New Blockbuster Book Explores Backstory Of Newhallville Murder Case

The individuals who murdered an innocent man, who framed an innocent teen, who copped a fake confession all made choices. So did Nicholas Dawidoff when he told their story — and he has now left New Haven with a choice of our own. 

Dawidoff chose to name names in telling the story. But not all names.

He chose to leave himself out of the story.

He chose to remove an omnipresent racial slur from the story.

He chose to wait to tell the story so he could tell it in full, to go back generations and to the South to trace the factors that led up to the plague of gun violence and limited opportunity and repeated long-term imprisonment of people framed for crimes they didn’t commit.

Dawidoff did all that to produce a gripping new book called The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and The American City. Norton releases the book this coming Tuesday, Oct. 18. The author will discuss it at upcoming community events. (See details at the bottom of the story.) 

The city in the book’s title is New Haven. The violence takes place in the Newhallville neighborhood. The injustice is the incarceration of a 16-year-old bullied by cops into confessing to a murder they could have easily proved he didn’t commit and almost as easily solved — instead of allowing the real murderer to continue killing people before he himself lost his life to a bullet.

The story is both a specific tale involving a specific heinous crime and a specific compelling main character — and an all-too common tale (a small sampling of examples can be found here, here, here, here, and here) about a confluence of crises to which we become all too inured when we hear about it day to day. Dawidoff, a Pulitzer Prize-finalist author and New Yorker contributor, spent eight years diving into the story in order to tell it in a deeper, more personal way that’s much harder to ignore.

In doing so, Dawidoff has presented New Haven with the choice: Will we do something about it?

In Finnegan's Wake

The previous New Yorker writer to embed himself in New Haven and Newhallville’s ​“Mudhole” to tell the story of urban American deindustrialization and drug-driven deadly violence and policing failure was William Finnegan. He did that when crack took over Newhallville’s economy in the late 1980s. His subsequent two-part series focused on a drug-slinging teen named Terry shocked the city for five minutes. Yale Law School hosted a panel discussion about it. It became part of a subsequent anthology called Cold New World.

Dawidoff, who is 59, grew up in New Haven. He left town to pursue his journalistic career. He moved back with his family in 2012 with the goal of understanding the divide in his hometown between the elite Yale-dominated world on the eastern slope off Prospect Street and the cloistered, dangerous world of Newhallville down the western slope. He planned to ​“write about the city as it reflected post-industrial American issues of long standing.”

Dawidoff interviewed 500 people over those eight years. Many of those people are familiar to Independent readers who read about them all the time. But we learn new information about these people, even if we’ve known them for decades. We gain new perspective about our city and our neighbors and acquaintances and authorities.

The interviewing led Dawidoff to the story of a 16-year-old he calls Bobby. Bobby’s story became the focus of the book. (Through his attorney, Bobby Johnson said he is fine with having his full name and photo appear in this story, as it did in multiple previous Independent stories about his case.)

Johnson was a kind teen who played a man-of-the-house role for his younger siblings and single mom from before the age of 10, who explored the other side of Prospect on his bike (and saw how different police treated Black kids there), who hung out with the non-Ivy League-bound crowd outside the ​“2 – 4,” the Dix Deli on Dixwell Avenue. 

Detectives decided Johnson was the person who shot dead a 70-year-old man named Herbert ​“Pete” Fields in his car on West Ivy Street during a robbery one night in 2006. A cop with a self-proclaimed 100 percent ​“clearance” record named Clarence Willoughby pressured and threatened and lied to Johnson for hours in an interrogation room until he agreed to repeat on tape a story detectives made up (and kept changing) detailing how he supposedly killed Fields. The detectives ignored unusually promising evidence that could have led to the real killer. They chose not to view the Visel’s Pharmacy in-store video that proved Johnson’s assertion that he was there at the time of the murder. 

Johnson was sentenced to 38 years at Cheshire Correctional Institution. Willoughby was eventually arrested on corruption charges and exposed for having allegedly framed numerous arrestees like Johnson. With the help of attorney Ken Rosenthal, Johnson eventually won his release and exoneration after nine years of incarceration. Then with the help of fellow exonerees like Scott Lewis and Stefon Moranot, Johnson struggled to re-enter society and make a new life in his 30s. He eventually obtained a life-changing settlement from the state for wrongful imprisonment. He moved outside the city.

