Good Kids, Bad City

by Kyle Swenson

  * * *

  Cleveland—city of churches. East Side, West Side, the whole spectrum: fish-fry-Friday Catholics and suburban megachurch holy rollers, lukewarm Protestants and Greek Orthodox. You’ve got quarry-rock cathedrals haunting corners of Ohio City. Old World cupolas and onion domes marking the skyline in Tremont. Beautiful stone wrecks patched with graffitied plywood lining East Fifty-fifth. And down on Public Square was the Old Stone Church, two modest granite bell towers dark with 150 years of soot, the oldest standing structure in town.

  Emmanuel Christian is just one of a dozen houses of the holy running up Superior on the East Side. It holds neither the political clout through mobilized voters nor the deep pastoral lineage of other black religious powerhouses in town. But a faithful two hundred or so regular worshippers bow their heads there each Sunday, hearing the Word delivered by Pastor Anthony Singleton. Pulled-taffy gangly and given to dapper, screaming-loud suits, Singleton has a commanding patter and confident stage prowl that give him the veneer of a showman. But preaching wasn’t exactly the road Singleton had originally planned to walk. The opposite, actually. “By the time I got to twenty-two years old, I had done everything but kill somebody, sleep with a man, and shoot heroin,” Singleton would boast later, a Cheshire-cat smile on his lips. “We grew up in the projects, not having a father. So I engaged in a lot of stuff.”

  Crime? “Little petty theft.” Drugs? “We had our weed and our beer and wine. Crack wasn’t out then, and we couldn’t afford cocaine, that was for rich people.” Women? “Girls was my thing. If I had one girlfriend, I wanted two. If I had two girlfriends, I wanted three.”

  But at twenty-two, a niece dragged Singleton by the arm to a church service. The words storming out of the preachers made little sense to the young street hustler. “I knew a Mark, but I didn’t know the Mark of the Bible. I knew a John, didn’t know a Matthew. Didn’t know nobody named Luke. I just thought, What’s he talking about?”

  When the preacher asked for all the sinners present to march to the pulpit to be baptized, Singleton’s niece urged him up. He didn’t care much for the ritual, but something had shifted: the urge to chase girls and get high—they were gone now. His brush with the Lord reconfigured Singleton. This was the launchpad for a preaching career that eventually stopped at Emmanuel Christian. In his new life behind the pulpit, Singleton didn’t ignore his past—most of the brothers and sisters filling the pews had suffered their own hard knocks, many self-inflicted. Singleton was a walking, talking example of the righteous path.

  That was certainly the case with Ed Vernon. In 2007, Emmanuel Christian started receiving vanloads of City Mission residents for Sunday service. The congregation became so popular with the recovering addicts and homeless residents that drivers had to make two trips to the mission to collect them all. Singleton stopped by the shelter to give small group talks, which is where he met one of the staffers, a little guy with midnight-dark skin and thick glasses. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” Ed told the pastor. “I’m going to come to your church.” He joined the congregation on the first Sunday he attended.

  Here was a humble man with high-voltage faith, Singleton thought, looking over his new parishioner. Drink, smoke, and vulgarity never passed Brother Ed’s lips. He knew his scriptures front to back. He threw himself into the church’s business, participating in services and ministering to sick members at home who couldn’t make it to weekly church service. Every Sunday, he was a bouncing, laughing presence in the congregation.

  As dedicated as Ed was to his scriptures, bad luck dogged him. He started hitting up Singleton for loans, and when it came time to pay them back, a teary-eyed Ed would apologize for not having the money. He’s working, and he’s still broke, the pastor thought. He often let Ed forget about the debt. The pastor picked up that Ed was infatuated with a woman who wasn’t interested in him—most of his money was going to her.

  When Ed lost his job at the City Mission, his situation became dire. One Sunday while the congregation was in service a repo man came right up on Superior and snatched Ed’s van away for missed payments. The next job he got was working security at a mental health center. The one rule: don’t touch the patients. Not long after starting, however, a patient fell on Ed during an incident. He pleaded, but no luck. They fired him.

  But Ed started dating a woman from the congregation and his prospects brightened. A new job worked out at a dry cleaner’s. And—amazingly—a fat check arrived in his mailbox from the IRS, a lump sum owed from a tax snafu involving his ex-wife, the former divinity student at the Mission. Ed was suddenly eight thousand dollars richer. He presented his new love interest with an expensive engagement ring.

