From Across the Pond: A Love Letter to Cleveland: The Memoirs of a Brit Journalist with the Cleveland Press 1970-82

It’s 7.30am and the first glimpse of gloomy daylight is creeping over the snow-covered Central Central Police
station at E.21st St and Payne Ave. The night shift is ending. Police officers are gathering their coats, greeting
their arriving colleagues and saying their farewells.
I am at a table in a little office used by my new employer, looking over the first of a number of overnight ‘reports
of interest’ from the police logs that might make a story or two for that day’s newspaper. A growing hubbub of
noise just outside the entrance attracts the attention of both myself and Hilbert (Hil) Black, the paper’s chief police
beat reporter,
I put on my coat and go to see for myself. Stepping around huge piles of plowed snow I see fingers pointing
skywards towards a barely-visible, half- naked body draped over the telephone and electric wires that run down
the street. The frozen body of a woman, legs on one side of the wires, her dress hanging over her torso dangling
from the other.
My first homicide? So soon? Not quite. It transpires that this is not a vicious crime, a gangster’s warning to the
police, or anything more than a homeless vagrant who has died during the night in an upstairs floor of the rundown “flop-house” across the street. With no intact windows in this decrepit, five-storey commercial building her
fellow vagrants have thrown her body straight out of an upstairs window, because they don’t know what else to
do with her

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