I Will Find You, Page 6

  Up ahead, a University Circle patrol car pulls into a lot. DAVE sees it and changes direction, heading east toward the hospital, where two hospital security guards stop him. Within a minute, three University Circle cops converge.

  The wino arrives next, still carrying his bag. He notes that DAVE’s zipper is open.

  I did not know the wino story until I read the trial transcript in 2007.

  The wino testified on the third day of the trial in October of 1984. His name was Larry Donovan, and he was an investigator for the University Circle Police Department, a security force created for and paid by Case Western and all the other institutions in University Circle. I had met him, briefly, outside of court when he came to testify during the trial, but I was sequestered outside the courtroom and didn’t hear his testimony.

  When we met for coffee in 2007, I almost didn’t recognize him. He still had the big Irish smile and ruddy cheeks I remembered, but he was much heavier than he had been back in 1984 and he limped, a state of affairs he blamed on a bum knee. He told me he had gone back to school not long after the arrest to get a degree in engineering while still working as a cop. He worked in computer technology for a while and then went to law school. Now he practices intellectual property law, where a background in engineering is useful.

  I asked him if he remembered the case.

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “That was a big one for us. We were all proud of how it came out.”

  Even then, so many years later, I was pleased to hear that the case was a big one for them, that this cop remembered it. I thought of the cut on my neck. I wanted it to be big, I wanted it to leave a scar, and I was disappointed when it was small and didn’t show. Yet back then, within days I had minimized my rape, insisting that I was fine and denying, even to myself, that I had been wounded in other ways, and that the wound was deep. I made sure no one could accuse me of the grave feminine sins of self-pity and victim-playing. Now that a cop—a man familiar with violence—said it was big, maybe I could admit it to myself.

  “Who came up with the wino disguise?” I asked.

  “That was mine,” he said. “I called it my Belker outfit. Remember the detective on Hill Street Blues, the one who was always undercover and dressed like a bum? That was the look.” He smiled at the memory.

  He was assigned to work undercover when he came on duty on July 10, he said. He changed into the Belker, wrapped a walkie-talkie in a paper bag to look like a bottle, and headed over to the campus. He got to the quad near Eldred at 4:15.

  “I figured I’d be there for hours and come up empty, but I was there less than forty-five minutes when he came strolling by,” he said, laughing. “Right past me. I couldn’t believe it. That thing about criminals always returning to the scene of the crime? That isn’t true—they usually don’t. But there he was. Dressed in the exact same clothes, even. I almost felt guilty, it was so easy to get him.”

  Tuesday, July 10, 1984.

  When they catch him outside the hospital, Donovan knows this is the guy. The messy “DAVE” tattoo on his upper right arm is just as I described. The University Circle cops read him his Miranda rights and search him. In one pocket, they find a screwdriver with a sharpened blade, along with a porn magazine called Black Cherry. In the other, they find the gold cross that had swayed over my face as he raped me, a pack of Kools, and some marijuana.

  “What are you doing on campus?” one of the cops asks.

  “I came over here to jog,” DAVE says.

  They cuff him and take him to the University Circle police station. Donovan reads him his Miranda rights again and tells him he’s been arrested for the rape he committed the day before.

  DAVE says, “I wasn’t even over there yesterday.”

  Donovan asks about the marijuana in his pocket.

  “I’m dying of bone marrow cancer,” DAVE says. “I drink beer and smoke weed for the pain.” Then he remembers he shouldn’t be talking to the cops, and shuts up. He doesn’t ask for a lawyer.

  The Cleveland police, who will handle the case from here on out, pick him up and take him downtown to the county jail for booking.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Do not blurt it out”

  Tuesday, July 10.

  The day after the rape, hours before DAVE returned to the campus, the case was officially transferred to the Cleveland Police Department’s Fifth District, where it landed on the desks of two detectives working the day shift. Both detectives were men; their female partner had the day off.

  The report had no leads: no suspect name, other than a tattooed DAVE; no license plate number; no witnesses but the victim—nothing to help them find the rapist right away. They were busy with several other cases, so they put my case aside.

  The detectives didn’t go over to the crime scene on the Case campus that day, or the next, one of them later testified in court. They didn’t call me or ask me to come in and give a statement. They didn’t talk to the University Circle police. They went home at 3:30 p.m., the end of their shift, without touching my case.

  That night, the University Circle police made the arrest and informed the lead Cleveland detective. He put off calling me, the victim, until the following morning, he testified in court.

  When I read this testimony in 2007, I discovered how insignificant my case was to those detectives. I was not surprised. Anyone paying attention in 2007 was well aware of the failures of the Cleveland Police Department, especially when it came to investigating rape. In later years, thousands of rape kits, containing evidence collected from victims but never sent to the state crime lab for DNA testing, would be found stacked in the evidence room. When they were finally tested, starting in 2011, the results would show that more than two hundred serial rapists roamed the city during the 1990s, attacking women while the police set the cases aside.

