I Will Find You (16 page)

“God, I’m so sorry that happened to you,” I finally managed.

“The second time, I walked right into it,” Charlene went on, echoing what I always told therapists—and myself—about my rape.

“I went into a house to get high,” she went on. “And it was a bunch of Puerto Rican guys, three of them. They raped
me and beat me up and threw me out the house, naked. I didn’t go to the police then, either.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I asked for it,” she said, sobbing again. “If I hadn’t been so stupid.”

Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. We’d ended up in the same place, lashing ourselves with the same word.

“That’s what I’ve been saying to myself for twenty years,” I said. “I was so stupid.”

“Yeah, but you weren’t out there hooking for drugs,” she said. “It’s different. I mean, you had a good job and my brother had no right to do that to you, he had no right to do that to any woman.”

I knew a lot of people would agree with her, including many cops and prosecutors: If you’re a hooker, you can’t say you were raped. If you’re on drugs, you deserve whatever you get.

Even Charlene believed this. I had a job. I had an education. I had a husband who did not hit me. I had parents who did not hit me. She had lived with abuse and violence all her life. And still, she thought it was fair to say that what happened to me was worse.

“Charlene,” I said. “They had no right to do what they did to you.”

She wiped at her tears again.

“It’s terrifying,” she said. “Especially when you think they’re going to kill you.”

I nodded, unable to speak.

Philip Francis was thirty-nine years old in 1999, when he was arrested for raping his nephew. He spent almost four years in jail, awaiting a trial, before he agreed to plead guilty in November of 2003. The judge sentenced him to four years, ruled that he had served the time, and released him on three years’ probation. But Philip failed to register as a sex offender, one of the terms of his probation, and was back in custody in April of 2004. He had been in various state hospitals and prisons ever since, awaiting some resolution, when I went to see him at Bridgewater in the fall of 2007.

Bridgewater, a large complex of state prisons and lockup treatment centers south of Boston, became infamous for two things. In 1967, Albert DeSalvo—the Boston Strangler—confessed to raping and killing thirteen women and was sentenced to life in prison at the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane. Not long after he got there, DeSalvo escaped. He left a note for the hospital superintendent that said he had
escaped to draw attention to the terrible conditions at the hospital. He gave himself up the next day.

The conditions De Salvo wanted to make public were revealed in the film
Titicut Follies
, a documentary by Frederick Wiseman that was released the same year DeSalvo escaped. Named for the annual show the inmates put on,
Titicut Follies
included shocking scenes of abuse, neglect, and the stripping and bullying of inmates. After it screened at the 1967 New York Film Festival, Massachusetts won an injunction banning its further distribution, citing an invasion of the privacy of the inmates. It was not until 1991 that a judge allowed the film to be shown to the general public. It included a postscript that said conditions at the hospital had improved since 1967.

The prison complex has four units for inmates: Bridgewater State Hospital for mentally ill offenders and defendants who need competency evaluations; a substance-abuse unit; a minimum-security prison; and the Massachusetts Treatment Center, a unit for sexual offenders like Philip. A prison spokeswoman directed us there, and after we went through the usual searches and checkpoints and locked gates, a guard led us to a conference room set up for a large meeting.

When Philip entered the room, he did not look at us. He had agreed to the interview weeks ago, but now his body language was reluctant and defensive. He shuffled over to a chair, his head hanging low, his gaze on the floor. He did not raise his head when he sat down, but stared at the table. The guard made sure he was settled and then stood at the door, his face impassive.

Philip was here because he had raped a child, but when I turned on the digital recorder and began asking him questions, I felt only pity for him. His answers were slow and halting, and his mouth couldn’t quite form the words he was trying to get out. I wondered if he’d had a stroke or if something was wrong with his tongue. When he at last finished a thought and got it out, he punctuated it with a bark of a laugh that had no mirth in it at all. He was like a child himself.

Philip was fifty-one years old when I interviewed him. He had spent much of his adolescence locked up, and when he wasn’t in prison he’d had to choose between surviving on the streets or going home to a father who beat him. As he spoke, I could see that he was missing many of his teeth.

