by Kyle Swenson
* * *
Morning, afternoon, night—you didn’t fix a name on the hours. Clock time had slipped from its routine, the minutes piling up uselessly at your feet. Hard to tell the difference when you spent nearly every hour of the day inside your cell.
Whatever time it was, at this particular moment, the death row inmates were playing chess. Not together over a board. No way. Not here. Instead, the players shouted their moves about the range. Ronnie was tuned into this particular contest. “Move my queen’s bishop five to forty-seven,” one of the players cried. Suddenly, screams started ripping through the cellblock.
The noise came from Mr. Collins’s cell, Ronnie realized. Mr. Cleophus Collins, one of the old-timers on the row. Mr. Collins, the man who used to own a restaurant in Cincinnati before getting into a shoot-out with some guys he didn’t know were undercover cops, to hear him tell it. Mr. Collins, who killed one of the cops but took six bullets in his own gut. Mr. Collins, who they brought back to life so they could send him to death row with his stomach so jury-rigged with tubing that when he broke wind it made the whole cellblock smell like an exploded sewer. Mr. Collins, Ronnie now realized, was the prisoner in cell 47. When the old man heard the number bounce down the range, he must have thought it meant they were coming for him, his time all up.
“Oh, Jesus, please!” Mr. Collins begged through tears. “Pleeeeeease!” The row was dead quiet except for the pleas. No one corrected the mistake, perhaps because the condemned men felt they were getting a peek around the corner at what would be coming their way soon enough. Guards eventually dragged Mr. Collins off for sedation.
Ohio’s condemned men were confined to single cells arranged around an open two-story central room. Twenty cells ringed the bottom ground floor, twenty above, these opening out onto a walkway. Each prisoner’s space extended ten feet from the cell door to the back wall, nine feet from the floor to ceiling. It was enough room for a bed and mattress and a wall-mounted bookcase and dimensionless private grief but little else. A sheet of light warmed the white concrete walls and floors through a single barred window for those hours of the day when the sun trucked into view. Otherwise it was dark and cold and empty. Wall-mounted televisions gurgled away between every five cells on the range. Most of the talk snapping between the condemned men was arguments about what to watch. This guy wanted the news. That guy wanted cartoons. The next guy over wanted a cowboy show.
The inmates were locked into their spaces for twenty-three hours out of every twenty-four. That meant someone was always on recreation—or rec. When your rec hour came, you had to get yourself a shower and clean your cell, but after that, the death row inmates were running up and down the range, doing favors for guys and delivering messages or passing notes between cells. It was the only face-to-face socializing anyone ever got. They waited for it like Christmas. Not long into his stay on the row, rec inmates were delivering notes to Ronnie’s cell that left him scratching his head. Notes scribbled in Wiley’s hand. Warnings about poison in the food.
The men talked out their own appeals. They updated one another on cases climbing the twisty ladder of the lower courts, cases that might nudge their own in one direction or another. And they banded together when they needed to—surprising, considering they couldn’t even assemble in a group. When the prison slashed the visiting hours for death row inmates and prohibited their families from bringing food, the condemned men united for a hunger strike.
“We are only asking that we be given the same privileges and treated the same as the rest of the prisoners,” four J Block inmates wrote to a Cleveland newspaper regarding the strike.5 “We are not dead yet; we yet exist.” Two of the names on the letter: Ronnie and Wiley Bridgeman. Within a few weeks, the hunger strike spread to the rest of the prison. The Lucasville administration eventually relented. But the successes and moments of unity were minor breaks in the total isolation of the row.
