Nut44x4
06-15-2008, 06:20 PM
Beyond rape: a survivor's journey
Search for attacker reveals unexpected truths
Sunday, June 15, 2008 3:52 AM
On Oct. 27, 1984, a headline on Page 14A in The Plain Dealer read, "Disgusted judge gives repeat offender 30 years for rape."
The story followed standard newspaper protocol: In it, the victim was anonymous.
In this version, the victim has a name. I am Joanna Connors, and I am telling the story I kept private for 23 years. I'm doing it for all of the others who have survived sexual assault in silence, ashamed and afraid to tell their stories.
I was running late. Again.
Dammit.
I was speeding down Euclid Avenue, headed east out of downtown Cleveland for a 5 p.m. interview at Case Western Reserve University. It was 5:10. Rush hour had begun.
This was in 1984, when I was the theater critic for The Plain Dealer. It was July 9, high summer, still hot and sunny in the evening.
I'd lived in Cleveland only 10 months. I still didn't know all the shortcuts, but I did know that University Circle was crazy at this hour. I should have left more time.
I was going to Case to write a story about the Actors' Company, a summer theater group at Eldred Theater. When I got to the parking lot, it was 5:20. I ran up to the small lobby area on the second floor and looked into the theater.
Empty.
"Dammit," I said, under my breath. "They're gone."
I didn't notice the guy standing on the other side of the lobby until he said: "They said to wait a few minutes. They'll be back."
I fidgeted and smiled. A few minutes passed. He took a cigarette from a pack of Kools and lit it.
"I'm working on the lights," he said. "Do you want to see what I've been doing?"
I walked into the theater, down the right aisle, and climbed the steps to the stage.
He pointed up toward the lights, with a vague wave of his hand, and said something that made no sense. Animal alarm flashed through my body, followed by a flood of adrenaline that said: This is not right. In fact, this is bad. Really bad. Get out of here. Now.
"I think I'll wait outside," I said.
Too late. He grabbed me from behind, pinning my arms to my sides.
I felt his hands on me. I felt the blade next to my neck, then next to my chest. I felt the scrape of the concrete wall on my back.
"Have you ever had a black man before?"
"No."
"I bet you've always wanted to," he said.
His breath carried the smell of cigarettes and alcohol.
He pushed his body into my face.
How long did it last? I had no idea: My sense of time slipped out of my grasp. The theater felt like a sealed tomb, something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story, soundproof and windowless. I feigned cooperation. "We'd better leave. Someone may find us," I said.
He got up and started pulling on his pants. I got my skirt.
He put the dagger-scissors up to my back and pushed the point in just enough so I could feel it.
He led me out a back door and down a staircase. Then we were outside. I registered the change in one-word thoughts: Bright. Sun. Air.
DAVE.
In the sun, I could see the tattoo on his right arm: "DAVE," carved into his skin with crude capital letters.
He turned me, so I was facing him. He licked his finger and rubbed at the blood on my neck. He smoothed my hair.
"Now, don't you go to the cops," he said. "If you go to the cops, I'll have to go to prison."
I know this story will not be easy to read.
It isn't easy to tell, either. It scares me to tell it, and it scares me even more to think of the reaction to it.
It is about rape. It is about race and class. And it is about our community -- our line-in-the-sand combativeness over these issues, and our stubborn and fearful reluctance to talk about them.
I've struggled with this story for more than 20 years. It scares me so much that I stopped telling it when I no longer had to. I told it to the police, the emergency room nurses and doctor, the detectives, the assistant prosecutor, the judge and the jury. I told it to my husband and my sisters and my mother. And then, of course, I told it to psychiatrists and psychologists, so many over the years I lost count.
When I decided to tell it publicly, I decided I would have to tell the raw, uncomfortable and sometimes painful truth. All of it, including things that I never spoke of before, the feelings that make me look bad. If I held back, then telling wouldn't help anyone. Including me.
So here is an uncomfortable truth: I ignored my instinct not to trust a stranger, because the stranger was young and black, and I did not want to look like a racist white woman who automatically does not trust young black men.
If he had been white? I'm not sure -- but I think I would have left.
Instead, I stayed. I walked into that theater, down the right-side aisle, and into a life constricted by fear and hiding.
The fear poked its way to the surface two years ago. I was with my daughter, Zoe, a high school senior, and we were doing the obligatory college tour at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
We were headed toward a library when the guide stopped at a small telephone box, which hung on a pole by a blue light.
"We have these all over campus," he said. "They're safety stations. If you're walking alone at night and you think someone is following you, or you might be in danger, you get to one of these blue lights, call, and help will be there within five minutes."
