In the days before he found me, breathless and late for an appointment, David Francis had tried to make someone else his victim: his baby sister, Laura.
I put the pieces together as she told me about the last time she saw him, my adrenaline flooding as her memory took her closer and closer to July 9, 1984.
“Last time I seen him I had just had my first child,” Laura said. “I was about nineteen. He had just got out of prison and he had been out about a month. The only time he came around and called, he called himself a pimp. He wanted me to meet him downtown, in a hotel. He had these guys down there, they was Mafia, he said, and he was going to turn me out and I was going to make money for him. And [he said] if I didn’t do what he said, that he was going to kill me. And I could tell he was serious—he wasn’t talking to me like a brother talks to a sister. And I told my mother, and the next time he called her she said to leave me alone or she would have him locked up again.”
“Do you remember when that was?” I asked.
“It was right before my mother died. About 1984.”
“Nineteen eighty-four. You’re sure?”
“Yeah. She was still up here in Cleveland at the time, before my sisters took her back to Boston.”
“Laura, that had to be in July, when he raped me. But he couldn’t have been out of prison for that long. He was only out of prison for a week, and then they caught him the day after he raped me and he was back in jail. So he called you right before he found me. Then your mother died in August.”
“They brought him in shackles to my mother’s funeral,” she said.
“I don’t think so. He was here, in Cleveland, in the county jail. I think I would have heard if they let him go to Boston. Though actually, I’ve found out they didn’t tell me everything, so he might have been there.”
One of the things they didn’t tell me was that they discovered a weapon on him in the county jail.
“It must have been Philip then,” she said. “Yeah, it was Philip. They brought him with chains on his legs and arms, and three guards. That was the last time I saw my father, at my mother’s funeral. It was awful. The city had to bury her because we didn’t have the money. My father came, and sat right in the family row, right in front of my mother’s casket. The exact words out of his mouth were, ‘The bitch got what she deserved.’ I told him, ‘When you die, I’m coming to your grave long enough to spit on it.’ And I never saw him again.”
I was far more riveted by the way our orbits aligned back in 1984 than Laura was. She escaped her brother; I didn’t. It made me wonder about David Francis’s other victims. The cops had told me that rapists tend to be serial criminals, escalating the violence with each rape. They were speaking from anecdotal stories and their own observations, but the recent results of rape kit testing and research back them up.
In 2002, David Lisak of the University of Massachusetts and Paul M. Miller of Brown University School of Medicine reported: “Studies that use long follow-up periods tend to show alarming rates of sexual reoffending among rapists … (and) several studies have shown that among incarcerated rapists the actual number of sexual crimes committed far exceeds the number of adjudicated charges against these men.”
Who else did David Francis rape or assault? I went back to see if I missed something in the criminal files from the prosecutor’s office.
When he was seventeen, David Francis was arrested in Boston and charged with “unnatural acts.” But because he was a juvenile, with more privacy protections under the law than adults, I could not get any more information on it from Massachusetts. Nor could I get information on another charge, made a week before the unnatural acts, for “assault in the 2nd degree” in West Hartford, Connecticut.
He was no longer a juvenile when he followed his mother to Cleveland in 1976 or 1977. He was twenty-one when his arrests in Cleveland started, nonviolent crimes that came one after the other. He would draw some jail time, get out, and do it again. Like his brother Philip, he changed his identity with nearly every arrest.
When he was arrested for receiving stolen property, he was Dalin Allen. When he was arrested for aggravated burglary, robbery, and carrying a concealed weapon, he was Daniel Allen. When he was arrested for breaking and entering, he was Tony Wayne. And he was Kevin Brown when he was arrested in Cleveland on January 22, 1978, for aggravated robbery, aggravated burglary, carrying a concealed weapon … and kidnapping.
I had missed the kidnapping charge the other times I looked at his records. As David Francis, he had limited his crimes to stealing cars and breaking into buildings. Except for the assault and unnatural acts charges when he was a juvenile in Boston, the kidnapping was his first crime against a person—at least, the only one I could find. What had he done to draw that charge?
I learned about the aliases in the file the prosecutor’s office gave me, but in all of that, I could find nothing more about the kidnapping charge. There was no trial transcript, because he pleaded guilty. The police department couldn’t find the thirty-year-old arrest report.
What exactly did Kevin Brown do? I decided to go back to see Russell Harrison, Ida Taylor’s son, the one who said he couldn’t remember David Francis on my first visit. Maybe his memory was bad, but records showed that the two had been arrested together in the fall of 1977 for a crime that carried more than a tinge of irony.
On the evening of October 11, 1977, the two broke into the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Society, founded and run by Icabod Flewellen.
