by Kyle Swenson
By panning his old life, Kwame picked up bits of rumors, names, rusted shrapnel off old stories; he would relay the information back to me, and I’d plow ahead, often smacking against walls. One rumor had it that a neighborhood woman once overheard guys boasting at a party of pulling off the Cut-Rate murder. Another story told of a career stickup artist confessing to the killing on his deathbed. Nothing could be confirmed.
These trips down memory lane took a toll on Kwame. As we spent more hours together, the businesslike tone of our first conversation had smoothed out; Kwame was friendly and funny, his big personality rolling out of him in belly laughs and jokes. We got along; our talks strayed all over the place, from the inner politics of his job at the Board of Elections to pro boxing. But the smile would be chased off his face and his baritone starch up when we discussed the case—particularly when we talked about the old neighborhood.
“I’m more of an analytical person,” he explained. “I like to think things out. And I’ve come to the conclusion that I really don’t want to trust anybody from the neighborhood. It seems to me that someone knew, or a lot of people knew. And for some reason, they wouldn’t do the right thing.”
“Right,” I said. “They could have spoken up, gone to the police. Something.”
“Exactly. And they let all this destroy my life, my brother’s life, and Rickey’s life.” But he had to keep stepping back into his old name because we needed Ed.
* * *
Alternative weeklies everywhere have institutionalized a bratty know-it-all attitude in their pages. At Cleveland Scene, we were constantly knocking the mainstream television stations and the Plain Dealer, outfits mostly staffed with out-of-towners brought in by corporate ownership. We’d make sport when they missed context, bungled East Side for West Side, or didn’t know the historical backstory. An alt-weekly editor once told me our papers—comically short-staffed, floating tenuously, finance-wise, on the bar and strip club ads at the paper’s end—could only compete with daily newsrooms if we were quicker, more detailed, and smarter. We may not have always covered the first two, but we overcompensated by thinking we were smarter—if only because we knew Cleveland.
Most of that institutional knowledge came from one primary source. I would say Michael D. Roberts was the dean of local journalism, but he would probably roll his eyes behind his red Coke-bottle glasses and tell me to go to hell. So let’s say he was more like the cranky uncle of Cleveland journalism, a longtime vet who was expertly positioned to hear the historic legacy running beneath current events. Cleveland born and raised, he was a cub reporter at the Plain Dealer on the streets of Hough during the ’66 riots. Later in the decade, he embedded with grunts in Vietnam and covered the Nixon White House. After leading the paper’s city desk, he became the editor of Cleveland Magazine in the 1970s, when city magazine journalism had real teeth. He ran an award-winning staff comprised of the best journalists in town. Retired, he still penned columns for publication; more importantly, he served as a mentor to dozens of young reporters, shaping their views of the city. I counted myself among them.
Often I’d cut out on work early, meeting Mike in a downtown bar off Public Square where he posted up most days, a half-finished glass of white wine on the bar top. In between rapping with downtown lawyers or business heavyweights, he’d unroll stories about his reporting days or stew on the latest gossip. Inevitably, he’d ask me what I was working on. That spring of 2011, I kept him updated on Kwame’s case—a story that I could tell didn’t punch his buttons too much (not overtly political enough). But he was encouraging. There in the honey-colored murk of the dive, Roberts would raise his wineglass, squint his eyes, and say what he always said, the same question he believed you had to point at any Cleveland story. “You gotta ask yourself,” the news vet said to me, “what’s it say about the town?”
I initially felt wrongful convictions were rare, a feeling based on little more than gut conjecture. Until relatively recently, the same sentiment echoed off the highest peak of the U.S. court system. “Our society has a high degree of confidence in its criminal trials,” Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor bragged in a 1993 majority opinion, “in no small part because the Constitution offers unparalleled protections against convicting the innocent.”1 In a 2006 opinion Justice Antonin Scalia stated that the American criminal system had an “error rate of .027 percent.”2
Such comfy assumptions, however, have been systematically undercut over the last thirty years. But rather than occasion a game-changing reevaluation of our justice system, much of the legal world has resisted the implications. Spend time around studies tackling the topic, and you’ll see we haven’t recalibrated our ideas or policies. We might never be able to. There is a fundamental resistance there. People don’t want to admit the criminal justice system is capable of such a serious mistake.
