by Kyle Swenson
When allegations of official misconduct land in a courtroom, judges tend to sit up, numerous attorneys would later explain to me. Again, this is more of a recent sea change in the legal world than traditional practice. A 2012 study by the National Registry of Exonerations found allegations of police and prosecutorial misconduct in 42 percent of nearly nine hundred exonerations studied, and in 56 percent of homicide cases.12 But the same report noted these numbers are likely low; unless journalists or attorneys later uncover misconduct, it likely goes unnoticed. But the prospect of civil litigation is exactly why judges are more apt today to pay attention: if the allegations are borne out and an exoneration results, a lawsuit on behalf of the exoneree is likely on deck. Whether that suit ends in a settlement or civil judgment, the city—or its insurer—will foot the bill. And nothing is more political in twenty-first-century urban life than court judgments that reach into a city’s coffers.
From my conversations with Howe, I also picked up the feeling that OIP was still digging for as much information as possible to buttress Ed’s claims. The city hadn’t responded—or even acknowledged—OIP’s public records request for the homicide files on the case, Howe told me. The copies they were working from were the ones I’d given them. The attorneys were also still sending groups of students up to Cleveland on the weekends, hoping to locate new witnesses or information.
On my own, from Florida, I began scouting around for more information on the police officers involved in the case. Per the contract with the police union, the city scraps all disciplinary reports tied to officers a few years after they’ve left the department. But the city still maintained the full personnel files, and through public records requests and newspaper clips I was able to pull together some picture of the men involved. Overall, these were former military men, guys who’d seen real action in World War II and Korea. The job of policing Cleveland’s streets was both violent and underpaid. Nearly all of the files I examined included requests for secondary employment. Each file also contained numerous instances of officers using their service weapons on the job.
The main detective working the Franks murder was Eugene Terpay. His name was inked on the majority of the police file reports; he testified in each trial, carrying the weight of the police case in the courtroom. He was on the Cleveland police force from 1949 to 1977, when he left to take a job as a lieutenant with the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Office. A former corporal in the U.S. Army, Terpay spent the majority of his career in the detective bureau, and his time in the city wasn’t dull. His file and old newspaper reports contained at least three instances of gunfire between Terpay and suspects. In 1957 he stopped a fleeing fifteen-year-old black suspect by putting a bullet through his heel; in 1964, the detective unloaded five bullets into a luncheonette robber. This was only a few months after stopping a car of teenage car thieves by shooting the driver in the arm. Department higher-ups cleared all the shootings. In his later career with the sheriff’s office, Terpay was the point man on a couple of high-profile murder cases, landing his picture in the newspaper. In these photos from the late 1970s he was a solid-looking man in late middle age, stray hairs lying across a bald head, gravity and age pulling his face into a bulldog grimace.
The detective’s file was mostly routine paperwork, but there were signs pointing to possible misconduct. In 1971, Terpay was personally named along with the department, East Cleveland Police, the county sheriff, and the Ohio Penitentiary’s warden in a federal lawsuit snapped out on a prison typewriter by an inmate named Marion H. Williams. The personnel file not only contained a copy of the complaint, but a memo from the officer to the legal department asking for representation. The rambling lawsuit documented the abuse Williams claimed he had suffered since going down on an apartment robbery in 1967; the complaint mainly focused on abuses within the prison. But Williams also claimed “One Cleveland Detective Eugene Trepay [sic] made false statements at Plaintiffs [sic] trial” and “also this Detective was the sole reason why Plaintiff was indicted.” Whatever happened with the lawsuit—or to Marion H. Williams—wasn’t clear.
