The Innocents (1964)
by Edward D. Radin

Excerpt from Chapter 2 on

Ephraim Clark, Lindberg Hall,
and Sceola Kuykendall

Detroit is a volatile city. Since its vast automobile manufacturing plants attract a steady stream of job seekers, there usually is an oversupply of labor. Even in the best of times there will be temporary layoffs because of changeovers in models, labor disputes and similar factors, affecting thousands of factory hands and swelling the rolls of those out of work. Hungry men, unemployed men, and drifters attracted by the bustle of a large city can and do turn to crime; robberies are no novelty in Detroit.

The fall of 1960 saw many groups of armed bandits making quick forays, particularly against storekeepers. Some of the retailers armed themselves and the inevitable happened: on the night of October 4, 1960, David Lipton was shot five times as he lunged for his gun when confronted by three armed men in his drugstore. They escaped in a waiting car. The murder of the druggist aroused the public; the police department announced a "crash program" to combat the rising crime rate, and newspapers waged a campaign to make Detroit's streets safe.

Some three months later police announced that the drugstore slaying had been solved. They had arrested a young woman who had taken part in several robberies, and she had confessed that on the night of the Lipton murder she had accompanied three men to the store and waited outside in a car, that she heard shots fired, her companions ran out, got into the automobile and sped away. The men she named were Ephraim Clark, Lindberg Hall, and Sceola Kuykendall. She said Clark's car had been used. Both Hall and Kuykendall had been identified for other crimes, and Clark knew both men. All three prisoners had been identified by Lipton's clerk.

On the surface it appeared to be a routine case, solved by the normal police method of questioning closely all suspects in robbery cases.

Clark had no funds for a lawyer, and a judge asked Harry Anbender, a well-known Detroit attorney, to defend the prisoner. It was Anbender's investigation that revealed much of the police activity on this case.

The lawyer had been reluctant to accept the assignment; he did little criminal practice and represented many business associations, including a group of druggists. He told the judge that he would represent Clark only if he were convinced that he was innocent.

He interviewed Clark in jail, and the prisoner readily agreed to take a lie-detector test or any other kind of examination the lawyer wanted; he had himself asked police for a lie-detector test. He insisted that he had nothing to do with the crime and said he had spent that evening visiting friends. Anbender questioned them and they upheld Clark's story. He also interviewed Hall and Kuykendall. Both men frankly admitted the other crimes but said they also had had nothing to do with the Lipton murder. They also said that Clark had not been associated with them in any of their crimes; they lived in the same neighborhood. Anbender noticed that the original police alarm for the three bandits did not match the description of the prisoners.

In her statement to police the woman accomplice said that she and Hall, who was her boy friend, had left Detroit for Chicago shortly after the murder in a car driven by another man. Anbender sought the latter out; he confirmed that he had made the trip and said they had left about 9 P.M. But the murder of Lipton had not occurred until 9:30. This man said his car had developed both tire and motor trouble and he had limped almost from gas station to gas station until he abandoned the trip and all of them returned to Detroit. The lawyer carefully verified each stop that had been made; the time element checked, showing that the trip had been started well before the murder. The woman could not have been sitting outside the drugstore in Clark's car as she was claiming.

She also had said in her statement that Clark had cruised around before parking half a block from the drugstore, even describing how he had backed into a parking space. Clark said that at the time the reverse gear on his car had been jammed, so that he could not back up, and he had had the gear repaired. Garage records showed that such repairs had been made to his car.

Anbender made one final verification of Clark's story. He obtained a court order allowing him to have the prisoner placed under hypnosis by a certified specialist. He warned Clark that if evidence of his guilt was discovered during the test the information would be given to police, but Clark willingly agreed to submit to the examination. Under hypnosis the prisoner still denied any knowledge of the murder and was able to recall more detailed information about his activities that night, thus strengthening his alibi.

Anbender was satisfied now that his client was innocent. He presented the information he had gathered to police and the prosecutor's office, but neither expressed any interest, telling him to save it for the trial.

