NEW JERSEY: The Phantom Forger

Monday, June 26, 1950

The cops first told Clifford Shephard that he was "the phantom forger" the day after they fingerprinted and mugged him. A slow-moving, heavy-jawed and trusting fellow, Shephard patiently smiled at their accusations, told them they'd find they were making a mistake. He was just a middle-aged salesman who lived in Scotch Plains, N.J., he explained, and, as a matter of fact, had just taken on a new line of liquid run-stopper for ladies' stockings.

Shephard's smile dissolved when a liquor dealer gave him one curled-lip glance in the New Brunswick, NJ. police station and told the cops, "That's the guy." A dozen other merchants nodded their heads positively. The detectives brought in Betty Lester, the buxom widow he had been sparking, and accused them both of passing bad checks through the length & breadth of New Jersey. At the trial, 16 witnesses testified in their behalf, but the liquor dealer was coldly positive:' Cliff Shephard and Betty Lester were sentenced to nine months in the county workhouse. That was 1935.

Second Rap

Nine months later, just as Shephard was due for his freedom, detectives from neighboring Newark arrested him for other forgeries committed during the period covered in his first conviction!

Again the law whirred on the wheels of men's blurry memories: again witnesses pointed unequivocally at Shephard as the bad-check passer. "I stood there handcuffed while they swore my life away," he said later. The judge gave him 18 months in the penitentiary. When it was over he was arrested a third time, but a grand jury refused to indict for the simple reason that he had been behind bars at the time of the new crime. A banker on the grand jury listened overtime to Shephard's story of innocence and sent him off to tell it to the Burns Detective Agency, which acts as a clearing house for records, descriptions and habits of forgers.

Months later, when Shephard was reduced to selling rugs made by the blind because nobody else would trust his con's record, he got a wire from the Burns people. A check-passer of his general description, Edward Sullivan, the "phantom forger," had been picked up, they said. Shephard made his way to Wisconsin, where Sullivan had been sentenced, came face to face with a man of his same general build and coloring, his same long face and heavy jaw—but by'no means a twin in looks. The real "phantom" looked at photostats of the checks which had convicted Shephard, borrowed paper from the prison warden and wrote out a confession that the checks were his own handiwork.

Third Plea

But somehow, despite Sullivan's confession, the New Jersey Court of Pardons twice turned down Cliff Shephard, presumably because his old accusers refused to change their stories. "I talked to three of the merchants," Shephard said. "They thought I was innocent. But they were afraid I'd sue for false arrest."

Then, as Shephard struggled to hold down a porter's job in a bar & grill, a friendly New York Timesman named Joseph Haff helped him organize his third plea. Last week, 15 years after the first arrest, New Jersey's Governor Alfred E. Driscoll signed a full pardon, and another would probably be available soon for Betty Lester, since enfeebled by a stroke. Sixty-four-year-old Cliff Shephard, tearfully pleased with the final triumph of justice, laid aside his broom and towel, thanked the State for excusing the crimes he had never committed.