I Will Find You (13 page)

In myths and legends, the fire-breathing dragon never has a family. The dragon always lives alone in a cave or on a mountaintop, and the person who sets out to vanquish him must first go through a dark forest.

My dragon had a family. My dark forest was a wilderness of databases and public records.

David Francis was one of eight children born in Boston in the ‘50s and ‘60s to Mildred (or Millie) Rodriques and Clifford Francis.

I discovered this on one of the dozens of prison reports stuffed into the prosecutor’s files—reports that had so little cohesion over David Francis’s sixteen years of incarceration in five different Ohio prisons that each one offered different, almost random information. On this one, David Francis listed his siblings’ names: Charlene, Clifford Jr., Philip, Joseph, Linda, Neamiah, and Laura.

I already knew their mother died a month after David Francis raped me in 1984. A Social Security death record check showed that their father, Clifford, died in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1995. The same record said Clifford Jr. died in 1994, at the age of forty.

I searched for the other siblings on Nexis, where I found page after page of names matching “Linda Francis” or “Joseph Francis.” The women could have married and changed their names as well, and Neamiah—the one name I had a hope of finding—was off the grid as far as I could tell. Perhaps he never registered for Social Security and never voted or drove or put his name to any of the other information sources culled by Nexis.

I thought about trying to find Laura, the sister the Reverend Russell Harrison had seen, in one of the scores of churches that lined Superior Avenue, but that would be like trying to find someone by checking every Starbucks in Manhattan on a Sunday morning.

I finally found Neamiah in the Cuyahoga County criminal records, under the misspelled “Nemiah Francis.” His five arrests, between 1987 and 2005, all involved drug possession and abuse, making him a casualty of the War on Drugs, which statistics show was waged mostly on young men in poor black communities across America.

Neamiah’s last known address, in 2005, was an overcrowded men’s homeless shelter in Cleveland, the one place Sue told me she hated to go to see her clients. When I called the shelter, they said he was no longer there. He could have gone anywhere, they said.

My last stab was Charlene, the oldest sister. David Francis listed her as his backup support for parole, if Ida Taylor couldn’t take him. He had listed her married name, Blakney.

I decided to go to Boston for a couple of days to see what I could find of the Francis family at the Massachusetts Registry of Vital Records and Statistics.

I ended up spending the day there, in an office park on the outskirts of the city, going through birth, death, and marriage certificates. Dates of birth are especially helpful in records searches, and the marriage and death certificates might give me leads, too.

I found that Mildred E. Morrell (not Rodriques, or Matia) and Clifford G. Francis were married on August 8, 1950, by a justice of the peace in Boston. Clifford was twenty-four and a truck driver. Mildred was thirty years old and a “stitcher,” which meant she ran a sewing machine in a factory.

Mildred was also pregnant. A birth certificate showed that Charlene Francis was born four months later, on December 19, 1950, in Boston. It noted the parents’ races: Clifford was “red,” Mildred was “col.” I found birth certificates for all of the other children except the two youngest, Laura and Neamiah. I was beginning to think I would never find them.

A death certificate for Mildred Francis, “AKA Matia Rodriques,” said she had died of “smoke inhalation and severe thermal injuries” on August 16, 1984. The cause of the fire was “pending investigation.” Her son, Clifford Francis Jr., died under suspicious circumstances, too, on January 27, 1994, of “multiple blunt trauma to face and forehead, struck by another
person in a residence.” The medical examiner ruled it a homicide. His death, like his mother’s, was unsolved.

Another marriage certificate showed that Clifford Francis Sr. remarried after Millie died. He lived another eleven years, dying on August 24, 1995, of pancreatic cancer. By then, his racial category on his death certificate had changed from “red” to “American Indian.”

In 2007, the
Plain Dealer
’s editor retired. The publisher surprised us all when he hired the first female editor in chief in the paper’s 150-year history. In June, Susan Goldberg arrived and changed everything for me. Like all editors, she wanted to put her stamp on the paper and win prizes with important stories. When my trusted editor told her about a story I was pursuing on my own—the David Francis story—she called me into her office to tell me she wanted it for the paper.

