“We did all kinds of radical things,” he said. “Now, of course, we’re thought of as too radical.” In the decades of conservative popes who came after John the 23rd, the activist social justice and liberation theology movements in the Church had receded.
Father Gallagher took a sip of his coffee and looked around the mall. It was 10:30 in the morning, and except for us, the place was empty.
“I remember going to jail one time for ten days, so we could experience the conditions of our prisoners,” he said. “It was my radicalization year.”
In 1965, the bishop of the diocese forbade his priests to join in the civil rights actions in the South. Gallagher and another young priest defied his order and went anyway, boarding a plane on March 23, 1965, heading for Alabama to join the last leg of the third Selma-to-Montgomery march. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was on the same plane. He had taken leave of the march for one day to come to Cleveland as the guest of honor at a Nobel Peace Prize dinner organized by local clergy for the benefit of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and was heading back.
I asked if they’d talked. “Oh yes,” Gallagher said. “He wanted to talk theology with us.”
After that, Gallagher asked the diocese for assignments in the inner city, and got them, leading three churches in poor, mostly black neighborhoods. He joined the Council of Christians and Jews and the NAACP, and was on the board of the Urban League in Akron.
What David Francis and Russell Harrison did to him didn’t stop him from his mission. I asked him if he was scared to be alone in the rectory after that.
At first he said no. “I was so happy they didn’t kill us. At the time, with that big gun pointed at my head, I did think they would end up killing us. It seemed to me they were debating whether or not to do it.”
The recording of our conversation lapses into several moments of silence.
“Did you pray during the break-in?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I wasn’t praying. I was worried. I was thinking that I didn’t have a will prepared.”
“Did you ever get robbed again?”
“Well, after that we put bars on the lower windows but not on the upper ones. And one night someone put a ladder up and crawled in and took a TV and some clothes. I slept through it, and I was glad I did. But I was never mugged, and I took a lot of walks in the neighborhood. At another church, someone stole my car. On Ash Wednesday.”
He paused. “You asked me if that break-in scared me,” he said. “I didn’t think I had any fears, but now that I’m thinking about it, I was always worried. There was always stress under the surface, and the stress lingers, and when you’re driving around, you’re always wondering, Are they going to see me? Are they going to come find me? Are they going to do something to me so I won’t talk? I think that’s when my diabetes started.”
“What about forgiveness?” I asked. “Isn’t that what a priest would tell someone, to forgive them?”
“Oh, I forgave them right away, when they didn’t kill me,” he said. “It didn’t change my attitude about working and living in the inner city. I wanted to be there.”
I had saved one question for last because I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable. “Did you ever counsel any women in your churches who had been raped?” I asked.
It did make him uncomfortable. “I don’t think so,” he said. Then he looked down at his hands. “In seminary, we were taught to fear women,” he went on. “We were taught to stay far away from them. They told us women are out to get you, they’re out to get you in bed.”
As I drove back to Cleveland, I felt light. Sitting there in that ordinary mall on an ordinary morning, drinking coffee with this short Irish man in a collar, I had that otherworldly feeling that sometimes comes in the presence of the extraordinary. I am not Catholic, or a believer in any other religion. But I felt as though I was meant to find Gallagher. We had glimpsed our own deaths in the face of the same man. I was meant to talk to him about fear and dying and forgiveness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Death House
When Judge Harry Hanna told David Francis, “I shall bury you in the bowels of our worst prison for as long as I can,” he was referring to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. No one outside the offices of a state government building calls it that, though. Everyone calls it Lucasville, the name of the closest town.
The Appalachian South starts in southern Ohio, bracketed by West Virginia on the east and Kentucky to the south. It is Ohio’s poorest and least-educated region, with poverty levels about double that of the rest of the state. In Lucasville and the surrounding area, the prison is one of the biggest employers.
This was where David Francis went in November of 1984, and this is where he stayed until the spring of 1993, when the longest and third-deadliest prison riot in the country’s history erupted on Easter Sunday. For eleven days, about 450 inmates took over an entire cell block, holding a dozen guards hostage. When it was over, one guard and nine inmates were dead, and dozens injured.
It started when a group of Sunni Muslim inmates refused to undergo a tuberculosis test because it violated their religious beliefs. The warden had ordered that all prisoners would be tested, and decided to lock down the entire prison for the tests. Before the lockdown happened, though, the inmates responded to his order with violence.
But the TB tests were just the flash point that ignited the riot. The conditions had been smoldering for several years. The reports that came out in the wake of the riot noted a slew of troubling issues. The prison was overcrowded to the point that cells designed for one inmate housed two. The warden allowed phone calls only on Christmas Day. The inmate-to-guard ratio of 9 to 1 was dangerously tilted. Though smaller gangs existed, the Aryan Brotherhood and the Muslims ruled, and violent disputes between them flared often. The warden had eliminated the practice of inmates choosing their own cellmates, and randomly put together blacks and whites, lifers and short-timers, Aryan and Muslim. Though it was a maximum-security prison, it was run more like a medium- to low-security one, with guards moving hundreds of inmates to meals and work assignments at any time through the halls.