The confidence of police and the prosecutor was justified at the trial. The woman told her story and would not change it during a severe cross-examination. The drugstore clerk also identified the three men. The jury ignored Clark's alibi witnesses and quickly found the three men guilty.

Anbender refused to give up. The woman witness had been moved from the county jail to special quarters at a police station. The lawyer interviewed her there, bringing along a newspaper reporter and a tape recorder. She admitted she had lied during the trial and said that police had made a deal with her, promising that if she would implicate the three men the charges against her would be handled in such a way that she would be "put out on the streets." She named the officers involved.

The recording was played for the prosecutor and Anbender was assured there would be a prompt investigation. The police officer assigned to conduct it was one of those named by the woman. The police report stated that she now repudiated the statement she had given Anbender and claimed she had changed from her trial testimony in an effort to save Hall, her boy friend.

The three prisoners were sentenced to life imprisonment.

The woman was released on probation and left Detroit, going to Cleveland. However, Anbender's activities on behalf of his penniless client had not gone unnoticed, and reporters were asking questions about some of the discrepancies in the woman's story. The prosecutor's office said it was starting an investigation of the case, assisted by two police lieutenants. Not long afterward Clark wrote to Anbender from prison that he had been visited by an assistant prosecutor and two detectives. "They tried to get me to say that you had made up a story for me to say," he wrote.

The lawyer's motions for a new trial were denied. By now Clark had been in prison for nine months on his life sentence.

In November, 1961, Detroit police discovered that Anbender had been right, that three innocent men had been convicted for the murder of the druggist. The discovery began with the arrest of Gene Adams, twenty-one, of. suburban River Rouge, on a robbery charge and his confessing to twenty different holdups during the past year. One of these included the robbery of a gas station on October 1, 1960, in which an attendant had been shot in the leg.

The bullet had been recovered, and three days later, when Lipton had been killed, the police ballistics expert had run a comparison test. The same gun had been used in both shootings. Faced with this information, Adams confessed to the drugstore murder and named his companions, one of whom later also admitted the crime.

The woman who had so glibly testified at the trial that she had accompanied Clark, Hall, and Kuykendall was hurriedly brought back from Cleveland on a charge of violating her probation. She was puzzled by her rearrest. "I said what they wanted me to say," she told reporters, referring to police and her testimony at the trial. She freely admitted that she had lied at the trial and subsequently had told the truth to Anbender.

She repeated the story she previously had given the lawyer, that police had coaxed her to name the three men by assuring her that she would not have to worry about the charges against herself. She also said that one of the detectives had told her that Kuykendall had confessed. She added that she was taken to the scene and was told what to say. "They kept telling me about the law of self-preservation." No reason was given as to why Clark's name was used.

The court quickly granted a motion to give the three convicted men a new trial. When Anbender asked the court for an investigation of the police action in the case, the judge replied, "It isn't before this court at this time to investigate the police department. I do not know what happened before that case got to court. This hearing is adjourned."

The murder charges against Clark, Hall, and Kuykendall were dismissed. Only Clark was released from prison, since the other two men had been sentenced for their parts in other crimes.

In discussing the case in the Detroit Legal Chronicle Anbender wrote:

"Something has got to come out of this. We are living in dangerous times when the tenure of a citizen's liberty can be affected by poor police work or overzealous police officers and ambitious prosecutors. I did a lot of police work on my own time and at my own expense which I felt police should have done. To my utter consternation, when I presented the police with my findings, they refused to accept them for what they were worth and went ahead on their own to try to prove my findings were wrong."

No charges were filed against the woman who had lied on the stand. The prosecutor's office told reporters that it did not feel that she could be tried as a probation violator, "and after much consideration and due to technical problems we decided not to proceed in a perjury case against her."

The technical problems were not spelled out. Several months later Clark filed a malicious prosecution and damage suit against the woman, a detective sergeant, and the city of Detroit.