The file contained another surprise: a letter dated November 25, 1975, from the desk of Stanley E. Tolliver. One of the first well-known black attorneys in town, Tolliver was a civil rights and political activist. Later he served as the president of Cleveland’s school board. But here he was writing directly to the chief of police about a client, George Clayton, a young black man involved in the murder of a suburban police officer. Clayton was the subject of a heated citywide manhunt, and the suspect eventually turned himself in alongside his attorney. “I advised the Police that no statements, were to be asked of the defendant, unless I was present,” Tolliver wrote in his letter, explaining what he had told officers at the handoff. “I was later called on the same day by Detective Gene Terpay,” Tolliver wrote. The detective told the attorney “‘Clayton, had changed his mind,’ and was willing to give a written statement, but only would sign it with” Tolliver present. “On consultation with Clayton, I learned that he had not ‘changed his mind’, but was beaten by the Police, one of which was Terpay,” the attorney wrote. Tolliver demanded an investigation into the beatings. No evidence was turned up.
There was one more surprise link between Terpay and the Bridgeman-Jackson case. Months later I was rifling through the archives of the Call and Post. An article in a December 1975 issue discussed the trials; the piece noted an “irregularity”: “[a] juror in Wiley Bridgeman’s trial, during the questioning of jurors, admitted to being the niece of Detective Terpay.” Nobody blew the whistle on the conflict, or thought to note it in the official court record.
* * *
“In the joint it’s a little harder than playing out there,” Kwame told me, a big smile sitting easy on his face. “They trying to really hurt you. The guys got their arms taped up with batteries.”
“Batteries?” I asked. “Like you’d put in a flashlight or something?”
“Up to here,” Kwame said, running a finger from wrist to elbow, his eyes glowing with the jailhouse memories. We were talking football, or at least what passed for pigskin action inside prison, where all the inmates’ anger and resentment was channeled into the yard games, with blockers kitted out with extra armor.
It was spring, about six weeks after the postconviction relief filing on Rickey’s behalf. I was in Cleveland for a wedding, and I made sure to see Kwame. We were sitting at the same Starbucks where we had first met. The man on the other side of the table hadn’t changed much in the last three years—only a little more dirty snow in his beard, a few pounds slimmer. When I was writing my article two years earlier, I had been so focused on discrediting Ed’s testimony, I’d spent little time looking at the other possible suspects. But Rickey’s new filing triggered the logical follow-up: if Rickey, Kwame, and Wiley were innocent, then who actually killed Franks? My attention swung to Paul Gardenhire.
This was a sloping curveball Kwame didn’t see coming. Paul was a year younger than Kwame and had grown up with the Bridgemans; their family trees tangled together at some distant point. Kwame told me Paul was wired bad from the beginning, starting his criminal career off before he was even old enough to drive. Kwame recalled hearing about Paul breaking into houses and businesses as a baby-faced preteen. It was a short path from there to stickups and murder—which is exactly how the two reconnected in 1978, when Paul went down on a robbery-murder and ended up in Lucasville with Kwame. The two neighborhood friends stayed close inside. Kwame explained to me that even though Paul was younger, he took an almost paternal interest in Kwame, making sure he had money in his pocket and stayed clear of trouble. But Kwame never knew that at the time of the murder Paul’s mother had turned police onto her son for the Cut-Rate robbery, or that police fielded another tip connecting Paul with a two-toned green car like the one seen at the scene. It wasn’t until OIP filed Rickey’s motion, tagging pages of the police reports to the paperwork as exhibits, that Kwame had the opportunity to read the documents and
see Paul’s name down as a suspect. “And Paul’s mother sat in the courtroom every day of my trial,” Kwame told me.
The new information scrambled all those feelings. He was clearly trying to fit the image of his friend with the man possibly responsible for derailing his life. And what of Paul’s friendship and support inside? It all could have been driven by the deep guilt of seeing his childhood friends go down for a murder Paul himself committed or was involved with.
“So you really think he did it?” I asked.
“I’ve mulled that over,” Kwame said, explaining he and Rickey had recently talked it through on the phone. “We went back and forth. I think Paul knows someone who had something to do with it. I really do. And I say that because of how forceful he has been over the years saying, ‘I know you had nothing to do with it. I know you had nothing to do with it.’”
