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Friendships sometimes grow out of the stoniest of soils. Just ask Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton.

For the two Piedmont residents, the ground that produced their 12-year friendship couldn’t have been much harder.

In 1984, she accused him of a brutal rape; he served nearly 11 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit; and she spent years agonizing over her mistake.

Then, in a tearful meeting in 1997, he forgave her.

Two people drawn together by a shared tragedy.

“Our relationship is questionable to a lot of people,” Cotton said one day last month. “It is unusual.”

Legal experts say they’ve never heard of another case like it.

“The single factor that makes this case unique is the character of the two people involved,” said Rich Rosen, a semi-retired law professor at UNC-Chapel Hill who helped Cotton win his freedom. “The two of them have bridged class, race and life experience. And most of all, they bridged what happened in this case.”

Thompson-Cannino of Winston-Salem and Cotton of Mebane have told their story in a recently released book called “Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption.”

They travel around the country promoting their book and talking about the need for criminal justice reform.

At a book signing in Kernersville, Thompson-Cannino smiled up at Cotton, her hand resting on his forearm.

“We really like each other a lot ...” she said. “Ron has probably been my greatest teacher.”

This for a man she once described as “this monster in the dark.”

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The rape occurred July 29, 1984, one of a series of sexual assaults in Burlington in a 15-month period.

Thompson-Cannino was a 22-year-old senior at what was then Elon College. She worked two jobs and maintained a 4.0 grade point average. She lived alone.

Shortly before 3 a.m., an assailant broke into her Burlington apartment, climbed on top of her and pressed a knife against her throat.

She screamed.

“Shut up,” he said, placing a gloved hand over her mouth, “or I’ll cut  you.”

If she survived the attack, Thompson-Cannino determined that she would be able to identify her attacker. She studied his features — hairline, nose, eyes, lips, mustache — so she could provide police with a description.

After she told the man she needed to go to the bathroom, she fled out her back door, wrapped in a blanket. As her assailant gave chase, she ran through the rain to a neighbor’s house, where she took refuge.

Later that night, the man raped a second woman who lived less than a mile away.

At the police station, Thompson-Cannino put together a composite drawing of her attacker, which police distributed to area media.

The effort paid off. Police got a tip that a man named Ronald Junior Cotton matched the description of the attacker.

Like his accuser, Cotton was also 22. He worked as a busboy at a seafood restaurant and, as a youth, had been in trouble with the law. A high school dropout, he sported a modest Afro and described himself as “a string bean” who liked to party.

When police questioned him, Cotton got his dates confused and gave them an alibi that couldn’t be corroborated.

When police showed Thompson-Cannino a group of photos, she picked Cotton. Later, in a physical lineup, she picked him again.

Police had almost no physical evidence in the case. The prosecutor relied mostly on Thompson-Cannino’s testimony.

In January 1985, a jury convicted Cotton of rape, sex offense and  burglary. The judge sentenced him to life plus 50 years.

Cotton’s nightmare became the happiest day of Thompson-Cannino’s life. She celebrated with a champagne toast in the district attorney’s office.

“That night I ... prayed for Ronald Cotton to die miserably in jail, alone and afraid,” she wrote in their memoir. “But before he left this earth for hell, I asked that he know the horror of being raped.”

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In Central Prison, Cotton spent his time working in the kitchen, singing in the gospel choir, pounding a punching bag, reading his Bible and writing letters to anyone else he could think of, professing his innocence.

At night, he’d hug his pillow, miss his family and girlfriend, and cry.

The anger and frustration grew.

And Cotton soon found a person on whom he could pour out his rage: Bobby Leon Poole.

Poole, a Burlington man serving a sentence for rape, had bragged to another inmate that he had attacked Thompson-Cannino.

Cotton felt that if he couldn’t get justice, he’d take it. So he fashioned a weapon from a piece of metal he tore off a desk and waited for the chance to use it.

“Rage ate me like a cancer,” Cotton wrote. “I felt that I had no hope. I would die in a cell like an abandoned dog at a kennel for something someone else did.”

When his father came to visit, Cotton talked about his plan. His father told him that if he killed Poole, he deserved to be in prison.

“I was no angel,” Cotton wrote, “but I was no murderer.”

He threw the weapon down a drain.

Cotton wasn’t the only one suffering.

After the rape, Thompson-Cannino’s life fell apart.

She broke up with her fiance, feared being alone, called police about imagined intruders, drank whatever alcohol she could find around her apartment and snorted cocaine. Her grades suffered. She felt numb inside.

She called herself “the walking dead.”

And she continued to see Cotton’s face in the darkness.

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In 1987, Cotton caught a break, or so it seemed.

The N.C. Supreme Court overturned his conviction. The court ruled that Cotton should get a new trial because the jury did not hear evidence that the second woman raped on July 29, 1984, couldn’t pick Cotton out of a lineup.

And this time, his attorney wanted the jury to hear the story of Bobby Poole.

But again, circumstances turned against Cotton.

Before the new trial started, the second victim identified Cotton as her assailant. She said she had been too afraid to do so more than three years earlier. This time he would stand trial for two rapes.

