JUST IN — Death Row Inmate Freed After 20 Years When Hidden Evidence Finally Surfaced

The phone rings at the Cleveland Police homicide desk 2 days after they pulled a boy’s body out of Don Creek. The officer who picks up doesn’t get a name. The voice on the other end is careful, almost rehearsed, like a man who has thought hard about exactly how many words he’s willing to say. He isn’t calling to confess.

 He isn’t calling to accuse anyone. Two decades, one line among thousands. Easy to overlook if you’re not looking for it. Nobody connects it to anything in 1988. Nobody connects it to anything in 1989 when a jury sends a 26-year-old man to Ohio’s death row for a murder he says he didn’t commit. It will take a Catholic priest, a stack of file boxes nobody was supposed to hand over, and almost 20 years before anyone asks the question that should have been asked from the start.

 If Joe Damrosio killed Tony Klan, how did another man know what the killer did to his hands? This is the story of how that question tore apart a death penalty conviction, exposed a prosecution office that hid what it knew and left one of the men responsible for solving Tony Klan’s murder more free at the end of the story than he was at the beginning.

 Before we go further, if you haven’t already, subscribe to True Crime Matters. Cases like this one where the system got it wrong and somebody had to fight to prove it are exactly what this channel exists to tell properly with the record instead of the rumor. Now back to Cleveland 1988. Tony Klan was 19 years old.

 The kind of 19 where you’re technically an adult, but everyone who knows you still thinks of you as a kid. He lived in Cleveland, worked odd jobs, and spent his Friday nights the way a lot of 19-year-olds in a rust belt city did in the late 1980s, moving between a couple of familiar bars with people he halfrusted and fully liked.

 On the night of September 23rd, 1988, that’s exactly where he was. By the next morning, he was gone. A jogger found him on September 24th face down in Don Creek, a slowmoving waterway that cuts through Cleveland’s east side. The medical examiner’s report would eventually describe what had been done to him in blunt clinical language, stabbed three times in the chest, his throat cut.

 It was without question or ambiguity a homicide. There is no version of this case then or now in which what happened to Tony Clan is in dispute. A young man went out for a night with people he knew and did not come home. Whatever else gets complicated about this story and it gets very complicated, that fact never does.

 Cleveland in the fall of 1988 was a city used to bad news. The steel economy that had once defined it had been gutted for over a decade, and homicide detectives in Kyahoga County were not short on work. A dead 19-year-old pulled out of a creek was tragic, but it wasn’t unusual enough on its own to guarantee careful handling. What it guaranteed instead was pressure.

pressure from a department that wanted an arrest, from a public that wanted an answer, and from a prosecutor’s office that, as this story will show, wanted a conviction more than it wanted the truth. Homicide detectives moved fast, the way departments tend to when a case involves a young victim and a city watching.

 Within days they had built a working theory and within it three names Thomas Michael Keenan, Edward Espinosa and Joe Dembrosio. The story detectives assembled went something like this. Keenan believed a man named Paul Stony Lewis had stolen drugs from him. Lewis had once worked for Kenan and whatever the actual history between them was, Kenan wanted to find him that night.

Somewhere in the search for Lewis Clan, who knew some of the people involved and had spent part of the evening with them, ended up in the group. According to the account that would eventually be told in court, Clan was brought along because someone believed he might know where Lewis was or might know something about him.

 By the early hours of September 24th, Clan was dead. Espinosa was the one who would end up telling this story to a jury, and the deal he made to tell it would become one of the most important and most contested decisions in the entire case. Here is the fact that should stop you cold before this story goes any further. The man who admitted under oath to being present for Tony Klan’s murder did not receive a death sentence.

 He received a prison term. Edward Espinosa pleaded guilty to manslaughter. In exchange for his cooperation, specifically for his testimony against Kenan and Damrosio, he was sentenced to 15 to 75 years in prison, eligible for parole well within his lifetime. Keenan and Damrosio, tried separately, would both be sentenced to death.