"Five minutes?" I whispered to Zoe. "Who are they kidding?
"Five minutes is way too late. In five minutes, you could be dead."
She rolled her eyes, the universal teenage response to fretful parents.
I looked at her. My beautiful, strong, confident daughter. She was a part of me, and I was a part of her. She had me in her blood, her cells. I would die for her, I would kill for her, and now I could see only one thing: She was prey.
It took me months after our college trip to work up the courage to tell Zoe. She cried. She said now she understood why I was so overprotective as a mother, why I smothered her, and why my husband guarded her every move.
Then I told my son, Dan, who got angry. He did not say much, but in time he came home with a tattoo on his chest: "MOM," inside a heart.
Both of them wanted to know more: Who was this guy? Why did he do it? What was his story?
I didn't know.
I had seen DAVE five times: When he raped me. When I identified him two days later in a lineup. When I sat across a table from him in the county jail three weeks later, to testify in a parole-revocation hearing that would keep him in jail. At the trial. And at the sentencing, where the judge sent him to Ohio's worst prison for 30 to 75 years.
Beyond that, I didn't know much more than his name. Yet, if I made a list of the most influential people in my life, DAVE would be near the top. He had controlled so much of how I lived.
I had told my children. Now it was time to answer all their questions -- and mine.
I had to reclaim the parts of me I lost to him.
I had to go find DAVE.
My search started with records from the Cuyahoga County prosecutor's office: police reports, witness statements, rap sheets, subpoenas, lab reports, the assistant prosecutor's trial notes, appeal briefs and grand jury indictments.
Halfway through the stack, I came to a page that stopped me.
On a court record, someone had scrawled the word DECEASED, and underlined it three times.
David Francis was dead.
He died of Hodgkin's disease in prison on Aug. 18, 2000.
I felt let down and relieved at the same time: I would not get to confront DAVE / I would not have to confront DAVE.
Now what?
I couldn't give up my search. I wasn't sure why I felt compelled to dig into the past, but I knew I had to do it. I needed to face my fears, but I also wanted some understanding: What brought him to this? Who was he, and why did our paths collide in violence? What happened to him afterward?
Or was I really trying to find out what happened to me afterward?
I turned back to the documents.
On release from prison for raping me, David Francis intended to return to Cleveland to live.
In one parole application, he said he would live with Lula Mae Foster, his aunt. In the next, he said she was his grandmother.
Foster still lives on E. 82nd Street, in the Hough neighborhood, one of Cleveland's most distressed. Last summer, I went to see her.
"Oh, yes, Millie's son," she finally recalled.
She raised 10 children -- five McIntyres from her first marriage and five Fosters from the second. But David Francis was no relation and never lived with her.
Foster met Francis' mother, Millie, at a basement after-hours place called Velma's. That was back in the 1970s, when Millie and some of her kids had moved to Cleveland to escape Millie's abusive husband.
Foster remembered prison officials calling to say David had died.
They asked her what to do with his body. "I said: 'I couldn't tell you. All I know is, his mother is dead, his brothers and sisters are in Boston, but I don't know any numbers. You'll have to do with him what you do. I don't have the money to bury him.' I hated it, but there was nothing else I could do."
Foster thought the youngest daughter, Laura, still lived in Cleveland. But she didn't know how to get in touch with her, either.
"I haven't thought about Millie or her kids in years," she said.
I found Charlene Blakney, David Francis' oldest sister, later that summer by combing records at the Massachusetts Bureau of Vital Statistics. She lived in New Bedford, about 45 minutes south of Boston.
"Do you know what happened to my brother?" she asked. "I tried to find him. I knew he was dead, but I've never known what happened to him."
I eased into the reason behind my visit by telling her he died of cancer and was buried in a prison cemetery.
"This family was cursed," she said.
David Anthony Francis was born Dec. 11, 1956, in Boston, the fourth child of Mildred and Clifford Francis, who would have five boys and three girls together.
When they married, on Aug. 8, 1950, Clifford was 24 years old. On the marriage license, he recorded his occupation as "truck driver."
Everyone called him T.C., for Top Cat. But Clifford Francis was not a truck driver.
T.C. drove a Cadillac and always had plenty of money and plenty of women. Most of the women -- although not Mildred -- worked the streets for him.
In Charlene's memory, T.C. weighed 500 pounds, at least. And he was mean. He beat Mildred and made her children watch. He beat the other women. He beat his boys -- Clifford, Joseph, David, Philip and Neamiah.
He didn't beat the three girls -- Charlene, Linda and Laura.
But T.C. was cruel to them in other ways.
