I Will Find You: In Search of the Man Who Raped Me. Joanna Connors

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СКАЧАТЬ like an old-fashioned Valentine with “Mom” on a ribbon inked across it, bloomed on his chest. He had tattooed me on his heart.

      It looked like it hurt.

      I had told my children. I had pulled on the vine, but I knew I had not unearthed it completely. I had to pull on it some more, pull it all the way out, kill it, do something to stop the panic from rising in my chest, stop the whoosh of adrenaline that came without warning and made my heart beat so hard you could almost see its movement under my clothes.

      I had seen the rapist 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.

      I knew he had gone to prison. Beyond that, I didn’t know much more than his name. Now it came to me that if I made a list of the most influential people in my life, he would be near the top, with my parents and husband and children.

      If it’s true that fear grows out of ignorance, which I believe, then maybe I needed to confront the ignorance to get at the fear. I needed to learn more about the man who stood above me and pushed my head toward his penis, the man I thought would be the last human being I would see on this Earth.

      The last thing he said to me was, “I will find you,” and deep inside the primitive, alarm-prone amygdala at the base of my brain, I still believed him. He had lurked in the shadows of my life all those years, watching me, waiting for me. I still dreamed about him. I still floated out of my body when I thought about him. I thought about him all the time. He was going to find me.

      But all I knew was his name—David Francis—his age, that he had lived in Boston at some point, that he had been in prison before, and that he was caught and convicted and sentenced to thirty to seventy-five years in prison.

      It occurred to me only much later that I had been sentenced as well, to a mixture of chronic fear, silence, and shame—a shame that never made sense to me, but that I would one day learn I shared with almost all rape victims. Why do we feel this shame? What do we do with it?

      After David Francis raped me, I never shook my fists toward the heavens and asked, “Why me?” I knew, or thought I knew, the answer to that one: I was trusting and stupid. But now I wanted the answer to a slightly different question: “Why him?”

      We were almost the same age. We both grew up in America in the ’60s and ’70s. We lived in the same city, just five miles apart. But when my path crossed with his that July day, it brought about a collision of two people who might as well have lived in two different countries. What brought us to that intersection, and what happened to us afterward?

      He had been in prison for twenty-one years. He could have been released on parole, but I thought he was probably still locked up. I wondered how prison had changed him, and whether he’d talk to me now. Maybe sitting across from him, with glass between us and guards all around, would make me feel brave, if not fearless.

      He’d said he would find me. Maybe I should find him instead.

      The familiar dread flooded in when I contemplated this, accompanied by a trembling thought that whispered, You can’t do this. It was a long time ago. He’s still in prison. Leave it alone.

      My husband didn’t want me to look for him, either.

      “He’s a monster,” he said, not realizing he was echoing the fears that came to me at night. “You don’t need to know any more about him than that.”

      I disagreed. I knew I wouldn’t be done with David Francis just by deciding I was. I’d already tried that.

      I needed to make sense of my rape. I make sense of things by writing about them. When I was a movie critic, I discovered what I thought about a film through the process of writing about it. Over the years, I had tried this with the rape. I wrote about it, and all that followed it, in an on-again, off-again series of journals I still have. I started and abandoned a novel about it. But this was different.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