I hoped writing about David Francis would make the fear go away, but I wanted more. I wanted this random act of rape to have meaning. I wanted to do what human beings have done for thousands of years—tell the stories that help us understand who we are and what happened in our lives to shape us. The way to do it, I figured, was the way I knew best: as a reporter.
In the summer of 2006, not long after Zoë graduated from high school, I started. I wasn’t ready to talk to David Francis, not yet, so I began by calling the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office to request the public records in my case. A few days later, they handed over a thick, messy file of police reports, witness statements, rap sheets, subpoenas, lab reports, trial notes, briefs, and indictments, all stuffed together in no particular order and bound with a rubber band.
At home, while sorting the stack into a semblance of order, I came to a page that stopped me.
Across a court record, someone had scrawled the word “DECEASED,” and underlined it three times.
David Francis had died in prison on August 18, 2000, sixteen years after he raped me. My search for him was over before I started it.
I sat at my desk with my piles of records, disappointment giving way to relief, relief swinging back to disappointment. I would not get to confront my rapist. On the other hand, I would not have to confront my rapist. The decision had been eliminated for me. David Francis was dead, and so was my story.
The “DECEASED” record sat on top of a large stack of papers. Not knowing what else to do, I started sorting them again, skimming the pages as I went along. I came to his juvenile record from Boston. It had fifty-three entries, detailing crimes and misdemeanors he committed before he turned eighteen. They began when he was twelve.
It occurred to me that while David Francis couldn’t talk to me, he still had a lot to tell me. I could follow his path through all these records. I could try to find his family in Boston. Maybe I could find his friends in Cleveland. He had at least a few; I remembered that an alibi witness testified, and lied, for him during his trial. I decided to check the trial transcript to see who she was and what she had to say when she testified.
The Old Courthouse opened in 1912, when Cleveland was an industrial powerhouse and the sixth-largest city in the country. It was a town on the go, alive with energy and commerce and immigrants and newcomers, a town many people even now believe could have overshadowed Chicago, with the right leaders and a bit of luck.
The courthouse was one of the public buildings the city leaders envisioned in 1903, when they commissioned a grand civic plan to echo the mall in Washington, D.C. The plan, which grew out of the City Beautiful Movement, called for a formal grouping of Beaux Arts–style buildings around a broad, grassy mall that led to a vista of Lake Erie.
The second building to go up, the courthouse was intended to inspire awe among the citizens who entered it seeking justice. A hundred years later it still does a pretty good job of it. Life-size bronze statues of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton flank the wide stairs leading to the front entrance. Above them, on a ledge surrounding the building, stand statues of the great lawgivers of history, from Moses on. Inside, twin marble staircases curl up the three-story marble rotunda, where a stained-glass window of Lady Justice looks down from a perch positioned to catch the rising sun.
Eventually the county outgrew the courthouse, and in 1976 most court operations moved to the ugly new Justice Center tower across the street. The graceful Old Courthouse remained open, though, home to the domestic relations and probate courts, where the people of Cuyahoga County go to get their marriage licenses and, later, their divorces, and where they go to deal with death.
The grand staircase led me down to the basement, a dim warren of offices and storage rooms. A canteen near the stairs sells tepid coffee and off-brand packaged snacks, and every time I went there I passed divorce lawyers huddled at the wobbly tables with their clients, most of them weeping.
In this basement, the county’s Clerk of Courts keeps all of its millions of pages of transcripts and criminal evidence. In 2006, when I first went there, none of the records were digital, and the archives of documents overwhelmed the space allotted.
In the hallways, towers of stacked file boxes along the walls formed a cardboard canyon of mortgage foreclosures, divorce actions, child-custody battles, competency hearings, property disputes, robbery trials, murder trials, rape trials. These were the records that would not fit in the overstuffed file rooms, where more boxes were stacked to the water-damaged ceilings.
As I walked through the canyon of files, I felt like a visitor to the Catacombs of Paris, wandering through tunnels lined with skulls and bones. I had entered an ancient repository of grief, a place that held the memories of the collective pain, bitterness, fear, and sorrow of the people of Cuyahoga County. My small piece of it came in the file of Case Number CR-193108: The State of Ohio v. David Francis.
I filled out a printed form and handed it to a clerk in a crowded office at the end of the hall. He returned a few minutes later carrying two expandable dark red envelopes stuffed with files, each held together with a rubber band. He gestured toward a table in the hallway and said, “Don’t take these out of this area.” That warning was the extent of the court’s security system.
I opened the smaller envelope. Out tumbled the evidence from my trial: a gold cross on a chain, a dozen Polaroids, some mug shots, and two tiny glassine envelopes containing pubic hair samples, mine and the rapist’s. I had forgotten about the embarrassing collection of the hair. I put the envelopes back with my fingernails, as carefully as if they contained anthrax.
The Polaroids showed my body, most without my head. Two of them showed my back, an abstract design of red lacerations and bruises turning blue and purple. Others showed a small red gash on my neck and puncture wounds on my fingers. I studied them. The photos looked like porn for a scar fetishist. They were crude shots of a body without the woman inhabiting it, a portrait of everything the rape did to me. I slid them back into the envelope.
The second one, much thicker, held the trial transcript.
On the first page, I read: Be it remembered, that at the September, 1984 term of said court, to-wit, commencing on Wednesday, the 17th day of October, this cause came on to be heard …
I trembled, surprising myself.
Be it remembered.
I turned to my testimony. There, on the onionskin pages, I found the Joanna of twenty-two years before. She was trembling, too, I remembered, as she told the jury what happened that day.
“If I have to go to prison, I’ll miss you”
Monday, July 9, 1984. Cleveland.
On the last day of the first part of my life, I’m running late. As usual.
Damn it, damn it, damn it.
I’m driving up Euclid Avenue in my Toyota hatchback, fifteen miles an hour over the speed limit, pushing it to twenty, headed east out of downtown Cleveland for a 5:00 p.m. interview at Case Western Reserve University.
It’s already 5:00. Rush hour starts at 4:30 here, and I’m trapped in the daily exodus of workers leaving their offices in the city for the suburbs, all of them stepping on the gas through the bad parts of town, speeding past the brick housing projects and the weedy vacant lots that mark the spots where riots burned through in the ‘60s.
At East 55th Street, the borderline between downtown and the inner city, you can almost hear the steady beat of car locks clicking down, the percussive sound track to Cleveland’s deep racial divide.
I slalom from the left lane to the right lane and back, swearing and scolding myself the way I always do.
Why don’t you leave more time? Jesus. What’s wrong with you?
It’s