Dawidoff chose not to include Johnson’s easily Googleable last name, at Johnson’s request, he said. He left out the dollar figure of his settlement, and the town where he bought his new home. He calls the probable true killer, who went on to commit more shootings before getting shot dead himself, ​“Major” rather than his real name.

He details how all-star ​“violence interrupters” William ​“Juneboy” Outlaw and Kermit Carolina interceded one day at the Lincoln-Bassett basketball courts to prevent a dispute between two teens over a stolen bike from degenerating into a shooting. He names Outlaw and Carolina; he calls the two teen participants ​“Sleeveless” and ​“Swagger.”

At other points, The Other Side of Prospect cascades with details: The names and methods of lead detectives Willoughby and Michael Quinn; the successes and setbacks in the lives of three generations of the Fields family as well as Johnson’s. Dawidoff brings us inside the police interrogation room, the card games at the seniors’ Mudhole clubhouse, the job interview at Home Depot, with such fine-grain observation that we feel physically present ourselves. He goes back generations to document the challenges faced (along with triumphs earned) by all three families most directly touched by this case.

The details Dawidoff includes give the book its power. They place us in rooms we’d never otherwise enter. Like Bobby Johnson’s cell and common areas at Cheshire:

Outside their cells, everywhere men went, everything they did was recorded on camera except for ​“in the cut” out-of-view locations, like the supply closets. Without open windows, the Cheshire smell was inescapable, a rancid blend of laundry detergent with such a distinctive scent that, a prison official noted, it helped dogs track escapees, and the cortisol-odor of stress and depression — the sour heaviness of not wanting to be there. ​“Jail doesn’t give you soap,” Bobby said. ​“So, if you don’t have family [to put money in your commissary account], you don’t have soap.” Like everything else, Cheshire’s ​“horrible stink,” Bobby said, eventually ​“became natural.”

The prison laundry was such an erratic operation that white T‑shirts routinely came back brownish, and Bobby took to washing clothes in his cell sink, as he sometimes also washed himself — the practice known as ​“bird-bathing.” You weren’t allowed to hang your clothes up to dry from a line, because this might impede a CO’s view of the room through the ​“Judas window” from outside the door, but you could drape them from your desk or your towel hook. The funky dampness of drying cloth added to the claustrophobia.

Other smells seeped into the day. Men MacGyvered cooking devices generically known as stingers by attaching stripped extension-cord wires to batteries that were kept separate by a wedge of toothbrush handle or cutlery, bound together and then submerged in a plastic container filled with salted water. A plastic bag holding cookstuffs was placed in the container. When the extension cord was plugged into a wall socket, the water heated up in the plastic container, and soon the hallways might smell briefly of recipes. Sometimes there were power outages, and Bobby thought they happened because so many people had stingers running. The lights would go out and it was ​“literal darkness” in there for thirteen hours, until the daylight seeped in through the window crevices.

Ixnay On "N" Word

Unlike Finnegan in Cold New World, Dawidoff doesn’t tell us in The Other Side Of Prospect whether he was physically there or recreating the details from interviews. He doesn’t describe his own interactions with Johnson and his family members, how they viewed his presence, how his presence may or may not have affected the story.

He also chooses not to spell out the ​“n word.” In his ​“note on sources” at the end of the book, he describes his wrestling with that choice:

You can’t write about Jim Crow, or white-flight New Haven, without encountering use of the N‑word. How or whether to print it is more complicated than a simple matter of accuracy. I think if you can do something to reduce a source of pain for others, soften its consumption, you should. On the other hand, I’ve been taught that revising or avoiding ugly history condemns societies to repeat it, that bad history has a way of enduring if it isn’t directly engaged with. Thinking about this from his home in Newhallville, the Black artist Winfred Rembert concluded it’s an ugly, sordid, mean word, but no substitute carries the same effect of a term devised only to humiliate and degrade others. I asked for advice from numerous people I know, including friends and figures in the book, and there was no consensus. Some thought that quoting the slur was appropriate, and that eliding it would undermine the historical intent and impact of the term. Others considered writing out in full to be gratuitous. Ultimately, I decided that the word was so offensive I didn’t want to write it out in full. So I didn’t.