“Why, God?” Cotton asked. “Why me?”

Things didn’t go well in court. Both rape victims said they had never seen Poole. Both identified Cotton as their attacker.
The jury found Cotton guilty. He received two concurrent life sentences.

Thompson-Cannino celebrated with another drink of champagne.

As Cotton awaited news of an appeal, he held on to the words his sister, Diane, had written him:

“The Lord knows how much we can bear. He knows the outcome of your life before you got into this situation. There’s a reason, Ron. Be free in your heart.”

It appeared that was the only way Cotton would ever be free. In August 1990, the N.C. Court of Appeals upheld his second conviction.

“It broke my heart ...” Cotton wrote to his attorney. “I wish I was dead.”

Then, in 1991, the state Supreme Court upheld his conviction.

With each setback, life went on. Days, weeks, months, years passed. Cotton still prayed for his freedom, but he knew he was running out of options.

“You can lock up your body, but you can’t lock up your mind,” Cotton said. “(I figured) I am going to do the time. I’m not going to let it do me.”

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Then, in 1994, Cotton became enthralled with the O.J. Simpson murder trial. That’s where he first learned about DNA testing. He asked his lawyers to pursue this new angle. He saw it as his last hope.

The results came back in June 1995.

There was no DNA left to test in the Thompson-Cannino rape kit, but the DNA in the kit of the second victim belonged to Poole.

Confronted with the DNA evidence, Poole confessed, providing details about the rapes that only the assailant could know.

On June 30, 1995, Cotton walked out of a courtroom in Graham a free man. At 33, he became the first man in North Carolina freed because of DNA testing.

Cotton looked to the sky and threw up his arms. “Lord,” he said, “where do I go from here?”

Thompson-Cannino wondered the same thing. She felt like someone living in a snow globe that had just been turned upside down.

How could she have made such a mistake?

Shame, guilt and doubt flooded her life. So did fear. She expected Cotton to retaliate. Why wouldn’t he want her to die for what she had done? She worried about the safety of her husband and young triplets.

“I cried and yelled ...” she wrote. “I wondered how I could have been so stupid.”

In 1996, PBS invited Thompson-Cannino and Cotton to appear on a Frontline segment about the shortcomings of eyewitness testimony. She agreed, provided she didn’t have to meet Cotton.

The program aired Feb. 25, 1997. At the end, Cotton said he wondered why he had never heard from his accuser.
Watching the program, Thompson-Cannino sobbed.

She called the Burlington detective who had investigated the case and asked him to set up a meeting with Cotton. It took place April 4, 1997, at a church in Elon College, not far from where the rape occurred.

Thompson-Cannino, Cotton and his new wife, Robbin, met in the pastor’s study.

For Thompson-Cannino, the tears came before the words.

“If I spent the rest of my life telling you how sorry I am, it wouldn’t come close to how I feel,” she told Cotton. “Can you ever forgive me?”

Cotton took her hand.

“I forgive you,” he said. “I’m not angry with you. I don’t want you to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder, thinking I’m out to get you or harm your family. ... All I want is for us to go on and have a happy life.”

Then Cotton, too, began to cry.

The meeting ended with Cotton and his wife and Thompson-Cannino and her husband in a group embrace.

“Ronald gave me something that eluded me in the 13 years since that sweltering summer night: the gift of forgiveness — not because I deserved it, but because that is what grace is about,” Thompson-Cannino wrote. “It was the real beginning of my journey back.”

Later that month, she wrote a letter on Cotton’s behalf, asking that the state increase his compensation for wrongful imprisonment. He eventually received nearly $110,000.

She also wrote Poole, asking to meet with him. The letter went unanswered. He later died in prison.

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As Cotton and Thompson-Cannino’s reconciliation became public, the two began to get requests for interviews and speaking engagements. They began to talk regularly on the phone, arranging schedules, sharing family updates.

They began to think of each other as friends.

“That’s what you see in the movies,” said her son, Blake, 19. “That is what is so special about their relationship.”

The friendship solidified on Feb. 1, 2001, when the two found themselves alone for the first time during an appearance in Seattle. In the past, family members had accompanied them on their travels.

This time, they got to talk one-on-one about their pasts.

“That’s where we made that turn around the corner,” Thompson-Cannino said. “He got to know me as Jennifer, and I got to know him as Ronald. ... We have a bond that is hard to explain. ... We have been in each other’s lives since we were 22. We have been on a journey that has spanned so much emotion and passion and honesty and everything.

“I haven’t shared that kind of totality of a relationship with anybody else in my life.”

Thompson-Cannino says she’s just thankful that rape wasn’t a capital crime in North Carolina at the time of her assault.
“I could have been pushing up daisies,” Cotton said with a grin.

“That’s not funny,” she shot back.

In the end, Thompson-Cannino says, if she were going to make a mistake, she’s glad she picked Cotton.

“Had it been another man, he probably wouldn’t have been as forgiving and as easy to reach out to,” she said. “Gosh, would anybody else have been as forgiving as Ron?”

Contact Donald W. Patterson at 373-7027 or don.patterson@news-record.com