Good Kids, Bad City

by Kyle Swenson

  * * *

  In a very typical Cleveland way, the hearing was almost scratched before it started.

  On Sunday night thick white flakes began dropping from the sky. By Monday morning the city was wrapped in a whiteout blizzard. The big windows in the thirteenth-floor hallway of the Justice Center normally peered out on an eastern stretch of the city kissing the lakeshore—city hall, the convention center, the erector-set skeletons of new construction. But on the morning of November 17, the view was swallowed by the surprise lake-effect storm. Snow fled past the windows like sand rushing through an hourglass. I stood watching, realizing the ice-snagged roadways might keep people from attending the hearing, especially anyone looking for a good excuse to stay away.

  I arrived early. I had slept badly the night before in a friend’s spare bedroom, so I was floating on an edgy rush of caffeine and nerves. The first people to join me in the room were law students only a few years younger than myself. They soon were joined by more, and quickly the entire side of the gallery behind the defense table was filled with two dozen OIP interns. Brian Howe—average sized, with dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard running along his jaw from ear to ear—soon appeared, taking his place at the attorney’s table. I introduced myself. We chatted briefly—he had other stuff on his mind, obviously. “Just so you know,” Howe told me before I left him, “it’s not admissible in court, but Ed did pass a polygraph test.”

  More spectators also arrived, more than the usual courtroom business attracted. There were law professors and other courtroom watchers in attendance. Reporters from the local news stations and the Plain Dealer. Terry Gilbert came with his law partner Jacqueline Greene. The attorneys were still representing Kwame and Wiley, and a few months after Rickey’s motion hit the court, Gilbert had submitted a similar request on behalf of the Bridgemans. Those motions would also live or die by the outcome of today’s hearing. As we chatted before the session started, a few attorneys from the prosecutor’s office brushed past us heading for the courtroom. Spying Gilbert, one of the lawyers turned to her colleague. “The vultures have already showed up,” she said, loud enough to be heard. “Can you believe that?” Gilbert grumbled to me.

  I grabbed a seat on the right-hand side of the gallery, close enough to hear and for my digital recorder to cleanly gobble up the voices from the witness stand. Before the start, I made a trip to the restroom, and as I returned to the hallway I spotted a small man at the windows staring at the moving curtains of snow. Without ever having seen him before, I knew it was Ed Vernon. Alone at the glass, he appeared to be locking eyes with something terrible out there, and for the first time I wondered if this man had the internal fortitude left to do what would be asked of him here. He was joined at the window by a thin man in a flashy pin-striped suit with matching tie and pocket square—Pastor Singleton. Together they bent their heads over a Bible.

  Karen Smith was the opener, a warm-up for the testimony everyone was waiting anxiously to hear. Now middle-aged and flashing a pacific, easy smile, she patiently answered Brian Howe’s questions, as he steered her through May 19, 1975, when she had walked into the Robinsons’ store.

  “Were either of the men that you saw as you approached the store Rickey Jackson?” Howe asked.

  “No.”

  “Were either of them Ronnie Bridgeman?”

  “No.”

  “Were either of them Wiley Bridgeman?”

  “No.”

  What happened after Smith entered the store and the white money order salesmen left? he asked.

  “Probably within a few seconds we heard what I thought was like firecrackers, and we all turned to the door,” the witness said. “And when we turned to the door you could see him, he was kind of, his profile was in the window, and you could see that they had thrown something, something was thrown and he was pressed against the glass. And I believe Mrs. Robinson at that time, as she started going to the door she said, ‘Oh, my God, they are shooting.’ And when she said that, I immediately felt the need to hide, run. It was a very small store. So I went to, like, the storeroom and just waited, just stood there.”

  Smith also recounted her own day at the police station. She too was shown a lineup, and the girl recognized Rickey and Wiley from the neighborhood. But she told the police she did not see the same men she had brushed by before the murder.

  “What was their response to that?” Howe asked.

  “They just started talking to me about the importance of me telling the truth and asked me how would I feel if I didn’t identify the people who had done this. I think they asked me questions about my mom, and it came out that my mom caught the bus and how would I feel if she was robbed and had been murdered or attacked by somebody and someone not identifying or telling the truth about them.”

  “So what was your response to that?”

  “My response was while it would be horrible that that happened to my mom,” Smith answered calmly, “that she would not want me to lie.”

  Howe also asked about how the detectives treated the teenager after she failed to identify the suspects.

  “I felt like they had little regard for me,” she replied. “I felt like I clearly wasn’t a favorite or preferred person. At that time Ed Vernon was also there, and I really don’t remember what his conversation was but I remember them offering him something to drink and something from the snack machine, and I was not offered that. So I felt that there was preferential treatment towards him and not me.”

