On the morning of February 1, 1982, the Rev. Horace T. Rickerson went to the library at Cleveland State University to research a sermon. He was found dead later that day on the floor of a men's restroom on the campus, shot seven times. Over the next seven months the same .22-caliber pistol was fired at four more people: a factory worker on a train platform, a university employee leaving a restroom stall, the university's maintenance supervisor and a seventeen-year-old student waiting for a bus. Three of the five died.
The man who fired it was Frank G. Spisak Jr., a thirty-one-year-old machinist who called himself a National Socialist. At his trial the next summer he wore a Hitler mustache, saluted, answered the judge in German and told the jury he had been fighting a race war. Twenty-seven years later, after a case that went twice to the U.S. Supreme Court, Ohio executed him. This account follows the court record, chiefly the Ohio Court of Appeals' 1984 opinion and the Supreme Court's 2010 opinion in Smith v. Spisak, and the reporting of the Cleveland and Columbus newspapers and Cleveland Magazine.
Spisak was born on June 6, 1951, according to his Ohio prison record. According to a 2006 profile in Cleveland Scene, his father was a factory worker who played trumpet in a polka band and moved the family from a neighborhood near Buckeye Road to the suburb of Middleburg Heights when Frank was young. Cleveland Magazine, citing a court document filed in his appeals, reported that he blamed an extremely strict mother who humiliated and hit him when he displayed sexual behavior, and that she taught him to hate people of color and others she considered undesirable.
At Midpark High School, class of 1969, he was a library aide and sang in the choir and the glee club, and classmates remembered him as argumentative. He enrolled at Cleveland State in 1969 and dropped out after about 40 credit hours. "After graduation from high school I had planned to study history in college," he wrote from prison, "but went to work in a factory instead because I wanted money to buy myself a car and do other things."
By 1972 he was working at a factory on Cleveland's East Side, where he courted a coworker, Laverne Lampert. They married within a year and had a daughter. Laverne later testified that after a car accident in the late 1970s her husband changed. He began wearing dresses in the neighborhood, listened to recordings of Nazi speeches and told her he had always wanted to become a woman. She left, came back briefly, and left again. According to Cleveland Scene, he had the license bureau change his name to Frankie Ann and began hormone treatments in anticipation of a sex-change operation that never took place. He collected Nazi memorabilia and guns, and Cleveland Magazine reported that he joined the National Socialist White People's Party.
In 1982 he was a machinist at the Edward W. Daniel Company on St. Clair Avenue and lived in a second-floor apartment at 1367 East 53rd Street. He told the court he always carried a gun when he left the apartment because he had once been mugged by five men. He often went to the Cleveland State library to read about Nazi history.
Horace Rickerson, fifty-seven, was the pastor of the Open Door Missionary Baptist Church in Cleveland. Cleveland Magazine described the congregation's history: it had begun about fifty years earlier in a borrowed room above a laundromat, later worshipped in cramped quarters on East 83rd Street, and in March 1977 Rickerson dedicated a new church building on Woodland Avenue, after a groundbreaking in December 1975. His sermons were carried on a weekly radio program called Heart to Heart on WJMO. His last broadcast, aired the night before he died, was titled "How to Know You Are Saved." That August his congregation held a ceremony, without him, to burn the paid-off mortgage on the church.
On February 1, 1982, Spisak called in sick to work and went to the Cleveland State library, where he read for several hours. He then went to a restroom. There, according to his trial testimony, he saw a Black man who, he claimed, exposed himself and propositioned him; Spisak said he became agitated and shot him several times. Rickerson had been shot seven times from more than eighteen inches away. Four spent casings were recovered. Prosecutors later argued that it was Spisak who had made the advance and been rejected. Rickerson's account is not in the record.
What Spisak told police afterward mattered for the next killing. He said that a university maintenance man had been in the restroom shortly before he shot Rickerson, and that he later worried the man might recognize him. Cleveland Scene reported that Spisak said he went to the library snack bar after the shooting, had a cup of coffee and came back to watch the crowd gather.