 Sit with that for a second because the entire rest of this case rests on it. The prosecution’s own key witness, the person whose account did more than anyone else’s to put a rope around Joe Damrosio’s neck, so to speak, was by his own admission in open court, a participant in the same crime, and the reward for that admission was a chance at freedom.

 The people who weren’t in the room that night, or whose presence was never established by anything other than Espinosa’s word, got the harshest sentence the state of Ohio can hand down. This isn’t an unusual arrangement in American criminal law. Cooperating witnesses trade testimony for reduced sentences constantly and sometimes that testimony is accurate and the deal is fair.

 But it means from the moment Espinosa took the stand that everything he said had to be measured against a simple uncomfortable truth. He had every incentive in the world to tell the story that kept him off death row. Whether or not it was the whole truth or the true one, there’s a detail buried in Espinosa’s account that on its own should have raised red flags for anyone weighing his credibility.

 Part of his testimony described Clan’s throat being slit and Clan then running away, screaming for help. Years later, when Father Cuc began pulling apart the physical evidence in this case, he would point out that this detail was not just unlikely. It was, in his words, physiologically close to impossible. A person doesn’t scream effectively with a severed throat.

 It’s the kind of detail that a defense pathologist, given the chance to examine the medical evidence and testify in front of the jury, might have dismantled in minutes. Diamio’s trial team never got that chance because the trial moved too fast and because, as would only become clear years later, they didn’t have access to everything.

the state already knew about the condition of clan’s body and the physical realities of the crime scene. Damrosio’s trial opened before a three judge panel in Kyahoga County Common P on February 6th, 1989. He was 26 years old, an Army veteran, and from the moment he was arrested, he said the same thing he would keep saying for the next two decades.

 He didn’t kill Tony Clan. Paul Lewis, the man Kenan had allegedly been hunting that night, testified for the prosecution, too. He told the court that he and Clan had gone to a bar called The Saloon that Friday evening, that he’d run into Kenan there, a man he used to work for, and the two of them had left together for another bar, Coconut Joe’s.

 Not long after, Clan showed up at Coconut Joe’s with Espinosa and Diamio. It was on its face an ordinary account of an ordinary night. Right up until the point where it wasn’t. Another witness, Carolyn Rosselle, testified that the three men, Kenan, Espinosa, and Diamio, showed up at her home in the early morning hours, still looking for Lewis.

Her testimony helped the prosecution stitch together a timeline that placed Ambrosio in the group throughout the crucial hours of that night. The trial, when you put it all together, moved fast. Espinosa’s account, corroborated in pieces by Lewis and Roselle, was enough. There was no DNA evidence tying Diamio directly to the killing.

 No physical proof placing his hands on the weapon. What the state had was a narrative built primarily around the testimony of a man who had already secured his own path off death row by agreeing to tell it and supported by witnesses whose own accounts, as later evidence would show, weren’t as airtight as they appeared under direct examination.

 The three judge panel that Ohio law allowed for in place of a jury heard all of it in the span of two working days. On February 8th, 1989, the panel convicted Joe Dembrosio of burglary, kidnapping, felony murder, and aggravated murder. They sentenced him to death. He was moved to Ohio’s death row, having spent by some accounts barely more than 2 and 1/2 days on trial for his life. That number matters.

 It will matter a great deal later when someone finally sits down and asks how a capital case, a case where the state is asking permission to kill a man, produced so little paper. Consider what a capital trial is supposed to look like. It’s supposed to be the single most exhaustively documented proceeding in the American legal system precisely because the stakes are irreversible.

Every witness interviewed by police is supposed to be cataloged. Every piece of physical evidence is supposed to be logged, tested, and made available for the defense to examine. Every alternate theory investigators considered, and discarded is supposed to leave a paper trail because the defense has a constitutional right to see where that trail leads, even if the prosecution decided it led nowhere.

 A 2 and 1/2 day trial with a single volume of trial record for a case that ended in a death sentence is not just unusual. It’s the kind of number that once someone finally looks closely at it starts to look less like efficiency and more like a warning sign. No one looked closely at it for a long time.

