Judith Clark and the 1981 Brink's Truck Robbery

Judith Clark and the 1981 Brink's Truck Robbery

This article relates to The Hill

The Hill is very loosely based on author Harriet Clark's experiences as a girl visiting her mother, Judith Clark, in prison. Judith Clark's crime was driving a getaway car during the robbery of a Brink's truck that was making deliveries to banks. One guard and two police officers were killed. In the novel, Suzanna's mother went to prison for participating in a bank robbery. In both cases, the crime was politically motivated.

Judith Clark was a member of the Weather Underground, a Marxist guerrilla organization that branched off from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1969. On October 20, 1981 at 4pm, Judith and several others, including other members of the Weather Underground and members of the Black Liberation Army, hijacked a Brink's truck at Nanuet Mall in Nanuet, New York, making off with $1.6 million. A report of the crime from the Boston Phoenix claims the group opened fire on the truck's guards immediately upon arrival, killing one, Peter Paige, instantly. Two other guards were injured but survived the attack. (One of these, Joseph Trombino, later died on 9/11 in the World Trade Center's North Tower.) During the shooting and robbery, Judith Clark sat in the car.

After taking the cash in the truck, the activists drove half a mile to a second location where they split up, with some hopping in a U-Haul van with the money and others (including Clark) getting in a Honda Accord. The group in the van engaged in a shootout with police, killing two officers. The group in the Accord crashed and everyone inside was promptly arrested. One of the other women arrested for driving, Kathy Boudin, had previously survived an explosion that killed three at a townhouse the Weather Underground was using as a base camp, caused by their bomb-making materials. She was released from prison in 2003 and died in 2022. Her legacy includes tireless advocacy on behalf of other inmates through AIDS education and parenting programs that helped incarcerated women become more holistically integrated back into society. Like Judith Clark, she was a devoted mother while in prison, to her son Chesa.

Two suspects, members of the Black Liberation Army, evaded police for two days after the crime before being confronted in a Long Island lumberyard.

Judith Clark refused to participate in her trial and was sentenced to 75 years to life in a maximum security prison, and remanded to New York's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. In a 2017 letter to the parole board, she wrote: "It took me another two years...to begin to reckon with the horror of my crime and the suffering I had caused. My life for the last 30 years has in large part been defined by that reckoning...not just in terms of my imprisonment, but also guided by my efforts to take responsibility for the harm I caused, to make reparation in the ways I can and...repair my relationship with my daughter, my family, friends and community." The letter is quite long and worth reading in full, particularly for those who may have interest in prison reform or transformative justice movements.

Clark was finally released in 2019, after serving almost 38 years. Recently, her daughter Harriet Clark sat down with opinion columnist M. Gessen for the New York Times, to discuss what it was like visiting her mother in prison every weekend during her childhood. This, too, is worth reading in full, but in particular, I was struck by her remarks on parental rights for the incarcerated:

"I also think people inside have rights, still, to connect with their children. And I think that trying to parent their children from the inside is what helps a lot of people rise to the occasion of becoming the parent they want to be. And I think it's so necessary for families and communities to say: 'Your parent may have done a terrible thing, but they love you and they are still worthy of affection and care and concern.'"

A memorial plaque commemorating those killed in the 1981 Brink's truck robbery in the location where it occurred
Photo by NYErik, CC BY 4.0

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This article relates to The Hill. It first ran in the May 6, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.