by Kyle Swenson
Wiley looked at this boy. The kid from a block over. The paperboy. One of the neighborhood boys who jokingly called Wiley “Bruce Lee” while they watched him practice martial arts in the yard. Wiley’s frustration had already made the short leap into hatred for everything that was happening to him, all the more so because he could feel the oppressive big-picture machinery clanging underneath it all. But still, Wiley looked at this boy and felt a tiny pang of sympathy. Damn, he thought, they made this little kid so scared.
* * *
At seventeen or eighteen, you’re still a work in progress. Mostly what-ifs and we’ll-sees. A bag of foggy inclinations, unfinished emotional infrastructure. The coming attractions, not the main event. But by twenty-one, you’re you. Ronnie and Rickey were still kids. Wiley was a man.
To the neighborhood Wiley was something of a star, the closest anyone on Arthur could reasonably label “genius.” Wiley was a looker: just under six feet, he was stout but fit from—of all things—martial arts and yoga. When he was suited up in his National Guard dress blues or one of his funky white velour suits, he turned heads. Add his car into the mix, the ’71 white Sebring he was always polishing in the driveway, and it was no surprise that Wiley was a favorite with the ladies.
But the style packaged a sharp mind. Wiley seemed to know about everything. He could tell you how to fix your car’s engine. He could pick up a bass guitar and effortlessly riff a Top 20 groove. He was unbeatable on the chessboard. He was a voracious reader; Ayn Rand and Kahlil Gibran were two of his favorites. The summer he spent working at the Cleveland State University library, he snuck off whenever he could to play the classical collection in a listening booth, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky crashing through the headphones. Wiley’s interests and his intensity really kept him somewhat apart from friends and family. It was like he was plugged into some higher plane of thought.
Bessie Bridgeman picked up early on her second oldest son’s precocious mind, a little boy who never seemed to give up once he was set on something. “It’s a hard road to go, if you really are going to walk it, but you don’t turn around,” she advised him.
The road was usually Wiley’s own, in spite of course corrections from others. His elementary teachers saw he was smart, so he was enrolled in advanced placement classes at a local Catholic school, St. Aloysius. But Wiley didn’t take to the environment—he felt like education came with a heavy helping of religion. Daily Mass wasn’t for him, period. You might get a good education, but you were also force-fed their agenda. The deal wasn’t worth it to Wiley.
This mix of personal resistance and independence found a home in the changing energy of the era. Cleveland’s early disappointing experiences in the 1960s with school desegregation and police violence had shown the limits of nonviolent protests. By the decade’s end, a younger generation was remaking the idea of black identity, retrofitting it from the pavement up. The flip side to the anger of Black Power was self-reliance. Integration was out. Independence was in. This bent into all kinds of shapes, from Afro-cultural organizations to community betterment programs. Wiley hooked up with one group, Cleveland Pride, which was run by a man named Baxter Hill. One of Stokes’s personal connections on the East Side, Hill drilled youngsters in marches and schooled them on community improvement. They would pick up trash out of empty lots. Across the East Side, you’d see telephone poles painted white five feet up from the sidewalk—the better for drunk drivers to avoid, and as high as most of the Cleveland Pride kids could reach. It was all, Wiley thought, about corralling the wayward possibilities of the youth, presenting structure and discipline that could lead to a healthier community.
As he got older, Wiley started spending hours at the East Seventy-ninth and Central Avenue office of the local Black Panther outfit. He was less interested in the group’s in-your-face militancy than the social agenda. Wiley volunteered to cook breakfast with the Panthers for elementary students at a school off Quincy Avenue. He also drove a bus for families visiting inmates at the state prison in Marysville. But Wiley never officially joined the group—to his mind, the message was scrambled in the delivery. How do you expect people to listen to you when you roll up on them with all that heavy militancy shit?
