She was lying in bed on a Thursday morning, thinking about the man she loved, hoping to gain his freedom before time ran out.
“Alexa,” he said, “play Christine and Ezra’s playlist.”
The sounds of Motown filled her bedroom, in a condominium near Philadelphia, as Christine Roess took a break from a long, excruciating battle. Smokey Robinson gave way to Van Morrison, who sang the first lines of “Crazy Love.”
I can hear your heartbeat
From a thousand miles
Ezra Bozeman was about 230 miles away, over the mountains toward Pittsburgh, imprisoned as he had been for the vast majority of his 68 years. Dozens of friends and at least seven state legislators had joined in a frantic effort to free him. Given his fragile condition, they worried that he could die at any moment.
When he and Christine first fell in love, she visited him, walked up to him, and whispered a few lines from “Crazy Love” in his ear. She later said that a guard told her: “Seeing the way she looks at you makes my hair stand on end.”
The playlist continued. Now it was “Wild Thing” by The Troggs, which reached number one on the charts when Ezra was 10 years old.
He was 19 on January 3, 1975, the day someone tried to rob a dry cleaners in Pittsburgh and shot and killed co-owner Morris Weitz. Another young man, Thomas Durrett, was charged with the murder. But authorities dropped charges against Durrett, who later testified that Ezra had committed the robbery and had tacitly admitted to the murder in a conversation earlier that day. According to a trial transcript, two of Durrett’s friends also testified that they had heard Ezra make similar statements.
Ezra said he was innocent. Authorities did not present any physical evidence linking him to the crime. At trial, no one inside the dry cleaners identified the shooter. Durrett did not implicate Ezra until months after the crime and after he, Durrett, was charged with the murder. However, Durrett was freed. A prosecutor told a judge there was insufficient evidence to convict Durrett, writing in a court document that “the only witness against him” in the forensic investigation “had failed to implicate him during direct examination.” Durrett died in 2018.
Ezra was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. For decades he attempted to overturn the conviction, arguing that authorities had not followed legal procedure and that his trial attorney had been ineffective. When a Pennsylvania court denied his appeal in 2019, the opinion noted that it was Ezra Bozeman’s eighth petition for post-conviction relief.
He learned to love himself and others.
“Alexa, next,” said Christine Roess, as a reporter listened to her playlist and stories on the phone. Through the bedroom window she could see new leaves on the trees. Christine is 78 years old and is the retired founder of a leadership development company that worked with Fortune 500 companies. She has one daughter and has never been married. And although she has been “madly in love” before, Christine said she has never felt a love as pure as the one she feels for Ezra.
Alexa played the next song on Christine and Ezra’s playlist: a cover of Sting’s “Fields of Gold.”
“Alexa, pause,” Christine said, fighting back tears, as memories washed over her like waves.
Ezra told him how he had changed in prison. He spent a lot of time in solitary confinement. Men found ingenious ways to feel less alone. They built pulley systems out of broken sheets and passed books from cell to cell. Sometimes they talked to each other, if they could get their way.
One hot summer day, according to an essay Ezra wrote and Christine shared with CNN, Ezra overheard a conversation between an old man and a young man. The older man was talking about his daughter and the younger man wanted to write her a love letter. But the older man said that the younger man couldn’t love her because he didn’t even love himself.
These words were not directed at Ezra, but they hurt him deeply. He realized that he did not love himself and that he needed to start doing so in order to give others the same love. It could be love, a kind of love that demanded nothing in return. He would give love and that would be satisfaction enough. This, he later wrote, was his “key to freedom.” It was “a love that transcends walls and circumstances, a love that knows no limits.”
Years after leaving solitary confinement, he became a certified peer specialist. This allowed him to visit and comfort other people who were in solitary confinement. He felt special compassion for those who could not read, because without books it was much more difficult to pass the time. If someone was in crisis and refused to take their medication, Ezra was a voice of love and reason.
One day he met a social worker named Dana Kelly, and she said he radiated so much love that he became one of her best friends. He would sometimes call her when she was with other people and talk to whoever was in the room, including a real estate agent, and her presence transcended the prison walls. One by one, her friends spoke to Ezra. And one by one, Kelly said in an interview, “they fell in love with him.”
Her friend Christine Roess saw Ezra on a Zoom call in 2021 and they started talking. She came to believe he was innocent and began working to exonerate him. As they continued talking, visiting, they really fell in love. They began to make plans together. She bought an engagement ring.
She hopes for the day when they can truly be together.
“Fields of Gold” is a melancholic song, a memory of love and beauty. Christine listened to him and thought about her first days with Ezra, when she touched his leg and felt the muscle. He was so strong then. But something wasn’t right. Her neck hurt and she walked with a cane. Even then, she heard a whisper in her mind, a voice that told her those were golden times. They didn’t walk through barley fields together, but those were the moments she would remember fondly.
“Alexa, next one,” he said.
These were some of Ezra’s favorite songs: Teddy Pendergrass with “When Somebody Loves You Back.” The O’Jays performing “Forever Mine.” The Edwin Hawkins singers sang “Oh Happy Day,” which made Christine sing for a moment.
“Alexa, next,” he said, causing an acoustic guitar to dance around bursts of synth, leading to a high-pitched male voice over a picture worth a thousand words.
“Do you know “Si” for Pan?” she said, and then she choked again, because the song said:
If a man could be in two places at the same time
I would be with you
tomorrow and today
By your side all the way
He was by her side in the visiting room on her birthday in January. When she took his hands, she felt that familiar strength. But his neck injury was getting worse. He underwent spinal surgery in February and that same month he fainted and fell. The injuries worsened. Ezra had been paralyzed from the chest down.
When she visited him at Laurel Highlands State Prison on April 15, he was on a bed on wheels. His collarbones were protruding and his muscles were withering. Looking at him wrapped in blankets, Christine thought he looked almost like a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes.
Ezra had a serious sore on his tailbone because he couldn’t turn around. He told her that he had to beg the nurses to give him a drink of water. But he didn’t want anger in his body, so he concentrated on being love. He said nurses were overworked and unrecognized.
A few days later he told Christine about another man who needed her help. And when a staff member approached her about returning to work as a specialist for other sick or disabled inmates at Laurel Highlands, she said something like, “Yes, I have a whole new skill set now, being a quadriplegic.”
People in Ezra’s condition can easily die from sepsis, blood clots, or pneumonia. Christine and a few dozen others from Team Free Ezra (a group of friends, advocates, lawyers, and fellow inmates) are trying to get him out of prison before that happens.
They could persuade the Board of Pardons to commute his sentence. They are working on a motion to persuade a judge to grant him compassionate release. And they’re asking Gov. Josh Shapiro to grant him a pardon. Christine wrote to the governor this month asking for help. Seven Pennsylvania lawmakers signed a letter dated March 14 asking the acting secretary of the Department of Corrections to release him.
“Alexa, next,” Christine said, and there was Savage Garden’s “Truly Madly Deeply,” the piano chords punchy and familiar, the words one bold statement after another.
I will be your dream, I will be your desire, I will be your fantasy
I will be your hope, I will be your love.
“I know all you need,” Christine sang, and she imagined Ezra, at her side in the greenery of Wissahickon Valley Park, and she imagined herself dressed in white, or maybe pink, and there were so many friends, dancing and celebrating, and He Ezra’s friend, Yusef, was giving the bride to the man everyone loved. A man who once sat alone in a cell and heard the truth. A man who found something the prison walls couldn’t contain.