John Hardaway was a former Georgia sharecropper who came to Cleveland at twenty-six and in 1982 worked at Production Finishing Co. on the city's West Side. He had stopped drinking seventeen years earlier. The prosecutor, Donald Nugent, later described his routine: every payday he went to the Black Horse tavern near Madison Avenue and West 117th Street, had a nonalcoholic drink, cashed his paycheck and walked across to catch the Rapid home. He had two children.
On the evening of June 4, 1982, Spisak and a companion, Ronald Reddish, were driving on the West Side and parked near the RTA station at Madison and West 117th. Spisak testified that he saw a Black man enter the station and followed him, intending to kill him as "blood atonement" for a recent crime against two white women. He admitted at trial that he chose the West Side because a killing there would not be linked to the Rickerson shooting at Cleveland State. He did not find the man at first and went back to the car. Hardaway then walked past the car and into the station. Spisak followed, drew his gun and fired repeatedly.
Hardaway was hit seven times in his arm and right side. A medallion he wore on his chest deflected a bullet, Cleveland Magazine reported. "I can still see the night he was shooting me," he told The Plain Dealer in 2011. "He was squatting down, pulling that trigger." He crawled onto the platform, where a train operator found him at about 11:30 p.m. and called for help. About $40 from his paycheck had fallen to the ground; the gunman did not take it. He spent about a month in St. John's Hospital and then went back to work. At trial he identified Spisak as the man who shot him.
At about 5 p.m. on August 9, 1982, Coletta Dartt, an employee of the chemistry department at Cleveland State, went to the women's restroom in the university's Science Building. When she opened the door of her stall to leave, a man came out of the adjacent stall, aimed a gun at her and ordered her back inside. She pushed him away and ran for the door. He grabbed at her shoulder bag. As she ran down the hall she heard a shot. A pellet was later removed from a hallway wall. Cleveland Magazine reported that she held a black belt in karate. She identified Spisak at trial.
Spisak gave two explanations. To police he said he had fired during a robbery. At trial he said he had overheard Dartt and others making derisive remarks about the Nazi Party. To a court-appointed psychiatrist, according to a court document quoted by Cleveland Magazine, he said he had meant to slap her and rob her.
Timothy Sheehan was born in County Cork, Ireland, and studied at Maynooth College west of Dublin, Cleveland Magazine reported. According to Cleveland Scene, he was working as a policeman in England when he met his wife, Kathleen, an Irish emigrant living in the United States, and followed her to Ohio. They raised four children, a son, Brendan, and three daughters, in Fairview Park. He managed the warehouse at Higbee's department store before moving to Cleveland State, where he became assistant superintendent for buildings and grounds. He rode the bus to work. His son remembered him as a man who loved his yard and his garden; a few weeks before his death he had taken one of his daughters to Ireland as a graduation present. He was an Irish-born Catholic.
August 27, 1982, was Brendan Sheehan's fifteenth birthday, and the family planned to take him to dinner. At 2 p.m., according to Cleveland Magazine, Sheehan left his briefcase, glasses and coat at his desk to check a report of a faulty door lock. He did not answer his pager. A campus security guard sent to look for him found him on a restroom floor in the university's Rhodes Tower. He had been shot four times. At home, Brendan and his mother waited at the bus stop as bus after bus went by. Then a Fairview Park police car pulled into the driveway.
Spisak's accounts of why he killed Sheehan changed. He told police he feared Sheehan had recognized him from the day of the Rickerson shooting. At trial he said he thought Sheehan was "one of those Jewish professors" who seduced young people in the men's room, and that he was sorry only because he later learned Sheehan "wasn't Jewish like I thought he was." He took Sheehan's pager and picked up the brass casings from the floor. He later told a psychiatrist he did so "because the brass is worth money and also because it's sloppy to leave it laying around." Prosecutors treated Sheehan as a potential witness to the Rickerson killing.
