Coletta Dartt left a restroom stall at Cleveland State on Aug. 9, 1982, only to encounter a gunman, who ordered her back into the stall. She shoved him aside and ran away as he shot at her.
Like Rickerson, Timothy Sheehan, a Cleveland State employee, was found dead on a campus restroom floor on Aug. 27. Three days later, CSU student Brian Warford was shot to death while waiting for a bus.
For months, the Cleveland State shootings horrified a city. The terror ended on Sept. 4, 1982, when Cleveland police responding to a report of a man firing shots out of a window arrested Frank G. Spisak Jr. At his apartment, police found newspaper clippings of the murders and Nazi and white-supremacist paraphernalia. Ballistics confirmed Spisak’s weapons were used in the shootings, and Sheehan’s pager was found in Spisak’s suitcase.
More than 28 years later, his appeals exhausted, Spisak is to die by lethal injection Thursday at the Lucasville prison.
“We’re happy the law is being followed,” said Brendan Sheehan, who was to celebrate his 15th birthday the day that Spisak killed his father. Brendan Sheehan went on to become an assistant Cuyahoga County prosecutor and is now a Cuyahoga County common pleas judge. He said his family is reserving further comment until after the execution.
Spisak unsuccessfully pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. At his 1983 trial, he sported a Hitler mustache and, in the words of a clemency report, “used his trial to spout his Nazi beliefs, (and) blamed African-Americans, Jews and homosexuals for his own shortcomings in life.” Interviewed by the Ohio Parole Board on Jan. 4, Spisak said that at the time, he and a co-defendant “thought they would create a better world by eliminating the people that were not like them. He stated they thought it would be a safer world if it were all white.”
Spisak’s victims were black, except for Sheehan. Spisak told the parole board he killed Sheehan because he was a possible witness to Rickerson’s shooting and because Spisak thought he was “a Jewish professor perverting youth.” Sheehan was an Irish-born Catholic.
Spisak was sentenced to death after a jury convicted him of aggravated murder, attempted murder and aggravated robbery. During his 27 years in prison, he has chalked up a significant disciplinary record for infractions including spitting at a chaplain, performing oral sex on another inmate, indecent exposure, possession of intoxicating substances, and possession of weapons or contraband. He unsuccessfully has sued the state for a sex-change operation and now calls himself “Frances.”
In its clemency report, the parole board wasn’t moved by Spisak’s insanity claims, noting that he planned the killings and tried to avoid detection. The board’s unanimous decision: “Spisak’s contention that he is not the ‘worst of the worst’ is not well taken.”
But Spisak’s attorney, federal Public Defender Alan Rossman, who has requested a stay of execution in federal court, said it’s inhumane to put a mentally ill killer to death.
“The failure of leadership to move the state of Ohio past the point where it is acceptable to execute the severely mentally ill is another opportunity lost,” Rossman said. “Maybe someday we will have a better alternative to dealing with mentally ill defendants than killing them.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2264 or tbeyerlein@Dayton DailyNews.com.
About the Author