Through his own reading of W. E. B. Du Bois and Richard Wright he was drawn to dialectical materialism, the grand Marxist theory of class struggle and exploitation. Wiley had a knack for boiling intellectual heavy lifting down to terms regular folks could understand. For the Panthers, he led community meetings on the topic. At first, when he started in with the petite bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat, people would roll their eyes at all that foreign talk. “It’s the history of the world,” Wiley would tell them. “You got the people who snub you, the people who play like they don’t snub you, then you got the people that you think are cool with you.”
Structure, codes, philosophies—these were the registers his mind worked in, slots you could organize experience around, categories where he could neatly park all the oppression he’d already run across in his life. By the time he was twenty-one years old, Wiley had felt out the larger political edges of being a black man in America. And when he found himself stuck in a courtroom fighting for his life, the situation wasn’t terrifying and painful because he was confused. It was terrifying and painful because Wiley understood exactly what he was up against.
* * *
The Cuyahoga County Courthouse on Lakeside Avenue was a grand showpiece of civic muscle, ornately self-conscious in its display of power symbols, knowingly synced with national backstory.
Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton both shot stony gazes from colossal plinths on either side of the building’s stone steps. Inside, marble hallways ran around a two-story atrium propped on Corinthian columns. The building went up in 1913, the era when the national imagination idealized the Midwest as the stage for the democratic experiment, and the courthouse wore those aspirations. A second-story mural depicted King John signing the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215. Opposite the atrium, another mural showed the Founding Fathers inking the Constitution in 1787. Quotes from Aristotle were chiseled into the walls. A two-story stained-glass window featuring the figure of Justice—a pale woman topped in a gold crown—colored the landing of a majestic staircase. The architecture signaled history and ideals; it also was a clear reminder to the accused felons walking into the building of the government power massed against them.
The two attorneys assigned to represent Wiley couldn’t have been more different. Jerry Milano was a hard-nosed street lawyer, all jagged edges and bulldog instincts inside a courtroom. It was a style that matched his rise. He had worked his way through law school tending bar and working at a chemical factory. His aggressive tactics earned him a client list that included local Mafia heavies and NFL legend Jim Brown, who turned to Milano when he was charged with assaulting a girlfriend. Milano won the sports hero’s case.2 Daniel McCarthy had also hoisted himself up from his own meager background in Cleveland; now in his fifties, he was a Shaker Heights patrician and father of eight, a former IRS man who mostly handled corporate tax law. Two years before Wiley’s arrest, McCarthy had become a minority owner of the New York Yankees.3
The first consequential witness to testify in Wiley’s trial was Charles Loper, a retiree and rumored alcoholic who lived in a home attached to the western side of the Robinsons’ store. As Loper explained to the courtroom, on the afternoon of the robbery, he’d been sitting on the steps watching his grandson play in the yard facing Fairhill. “I heard some shots,” Loper told the jury. “I heard shots and the man fell and I grabbed my grandson out of the driveway and started running up to the porch, and tried to get in the house.”
Loper, however, claimed he couldn’t identify the attackers. “Only thing I saw was a hand grab his briefcase and run down Petrarca. They had to go down Petrarca ’cause they didn’t go up Fairhill.”
“Did you ever see this boy in the neighborhood?” Milano asked, pointing to the defendant. “Look at him carefully.”
&nb
sp; “No, I haven’t.”
“Did you see him on that day?”
“No, I haven’t.”
Still, Loper’s testimony moved the state’s case forward in a significant way: the old man testified he’d seen Ed Vernon get off at the bus stop a few feet from his lawn and walk toward the store—placing Ed at the scene.
The other main player in the prosecution’s early case was Anna Robinson. Still frail from the bullet that had ripped through her throat, the store owner described for the jury the harrowing details of how she’d heard a scuffle outside and peered through the glass door to witness the attack. “I walked to the door and I saw this tall party standing there. I saw a flowered shirt. I didn’t notice the face,” she said in court. “I looked down the left-hand corner of the glass and I saw Mr. Franks’s body on the ground and someone bending over him, stooping over him real low that had a black coat on and a black cap.”
Robinson explained that she tapped on the door to get the attention of the attackers. That’s when a bullet punched through the glass. “The blood ran all down my arm and everything,” she said. “The blood ran towards the bread rack which was in front of the dairy case. It’s a long dairy case.”