 Damrosio went to death row and the case, as far as the public was concerned, was closed. Death Row is not a place designed for hope. And Joe Damrosio spent the better part of two decades there anyway, insisting on his innocence to anyone who would listen, which for most of that time was almost no one. The Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his conviction in 1993.

It affirmed his death sentence again in 1995. After additional proceedings, the state’s appellet machinery, methodical and largely unmoved by his claims, did what it was built to do. It upheld what a jury and a panel of judges had already decided. Damrosio filed a federal habius corpus petition in 2001, the long-shot mechanism by which state prisoners ask a federal court to look again.

 Most of these petitions fail. Most of the men who file them stay exactly where they were. What changed Ambrosio’s case wasn’t a legal argument. It was a man named Father Neil Cuk. Cuc was a Catholic priest and notably also a registered nurse before entering the priesthood which gave him an unusually methodical evidence first way of looking at a case file.

 He wasn’t a lawyer, an investigator, or anyone with formal standing in the criminal justice system. He was a man who agreed to look into Damrosio’s case initially out of little more than pastoral concern and who kept pulling threads long after most people would have stopped. What he found when he actually got his hands on the files stunned him.

 A death penalty case, he would later explain, typically generates roughly 15 volumes of material for a trial that runs 4 to 6 weeks. Damrosio’s capital trial, a trial that ended with a death sentence, had produced a single volume for a proceeding that lasted two and a half days. Something about that imbalance didn’t sit right with him.

 If the state had genuinely built an exhaustive, careful case against a man it was preparing to execute, where was all the paperwork that should have come with it? So Cuc started digging into what the state actually had. Not what had been presented at trial, but what existed in the prosecutor’s file, the police file, and the coroner’s file.

 And what he found there wasn’t missing evidence in the sense of evidence that never existed. It was evidence that had existed the entire time. Sitting in drawers, Joe Damrosio’s own defense attorneys had never been allowed to open. By the time Damrosio’s legal team brought their findings to federal court, they had identified more than a dozen categories of evidence the prosecution possessed before trial and never disclosed to the defense.

 Evidence that under the Constitution, they were required to hand over. The rule that governs this comes from a 1963 Supreme Court case, Brady v. Maryland. And it’s about as close to a bedrock principle as American criminal law has. When the prosecution has evidence favorable to the accused, evidence that could change the outcome, it has to turn it over.

 Not because it’s polite, because the trial isn’t a fair contest without it. Withhold it. And you’re not just bending a rule. You’re deciding unilaterally which parts of the truth a jury is allowed to hear. Some of what Cucath and Damrosio’s legal team eventually surfaced. The first detectives on the scene at Don Creek did not believe Clan had actually been killed there.

 There was no blood at the scene, no visible sign of a struggle. Details that should have raised immediate doubts about the very timeline Espinosa would later testify to. Clan was also found without his shoes, a detail the original investigators flagged as significant and that never made it in front of the jury. There was the matter of Paul Lewis himself.

 According to evidence the prosecution held but never disclosed, Lewis had been accused of raping Tony Klan’s roommate, Christopher Longaneer. Clan reportedly knew about the allegation. That single fact that the man everyone was supposedly searching for that night had a documented undisclosed motive to want Clan silenced was never given to Damrosio’s defense.

It’s the kind of detail that in a different trial might have redirected the entire theory of the case. There was bloody clothing recovered from Kenan’s garage, evidence the defense never received. There was cocaine later discovered in Kenan’s truck after it had been repossessed despite police having claimed the vehicle was searched at the time.

 There was a cassette recording connected to the investigation that reportedly implicated other individuals. Evidence that likewise never reached the defense. There was testimony from a woman named Linda Delases Hudac who reportedly told investigators she’d seen Clan alive later on the Friday evening than the prosecution’s timeline allowed for.

 And there was that anonymous phone call, the one that opened this video. Investigators eventually identified the caller as Paul Lewis. 2 days after Clan’s body was found, Lewis had called police and asked whether the victim’s hands had been cut. a detail that had not been made public. It’s not proof of anything on its own. It’s not a confession, but it is at minimum the kind of detail that a defense attorney representing a man facing execution has every right to know about and interrogate in front of a jury.

