By Gregory L. Moore, Special to The Washington Post
Dewey Bozella was just 18 when he was first arrested for the brutal murder of 92-year-old Emma Crasper in her Poughkeepsie, N.Y., home in 1977. A small-time hood, Bozella had moved to Poughkeepsie from Queens to escape the pull of petty crime. “I was never anyone’s goody-goody, and I had been on a self-destructive road since I was in grade school,” he writes. “I had gotten into trouble before and had a short rap sheet for stealing. I took bicycles left outside grocery stores. I took boom boxes. I took a wallet from a guy on the street one time. But I never took anyone’s life.”
Bozella was held for 28 days, but with no physical evidence, he was released.
We learn in his painful and uneven memoir, “Stand Tall,” written with Tamara Jones, that Bozella’s release was just an interlude. Six years later, he was re-arrested and quickly convicted for the Crasper murder on the word of two men facing prison time. Bozella served 26 years, mostly in the Sing Sing maximum-security prison, 30 miles north of New York City.
If nothing else, his book demonstrates that life really is about having the strength to make good choices even when all hope appears lost. Bozella wins his release after reinventing himself — embracing religion and leaving behind smoking, drinking and drugs to focus on self-improvement. In one dramatic test early in his sentence, he meets the man he had sworn to kill for murdering his younger brother. With other inmates watching, Bozella ends up hugging the man and offering his forgiveness. “That was the birth of my true identity,” he writes.His journey is indeed heroic. But there were pain and anger along the way. Bozella was sent to prison the second time with no more evidence than police had on the first arrest. He writes that the police never forgot that he had earlier wriggled off the hook and they harassed him in those intervening years. His assertion that he was a victim of an ambitious prosecutor and bumbling cops is not that implausible, given what we have seen in some other high-profile cases of innocent men sent to prison.
Through four parole hearings, Bozella refused to admit guilt to gain early release. He won a new trial in 1990 because African-Americans were excluded from his first trial. But a diverse jury convicted him a second time.
Resigned to his 20-years-to-life sentence, Bozella recalls: “I locked my soul up, too. Sealing my true self up tight — putting my soul in solitary — was the only way I could see to survive this terrifying underworld that was my new home.”
Life in Sing Sing was brutal: Stay alive by minding your own business, never look in another man’s cell, and figure out a hustle to buy cigarettes, the coin of the realm in the joint. Anything a man could get on the outside, Bozella writes, was available in “Swing Swing” — drugs, chicken, alcohol and sex.
His back story is the typical hell-to-cell existence. He was the second-oldest of six kids born to a black mother and an abusive, two-timing white father. The children were driven into foster care when Bozella was 11 after his father beat his mother to death.
He left Queens for good at 17 to live with an older half brother in Poughkeepsie. Despite the close call in 1977, Bozella still found trouble and ended up serving two years in prison for robbery. Once out, he was determined to go straight and was taught to box by retired heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson. But before he could get a fight, he was off to Sing Sing in January 1984.
Inside, he trained with a corrections officer and became the undefeated light-heavyweight champion of the prison. The book doesn’t dwell on his boxing exploits. But his fighting spirit is a theme as he tries to improve himself and prove his innocence. He became a jailhouse lawyer and a man of faith, and earned a GED as well as bachelor’s and master’s degrees. “For the first time in my life,” Bozella writes, “I started feeding my mind instead of numbing it.”
He met and married the sister of a prisoner. But marriage straddling prison was complicated for Dewey and Trena. They were unable to conceive a child during conjugal visits and began drifting apart: He suspected she did not believe in his innocence, and she was turned off by his increasing coldness.
After he won the attention of the Innocence Project, which has freed nearly 350 inmates with DNA evidence, Trena became a fierce advocate. In 2009, the project dropped the case because of a lack of DNA evidence to pursue, but not before getting a white-shoe law firm to take it pro bono. A team of four inexperienced lawyers took on the challenge with gusto, finding the retired detective who put Bozella away. Art Regula immediately handed over the case file. Asked why he kept it all those years, he said, “Because I knew someone like you would be at the door someday, because he didn’t do it.”
Energized, the lawyers hunted down more records, including accounts that contradicted the men who placed Bozella at Crasper’s apartment. They also found witness statements supporting a theory that another man, serving time for a similar murder of an elderly widow, did the killing. None of this information had been shared with Bozella’s defense. A judge agreed that his due process rights had been violated and granted him a third trial. On Oct. 28, 2009, prosecutors finally decided to drop the case. (The Crasper murder remains unsolved.)
A free man at 50, Bozella became something of a celebrity. A documentary about him aired on ESPN, he won the network’s Arthur Ashe Award for Courage, and he received a settlement for his years in prison, later reported to be $7.5 million. The book has a Rocky-like finish, with Bozella getting his first and only professional fight in 2011, surviving four rounds to win a unanimous decision.
“Stand Tall” is not a great book, but it is riveting in parts, especially when Bozella depicts his chilling life in prison and when he chooses self-respect over expediency. That he emerged with a loving heart, a devoted wife and his sanity is perhaps his biggest triumph of all.
Gregory L. Moore, the former editor of The Denver Post, teaches journalism at the University of Colorado’s College of Media, Communication and Information.
STAND TALL: Fighting for My Life, Inside and Outside the Ring
By Dewey Bozella.
Ecco.