DNA testing is what originally dynamited the unquestioned reliability of the legal process. Beginning in the mid-1980s, lab tests began to prove—beyond a reasonable doubt—the innocence of felony defendants. These were men (overwhelmingly men) who had been served punishment through the standard mechanics of American courts—police testimony, eyewitness evidence, confessions, and guilty verdicts. Yet science upended everything: here, science was saying the law had failed. By the start of 2012 the National Registry of Exonerations, a tag-team effort by the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, determined that between 1989 and 2012, American courts saw 873 exonerations. These innocent men and women spent an average of eleven years in prison while waiting for the truth to emerge.3
Combing through these cases, experts have filed down the factors common to false convictions. This “catalog of errors” includes missteps and bad acts along each step of an investigation and trial: eyewitness misidentification, false confession, perjury, official misconduct, and false or misleading forensic evidence. Yet each case represented its own unique mix. That’s why much of the research on false convictions is more speculative than systemic—each case study resists classification.4
Cuyahoga County had its own record of wrongful conviction. By 2011, the county had seen nine exonerations since 1989; that figure did not include a number of high-profile cases that were then currently being fought out in the courts and regularly featured in the news cycle. And true to local style, these fights were dirty—enough to question the reliability of cornerstones of the local legal process.
For example, in 2000, David Ayers, an African American security officer at a Cleveland public housing project, was arrested and convicted of the murder and rape of a seventy-six-year-old woman. Detectives initially zeroed in on Ayers not because of concrete evidence but because he appeared “gay-like”—an observation the officers were stupid enough to put in their notes. Despite no physical evidence, detectives arrested Ayers after lying in affidavits, forcing a witness to make a statement implicating Ayers (the witness later retracted), and illegally using a jailhouse snitch as a witness against the defendant. Eleven years later, Ayers was still in prison and trying to get DNA evidence from the victim tested—tests that would eventually clear him.5
Official misconduct had also shipped Joe D’Ambrosio off to death row. In 1989, the Clevelander and another man were separately tried and convicted of the murder of a nineteen-year-old acquaintance on the testimony of a third defendant who cut a deal with Cuyahoga County prosecutors. Thanks to a Catholic priest D’Ambrosio met while awaiting his execution, the case was reopened; D’Ambrosio’s attorneys discovered that a prosecutor named Carmen Marino had withheld key evidence pointing away from their client. In 2009, D’Ambrosio was released from prison, but the county continued to push to retry the defendant. In 2010, a judge granted a motion blocking a retrial—but in 2011, the county appealed that decision. Prosecutors still wanted another chance at D’Ambrosio.6
Bad DNA evidence was behind Wally Zimmer and Tom Siller’s hellish experience. In 1998, the two men—someti
me neighborhood handymen who also used crack—were convicted of the murder of a seventy-four-year-old woman who was beaten and robbed in her Slavic Village home. Police found the fingerprints of both men at the victim’s house—they regularly did work for her. Prints of a twenty-eight-year-old con named Jason Smith also turned up. When police arrested Smith, they found what appeared to be a bloody pair of pants in his possession. Smith, however, told police he’d seen Zimmer and Siller kill the woman and had only come in later to ransack the house. A county lab expert named Joseph Serowik testified that Smith’s pants were not bloody; prosecutors told the jury at Siller and Zimmer’s trial that the lack of blood pointed to Smith’s truthfulness. The two were given thirty years to life. However, in 2001, Serowik came under fire when a Cleveland man convicted of rape was exonerated by new testing. A review of Serowik’s lab work showed rampant errors and fabrication. When Smith’s pants were retested, the lab discovered more than twenty bloodstains, including both the victim’s and Smith’s blood. But the county continued to fight motions for Zimmer and Siller’s release, and by 2011, the two were mulling over whether to take a deal on a theft charge in exchange for immediate release. They’d already been in prison for thirteen years.7
So, as recent Cleveland history attests, there’s no one weak spot in the armor: the fatal errors behind a wrongful conviction can come at any point in the process—from misguided detectives to belligerent prosecutors to lying experts on the government payroll.