I still wasn’t sure I would find anyone in the Francis family, or that I could produce the kind of story I knew she envisioned: a prize-winner. All editors, no matter how much they deny it, want to win the big journalism awards. Neither of us mentioned it, but it was obvious, and it made me uneasy. I never saw myself as a winner. Most of the time, I still felt like an imposter in the newsroom.

But I needed more than weekends and evenings to work on it, and I needed an editor to help me find my way. We came to an agreement. My children and my husband would have full veto power over everything in the story. I would have six
months—a rare luxury in the news business—and a photographer with me on all of my interview attempts.

At the first editorial planning meeting, I noted another newspaper rarity. Almost everyone around the table was a woman—the editor, the managing editor, the features editor who would be handling my story, the layout editor, the copy editor, and the photographer. I wish I had taken a picture to send to the guy who’d asked about the “pulchritude corner.”

I told them I had eleven different addresses for Charlene, all of them listed in Nexis as current, and I’d located one of the brothers, Philip, in the Massachusetts state prison at Bridgewater.

We decided I would go back to Boston to talk to Charlene and Philip, and that the photographer, Lisa, would go with me.

Setting up an interview with an inmate is a long process with many steps, and back then it was usually conducted by letter, not e-mail or phone. Massachusetts required me to get permission to see Philip first from the head of the prison system, then from the warden. After they signed off, I wrote to Philip directly to ask for an interview, and waited while the letter went through the prison’s mail inspections. Then I waited for him to respond, and for that letter to go through the process in reverse.

When Philip didn’t respond, I wrote again, this time including a letter of agreement that he could just sign. A few weeks later I got it back, signed “PHILIP,” in block lettering. Someone else had written in his last name. I set up an interview date with the warden, and in October Lisa and I flew to Boston.

We looked for Charlene first. Some of her addresses were in Boston, but most were in New Bedford, a town on the coast south of Boston that was once the hub of the whaling industry. Herman Melville had worked out of New Bedford as a whaler.

New Bedford was also the site of a brutal barroom gang rape in 1983, the rape at the center of the 1988 film
The Accused
. The title referred not to the rapists but to the victim, who was drunk that night and wore a skimpy outfit. Even the prosecutor, a woman, initially thought this meant she’d asked for it and could not possibly claim she was raped. The movie was a hit. Critics loved it; Jodie Foster, who played the rape victim, won an Oscar. Even so, I could never bring myself to watch it.

The morning after we arrived, Lisa and I stayed in the Boston area to check Charlene’s addresses there. One led us to vacant lot that had become a neighborhood dump. Among the litter, a rusted grocery-store cart, tipped on its side, held some beer cans and a soggy piece of clothing.

Next door, two men were bent over the engine of a car. I asked them if they knew anything about the family that lived in the house that once stood there.

“They say there was a fire, but it was years ago,” one of them said.

This was where Millie, the mother of David Francis and seven other children, died in 1984, trapped on the second floor in her wheelchair while smoke filled the air and the fire—rumored to have been set by her husband—burned on.

We drove on to Brockton and then Dorchester, where the family lived when David was growing up. Martin Luther King Jr. lived not far from them in Dorchester in the 1950s, when
he was getting his PhD at Boston University. The Dorchester house had been torn down, and in Brockton the house was vacant.

We drove down to New Bedford in the afternoon, into neighborhoods that looked just like Hough in Cleveland. Abandoned houses covered with plywood and spray-painted graffiti shared blocks with homes families still occupied. It was a Saturday, but no one was outside. No kids played, no one sat on a porch to catch the last warmth of the day. At one of Charlene’s many addresses, a row house, the front door hung open on one hinge. Inside we could see a few pieces of furniture and some clothes and toys on the floor, left behind when the last tenants moved out.

