by Kyle Swenson
“And what did he say?” a defense attorney asked.
“He stopped playing,” Tommy answered, “and said, ‘I have got X-ray eyes.’”
* * *
Wiley’s feelings were sharp to the times—all that thinking and reading had arranged the world in a way so he could see the racism, the victimization, the atrocities. But now he was experiencing it himself. Rickey and Ronnie might have felt their plight as a stand-alone nightmare. Wiley saw his situation connected to something larger. Worse, he felt the conclusion was preordained. It’s dialectical materialism all over again, like he explained to the bewildered audience at the Panther meetings. I know exactly what is happening, he’d tell himself. I just can’t do anything about it; I can’t explain it. It was all piling up at the front of his brain—lineups and Ed Vernon, petite bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat, the racism, the victimization. And Wiley knew the stakes here were life and death.
At the time, Ohio’s death penalty law was less a responsible piece of legislation guiding the state’s ultimate act than a slingshot indiscriminately hurling felons at the electric chair.
Ohio had been wielding the death penalty since before it was an actual state. But in 1972, the law was scrubbed from the books thanks to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that invalidated statutes across the country on the grounds of arbitrary sentencing. Undaunted, the Ohio Legislature simply rewrote the law in 1974, retrofitting it with new language patching over the weak spots; this new statute had three mitigating circumstances that judges could refer to when declining to impose a death sentence for an aggravated murder case: if the victim caused the murder; if the offender was under duress; or if the murder was the result of the offender’s psychosis or mental deficiency. But those three outs were not there for leniency. By narrowly defining the exemptions to capital punishment, the state ensured nearly all defendants in murder cases were headed for death row—including Rickey, Wiley, and Ronnie.
On August 12 Wiley stood in the courtroom for the jury’s ruling: guilty. As he was led from the chamber, the older Bridgeman brother stumbled, calling for his attorney. “I’m on your side,” Milano told him. “I don’t think you did it. I don’t think anybody in the courtroom thought you did it, except the jury.”5
Within the week, Rickey’s jury delivered the same verdict.
* * *
Six weeks after juries delivered guilty verdicts against Rickey and Wiley, Ronnie’s own trial started in the same courthouse.
On paper, the delay could have given Ronnie an edge. In the two earlier trials, defense attorneys could only zero in on the inconsistencies between Ed’s testimony and the typed statement to police introduced by Milano; Ronnie’s legal team had more material to work with: they could fish for errors and mistakes in both of Ed’s trial testimonies as well, giving the attorneys more possible ammunition to impeach the witness.
That job fell to one of the loudest personalities in the courthouse. Through the random assignment system, Thomas Shaughnessy was placed on Ronnie’s case. A hulking Irishman capped with a swirl of light hair, Shaughnessy was a workhorse who took more cases to trial every year than whole divisions within the prosecutor’s office. Based out of a cluttered office on a dicey stretch of Buckeye Avenue in Cleveland’s black East Side, a .38 in the drawer and a shotgun under the desk for protection, the attorney liked to boast that he was the Woolworth’s of Cleveland’s legal world: “Nobody can touch our low fees and high volume.”6
He was less renowned for trial prep or legal smarts than courtroom showmanship; his cross-examinations were pure working-class vaudeville pitched to Cleveland juries, equal parts blood sport and stand-up—but always entertaining. These performances were well lubricated by the lunch hours Shaughnessy openly spent hefting beers in the bar. “He’ll say, if I don’t blow a .14 or .15 after lunch, I’m useless for the afternoon,” a friend recounted Shaughnessy once boasting to a jury.
As Ronnie’s trial started, Shaughnessy made it clear out of the gate that he was preparing to swing a wrecking ball at Ed. He opened his cross-examination with a series of seemingly innocuous questions. The attorney pointed out that the boy had told the court his school was located on East 116th Street. “Actually it is on East Boulevard, isn’t it?” Shaughnessy asked.7
“Yes.”