"He told us we were worthless, we were stupid, that we weren't nothing but a bedsheet for men," Charlene said.
The five boys started getting in trouble young, stealing cars mostly.
David had just turned 12 when he got the first entry on his rap sheet. It was 1968, and he was arrested for assault and robbery.
His juvenile rap sheet goes on from there, 53 entries that record an adolescence of constant arrests for theft, breaking and entering, carrying concealed weapons, drugs and escaping from detention.
The girls, too, got into trouble with the law, Charlene said.
Drugs and prostitution. She always thought the whole family would end up dying from drugs or alcohol. Three of them were already gone: Clifford was murdered in a drug deal gone bad; Linda and David died of cancer.
Charlene kept coming back to one question. Why would a newspaper be writing a story about David? Had he murdered somebody?
I broke it to her gently, the way I'd told my daughter. "He went to prison that last time for rape," I said. "He raped me."
Now she was crying again, saying this was not the brother she knew, that he had plenty of girlfriends and didn't need to rape anybody, that he always protected his sisters.
"I know what rape is," she finally said. "I was raped myself. But I asked for it, because I was on drugs and I was prostituting. It was just me, being stupid."
"No, Charlene," I said. "You didn't ask for it. It was not your fault."
She shook her head, tears rolling down her face. "If I hadn't of been so stupid," she said.
"You know, that's what I was saying to myself for 20 years," I said.
Even broken families exert a powerful pull. Sometime in 1977, David Francis followed his mother to Cleveland. I couldn't find any evidence that he ever held a job, but his adult rap sheet starts with a Sept. 10, 1977, arrest for possession of criminal tools. The rap sheet has three more entries, most in connection with stealing cars.
But no violent assaults.
That seemed odd. What propelled him from stealing cars to rape?
From the prosecutor's file, I learned David Francis used many aliases: He was Dalin Allen when he was arrested for receiving stolen property.
He was Daniel Allen when he was arrested for aggravated burglary.
He was Tony Wayne when he was arrested for breaking and entering.
And he was Kevin Brown when he was arrested in Cleveland on Jan. 22, 1978, for aggravated robbery, aggravated burglary, carrying a concealed weapon -- and kidnapping.
The kidnapping charge intrigued me, but the police report that would have had details was missing. Kevin Brown pleaded guilty, so there was no trial transcript. What had he done? Who was the other victim?
I knew he had committed at least one crime, breaking and entering in 1977, with one of Lula Mae Foster's sons, Charles McIntyre. On a hunch, I scrutinized McIntyre's file, looking for a connection there.
I was almost at the end when I found it: On Jan. 23, 1978, while he was already in jail for another crime, McIntyre was charged with two counts of aggravated robbery and two counts of kidnapping.
Kevin Brown was arrested Jan. 22, 1978, for aggravated robbery.
And kidnapping.
McIntyre's file had all the details.
On Aug. 29, 1977, David Francis and Charles McIntyre forced a Cleveland priest, the Rev. Thomas Gallagher, at gunpoint to turn over $1,200 in bingo money from the rectory safe. They took watches and jewelry from Gallagher and his teenage helper. Then they bound the priest and the girl, pushed them into a closet and left.
Four months later, when police arrested Charles McIntyre for another crime, they found Gallagher's gold pocket watch.
Five days later, police arrested David Francis. He told them his name was Kevin Brown.
Now 77 and retired, Father Gallagher said the crime made him more watchful, more cautious, but he did not ask to be transferred from St. Philip Neri on Cleveland's west side to a suburban parish.
"It didn't change my attitude about living and working in the inner city," he said. "Even before I was a priest, I felt very strongly about interracial justice."
"Were you able to forgive the two men who robbed you?" I asked.
He seemed surprised. "When they didn't kill me, I forgave them right away."
As Kevin Brown, David Francis pleaded guilty to reduced charges from the rectory robbery. Authorities discovered his real identity when he was sent to prison.
He was paroled for that crime on July 2, 1984 -- seven days before the rape. But before he found me, he had another victim in mind.
His baby sister, Laura Wills.
The youngest of the eight children, Laura came to Cleveland with her mother in the mid-'70s. She stayed here after her mother and Charlene moved back to Boston.
"I kept my distance from David," Laura said, right before Christmas 2007. "He was always a problem child. I think he was disturbed in the head."
She last spoke to her brother right after his parole.
Laura was 19 and had a baby.
David wanted her to come downtown and meet him at a hotel. He wanted to put her out on the stroll -- pimp her out. When Laura declined, he started threatening her, saying he was going to have her beaten if she didn't do what he wanted.