That’s one of many difficult choices Dawidoff made in navigating the role of a white outsider plunging into a world of Black exploitation to tell an injustice story without furthering the injustice by exploiting and profiting from it himself.

He also notably diverged from the approach of another New Yorker author, Janet Malcolm. In an essay entitled ​“The Journalist and the Murderer,” Malcolm famously compared the reporter to a con artist in the quest to gain the trust of reluctant people:

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction learns — when the article or book appears — his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and ​“the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

Dawidoff sought to achieve the opposite: Doing right by his subject — while also doing right by readers and society and the truth.

Is it possible to do both?

"Love" Reporting

Yes, Dawidoff responded when asked that question during an appearance Thursday on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven.”

He quoted the documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s describing the goal of developing a ​“relationship of love” with interviewees — and echoed the Hippocratic oath of avoiding harm above all else.

“Your heart has to be capable of real affection and care for people in their full complexity as possible,” to tell a story like Prospect right, Dawidoff argued. ​“Otherwise it diminishes. Janet Malcolm was a great writer. But that’s one thing that she said that feels to me particularly unloving.”

He also disagreed with the idea that doing right by people who have entrusted stories to you has to conflict with doing right by readers by telling a true story.

Dawidoff withheld the dollar amount of Johnson’s ​“significant” settlement from the state and the name of his new town of residence not to advance the narrative, but to protect Johnson from getting further harassed. That didn’t detract from the story, Dawidoff argued: ​“It just felt like a matter of human decency.”

As for calling the teen bike-disputants ​“Sleeveless” and ​“Swagger” rather than naming them, Dawidoff spoke of the author’s responsibility not to have a story lead to unnecessary violence.

Naming the teens could lead to people posting their identities online and fueling a potentially dangerous new beef, he said.

“Gun violence is a very serious thing. Often the way that gun violence occurs is via social media. Where people put up intemperate things on social media. Other people respond. It escalates. It becomes a ​‘disrespect.’ People get increasingly angry about things that didn’t actually happen. …

“The last thing I wanted to do was be, a), insensitive myself, or, b), instead of doing my own very small part to try to make things better, to in fact make things worse, or do some harm.”

“We live in a time … where the access to information and the appetite for it that ensues is unending,” Dawidoff observed. ​“As a nonfiction writer, part of what makes something you’re writing as good and one hopes as beautiful as it can be is if you make good choices about what you leave out …”

It Takes A Community

The Other Side of Prospect is descriptive for the most part, not prescriptive.

The author skims at the end of the book through the town-gown and prison re-entry and community-policing debates. He holds up Judith Rodin’s work in addressing Philadelphia poverty at the University of Pennsylvania as a model for Yale, which passed her over for the presidency.

But for the most part Dawidoff isn’t pushing a policy platform. Rather, by brilliantly documenting in the most compelling personal terms the broader challenges of economic racism, criminal injustice, and urban neglect, he is challenging New Haven and America to pay attention. To see the problem as ours, not somebody else’s. To stay with the story after finishing the book. To add hopeful new chapters.

“At the project’s end, my belief was in the need for a neighborhood’s problems to be embraced by the greater city and its surroundings as collective problems, taken on especially by its leading institution,” Dawidoff wrote in his back-of-the-book ​“note on sources.” ​“I came to feel just as strongly that solving and preventing homicides was not just a police obligation but the collective business of the city. If the broader community took homicide personally to the point of full, all-in priority collaboration, doing anything it could to help solve and prevent these tragic crimes, there would be far fewer of them.”

Dawidoff made tough choices. He succeeded in giving his hometown a gift. Will we run with it?

Nicholas Dawidoff will discuss The Other Side of Prospect along with author Reginald Dwayne Betts at the main public library branch on Elm Street on Wednesday Oct. 19 starting at 6:30; and with civil rights attorney Michael Jefferson and librarian Diane Brown at the Stetson Branch on Dixwell Avenue on Oct. 26 starting at 6 p.m. He will discuss the book with Babz Rawls-Ivy on WNHH FM’s ​“LoveBabz LoveTalk” on Thursday Oct. 19 starting at 10:15 a.m.

Click on the above video to watch the full interview with author Nicholas Dawidoff on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven.” 

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