 It never got the chance. There was also the matter of the witnesses themselves. James Russell and Carolyn Rosselle, the same Carolyn Rosselle, whose testimony had helped the state build its timeline against Damrosio, later sought police assistance relocating, telling investigators they believed they had received threats.

 That too is the kind of detail that speaks directly to witness credibility. the kind of thing a defense attorney would want to explore in front of a jury deciding whether to believe what those witnesses said. It never reached Diamio’s trial team either. Put it all together and a pattern emerges that goes well beyond a single overlooked document.

 This wasn’t one lost file. It was by the federal court’s own later count more than a dozen separate categories of evidence. physical evidence, motive evidence, timeline evidence, and witness credibility evidence, all pointing in directions the prosecution’s theory of the case did not want a jury to wander into.

 Some of it might have meant nothing on its own. Taken together, it painted a picture of an investigation that had multiple live leads before it ever narrowed to Diamio, Kenan, and Espinosa. leads the jury never learned existed. None of this proves by itself exactly what happened to Tony Clan or who is responsible. What it proves, and this distinction matters enormously, is that the jury who sentenced Joe Damrosio to death never got to weigh any of it.

They made a life ordeath decision with a fraction of what the state actually knew, sitting in a file cabinet 3 mi away. In 2006, a federal district court agreed that Kyhoga County prosecutors had violated Damrosio’s constitutional rights. The judge found that most of the evidence his legal team had uncovered had in fact been suppressed and that much of it was material, meaning there was a reasonable likelihood it could have changed the outcome of the trial.

The court overturned both his conviction and his death sentence. It’s worth being precise here about what that ruling was and wasn’t. It was not a declaration that Joe Damrosio was innocent. Courts overturning convictions on Brady grounds aren’t making a finding about guilt or innocence.

 They’re making a finding about whether the trial itself was constitutionally fair. In Damrosio’s case, the court’s answer was unambiguous. It was not. Ohio didn’t simply let him go. The state appealed and on June 5th, 2008, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the district court’s Brady ruling. The appellet judges laid out in considerable and damning detail the pattern of suppressed evidence the prosecution had sat on for nearly 20 years.

 In September of that year, the district court ordered that Diamio be retrieded within 180 days. not released outright, but given the trial his original jury never got to have this time with the full record in front of them. That should have been in a fairer version of this story close to the end.

 It wasn’t preparing Damrosio for a second trial should have been Kyahoga County’s chance to do this properly. Instead, according to the courts that reviewed what happened next, prosecutors kept making the same mistake that had gotten them here in the first place. More undisclosed evidence surfaced during the retrial preparations, and then came a development that in the context of everything before it felt almost too pointed to be coincidental.

Edward Espinosa, the cooperating witness whose testimony had done more than anyone else’s to convict Damrosio in 1989, had died. The state, according to the federal courts that later reviewed the matter, failed to properly and promptly disclose his death to Diamrosio’s legal team or to the court overseeing the case.

 Think about what that means for a retrial. The central witness against Ambrosio, the man who told the jury what he claimed he’d seen, could no longer testify, could no longer be cross-examined about the deal that had kept him off death row, could no longer be confronted with any of the newly surfaced evidence that might have undercut his 1989 account.

 And the prosecution, by the court’s own account, didn’t move quickly to tell anyone. In March 2010, a federal judge, Kathleen Ali, barred Kyahoga County prosecutors from retrying Damrosio for Tony Clan’s murder. After roughly two decades on death row, Joe Damrosio walked out. He became the 140th person exonerated from death row in the United States since 1973 and the sixth from Ohio alone.

 A state that like several others has had to reckon repeatedly with how often its capital system has gotten it wrong. There is no dramatic courtroom footage of that walk out of prison. No crowd of cameras waiting the way there might be in a bigger, more publicized exoneration. What there was, according to Diamrosio’s own later account, was a strange kind of vertigo, the sense of a man stepping back into a world that had kept moving for 22 years, while his had stood almost completely still.