Wiley—Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction’s inmate #A143810—poured himself into words. When the range stirred at 5:00 A.M., he was up, exercising in his cell in the hour before breakfast. Afterward, he sat at this desk cramming words onto legal pads, his long looping sentences charging forward, clause after clause, with a precise, stately diction. He wrote poems, short stories, and letters—dozens of letters to journalists, politicians, attorneys, even other condemned men and women. By afternoon, he’d jump to novels; the librarian was a good guy, came twice a week. Wiley was always working through a large stack of books. He liked to step into the espionage world of Robert Ludlum or Robert A. Heinlein’s space fantasies. These were escape routes out from the thoughts that clamored against his head, including a crushing sense of responsibility. He was the oldest. His brother and friend were here as well, both younger guys. I’ve got to make sure nothing happens to them, Wiley thought. But there was nothing he could do from his cell. All the complex depth and bold strokes of his personality, the marks his mother spotted so early, the parts of Wiley that made him so unique in the eyes of the neighborhood and especially in the eyes of his brother and Rickey—all that counted for nothing here. Prison took distinction and pride from you. Wiley was just another cell number waiting for his rec days. It was so humiliating, he couldn’t help wishing he were alone.
For Rickey—#A144061—the confinement itself was excruciating. He was always mobile as a kid—all those independent one-man missions to other parts of the city on the bus. Now Rickey was stuck in place, looking at the same four walls. His days passed in a flurry of exercise. The straining muscle, the heat from his body, his lungs knocking back breaths—the physical work kept his mind away from what he didn’t want to think about.
Still, blinding sheets of anger would cover him when he heard the other inmates hopefully discussing appeals or Supreme Court cases. These guys were conning themselves into rosy thinking by ignoring the facts. He took a macabre sort of pleasure in making light of their situation; on his rec walks, if he caught a guy writing a letter in his cell, he’d tell him he’d better hurry up, time was running out. Or he wouldn’t hesitate to tell someone they had a pretty nice radio, who was getting that after their big date with Ol’ Sparky?
Despite his gallows humor, Rickey saved himself a narrow portion of hope, thinking about what would happen if they were released from the row. Prison, he resolved, might be its own strange adventure. But the same string of thoughts always led him back to the execution date and Ed Vernon. If it came down to it, would the kid really let them take that walk? Would he stay silent?
Ronnie—#A143953—dealt with anxiety that was always coding red. The zigs and zags of Ohio’s capital punishment fight were enough for that. But Ronnie was really still back in the Cleveland courtroom, his mind stuck like a snagged record, trying to understand how the state could say he did something he didn’t do. But how could he prove it? Especially now? They had him in checkmate. He was still back trying to make sense of the first move.
He filled his time in one-sided dialogue with God. He begged. He cussed. If you can’t do nothing for me, fine, I’m fucked, Ronnie resolved. Look, God, if you are real, okay, I’m praying for Rickey, and I’m praying for my brother. Cut them loose. Get them up out of this shit. But all three stayed. Ronnie felt like he couldn’t fit the correct words together to make his prayers effective. So he waited—waited to die, or waited to see if he was going to die while listening to the anguish the same waiting was igniting over in the other cells. The tears and screams. The guards rushing to one cell so this guy doesn’t hang himself with a bedsheet, or running to stop another from slashing open his veins. This all rode his body hard. His shoulders sagged under the weight. Each night, the bed felt harder. And was it getting darker earlier? Night seemed to swoop in sooner than on the outside. Ronnie was having trouble seeing. Maybe if he could get a deep breath down, but the air felt heavy, like smoke off a burning trash pile. Each breath he struggled to get down sent his heart bashing around his chest. It got so bad sometimes that guards had to pull him fr
om his cell for fresh air.
After months inside J Block, waiting to learn if he’d die or not, waiting to wait more, Ronnie figured he had been going about this prayer thing wrong. Faith couldn’t be taken lightly; you couldn’t scattershot your pleas like darts against a board. It was serious. Then one day, leafing through a copy of the Koran that was making its way through the cellblock, his eyes were hooked by a line. The words rang his brain like a bell. Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves.
* * *
Good news graced J Block in April 1977: Wiley won a retrial. He was going back to Cleveland.
