I Will Find You (10 page)

October 1984.

As the trial gets closer, my brain shifts to obsessing over more familiar territory: What to Wear. I’ve seen courtrooms in action only in movies and on TV shows, a predicament that has transformed the witness box into a stage. I have been cast in the role of the victim, but I have no idea to how dress the part, let alone play it. For several nights, I have the Freudian dream that I am naked among the clothed, desperate to cover myself while wondering why I am naked.

Intrinsically tied to the “What to Wear” question is the much bigger question that has ruled my life since I was ten years old and my uncle called me the chubby sister, to distinguish me from Nancy, “the smart sister,” and Claire, “the pretty sister.”

I am, and forever will be, the daughter of a mother who never stopped trying to lose those “last” five pounds, who said the last-five-pounds thing so often I believed her. Now I look at pictures of her from my childhood, from our years
in Miami, and I see that she was as slender and glamorous as Jackie Kennedy. I remember how beautiful she was, in her chic, spaghetti-strap dresses, the Bernardo sandals that made her tanned legs look long and elegant, the slim white slacks she wore with sleeveless blouses that tied at the waist. Every night, she put her hair in pin curls, with X-crossed bobby pins, a ritual that somehow produced a Jackie bouffant in the morning. She wore Tabu perfume, a dark, musky scent that instantly takes me back to evenings when my sisters and I would sit on her bed and watch her dress to go out to parties. She smoked like Jackie Kennedy, too, mostly to keep her weight down. She took us to Virginia every summer to visit our cousins, and on the long car trips we vied for the seat in front, right next to her, where she would hand us her pack of Kents and ask us to light a cigarette for her. I loved putting the cigarette between my lips and working that glowing little push-in lighter in the dashboard.

In one photo, my mother is in a hospital cafeteria, her starched white nurse’s cap pinned to her hair, a cup of coffee on the table and a cigarette in her hand. Years later, she told me that when she was in nurses’ training, hospitals kept open jars of amphetamines in the drug dispensary for student nurses and residents who were pulling twenty-four-hour shifts. “It was like a candy jar,” she said, delighted by the memory. “We’d just dip in whenever we wanted.”

Still, she dieted. “I just want to break 130,” she said over and over, which meant she weighed 131 or 132 and really wanted to starve herself down to 125. But like every women’s magazine that has ever existed, she promoted dieting one
moment and featured fattening food the next. Her cooking repertoire consisted of boiled hot dogs served with baked beans, hamburgers and tater tots, London broil and baked potatoes. For many years, every Sunday she made a meal from her Georgia farm childhood: real fried chicken, corn on the cob, mashed potatoes, and string beans that she had cooked for hours with a big chunk of salt pork, until the surface of the water reflected light like an oil spill. While we ate, she smoked.

When I was fourteen, she took me to a Weight Watchers meeting in a basement room of the public library. Her effort to be helpful felt only like criticism. I sulked in the back row, behind the women in velour tracksuits, listening to the energetic leader tell us how to cook Weight Watchers meals that our husbands and children would eat. I am not sure whom I hated more at that moment, my mother or myself.

The first time I remember my mother telling me I looked thin, her ultimate compliment, was when she saw me after the two-month bout of dysentery that had started in Bolivia, on a trip my husband and I took through South America when we were twenty-three. “You’re so thin!” she said, before she even hugged me. It makes me sad now to remember how happy that made me feel. We joked that we should bottle the Bolivian water and sell it to Americans as the latest diet craze. We would call it: La Paz.

So. This is the body that I still scorn, the body that disappoints me, the body that David Francis cut and violated, the body
I still scrutinize every morning in the mirror, focusing on its imperfections.

I want to think of it as the strong body that survived, but my mind fails me.

As the trial draws near, the worries about how I will look to the jury help me avoid thinking about the rape and what I will have to tell the jury. My mother takes me to the mall to buy some new clothes. After all that worry, I will have no memory of what I end up wearing.