But Kwame never knew Paul had any possible connection to his own case while they were incarcerated together. “If I had known it then,” Kwame said, the smile back on his face, “I probably would have beat his ass.”
Kwame was actually still in touch with Paul. He was back in prison after another murder charge. They had just recently spoken, Kwame said. Paul called him up asking if he knew a lawyer named Brian Howe. Paul had received a letter from the OIP attorney asking if he knew anything about the Franks case. “I told him, ‘If you have anything to tell him, you should tell him,’” Kwame told me. “‘Anything.’”
But Paul wasn’t the only name from the police file jumping out at Kwame. Two brothers, Skip and Railroad King, had been identified by the FBI as the possible robbers. Kwame remembered them from the neighborhood. “Them cats was real maggots, man,” Kwame recalled. “You ain’t supposed to say anything about the dead, but them guys, they were the type of guys, they had a reputation in the city that if they got somebody to go with them on a caper, they would rob them after the caper.”
That street rep seemed to have caught up with both King brothers. In November 1979 Railroad King’s body was discovered in some bushes on Kennedy Avenue. Four years later, Skip King was driving a car down Beulah Avenue when a passenger shot and killed him.
* * *
In August, with both sides prepping for the showdown in November, Rickey’s lawyers visited him in Grafton and threw down a hypothetical: What if Rickey could leave prison right now, no problem? the OIP team told him. All he had to do was sign some papers absolving the state of future legal and financial liability. The word “free” set Rickey’s head and heart stampeding. But after a moment, he saw it was a no-go. “I knew there was no way in hell I could seriously contemplate any deal that did not include my (our) complete exoneration in the death of Mr. Franks,” Rickey wrote to me in a letter a few weeks later, recounting the offer. “I’m an innocent man, Kyle, and my stance on that isn’t open for negotiation. Not now, not ever. The way I look at it, man, I don’t have too much more to lose and I’m pretty much bottomed out as it is. There isn’t a whole lot more they can do to me. I know I don’t want to die with Mr. Franks’ blood on my hands. That’s not how I want to be remembered.”
Rickey’s resolve to push his innocence didn’t seem to spring just from stubbornness or a desire for a civil suit payday down the line. All he had was his innocence. Giving up was giving in, a way of debasing what had been stolen. “Honestly, though, I doubt this will ever be over entirely,” he wrote. “How do you shake off something that has been a part of your life for so long? As much as I might long for some semblance of a ‘Normal life,’ there are certain realities that I have experienced throughout this whole ordeal that have so profoundly changed the way I look at everything and everybody. I simply have to accept the fact that I will never be happy or completely whole again. They broke something inside of me, Kyle.”
* * *
They came to get him in November, piling Rickey and eleven other Grafton inmates into a Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections van meant to seat eight. Rickey didn’t care about the tight squeeze. Two feelings were bumper-to-bumper in his head. The first: he’d be back to Grafton. Brian Howe and everyone else at OIP had made that clear, kept the temperature realistically low on his expectations. This was just a court date to see if he’d get another court date, as Rickey understood it. Grafton would see him soon enough.
But Rickey was also consumed by excitement. The prison van rolled up onto the highway heading north for Cleveland. It was thrilling. Even the smell, country air stained with the van’s exhaust, had him almost giddy. Rickey was pinched against the window, his shackled hands together. Through the tiny mesh wiring covering the glass, he watched farmland bunch up into neighborhoods, houses and strip malls veined with trees spangled with fall’s gold and brown and red. It was the first time in thirty-nine years he’d been out on the open road heading for Cleveland. Man, he thought. I don’t want to go back the other way.
When the van arrived in the city, Rickey couldn’t make out anything familiar, just these tall strange buildings bouncing sunlight between their glass windows and brick. None of this shit was up, he thought. Then his eye hit Terminal Tower, fifty-two stories tall, something his thoughts could grab hold of as a landmark. He was in Cleveland, for sure, and it felt, strangely enough, great to be back in the city after so long.