Laura moved before he could find out where she was. Next thing she heard, he had died in prison.
Like Charlene, Laura succumbed to drugs and prostitution, and lost her children. She, too, was raped.
David Francis died at Pickaway Correctional Institution, a month before a parole hearing that might have set him free again.
I went there on Jan. 16, 2008.
Prisoners lie in an open field on a hill, their presence marked only by brick-size stones sunk into the earth above their caskets.
They don't even have names: In death, as in their life behind razor wire, they are identified by numbers.
David Francis was 130. I looked down at the stone, feeling an odd emptiness now that my journey had come to an end.
Finally, I said, "Well, Dave, Charlene and I are the only ones who really thought about you after you died."
Talking to him made me feel weird, like I was talking to myself in public. My hands were dirty, my shoes caked with mud. I had nothing to say. Why had I even come here?
I don't believe the dead can hear you speak. I don't believe that anything meaningful remains in their graves. I believe that our souls, or spirits, or whatever you want to call them, exist somewhere else after death. Where, I could not guess.
But we know the dead live on within the people who remember them.
Not long after I returned from David Francis' grave, I realized I had to go back to Eldred Theater.
I went in late January, on one of those Cleveland days that come in a dozen shades of gray. Students walked through the quad hunched over with their backpacks, heads down against the sleet.
The theater was almost dark when I went in, lit only by the ghost light on the stage. The bulb atop its pole glowed like an eerie beacon, leaving the edges and corners in gloom.
Some say ghost lights started way back in Shakespeare's time, when theater companies left candles on the stage to ward off the ghosts of performances past. Some say they light the theater for the friendly ghosts who live there.
I walked toward the back corner where David Francis had dragged me. My shadow followed me, a giant bodyguard hovering over each step.
Painted scenery flats leaned against the wall in stacks, crowding the corner. It looked . . . ordinary.
I tried to see it that way -- as the hundreds of students and actors and stagehands had seen it over the years.
But to me this was sinister and sacred ground. Here was the place where, for an hour removed from time, I was sure my life would end. Here was where I lost part of myself.
I looked up into the fly space, almost expecting to see myself up there among the lights, watching.
I felt disoriented, but my body was alert, trembling from anxiety so powerful it made my knees lock. I sat on the edge of the stage, trying to escape the heaviness I was feeling.
Sitting there in the dusky theater, I realized why I had not felt anything when I stood at David Francis' grave. That cemetery was where the prison buried him. But here, in this theater, was where I needed to bury him.
I went out on this story to find David Francis. I thought if I found out who he was, I could discover the reason that our paths crossed. And if I could understand that, I could protect my children.
Now I could see that what I really wanted to find was not David Francis, but the source of my fear. I wanted to confront that fear and kill it.
What happened was not what I expected.
I found David Francis. I learned that he had a horrifying childhood, that he learned violence at his father's knee, and that he took that violence and horror and damage with him when he went out into the world at the age of 12.
I found Charlene, who stopped doing drugs and drinking, got her family back, and in time forgave and buried the father who hurt her.
I found Laura, who took me to the church that had saved her.
I found Father Tom Gallagher, who would not let being held at gunpoint, tied up and locked in a closet stop him from doing what he was put on this Earth to do.
I needed to hear their stories. They needed to tell them.
"We did our part; we kept it inside so long," Laura said. "It's something that needed to be told."
Human beings have been telling each other stories since we lived in caves and had no written language. We tell stories to remember, to pass on our history, to worship, to teach, to exert power, to mourn, to celebrate, to entertain.
We tell stories to connect with each other, to make sense of the world and our experience in it.
Maybe that is the point, in the end: We all have burdens we must carry through life, grief and disappointments that we cannot change. But we can make them lighter if we do not bear them silently and alone.
I cannot protect my children. I know this. It is the terrible truth of being a parent: The day comes when we have to send our very hearts out into the world, unprotected.
But now I know that my children protected me, all those years.
They tethered me to all that is hopeful. They made me brave. They held me to this life until I was ready to come back to myself.
Sitting there in Eldred Theater, I looked back up into the fly space. It's OK, I thought. You can come back.
This article is a condensed version of a Plain Dealer series, available at www.cleveland.com/beyondrape/.
survivor@plaind.com
Sitting there in the dusky theater, I realized why I had not felt anything when
I stood at David Francis' grave. That cemetery was where the prison buried him. But here, in this theater, was where I needed to bury him.
Charlene kept coming back to one question. Why would a newspaper be writing a story
about David? Had he murdered somebody? I broke it to her gently, the way I'd told my daughter. "He went to prison that last time for rape," I said. "He raped me."