I asked him about his father.

“He was a very angry person,” Philip said, “but what he was angry about I don’t know; I never really talked to him about it. The last time I seen him was close to when he was dying. I was in my twenties at the time. And he was all, ‘I’m sorry for what I did, I never was a father and I can’t blame you for hating me.’”

“Did you forgive him then?”

“I guess I tried. I guess so. I mean, I couldn’t forgive him for the way he made my life turn out, but for the alcohol and the punishment, I forgave him for that.”

I asked if it was true that his father was a pimp, as Charlene had told me, and he said, “I don’t know about that. He had three different women in the house, and all their kids, but I don’t know what-all they did.”

“How did he make money to support you all?” I asked. “Did he have a regular job?”

Philip barked a laugh. “When I was nine or ten years old, I was hit by an ice-cream truck,” he said. “And we won a lawsuit, and my father lived off that money; he got the ice-cream truck, too. I was in a body cast for maybe two or three years, and I suffered some head injuries. And then, like, six months after I got out of the cast, I started getting into trouble. Stealing cars, hanging out with hippies, drinking, doing LSD and all that. Windowpane, mushrooms. We used to hang out in Cambridge up at Harvard Square. I actually hung out with Janis Joplin up there.”

“Really? Janis Joplin?” I hear in my voice the same astonishment as I do on my recordings with Charlene. “How old were you?”

“I was about twelve, twelve and a half at the time.”

“Charlene said your father beat you and your brothers, and your mother, but not the girls.”

“Yeah. He spent a lot of time drinking,” Philip said. “He’d come home and drink and get in fights with my mother. We’d come home from school and he would beat us with bullwhips. I hated to come home from school. I would go as slow as I could go. He used to hang us in closets, stuff like that. On hooks.”

When I asked about David, Philip smiled and barked out his laugh again, but with his eyes focused on the table. “David was my big brother and maybe my best friend. He was nice to me. He gave me my first drink and my first cigarette. I was, like, five and he was six. We snuck into my father’s liquor
cabinet and got drunk on vodka and beer.” That laugh again. “Very drunk.”

David also provided Philip with his introduction to crime. “We started stealing when I was maybe about ten, me and David,” he said. “We used to steal Kool cigarettes (the nonfilters) radios, watches, and things. Back then they didn’t have things locked up, so it was easy to walk into Woolworths and steal stuff.”

“What happened when you got caught?”

“I mainly grew up in the DYS,” he said. He was referring to the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services, a notation I had seen dozens of times on both brothers’ criminal records. “I was in a special hospital for kids, ’cause I was suicidal, and I tried to kill my friends.” Another laugh.

Charlene had spoken this way, too, injecting an offhand reference to abuse, or criminal activity, or even death. For instance, Charlene told me that she married when she was sixteen because she was pregnant and desperate to get away from her family. She didn’t love her husband, but she moved to Cleveland with him. He turned out to be as abusive as her father. “And I just got tired of it,” she said, “and one night I just stabbed him in the back and got on a bus back to Boston.” She would have gone on to something else if I had not stopped her to ask if she killed him or been arrested. “No,” she said. “He didn’t come after me, either.”

Another time, she spoke of her mother’s last months in Cleveland, when she lived with Earlie B. Giles at Ida’s house. “She was drinking all the time then, and whenever she needed money, she’d sell his eye,” Charlene said.

Again, I asked her to stop and explain.

Earlie B. had a glass eye, Charlene told me. She didn’t say why he had it, but what he did with it was the point of the story. He would take it out sometimes and leave it somewhere and then have to go looking for it.

“In Cleveland back then, you could pawn anything at the pawnshops,” she said. “Nobody should have told my mother that, ’cause she stole his eye and went and pawned it so she could buy alcohol. So we’re getting drunk, and Earlie B. comes in their room and he’s missing his eye, and she told him what she did. It was funny as hell. Then after that, every week, when she needed money for a drink, she’d steal his eye and go pawn it.” She laughed. “We had a good time in Cleveland. It was a party town back then. I miss my mother.” Then she laughed affectionately. I laugh, too, every time I read the transcript.

