A man named Richard Wise died a few weeks ago. That name might not mean anything to you, but Google “Richard Wise, Philadelphia”, and you’ll be surprised and even taken aback at what comes up. Wise, 40, died in New Jersey, and his life was tragic.
I encountered Richard Wise in 1995 when he was 23 years old and walking on Pine Street in the early morning hours. He was strutting in the middle of the street like a cowboy in a TV western and I was coming from work and headed to my apartment. For an instant our eyes met. It was one of those involuntary eye locks that mean nothing, but Wise snapped and raising a fist, said, “What the fuck are you looking at?” I pegged him for a addict, or a man about to be put into a straight jacket.
Several months later I saw his picture in a newspaper. I remembered the white blond hair and the piercing eyes. Wise had just been arrested with another suspect, 20-year-old Herbert Haak, for an attack on a gay man near 23rd and Spruce Streets. Although Haak was not charged in the assault, both he and Wise were identified as the duo responsible for a string of attacks on African-Americans and homosexuals in Center City. The news story related how at 10PM on the night of October 30, 1995, Wise and Haak spotted Christopher Beck, 27, on his way home from a meeting when they approached him and demanded that he give them the jacket he was wearing. The non-compliant Beck instantly bolted and took cover in an apartment building, whereupon Wise caught up with him and beat him on the head with a can of tuna. The blow to Beck’s head was so hard that it put a dent in the can.
It was easy for Beck to identify Wise. He told The Inquirer, “He [Wise] had very glassy, dangerous eyes.”
Court of Common Pleas Judge Willis W. Berry Jr. convicted Wise of robbery, aggravated assault, and weapons violations in the attack on Beck. The charges against Haak were dismissed.
A month passed. On November 2, 1995, sound asleep in my apartment at 21st and Pine Street; I was awakened before dawn when I heard a very loud scream in the street. I jolted upright in bed, thinking “What was that!” and listened for more screams but when they did not come I figured the one scream was just a fluke and had probably come from one of the many Drexel, Penn or Art Institute students who sometimes caroused outside on the sidewalk. When my alarm rang at 6AM, I showered, shaved and prepared to head to my part time job at 15th and Spruce. Upon leaving my apartment, I felt a strange compulsion to cross over to the other side of the street where there was a deep stairwell, but then just as quickly decided not to do that.
Almost two hours later, on my way home, I noticed a neighbor walking his dog standing near the stairwell. He told me that he had just called the police because he’d discovered somebody at the bottom of the stairwell. He did not mention a murder or a body so in those few moments I assumed it must be a homeless person who had injured himself. I considered peeking into the stairwell, but before I knew it processions of police cars and ambulances were racing towards us. In the pandemonium I moved to the other side of the street to the steps of my apartment and watched as a crowd slowly began to build.
The person in the stairwell was not an injured homeless man, but a 26-year-old Center City paralegal, Kimberly Ernest.
Ernest had been strangled and murdered; her body clad only in a sports bra, socks and Nike sneakers and propped up on the lower steps at the bottom of the stairwell in the most obscene position imaginable. I write this with some authority because some months after the tragedy, while writing about the case, I was given the opportunity to view a photograph of the body in the stairwell.
Immediately after the murder, the stairwell was transformed into an outdoor shrine that many passers by covered with flowers, votive candles, trinkets, notes, rosaries, religious pictures and teddy bears. From my second floor kitchen window I would often see people standing silently before the stairwell or even kneeling on the sidewalk, saying a prayer.
When the media published Kimberly Ernest’s photograph I recognized her as the same woman I had seen jogging on Pine Street for many months. Tall and regal looking with a great shock of long hair framed by a pair of earphones, Ernest seemed a natural athlete in her black, if somewhat risqué looking tank top as she ran up and down Pine Street. Sometimes she would jog past me on the sidewalk. Other times I would spot her jogging from my apartment window. She was an imposing figure of a woman.
On November 30th, photographs of Ernest’s alleged killers appeared in the press. There was Richard Wise with his glassy, dangerous eyes, and Herbert Haak, both Fishtown natives. In those early news stories police reported that the duo were attempting to break into a car near 18th and Pine when Ernest jogged past and scolded them. It’s easy to imagine Ernest, with her impressive physique, challenging these two petty crooks. But tragically, her self styled ‘citizens arrest’ came at a hefty price, if this is indeed what happened. Ernest was allegedly hit over the head, dragged into a stolen car, beaten, raped and then dumped into the stairwell at 21st and Pine. Another scenario had Ernest being abducted on Pine Street as she jogged and then killed in the stairwell. I was told that her face looked as if it had been slammed into a wall. (When I viewed the photograph of the murder scene, Ernest’s face was not visible).
With the alleged killers caught, city residents breathed a sigh of relief. But then came the trial. Like the OJ Simpson trial in Los Angeles, the Ernest trial would crumble into a farce.
The jury deliberated for three hours, but found Wise and Haak not guilty despite District Attorney Lynn Abraham’s firm conviction that these men were the killers. The jury was swayed from a guilty verdict because the DNA from the semen found in Ernest’s body was not Wise or Haak’s. The prosecution maintained that the DNA didn’t match because the semen came from an earlier, consensual sexual encounter.
For me, personally, the jogger case would have a number of other twists.
I won’t bore you with microscopic details, except to say that a male paralegal friend of mine turned out to be a secret lover of Ernest’s. This led to an exchange of interesting personal stories that I cannot repeat in this column. And in yet another strange development, somebody I knew as a regular fixture on Pine Street, the son of a famous Center City attorney, was now being considered by a law firm as a suspect in Ernest’s slaying (this accusation later proved to be false). The fact that the infamous Center City jogger murder case still hadn’t been resolved was a point of frustration and concern for many Center City residents. How was this case botched? How could a killing so horrendously ugly go unsolved?
Since 1995, I have thought many times about that loud scream I heard in the early morning hours of November 2, 1995. Could the scream have been Ernest’s as she was being forced into the stairwell? Investigators at the time told me that other people on my block had heard a scream that night.
Wise sued the City of Philadelphia for $75 million dollars in 1997, claiming that the police used torture to get him to confess to the murder of Ernest. In his 62-page federal lawsuit, he claimed that he was stripped naked, deprived of sleep and mentally tortured by cops until he signed a confession. The police, on the other hand, insisted that they had treated both Wise and Haak “like gentlemen.” Jailhouse informants, however, told investigators that both Wise and Haak confessed to the murder and that Haak said he would say that he was forced to sign a confession.
People don’t talk about the Center City jogger case anymore, but the case came up for me recently when I was told that Wise had recently died.
I was able to confirm this fact, given that his obituary is online for anyone to see, but what I didn’t know is that while Wise was in Graterford Prison for one of his offenses, his wife and baby were killed in a fiery auto accident while they were on their way to visit him.
No matter what one may think of Wise as a human being, tragedies like this cut deep. It might be hard to take the high road and to refrain from saying that Wise “deserved this,” or that this was Wise’s karma being dispensed with God’s blessing. Man’s justice is not God’s mercy, as the saying goes. We simply don’t know what went on in the heart and mind of Richard Wise before he closed his eyes for the last time.
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