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/insight/stories/2008/06/15/joanna.ART_ART_06-15-08_G1_V4AFNHP.html?sid=101
Search for attacker reveals unexpected truths
Sunday, June 15, 2008 3:52 AM
On Oct. 27, 1984, a headline on Page 14A in The Plain Dealer read, "Disgusted judge gives repeat offender 30 years for rape."
The story followed standard newspaper protocol: In it, the victim was anonymous.
In this version, the victim has a name. I am Joanna Connors, and I am telling the story I kept private for 23 years. I'm doing it for all of the others who have survived sexual assault in silence, ashamed and afraid to tell their stories.
I was running late. Again.
Dammit.
I was speeding down Euclid Avenue, headed east out of downtown Cleveland for a 5 p.m. interview at Case Western Reserve University. It was 5:10. Rush hour had begun.
This was in 1984, when I was the theater critic for The Plain Dealer. It was July 9, high summer, still hot and sunny in the evening.
I'd lived in Cleveland only 10 months. I still didn't know all the shortcuts, but I did know that University Circle was crazy at this hour. I should have left more time.
I was going to Case to write a story about the Actors' Company, a summer theater group at Eldred Theater. When I got to the parking lot, it was 5:20. I ran up to the small lobby area on the second floor and looked into the theater.
Empty.
"Dammit," I said, under my breath. "They're gone."
I didn't notice the guy standing on the other side of the lobby until he said: "They said to wait a few minutes. They'll be back."
I fidgeted and smiled. A few minutes passed. He took a cigarette from a pack of Kools and lit it.
"I'm working on the lights," he said. "Do you want to see what I've been doing?"
I walked into the theater, down the right aisle, and climbed the steps to the stage.
He pointed up toward the lights, with a vague wave of his hand, and said something that made no sense. Animal alarm flashed through my body, followed by a flood of adrenaline that said: This is not right. In fact, this is bad. Really bad. Get out of here. Now.
"I think I'll wait outside," I said.
Too late. He grabbed me from behind, pinning my arms to my sides.
I felt his hands on me. I felt the blade next to my neck, then next to my chest. I felt the scrape of the concrete wall on my back.
"Have you ever had a black man before?"
"No."
"I bet you've always wanted to," he said.
His breath carried the smell of cigarettes and alcohol.
He pushed his body into my face.
How long did it last? I had no idea: My sense of time slipped out of my grasp. The theater felt like a sealed tomb, something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story, soundproof and windowless. I feigned cooperation. "We'd better leave. Someone may find us," I said.
He got up and started pulling on his pants. I got my skirt.
He put the dagger-scissors up to my back and pushed the point in just enough so I could feel it.
He led me out a back door and down a staircase. Then we were outside. I registered the change in one-word thoughts: Bright. Sun. Air.
DAVE.
In the sun, I could see the tattoo on his right arm: "DAVE," carved into his skin with crude capital letters.
He turned me, so I was facing him. He licked his finger and rubbed at the blood on my neck. He smoothed my hair.
"Now, don't you go to the cops," he said. "If you go to the cops, I'll have to go to prison."
I know this story will not be easy to read.
It isn't easy to tell, either. It scares me to tell it, and it scares me even more to think of the reaction to it.
It is about rape. It is about race and class. And it is about our community -- our line-in-the-sand combativeness over these issues, and our stubborn and fearful reluctance to talk about them.
I've struggled with this story for more than 20 years. It scares me so much that I stopped telling it when I no longer had to. I told it to the police, the emergency room nurses and doctor, the detectives, the assistant prosecutor, the judge and the jury. I told it to my husband and my sisters and my mother. And then, of course, I told it to psychiatrists and psychologists, so many over the years I lost count.
When I decided to tell it publicly, I decided I would have to tell the raw, uncomfortable and sometimes painful truth. All of it, including things that I never spoke of before, the feelings that make me look bad. If I held back, then telling wouldn't help anyone. Including me.
So here is an uncomfortable truth: I ignored my instinct not to trust a stranger, because the stranger was young and black, and I did not want to look like a racist white woman who automatically does not trust young black men.
If he had been white? I'm not sure -- but I think I would have left.
Instead, I stayed. I walked into that theater, down the right-side aisle, and into a life constricted by fear and hiding.
The fear poked its way to the surface two years ago. I was with my daughter, Zoe, a high school senior, and we were doing the obligatory college tour at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
We were headed toward a library when the guide stopped at a small telephone box, which hung on a pole by a blue light.
"We have these all over campus," he said. "They're safety stations. If you're walking alone at night and you think someone is following you, or you might be in danger, you get to one of these blue lights, call, and help will be there within five minutes."