 He would later describe the disorientation of relearning basic things using a cell phone, navigating a grocery store, understanding that the Cleveland he’d left in 1988 barely resembled the one he was walking back into. Freedom, it turned out, was its own kind of adjustment, one the court’s rulings could grant, but couldn’t actually prepare a person for.

 Prosecutors appealed the order, barring reprosecution. In August 2011, the Sixth Circuit affirmed it, ruling specifically that the district court had the authority to bar a new trial because the state had failed to comply with the terms of the earlier conditional ruling. Ohio took the fight to the US Supreme Court. In January 2012, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

 That was finally the end of it. 23 years after a three judge panel sentenced him to die, the state of Ohio’s capital case against Joe Dembrosio was closed for good. And it wasn’t closed because a jury found him not guilty. It was closed because the people whose job it was to prove his guilt had, by the unanimous conclusion of every federal court that reviewed it, failed to play fair the first time and then failed again when given a second chance.

 Walking out of prison did not mean the story was over for Joe Dembrosio. And it’s worth spending a moment on what came after because it says something about how difficult it actually is in America to get the system to say the words, “We were wrong.” Even after it has already done exactly that twice in federal court. Ohio, like a number of states, has a compensation statute for people who were wrongfully imprisoned. to collect under it.

 A former prisoner generally has to prove one of two things. Either that a specific error in procedure led to their postconviction release, or that they simply did not commit the crime. Damrosio filed suit seeking that declaration in 2012, the same year his capital case finally closed for good. It did not go smoothly.

 An earlier ruling in his favor was reversed by the Ohio Supreme Court over how the compensation statute’s technical requirements had been applied. Damrosio refiled and on August 31st, 2020, eight full years after he’d first sought it and a full decade after he’d walked out of prison, Kyahoga County Common Please Court Judge Michael Russo ruled that Joe Damrosio had been wrongfully imprisoned.

 8 years for a declaration that by any plain reading of everything two federal appellet courts had already found should not have needed a fight at all. Damrosio didn’t disappear quietly after his release either. He spent the years that followed becoming one of the more visible voices in Ohio’s death penalty reform movement, testifying, speaking publicly, and pointedly continuing his relationship with Father Cuc, the priest whose willingness to open a single trial record box changed the entire trajectory of his life. Their story, the exonerated

man and the priest who wouldn’t let his case sit closed, became its own thread in the broader conversation about capital punishment in Ohio. Cited repeatedly in years of legislative hearings and public debate that followed. He took his fight further than most exoneries do too. Even after difficult to hear a man describe watching the state prepare for years to execute him for a crime it never proved against him fairly and not feel the weight of what he was arguing.

 It’s tempting telling a story like this to wrap it up with a clean bow, an innocent man, a wrongful conviction, a happy ending. But the more honest version of this story is messier. And the mess is exactly what makes it worth understanding. Consider the ordinary path a wrongful conviction case takes when it does get corrected.

 Usually, there’s a single identifiable turning point. A DNA test that couldn’t have come back any other way. An alibi witness who finally comes forward. A confession from the actual perpetrator. Those cases are tragic, but they’re relatively simple to explain. the system had the wrong person and eventually new information proved it.

 Damrosio’s case doesn’t have that kind of clean turning point and that’s precisely what makes it more unsettling. There was no DNA breakthrough. There was no last minute confession. What unraveled this conviction was essentially an audit. one priest with a nursing background looking at a stack of files the state had always possessed and asking again and again why wasn’t this in front of the jury.

 That question turned out to be enough to collapse a 20-year-old capital conviction, which raises an uncomfortable follow-up question of its own. How many other convictions would collapse the same way if anyone ever bothered to ask it? Joe Damrosio was never found not guilty by a jury that heard the full truth. No jury ever got that chance.

 What the record shows across a 2006 federal ruling, a 2008 appellet affirmation, and a 2011 order permanently barring reprosecution is something arguably more damning to the system than an ordinary wrongful conviction. Prosecutors in Kyahoga County had in their own files evidence that could have changed the outcome of a death penalty trial.

