The Long Goodbye

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The Long GoodbyeAll his victims were people who had changed courses in life, seeking a secondchance. Now, 25 years after Frank Spisak’s serial murders terrified ClevelandState University, the death-row inmate gets a second chance at avoiding execution.In a courtroom, survivors and lawyers will return to 1982 and confront his crimes.A jury will decide his fate.John HydukHe attacked five people, killing three. He would have killed more if his aim werebetter.Their bodies and lives were torn by the tumbling slugs from a .22-caliberautomatic.Now, 25 years after Frank Spisak wandered the city streets with a pistol poppinglike the devil snapping his bubble gum, he will walk again in the minds of hisvictims and their families. Old case files will be reopened. Healed wounds will betorn apart.Spisak, convicted of a series of 1982 murders and sentenced to death, has foughthard to live. The state of Ohio - navigating a gauntlet of court appeals - hastried just as hard to kill him.Last October, three federal appeals court judges struck down Spisak’s deathsentence and ordered him resentenced. The judges said Spisak’s lawyer had beenineffective and that the judge had given the jury improper instructions during his1983 sentencing.Although Spisak’s guilty verdict still stands, a new jury may deliver a sentenceas early as this summer. Spisak’s lawyer plans to argue that he killed because hewas insane and should be spared from death.Raised by emotionally distant parents, Frank Spisak was beset by gender issuesfrom childhood. He blamed “an extremely strict mother who humiliated and hit himwhen he displayed sexual behavior,” says one court document. She “taught him tohate people of color and others whom she deemed to be ‘undesirable’ or‘repulsive.’ ”Even as Spisak married, he took female hormones, anticipating a sex-changeoperation that would never happen. He used his quick and inquisitive mind tomentally rebuild the Third Reich, joining the National Socialist White People’sParty and fancying himself a storm trooper. He collected guns.Today Spisak’s world is a prison cell at the Mansfield Correctional Institution.Inside it he lives as a woman, corresponding through prison pen-pal Web sites,trolling for “very special girlfriends.” He signs his letters Frances Ann, under“With love” or “Every best wish.” And no one - not even his psychiatrists - cansay with certainty where the invented Frank ends and the real Frank Spisak begins.The story of Spisak and those he killed and tried to kill is a morality play withthe moral still to be written. At first, the victims seem like random choices.Separated by age and race and gender and class, they would not have foundthemselves side by side on the same city bus.But what they had in common was this: They were all strivers after somethingbetter, people who had changed courses in life, seeking another chance. AndCleveland is a city built on second chances.The city we live in was born that summer. Four years after default, and after 13years of burning river jokes, we declared ourselves back on track. As The

Cleveland Press closed and Halle’s department store faded, Time magazinepronounced us one of the country’s most desirable cities and the “CBS EveningNews” reported we were on the road to recovery.We did not feel like a city under siege. As crime scene investigators were pullingslugs from a campus wall, Duran Duran was opening for Blondie a few blocks away atthe Agora. As another victim lay bleeding, moving vans emptied the Williamson andCuyahoga buildings on Public Square for demolition before the building of the newStandard Oil Tower. Everywhere, the 19th century was making way for the 21st. Heattacked five people, killing three. He would have killed more if his aim werebetter.Their bodies and lives were torn by the tumbling slugs from a .22-caliberautomatic.Now, 25 years after Frank Spisak wandered the city streets with a pistol poppinglike the devil snapping his bubble gum, he will walk again in the minds of hisvictims and their families. Old case files will be reopened. Healed wounds will betorn apart.Spisak, convicted of a series of 1982 murders and sentenced to death, has foughthard to live. The state of Ohio - navigating a gauntlet of court appeals - hastried just as hard to kill him.Last October, three federal appeals court judges struck down Spisak’s deathsentence and ordered him resentenced. The judges said Spisak’s lawyer had beenineffective and that the judge had given the jury improper instructions during his1983 sentencing.Although Spisak’s guilty verdict still stands, a new jury may deliver a sentenceas early as this summer. Spisak’s lawyer plans to argue that he killed because hewas insane and should be spared from death.Raised by emotionally distant parents, Frank Spisak was beset by gender issuesfrom childhood. He blamed “an extremely strict mother who humiliated and hit himwhen he displayed sexual behavior,” says one court document. She “taught him tohate people of color and others whom she deemed to be ‘undesirable’ or‘repulsive.’ ”Even as Spisak married, he took female hormones, anticipating a sex-changeoperation that would never happen. He used his quick and inquisitive mind tomentally rebuild the Third Reich, joining the National Socialist White People’sParty and fancying himself a storm trooper. He collected guns.Today Spisak’s world is a prison cell at the Mansfield Correctional Institution.Inside it he lives as a woman, corresponding through prison pen-pal Web sites,trolling for “very special girlfriends.” He signs his letters Frances Ann, under“With love” or “Every best wish.” And no one - not even his psychiatrists - cansay with certainty where the invented Frank ends and the real Frank Spisak begins.The story of Spisak and those he killed and tried to kill is a morality play withthe moral still to be written. At first, the victims seem like random choices.Separated by age and race and gender and class, they would not have foundthemselves side by side on the same city bus.But what they had in common was this: They were all strivers after somethingbetter, people who had changed courses in life, seeking another chance. AndCleveland is a city built on second chances.The city we live in was born that summer. Four years after default, and after 13years of burning river jokes, we declared ourselves back on track. As TheCleveland Press closed and Halle’s department store faded, Time magazinepronounced us one of the country’s most desirable cities and the “CBS EveningNews” reported we were on the road to recovery.

