Frame-up to Freedom- the story of the Duck Island murder case

Manhattan, July 1983
(Chapter 1)

A middle-aged woman was sitting on my mother’s bed where her left leg was before the amputation. I bent over and kissed my mother on the forehead.

“Hello, I’m Lee Josephson, Mrs. Josephson’s son.”

Now standing the middle-aged women introduced herself.

“Dr. Beth Goldman.”

Above the breast pocket of a smartly starched white coat was embroidered, “Susan Goldman, M.D., Department of Psychiatry, St. Vincent’s Medical Center.” She was a tall, slim woman with thick, once-black, now mostly gray hair pinned above her head in the manner of my tall, English-born grandmother, Mabel. Mabel taught English at Trenton High, supported women’s suffrage, and opposed the First World War, all of which contributed to her failed relationship with my grandfather, a gin-drinking factory laborer. He joined the Marines and died in one the last battles of the First World War.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said to Dr. Goldman, standing.

“She told me you’d come today. It’s in the middle of the day in the middle of the week. I thought it was another part of her losing contact with reality, But, well, here you are.”

“I flew down from Boston on some legal business. I called and said I’d drop by this afternoon. She seemed alright when I called.”

The Good Sisters of Charity, the Catholic order that founded St. Vincent’s in 1849, had arranged for my mother to have a semi-private room, two beds, one empty. The patients they put alongside her couldn’t stand her screaming.

“Can I speak to you?” Dr. Goldman asked, nodding that we should move to the hallway. In 1983, the current standards of patient confidentiality weren’t in place and we chatted as visitors passed.

“I was asked to evaluate her. For example, today she told me her husband was a political prisoner over in Italy while she raised the family alone. A pretty bizarre fantasy.”

“She is well-informed about politics and I believe she knows what’s real and what’s fantasy. She may not be explaining things all that clearly.”

“And she keeps talking about some Black man in prison. Was there a Clarence?”

“My father was a lawyer for a man named Clarence who became a friend of the family…”

“My leg! My leg!” The screaming about a leg that is no longer there carried out to the hallway where Dr. Goldman and I stood.

“Why is she screaming about a leg that’s not there?” I asked.

“Neuropathic pain,” replied Dr. Goldman. It’s from the nerve damage caused by amputation. It’s very difficult to treat. Psychosis may respond better to medication than neuropathic pain. Treatment for psychosis is what I was called in to evaluate.”

“They amputated to save her but that left her in severe and untreatable pain. Can’t say as I understand the ethics of that.”

“She lost blood flow to her leg. I’m sure her doctors were afraid she would have developed an infection and died without the amputation.”

“Keeping her alive to suffer horrible pain?”

“She agreed to the amputation. She signed the form.”

“I’m sure she did. But when I called this morning she told me she wished she were dead and she meant it. And as far as this Clarence goes, there was a Black man named Clarence Hill who was in prison for many years. My father was a lawyer, and Clarence was his client and became a friend of our family. And as far as her husband being a political prisoner, my father did a year in Milan.”

“Josephson’s not an Italian name. Is your family Italian?”

“Milan is a federal correctional institution in Milan, Michigan. Pop needed correcting for his refusal to answer the questions of a Congressional committee that didn’t like his politics. That’s why she called him a political prisoner.”

“We don’t have political prisoners in this country,” Dr. Goldman stated abruptly, as she looked at the clock on the end of the hallway. “Well, er, I’ve got to go to my next patient.”

“Nice meeting you.”

I went back to my mother’s room. Before the amputation, she was 73 but she looked 53, gray but vigorous. Now she looks 103, thin, pale skin pulled tight over her cheekbones. I sat on her bed where her left leg used to be

“Had any visitors? I asked.

She pointed to a bureau topped with vases of flowers. Next to each vase stood a card of well wishes from her friends, friends who phone me in desperation asking if there is something someone can do to stop her screaming. They send flowers and cards in lieu of visiting. It’s understandable. She turned her head to me and said:

“They squashed him like a bug. No more thought than you or I would give to killing a cockroach under the sink.”

