A Quest to Free a Kindred Spirit

The phone rings in her Pasadena home and Joyce Ride pauses to hear the voice on the answering machine. Maybe this will be the call from prison.

Nope. Not this one. Ride, 78, goes on with the story, her dog, Cady, sprawled on the floor at her feet.

You’re not supposed to ask inmates why they’re in prison, says Ride, who’s been going behind bars for 25 years. Prison volunteers are trained to be pals, not inquisitors. So for the first year that she traveled once every other week to the state prison in Frontera, back in 1994, Ride didn’t know that Gloria Killian was serving 32 years to life for murder.

Then one day Ride, the mother of astronaut Sally Ride, said the heck with it.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

When she heard Killian’s claim of innocence, she had another question.

“Would it be all right with you if I hired an investigator?”

The investigator further convinced Ride that Killian had been set up; fingered by a casual acquaintance who had already been convicted of the 1981 homicide/robbery in Sacramento. The murderer won a break on his own sentence by claiming that Killian and another man were in on it with him.

Killian, a law student with no criminal record, was convicted in 1986 despite her claim of innocence. She had been in prison eight years when Joyce Ride met her. As soon as Ride’s investigator wrapped up his work in 1995, Ride went to see Santa Monica attorney William Genego.

“I told her these cases can take a long time to resolve, they can be incredibly expensive, and there was absolutely no way I could assure her we would be successful,” says Genego.

Ride, a widow and former teacher, didn’t flinch. Get it going, she said, and she kept writing checks even as state courts rejected one appeal after another.

“She has a strong conscience, a commitment to social justice and deep roots in progressive faith,” says Ride’s daughter Karen “Bear” Ride, a Presbyterian minister at USC.

Ride first visited female inmates in the 1970s, motivated by a nun who spoke to her Presbyterian women’s group. Of the 12 women now on death row in California, she believes two may be innocent and that four others deserve leniency for having murdered men who battered them. Her blue Norwegian eyes narrow when she mentions Gov. Gray Davis, who has said there should be no special consideration for women who go after their tormentors.

In Killian, Ride saw a kindred spirit. As a prison law clerk, Killian represented battered women, went after guards for sexual harassment and worked on a lawsuit demanding better medical coverage. Killian kept up those fights even as her own pleas for justice were rejected. There was no way Ride would abandon her, no matter the cost.

“It seemed the perfectly normal thing to do,” Ride said of her check-writing, which cut deeply into her retirement fund.

Genego says such cases can run into six figures. He became so convinced of Killian’s innocence that he began representing her for free a couple of years ago. And then, last week, after all these years, he called Ride with the news.

“I think I yelled, ‘Whoopee!’ into the phone,” says Ride.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had reversed Killian’s conviction, saying it was based on a “thoroughly discredited” perjurer trying to scam a lighter sentence. A new trial could be ordered at some point, but Killian is expected to be released on bail as early as today.

“I told Joyce she was a hero,” says Genego, “and she started laughing and said she never thought of it that way.”

By chance, Ride had a scheduled visit at the prison the day Killian got the news. “She was a couple of feet off the floor,” says Ride.

When the call comes, she’s going to pick Killian up at the prison and bring her home to Pasadena. “She’s going to stay with me until she gets herself situated,” says Ride.

Killian, 55, may return to law school, picking up where she left off before 16 years were taken from her.

As we waited for the phone to ring, I asked Ride what makes her the kind of person who couldn’t let go of this case. She went to another room and when she returned, she handed me a poem by Adrienne Rich.

*

My heart is moved by all

I cannot save:

So much has been destroyed.

I have to cast my lot with those

who Age after age, perversely,

With no extraordinary power,

Reconstitute the world.

*

Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com.