Along with his attorneys, the street-tough Jerry Milano and the corporate boardroom number cruncher Daniel McCarthy, the older Bridgeman brother successfully pressed the Ohio Court of Appeals to reconsider the case due to errors from the bench. Wiley argued that Judge John C. Bacon had erred when issuing instructions to the jurors tasked with deciding Wiley’s guilt or innocence. The jurist, a visiting judge from rural Meigs County, had told the Cuyahoga County panel that all they had to do was identify whether Wiley was the perpetrator because the robbery and murder were undisputed. The higher court found that Bacon’s bungled wording had incorrectly assumed elements of the crime had already been proven. The technicality was a possible lifesaver. The reversal was one of three cases overturned in a few weeks tied to visiting judges shipped in to assist an overloaded Cuyahoga County Courthouse in 1975.6 Wiley set out for his new court date in autumn unsure what to expect. Hope and fear had fought to a standstill in his gut.
He was returning to a city teetering through another seismic shift. The Perk administration’s overreliance on federal funding had only temporarily offset the dire financial condition sparked by hundreds of businesses fleeing to the suburbs and beyond. Tax increases failed to keep pace with the demographic changes; a close read of Cleveland’s books showed that the city was speeding toward financial default. Blood was back up in the neighborhoods, too, now in the ethnic West Side wards. The federal lawsuit over school desegregation filed in 1975 had reelectrified racial lines; car bumpers around the city wore stickers proclaiming “NO!”—a simple, declarative antibusing slogan. The suit wasn’t the West Side’s only grievance. While the suburbs continued to soak up business and population, the Perk administration had offered substantial tax abatements to corporations to keep downtown development flowering—another blow to the tax base. Feeling ignored and sidelined in favor of deep pockets, neighborhoods organized into community action groups, less polite block clubs than grassroots shock troops given to shouting down city hall officials at meetings or picketing their homes. Dennis Kucinich, a boy-wonder Democrat city councilman representing the West Side’s Tremont, tapped this aggression in his 1977 campaign for the mayor’s office. “Urban populism,” as he dubbed it, was about empowering the neighborhoods, not downtown business interests, to decide how they wanted to develop their blocks. It was a politics that mobilized the same white resentment fueling the desegregation debate, tossing race and issues of civil rights in the backseat in favor of economics.
Squinting out the window of the prison transport bus as it motored north into town, Wiley thought Cleveland looked the same. Terminal Tower’s thin spire at attention on the skyline. The acres of factories coughing smog from the winding riverbanks, a thick taste that hit your throat as you pulled closer to downtown. Municipal Stadium, the soot-stained colossus, hulking at the lakeshore. The only noticeable change to the city was the building where he was heading. That summer, the city proudly opened the doors of a new Justice Center, planted directly across the street from its predecessor on Lakeside Avenue, one of 480 new jails constructed nationally in the first half of the decade to keep pace with the War on Crime. Whereas the county’s old legal seat wore its American history like a proud coat, the new courthouse rose twenty-four bland stories into the Cleveland skyline, a featureless cube that screamed out technocratic banality of seventies chic.
As the pretrial motions began in one of the new windowless courtrooms, it was clear Milano and McCarthy had shifted their strategy for Wiley’s second chance at an acquittal. Before jury selection, the attorneys notified the court they would be presenting an alibi defense. Instead of exclusively ripping away at Ed Vernon’s credibility, the defense team also charged into the retrial aiming to topple other parts of the state’s case. This included raising questions about the propriety of the police investigation and the lack of actual physical evidence linking the defendant to the crime.
Wiley wasn’t completely sold on the strategy. Through his own constant letter writing, he’d learned from his family back home about a neighborhood girl named Angela Bennett. After the convictions, she told friends she had seen the actual getaway car both as the crime was happening and later around Arthur Avenue. Wiley was so excited by the information, he wrote his own motion for a new trial based on new evidence. The courts ignored the filing, and Milano and McCarthy were uncertain on how Bennett could factor into the retrial. One of the attorneys was also under extreme pressure. In 1976, McCarthy had been tasked by a federal judge to oversee the dramatic desegregation of Cleveland’s public schools. Those “NO!” bumper stickers were aimed directly at McCarthy. The attorney was receiving death threats.