This witness, however, could not place Wiley, the alleged getaway driver, at the scene.
Down the hallway in the courthouse, Rickey Jackson’s trial was going through similar motions. Seated between his two lawyers, Robert Loeb and Joel Garver, Rickey watched as Mrs. Robinson unraveled the same horror story for the jurors—with one key difference. Rickey, the state maintained, was the alleged triggerman who not only killed Franks but maimed Mrs. Robinson. The store owner told the jury she’d known Rickey for almost eighteen years. But she could not identify either of the men scuffling with Franks.4
“I believe you testified that you cannot identify Rickey Jackson?” Garver, the defendant’s attorney, asked Robinson, the lawyer’s hand resting on his client’s shoulder. “You cannot identify Rickey Jackson as either of those two, is that correct?”
“I didn’t see the faces, no.”
Karen Smith, however, testified that she could. The Arthur Avenue neighborhood girl was called to the stand to recount her own experience that day by Rickey’s defense. Smith, who knew both Bridgeman brothers and Rickey Jackson—she had even shared a class with Ronnie in elementary school—was adamant that the two men she saw outside the Cut-Rate weren’t the defendants.
“It was not Ronnie Bridgeman?”
“No.”
“And it was not Rickey Jackson?”
“No.”
“How close did you get to those two people?”
“I had to pass around them,” she answered. “It was close.”
“Are you absolutely positive when you state that the two men who were outside that store as you went in were not Rickey Jackson or Ronnie Bridgeman or Wiley Bridgeman?”
“Yes.”
Smith—the shy girl easily embarrassed by just a look from a stranger—held her ground when the prosecutors tried to insinuate she was just trying to help her friends. They also went after her character. “If you had an opportunity to do Rickey Jackson a favor, do you think you might do it?” the prosecutor, Dominic Del Balso, asked the teen.
“What kind of favor?”
“Any kind,” he said. “You are doing him a favor today, aren’t you?”
“No,” the girl answered, grabbing hold of where Del Balso was going. “Not a favor for him. I am not—I wouldn’t come up here and lie for him.”
“Do you date a lot of guys? Go out with guys a lot?”
“No.”
* * *
Ed Vernon was the prime witness for the state’s cases against each of the three young men—really, the whole case. In each trial, the recently turned thirteen-year-old told a story that laid a straightforward line of facts stringing points A to B to C.
Instead of riding the school bus home on the day of the murder, Ed claimed he’d left his elementary school early, catching a city bus home alone. At the stoplight at Cedar and Fairhill, the boy had recognized Wiley Bridgeman behind the wheel of a green car. The two even waved. Then, Ed claimed, he’d stepped off at the bus shelter on Fairhill, a short walk from the Cut-Rate. From there, he’d seen Rickey and Ronnie attack Franks as he was leaving the store. Ed claimed he’d seen the two run away, reappearing later in the same green coupe he’d just seen Wiley driving, as Harry Franks bled out on the pavement. Ed also explained that when he had been shown Rickey and Wiley in the lineup, he had not picked the suspects out initially because he was afraid. It was only later, after seeing Rickey and Wiley making their phone calls in the police station, that Ed identified the men to police.
But there were issues with the boy’s testimony that first surfaced a week into Wiley’s trial. Milano discovered a piece of evidence that seemed to derail Ed’s testimony: a statement Ed gave police and signed on May 25, the day of the lineup. Milano believed the statement was so explosive that he was worried the state would try to manipulate the witness. “I request of you to advise the prosecutor, Judge, not to talk to this young boy during the lunch hour, please,” Milano dramatically asked before testimony resumed. “Or any detectives, please, sir.”
When court resumed, Milano passed a single-page statement to Ed. “Would you read that first paragraph to the jury, please.”
In a voice wavering like bad FM reception, the boy read from uneven clumps of hastily typed text. “On Monday, May 19, 1975, at about 3:50 P.M., I was getting off the bus at Fairhill and Petrarca. I seen two guys, Rickey and Vincent, they were at the side of the store. They were waiting. A white guy got out of his car and was walking towards the store. When he got up to the guys Vincent threw pop in his face. Then Vincent hit him with a stick. Then Vincent tried to take a briefcase from him. Then Rickey shot him twice.”