 A mysterious accuser’s undisclosed motive. Physical evidence pointing away from the prosecution’s own timeline. A phone call that never should have known what it knew. And for the better part of two decades, they simply never gave it to the man they were trying to execute. That’s not a story about one man’s bad luck.

 That’s a story about what happens when the people entrusted with deciding who lives and who dies decide quietly that the defense doesn’t get to see everything the state already knows. And somewhere in the middle of every legal filing, every appellet opinion, every hearing about Brady violations and habius standards, it’s easy to lose the person this story is actually about.

Tony Klan was 19 years old. He went out with people he knew on a Friday night in September 1988 and never came home. Whatever the truth of what happened to him, and after everything the courts uncovered about how thoroughly his case was mishandled, that truth may never be fully and reliably established. He deserved a justice system that took his death seriously enough to get it right the first time.

 He deserved investigators who followed every lead instead of the ones that fit fastest. He deserved a trial where the jury heard what the state actually knew, not a curated fraction of it delivered in 2 and 1/2 days. Instead, what Tony Clan got was a case built and closed so quickly that the truth of what happened to him has spent the last 37 years buried under a wrongful capital conviction, a suppressed evidence scandal, and a federal court fight that ran nearly as long as his own life had.

Somewhere in Cleveland, there are still people who loved him, who have had to watch the story of his death become in the public record a story primarily about the man wrongly convicted of causing it. That’s not a criticism of Joe Dembrosio, who spent 20 years paying for a crime, the courts ultimately agreed the state never proved against him fairly.

 It’s a reminder of something this channel comes back to again and again. When the system fails this badly, it doesn’t just fail the person it wrongly convicts. It fails the victim, too, by leaving the actual truth of what happened to them unresolved, possibly forever. Joe De Ambrosio spent his years of freedom, saying publicly that he didn’t know with certainty exactly what happened to Tony Clan that night, only that the trial that sentenced him to die for it was never a fair one.

 Tony Klan’s family has had to live with that same unresolved space for over three decades. A case that was never properly solved. A conviction that collapsed under the weight of what should have been disclosed from the start and no clean answer to replace it. And that’s really the uncomfortable center of this entire story.

 A capital case in Ohio ran its full course. trial, conviction, death sentence, appeals, federal habius review, a second attempted prosecution, and finally an order permanently barring any further prosecution. And at the end of all of it, the question a homicide detective should have been asking from day one is still formally open. Who killed Tony Clan? Not who was convicted, who actually did it.

 The three names investigators zeroed in on in the fall of 1988 remain the only three names ever seriously attached to this case and only one of them, Espinosa, ever admitted under oath to being present. What makes that question even harder to answer is that Diamio’s case wasn’t the only one to collapse.

 Thomas Michael Keenan, the man prosecutors alleged had led the search for Paul Lewis that night, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death twice. Once in 1989, and again after the Ohio Supreme Court threw out his first conviction over prosecutorial misconduct in closing argument. His second conviction held for nearly two decades until a federal court found in 2012 that the same office that had prosecuted Damrosio had also withheld evidence in Kenan’s case, including material that could have impeached the credibility of police detectives and other prosecution

witnesses. Ohio remarkably continued fighting to try Keenan a third time even after that ruling. One Ohio Supreme Court justice wrote that doing so risked the state one day discovering it had executed a man without ever giving him a fair trial. Kenan has been free since 2012. Which means that decades after Tony Klan’s murder, two of the three men originally charged in his death have had their convictions unravel for strikingly similar reasons.

 the same prosecutor’s office, the same pattern of withheld evidence playing out twice. For now, what’s certain is this. The state of Ohio spent parts of three different decades trying to prove its case against Joe Damrosio and never once succeeded in doing it fairly. That failure cost him roughly 20 years of his life. It cost Tony Klan’s family a resolution they were entitled to and never received.

 and it left behind a case file that even now with every appeal exhausted and every court that could weigh in having already done so still doesn’t answer the only question that ever actually mattered. If this case affected you the way it affected the people who lived through it, that’s worth sitting with for a moment before you go.

 And if you want to see more cases like this one where we go past the headlines and into the actual court record, subscribe to True Crime Matters. We’ll be back with the next one