I saw, had friendly business with blacks every day of his workweek. How many white suburbanites in 1970s Cleveland could say the same?
I rolled the Buick to a stop on Arthur Avenue, the street near Cedar where Kwame, Wiley, and Rickey had all lived. The passing years had taken a sledgehammer to most of the lots here as well. On foot, I saw that many of the two-story homes were gone, some replaced with belt-high grass while elsewhere foundations, piping, and chimneys still stood, as if the homes had been airlifted away in a hasty evacuation—picked like flowers. Skyscraping maples dropped a checkered sunlight from above, laying a gloomy magic-hour tint on the street regardless of the time.
I was striking out on a shoe-leather hunt for old witnesses or anyone else who remembered the murder. No one answered my door knocks. Occasionally a curtain flickered with movement. Meanwhile, Kwame worked his own paths. He brought back the name he had cast off in prison, stepping into it again like old clothes. He contacted friends, family, and neighbor folks; each one had the same frozen beat of silence after he said, Hello, you might not remember me, this is Ronnie, the mental time machine darting back three decades plus, and then Ohhhhh, the voice warm with recognition.