Brian Warford was seventeen. He had dropped out of Collinwood High School as a sophomore in 1980, Cleveland Magazine reported, and after a falling-out with his father went to live with a sister. By the summer of 1982 he had enrolled in an alternative education program at Cleveland State and was working toward a GED. After late classes he waited for the bus on Euclid Avenue. His mother was Cora Warford; his brothers Jeffrey Duke and Eric Barnes and a sister attended Spisak's execution in 2011.
On the night of August 29, 1982, Spisak and Reddish drove around the near East Side and downtown on what Spisak called a "hunting" mission. After he took Reddish home, Spisak kept driving and came to the Cleveland State campus, where he saw Warford, who appeared to be asleep in a bus shelter. He parked, checked that no one else was around, walked up to Warford and shot him in the head at close range. He could not find the casings in the dark. Warford's body was found on the morning of August 30. Five spent .22-caliber casings were recovered. At trial Spisak said he had wanted "to inflict the maximum amount of casualties on the enemies," and that he did not want to be caught "because I wanted to be able to do it again and again and again and again."
Four of the five shootings had happened on the Cleveland State campus, three of them in restrooms. The Hamilton Journal-News later wrote that the shootings had "horrified a city," and Cleveland Scene reported that rewards were offered for information but police had no solid lead. Nothing in the sources indicates that police connected the Hardaway shooting on the West Side to the campus shootings before an arrest.
The break came by accident. On September 4, 1982, the start of Labor Day weekend, Cleveland police were sent to the house on East 53rd Street on a report of a man firing a gun from a window. Spisak admitted firing one shot and let the officers into his apartment. A shotgun and a .22-caliber automatic pistol were in plain view, and when Spisak moved toward the couch, officers found a loaded .38-caliber handgun and a two-shot derringer under the cushions. He was arrested for discharging a firearm within the city limits and possessing unregistered handguns, posted bond and was released. The guns stayed with the police.
On September 5 a woman called police, asked not to be identified, and told them that the guns taken from East 53rd Street had been used in the Cleveland State killings. Cleveland Scene reported that Spisak had bragged about the shootings to his ex-wife and to his girlfriend; the sources do not identify the caller. Ballistics tests matched the confiscated weapons to the pellets and casings from the campus shootings. Police obtained a warrant and searched the apartment, where they found newspaper clippings about the killings and Nazi and white-power material.
Spisak was not there. A neighbor told officers that her son had seen Spisak and Reddish driving away and had written down the license number. Police traced the car to a house at 4324 Marvin Avenue. Reddish answered the door and was taken outside. Inside, officers found open suitcases, one holding Spisak's identification and a pager later identified as Timothy Sheehan's. Spisak was hiding in a basement crawl space. He was arrested, advised of his rights and taken to the Justice Center. He also told police he had replaced the barrel of the .22 to hide that it was the murder weapon.
From his arrest on, the Ohio Court of Appeals wrote, Spisak "consistently admitted to committing the acts in question." Cleveland Scene reported that he autographed a swastika T-shirt for detectives.
Ronald Reddish was convicted of the attempted murder of John Hardaway, The Plain Dealer reported in 2011. His sentence and later history are not in the sources.
A Cuyahoga County grand jury indicted Spisak on four counts of aggravated murder with twenty specifications (two of the counts covered the killing of Sheehan), two counts of attempted murder, three counts of aggravated robbery and one count of receiving stolen property. He pleaded not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity to all counts but one, to which he pleaded no contest.
The court ordered him examined by five psychiatrists and psychologists: Dr. Phillip Resnick, Dr. Sandra McPherson, Dr. Kurt Bertschinger, Dr. S. M. Samy and Dr. Oscar Markey. Four reported that his condition would not support a plea of legal insanity. Markey's report was ambiguous. He had diagnosed a schizotypal personality disorder and an atypical psychotic disorder.