  What if the University Circle police had treated my case with the same disinterest the Cleveland police showed? What if they had decided, when the case went over to the Cleveland police, that it was not their problem anymore, so why bother with a stakeout?

  And what if DAVE, never caught, found out I had gone to the cops and decided to follow through on his promise? What if he came to find me?

  Wednesday, July 11, 1984.

  The phone rings. My husband, who is already screening calls to protect me, answers.

  I listen to his side of the conversation, and when I hear him say “officer” I want to grab the phone out of his hands and hear whatever the cop has to say myself. Instead I wait, vibrating, every sense lit up, while he talks and listens. Finally he says, “OK,” and “Thanks,” and hangs up.

  “They got him last night,” he says. “They want us to come in to view a lineup. He went back to the campus, looking for another victim.”

  No, I think. He was looking for me. I picture him in jail, pacing the perimeter of the cell, enraged. The bitch promised she wouldn’t go to the cops! He wishes he had killed me when he could have, when he had the point of his homemade dagger at my throat. He vows again that he will find me, someday.

  When we’d come to The Plain Dealer the year before, I was already slated to be the theater critic and my husband was assigned to news. The first beat they gave him was cops, so he could learn the city. He’s spent several months working out of the grungy Plain Dealer office at police headquarters, known as the cop shop. He knows his way around the place. He knows people there, the right people, the people who can do things for you.

  This will later prove to be as much a bad thing as a good one.

  That day, he drives me to the Fifth District station to meet the two detectives, who look like knockoffs of Dennis Franz in NYPD Blue, from the $3 ties and the shirt buttons pulling open over their guts to the way they wince and look away when I give them the details of the rape.

  I am one of the 1 in 6 women in Cleveland who will report a rape this year. I am one of the 3,734 people who will report a forcible rape in Ohio in 1984. The Cleveland Police Department will not form a se
x-crimes unit and institute procedures to deal with rape victims until the following year.

  They want me to view the lineup. We drive downtown to police headquarters, a brick fortress pocked with windows so narrow they look like sniper posts. The elevator smells like cigars, with a faint scent of urine underneath.

  We wait outside the room while they bring in men from the county jail for my inspection. When they’re in place, the detectives usher me into a small room with a one-way mirror, a row of chairs facing it. The lights behind the glass are off, obscuring the men for now while the lieutenant running the procedure explains that seven men matching my description are standing behind the glass. He will turn on the lights, call each one to step forward, turn to the right, then the left, face forward again, and then step back.

  He notices my agitation. “You can see them, but they can’t see you,” he says. “Don’t worry.” Then he tells me that even if I see the attacker right away, I can’t say anything. I have to wait for each man to come forward. “Do not blurt it out,” he says. “Take your time and look at each man carefully.”

  When he turns on the light, I see DAVE at once. He might as well be standing under a spotlight, or be the only man in the lineup. I know he can’t see me, but I feel him staring at me through the glass. He tilts his head back, just a bit, and sneers at me. For a few seconds I think I might throw up, right there in front of all the policemen, but I force the nausea back down as the lieutenant calls the first man to step out.

  DAVE, second in line, saunters forward when called. He keeps staring at me, a challenge in his expression. The other six men take their turns, but I don’t bother to exam them the way the lieutenant instructed. I do notice that DAVE is the only one with a tattoo on his arm. He’s also the only one with any energy. The other men look spent, like they’ve already used up their youth and are expecting nothing from life anymore. When they have all shown themselves, the detective asks me if I see the man who attacked me.

  “Yes, I do,” I say. “Number Two.”

  “How certain are you?”

  “A hundred percent,” I answer, with a quaver in my voice that must have made him wonder how sure I really was. “That’s him.”

  Outside the lineup room, the detectives tell us that they’re still getting information on him, but that his name is David Francis and that he was just released from prison on parole the week before.

  We head back to the Fifth District station so they can take my statement. One of the detectives moves a pile of papers from a chair, deposits it on top of another pile on the desk, gestures for me to sit down.

  “So tell us what happened,” he says, rolling a report form into an electric typewriter. I tell him the same thing I told the cop who took me to the hospital, and the second cop who came to interview me there.

  He types with his index fingers, concentrating hard, lifting a hand when he wants me to slow down. When I get to the part where I tried to hold the rapist off by telling him I was having my period, he stops typing.

  “Were you?” he whispers, flushing a deep red but keeping his eyes on the keys. His partner, sitting across the desk, pretends he didn’t hear any of it.

  Act by act, I shepherd the detectives through their deep embarrassment about my rape. The lead detective then takes Polaroids of my neck and my hands, which were cut when I tried to push the dagger away, and asks my husband to hold up the back of my shirt so he can photograph what turn out to be my worst injuries: mottled bruises and red, scraped skin across my entire back.

  On Thursday, July 12, three days after the rape, the lead detective goes to Eldred Theater. Though the crime scene was never secured and anyone could have disturbed the evidence, he takes twenty-four photographs and collects samples of the dirty red carpet at the back of the stage. He finds a tag from an item of clothing and a small piece of paper, creased and ripped. On it, someone has scrawled three telephone numbers.