13
39 YEARS, 3 MONTHS, 6 DAYS
Cleveland, November 17, 2014
He clearly didn’t want to be there. His steps stopped short at the door, where for a moment he nervously swung his gaze around the courtroom on the thirteenth floor of the Justice Center. When Ed Vernon’s feet finally inched forward, they moved in a reluctant shuffle, as if he was being reeled in on the end of an invisible rope. Each step seemed a battle, like he might turn and bolt for the elevator.
Every eye turned. The hard church pews in the gallery were filled with a dozen twenty-something law students. County bailiffs leaned against the wood-paneled walls. In the middle of the courtroom, two large conference tables had been placed together, an arrangement that looked more appropriate for corporate negotiations than legal jousts. The attorneys looked up from their encyclopedia-wide binders, each filled with court transcripts and police reports snapped out on typewriters well before most of the people in the room could drink alcohol or vote or even walk. Ed crossed the room and settled into the witness stand.
He appeared squeezed dry, whittled down at fifty-three and shivering inside a large winter coat. His eyes, distorted behind thick glasses, moved all around the courtroom—everywhere but the attorney’s table, where a seated figure fixed him with a laser stare. It had been nearly four decades since Ed had last seen Rickey Jackson. The circumstances had been almost identical. But the skinny teen Ed once knew was gone. Instead, here was a fifty-seven-year-old man, his frame under the orange jumper still cut slim from hours in the prison yard, features pinched into a no-tell poker face, manacled hands calmly before him like a principal ready to hear excuses from a wayward pupil.
Behind that stare, even as Ed Vernon settled into the witness stand, Rickey was still waiting for Ed Vernon to appear. The scrawny paperboy—that was the image locked into his brain; the witness had his right hand up and was already parroting back the oath when Rickey realized this twisted little man was actually the boy he’d been waiting to see for thirty-nine years, three months, and six days.
From my seat in the gallery, I was surfing one surreal jolt of recognition after another. This case had existed so long for me on paper. In the reported details of these men’s lives. Childhood addresses. The memories of family members. Prison records. Even the tilt of their handwriting. But this was the first time I’d laid eyes on either one, and somehow both made the jump from my notebooks to real life with little alteration. Rickey—sullen and serious; Ed—spooked and squirrelly. And stacked between them were four decades of emotions now being aired in a courtroom.
The months of waiting had loaded this moment with the pregnant anticipation of a championship heavyweight bout. Ed was here to convince t
he court he lied in 1975 when his testimony sent Rickey, Kwame, and Wiley to prison. Judge Richard McMonagle presided over the hearing, the man who needed to be convinced. With thirty-six years on the bench, the Republican had the distinction of the longest judicial tenure in county history. A schoolboy part down the middle of his hair offered no softening touch when paired with the flat, expressionless face, a screen of judicial circumspection that was a genetic inheritance as much as a part of the job. McMonagle’s father had been a Cuyahoga County judge for thirty years. His brother and cousin also served on the bench. Soon, McMonagle’s son would campaign for his own seat. And whatever decision McMonagle made on Rickey’s motion would likely be one of the last of his legal career. He was retiring at the end of the year.
We were at a point in the judicial process where the legal system was going to look at itself in the mirror. But the typical language of the courtroom didn’t seem adequate. The legal system’s machinery is all about scaling down human drama, shrink-wrapping pain and violence and conflict into names on a docket and case law references. In this courtroom what was being fought over seemed grander, and freighted with more weight than brittle legalese and procedure could fully express. The confrontation here seemed to spill out of the courtroom, breaching the walls of the Justice Center, into the city beyond. From my seat, I saw this as a showdown between Cleveland’s past and present, the current shiny rebranded metropolitan image called to the mat by the legacy of racial disparity, police violence, and injustice.