"Five minutes?" I whispered to Zoe. "Who are they kidding?
"Five minutes is way too late. In five minutes, you could be dead."
She rolled her eyes, the universal teenage response to fretful parents.
I looked at her. My beautiful, strong, confident daughter. She was a part of me, and I was a part of her. She had me in her blood, her cells. I would die for her, I would kill for her, and now I could see only one thing: She was prey.
It took me months after our college trip to work up the courage to tell Zoe. She cried. She said now she understood why I was so overprotective as a mother, why I smothered her, and why my husband guarded her every move.
Then I told my son, Dan, who got angry. He did not say much, but in time he came home with a tattoo on his chest: "MOM," inside a heart.
Both of them wanted to know more: Who was this guy? Why did he do it? What was his story?
I didn't know.
I had seen DAVE five times: When he raped me. When I identified him two days later in a lineup. When I sat across a table from him in the county jail three weeks later, to testify in a parole-revocation hearing that would keep him in jail. At the trial. And at the sentencing, where the judge sent him to Ohio's worst prison for 30 to 75 years.
Beyond that, I didn't know much more than his name. Yet, if I made a list of the most influential people in my life, DAVE would be near the top. He had controlled so much of how I lived.
I had told my children. Now it was time to answer all their questions -- and mine.
I had to reclaim the parts of me I lost to him.
I had to go find DAVE.
My search started with records from the Cuyahoga County prosecutor's office: police reports, witness statements, rap sheets, subpoenas, lab reports, the assistant prosecutor's trial notes, appeal briefs and grand jury indictments.
Halfway through the stack, I came to a page that stopped me.
On a court record, someone had scrawled the word DECEASED, and underlined it three times.
David Francis was dead.
He died of Hodgkin's disease in prison on Aug. 18, 2000.
I felt let down and relieved at the same time: I would not get to confront DAVE / I would not have to confront DAVE.
Now what?
I couldn't give up my search. I wasn't sure why I felt compelled to dig into the past, but I knew I had to do it. I needed to face my fears, but I also wanted some understanding: What brought him to this? Who was he, and why did our paths collide in violence? What happened to him afterward?
Or was I really trying to find out what happened to me afterward?
I turned back to the documents.
On release from prison for raping me, David Francis intended to return to Cleveland to live.
In one parole application, he said he would live with Lula Mae Foster, his aunt. In the next, he said she was his grandmother.
Foster still lives on E. 82nd Street, in the Hough neighborhood, one of Cleveland's most distressed. Last summer, I went to see her.
"Oh, yes, Millie's son," she finally recalled.
She raised 10 children -- five McIntyres from her first marriage and five Fosters from the second. But David Francis was no relation and never lived with her.
Foster met Francis' mother, Millie, at a basement after-hours place called Velma's. That was back in the 1970s, when Millie and some of her kids had moved to Cleveland to escape Millie's abusive husband.
Foster remembered prison officials calling to say David had died.
They asked her what to do with his body. "I said: 'I couldn't tell you. All I know is, his mother is dead, his brothers and sisters are in Boston, but I don't know any numbers. You'll have to do with him what you do. I don't have the money to bury him.' I hated it, but there was nothing else I could do."
Foster thought the youngest daughter, Laura, still lived in Cleveland. But she didn't know how to get in touch with her, either.
"I haven't thought about Millie or her kids in years," she said.
I found Charlene Blakney, David Francis' oldest sister, later that summer by combing records at the Massachusetts Bureau of Vital Statistics. She lived in New Bedford, about 45 minutes south of Boston.
"Do you know what happened to my brother?" she asked. "I tried to find him. I knew he was dead, but I've never known what happened to him."
I eased into the reason behind my visit by telling her he died of cancer and was buried in a prison cemetery.
"This family was cursed," she said.
David Anthony Francis was born Dec. 11, 1956, in Boston, the fourth child of Mildred and Clifford Francis, who would have five boys and three girls together.
When they married, on Aug. 8, 1950, Clifford was 24 years old. On the marriage license, he recorded his occupation as "truck driver."
Everyone called him T.C., for Top Cat. But Clifford Francis was not a truck driver.
T.C. drove a Cadillac and always had plenty of money and plenty of women. Most of the women -- although not Mildred -- worked the streets for him.
In Charlene's memory, T.C. weighed 500 pounds, at least. And he was mean. He beat Mildred and made her children watch. He beat the other women. He beat his boys -- Clifford, Joseph, David, Philip and Neamiah.
He didn't beat the three girls -- Charlene, Linda and Laura.
But T.C. was cruel to them in other ways.