The trial opened in June 1983 before Common Pleas Judge James J. Sweeney. The Ohio Court of Appeals gives the start date as June 7; Cleveland Magazine gives June 13. Donald Nugent, then a thirty-four-year-old assistant prosecutor and former Marine, tried the case for the state. Thomas M. Shaughnessy led the court-appointed defense. "Part of the job that you've undertaken is going to be sitting in judgment of a sick and demented mind that spews forth a philosophy that will offend each and every one of you," Shaughnessy told the jury.
Spisak had grown a Hitler mustache in jail, and he carried a copy of Mein Kampf. He greeted his lawyers and the judge with Nazi salutes and answered the judge's questions with "jawohl." The defense, hoping to show the jury how disturbed he was, put him on the stand. He testified that he had shot Rickerson, Sheehan and Warford, shot Hardaway and shot at Dartt, and that he had done it as a follower of Adolf Hitler, his "spiritual leader in a war for survival of the Aryan people." He said he had bought guns and stockpiled ammunition for that war and had hoped to create terror at Cleveland State, which he called one of the places where "the Jews and the system" were "brainwashing the youth." He said God was his "immediate superior."
He also told the jury he would do it again. Prosecutors read a letter he had written to a friend calling the killings of Rickerson and Warford "the finest thing I ever did in my whole life." He testified that if he still had his guns he would escape from jail, "go out and continue the war I started." Shown a crime-scene photograph of Sheehan, he said, "I thought I did a good job."
Nugent's cross-examination aimed to show that the Nazi motive was a story told after the fact and that the killings were driven by robbery and Spisak's own gratification. When Spisak said he had shot Hardaway as "blood of atonement" for a recent killing of a white woman by a Black man in the Flats, Nugent pointed out that the killing had not been made public until the day after Hardaway was shot. Nugent called him by his female name, Frankie. "The name is Frank to you, buddy," Spisak answered. Nugent also called Kathleen Sheehan to testify about the morning she said goodbye to her husband. She had not wanted to take the stand, and her son asked the prosecutor not to make her, Cleveland Scene reported; she testified.
The insanity defense failed on the defense's own evidence. On July 11, Markey testified. Questioned by the judge, he said that Spisak did not have a mental disease at the time of the crimes or at trial. On cross-examination he agreed that Spisak "was not in a frenzy where he didn't know what he was doing" and could have refrained from pulling the trigger on any of the five. Sweeney struck Markey's testimony and told the jury to disregard it. The only other defense witnesses were Spisak's sister and his ex-wife, who described his behavior. The judge ruled that the defense had not produced enough evidence of legal insanity and refused to instruct the jury on it.
According to Cleveland Magazine, the state called sixty witnesses and introduced 250 exhibits. On July 15, 1983, after just over five hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Spisak of the four counts of aggravated murder, both counts of attempted murder and two counts of aggravated robbery. It acquitted him of one robbery count and one specification. Asked by a reporter whether he could think of any reason he should not be electrocuted, Spisak said, "Not offhand; can you?"
The penalty phase began on July 16. Three defense experts testified that Spisak suffered from some degree of mental illness. McPherson, a clinical psychologist, described schizotypal and borderline personality disorders marked by paranoid thinking, gender identification conflict and emotional instability. She said he had described the killings to her as matter-of-factly as "what I had for breakfast." Bertschinger, a psychiatrist, and Markey agreed with the diagnosis. None said he was legally insane.
Shaughnessy's closing argument became the center of the case for the next twenty-seven years. He described the crimes in detail ("you can smell almost the blood"), acknowledged that Spisak's admiration for Hitler had inspired them and told the jurors, "when you turn and look at Frank Spisak, don't look for good deeds, because he has done none. Don't look for good thoughts, because he has none." He said Spisak was demented and "never going to be any different." He asked the jurors to draw on their pride in a "humane society" and ended: "Whatever you do, we are going to be proud of you." He never expressly asked for a life sentence.
On July 19, 1983, the jury found that the aggravating circumstances outweighed the mitigating factors and recommended death. Sweeney agreed and imposed the sentence, adding terms of seven to twenty-five years on each attempted murder and robbery count. Spisak shouted his last words to the court: "Even though this court may pronounce me guilty a thousand times, the higher court of our great Aryan warrior god pronounces me innocent. Heil Hitler!" Afterward, recovering from his wounds, John Hardaway told reporters Spisak should be electrocuted.
The Ohio Court of Appeals for Cuyahoga County affirmed in 1984. It held that Sweeney had properly struck Markey's testimony because it "reinforced the argument that the appellant was sane," and that Spisak had not met his burden of producing evidence of legal insanity. "Clearly, anyone who murders three people and attempts to murder two others is suffering from extremely severe emotional and/or mental problems," the court wrote, but that did not meet "the very strict test for legal insanity." Because two of the murder counts covered the single killing of Sheehan, the court vacated one of them. It found the death sentence appropriate.
The Supreme Court of Ohio affirmed on April 13, 1988, rejecting among other claims his complaint about his lawyer, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined review on March 6, 1989. Ohio courts denied post-conviction relief in 1995. Spisak then filed a federal habeas corpus petition. Judge Solomon Oliver Jr. of the U.S. District Court in Cleveland denied it on April 18, 2003.
In 2006 a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the convictions but ordered a new sentencing hearing (Spisak v. Mitchell, 465 F.3d 684). It found two errors. The penalty-phase instructions, it said, had led the jurors to believe they had to reject death unanimously before considering a life sentence. And Shaughnessy's closing had been so hostile to his own client that it amounted to ineffective assistance of counsel; much of it, one judge wrote, "could have been made by the prosecution." Shaughnessy could not answer; he had died of throat cancer in 1997.
Ohio appealed. In 2007 the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the ruling and sent it back for reconsideration in light of two recent decisions on the deference federal courts owe state courts (Hudson v. Spisak, 552 U.S. 945). In 2008 the Sixth Circuit reinstated its opinion (Spisak v. Hudson, 512 F.3d 852). The state petitioned again, and the Supreme Court agreed on February 23, 2009, to hear the case.
The case was argued on October 13, 2009, and decided on January 12, 2010 (Smith v. Spisak, 558 U.S. 139). Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the Court. On the instructions, the Court held that they differed significantly from those struck down in Mills v. Maryland (1988): they required unanimity on the final weighing but did not tell jurors they had to agree unanimously on each mitigating factor, so the Ohio courts' decision upholding them was not contrary to clearly established federal law.
On the closing argument, the Court assumed for the sake of argument that it was deficient and held that it made no difference. The jurors had just heard "Spisak's boastful and unrepentant confessions and his threats to commit further acts of violence," Breyer wrote, as well as three experts describe his mental illness. "We therefore do not see how a less descriptive closing argument with fewer disparaging comments about Spisak could have made a significant difference." Counsel had appealed to the jurors' sense of humanity, using the words "humane people" and "humane society" ten times. There was no reasonable probability that a better argument would have changed the result.
Justice John Paul Stevens concurred in the judgment only. In his view both errors were real. The instructions, he wrote, were unconstitutional under Beck v. Alabama (1980) because they forced the jury into a false choice, and the closing argument was "so outrageous that it would have rightly subjected a prosecutor to charges of misconduct." He noted the "catastrophe of counsel's failed strategy" and said it was hard to convey how bad the closing was "without reproducing it in its entirety." But Spisak's own conduct had "alienated and ostracized the jury," Stevens wrote, and "even the most skillful of closing arguments, even one befitting Clarence Darrow, would not have created a reasonable probability of a different outcome in this case." The Court reversed the Sixth Circuit, and the death sentence stood.
Spisak spent more than twenty-seven years on Ohio's death row, at the Mansfield Correctional Institution and, according to his clemency report, the Ohio State Penitentiary. In 1999 he sued the state over "keeping her locked up on Death Row in an all-male prison environment where she cannot receive appropriate hormonal and surgical treatment," The Columbus Dispatch reported; he lost. He called himself Frances, and his lawyers referred to him as Frances. According to the Hamilton Journal-News, his prison disciplinary record included spitting at a chaplain, indecent exposure, sexual activity with another inmate and possession of intoxicants and contraband. Cleveland Magazine reported that a request to resume stamp collecting was denied after he said his specialty was old German stamps, "especially those from Nazi Germany."
In a letter to Cleveland Scene around 2006 he wrote that he was no longer a Nazi and that "mental illness caused the crimes, and I'm sorry that I got mentally ill enough to hurt and kill others." He signed it "Miss Frances Ann Spisak." His lawyer, Alan Rossman, argued that the Nazism had been a symptom of an identity disorder rather than its cause. Nugent, by then a federal judge, rejected that view: "The reason he was doing these killings was that he was a pervert and was looking for his own self-gratification," he told Cleveland Magazine in 2007.
In January 2011 Spisak's lawyers asked the Ohio Parole Board and Gov. John Kasich to spare him because he was severely mentally ill with bipolar disorder. Interviewed by the board on January 4, he said he was no longer sympathetic to the Nazi movement, though he told the board he was reading a biography of Hitler at the time. He said that in 1982 he and a codefendant had thought they would make "a safer world if it were all white."
The board voted unanimously against clemency. "Spisak killed three people, tried to kill at least one other and shot a fifth in his admitted plan to kill as many African-Americans as possible and start a race war in Cleveland," it told the governor. "A recommendation for mercy is not warranted in this case." It noted that he had planned the killings and tried to avoid detection. Kasich followed the recommendation. Spisak's last legal effort relied on public comments by Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul Pfeifer, who had called for an end to Ohio's death penalty because it was not being applied as intended. The Sixth Circuit refused a stay on February 15, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied one as well.
Frank Spisak was executed by lethal injection at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility near Lucasville on the morning of February 17, 2011. He was fifty-nine. It was the first execution under Kasich and the forty-second in Ohio since 1999, and the Columbus Dispatch noted that the twenty-seven years between crime and execution were the longest gap in that series. He was the last Ohio inmate executed with sodium thiopental; the drug's only U.S. manufacturer had stopped making it, and Ohio switched to pentobarbital. His last meal was spaghetti with tomato sauce, a salad, chocolate cake and coffee.
Witnesses included John Hardaway; Warford's brothers and sister; Sheehan's daughter, Cathy Sheehan Daly; Judge Donald Nugent; Jim Oliver, a retired officer who had investigated the shootings; Spisak's lawyers Michael Benza and Alan Rossman; and Bill Kimberlin, a psychology professor at Lorain Community College, according to The Plain Dealer, who had befriended him. Clean-shaven, Spisak waved to his lawyers. Asked for last words, he said, "Yes, I would. I would like to read from the Holy Bible." A staff member held up a handwritten note, and he read, in German, the first seven verses of chapter 21 of the Book of Revelation, struggling with the text ("It's too far away. I can't read it. It's blurry"). He did not read the eighth verse, which names murderers among those consigned to the lake of fire. "Speak English, you fool," said Eric Barnes, Warford's brother, who held a paper with two photographs of Brian, one as a baby and one as a young man. Spisak ended with "Heil Herr." He was pronounced dead at 10:34 a.m.
Cora Warford issued a statement: "In memory of my baby boy Brian Warford, I can finally say justice has been served. If one can say this brings closure, I can say it is peace of mind for me and my family. Spisak will have to stand before a higher court one day as we all will and may God have mercy on his soul." The Sheehan family gathered at a church. "Today, we chose to celebrate the life of husband and father, Timothy Sheehan, not the death of Frank Spisak," their statement said. Spisak's lawyers said in theirs that he had been "seriously mentally ill and committed the crimes because of this mental illness, not because of hate."
Brendan Sheehan, whose father was killed on his fifteenth birthday, decided to become a lawyer. He worked on Nugent's judicial campaign as a high school junior, went to law school at Cleveland-Marshall, clerked for Nugent after Nugent became a federal judge, and after Bill Mason became county prosecutor in 1999 talked his way into a job in the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office, starting in child-support court, where he later ran the internet crimes against children unit. He named his son Tim. By 2011 he was a Cuyahoga County Common Pleas judge. After the execution he said Spisak had known what he was doing, and that the German verses confirmed it: "He showed his true colors in the execution." Nugent said in 2007 that at each Sheehan family wedding someone else had to say the father's prayer in Tim Sheehan's place.
John Hardaway lived to see the execution. In 1984 he sued Spisak and Reddish and won a default judgment, but neither man had assets, and he never collected. In 2011 he was eighty-three, living in a one-bedroom apartment on Cleveland's East Side with chronic pain in his right hand, and said he needed a new hearing aid. He had stopped carrying the newspaper clipping of Spisak's face in his wallet. "I never had no hard feelings toward white people at all, even after the shooting happened to me," he told The Plain Dealer. "I can't live with no hate."
Motive. Spisak gave a political motive at trial, and the jury, the courts and the parole board all recorded it. The prosecution argued that it was a pose adopted once "the gig was up," in Nugent's words, and that the real motives were robbery and sexual gratification. His own lawyers later argued that both the Nazism and the killings came from mental illness. The convictions do not depend on which account is right.
Rickerson's death. Spisak's claim that Rickerson propositioned him rests only on Spisak's testimony. The prosecution argued the reverse. No evidence for either version is described in the sources.
The anonymous caller. The woman who called police on September 5 was never publicly identified in the sources. Cleveland Scene reported that Spisak had boasted to his ex-wife and his girlfriend, but did not say either of them made the call.
Details that differ between sources. Brian Warford's age is given as seventeen in the court records and most reports and eighteen in the Columbus Dispatch. The number of shots that hit Hardaway is seven in the court record and most reports and five in Cleveland Scene. The trial opening date is June 7 (Ohio Court of Appeals) or June 13 (Cleveland Magazine), 1983.
Mental illness. Every expert who examined Spisak before trial found him legally sane. Three defense experts found serious personality disorders, and his lawyers later described bipolar disorder. Whether mental illness drove the crimes was argued until the day he died and was never accepted by a court as a reason not to execute him.
June 6, 1951: Frank G. Spisak Jr. born.
1969: Graduates from Midpark High School; enrolls at Cleveland State, later drops out.
February 1, 1982: Rev. Horace Rickerson shot and killed in a Cleveland State restroom.
June 4, 1982: John Hardaway shot seven times at the West 117th Street rapid station; survives.
August 9, 1982: Coletta Dartt shot at in a Cleveland State restroom hallway; unhurt.
August 27, 1982: Timothy Sheehan shot and killed in a Cleveland State restroom.
August 30, 1982: Brian Warford found shot dead in a bus shelter on campus.
September 4, 1982: Spisak arrested for firing a gun from a window; guns confiscated; released on bond.
September 5, 1982: Anonymous caller links the guns to the killings; ballistics match; Spisak found in a crawl space on Marvin Avenue.
June 1983: Trial opens before Judge James J. Sweeney.
July 15, 1983: Convicted of three aggravated murders, two attempted murders and robbery.
July 19, 1983: Jury recommends death; judge imposes it.
1984: Ohio Court of Appeals affirms.
April 13, 1988: Supreme Court of Ohio affirms; U.S. Supreme Court denies review March 6, 1989.
April 18, 2003: Federal district court denies habeas petition.
2006: Sixth Circuit orders a new sentencing hearing.
2007: U.S. Supreme Court vacates and remands; Sixth Circuit reinstates its ruling in 2008.
January 12, 2010: Smith v. Spisak reverses the Sixth Circuit; death sentence reinstated.
January 2011: Parole Board unanimously recommends against clemency; Gov. Kasich denies it.
February 17, 2011: Spisak executed at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, 10:34 a.m.