Luke Ford

Comment: “Two new true crime books. Two victins. Two liberal white women who could have used Derb’s “the Talk” …”

New York Times: In “I Will Find You,” Joanna Connors, a reporter for The Cleveland Plain Dealer with a college-age daughter, embarks on a quest to understand the man who raped her two decades earlier, a crime she had never discussed with her children. Using her journalistic skills, she sets out to investigate the world that produced a man capable of such an act. The result is a searing narrative that plumbs both emotional and political depths.

Like Winslow, Joanna Connors is a white woman raped by a black man, but this fact, largely ignored in Winslow’s memoir, becomes a point of serious moral and political inquiry in Connors’s “I Will Find You.” In July 1984, Connors, then a drama critic for The Plain Dealer, walked into an empty theater on the Case Western Reserve campus, late for a 5 o’clock interview. Claiming to be working the lights, a man in the lobby offered to take her inside. Ignoring her internal alarm, Connors followed him, and there the man (who had been released on parole just a week earlier) raped her at knife point. Asked why she went with him, Connors privately, and with great shame, admits to herself, “I could not allow myself to be the white woman who fears black men.” Despite being “the perfect victim” (white, educated, middle-class, married, with proof of a struggle and an immediate police report) and her perpetrator, David Francis, the perfect assailant (black, poor, with a criminal record), she is subjected to painful scrutiny and degradation before he is finally convicted.

Connors’s forthright exploration of race and poverty enlarges her personal story, turning it into a richer, more complex and ultimately more harrowing account of interwoven traumas. David Francis, she discovers, was one of eight children born into a family that one surviving member describes as “cursed.” That’s as apt an explanation as any other: When Connors interviews some of Francis’ siblings and family friends, she confronts a dizzying intersection of addiction, alcoholism, violence, racism, poverty and crime. (Even small children can’t escape: In this extended family not one but two toddlers are killed, one by violence, the other through gross negligence.)