"He told us we were worthless, we were stupid, that we weren't nothing but a bedsheet for men," Charlene said.
The five boys started getting in trouble young, stealing cars mostly.
David had just turned 12 when he got the first entry on his rap sheet. It was 1968, and he was arrested for assault and robbery.
His juvenile rap sheet goes on from there, 53 entries that record an adolescence of constant arrests for theft, breaking and entering, carrying concealed weapons, drugs and escaping from detention.
The girls, too, got into trouble with the law, Charlene said.
Drugs and prostitution. She always thought the whole family would end up dying from drugs or alcohol. Three of them were already gone: Clifford was murdered in a drug deal gone bad; Linda and David died of cancer.
Charlene kept coming back to one question. Why would a newspaper be writing a story about David? Had he murdered somebody?
I broke it to her gently, the way I'd told my daughter. "He went to prison that last time for rape," I said. "He raped me."
Now she was crying again, saying this was not the brother she knew, that he had plenty of girlfriends and didn't need to rape anybody, that he always protected his sisters.
"I know what rape is," she finally said. "I was raped myself. But I asked for it, because I was on drugs and I was prostituting. It was just me, being stupid."
"No, Charlene," I said. "You didn't ask for it. It was not your fault."
She shook her head, tears rolling down her face. "If I hadn't of been so stupid," she said.
"You know, that's what I was saying to myself for 20 years," I said.
Even broken families exert a powerful pull. Sometime in 1977, David Francis followed his mother to Cleveland. I couldn't find any evidence that he ever held a job, but his adult rap sheet starts with a Sept. 10, 1977, arrest for possession of criminal tools. The rap sheet has three more entries, most in connection with stealing cars.
But no violent assaults.
That seemed odd. What propelled him from stealing cars to rape?
From the prosecutor's file, I learned David Francis used many aliases: He was Dalin Allen when he was arrested for receiving stolen property.
He was Daniel Allen when he was arrested for aggravated burglary.
He was Tony Wayne when he was arrested for breaking and entering.
And he was Kevin Brown when he was arrested in Cleveland on Jan. 22, 1978, for aggravated robbery, aggravated burglary, carrying a concealed weapon -- and kidnapping.
The kidnapping charge intrigued me, but the police report that would have had details was missing. Kevin Brown pleaded guilty, so there was no trial transcript. What had he done? Who was the other victim?
I knew he had committed at least one crime, breaking and entering in 1977, with one of Lula Mae Foster's sons, Charles McIntyre. On a hunch, I scrutinized McIntyre's file, looking for a connection there.
I was almost at the end when I found it: On Jan. 23, 1978, while he was already in jail for another crime, McIntyre was charged with two counts of aggravated robbery and two counts of kidnapping.
Kevin Brown was arrested Jan. 22, 1978, for aggravated robbery.
And kidnapping.
McIntyre's file had all the details.
On Aug. 29, 1977, David Francis and Charles McIntyre forced a Cleveland priest, the Rev. Thomas Gallagher, at gunpoint to turn over $1,200 in bingo money from the rectory safe. They took watches and jewelry from Gallagher and his teenage helper. Then they bound the priest and the girl, pushed them into a closet and left.
Four months later, when police arrested Charles McIntyre for another crime, they found Gallagher's gold pocket watch.
Five days later, police arrested David Francis. He told them his name was Kevin Brown.
Now 77 and retired, Father Gallagher said the crime made him more watchful, more cautious, but he did not ask to be transferred from St. Philip Neri on Cleveland's west side to a suburban parish.
"It didn't change my attitude about living and working in the inner city," he said. "Even before I was a priest, I felt very strongly about interracial justice."
"Were you able to forgive the two men who robbed you?" I asked.
He seemed surprised. "When they didn't kill me, I forgave them right away."
As Kevin Brown, David Francis pleaded guilty to reduced charges from the rectory robbery. Authorities discovered his real identity when he was sent to prison.
He was paroled for that crime on July 2, 1984 -- seven days before the rape. But before he found me, he had another victim in mind.
His baby sister, Laura Wills.
The youngest of the eight children, Laura came to Cleveland with her mother in the mid-'70s. She stayed here after her mother and Charlene moved back to Boston.
"I kept my distance from David," Laura said, right before Christmas 2007. "He was always a problem child. I think he was disturbed in the head."
She last spoke to her brother right after his parole.
Laura was 19 and had a baby.
David wanted her to come downtown and meet him at a hotel. He wanted to put her out on the stroll -- pimp her out. When Laura declined, he started threatening her, saying he was going to have her beaten if she didn't do what he wanted.