“About a half mile from 116th, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And you told the ladies and gentlemen before that Audubon was on 116th and you just made a simple mistake, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And you weren’t intending to deceive them or you weren’t lying, you made a simple, honest mistake?”
“Yes.”
“About a half a mile mistake, didn’t you?” Shaughnessy managed to get in before the prosecutor, Charles Mathay, cut in with an objection.
Not long after, the attorney reminded Ed that he had testified he received straight As in all his classes. “And your mathematics class, Edward, did you ever have any discussion or training relative to inches, feet, yards, rods, miles, and centimeters?”
“Yes.”
“Well, how many inches are there in a foot?”
“In a foot?”
“Yes.”
“Six.”
“Six inches in a foot and you got an A in mathematics?” Shaughnessy said.
“Yes.”
Later, as the attorney was pointing to a map of the crime scene, Shaughnessy again used it as an opportunity to embarrass the thirteen-year-old.
“Incidentally,” he asked Ed. “How do you spell ‘Cedar’?”
“S … e … a … r … d.”
“How do you spell Fairhill?
“F … r … i … r … h … i … l … l.”
“All right,” Judge Angelotta cut in. “Let’s cease and desist. I think it is obvious, Mr. Shaughnessy, what you are trying to show.”
Shaughnessy’s clinical dissection of the witness’s testimony picked at the smallest of statements. First the attorney noted that Ed had testified in the current trial that he had seen Mr. Loper on the day of the murder. In the August trials, however, Ed had told the court he had not looked at Mr. Loper’s house and didn’t see the old man. “But Edward,” the lawyer said, “that’s exactly the opposite of the answer that you gave us today, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Well now, tell the ladies and gentlemen here, if you will, Eddie, did you wave to your old pal Mr. Loper or didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did.”
“You did. So on the seventh day of August, Thursday, 1975, you made another mistake, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you make a mistake, Eddie, or did you tell a lie?”
“Objection,” the prosecutor cut in.
“I…” Ed said, stumbling for words. “I made a mistake.”
The defense attorney continued in attack-dog mode. He challenged Ed on the previous testimony in the other trials: that after the murder, Ed had seen Rickey and Bitzie at the store in the crowd of onlookers. “Yet Eddie, once again you have told us here today that it wasn’t Rickey that was there at the time,” the attorney said. “It was Buddy, and you have said that ten times.”
Shaughnessy also went after Ed’s original police statement. In the document, the witness had said he saw Wiley driving a car with Rickey and Bitzie. But in Ronnie’s trial, the boy said he couldn’t see the faces of the passengers in Wiley’s car. The attorney also blasted the boy for saying in his typed statement “Vincent” was the second attacker, not Ronnie. Ed continued to deny the substance of the statement. “Is your memory, young man, better today than it was six days after this incident on May the twenty-fifth?”
“Today.”
“Tell us, if you will, Edward, what has happened or who have you talked to or what reports have you read that would cause your memory to be sharper today than it was five or six days after this incident happened?”
“Nothing.”
By the time the defense attorney
was done with the state’s main witness, even the judge was shaky on Ed’s credibility. “If this is an example of someone who gets straight As in the Cleveland School System, the Cleveland School System is a disgrace,” Angelotta grumbled to the lawyers after the jury had been dismissed for the day. “It is quite obvious that this boy says things that are untrue,” the judge continued. “There are many areas of discrepancy in this testimony for whatever reason. That doesn’t make him a liar. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t see what he said he saw.”
Angelotta continued to ruminate before the attorneys, with the stenographer snapping down his thoughts into the transcript. “I frankly don’t know what to think,” he said. “And I am not going to substitute my judgment for what these twelve people think.”
The rest of Ronnie’s defense cut a similar path as in the previous trials. Karen Smith again reiterated that the men she saw outside the Cut-Rate were not Rickey or Ronnie. A number of Ed’s classmates repeated that he’d been on the school bus, not on the sidewalk, when the bullets started flying. Ronnie himself took the witness stand to deny the allegations.