  * * *

  Ed’s turn came after the lunch break. The man on the witness stand appeared small, reduced, in part because he was layered in a heavy overcoat and neat argyle sweater. Big deep sighs escaped his chest like steam out of a radiator. He had a habit of cocking his head to the side when asked a question, eyelids down to slits behind his glasses, suspiciously rolling whatever was said around in his mind, looking for the trap. And the traps would come. But first, Brian Howe began his examination of the witness by asking Ed to recount his day on May 19, 1975. Slowly, the witness told the court he’d been at school until regular classes let out. He then boarded the school bus with the rest of the neighborhood children. As the bus neared Ed’s stop on Cedar Avenue, he and the other riders heard gunshots as the vehicle crossed Stokes Boulevard.

  “So you hear the shots,” Howe reiterated. “What are the other schoolchildren doing at this point, do you remember?”

  “Everybody was looking,” the witness answered calmly. “Everybody heard it and we stopped talking and looked.”

  “Did you personally look out the bus at that time?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Nothing.”

  Howe moved to highlight the importance of the point here. “Were you ever on the city bus at all that day?”

  “No.”

  “From the bus did you see the victim in this case, Mr. Franks, being beaten?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever see him get shot?”

  “No.”

  At the defense table, Rickey’s manacled hands were pressed palm to palm, his fingers aimed at the ceiling as if in prayer, eyes shuttered, nodding thankfully as the questioning continued. Ed recounted getting off the bus with the rest of the kids. The group then ran up to the store to see what the commotion was about.

  “Had you ever seen a dead body before?” Howe asked.

  “No.”

  “What were you feeling?”

  “I don’t know,” Ed said, his head hanging low. “Just scared, because I had never seen anything like that before.”

  “Did you see anyone running away from the scene?”

  “No.”

  “As you approached the store did you see anyone with a pipe or a stick?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see anyone take anything off of the body that was lying on the ground?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see any green car?”

  “No.”

  But
as Ed and the other children walked back home, one of the boys—Tommy Hall, according to Ed—mentioned he knew who probably did it: Bitsy, Buddy, and Rickey. So when Ed returned to the crime scene about an hour later, he volunteered when the police asked if anyone had information. He was just doing what he thought was right, the witness emphasized. He was only trying to help. Ed explained that his family knew he was telling tall tales and it had gotten him in trouble before.

  “My mother knew me. She knew I was lying,” Ed told the court. “She told me when I go down to the lineup, all I had to do was not pick out anyone, and they’ll let them go.”

  And that’s what he did, Ed explained, when Cleveland PD detectives asked him to point out the assailants who had robbed the store. He recognized the faces from the neighborhood, the faces that went with the names he’d mentioned to police. But he didn’t make the identifications. The detectives then took the twelve-year-old into a back room. “They were pretty mad, the detectives,” Ed said from the stand before falling into a long pause. When he lifted his head again, his face was wet. “At that point, they began calling me names. They began to push stuff around.” His fist smacked down on the witness box’s railing. “Beating on the table, the detective said, ‘You lied! You know that’s perjury! Your mother and father can go to jail.’ So I began to cry.

  “I’m just sitting there, crying,” Ed repeated, his voice shaved down to a dry whisper. The courtroom was quiet. “He said, ‘We’ll fix it. We’ll fix it.’ After that, the police took a statement from me saying I was scared and that’s why I didn’t pick them out of the lineup. But I wasn’t scared. I didn’t pick them out because I knew they didn’t do it.”

  “Did you ever tell the prosecutors about threats?” Howe asked. “About the actions of the detective when you were in the room after the lineup?”

  “No,” Ed said. He then tumbled strangely into the present tense, as if speaking of the events was enough to place him back inside those frightening moments. “I am twelve years old. I don’t know nothing about going to a prosecutor and talking to them about anything.”

  “Did you ever tell any of the defense attorneys?”

  “No. I didn’t tell anybody.”

  “Why not?”

  “How would I know how to go and approach somebody about something that I don’t even understand myself? I am twelve.”

  Ed told the court that before the trials prosecutors had given him copies of his previous testimony. He was told to study the statements so his story remained consistent.

  “Were you worried about saying different things at different trials?” Howe asked.

  “I am just all confused anyway, so it didn’t matter because when they gave me those transcripts to go over I didn’t remember all that stuff,” he said. “Every time I went to a different trial it was quite a difference.” The witness fell silent again. “I can remember just the emotional stress and the pressure that they put on me,” Ed replied. “I just couldn’t … I couldn’t take it.”

  “Did you ever actually see Rickey Jackson involved in the shooting that day?”

  “No.” The tears were choking his voice now. “I didn’t. No.”

  “Did you ever see Ronnie Bridgeman involved at all that day?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever see Wiley Bridgeman involved in the crime that day?”

  “No,” Ed said, his head swinging from side to side.

  “Did you ever see any of the three of them at the scene?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever see a green getaway car?”

  “No.”

  “How did you feel about testifying to something that you knew was not true?”

  “I felt really bad, guilty about what I was lying about,” he said, the words pushing through his sobs. “I was carrying all of that.”