We did not feel like a city under siege. As crime scene investigators were pullingslugs from a campus wall, Duran Duran was opening for Blondie a few blocks away atthe Agora. As another victim lay bleeding, moving vans emptied the Williamson andCuyahoga buildings on Public Square for demolition before the building of the newStandard Oil Tower. Everywhere, the 19th century was making way for the 21st.Second chances seemed very real then.Now, Frank Spisak has a simple request: Give me a second chance. Twelve jurorswill decide how far second chances extend.On one side of the courtroom, those who hope that justice will finally be done anda verdict carried out will gather. On the other side will stand a man who believesthat true mercy cannot be strained, even if is stretched thin over a quartercentury.A gavel will bang like a pistol shot. Suddenly it will be 1982 all over again. “I’m on death row for killing three men. … Although I’ve been locked up a longtime, I still feel like I am young and have a lot of life left in me to live; Idon’t want to have to waste it rotting in some prison! … I devote all my energiestoward trying to win my appeal and get me out of here before it is too late for meto have a real second chance in succeeding in life.”Frank Spisak, in prison letters posted on the Web site mansonfamilypicnic.com. After the cops and the coroners finish their work, the flattened slugs andphotographs of spent bodies go into a fat manila folder in the Cuyahoga CountyProsecutor’s Office. The folder lands on the desk of a young assistant prosecutornamed Donald Nugent. He is an ice pick in a nice suit. He is 34, with a diplomafrom Xavier University and a Cleveland Marshall law degree folded neatly around astint in the Marine Corps. He is halfway through a career that would see him try50 murder cases and prosecute at least that many rapes. The graying prosecutors inthe office have dubbed him “Jack Armstrong,” like the “All-American Boy” of oldradio shows, and he is golden.It is 1983, and Nugent reaches into a manila folder. He looks at pictures of whatseems like half of Cleveland, bleeding. Here is the Rev. Horace T. Rickerson, dead, shot seven times on Feb. 1, 1982.“Four spent bullet casings were recovered from the scene,” a court document readsin the same flat prose that lists ingredients on a cereal box. The pastor of the Open Door Missionary Baptist Church, Rickerson had looked at itscramped home on East 83rd Street and dreamed, because dreams not only turned intoclassrooms and towers, but into spires and pulpits, too. In December 1975, aground-breaking ceremony was held, and in March 1977, Rickerson dedicated thebrand-new church on Woodland Avenue, just up the street from the borrowed roomabove a laundromat where the congregation had started 50 years before.A weekly radio show called “Heart to Heart” on WJMO carried Rickerson’s sermons.His last broadcast, aired the night before he died, was titled “How to Know YouAre Saved.”Rickerson left to research a sermon at Cleveland State’s library and neverreturned. He went home. That’s the way church people say it: He went home. ThatAugust, Rickerson’s congregation gathered without him for a ceremony to burn thepaid-off mortgage.

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