But what really drives you into Kafka territory is that we still can’t say with any clarity how large a problem wrongful incarceration is in the United States. That’s the great knockout punch of false conviction scholarship—it’s guesswork. Yes, we can tally the number of cases we’ve caught. But the actual number of innocent Americans imprisoned for something they didn’t do is unknowable. Some experts have estimated that as many as five thousand to ten thousand wrongful convictions occur each year. Another group posits that 1 to 5 percent of annual felony convictions may be erroneous. Still a separate camp has cited surveys with judges who said they believe the jury got it wrong in 10 percent of the trials they oversaw.8 This moving target actually handicaps the movement. It’s hard to wrap systemic research around a loose data set. It also hands ammo to critics: there’s no institutional wrongful conviction problem, they can say, these are just one-off situations, random mistakes instead of endemic issues.
So I didn’t have an answer ready for Michael Roberts when he asked me what the Jackson and Bridgeman case said about the town. That would take time. But I had already begun to see that it wasn’t just a Cleveland story.
* * *
Karen Smith, the neighborhood teen who walked into the Cut-Rate just as the 1975 robbery was unfolding, was key. She had both seen the actual stickup men as she entered the store and also maintained neither was Rickey or Ronnie.
I was excited to learn Smith was still around. After graduating high school, Smith went on to Oberlin College and later earned a master’s degree at Ohio State. When I got her on the phone, the warm voice on the other end explained that she currently was still in the Columbus area, working with developmentally challenged children.
May 19, 1975, was still clear in her memory. “Oh, yes,” she said, stretching the words into a singsong. Her account matched what she had told the juries in 1975: the men outside the store as she walked by were not Ronnie and Rickey. But she went further and filled in what happened after the arrest of the three men. She was taken to the police station and urged by police to make an ID during the lineup; the cops asked her how she would feel if her mother had been the dead victim. Later that day, she remembered, police brought Ed snacks at the station house. She was treated with frosty indifference. Smith also recounted how investigators plied her with additional details of the crime, information she would not have known from her own vantage point, such as how acid had been used in the attack, or that the culprits got away in a green car.
The courage of a sixteen-year-old girl to keep facts straight under that full-court press must have been considerable. Then to go to trial, telling her story while trying to fend off hostile assaults and embarrassing innuendo (“Do you go on many dates, Karen?”) from prosecutors—the kind woman I was speaking with had shown serious resolve as a teenager. “Over the years, it’s kind of bothered me that people didn’t take my word to be the truth,” she admitted to me. “That is something I live with.”
Some spelunking through online databases brought me a phone number for Ivan Tanksley, another neighborhood kid, who was ten at the time of the killing. Now living in South Florida, Ivan also remembered the day, and brought my heartbeat up to a gallop when he casually mentioned he’d seen the murder.9
“What?” I said.
“I had a paper route,” he said, explaining he’d been walking by a nearby gas station when he heard the shots. “I seen the guys going to the car, and then they went up Fairhill.” It wasn’t Rickey, Ronnie, or Wiley. “I knew them. Especially Rickey Jackson and his brother, Ernest. I could tell them from the back, especially back then, and if it was them, I would have known. It wasn’t them.”
“Did you ever get interviewed by police?”
“I don’t remember being interviewed by police.”
Ivan also recalled seeing Ed around the neighborhood after the trials, after everyone knew he’d lied and sent three innocent guys to prison. “Did you ever ask Ed about it?”
