Good Lawyer, Dead Lawyer

Good Lawyer, Dead Lawyer

by Richard Muti

Someone is killing lawyers in Franklin and Cambridge Counties, New Jersey, and no one seems particularly upset about it.  (Except the lawyers, of course.)

News Story, Franklin Evening Standard

JUDGE FOUND SLAIN

Cambridge County Jurist is Latest Victim of Lawyer Killer

Just one day after another lawyer killing—what was thought at the time to be the third such murder—shocked the public, an earlier victim has been discovered. The badly decomposed body of Judge Vernon Duke was found late yesterday in his secluded Cambridge County home. Police were summoned to the home after Johnny Berkowitz, a paper boy for this publication, noticed a strong odor emanating from the Duke residence while making collection rounds for his paper route.

“It stunk pretty bad,” young Johnny related, “kinda like when my hamster got loose and died in the wall of our house, only worse.  I knew the papers were piling up outside the house, but I thought the judge was away on vacation,” the paper boy explained.

Police at the scene speculated that Duke had been dead for at least three weeks.  He had been shot once in the back of the head at close range.  Duke was the subject of controversy recently when a female law clerk in his office accused him of sexually harassing her.  The clerk, whose identity is being withheld by this newspaper, has said that Duke demanded sexual favors from her in exchange for good job performance reviews.

Duke had denied the charge, but other female clerks came forward to support the allegations of improper conduct on the jurist’s part.  He had been sanctioned by the Judicial Ethics panel and was widely expected to be removed from office and disbarred by the N.J. Supreme Court.