We were talking about visitors. Now it’s squashing a bug? Was Dr. Goldman correct about her losing contact with reality?

“When he confessed, they gave his execution no more thought than you or I would give to killing a bug.”

But the word “execution” indicates the bug was Clarence Hill, the man convicted for the Duck Island murders in 1944. Clarence spent 19 years behind “The Wall,” jailhouse jargon for Trenton State Prison, now called New Jersey State Prison. Clarence died in 1973.

“You used to bother your father when he worked on Clarence’s case in his law office,” she said. “The office was the big oak desk I bought and put in the living room. You were four or five then. He got out of Milan and worked for the CRC and needed a desk.”

The Civil Rights Congress (CRC) was an organization of radical lawyers that took cases that were too hot to handle for the better-funded and more mainstream organizations like the NAACP or the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In the 1950s,the CRC was classified as a subversive, communist front organization by the US Attorney General.

“‘Not everybody in prison is a bad man,’ you used to say,” my mother mused. “And ‘My daddy works for a good man in prison.’ You were always fascinated by Clarence and the Duck Island case.” She was speaking normally, thank God.

“Yeah, I liked mysteries. Whodunits. Remember the old wooden Emerson radio? I learned to turn the dial just after I learned to walk. Remember “The Shadow?” ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the minds of men? The Shadow does.’ Well, Duck Island was a real-life murder mystery. The older I got, the more interested in it I got. Remember how Pop took me on his investigations to Trenton? We’d stay with the Wisharts.”

My mother was born Lucy Wishart. Al Wishart, her brother, and his wife, my aunt Lelia, lived in Trenton and were my favorite aunt and uncle. My mother stared blankly out the window, tears streaming over snow-white cheeks.

“Can I have a drink of water? And prop me up a little.” She drank and used a tissue to wipe her eyes. “You should read the old family papers. They’re all there is. When your father began on Clarence’s case, the trial transcript was where it should be, at the Mercer County Courthouse. Your father transcribed much of it by hand.”

“Mercer County includes Trenton, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. Then some years later he went back to look up some details on the case, but they told him the transcript was lost in the flood. The Delaware River flooded Trenton in ’55, but the other cases from before the flood were still on the file. He was dumbfounded, since Clarence was in prison, so legal action in the case was still possible. ‘Those confessions get published and Trenton Negroes’ll burn the sorry city down.’ That’s what he said.”

“What do you think happened to the trial transcript?”

“No way of knowing. But the old papers are in my closet; they are the only record of the Duck Island murder case.”

“I love you, Mom.” I kissed her forehead again. “Got to catch a flight back to Boston to see Kris’ baseball game. He’s pitching tonight.” My son Kris was in a suburban Boston little league.

“You be there,” she said. “Don’t worry about me.”

***

My mother told me to read the old family papers, read them because she knew I was fascinated by the Duck Island murder case, read them because she knew they were the only record, read them because she didn’t want them discarded after she was gone. I’d have to read them soon, if I was ever going to discuss them with her.

So I went to her empty apartment in a section of lower Manhattan known as Chelsea. In a closet off her bedroom, I stood on a chair to see the top shelf where the old papers are stored in shopping bags. As I removed the shopping bags stalactites of once white now yellow paint hanging from the ceiling fell to the floor. One a luxury apartment, even the required maintenance of widow Josephson’s rent controlled apartment draws no interest from the building’s superintendent. The old shopping bags had two large red letters, A and P, on their sides, and scrawled in pencil over the A and P were the words “Duck Island.”

I arranged the papers in piles on my mother’s bed. Pile 1: papers concerning the trial, including long handwritten sections of the trial transcript and legal briefs yellowed by time. Pile 2: the accused man’s, Clarence’s, life story with letters from Clarence’s prison letters to Pop and Pop’s response. Pile 3: interviews with a Captain Keegan of the Hamilton Township Police Department. It seems both Pop and Allen interviewed this Keegan. Hamilton Township is the small city bordering Trenton where...