Tuesday, July 10, 1984.
The next day, DAVE does something no one can quite believe.
He returns to the scene of the crime. Not only that, he returns at the same time of day, wearing the same clothes. He must have believed me when I said I wouldn’t go to the cops. Maybe he even thought I’d come back.
At 4:53 p.m., he saunters into the quad near Eldred Theater, walking north, past a wino sitting on a bench with his bottle in a paper bag. He passes a small waterfall sculpture. The wino watches him, but DAVE doesn’t notice. He stops at a bench, sits down. Across the quad, the wino takes a drink. After a minute or two, DAVE gets up and walks west, toward Severance Hall. The wino follows him from a distance. He lifts his paper bag to his mouth again.
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.”
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.