Chapter 11: Mary Ann Finegan

Solved!

Mary Ann Finegan
1939-1982

With the summer of 1982 just days away, Mary Ann Finegan tooled north on Interstate 77 in her 1969 Ford pick-up truck. The late-night drive from her Barberton home to downtown Cleveland should have triggered a one-woman celebration of sorts since a much-needed summer vacation had just begun for the middle-school guidance counselor. But a profound level of sadness consumed her during the 45-minute trip as she dealt with the break-up of a girlfriend the week before. Perhaps a night on the town with friends would lift her spirits.

Call it sheer coincidence or divine intervention. As Mary Ann walked from a West Sixth Street parking lot to the go-to lesbian nightclub, Isis, her ex spotted her from the passenger seat of a friend’s car. So the woman stowed her purse and house keys in the trunk of her dinner companion’s vehicle and flagged down Mary Ann. The pair walked back to the faded-red truck to talk.

By the end of the night, nobody could have predicted the horror of the women’s abductions, the rape of the ex-girlfriend, and, ultimately, Mary Ann’s murder. It would take nearly three decades for the Cleveland Police Department to track down her killer. “It doesn’t matter how long it takes to get (the criminals),” said Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason in 2010, when he announced the indictment of a career jailbird for the ghastly crime. “We’re going to be vigilant until we get them. We’re going to continue to push forward on every case that we have.”

But the pledge for justice came too late for Mary Ann. Born on December 14, 1939, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she was the only child of Clare Earl “Pat” and Emelie Ann Zdila Finegan. At the time of her murder, the Finegan name had become synonymous with decades of reputable retail service in Summit County’s floral industry. But to trace the timeline that led to the family’s entrepreneurial success is to connect the dots back to the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Maryland and Pennsylvania.

Mary Ann’s paternal great-great grandparents, Patricius “Patrick” and Jane Finegan, emigrated from Ireland to the U.S. in the early 1830s. The couple settled in the town of Cumberland in the Maryland Panhandle. There, Patrick supported a brood of three sons and three daughters on his wages as a self-employed tailor in the Finegan & Robinette firm.

The Finegans’ fifth child, Amos, made the family proud by fighting for the Union in the Civil War, enlisting as a sergeant in Company C of the Maryland Infantry’s Third Potomac Home Brigade in December of 1861. During the next four years, the company fought in several battles, including a three-day clash with Robert E. Lee’s Confederate troops at Harpers Ferry. It then was assigned to guard the Baltimore-Ohio rail line until it was mustered out a month after the end of the war in April of 1865.

Amos established himself after his military service as a respected businessman 15 miles north of Cumberland in the heart of coal-mining country in Meyersdale, Pennsylvania. His reputation as a skilled house painter and interior decorator became the talk of the town. So did his 1876 marriage to a local girl, Emma Lent, who was 10 years his junior. The union produced four sons and a daughter, including their third child, Amos Earl, in March of 1889. To distinguish himself from his dad, the boy juxtaposed his first and middle names and referred to himself as “Earl” on legal and census documents.

By 1912, the 23-year-old Earl moved to Summit County to work as a machinist in Akron’s rubber plants. He married his sweetheart, Hilda “Helen” Trumphour, the following year and bought a $6,000 house at 64 S. Seventh St. in Coventry Township. The couple plunged into parenthood with the births of Clare Earl in 1914, Betty in 1917 and Patricia in 1921. And in an apparent homage to Earl’s grandfather, Patricius, they affectionately called their only son “Pat,” who demonstrated a childhood gift for playing music, most notably on the violin. By 1930, Earl quit his job in the mills and converted half of his home into the family-run East End Greenhouse.

On the other side of Mary Ann’s family, her maternal grandfather, Adam Zdila, emigrated from his native Austria-Hungary to the United States in 1896. At 15 years old, he boarded the Red Star ocean liner, the "Friesland," in Antwerp, Belgium, with a handful of other laborers to look for work in Pennsylvania’s coal mines. He subsequently was hired by the L.P. Carter Coal Company in Monessen.

His future wife, the Czech-born Anna “Annie” Sepesky, crossed the Atlantic on April 3, 1911, when she and her one-year-old daughter, Anna, boarded the "Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm" in Bremen, Germany, and sailed to New York. Settling in suburban Pittsburgh, she and Adam married in 1912 and bought a home in New Kensington, where they raised two sons and four more daughters. Their fourth child, Emilie, was born in December of 1920.

Pat Finegan and Emilie Zdila met and married in Pennsylvania in the late 1930s, after he moved from Coventry Township to live with his dad’s family in Meyersdale. Throughout the western half of the state, Pat was well-known on the nightclub circuit as an accomplished violinist when his daughter was born. By 1946, while Mary Ann was in grammar school, the family relocated to the Akron area, where Pat landed a salesman’s job with the Borden Ice Cream Company. He also continued to moonlight as a nightclub entertainer, joining Local 24 of the American Federation of Musicians.