“No,” Ivan answered. “One of my brothers has kids by Ed’s sister. If I were to talk to him about it, it would have gotten out of hand. Something would have happened. So I just left it alone.” Before hanging up, Ivan offered a last thought. “That’s crazy they’ve been in jail for all this time for something they didn’t do.”
Kwame was able to track down a phone number for Valerie Abernathy.10 Eighteen in 1975, she fit another piece into the emerging picture. “At the time when this was supposed to take place,” she told me, groping around her memory, “if I’m not mistaken, that day me and Buddy were together. We were just hanging out. His friend was my boyfriend at the time. I’m just wondering with all of that going on, why nobody ever called me.” Valerie went on to explain that around Arthur, no one believed Ed was telling the truth. “Edward Vernon’s eyesight is terrible,” she said. “How did he see anybody?”
By far, the most interesting conversation I had was with Lynn Garrett. Kwame again found his phone number. Lynn had, as Kwame would later relate, been as close to him growing up as Rickey Jackson was right before their arrests—as tight as friends could be. But Lynn, unlike his buddies, had stayed in school, graduated, and earned a football scholarship to Bowling Green State University. Lynn was a tailor in Cleveland now. He was also—and this was just the first of many surprises Lynn would have—the father of two kids with Ed Vernon’s other sister, Darlene.11
Lynn, then, wasn’t just a witness—he was a connection to Ed. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I got him on the phone, where his loyalties were parked after all these years. But out of the gate, Lynn understood why I was calling. “It was a great injustice,” he told me. “To this day, it’s unbelievable. Rickey, Wiley, and Ronnie—we grew up together. If they were the kind of guys who robbed stores, I would never have been around them.”
His next statement also sent my pen furiously scribbling notes: according to Lynn, he remembered the day of the Franks murder clearly—because he’d been with Ronnie and Rickey that afternoon when they were supposedly committing the crime. Lynn told me about hanging out in the street with them when a neighborhood girl told them about the shooting.
After our first conversation, I spoke to Lynn a number of times through the late spring. He seemed to genuinely want to help his old friends; but I also sensed he felt I was not getting the right angle on Ed. Lynn didn’t defend him so much as try to defuse any hostility I might have by placing the situation in perspective. “Who knows what’s in a kid’s mind or heart,” he told me one day, the deep baritone quaking a bit. “I c
an’t answer why he would have done something like this.”
One afternoon while we were on the phone, Lynn put me on hold. When his voice jumped back on the line, it took me a moment to understand he was talking to someone else, a third party he’d looped into the call. “… Edward, that court thing, he really didn’t see the murder, did he?”
“Oh no,” a woman’s voice, rusty with age, said. “See, [Ed’s father] Cannon didn’t want him to testify. But by then it was too late.”
“Right, too late,” Lynn answered. This, I suddenly realized, was Darlene. Before I could introduce myself, Darlene rang off, leaving Lynn and me on the phone. He seemed happy that, whether Darlene knew it or not, she had helped explain Ed’s situation.
The initial revelation I had on the street corner watching the bus with Kwame—this guy is actually innocent—had been bolstered by the mess of contradictions in the transcripts and police documents. Now these new interviews, by adding different pieces to the case, supported the contention that in 1975 three innocent men had been sent to prison for a murder they didn’t commit. Ivan claimed he saw the actual killers. Valerie was a possible alibi for Wiley. Lynn did the same for Rickey and Ronnie. None of these individuals had been interviewed before, yet their stories could have seriously altered the flow of the investigation or at least added more building blocks to a case for reasonable doubt at trial.
I was excited to share the news with Kwame. One afternoon we met on a bench in an Asia Town strip mall, not far from his job at the Board of Elections warehouse on the near East Side. Spinning with the new finds, I babbled out the developments, only to watch Kwame step back inside whatever headspace he’d outfitted to handle this. Tight lips curling into a bemused smile and wincing eyes dammed up any words or feelings. After prodding, Kwame finally explained he was surprised. “All those people remember the case?”