I asked Philip to tell me about the suicide and murder attempts when he was young.

“I was in a place called Lyman School,” he said.

I looked it up later. Lyman School for Boys, in West-borough, Massachusetts, was the first reform school in the United States. It opened in 1886 and closed in 1971. The Boston Strangler went to Lyman when he was twelve. Former residents have reported harsh rules and physical abuse at the school, and a few have alleged that the “masters” raped them while they were there.

Philip told me he was raped by a teacher, a man who, he said, preyed on the young boys in his charge without anyone but the boys themselves knowing about it.

“It’s a big place, so most of the time he would take the kids up into the music room when no one was there.”

“You didn’t report it to anyone?”

“Who? He was in charge. I guess from that time on, I’ve kind of been suicidal. I’ve OD’d, I’ve slit my wrists, I’ve swallowed pills.”

He said he was fifteen or sixteen when he left Lyman and went to a group home. “And then the group home closed down and I ended up in the streets. I saw my stepmother, Mary, and she said, ‘Come live with us,’ so I went, but then my father started on me again, so I left and I ran away from home again. I stayed in abandoned buildings; I would break into cars and stay in cars.”

Philip told his story in disjointed episodes, each marked by either the prisons and juvenile facilities where he was sent, or by the things he did that got him to those places.

“For some reason I happened to be in my sister’s house and I tried to kill the whole family,” he said, out of nowhere. “I turned on the gas. That’s why they sent me to another hospital. They said, ‘You’re a hard case to figure out because you have a habit of closing people out and you hear voices, and you stabbed a guy twelve times and you didn’t even know you stabbed him.’ They said it happened in downtown Boston. I don’t remember it.” The stabbing did not turn up on his criminal record, either.

I asked him about his nephew. “What happened there? Charlene said you molested him.”

“I guess my nephew got in trouble, and he made some allegations that I supposedly had sexually assaulted him. I kept telling the DA I never touched him. He never mentioned it to anyone until he got in trouble. So I waited in jail like four years, waiting to go to trial on this case. And the DA said, ‘Look, we’ll let you go home if you plead guilty. There’ll be no charges, nothing, you can go home.’ I agreed. So I was on the street, I didn’t get in no trouble. And because I don’t write that good my probation officer was [in charge of] registering me as a sex offender, and I guess she forgot [to] and I got picked up for failure to register, and I went to jail for that.” Three years later, he was still in prison.

As with Charlene, I didn’t know how much of Philip’s story was true. Memory is the ultimate unreliable narrator. Brain researchers theorize that what we think of as solid and immutable memories are actually fluid, changing slightly each time they are recalled. The more we tell the stories, the more they change, and with every telling the new, rewritten memory becomes the one we think we’ve always had.

The Francis family’s stories also operated on the fuel of rumor and hearsay. The elusive “they” were always saying that someone killed someone in a bar, or someone got mad and stabbed someone, or someone died in a fire, or a fight. All of this went into their collective memories.

I asked Philip, “When did you last see David?”

“I don’t know,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “He was hanging with a bunch of people. He told me he was staying in Dorchester. That was about it. The next thing I know, I heard he was locked up for killing some cabbie here in Boston. I
guess him and his buddies, they robbed some cabdriver and killed him, and David turned state’s evidence, because the next thing I heard he was in Ohio.”

Philip had started crying.

“I spend a lot of time crying,” he said, swiping at his face with his bare hand. “I try not to reflect too much about growing up; I try to wipe it from my memory. Because I don’t think any child should have to suffer like that. Especially for something they didn’t do. Like I tell my psychiatrist, it’s not my fault I was born, I didn’t ask to be born, and I don’t know what would possess any man to hurt a kid like my father did. Especially his own family.”

For the first time that afternoon, he raised his head and looked at me. “I still try to figure it out to this day,” he said. “What did we do wrong to deserve such a tragic life? You know?”