Former inmates told newspaper reporters about the conditions. “It’s a hard joint,” one of them said. “You have to live one day at a time at Lucasville. Everybody has a knife. And if you don’t have one, you better get one.” Then he demonstrated how to make a knife with a gallon-size plastic milk container and a piece of metal.
When I started my search, I wanted to know what paths David Francis and I had taken to bring us to our collision on July 9, 1984, and where our lives went afterward. For him, the first nine years after the rape were spent living in a cramped cell, quite possibly with a member of the Aryan Brotherhood.
After the usual weeks of letters and phone calls asking for permission to visit the prisons where David Francis lived during the sixteen years after my rape, I went to Lucasville at the end of 2007. I hoped someone there might remember him.
I talked first with the warden, a man who had started his career as a guard and worked his way up the corrections ladder.
“It’s important to understand the mission of Lucasville,” he told me. The mission boiled down to this: Lucasville is the time-out chair for the problem children of the Ohio prison system. When an inmate at another prison is violent or disruptive, they ship him to Lucasville.
“We’ve got everybody’s maladjusted here,” the warden said. “That’s all we have. And they come to Lucasville for serious things. They don’t come here for singing poorly in the choir.”
I was curious about how David Francis fit in with this rough crowd. “Is it true that other inmates treat the rapists worse than anyone else?” I asked.
“Well, that’s kind of correctional lore, and in the past it was accurate,” he said. “Sex offenders were not very well received by the other inmates. Now, though, so many more sex offenders are in prison, there’s some normalcy to it.”
I have been in pr
ison visiting areas, rooms filled with inmates sitting with their wives or girlfriends, eating snack food purchased from the long rows of vending machines. They fiddle with their stacks of quarters and avoid looking at the other inmates and their visitors. No one has much to say.
This time I was going beyond the public area for a look inside what everyone considered the meanest prison in Ohio. Lisa was not with me—no photographers allowed. The spokesman guided me down the main corridor, where a line of inmates walked single file along the wall in silence.
“This is a lot calmer that I expected,” I said.
My guide positioned himself between me and the inmates and shook his head. “Understand we’re in a prison,” he said. “It’s deceptive. It’s calm and orderly, but things do happen. It’s no way to live.”
No one could determine which cell, or even cell block, had once housed David Francis, so we went into a typical cell block. The cells, on two levels, surrounded an open control area. The guide told me that about half of the 1,460 inmates remained locked in these cells twenty-three hours a day, getting out only to shower and to exercise, alone.
We walked past the exercise area. In a small wire cage that brought to mind an animal display at the world’s worst zoo, a man was doing pull-ups. As he went up and down, biceps ballooning, I saw he had a tattoo that curved around his neck, one word inked in elaborate Olde English lettering, the style of the Aryan Brotherhood: “NEFARIOUS.”
The other, luckier inmates can leave their cells daily for jobs within the prison, and with good behavior are permitted group recreation time and meals in the dining hall. The average length of stay at Lucasville is about seven years.
I wore loose jeans and the baggiest sweatshirt I owned for this visit, an outfit that did nothing to stop the stares I drew everywhere we went. The attention unnerved me. I found myself calculating how many of these men might be in for rape, and moved closer to my guide.
We walked through the dining hall and the gym, and when we finished the tour, the guide surprised me with a question. “Do you want to see the Death House?” His voice was casual, like he was offering to show me the library. It surprised me. I knew Ohio executed its condemned prisoners at Lucasville and that reporters witnessed these executions. But I didn’t know they let reporters all the way inside, past the designated viewing area.
Ohio, along with Oklahoma and Arizona, has become notorious for botching lethal injections, so much so that in 2015 the Supreme Court agreed to review the constitutionality of the procedures. The standard method involves three drugs, but a shortage of one of the drugs—created when the European supplier refused to sell it for use in executions—had led to improvisation.
In 2014, Ohio tried a controversial two-drug injection on one prisoner, a method never before used in the United States. The condemned man, sentenced to die for the rape and murder of a woman in 1989, died a slow and agonizing death, according to witnesses.
The most famous of Ohio’s botched executions happened in 2009, when the executioners poked around for two and a half hours trying to find a usable vein in Romell Broom, who was sentenced to die for the rape and murder of a fourteen-year-old girl in Cleveland in 1984. Witnesses reported that Broom, who was grimacing and in pain, tried to help with the needle placement several times, pointing out possible veins and rubbing his arms. The governor finally called the execution off. In 2015, Broom was still on death row.
All of this happened in the years after 2008, the year of my tour. My guide led me across the yard to the door of a small, unmarked brick building and opened it. When I entered, I half expected to feel the presence of ghosts. I thought a place called the Death House had to be haunted by the spirits of unspeakable sorrow and dread.