Flewellen worked as a janitor at Case Western Reserve University, where he earned a BA in history at the age of seventy-six. Long before that, however, he began amassing a collection of items reflecting his life’s passion, African-American history. He was single-minded but wildly indiscriminate, collecting valuable African art and significant historic artifacts and displaying them alongside unremarkable household memorabilia he gathered going door to door in Hough. His house looked like a hoarder’s warehouse, the story goes, but he called it a museum and opened its doors in 1953. Though he moved it to several other locations over the years, he never quite achieved his dream of establishing an important cultural institution for the study of black history. Money to pay staff and fix leaky roofs was a constant problem, as was his habit of conducting one-sided feuds with his supporters.
He reported the break-in to the police, whose report does not show what, if anything, Russell Harrison and David Francis stole. I was disappointed to find that the report also did not record what Flewellen had to say about two young African-American men breaking into a museum dedicated to their own history.
I decided to see if Harrison’s memory had improved since the first time I’d met him.
In the months in between, I had gone to see Ida in the hospital following her knee surgery, hoping she could tell me a little more about David Francis. She couldn’t, but I stayed awhile to talk and she remembered my visit when I called to set up another meeting.
Lisa, who was not yet working with me the first time I went, came with me. Ida led us into the dining room. Russell was there, and so was Gregory, the brother I met on the first visit. They sat at the table with another son and a daughter, watching The Twilight Zone on a very large TV.
Ida sat at the head of the table, next to her daughter, who told us she was Gloria. The other son never spoke. They kept the TV on while we talked, adding a sci-fi sound track to the proceedings.
I asked them how long they had lived in this house.
“Oh, they call me the ‘Queen of the Street,’ I’ve lived here so long,” Ida said. “We moved here in 1969. I’ve lived here longer than anyone else.”
“This was a live street, back in the day,” Gloria said.
“Yeah, them were the good old days,” Russell said. “Partying, partying, partying.”
“Everybody else is gone now,” Ida said. “They died, they moved. More died than moved.”
I asked if anyone else in the family had nicknames like Queen of the Street.
“We call her Big Momma, too,” Russell said. “I’m the Godfather. If you want to write a book about me, you’d have to call it ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still.’”
Everyone laughed. I didn’t get it.
“I’m Mae West,” Gloria said. “And Gregory there is Hubba Bubba.”
Now I wondered if they were putting me on.
A young woman came in, gave Ida some cash, kissed her on the cheek, and sat down. “My granddaughter,” Ida said with pride. The money must have been lottery winnings, because this set off a conversation that I recorded in my notebook only as “long discussion of lottery.”
When they finished, I asked if they had remembered any more about David Francis since my first time there. I was saving what I knew about the 1977 arrest for later, if I needed it, but Russell surprised me.
Right off, he said, “Yeah, we ran together.”
“Yeah, I saw that you were arrested together in 1977,” I said.
He nodded and shrugged. “I wouldn’t have a lot negative to say about him.”
He flashed a smile at Lisa, who was standing in a corner with her camera. “Aren’t you going to take my picture?” He managed to turn the question into a pickup line.
“Not yet,” Lisa answered.
Russell looked back at me. “He used to be my protégé at the time.”
Ida broke in to say that she hadn’t remembered much about David when I first asked, but after I left she remembered more. “He was in and out of the house ’cause his mother lived here,” Ida said. “His mom stayed here, he stayed here, Laura stayed here….” She gazed off into the distance.
“So, was he your protégé in crime?” I asked Russell.
“Yeah,” he said. “He was my protégé in crime—and the ladies.” He winked at Lisa. His brothers laughed.
“What else did you do together?” I asked.
“I can give you information about myself, but I’ll sell my story because my life is worth something,” he said.
Then he looked at Lisa again and smiled. “But I can tell you that even when I was bad, I was good,” he said, drawing out the last word so it came out “gooooooood.” Now everyone laughed.
“See, I saw David as a diamond in the rough,” he said. “I was basically schooling him. I went to prison for one robbery we did, and I didn’t tell on him. I took the fall for it.” He sat up straighter. “I was locked up for several years.”
“Back in the day they was different than where they are now,” Ida said, looking around at her sons. Gloria patted her mother on the arm and smiled. “You love your boys no matter what,” she said.
“I was in Lima, I was in Mansfield,” Russell said, ticking off Ohio prisons. “I been to a number of them. Last time I got out of the penitentiary, I said, ‘I need a vet.’”
“A vet?”
“Yeah, you know, a veteran. An older woman who would take care of me,” he said. “I had one once. She was a preacher.”
He winked again at Lisa.
“Did you know David went to prison for rape?” I asked.
“No,” Russell said, his tone neutral. “Last time I got out, I never saw him again.”
“Are you surprised he was convicted of a rape?”
“Nope,” he said. “In the process of doing this one robbery, there was a young girl, and next thing I know he’s in the bedroom with her. In the bed. I said, ‘C’mon now,’ and he said ‘No.’ I had to get him out of there. So I knew it was inevitable.”