  However, the run of luck didn’t stick. His girlfriend, he would later say, relapsed into a drug habit, siphoning money away from Ed and hocking her engagement ring. He lost his job again, then quickly fell behind on the payments for a new car he’d bought with his IRS check. Once again, the repo guy took the vehicle. By that point, Ed was out three jobs and two cars in a stretch of twelve months. Whatever it was—karma or his spiritual balance—it was all wrong with Ed, Singleton thought. And then there were those intense crying jags during the all-night shut-ins. It was as if a black cloud clung to Ed at all times.

  In 2011 Singleton started to gather clues about what was going on with Ed. When a reporter—me—and then attorneys began filling up his office answering machine looking for Brother Ed, the parishioner swatted it off, telling the pastor the calls were about some business back at the City Mission—old story, he claimed. But then Singleton found himself flipping through Scene, reading about an Ed Vernon who had testified against three neighbors in a 1975 murder case. Fireworks went off inside Singleton’s head.

  “Honey!” Singleton yelled to his wife, bent over the family computer one night, searching online for more details of the case. “This is it! This is what’s wrong with Ed.” His wife wasn’t convinced. “You can’t go by what that newspaper says,” she said. “That’s one of them free newspapers.”

  Singleton went as far as heading downtown to the public library, hunting for old newspaper articles on the crime and trials. Armed with the information, one day he risked mentioning it to Ed when the two were driving together to Bible study. The preacher casually asked why a Scene magazine reporter was looking to speak with him.

  “No, Pastor,” Ed said. “That’s something about the City Mission.” Singleton, though, had already read the story. He knew why the reporter had called. But here Ed was, lying to him still. Singleton was in a bind. If Ed didn’t want to go there, he couldn’t push him. But the pastor also couldn’t leave it alone.

  Not much later, Ed disappeared. Poof, gone. He stopped showing up for Bible study, wasn’t in the pews for Sunday service. When Singleton called, Ed’s cell cut right to voice mail.

  * * *

  Down in Cincinnati, Sierra Merida’s brain was also stuck on Ed Vernon. After inheriting Rickey’s case from the last round of OIP interns, the second-year law student looked at the recaps of available leads and information.2 Clearly nothing so far had inched the case forward. There was only one serious option: talking to Ed.

  When she walked into her first year of law school, Merida, like Crowley, had every intention of sitting at the other table in the courtroom as a prosecutor. OIP, however, offered a great opportunity at real-world legal work, so she showed up for an informational meeting. After a spiel about the program from staff, Dean Gillispie spoke. A burly white man from the Dayton area, he had been convicted of three rapes in 1991 despite passing numerous polygraph tests and providing a bulletproof alibi for the window of time when the crimes took place—he wasn’t even in Ohio. Still, Gillispie spent twenty years in a cell before OIP obtained a reversal of his conviction in 2011. The story hit Merida where it counted; she put her name down for OIP.

  The law student picked up parallels between Gillispie’s nightmare and Rickey’s own. No physical evidence was presented at either trial. The convictions w
ere sealed with eyewitness testimony. Both Gillespie and Rickey had clean records before their arrests. Merida could only imagine what it must have been like—sitting in a courtroom, scared, indecipherable legalese flying over your head, and feeling like no one was fighting for you. Reading the 1975 court transcripts, she was shocked by how transparent Ed’s lies had been. Even the judges didn’t seem convinced, at least from the comments in the record. And the state presented no other evidence. The case was so thin. In her mental snapshot of Ed, the thirteen-year-old transformed into a villain. How can someone say something like that? How could he lie? And now, how could be still remain silent? Yet Ed was the only answer to Rickey’s predicament.

  OIP’s Carrie Wood shared Merida’s feelings. Ed was the only path left for mounting Rickey’s case. Pastor Singleton was the only gateway to the witness. Together, Merida and her OIP partner practiced what they’d say on the phone, then punched in the numbers.

  Singleton wasn’t even supposed to be in the office. But instead of letting the call slip to his voice mail, the pastor’s long arm grabbed the braying receiver. A beat or two, that’s all it took for him to connect the woman’s voice on the phone, the nervous practice rap, with what had been sitting like a rock in the back of his mind for weeks.