But what struck me was how mundane it was. The institutional-beige walls and floors, the gurney, the medical equipment—these imitations of a hospital setting stripped the place of its power and meaning. They sterilized the act of killing a human being, transforming the enormity and mystery of death into a common medical procedure.
First we looked at side-by-side viewing areas, each the size of a walk-in closet, one for the inmates’ witnesses and one for the victims’. They were separated by a thin wall, and in each, three worn vinyl office chairs faced the glass window that revealed the execution chamber. A hospital gurney outfitted with straps sat center stage, like a set piece in a play—an effect amplified by the curtains that could be drawn across the window when the drama ended.
We proceeded to the cell where the inmate waits for his execution, a small room with a bed, a sink, a toilet, and, hanging in an upper corner, a small TV. The TV made me want to cry. I pictured a condemned man spending the final hours of his life watching Cops, or Judge Judy, distracted to the very end.
“It is approximately seventeen steps from the cell to the execution chamber,” the spokesman said. As we entered the chamber, bare but for the gurney, I saw a wall telephone installed for last-minute reprieves, and a microphone for the inmate to deliver his last words. The IV line and assorted medical devices were hidden in an adjacent room, which served as the equivalent of the blindfold over the eyes of men facing a firing squad.
I thought I detected the odor of gas in the chamber. I almost remarked on it, but I decided I’d imagined it, since they had never used gas for executions here. At one time Ohio gave the condemned a choice between death by lethal injection or death in the electric chair, but the chair had been removed several years before and donated to the Ohio Historical Society. They displayed it in 2011, in an exhibit that also included a wooden cage used on state mental patients in the late 1800s. It was called “Controversy Pieces You Don’t Normally See.”
David Francis might have died here. My mother, my sisters, and my husband might have watched through the glass. My children might have never existed.
I could still smell the phantom gas as we left the building, still smell it as I said goodbye to the spokesman and walked to my car for the long drive back to Cleveland. The dark feeling I had expected in the Death House remained with me the entire drive north, as the late afternoon gave way to night and I passed the twin billboards of the Five Commandments.
David Francis remained at Lucasville for eight and a half years, until the Lucasville Uprising in 1993. Francis was not part of the revolt. On the fourth day of the rioting he was among the eighty-seven inmates who were evacuated to the now-closed prison in Lima. At the time, Lima warden Harry Russell said that the group included the most psychologically disturbed of Lucasville’s inmates.
Francis, who was not a model prisoner, was moved from prison to prison when he got into trouble. A year after the move to Lima he was sent to the prison in Warren, and four years later, in May of 1998, he landed at his last prison, Lebanon, located between Cincinnati and Dayton.
In early 2008 I drove to Lebanon, traveling on an interstate with a legendary roadside attraction: Touchdown Jesus. He faced west toward the highway, positioned on an island between a megachurch’s amphitheater and its baptismal pool, a magnificent sixty-two-foot Styrofoam-and-fiberglass sculpture. He appeared to be emerging from the earth, his arms raised to heaven in the gesture that referees use to signal a touchdown. Three years later, a bolt of lightning struck the statue, which went down in flames.
When I arrived at Lebanon, the warden had arranged for me to meet with three low-security inmates to talk about prison life. One of them, Holman, had been in Lucasville at the same time as Francis, but he didn’t remember him.
“Now, rape is not considered that bad,” he said, echoing what the Lucasville warden told me. “But back then, it was looked upon as the worst of the worst. On kids especially, but even on grown women. I would say his time was probably quite rough for that type of crime. He would have gotten no respect,
and I’m sure he was preyed upon, just as he preyed upon you.”
I knew Holman was trying to make me feel better, but it didn’t work. I felt hollow. What difference did it make to me if other prisoners hurt David Francis? What was the point of any of it? American prisons and jails hold 2.3 million men and women. Counting various forms of community supervision outside of prison, 1 in 35 Americans was under some form of correctional supervision at the end of 2013, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
They serve their time, most of them keeping their heads down or looking over their shoulders, just trying to make it through the threats and fights and dull routines of daily prison life. And then after a few years we let them out. But to what? What awaited David Francis when he was paroled in 1984? His mother was dying, his father was worthless, he had not finished high school, and he had a rap sheet that ran for pages and pages. What did anyone think he would do when he got out?
I couldn’t stop thinking about the utter waste of that life, and all those lives, and when I visited Mansfield, another of David Francis’s stops on his tour of Ohio’s prisons, I said something to that effect to the warden.
“Don’t feel sympathetic toward him,” the warden said, looking at me with a stern expression. “Lots of people have hard lives, but they don’t rape and murder other people. The guys in here? They deserve to be here.”
Well, that was true, too. If they had not caught him after he raped me, the cops and the judge were sure he would have raped again, and possibly escalated to murder. He deserved to go back to prison.
Still, I kept thinking about what Philip said: “I didn’t ask to be born. It’s not my fault I was born. I still try to figure it out to this day: What did we do wrong to deserve such a tragic life?”
In it I heard an echo of Paradise Lost, when Adam asks God: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man, did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?”