“Yeah. See, he might have had to rape, but I was an ex-player. Real good with the women. For me it was like apples in an orchard: I just reached up and plucked them off the tree.”
He looked over at Lisa once more.
“It’s just that I was charming, as you can well see.”
“How long were you in prison?”
“Several years,” he said. “See, I don’t mind telling you I was in a penitentiary. A lot of people try to forget their past, but I think that’s a mistake. ’Cause if you forget where you came from, you could go down that same path again.”
His brothers and sister nodded in agreement. Russell repeated that I’d have to pay him to talk more. I closed my notebook. Lisa hadn’t taken any photos yet, but she started to pack up her bag.
“You should come to my church,” Russell said while I waited. He gave me the address. “I’m usually there, but if I’m not, just tell them Reverend Harrison sent you.”
In the car, I said to Lisa, “Jesus, I thought he was going to ask you to go upstairs with him.”
Lisa laughed. “Did you see the hands on that guy dressed as a woman?”
“What?”
“Gloria,” she said. “That was a guy.”
How could I have not seen that? I was focusing on Russell, but still. I was embarrassed I had missed something that was so obvious to Lisa. Gloria was the one who said she was called Mae West. All through the conversation, she sat close to Ida, patting her arm. I’d thought, That’s a good daughter, and turned my attention to the wayward son.
“Her whole family accepts her,” I said. “Wow. That’s great—it’s no big deal to them.”
“I know,” Lisa said. “Amazing.”
When I looked Gloria up in the county’s criminal database, I found something interesting. In both 1986 and 2004, when she was arrested for theft and, later, drug possession, the records identified her as male. But in 1986, the court sentenced her for the theft to the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville.
I found it hard to believe the Ohio corrections system was that tolerant and forward-thinking in 1986, or even today, for that matter. It’s possible Gloria had gotten sexual reassignment surgery, but I doubted it, given the expense. Later, Laura told me they might have sent her to Marysville before they realized she was a man, at least anatomically.
The next day I went to the Justice Center to see if I could find in the police department’s records what Russell Harrison had been hiding. I left with copies of decades-old microfilmed documents from his police files. They were dark and blurred, as though they had been printed in disappearing ink. It took me hours to read it all, not just because of the dark copies but because my hands were shaking as I read.
The reverend had a lot to hide.
At lunchtime on Monday, August 29, 1977, the Reverend Thomas Gallagher answered the door to the rectory of St. Philip Neri Church on St. Clair Avenue in Cleveland, where he was the priest. A young man stood in front of him. Gallagher thought he recognized him, maybe from his old church, St. Agatha on St. Clair and East 109th Street.
The young man asked the priest a couple of questions about church youth programs, then asked, “Can I use your bathroom?”
Gallagher hesitated. Did he really recognize this young man? Maybe he shouldn’t let him in. But Gallagher ignored his instincts. He had worked in the inner city for years, it was his calling, and it did not feel right to suspect the young man. He let him in and pointed to the bathroom.
A minute later, the man came out of the bathroom holding a .38-caliber blue steel revolver. “I have a present for you,” he said, pointing the gun at the priest’s head. The man was David Francis.
Francis opened the rectory door and let in a slightly older man. Russell Harrison.
“Where is your housekeeper?” Francis asked.
The rectory had no housekeeper. Julie Casey was in the kitchen, making hot dogs for lunch. Julie was a volunteer, and only fifteen years old. It was her last day of summer vacation. Gallagher called to her, and when she came into the room and saw the two men and the gun, Gallagher was surprised by her reaction. She didn’t seem to be afraid; she was angry.
“This is the third time I’ve been robbed this month,” she said.
Francis turned to Gallagher. “You have three minutes to show me where all the money is.”
Gallagher took them upstairs to his bedroom safe. Harrison stayed with him. Francis took the girl into another bedroom. After a few minutes, Harrison went to find them and discovered Francis holding the girl down on the bed. She was crying. Harrison ordered him back to the priest’s room. “And bring the girl,” he said.
As Gallagher opened the lock, Francis stepped behind him and cocked the gun at his head with a loud click. Gallagher would remember the sound of that click more than thirty years later, as clearly as he heard it that day. He took it as a warning: Don’t try pulling a gun out of the safe.
Harrison heard the click, too. “Don’t shoot the minister unless you have to,” he said.
When the safe was open, the men made Gallagher and the girl lie facedown on the floor and bound their hands and feet. Then they took Gallagher’s briefcase and filled it with the cash in the safe: $1,201 that had been collected at a bingo game and raffle the night before.
Harrison went through the priest’s pockets, then the girl’s, taking their cash. He took the watches off their wrists, a turquoise ring from Julie, and a gold pocket watch from the priest’s dresser—a railroad watch inscribed “A.G.”