But from his seat at the defense table, concerns were marching to the front of Ronnie’s mind. His confidence in his legal counsel shrank as the trial progressed. He could smell the booze coming off Shaughnessy. The lawyer’s face seemed to get redder as the day wore on. Ronnie would later say he watched his attorney nod off during portions of the trial. And despite Shaughnessy’s assurances, Ronnie couldn’t escape the fear that the verdicts in Rickey’s and Wiley’s trials had sealed up his own.
His attorney also seemed to second-guess his own work, especially the hard press on Ed. The cross-examination threatened to leave the impression on a jury not of a cunning lawyer torpedoing a lying witness, but a grown man mocking and steamrolling a scared little boy. In a rambling, disjointed closing statement to the jury, Shaughnessy admitted as much. “I made a few mistakes,” he told the jury. “I am sure I am going to be castigated as a beater of children or something like that because I devastated that boy on the witness stand.”
In the end, that was what mattered: Ed. If you believed the boy or not. If you believed the boy, the state’s witness, the nebbish paperboy with thick glasses; or if you accepted the credibility of the three young men who had trouble articulating why they were innocent because they all still had trouble understanding why they were there at all. The choice before the jury was one of belief—Ed or Ronnie?
On September 27, Ronnie was found guilty.8 Shortly after Christmas, all three young men were sentenced to death by electrocution.
5
WE YET EXIST
Lucasville, Ohio, 1977
The severed pinkie fingers were addressed to the president of the United States. How far the packages made it into Jimmy Carter’s White House bureaucracy, no one was ever able to figure. But the four mutilated digits came with a clear return address: J Block, the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, Lucasville, Ohio.
The state’s newest high-security facility was located at its very bottom, a straight two-hundred-mile drop south from the Lake Erie shoreline. The town itself was little more than a rural pinprick with fewer than fifteen hundred residents in Scioto County, a sparse section of Ohio that pulls its cultural DNA less from the Midwest than from Appalachia. Hills crowded with trees and hung with scraps of mist in the morning cupped the thirty-two-million-dollar facility on all sides. The prison sat on sixty-nine acres boxed in by an octagon of parallel twelve-foot-high cyclone fences curling at the top with barbed wire. Long hallways ran the length of the complex, hospital-like runways soaked in overhead fluorescence, the polished floors squeaking underfoot. Three main residential blocks branched off the corridors—L, K, and J Blocks. Forty units ran on each cell range, twenty above, twenty below.
It was a modern design packaging medieval conditions. After the doors opened in 1972, the facility quickly earned a reputation as one of the fiercest lockups in the country.
Lucasville—officially known as SOCF, but everyone just called it Lucasville, or “The Luke”—was designed to replace the old Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus, a castlelike Gothic pile of stone built in the 1830s. In 1968, the hard-core lifers and cons, Ohio’s worst, rioted inside the limestone walls over conditions like overcrowding, vermin, and lack of water. Guards were taken hostage. The National Guard broke the standoff after twenty-eight hours. Five inmates were killed in the incident. These same men who had torn up the OP were the first to fill the bunks at Lucasville.
The new prison’s ribbon cutting was coincidentally timed to an eye-popping jump in the state’s prison population: in 1974, Ohio’s facilities held 7,700 people; by 1976, the number was more than twelve thousand. These were the early boom years of Nixon’s accelerated federal crime policies. Although Lucasville was designed to bed around sixteen hundred inmates in individual cells, by the middle of the decade the prison was housing two thousand, many double bunked. Within a year of opening, three guards were taken hostage; one was killed in a rescue attempt. In 1976, members of a finance subcommittee from the Ohio General Assembly investigated allegations of abuse and mismanagement at the facility.1 Their report concluded that “serious and volatile problems exist” at Lucasville, and that there were “clear danger signals that the penal system is overburdened beyond present capabilities.” The elected officials focused on the vicious tensions flowing between the prisoners, many black and from urban areas like Cleveland or Cincinnati, and the guards, drawn from the white and rural local population. “There is substantial evidence that a disturbingly high number of violent physical acts are committed within SOCF walls, by and against inmates, resulting in further tensions and fears among the inmates, guards and the community,” the report concluded. Between May 1975 and June 1976, state investigators counted three murders, four suicides, thirty-six cuttings, four serious assaults, ten minor assaults, forty-two fights, and two employee stabbings.
