Verna starts to ask her something else, but Darlene holds up her hand.
“I’m real sorry,” she says. “I am. But I’ve already said more than I was supposed to. The sheriff will be over to talk to you as soon as he can. He’ll have a lot more information for you and can answer your questions. I’m very sorry for your loss, but I am glad we finally found her for you. I’m gonna go now, but—”
“Tell me this before you do,” Verna says. “Is Ronnie getting out of jail tonight?”
“No, ma’am, he’s not.”
“Can you make sure I’m notified when he does? I don’t want to be alone with him. I want someone here with me when he comes home. Preferably the police, who can be here while he packs a few things then escort him out.”
Darlene nods. “I’ll make sure you’re notified, but it won’t be tonight—and probably not even tomorrow.”
“Thank you. And thanks again for your part in helping find my baby girl.”
“You’re so welcome. Good night, ma’am.”
She turns and starts to leave the room.
“I’ll walk you out,” I say.
93
By walking Darlene out, I not only give Dad and Verna a little time alone together but can see if I can get any more information out of her.
We walk back through the open kitchen and living room, through the photograph-covered foyer, and out into the warm, humid night.
As soon as we’re outside she says, “How good are you at keeping shit to yourself?”
“The best. You can tell me anything. It’ll stay between us.”
“I can’t believe that glory-hogging bastard didn’t even let y’all know what we had. He’s such a fuckin’ prick. You know what the extent of the credit you’ll get will be? An anonymous tip. That’s it. You’ll be an anonymous tip. And I won’t be shit. It was your idea and my work that found her, but . . . we won’t get . . . Look at where I am and what I’m doin’ while they’re over there at the crime scene I led them to. I’m sick of it.”
“Where is it? Where’d you find her?”
“A little park on Caverns Road.”
“How?” I say. “How’d you find her?”
“By doin’ what your ass asked me to do—looking at every crime that’s occurred since she went missing—and a few from a little before.”
“I didn’t say every crime. I said every homicide and missing person case—anything that had any similarities to—”
“Well . . . good thing I misunderstood you, ’cause . . .”
“How sure are you it’s her?”
“As sure as we can be without some sort of DNA confirmation or something like that, but it’s her.”
“How do you know?”
“Clothes. Jewelry. ID in what was left of her wallet. Only bones left of her, but she was wrapped in some sort of blanket or something and then a nylon or polyurethane material around it. Preserved everything about as good as could be expected without a coffin.”
I think about what that means.
“You know I know a lot more about this case than anybody realizes,” she says.
“Oh yeah?”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s just frustrating. I’ve read and studied it and thought about it for years and . . . nobody ever even asks what I think.”
“What do you think?” I ask.
She smiles. “I didn’t mean you, but . . . I’ll tell you sometime. Anyway, they already got her dental records from her dentist—local guy still in practice, though his son mostly runs it now. They’re checking her records against what they found, but it’s her.”
“Tell me about the park where she was found,” I say.
“It’s very small. More of a monument garden than park. Local black civic group built it back in 2000. It’s called Tree of Peace or the Peace Tree or something like that. I don’t know a lot about it, but I think it has something to do with the last spectacle lynching in the country that took place here back during the Great Depression. Maybe some other racial shit. Dozier maybe.”
“What made you look there?”
“I got lucky. I looked at some shit and made a guess or two.”
“Tell me.”
“I’ll tell you, but only because I don’t trust Glenn and I won’t be here much longer. But don’t you do anything to hurt me with this. I’ve applied to work with the highway patrol. Don’t fuck that up for me.”
“I won’t.”
“Two crimes and a few odd occurrences happened on the same night back in 2000. We had a hit-and-run victim on the road not far from the garden thing, which was under construction at the time. Thing is . . . it was weird. The victim, a young girl named Naomi about Janet’s age, was found on the side of the road. It was bad. You’ve never seen a body so mangled and . . . looked like she’d been hit by something big, like a semi tractor-trailer, and then dragged for a long ways down the road. It was . . . It’s hard to even think about. Thing is, she had some cuts and injuries not consistent with being hit and or dragged by a vehicle. Like she had been stabbed and her throat slit, but . . . ME said it could’ve been a murder made to look like a hit-and-run or she could’ve gotten the injuries in some weird way from the vehicle. It’s been open all this time. Reading about it this time . . . in the light of what happened to Janet . . . I don’t know, I guess I saw it in a new way. I thought about all that blood in her car and then I thought about this other girl being cut and . . . I don’t know . . . it just made me wonder. I thought it was a long shot, but I pulled the file to show you and the sheriff and then I saw this other shit that happened near there that same night and . . . I don’t know, it just clicked a little.”
“What else happened that night?”