By that time, Earl and Hilda’s greenhouse business had outgrown their South Seventh Street home. They moved into larger living quarters and retail space at 920 Kenmore Blvd. in Akron, christening their new store Finegan’s Flower Shop. They advertised “flowers for every occasion,” especially those for wedding bouquets and funeral arrangements. And Pat, his wife and daughter set up house in his parents’ former home in Coventry Township.

Pat left his sales position and joined the his parents’ business the following year. But tragedy struck the Finegan clan. Shortly before Thanksgiving of 1949, the 35-year-old Pat suddenly collapsed and died of a massive heart attack at Peoples Hospital. He left Emilie a 28-year-old widow; Mary Ann was just 10 years old. To support herself and her daughter, Emilie started her own flower business, Cottage Floral Shop, in their Seventh Street home less than a year after Pat’s death.

Mary Ann, meanwhile, immersed herself in both schoolwork and extra-curricular activities. A member of Kenmore High School’s Class of 1957, whose student body nicknamed her “Finy,“ she served as the president of the school’s Future Teachers of America chapter, treasurer of the Booster Club and social chairperson of its choir and orchestra. She read morning announcements on the public-address system, performed in her class’ amateur show, and shot hoops in the Y-Teen basketball league. And in her senior yearbook, "The Eromnek" (“Kenmore” spelled backwards), she professed an affinity for onion rings, black cats and “Pinto games.” She also bequeathed her “Pinto Plymouth” to three female classmates: Reba Raines, Pauline Able and Barb Botos.

A year after her high-school graduation, Mary Ann’s grandparents decided to retire from the floral industry and down-size into a smaller house on Lakewood Boulevard. Emilie seized the chance to merge Finegan’s Flower Shop orders with her own and took over the Kenmore Boulevard home and retail space. She also employed Pat’s brother-in-law, Max Long -- the husband of his younger sister, Patricia -- as an in-house designer. The expanded Cottage Floral remained her bread-and-butter until 1998, when she sold the company.

It would take Mary Ann eight years to complete her undergraduate studies at the University of Akron, where she was awarded a baccalaureate degree in education on June 7, 1965. The following year, the Coventry School District hired her as a teacher at Erwine Middle School. The system later promoted her as the school’s guidance counselor, whose colleagues and students learned of her compassion for those in need. If she found a stray dog or cat, she’d take it home. One time, she dipped into her own bank account to pay for an emergency dental operation for a student whose parents couldn’t afford the bill. And after school, she umpired girls’ softball games and coached volleyball and basketball teams, stressing the importance of sportsmanship to the teen athletes.

Those attributes undoubtedly fueled an electrifying attraction in early 1982 between Mary Ann and a recently divorced Mentor woman, who had just moved to Cleveland’s West Side. Although the relationship hit the skids by late May, the pair continued to maintain intense respect and admiration for each other.

By all accounts, life was treating Mary Ann well. Besides her gratifying position at Erwine, she bought a house at 4655 Manchester Rd. in Barberton, where she lived with her mother. She was also raising four dogs, had started an antiques business on the side, and was sporting her new baby: a sporty, white Corvette two-seater. That’s why the chain of events on the night of Friday, June 4, was incomprehensible to her family and friends.

According to police reports and the ex-girlfriend’s statements to the cops, she and Mary Ann unexpectedly met in the parking lot across the street from Isis at about 11 p.m. They agreed to sit and talk for awhile in the pick-up truck. But after Mary Ann turned on the ignition to move the truck closer to the bar, a five-foot-seven-inch black man in his 20s forced open the passenger-side door. He pointed a gun at the girlfriend’s chest and barked an order at Mary Ann to drive him to a remote industrial section of the Flats. If she didn’t, he would kill her ex on the spot.

The terrifying ride ended in a field behind a warehouse at 2531 W. 4th St. near the bottom of a hill that led to the Tremont district. Once Mary Ann shut off the truck’s engine, the thug demanded both women to take off their pairs of jeans and panties. Mary Ann complied; her girlfriend refused. The man retaliated by shooting Mary Ann once in the right side of the head, instantly killing her. He then dragged the other woman to a nearby field, where he repeatedly raped her in the weeds before shooting her in the throat and right side of her chest. He also stole the women’s money and jewelry before running into the darkness.