  The detective takes the evidence to headquarters, tags it, and enters it into the property book. Then he goes over to the county jail to see David Francis.

  Twenty-three years later, when I read through the prosecutor’s file, the report he writes will tell me about their conversation.

  The detective first reads Francis his Miranda rights, then asks him about the rape.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Francis tells him. “I didn’t have nothing to do with no rape.”

  The detective tells him the victim identified him.

  “I can’t even have sex,” Francis says. “I have bone cancer. I haven’t had an erection for six months.”

  “Can you climax?” the detective asks.

  “No. I told you, I can’t get hard because of the cancer. The doctors told me I have six months to live. That’s why they let me out of prison early.”

  “What were you doing over on the Case campus?”

  “I was jogging.”

  Francis is still in his street clothes. The detective gives him some jail clothes and takes his black pants, the black nylon shirt, the undershorts, a pair of black socks, and a pair of blue-and-white tennis shoes, which he submits to the department’s forensic lab to be tested for carpet fiber.

  Two days later, on Saturday, July 14, the detective calls the only local number on the piece of paper he found on the stage. A man answers, and when the detective asks, “Who is this?” he answers, “Ed.”

  “Is David Francis there?” the cop asked.

  “No,” Ed answers.

  “Do you know David Francis?”

  “Call back later,” Ed says, and hangs up.

  Later on in the day, the detective asks his female partner to call the number, hoping a less threatening voice might get more information.

  Earlie B. Giles answers the phone.

  “Do you know David Francis?” the partner asks.

  “Yeah, I know him,” Giles says. “I’m his mother’s man.”

  “What is his mother’s name?”

  “Matia Rodriques.”

  “Do you know where David Francis is?” the partner asks.

  “We heard he was down at the Justice Center, arrested for a rape or something,” Giles says.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “He seized her tongue”

  When we get home from police headquarters, I know it’s time to tell my mother and sisters. Past time. I have invented reasons not to do it, but the reasons no longer apply. I sit on our bed and pick up the phone. I put it down. I do this over and over, unable to call my mother. I want to protect her from this news. I worry that she won’t be able to bear it, hearing what has happened to me, her middle daughter. I worry that she will cry or scream, and that I won’t be able to bear that.

  “I was raped.” Why is it so hard to say these three words? They are simple, declarative. But I can’t do it. The words will always burn in my throat.

  It would have helped to know, back then, that this is how almost all rape victims feel. It would have helped to know that we shared a silence as ancient as the Greek myth of Philomela, who was raped by her brother-in-law Tereus. When it was over, Philomela, a virgin, vowed she would tell everyone what he had done, then changed her mind and begged Tereus to kill her.

  As Ovid told the story in Metamorphosis:

  But Tereus did not kill her; he seized her tongue

  With pincers, though it cried against the outrage,

  Babbled and made a sound something like “Father,”

  Till the sword cut if off. The mangled root

  Quivered, the severed tongue along the ground

  Lay quivering, making a little murmur,

  Jerking and twitching, the way a serpent does

  Run over by a wheel, and with its dying movement

  Came to its mistress’ feet….

  I didn’t know the myth before I was raped, but I had read Philomela’s story without realizing it. It has inspired countless variations. Shakespeare revived it in his bloodiest, most savage play, Titus Andronicus, with the gang rap
e and mutilation of Lavinia. T. S. Eliot devotes a stanza to it in The Waste Land. In The World According to Garp, John Irving created the Ellen James Society, a group of women who voluntarily cut out their own tongues in solidarity with the eleven-year-old Ellen James, who was raped and then mutilated into silence.

  In the myth, Tereus holds Philomela hostage in a house in the forest and tells her sister, Procne—his wife—that she is dead. The myth ends with the muted Philomela figuring out how to break her silence: She weaves her story into a tapestry and sends it by secret messenger to Procne. When Procne sees what her husband has done, she rescues Philomela and then proceeds to lose her mind. She kills their son, cuts him up, cooks him, and serves him to Tereus. When the meal is finished, she tells her husband what—or rather, who—he has just eaten.

  With this revelation, Tereus goes mad and tries to kill both Procne and Philomela, but the gods intervene and change them into birds. Procne becomes a swallow and Philomela becomes a nightingale. The sisters fly off together.

  I find refuge in my sister, too. After deciding I can’t call my mother, I call Nancy, the person I followed and adored and copied from the time I could toddle after her, calling, “Wait for me,” through our years at the University of Minnesota, which I chose because she was going there. Nancy and our little sister, Claire, are both living in New York, Nancy in Brooklyn and Claire on the Lower East Side.

  When Nancy answers the phone, I open with a warning. “I have something bad to tell you,” I say.

  I don’t say, “Are you sitting down?” but even so I feel as though I’m following a script. I’m observing myself again, detached from what I’m doing, speaking with a calm that Nancy will always remember. She waits for me to tell her something has happened to our mother. I say the three words. “I was raped.”