“A tractor with a backhoe was stolen and the garden monument was vandalized. Part of the installation is a full-size bronze tree with a noose hanging in it—you know, for all the lynchings. It was dug up and knocked over, but the more I looked at it . . . the more I saw that it wasn’t knocked over so much as carefully laid over on its side. It wasn’t damaged in any way. All they had to do was get a backhoe and lift the tree and put it right back in the ground. Hell, they went to the same construction site down the road and borrowed the same one that had been stolen to do it. Because of the way it was done—all careful like—I thought maybe it was a distraction, a decoy, from what was really going on. There was another spot in front of the monument that looked like it had been disturbed. They had recently laid sod around the new monument and it looked like it had been moved a little—but only a little. But it was enough to notice. It was like when you dig a hole and put the dirt back in and there’s more than enough so it’s raised up some. It was like that. But because the tree was the focus and looked like it was what had been vandalized, everybody thought the tractor just disturbed the area. They took pictures of it, notated it, but didn’t really investigate it. And I get it. Looked like there was nothing to investigate, but when I looked at the pictures, I could tell the sod had been laid back down too neatly to be explained by a tractor running over it. I figured it was nothing, but thought it was possible it was something. You know, worth taking a look at. So we did. I wasn’t sure what to expect but it damn sure wasn’t Janet Leigh Lester, I’ll tell you that.”
“Good work,” I say. “Very nice. That’s some truly impressive investigating.”
“Lot of luck. Just stumbled onto it really.”
I shake my head. “Not luck. Damn fine police work. You have any idea how many people would have looked at exactly what you did and never see anything?”
Her face flushes crimson. “Thanks. Thank you. A lot. I . . . I really appreciate it. I need to go. Please don’t breathe a word of this to anyone.”
“I won’t.”
“Swear.”
I nod. “I won’t.”
“Then I’ll tell you the most troubling part.”
“What’s that?”
“The sheriff’s brother, Brad, worked on that construction site. He . . . I thin
k Glenn is covering up for him. Think that’s the real reason you’re being shut out.”
94
The torture and murder of Claude Neal, a twenty-three-year-old farm laborer who lived about nine miles outside of Marianna with his wife, mother, and aunt, has been called the last public spectacle lynching in US history.
Lola Cannady, a twenty-year-old white woman who had grown up near Neal, left her family home on Thursday, October 18, 1934, to walk to a water pump to water the family’s hogs, and never came home again.
Neighbors helped the Cannady family search for Lola in the fields behind the family’s farm, and early the following morning found her body in the woods under the cover of a couple of logs and pine tree branches. She had been bludgeoned to death with a hammer used to mend fences taken from her family’s own field, and it was also later determined that she had been raped.
I’m on the uncomfortable couch in Verna’s den reading the rest of the murder book and information about Claude Neal, the disgraceful racial history of Marianna, and the monument and garden commemorating it where Janet’s body was discovered. Dad is asleep in Ralphie’s recliner beside me.
He insisted on staying here tonight and I didn’t feel like I could leave him here alone.
I had gone by the garden earlier in the night to try to talk to Glenn Barnes or get a look at the crime scene, while Dad and Verna dealt with a news crew that showed up at her door, but Glenn was gone and the deputies posted on the perimeter wouldn’t let me back where FDLE was continuing to process the scene.
The sheriff at the time of Lola Cannady’s death, Flake Chambliss, arrested Neal within two hours of finding Lola’s body in a field near her family’s farm. According to reports, Claude Neal’s aunt and mother were found attempting to clean blood from Neal’s clothes, and a piece of cloth appearing to match those clothes was found near Lola’s body.
By the next day, area newspapers were printing stories about Neal and racial tensions in town were already beginning to intensify. With only two deputies, Sheriff Chambliss decided his department would be unable to protect Neal from the growing mob wanting to lynch the young man, so he decided to move Neal through a series of different jails.
Transported across state lines to the Escambia County Jail in Brewton, Alabama, and booked under the name John Smith on a vagrancy charge, Neal remained in custody there. Following a coroner’s jury back in Marianna determining that Neal raped and murdered Lola Cannady, and that his mother and aunt were feloniously present as accessories, Neal’s whereabouts were leaked to the press. A lynch mob from Marianna broke Neal out and carried him back home to a spot in the woods near Peri Landing along the Chattahoochee River.
Neal was tortured and castrated, his genitalia shoved in his mouth and down his throat, was stabbed, burned with hot irons, had his toes and fingers removed, and was hanged before his dead body was tied to a vehicle and dragged to the Cannady property. Outraged that he had not been the one to kill Neal, George Cannady shot his corpse three times in the forehead. Further mutilation of the body ensued by the moonshine-drunk crowd gathered there, which included kids who stabbed the body with sharpened sticks. The mob then began to burn down shacks around the area where black families lived.
Later that night, the mutilated body of Claude Neal was hung up outside the town courthouse. When Sheriff Chambliss discovered it early the next morning, he cut it down and buried it.
A mob of some two thousand people formed outside the courthouse, excited to see the lynching, and demanded that Chambliss dig up the body and hang it back up again when they realized they were too late to see it. When Chambliss refused, they purchased pictures of the corpse for fifty cents each and started rioting. Some two hundred African-Americans were injured. The police were also attacked. Eventually, the National Guard arrived and ended the riots.