Fifteen hours later, on Saturday afternoon, a security guard heard a soft, cat-like whimper in the brush. To his surprise, he found a beaten, bloodied woman barely alive. He called the police, who then found the truck about 45 feet away, with Mary Ann’s corpse propped upright in the driver’s seat. Officers also called for an ambulance to rush the surviving victim to Metro General Hospital on West 25th Street, where she lay paralyzed from the chest down with a bullet lodged near her spinal cord. She spent the next three months confined to a hospital bed, followed by another five months in rehab. “We were very upset,” said Sally Tatnall, the “den mother of the lesbian-separatist movement,” in March of 2009. “(Isis) was a bar we all went to. We continued to go there, but we were always careful.”

Others who met Mary Ann remembered her as a quiet, thoughtful woman with a caring disposition. And her girlfriend’s blow-by-blow account of both the crime and gunman left them speechless. “She told me that, before he shot Mary Ann, he said, ‘You don’t want to (take off your clothes)? Here’s what happens when you don’t,’” said Sandy Moore, a middle-school math and language-arts teacher who retired to Largo, Florida, in late 2004. “She also said she was scared to death that he would come back to find her. It was a brutal and terrorist attack. And it could have been any one of us. It was like a roulette kind of thing.”

Lesbians, in particular, grumbled at the police investigation when nobody was arrested. They accused detectives of conveniently putting the case on the backburner because it involved the gay community. Mary Ann’s girlfriend even confided in anyone who listened that the cops purposely kept her out of the loop. “She thought they didn’t care,” Moore said. “They didn’t search for the killer, and she was ticked. She thought they really botched it.”

An astounding 4,000 mourners gathered three days after the murder for afternoon and evening wakes at Schlup Funeral Chapel at the corner of Kenmore Boulevard and Eighth Street in Akron. The next morning, they attended a funeral mass at St. Francis DeSales Catholic Church before the casket containing Mary Ann’s body was transported to a cemetery near New Kensington for burial. Her cousin, Sandy Zdila, couldn’t understand the senseless circumstances that led to the murder. “She went out of her way for everyone. In sorting through her things, we found many cards that were obviously from the kids. They’d say something like, ‘We love you, Miss Finegan,’” she told the "Cleveland Press" before the funeral. “I just don’t believe it. Why don’t the killers kill people like themselves? Why her?”

Cleveland’s gay community thought it knew the answer: homophobia. And vicious gay bashings ran rampant in dimly lit alleys, parking lots and public parks. In the early ‘80s, Mary Ann’s murder was just one in a string of at least six deadly attacks on gays and lesbians. Even $1,000 rewards from the LGBT fundraiser, Northern Ohio Coalition, Inc., went unclaimed because nobody stepped forward with information that could have led to the killers’ convictions.

In June of 1989, the Lesbian/Gay Community Service Center of Greater Cleveland founded an assistance program and telephone hotline for victims of anti-gay violence. Slightly misspelled by its organizers, the Maryann Finegan Project marked the seventh anniversary of her death. It also linked the LGBT center to law enforcement, legal aid and social service agencies to help report and reduce the number of attacks against sexual minorities. The program was the first of its kind in Northeast Ohio. “But I don’t know that pioneer was the right word for it,” said Ed Boyte, who volunteered to answer phone calls from victims every Tuesday and Thursday nights between 1990 and 1993. “We certainly weren’t trying to be armchair therapists, but we were doing work that could have been done by social workers.”

To say the least. For starters, project co-coordinators Howard Grandon and Jeannine Petti led mandatory sensitivity-training sessions for Cleveland’s police rookies to recognize and protect the city’s gay and lesbian population from harassment and violence. They also met with representatives from the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department, the Cleveland Metroparks and prosecutors’ offices throughout Northeast Ohio to establish relationships with the gay community.

Hotline workers reported the number of hate crimes to the FBI and walked victims through the legal process so that their assailants were caught, tried and convicted. They even organized a “Hatred Isn’t Magic” boycott of WMJI-FM radio, whose DJs and talk-show hosts routinely made “distorted and defamatory” anti-gay remarks, like “Picture it in your head: Two guys doing it. That, to me, is disgusting.” Verbal potshots spawned physical attacks, volunteers argued. “I knew, at the time, it was a chicken-and-egg kind of thing,” Boyte said. “This was really serious stuff we were doing. I think we raised awareness to the rest of the population by issuing a warning without being alarmists.”

But after four years, the center’s leaders felt that the numbers didn’t justify the need to continue the program on its shoestring budget. For example, in 1991 alone, hotline staff members fielded a measly 57 calls involving 109 victims from Cuyahoga, Lorain, Summit, Trumbull and Wayne counties. While supporters defended the program for recording and reporting verbal threats and physical assaults, funding was cut and the project folded. Its demise was also attributed to the overwhelming number of gay and lesbian victims, who refused to reach out for help for fear that their families, friends and co-workers would find out about their sexual orientation. “That probably wouldn’t happen today since some of the homophobia is not there now. Gay people are less likely to be worried about being outed,” said Boyte, the assistant director of the Cleveland Mediation Center since 2000. “But, hopefully, the people we assisted got the support they needed.”