They pulled the priest and the girl to their feet and ordered them into the closet. The priest remembered that with their ankles bound, they had to hop in. The men barricaded the closet with a dresser and some chairs and left. Later, two nuns said they saw them walk out of the rectory as though they belonged there. The priest waited a while after he heard them leave before he pushed out of the closet, cut his and Julie’s hands free with scissors, and called the police.
Four and a half months after the robbery, the case was unsolved and Russell Harrison and David Francis were still free. Records don’t show where Francis was, but Harrison was living on the east side of Cleveland with his new girlfriend, a woman he’d known for seven months.
The blurred microfilm copies of the police reports told the story of her two-year-old daughter, Jasmine.
On January 16, 1978, Jasmine wouldn’t eat her dinner. Russell ordered her to eat, and when she wouldn’t mind him, he slapped the toddler’s forehead, making her fall back and hit her head. Jasmine’s mother told the police that after this she went into the kitchen and said, “Jasmine, eat your food so your daddy won’t get mad at you,” which got her daughter to eat.
“He came in, and seen that she was eating her food for me,” the girlfriend said, which made him even angrier. “And that’s when he tied her up with a clothesline rope, and he picked her up and shook her and he said, ‘Damn it, girl, you’re going to mind me!’ if he had to whip her butt every time she turned around.”
This was at 7 in the evening, Jasmine’s mother said.
The next morning, Jasmine lay unresponsive on the floor of her bedroom, which police later found empty of everything but a few pieces of her clothing, a potty-training chair, and a suede belt, which one of Jasmine’s aunts told them Harrison used to tie the child to the potty. At the hospital, the emergency crew reported that he said, “If she lives, I promise I will never beat her again.”
She did not live. In the five months that Russell Harrison had lived with his girlfriend, Jasmine, and her brother, “He whipped her about ten or eleven times,” the girlfriend told police. “She would always make him mad, but he said that he liked the child.”
In the dining room, the police found a gun and a splintered wooden paddle.
And in the closet in the room where Russell Harrison slept, they found items that had been reported stolen in August, six months earlier: a Timex watch with a gold band and a blue face, and a gold Illinois Central pocket watch inscribed “A.G.”
Four months later, when Russell Harrison was in county jail for the murder of Jasmine, the police asked him about the gold pocket watch and the Timex they’d found in his closet.
Apparently, Harrison did not take the fall for David Francis, as he’d claimed. Five days later, police tracked Francis down. When they arrested him, he gave them an alias, Kevin Brown, and so it remains, to this day, in the county criminal database. He pleaded guilty to all the counts but kidnapping, went to prison, and was paroled. When that was is not clear in the records, but in 1982, he was back in prison for violating that parole. The next time he was paroled was in July of 1984.
When the prosecutor compiled the criminal record for David Francis’s file, preparing to try him for my rape, the report on the robbery and kidnapping at the church rectory was not there. It was still in the record for “Kevin Brown,” though that record does note that Brown sometimes used the alias Daniel Allen.
Harrison pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter for the death of Jasmine, and guilty to aggravated robbery for holding up Father Gallagher. He was sentenced to seven to twenty-five years on each count, to run consecutively. I could not find records of his release date, but I was stunned to see that he served less time for murdering a child than Francis did for raping me. Harrison was out by 1995, when he was arrested for drug abuse with violence specifications. On that charge, the court offered probation, with several requirements for drug rehabilitation. When he tested positive for cocaine in 1998, he was sent to prison. He was out again in 2000.
Father Thomas Gallagher, seventy-seven years old and retired, was worried when I told him that one of the men who tied him up back in 1977 was still alive and out of prison.
“When all this happened, I was thinking they might come after me because I was a witness,” he said. Before we talked, he said, he needed to ask me: “If I say anything now, will he come after me?”
We were having coffee in the food court of Summit Mall, near Gallagher’s retirement home in Akron. It was January of 2008. On the phone, Gallagher had told me to look for the “short Irish guy in the collar.” I would have known him anyway, from the photo that ran with the story in The Plain Dealer the day after the robbery.
Father Gallagher told me he stayed on at St. Philip Neri after the robbery, leaving in 1990 only because he was reassigned to the Veterans Affairs hospitals in Cleveland. He retired in 2000 at the age of seventy, having spent more than twenty-five years ministering to the poor in inner-city parishes.
“Even before I was a priest, I felt strongly about interracial justice,” he said. “I just happened to be ordained at the right time, when John the 23rd was pope. I was ordained in 1961, and Vatican II was right after that. It was a time when a lot of us in the Church were really fired up about integration and social justice. Changes were just starting to come.”
When he was a seminarian he took urban studies courses at Case Western, and later he entered a four-year program created to teach clergy of all faiths how to organize for social changes in their communities.
“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.