  “This must be the Lord,” Singleton told the young women. The pastor explained he’d read the Scene piece and done his own fact-finding on the case. “I believe one hundred percent these guys were innocent.”

  “Well, Pastor,” Sierra ventured, “we believe one hundred fifty percent.” The law students explained that they needed Ed to retract his testimony for Rickey to get a shot at release. The pastor explained that Ed wasn’t ready now. He’d try to work on him. They’d wait and check back, the women said. Singleton neglected to tell them Ed was off-grid, no one knew where he was—not a lie, exactly. If OIP thought Ed wasn’t going to surface again, Singleton worried they’d shrug and move on to the next case.

  But the Lord, Singleton liked to say, comes through. A few days later, Singleton was back in his office at Emmanuel Christian. Once more, the office phone rang. It was the woman who had been engaged to Brother Ed on the line. “Guess who was just here?”

  It was Ed. “I need you to do something for me,” the pastor explained. “I need you to keep him around.”

  “Why?” the woman blurted back. “I don’t like him like that anymore.”

  The pastor said she needed to keep Ed close anyway. It was important. “Just be his friend then.”

  * * *

  Ed was in his kitchen futzing with a can of beans when his fingers went AWOL on him. The can. The opener. One moment he felt the weight, his hands in action. The next, nothing. The wiring between his mind and parts was cut. Then the light quit his eyes.

  He woke up four days later strapped to a hospital bed. A stroke, triggered by sky-high blood pressure. This was in June 2012, and what followed was a medical mystery: the doctors couldn’t herd his systolic and diastolic numbers to a safe level. Drugs, diet, therapy—the man’s system remained dangerously unstable. For the next year he was in and out of the hospital for treatment.

  His condition caused wild attacks of hypertension. His body would swell, the inflation starting in his feet and creeping up as pain pounded through him. Often, lying in a hospital bed, barely able to breathe due to the fluid buildup, it felt like each of his cells would explode. Ed wished for death. Lord, just take me home, he’d pray. I don’t want to keep suffering like this. No relief came. He consoled himself by figuring God had other plans for him.

  Pastor Singleton made regular visits whenever Ed was in treatment. He was convinced his friend’s health was so bad, he might die before anyone got the opportunity to pull the truth from him. The preacher chose a Sunday in early 2013 to finally confront Ed. He brought Ed’s old girlfriend along. He was still sweet on her. Maybe Ed would see the moment as a way to prove himself. Singleton couldn’t promise Ed how this would all play out, if he might land in legal trouble or even jail. All he could do was appeal to his friend. When they arrived in Ed’s room, the patient was in good spirits—giddy, even. Tomorrow he was being discharged. The preacher wasted little time. “I have something to talk to you about,” Singleton said. “I’ve been praying about it and watching you.” Singleton told Ed he’d read the Scene story. Knew about 1975. Ed’s body went rigid. Behind his glasses, tension glazed his dark eyes. Ed’s head started swinging from side to side, no no no. “I want to know if you’re ready to talk about it,” the pastor said. “I think you should tell the truth.”

  Ed was suddenly out of the bed. Arms wrapped around Singleton, the IV tubing nearly yanked out of the machines. A weeping face soaked his shoulder. Half-heard words tumbled out.

  “Listen here, this is fitting to be over,” the pastor told his sobbing friend. “I’ve been in touch with the Innocence Project, this girl named Sierra. They are ready for my phone call.”

  * * *

  They met at the church. The pastor let them have the sanctuary to talk. It was a safe space, the same room where Ed’s sealed-up anguish had sprung a leak during those shut-ins. A frostbitten April morning pressed in against the building. Behind the altar, tapestries with Bible verses hung from the baby-blue walls. Hebrews, chapter 11, verse 1: NOW FAITH IS THE SUBSTANCE OF THINGS HOPED FOR, THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN.

  The four sat by the altar—Carrie Wood, Sierra Merida, another OIP student, and Ed. The visitors from Cincinnati weren’t sure what to expect. Ed might stick to his story, or force them to cat-and-mouse with him until he was cornered. He might get angry. He could scream. But when Ed opened his mouth, the man simply started talking in a voice that steadied the more he spoke.