My trial is far less dramatic than movies had led me to believe it would be. I will learn this from reading the 499-page court reporter’s transcript many years later, not from being there to watch it unfold, because I am not allowed in the courtroom except to testify. It’s common practice to sequester witnesses, and so I wait outside Courtroom 17C, in an open area shared with three other courtrooms.

As rolling schedules of pretrials and hearings come and go in the other courtrooms, the waiting area fills up with victims waiting to testify and families there to support the accused, almost all of them black. The days I spend in that waiting area I see, for the first time, an American reality I knew only in the abstract: In Cuyahoga County, as in the rest of America, the criminal courts are filled with people who are black or poor, victims and defendants alike. Often, I was the only white person in the waiting area.

Census statistics show that African-Americans make up 13.6 percent of the U.S. population, a percentage mirrored almost exactly in Cuyahoga County. But in the latest Bureau
of Justice Statistics, from 2013, 37 percent of imprisoned men were black while 32 percent were white.

In 2013, the Sentencing Project, an advocacy and research group, reported to the United Nations that African-American males are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white males, and warned: “If current trends continue, one of every three black American males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime … compared to one of every seventeen white males.”

The trial begins on Monday, October 22, 1984, with jury selection. It takes about two hours. The judge then sends the jurors and alternates, the lawyers and the bailiff on a bus out to Eldred Theater for a jury view requested by the defense lawyers, who hope to show how dark the theater is, how hard it would be to see anything or anyone clearly.

We return to court on Tuesday, October 23, at 1:00 p.m. My husband and my mother leave me in the waiting area to go watch the trial, but they promise to come out during breaks to update me.

“Levenberg was great,” my husband reports after the opening statement, smiling as though Levenberg is now some hero who’d ridden in to save the day. The smile feels like a betrayal. We’re supposed to hate Levenberg, together. I still hate him. I need him, too: I need him to win this and save me. I hate needing him. I gulp these feelings down and smile back,
nodding. My husband bends to hug me before rushing back to the courtroom for the defense’s opening.

I shift on the straight-backed chair, trying and failing to get comfortable. Time passes. People come and go from the other courtrooms, but the door to 17C remains closed, a silent rebuke to my mistakes and failures.

I keep my eyes on that door and wait, a supplicant to a powerful secret society. Inside, they are talking about me. They are calling me “Miss Connors.” They are going over what I did that day, and what was done to me.

The waiting area empties. Close to the end of the day, a sheriff’s deputy emerges from the courtroom and walks toward me, his belt sagging under the weight of his hardware.

“You’ve been called,” he says.

My heart is a wild bird when I enter the courtroom. I search for my husband and mother and find them in the first row, turned toward me with expressions they intend to be reassuring. I fix my eyes on them, trying to obliterate the rest of the courtroom, but I can feel David Francis watching me go down the aisle.

The room is still and silent. I walk through a fog to the judge’s bench.

No one has come to watch the trial, with the exception of an older couple I don’t recognize. They turn out to be court groupies who come to the Justice Center to watch trials almost every day. “It gets us out of the house, and it’s better than TV,” the woman tells my mother one day.

After the oath I take my place on the witness stand, which puts Francis directly in front of me, slouching at the defense
table between his two lawyers. He sits up straight and studies me; a hard challenge is his gaze, his final attempt at intimidation. I look away, toward the jurors, but my eyes slip back to him to see if he’s still watching me. He is. I see that he’s made himself presentable with a white knit polo shirt, his hair arranged in neat cornrows.

“He’s getting ready to be pretty for the big guys in prison,” my husband says later, trying to cheer me up. He doesn’t. His sarcasm infuriates me. I push my anger down and pretend it isn’t there.