  “Are you scared today?”

  “No.”

  “How do you feel seeing him?” Howe asked, waving his arm at his client.

  Ed tilted his head. He thought. “I feel … I feel really good about seeing him. I feel really good about seeing him.”

  * * *

  “Where,” Assistant Prosecutor Mary McGrath started off her cross-examination of Ed, condescension dripping off her words, “do we begin?”

  The snow had let up by early afternoon; fresh white layered the city’s nooks and crannies outside the thirteenth-floor windows. Veteran prosecutor McGrath, a small woman with short brown hair, flicked her bespectacled eyes between the witness and the notes and binders she’d brought to the podium. The strategy behind her cross-examination was clear with the first few questions. McGrath would use Ed’s previous testimony to hammer apart his new account.

  McGrath began by asking the witness to read from the 1975 court transcripts; she directed Ed to Charles Loper’s statements about seeing the boy walking toward the store right before bullets started flying. “So to sum it up, Mr. Vernon,” the prosecutor said. “Mr. Loper, who lives attached to the store, testified in 1975 that he saw you get off at the bus stop that is on Fairhill near the store. Why would he make that up?”

  Ed seemed to sense the question was coming. “I don’t know,” he shrugged. “At that time, Mr. Loper was a chronic drinker. He was an alcoholic. So I don’t know.”

  “But he testified that he saw you get off at the bus stop and walk toward the house and you greeted each other?”

  “No,” Ed said, throwing steel behind the word.

  “That’s a lie?”

  “That’s a lie.”

  McGrath’s next series of moves were subtle, and sent me scribbling furiously into my legal pad. The attorney pointed out that on the day of the murder, detectives already had a breakdown of how the crime was committed—how many assailants there had been; how the victim had been beaten, shot, and splashed with a liquid. The police hadn’t yet interviewed Anna Robinson, she was still in surgery. So where did police get those details? Ed had to be the source, she argued. “Who knew this information, other than you and Mrs. Robinson, to give the police this information?”

  This was bullshit, I knew. In the gallery, I began furiously scratching names into my notebook—Karen Smith, the florist across the street, the motorist who was driving nearby as the robbery happened. They were all interviewed by police on the day of the crime—that’s where the details came from. Not Ed. Obviously McGrath knew this. But she was trying to shake the witness, and it was starting to work.

  “No,” he said, his voice diving into an exasperated whine. “No. I would have never knew anything if I am on the bus with all the rest of the kids. How would I know to give that information?”

  “Because you were there,” McGrath shot back.

  “No, I was not there.”

  “You saw liquid thrown in his face?”

  “You can smile and laugh at me all yo—” Ed snapped.

  McGrath cut him off. “No. I am not laughing at all.”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  The attorney skillfully laid another set of rhetorical booby traps for Ed as she walked him through the lineup again. The witness and attorney tussled over whether he lied to police in his lineup. “Did you recognize Rickey and Ronnie?” she asked.

  “I didn’t identify them.”

  “That’s not what I asked you.”

  “I didn’t identify them,” Ed shouted in a frustrated wheeze.

  “Did you recognize them as someone you know?”

  “I didn’t identify them.”

  “You knew them? Can we agree to that much? You knew them?”

  “They asked me did I see anybody in the lineup that I know, and I said no.”

  “But that wasn’t true,” the attorney said. “They asked you if you saw anyone in the lineup that you knew, and you knew these guys from the neighborhood.”

  Ed broke. “You sound just like these prosecutors and these detectives did back then. You are trying to trip me up with questions, you know, and get me to say things that are not true.


  “I am saying it was a lineup,” he continued, exasperated. “I was supposed to identify the person that was involved in the crime. Okay? I am not stupid, okay? I understand you are supposed to ask me questions, but I am tired of you trying to make me look like I am stupid, I am senile, I am crazy, you know. To know somebody and to identify somebody is two different things.”

  McGrath pivoted to another tactic; she accused Ed of conveniently waiting for all the detectives involved to die off before coming forward with his new story.

  “No!” he barked. “I didn’t even know none of these people were dead. It wasn’t like I kept tabs on people. Man, who sits around and thinks about stuff like that? Only thing I thought about was telling the truth.

  “You don’t know how much pain and suffering I have been going through throughout these years. You and nobody else knows. You can ask a thousand questions and it is still not going to free me from the pain and the hurt and the lies that I had to live.”

  Ed continued, “I don’t trust nobody to this day. I don’t trust in relationships. This thing has been emotional, it has severed ties in my relationships with my kids’ mothers, with my family, with people. I don’t trust people because I don’t trust, I don’t believe them. I don’t believe them. I don’t believe them.”

  * * *

  The hearing was called for the day. McMonagle ordered the testimony to continue Tuesday. I passed another night in Cleveland, using happy-hour drinks to calm my nerves, anxious thoughts running over Ed’s testimony, concerns over whether the prosecutor had roughed up his credibility in the eyes of the judge.