Even though the problems at Lucasville were well known to the state, the ballooning prison population put up logistical roadblocks to any solutions. The violence continued; most seemed to be centralized in J Block, the area housing inmates in Administrative Isolation (the “hole”) and death row. “It was here that most of the guard-on-prisoner brutality and murders occur,” an inmate would write years later.2 “The guards are allowed free rein to use violence on prisoners and it was a custom for them to run in a prisoner’s cell and beat him, or beat a prisoner while he was handcuffed.”
By the late 1970s, a group of prisoners known as the Lucasville 14 had had enough. Citing the recently inked Helsinki Accords, an international agreement between Western nations and the Soviet bloc, the Ohio inmates formally renounced their American citizenship and asked to be released behind the Iron Curtain. When the government ignored the request, three men—Richard Armstrong, August Cassano, and David Cattano—each hacked off a pinkie finger (Cattano cut off two) and mailed them to the U.S. president in protest.3 Word about the self-mutilating defiance shot quickly through the prison; the men became heroes on the turbulent ranges of Lucasville—particularly on death row.
There, any sliver of good news or the smallest provocative fuck-you to the powers upstairs and beyond was a needed lifeboat. The inmates—including Ronnie, Rickey, and Wiley—were playing out a terrifying waiting game. Because although the state hadn’t executed anyone since 1963, the chair had been moved from the Ohio Penitentiary to Lucasville. Nailed together in 1897 from wood as dark as aged whiskey, it was the last seat for 315 condemned men and women. They called it “Old Sparky.”
* * *
Ohio’s revamped death penalty statute worked as planned, transforming the state’s felony homicide dockets into conveyor belts feeding directly into death row. By summer 1976, nearly sixty Ohio inmates had been sentenced under the 1974 law, including fifteen from Cuyahoga County. But their cases were all essentially stalled while capital punishment itself became the subject of a court battle.
Two opposing c
urrents collided in the federal courts in the 1970s. The first was the effort by progressive activists and attorneys to dismantle capital punishment statutes across the country. The other was the momentum coming from state legislatures. The lessons of Nixon’s two overwhelming presidential campaign victories were easy to read: tough-on-crime politicians fared well with voters. In spite of the administration’s War on Crime and the increased rates of incarceration, felonies continued to rise as the decade reached its midpoint. State officeholders eager to polish their credentials defended capital punishment with zeal. Whenever opponents depleted the government’s punitive might with a court victory, state legislatures fast-tracked replacement laws recalibrated to cover whatever vulnerability the legal challenge had exploited. This was the cycle: court challenge, new laws, and new court challenge. The stakes—the state’s moral right to take a life—were immense. Yet the debate played out quietly. This was a fight hinging on pretzel-twisted concepts of due process and chain of custody; powered by ideology, yes, but at its high-noon moment not settled in passion but with dense legal briefs or the sober debate of a court hearing. It was a bloodless, academic struggle, removed by more than miles and electrified walls from the cellblocks where the bullshitting dipped low when the news bulletins squawked over the radio, every ear searching the broadcast for anything on a U.S. Supreme Court decision that could file their lives down to a small window of time. In July 1976, Ronnie, Rickey, and Wiley were on J Block when a broadcast echoed down the range about a high-court ruling upholding another state’s death statute, one mirroring Ohio’s own.4
They all knew what it meant. By now each was an armchair appellate scholar. This decision was the cue for Lucasville’s warden to warm up the chair.