Over the coming years, I will see enough trials as a reporter to know that they are slow and tedious. Even murder trials can make you feel as though you’re stuck in an SAT exam that will never end, especially when the coroners take the stand. Prosecutors have to provide evidence for each count of the indictment, and at the same time counter any doubts the defense might try to introduce during their part of the trial. Since Francis is charged with eighteen counts, Levenberg has to go through them one by one, building a numbing and disjointed story that begins with questions like, “How long have you worked at
The Plain Dealer
?” and “Where did you park when you got out to Case Western Reserve University?” and “What kind of vehicle?”

He spends seven pages of transcript asking me about the lighting in the theater and how well I could see that day. At one point, he asks me to take off my glasses and tell him how many fingers he’s holding up.

I answer these like a star expert hired for the trial, but then Levenberg comes to the point of what happened in the theater.
I can feel my face flush red when he asks: “You say there came a point in time when as a result of the conversation that you were having with this individual about the lights, you became aware in your own mind that there was something untoward, that something didn’t jive here, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“What, if anything, did you do at that time?”

My voice starts to tremble. As I go through the story once again, I float from the witness box and enter that other dimension. I can see myself on the stage. I hear myself say, “I think I’ll wait outside.” I feel him grab me from behind. “No,” I say. I feel the metal at my throat.

Levenberg asks: “What happened at that time?”

From afar, I answer.

“I saw my hand and it had blood on it and I became terribly frightened and I thought I was going to be killed.”

My voice breaks on the word “killed.” I stop talking, trying to hold back the flood of my fear and my grief and my shame. I tell myself I cannot cry in court.

When I lose that battle, the judge leans over with a box of tissues, looking at me with the face of a concerned father. That makes me cry even more.

Levenberg waits while I dry my tears and clear my throat, trying to get rid of the tightness. He goes on, easing me back with softball questions like, “This all took place there on the stage, is that correct?”

After a few of those, he asks, “What was the next thing that occurred?” and I have to resume the story.

“I was saying, ‘Oh, please, don’t do anything to me,’” I say. “I thought I was going to be murdered.” The tears come again, but this time I am not watching myself from above. I am in my body, fully in it, and I am telling the people in the courtroom what I felt that day.

I was going to be murdered. I would die on that stage.

Now I can’t stop the tears with tissue.

“Your Honor, I think this might be an appropriate time to stop,” Levenberg says. The judge calls a recess until the next morning.

I go home with my husband and my mother, who hover over me with the gentleness of hospice volunteers. I don’t sleep. At 9:15 on Wednesday, October 24, we begin again. Levenberg leads me through each count of the rape, each separate sexual act. It takes over two hours, longer than the rape itself.

Then the defense starts the cross-examination. The two public defenders, stuck with a defendant who has tattooed his own name on his arm, will try to build a case of mistaken identity. They failed with their first attempt, a motion to get the lineup thrown out on the grounds that David Francis was the only one in it with a “DAVE” tattoo.

The lead defense lawyer, John Adams, asks in as many ways as he can about how dark it must have been in the theater, suggesting that it was too dark, really, to see much. He goes over how terrified I was, too terrified to make a real identification. He asks if I looked more at the weapon than at the rapist. He shows me photos of the men in the lineup. Don’t I agree that most of them do not fit my description?

When it is over at last, I have to leave the courtroom again, still sequestered in case I am called back to the stand. Again I wait, alone, for my mother and husband to tell me what’s happening. After the ER doctor testifies, my mother rushes out with exciting news.

“The doctor described you as thin! A thin woman!”

Another time, my husband comes out to report on the defense’s first alibi witness. She’s twenty-one, he says, she has a one-year-old child, and she describes David Francis as a friend. She is the one from the jail records, who visited him in jail several times. In the trial transcript, one of the first questions the defense lawyer asks her is, “Where do you presently reside?”

She responds, “What that mean?”

Once they establish her address, she testifies that the last time she saw David Francis was on July 9, at around four in the afternoon. They were at her apartment with her old man, her mother, and a couple more friends. “We just be sitting around talking, looking at TV, that’s all,” she says.

The lawyer moves the story along, asking, “Did there come a time when Mr. Francis left your home?”