Milano waited a beat before diving in. “Now,” the attorney said. “You told us and you told the prosecutor, you told me that you saw Mr. Franks coming out of the store here in court, didn’t you?
“That’s where they made a mistake at,” Ed replied.
“You are telling us the police made a mistake while they were typing it?”
“Yes,” he said. “I told the detectives, too.”
“You are saying that first paragraph was just a figment of their imagination?”
“No, not all of the first paragraph, just those few words.”
“Those few words are that you saw poor Mr. Franks get out of his car, walk up to these two boys and have acid thrown in his face and shot, is that correct, Edward?”
“No, he was coming out of the store,” the boy replied. “They said just go ahead and sign it.”
“You are telling us, then,” Wiley’s attorney drilled in with evident sarcasm, “you told the detectives before you signed your statement, ‘Gentlemen, this isn’t the truth, this isn’t what I said.’ And they said, ‘Oh, go ahead and sign it anyhow.’ Is that what you are telling us?”
“They wouldn’t type it over.”
“They wouldn’t type it over?”
“No,” the boy said. “I told him to type it over and he said he didn’t have time.”
After Ed left the witness stand, Detective John Staimpel was quickly called. No, the detective testified, Ed did not indicate there were any issues with his written statement.
Following the close of the state’s case, Milano moved for the judge to issue an immediate acquittal on the grounds that the prosecution had not proved the charges. “The issue here is have they proven beyond a reasonable doubt that either Wiley Bridgeman did it or aided and abetted in the commission of the crimes,” Milano argued after the jury had been dismissed from the courtroom. “The only evidence on that is what Vernon has told you. Now, can you believe Vernon? The Court may think, ‘Well, let it go to the jury.’ Judge, you know what happens with juries. How many times have lawyers said, ‘Jesus Christ, how in the world did they arrive at this verdict.’” The attorney pressed on about the witne
ss’s credibility. “You have the boy’s testimony, and either he or that policeman is a liar. I won’t change the language, I don’t think it’s too strong.”
“Mr. Milano, the matter of credibility of the witness actually is for the jury in a jury trial,” Judge Bacon replied. “There has been some impairment, I think we’ll admit. There have been some inconsistencies, but then there’s also the question of the boy’s positive testimony. Whether he’s going to be believed or not, why, that is not my function.” Judge Bacon ruled against the defense request. “I believe the jury is going to have to decide this one, Mr. Milano.”
Both Rickey’s and Wiley’s defense teams aimed to upend Ed’s credibility. A parade of the boy’s classmates cycled through both courtrooms, each relaying a variation on the same story. These middle school kids from the neighborhood told the court that Ed had not gone home early on a city bus. He stayed until the end of classes as usual and rode the school bus home with the rest of the kids. The day stood out for the witnesses—they saw the murder. According to at least three children, as the school bus crossed Fairhill down Cedar, the kids glued their eyes to the driver’s-side windows as two black men attacked a white man outside the Cut-Rate. Distance, angle, traffic—none of the children could identify the men, they all claimed. But as the bus passed, the children said they heard pops—gunshots.
Ed was there rubbernecking at the bus window with the rest. “Was Eddie on the bus with you on the way home?” Wiley’s attorney Daniel McCarthy asked a girl named Kim Dickson.
“Yes,” the girl replied. Dickson explained that she, Ed, and another neighborhood kid named Tommy Hall then got off at their usual stop—East 108th and Cedar—and ran up to the Cut-Rate to join the growing crowd.
“Me and Edward went to my house to put my books down and we came back down and went up Frank to the Robinsons’,” Tommy Hall later testified in Rickey’s trial. “We seen the man dead and a detective took his coat off and put it over his face.” Tommy relayed in both Rickey and Wiley’s trials that Ed began to claim to know who the killers were. “We was coming up the street and we said, ‘How did you see it if we didn’t?’”