Even so, Mary Ann’s murder probably would have remained unsolved, if a team of investigative news reporters from WEWS-TV 5 hadn’t questioned the more than 3,000 untested rape kits that it discovered in the Cleveland Police Department’s evidence room in 2005. Four years later, the force’s Cold Case Unit analyzed evidence that police gathered at the Finegan crime scene and made a match in the FBI’s nationwide DNA database.

County Prosecutor Mason formed the unit in 2006 with a grant that was jointly funded by the U.S. Justice Department and the office of Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray. The department employed three former or retired criminal-trial supervisors, a paralegal, an investigator and two retired murder detectives. As a team, they collaborated with the police department’s homicide and sex-crimes units as well as the coroner’s office and the Bureau of Criminal Investigations. The squad worked so effectively that the federal government granted it another $500,000 in early 2010 to continue cracking unsolved crimes.

On February 10, 2010, Mason staged a news conference to announce a 16-count indictment against Richard Anthony Wilson, charging him with murder, aggravated murder, rape, kidnapping and robbery in the Finegan case. He also vowed to send the 56-year-old Florida native to death row in the Lucasville Correctional Institution in Southern Ohio.

When the story ran on the "Plain Dealer’s" website, Cleveland.com, at 7 a.m. the next day, Internet surfers weighed in on the news. Most readers called for capital punishment by injecting a “forever night shot” into Wilson’s veins. “I hope he gets what he deserves: his last meal,” wrote “Carrie.” “May he push up skunk weed,” declared “Filesaid.” “It sounds like this guy has been a cancer on society for many years,” surmised “Dawgintampa.”

News of the charges also caught the Coventry School District by surprise. After 28 years, Mary Ann’s former bosses, fellow teachers and students assumed her murder never would be solved. “She was an exceptional guidance counselor who took her job very seriously, who had a true affection for students and sympathized with their problems,” former Erwine office secretary, Judy Husted, told an "Akron Beacon Journal" reporter after Mason’s announcement. “She went way beyond what she was required to do. Her death was a traumatic event as much for the students as it was for the staff.”

Those who sympathized with the Finegan and Zdila families also reflected on the memory of Emilie, who died on October 14, 2008, at the age of 87, never knowing who killed her daughter. “I know that was something that always bothered her mother,” Husted said. “I think, for that, we were regretful that her mom was not here to know that that was taken care of. Maybe in the long run, it really is better this way.”

After nearly three decades, Mary Ann’s 16-year career at Erwine still made an emotional impact on the Coventry Township community. The system even awarded a scholarship in her name every year after her death. “The students and adults she came in contact with were her life and reason for her existence,” said Lee Ann Weisenmiller, the district’s treasurer. “A memorial scholarship was formed for high-school seniors aspiring to go to college who best exemplify her leadership, ideals and character.”

Nobody could say the same about Wilson. He was no stranger to run-ins with the law; his rap sheet dated to 1969 when he was 16 years old. In fact, he was arrested a month after Mary Ann’s murder on a charge of concealing a gun that police believed was the firearm that killed her. A test-fired bullet from the weapon proved it shared similar characteristics with a pellet that the coroner’s office extracted from Mary Ann’s body at the morgue.

At the time of the indictment, Wilson was locked up as inmate FG4199 at the 2,000-bed, maximum-security prison, the State Correctional Institution-Fayette County in LaBelle, Pennsylvania, where he was doing time for a parole violation in connection with a 2003 robbery in Erie. Court records showed he had also served a three-year-to-10-year sentence for escape and reckless endangerment in North Braddock in February of 1996 and for stealing a car in Rankin a month later. Ironically, the prison was located just 35 miles from Mary Ann’s burial site in neighboring Westmoreland County. “I never thought, after this length of time, he’d be caught,” the surviving victim said at Mason’s news conference. “I’m a witness to what he did, what he said, where he was, and certainly I will testify. And I may be nervous when I do so, but it’s the right thing to do.”

Mason applauded his investigators for solving their ninth and tenth cold cases -- those of Mary Ann and her ex -- in four years. He also boasted that, in his 11 years as Cuyahoga County’s top prosecutor, his office had scored a 90 percent conviction rate against more than 180,000 criminals, a statistic that relieved the girlfriend. “Nothing can bring back Mary Ann, but justice can be served,” she said. “At the same time, (Wilson) won’t kidnap or murder anyone else again.”

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Mary Ann Finegan was buried in Section B, Lot 68, Plot 5 of Union Cemetery, 2030 Freeport Rd. in Arnold, Pennsylvania. She was 42 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser