25 August 2026
A phone call came into the Cleveland Police homicide desk two days after a boy’s body was pulled from Don Creek, and the voice on the other end was careful, almost rehearsed, like a man who had thought hard about exactly how many words he was willing to say. He wasn’t calling to confess. He wasn’t calling to accuse anyone. He asked a single question about the victim’s hands, a detail that had not been made public, and then he hung up. That call, one line among thousands, was easy to overlook if you weren’t looking for it. Nobody connected it to anything in 1988. Nobody connected it to anything in 1989 when a jury sent a 26-year-old man to Ohio’s death row for a murder he said he didn’t commit. It would take a Catholic priest, a stack of file boxes nobody was supposed to hand over, and almost 20 years before anyone asked the question that should have been asked from the start. If Joe Damrosio killed Tony Klan, how did another man know what the killer did to his hands? This is the story of how that question tore apart a death penalty conviction, exposed a prosecution office that hid what it knew, and left one of the men responsible for solving Tony Klan’s murder more free at the end of the story than he was at the beginning. Tony Klan was 19 years old, the kind of 19 where you’re technically an adult but everyone who knows you still thinks of you as a kid. He lived in Cleveland, worked odd jobs, and spent his Friday nights the way a lot of 19-year-olds in a rust belt city did in the late 1980s, moving between a couple of familiar bars with people he half-trusted and fully liked. On the night of September 23rd, 1988, that’s exactly where he was. By the next morning, he was gone. A jogger found him on September 24th face down in Don Creek, a slow-moving waterway that cuts through Cleveland’s east side. The medical examiner’s report would eventually describe what had been done to him in blunt clinical language, stabbed three times in the chest, his throat cut. It was without question or ambiguity a homicide. There is no version of this case then or now in which what happened to Tony Klan is in dispute. A young man went out for a night with people he knew and did not come home. Whatever else gets complicated about this story, and it gets very complicated, that fact never does. Cleveland in the fall of 1988 was a city used to bad news. The steel economy that had once defined it had been gutted for over a decade, and homicide detectives in Cuyahoga County were not short on work. A dead 19-year-old pulled out of a creek was tragic, but it wasn’t unusual enough on its own to guarantee careful handling. What it guaranteed instead was pressure, pressure from a department that wanted an arrest, from a public that wanted an answer, and from a prosecutor’s office that wanted a conviction more than it wanted the truth. Homicide detectives moved fast, the way departments tend to when a case involves a young victim and a city watching. Within days they had built a working theory, and within it three names, Thomas Michael Keenan, Edward Espinosa, and Joe Damrosio. The story detectives assembled went something like this. Keenan believed a man named Paul Stoney Lewis had stolen drugs from him. Lewis had once worked for Keenan, and whatever the actual history between them was, Keenan wanted to find him that night. Somewhere in the search for Lewis, Klan, who knew some of the people involved and had spent part of the evening with them, ended up in the group. According to the account that would eventually be told in court, Klan was brought along because someone believed he might know where Lewis was or might know something about him. By the early hours of September 24th, Klan was dead. Espinosa was the one who would end up telling this story to a jury, and the deal he made to tell it would become one of the most important and most contested decisions in the entire case. Here is the fact that should stop you cold before this story goes any further. The man who admitted under oath to being present for Tony Klan’s murder did not receive a death sentence. He received a prison term. Edward Espinosa pleaded guilty to manslaughter. In exchange for his cooperation, specifically for his testimony against Keenan and Damrosio, he was sentenced to 15 to 75 years in prison, eligible for parole well within his lifetime. Keenan and Damrosio, tried separately, would both be sentenced to death. Sit with that for a second because the entire rest of this case rests on it. The prosecution’s own key witness, the person whose account did more than anyone else’s to put a rope around Joe Damrosio’s neck, so to speak, was by his own admission in open court a participant in the same crime, and the reward for that admission was a chance at freedom. The people who weren’t in the room that night, or whose presence was never established by anything other than Espinosa’s word, got the harshest sentence the state of Ohio can hand down. This isn’t an unusual arrangement in American criminal law. Cooperating witnesses trade testimony for reduced sentences constantly, and sometimes that testimony is accurate and the deal is fair. But it means from the moment Espinosa took the stand that everything he said had to be measured against a simple uncomfortable truth. He had every incentive in the world to tell the story that kept him off death row, whether or not it was the whole truth or the true one. There’s a detail buried in Espinosa’s account that on its own should have raised red flags for anyone weighing his credibility. Part of his testimony described Klan’s throat being slit and Klan then running away, screaming for help. Years later, when Father Cuc began pulling apart the physical evidence in this case, he would point out that this detail was not just unlikely. It was, in his words, physiologically close to impossible. A person doesn’t scream effectively with a severed throat. It’s the kind of detail that a defense pathologist, given the chance to examine the medical evidence and testify in front of the jury, might have dismantled in minutes. Damrosio’s trial team never got that chance because the trial moved too fast and because, as would only become clear years later, they didn’t have access to everything the state already knew about the condition of Klan’s body and the physical realities of the crime scene. Damrosio’s trial opened before a three-judge panel in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court on February 6th, 1989. He was 26 years old, an Army veteran, and from the moment he was arrested, he said the same thing he would keep saying for the next two decades. He didn’t kill Tony Klan. Paul Lewis, the man Keenan had allegedly been hunting that night, testified for the prosecution too. He told the court that he and Klan had gone to a bar called The Saloon that Friday evening, that he’d run into Keenan there, a man he used to work for, and the two of them had left together for another bar, Coconut Joe’s. Not long after, Klan showed up at Coconut Joe’s with Espinosa and Damrosio. It was on its face an ordinary account of an ordinary night, right up until the point where it wasn’t.…
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