  One hour fell into the next. Then another. A question from the others occasionally interrupted Ed, but mostly he spoke. It was rare for Wood to take an actual written affidavit on a first meeting. But Ed was on such a roll, the attorney handed him a pen and legal pad.

  “My name is Edward Vernon,” he lettered at the top of the page. “I live in the city of Cleveland. My date of birth is 6.10.62. I testified in the trails of Rickey Jackson, Wiley Bridgeman, Ronnie Bridgeman. The testimony I gave was False. I am writing this to tell the truth about what happened that day.”

  Thoughts he’d never before wrapped into actual words popped into his head faster than his hand could put them down. His tight scrawl covered three pages. “I swear or affirm that the contents of this affidavit are true to the best of my knowledge,” he inked in closing before the hurried dash of his signature.

  Six hours after first walking through the door of Emmanuel Christian, Wood and her law students left the church gunning for a notary to sign off on the affidavit, certifying its legal value. And as far as Sierra Merida was concerned, Ed Vernon had stepped out of the villain role.

  12

  WE CAN FIX THIS

  Cleveland, March 2014

  I thumbed Kwame’s number into my cell phone, a slight buck of excitement forcing me to bungle the digits at first. When the line connected, I slipped into an empty office at the newsroom in Miami.

  “Hey, Kyle,” Kwame said, a little confusion edging into his voice, puzzled no doubt why I was reaching out from twelve hundred miles away. We hadn’t spoken in six months.

  It came tumbling out of me in a clumsy rush. Ed. The affidavit. The Ohio Innocence Project. Motion for new trial. The upshot cradled there in my babbling: Ed Vernon had recanted his 1975 testimony. He’d admitted he’d lied. Lawyers had just filed motions on behalf of Rickey for his release. It was finally happening.

  “That’s beautiful,” Kwame said in his slow-rolling voice. “That’s beautiful,” he repeated. I plowed ahead, talking until I realized there was only dead air on the other end. “Kyle,” a woman’s soft voice came on. “This is Kwame’s wife. He can’t talk right now. He’s … he’s too emotional. He’s crying now.”

  * * *

  I’d known what was in the works for months before my call to Kwame. One after
noon in Miami in the fall of 2013 my cell phone pinged with a number from the Cincinnati area. I almost let it kick to voice mail—wasn’t interested in anything coming from Ohio—but answered at the last moment. The caller, young but armed with a commanding old-man-river baritone, introduced himself as Brian Howe. He was an attorney with the Ohio Innocence Project.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard from OIP since moving to Florida. Usually, it was a student, asking for another copy of the police reports or the trial records. These were touch-and-go exchanges: I’d mail off the files again and hear nothing back. After leaving Cleveland, I was not hopeful OIP or anyone else could really help Kwame, Rickey, and Wiley. “Off the record,” Howe told me about a minute into our call, “Ed has recanted.”

  Everything I knew and felt about the situation was suddenly rearranged. My thoughts jumped to Kwame, but Howe cut me off. “We don’t want Kwame or Wiley or anyone else spooking Ed at this point.” He asked me to wait to share the news until they actually filed the motion for Rickey’s new trial on the basis of the recantation sometime next year, in spring 2014. He shared little else about the developing case.

  Howe rarely let his poker face slip in our early conversations. Later I learned Ed had recanted his 1975 testimony in spring 2013, before Howe came on at OIP. Then in early thirties, he was polite and formal, a reserve that camouflaged a tenacious attorney who fought zealously for his clients. He was a true believer in the work, a dedication born out of his own time as an OIP intern while in law school. A philosophy undergraduate major, he was drawn to the law by the power it had to force an outcome outside the courtroom. As a law student working OIP cases, he had seen this up close: it was Howe who had gone to Mansfield Correctional to pick up the cigarette butts Clarence Elkins had surreptitiously grabbed to secure his release. After working a few years handling tenant issues with the Legal Aid Society after law school, Howe returned to OIP when Carrie Wood left for the Ohio Public Defender’s Office. He later told me the Scene story was the first thing he’d read when he was handed Rickey’s case. Like Wood, he understood that Ed was the key to dismantling the convictions. If they could overturn Rickey’s conviction, Wiley and Kwame’s cases would follow.