October 4 was sun-shot and stirred by lake breezes, the temperature stalled out pleasantly in the low sixties. Across the city, Clevelanders walked to polling sites for a four-candidate mayoral primary that would deliver a roundhouse loss to Ralph Perk and put Kucinich on track to election in November. The white ethnic wards, once Perk’s base, turned to Kucinich. This “urban populism” springing out of the West Side would also unseat seven incumbent council members, “the biggest political bloodbath in years,” one commentator called it.
Up on the twenty-second floor of the new Justice Center, Jerry Milano and Daniel McCarthy opened the proceedings by trying to pull information out of the state that could point to their client’s innocence. Under legal procedure, however, the defense couldn’t see the police files related to the case; the new judge, Sam Zingle, combed the pile himself to decide what was relevant. The attorneys were left groping blindly. How could they know what to ask for if they couldn’t examine the file?
Topping the list of what the lawyers wanted to know was information on other suspects police had identified for the Franks killing. The lawyers had learned about a mother coming forward at the time of the shooting saying her son was involved. The lawyers also learned the FBI had told police the robbery may have been done by Skip and Railroad King, the local stick-up men. Bennett provided yet another account. All pointed to other suspects—yet the attorneys could not access the information police developed about the tips. “Now we have three people saying these guys didn’t do it, that we weren’t told about it until this morning,” Milano argued before the judge.7
“In all police investigations there are all sorts of tips and leads,” county prosecutor James Sweeney shot back. “I don’t think each anonymous phone call is necessarily exculpatory.”
“I agree, but he said he had information that three other guys did it,” Milano said, referring to the FBI tip. “If that’s not exculpatory, what is?”
Wiley’s lawyers were also suspicious of a lack of forensic reports from the investigation. In the 1975 trials, officers testified they had both tested the paper cup found on the scene as well as hunted for fingerprints on two cars, Franks’s and another vehicle suspected of being involved. None produced usable prints. But the defense wasn’t provided paperwork on the results.
And now the paper cup—the only piece of physical evidence from the crime scene—was missing. As Wiley’s second trial opened, the Cleveland police officers responsible for processing the evidence failed to serve up a convincing reason why. A detective named Marvin said he had given it to a police tech named Frank Muhlhan. The tech’s testimony, however, provided no clarity.
“You never saw this white cup?” Milano pounded into Mu
hlhan on a cross-examination early in the trial.
“I never saw a white cup,” the officer responded.
“Do you know Detective Marvin?”
“Yes, I do.”
“And if he said he gave you a white cup to examine, you just don’t know anything about that?”
“I know a white cup was processed,” the witness said. “That’s all I know.”
Milano kept pressing. “And where is it, do you know?”
“I have no idea.”
The Cleveland police had an equally limp explanation for why the tip from the FBI linking the robbery to Skip and Railroad King was ignored. As Wiley’s second trial progressed in the first week of October, Detective Eugene Terpay again took the witness stand. When Milano initially asked whether he had followed up on the lead, the detective answered that this informant was not always reliable.
Yet when Judge Zingle questioned Terpay, the officer clearly contradicted himself. “Did the FBI indicate who the informant was?” the judge asked.
“No, sir, they never do.”
“Not knowing the informant, did you have any way of knowing his reliability?”
“I had no way of knowing how reliable the information was,” the detective admitted.
Milano jumped on the admission. “Then it may have been the most reliable information in the world, as far as you know? Isn’t that correct?”
“It could have or could not have been, yes,” the stone-faced cop answered.
* * *
Now for the fourth time, Ed Vernon was the key voice for the prosecution. This time, however, the boy was on his own with his story: Charles Loper, the neighbor who claimed to have seen Ed by the store during the robbery, had died. His previous testimony from Wiley’s 1975 trial was read to the new jury.
The intervening two years had also revealed another problem with the state’s star witness. Wiley’s attorneys had learned that Robert Robinson, the store owner, paid Ed fifty dollars after the first three trials. Although Robinson claimed the money was just to reward Ed for his courage in testifying, it was hard not to look at the payout as a bribe.