Lisa did the driving on that trip, and as we rolled through these clusters of poverty in New Bedford she pointed out that our rental, an ugly, elongated orange SUV, could be a problem. “It’s a clown car!” she said. I laughed, picturing dozens of clowns emerging from the back, but Lisa was serious. She took photos of it and sent them to a friend.

I didn’t know her before we started working on the story together, but on this trip we got on like we’d been friends for years. I’m solitary by nature and had not wanted anyone working with me at first. I didn’t want to share any decisions or have to explain myself to anyone, and when the story became a
Plain Dealer
story I worried that they would assign a male photographer, to “protect” me. But I saw early on that Lisa was a perfect counterpoint to me: She laughed a lot, charmed strangers, and had the kind of carefree confidence I had always wanted. Now she wasn’t quite as carefree.

“We’re not exactly inconspicuous here,” she said. This was indisputable. She had cameras and other equipment she lugged with her at each stop, afraid to leave it exposed in the back of the SUV.

For once, I was the one who was not afraid, which struck me as odd but fantastic. Even with Lisa beside me, I should have had that familiar, adrenaline-fueled queasiness in my gut. Instead I felt removed from what we were doing, as though I was watching myself impersonate a reporter in a movie about two gutsy women investigating a story. I’d found courage in the place I felt safest: my disassociated state.

When we ran out of addresses in New Bedford to check, Lisa pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot to regroup. I had three phone numbers, two for Charlene that Nexis had listed as disconnected, and one I found online for a Willie Blakney, who may or may not have been related to her. Nexis was correct on the first two numbers. On the third number, a man answered. I told him I was a reporter, I was looking for Charlene, and that I was writing about her brother David.

“Where did you get this number?” he asked.

I told him I found it online. He said, “Uh-huh,” in a way that told me he didn’t believe me.

I asked again about Charlene. “Do you know how I can reach her?”

“I’ll tell her you called, but I don’t think she’ll want to talk to you,” he said, and cut the connection before I could thank him.

“I think that was her son, but I don’t think he wants me to talk to her,” I told Lisa. We sat in the car, wondering about
our next step. I didn’t want to call him back for more hostility. It looked like my only option, though. I could not return to the newsroom without finding and talking to Charlene.

A couple of minutes later, my cell rang. I answered to a woman crying.

“Do you know what happened to my brother?” she asked. She could barely get the words out. “I tried to find him. I knew he was dead, but I’ve never known what happened to him.”

It was Charlene. After I told her that her brother had died in prison, and I was a reporter from Cleveland doing a story about men who died in Ohio prisons, she said she would talk to us. She gave us an address that was not on my Nexis list.

On the way, I told Lisa I wanted to bring some flowers to Charlene. After about ten minutes of driving around we came to a grocery store. When we went in, I could see that it was the kind of store that overpriced everything and sold bruised produce and bread past its sell-by date to poor people who had no other options for shopping. I didn’t really expect it to have flowers, but it did, a little collection of plastic-encased bouquets in buckets off in a corner. I grabbed a thin bunch going brown at the edges and paid $10.

Charlene was waiting for us at her door on the second floor of an apartment building, sniffling into a wet tissue. I introduced Lisa, handed Charlene the pathetic flowers, and followed her to the dining room, where open moving boxes filled with clothes lined the walls. A dinette table sat opposite an aquarium without water, its light glowing on a collection of plastic coral and ocean plants. Above it hung framed school pictures and family snapshots.

“I’m so sorry about your brother,” I said, as though he had just died. She put the flowers on the kitchen counter without comment, offered us water, and then sat across from me at the table.

Seeing her there, sitting in her apartment, I was excited and ashamed at the same time. I’d found David Francis’s sister, doing investigative work I’d never before attempted, in a city I didn’t know. I’d done it. My story was coming together, right here.

But I was lying to Charlene, taking advantage of her grief. I was afraid to tell her the real reason I wanted to know about her brother. Before I talked about the rape, I wanted to see how she talked to me, see if she was as hostile as her son had been on the phone. My hands shook just a little when I put a digital recorder on the table between us and hit Record.