But they couldn’t end what caused them to begin in the first place. And the fear and hate and mistrust and racism continued to fester just beneath the surface. Always there. Always about to boil over.
Never formally indicted nor arraigned, Claude Neal was believed by many to be innocent. Rumors of other suspects and scenarios swirled around but no investigation was conducted. Governor Sholtz called for a grand jury investigation into the lynching, but in spite of several news articles providing possible leads as to the identities of those involved, the grand jury merely concluded that the lynching was perpetrated by persons unknown.
No further investigations were conducted and the governor absolved Chambliss of any personal responsibility in the matter.
But Marianna’s racial tensions and atrocities didn’t begin or end with Claude Neal.
By 1930, some four thousand black men had been lynched nationwide, most in the Deep South, and though Alabama and Mississippi had more total lynchings, Florida had the highest per capita rate during the first thirty years of the twentieth century.
Like most cities in the Deep South, systemic racism and brutality are part of Marianna’s shameful blood-stained history, but this little town seems to have been a place of heightened savagery and wicked extremes.
Four years after the Civil War ended, Marianna and Jackson County were the center of a low-level guerrilla war conducted by the Ku Klux Klan known as the Jackson County War. Members of the Klan, many of them Confederate army veterans, murdered over one hundred fifty government officials and African-Americans.
Another racial blight on the small town of Marianna is that of the Florida School for Boys, or Dozier School for Boys, the reform school operated by the state of Florida from 1900 to 2011. The school had a reputation for abuse, beatings, rapes, torture, and even murder—all of students by staff. A staff it seems was made up of many Klan members. From 1932 to 1936, twelve young African-American boys died inside Dozier. According to school officials, all twelve died of pneumonia. Over the course of its corrupt history, at least sixty-five young boys died. Many, many more lived cruel little lives of rape and torture, humiliation and degradation.
The garden monument where Janet’s remains were discovered is meant to be a reminder of all of this plus a place of peace and hope for a better, more civil future.
An image of Janet appears in my mind, unbidden, and sparks a series of thoughts that lead to a series of questions.
I pull out Janet’s picture and look at it again.
It’s so subtle but it’s there.
I push myself up off the couch and walk out into the living room.
As I begin to head down the hall toward Verna’s room, I see a large dark figure near the front door.
95
The figure doesn’t move.
His back is to me.
Placing my hand on the weapon holstered at my right side, I slowly move toward him.
As I get closer, I see that it’s Ralphie’s Iron Man costume standing near the front door.
The suit looks amazingly like the one from the movie—though much larger. Ralphie isn’t in it. It’s just the suit, and even in the dimness of the foyer it looks like metal.
Walking down the hall toward Verna’s room, I stop at Ralphie’s room to check on him.
As I stand there looking at him, he opens his eyes. “Everything okay?”
I nod.
“Iron Man still watching the front door?” he asks.
“He is.”
“Ralphie you have some amazing costumes.”
“Not Ralphie. Tony Stark.”
“Sorry.”
“Let me know if there’s any trouble. Sheriff Jack said there might be.”
“I’m staying on the couch, buddy,” I say. “I’ll keep watch tonight. You just get some sleep.”
“You sure?” he asks.
“Absolutely.”
“Be very vigilant,” he says. “Ronnie is a very bad villain.”
“I will.”
I continue to the last door at the end and tap on it.
The light is on so I’m hoping she’s awake.
“Verna?” I say. “I
t’s John. Are you awake?”
She opens the door, a robe wrapped around her. “What is it? Is everything okay? Where’s Jack?”
“Yes. Everything’s fine. Dad’s asleep. I’ve just been studying the case some more and have a couple of questions for you. They can wait ’til morning—I just didn’t want to.”
“No, of course,” she says. “I appreciate you working on it. Please come in.”
She leads me over to a small sitting area in the far corner of her room and we sit in the two high back chairs there.
Between the chairs on a small round table is a stack of newspapers and magazines.
“We used to read books here,” she says. “Now I’m the only one who uses it—and just for short reading.”
I nod and think again about how everything in her life changed on that February night so long ago.
“Did you uncover something else in the file?” she says. “I still can’t believe they found her. I know they never would have if it weren’t for you and Jack. Thanks so much for all you’re doing. Thanks for helping him, for taking care of him. He’s very lucky to have you.”
“Thank you,” I say. “I’m sorry you two didn’t have more . . . of each other over all these years.”
“You are?” she asks in surprise.
I nod.
“It surprises me you’d feel that way,” she says. “Your mom and—”
“I wish both of them could have had more happiness over the years,” I say. “Wasn’t something they were going to have together.”
Tears glisten in her eyes and she pats my hand. “So much sadness in this world. So much . . . suffering.”
We are silent for a moment.
“Anyway. Thank you,” she says. “What questions did you have?”
“It’s about Janet’s biological father,” I say. “There’s no mention of him in the book.”
True Crime Fiction Page 38