Laura moved before he could find out where she was. Next thing she heard, he had died in prison.
Like Charlene, Laura succumbed to drugs and prostitution, and lost her children. She, too, was raped.
David Francis died at Pickaway Correctional Institution, a month before a parole hearing that might have set him free again.
I went there on Jan. 16, 2008.
Prisoners lie in an open field on a hill, their presence marked only by brick-size stones sunk into the earth above their caskets.
They don't even have names: In death, as in their life behind razor wire, they are identified by numbers.
David Francis was 130. I looked down at the stone, feeling an odd emptiness now that my journey had come to an end.
Finally, I said, "Well, Dave, Charlene and I are the only ones who really thought about you after you died."
Talking to him made me feel weird, like I was talking to myself in public. My hands were dirty, my shoes caked with mud. I had nothing to say. Why had I even come here?
I don't believe the dead can hear you speak. I don't believe that anything meaningful remains in their graves. I believe that our souls, or spirits, or whatever you want to call them, exist somewhere else after death. Where, I could not guess.
But we know the dead live on within the people who remember them.
Not long after I returned from David Francis' grave, I realized I had to go back to Eldred Theater.
I went in late January, on one of those Cleveland days that come in a dozen shades of gray. Students walked through the quad hunched over with their backpacks, heads down against the sleet.
The theater was almost dark when I went in, lit only by the ghost light on the stage. The bulb atop its pole glowed like an eerie beacon, leaving the edges and corners in gloom.
Some say ghost lights started way back in Shakespeare's time, when theater companies left candles on the stage to ward off the ghosts of performances past. Some say they light the theater for the friendly ghosts who live there.
I walked toward the back corner where David Francis had dragged me. My shadow followed me, a giant bodyguard hovering over each step.
Painted scenery flats leaned against the wall in stacks, crowding the corner. It looked . . . ordinary.
I tried to see it that way -- as the hundreds of students and actors and stagehands had seen it over the years.
But to me this was sinister and sacred ground. Here was the place where, for an hour removed from time, I was sure my life would end. Here was where I lost part of myself.
I looked up into the fly space, almost expecting to see myself up there among the lights, watching.
I felt disoriented, but my body was alert, trembling from anxiety so powerful it made my knees lock. I sat on the edge of the stage, trying to escape the heaviness I was feeling.
Sitting there in the dusky theater, I realized why I had not felt anything when I stood at David Francis' grave. That cemetery was where the prison buried him. But here, in this theater, was where I needed to bury him.
I went out on this story to find David Francis. I thought if I found out who he was, I could discover the reason that our paths crossed. And if I could understand that, I could protect my children.
Now I could see that what I really wanted to find was not David Francis, but the source of my fear. I wanted to confront that fear and kill it.
What happened was not what I expected.
I found David Francis. I learned that he had a horrifying childhood, that he learned violence at his father's knee, and that he took that violence and horror and damage with him when he went out into the world at the age of 12.
I found Charlene, who stopped doing drugs and drinking, got her family back, and in time forgave and buried the father who hurt her.
I found Laura, who took me to the church that had saved her.
I found Father Tom Gallagher, who would not let being held at gunpoint, tied up and locked in a closet stop him from doing what he was put on this Earth to do.
I needed to hear their stories. They needed to tell them.
"We did our part; we kept it inside so long," Laura said. "It's something that needed to be told."
Human beings have been telling each other stories since we lived in caves and had no written language. We tell stories to remember, to pass on our history, to worship, to teach, to exert power, to mourn, to celebrate, to entertain.
We tell stories to connect with each other, to make sense of the world and our experience in it.
Maybe that is the point, in the end: We all have burdens we must carry through life, grief and disappointments that we cannot change. But we can make them lighter if we do not bear them silently and alone.
I cannot protect my children. I know this. It is the terrible truth of being a parent: The day comes when we have to send our very hearts out into the world, unprotected.
But now I know that my children protected me, all those years.
They tethered me to all that is hopeful. They made me brave. They held me to this life until I was ready to come back to myself.
Sitting there in Eldred Theater, I looked back up into the fly space. It's OK, I thought. You can come back.
This article is a condensed version of a Plain Dealer series, available at www.cleveland.com/beyondrape/.
survivor@plaind.com
Sitting there in the dusky theater, I realized why I had not felt anything when
I stood at David Francis' grave. That cemetery was where the prison buried him. But here, in this theater, was where I needed to bury him.
Charlene kept coming back to one question. Why would a newspaper be writing a story
about David? Had he murdered somebody? I broke it to her gently, the way I'd told my daughter. "He went to prison that last time for rape," I said. "He raped me."
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