Mom Says Family Haunted By Daughter's Murder

EAST CLEVELAND, Ohio -- It's been 25 years, and the painful memories linger of the day that Bessye Middleton's 14-year-old daughter was raped and stabbed to death.

The girl, Tryna Middleton, was abducted at knifepoint on Sept. 21, 1984, while she was walking home from a Friday night football game with two friends.

The man convicted of her murder, Romell Broom, is scheduled to die by lethal injection Tuesday.

"It's been 25 years and the pain has gotten a little bit better but there is not a single day that I don't get up and think about her during some point in the day," Bessye Middleton, 65, said.

Tryna's father, David Middleton, a retired auto worker, won't drive down the street where his daughter was abducted and for years became nauseous returning to a home filled with memories. Bessye Middleton will only drive down the street where her daughter was abducted when she heads to church on Sundays.

On the day of the murder, Broom watched the girls from a slow-moving car. They sensed something wasn't right and turned up a different street to get home, Bessye Middleton said.

But Broom, who was familiar with the neighborhood, apparently guessed their detour and was waiting for them. He raped Tryna Middleton and stabbed her seven times, according to the attorney general's office.

Broom's preying on girls eventually caught up with him.

Three months later, Broom forced an 11-year-old girl into his car but the victim's mother thwarted his escape by running after the car, which was stuck on ice, and yelling to her daughter to jump out.

"The daughter finally jumped out, just about the same time he got some traction on the vehicle and he actually ran over her leg," said Gary Belluomini, an FBI agent who worked in a white-collar crime unit where Bessye Middleton was a clerk.

Two eyewitnesses to the attempted abduction collaborated, one getting the numbers on the getaway car's license plate and the other the letters. That led to Broom's arrest.

He was identified by the girl, her mother and by two eyewitnesses and, after police recognized the similarities with the cases, by Tryna's girlfriends.

The back-to-back identifications helped crack the case, according to retired Cleveland police Detective Edward "Buddy" Kovacic.

"You connect the dots and all of a sudden the dots start looking like a square or a triangle. All of a sudden they connect and that's what happened," he said.

Broom, 53, has a criminal record dating to when he was 13, including robbery, car theft and the 1975 rape of a his niece's 12-year-old baby sitter. He served 8½ years of a seven- to 25-year rape sentence and was paroled four months before Tryna was killed.

Broom turned down media interview requests as his execution date approached, according to the state prison system. The state Parole Board has recommended that Gov. Ted Strickland deny clemency.

The Ohio Supreme Court on Friday rejected his request to present evidence he says could have changed the outcome of his trial.

Broom has claimed that he was targeted because of his earlier rape conviction and has complained that his attorneys didn't get all the information collected by police.

Prosecutors say a federal judge has already ruled that the evidence would not have made a difference at trial.

The defense at his 1985 trial said Broom, whose sister was a stabbing murder victim, dropped out of school in 10th grade and was shaped by a broken family in which he saw his mother beaten by his father. Broom often had to care for his siblings.

Broom's mother pleaded with the trail court to spare his life.

"He didn't kill your baby. He didn't kill that baby. I swear to God, he didn't kill your baby," his mother, Ella Mae Broom, said after she left the witness stand.

Bessye Middleton thinks the time has come.

"It's not that you want somebody's life to be taken from them but he's trying to beat the system," she said in an even tone. "We had to suffer. He's had 25 years longer than her."

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