Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  Willis McCall, meanwhile, had barricaded himself in his room with Assistant State Attorney A. P. “Sam” Buie, the former University of Florida football standout who had aided Jesse Hunter in the prosecution of the Groveland Boys, as well as McCall’s old friend Judge W. Troy Hall, who also happened to be in charge of the coroner’s inquest into the manner of Shepherd’s death. Together they had worked on McCall’s statement detailing the events of the previous evening, so that by the time the FBI agents Wayne Swinney and Clyde Aderhold arrived at the sheriff’s bedside, he was ready to talk. With their notebooks in hand, the agents followed McCall through his tale of the prison transfer that landed him as well as Irvin in the hospital and Samuel Shepherd in the morgue.

  McCall, Yates, and the two prisoners had left Raiford in the early evening, the sheriff avowed. McCall had dropped off Yates at his car in Weirsdale, and he had then followed the deputy across the Ocklawaha River Bridge. He’d lost sight of Yates’s taillights where the clay road curved. About the same time, he’d begun to feel a strain on the steering wheel, and when he pulled the car over, he noticed that the tire was “half way down.” So he had radioed Yates and told him to send someone from the Gulf service station in Umatilla to fix his flat. Right then, McCall said, Samuel Shepherd spoke up about having to relieve himself.

  “He said, ‘I will piss in my britches if you don’t let me out.’ I said, ‘All right damn it get out and get it over with.’ Those were my exact words, and I opened the door, and they both got out of the car, and just as they stepped out of the car, and just as Shepherd was straightening up from getting off the seat, he hit at me with a flashlight and yelled to Irvin to ‘get his gun’ and he hit me with the flashlight.”

  The agents were busy scribbling. McCall continued: “At that time one of the boys, I don’t know which one, grabbed me by the shirt . . . grabbed me by the hair of the head and had hold of my shirt and my hair, and then I grabbed for my gun and got to it before either one of them did and started shooting it. I just had to do it, it was either me or them and I beat them to my gun.” The sheriff had emptied his gun; then, with Shepherd and Irvin lying in a ditch, McCall had made another radio call to Yates. “The niggers tried to jump me!” he’d screamed. “I had to shoot them!”

  The sheriff reenacted parts of the shooting for the agents. He showed them his torn shirt, his broken eyeglasses, the powder burns on his coat. He answered their questions. He also told them that he was not willing to give a signed statement at this time but added that he “might possibly furnish a statement at a later time.”

  Deputy James Yates, who told the FBI agents that “he knew nothing of the shooting,” since it was all over by the time he’d gotten back to the sheriff’s car, also declined to make a statement. He said that for now he “would rather think over the matter” and would consider “furnishing a statement to the Bureau at a later date.”

  To McCall’s dismay, agents Swinney and Aderhold continued poking around the hospital; they talked to physicians, nurses, and the administrative staff. In succeeding days they visited the scene of the shooting, took samples of McCall’s hair, examined the sheriff’s automobile, and attended Samuel Shepherd’s autopsy. They were able to verify some important facts and to establish a chain of events that did not seem to be in dispute.

  The agents learned, too, that within an hour of the shooting numerous automobiles had converged at the scene, many of them carrying friends of the sheriff. Among the first to arrive was Spencer Rynearson from the Gulf service station, who, despite the fact that the bodies of two black men were lying next to the car, had been instructed by McCall to change the tire. He had thrown the flat in the back of the sheriff’s Oldsmobile; in one of the grooves he’d noticed the nail that had punctured the tire. Yates had interrupted a city council meeting with news of the shooting, and McCall’s Umatilla friends, the town’s mayor, and members of both the city council and local Kiwanis Club had soon shown up at the roadside, along with police. State Attorney Jesse Hunter had arrived about the same time as Marie Bolles, the editor of Eustis Lake Region News, who’d promptly begun photographing the disheveled McCall at the scene: He’s standing alongside his car, his rumpled, torn shirt hanging over his belt, a cut on his temple plainly visible; two bodies are splayed awkwardly in the grassy ditch behind him, the head of one resting on the thigh of the other; blood everywhere.

  “Marie, it’s just one of those things. I hate it that it happened,” McCall had said to his neighbor as she, with Hunter beside her, had moved in closer to photograph the two dead prisoners. That was when Hunter “saw one of them move.” Reuben Hatcher, the jailer at Tavares, had confirmed that one of the Negroes was indeed still breathing, and on Yates’s car radio he’d contacted Waterman Memorial Hospital. There would be a delay; a Jim Crow car was being dispatched from the Dabney Funeral Home in Leesburg because the hospital ambulance could not be used to transport blacks. In the meantime, Walter Irvin, groaning and writhing in pain, lay unattended. Concern centered on Sheriff McCall’s injuries.

  Stetson Kennedy, a Jacksonville native and frequent contributor to many liberal and black newspapers, observed Jesse Hunter eyeing McCall suspiciously at the scene of the shooting that night. The sheriff was hovering around his Oldsmobile, where his trademark ten-gallon Stetson sat crumpled on the hood; his hair mussed up, his broken glasses perched on his nose, a trickle of blood on his temple yet to be wiped away, he appeared to be in a daze. His hangdog look of exhaustion and remorse won him no sympathy from the state attorney, whom the sheriff could barely look in the eye. Hunter shifted his gaze from McCall back to Walter Irvin, now curled on the ground with his knees bent and his open mouth gasping for breath. Turning again, leaning in toward McCall, the prosecutor believed himself to be out of anyone’s earshot when, displeased, he spat, “You have pissed in my whiskey.”

  McCall was vocal in expressing concern for the black man while the small crowd of maybe thirty people waited for the ambulances to arrive. “One of them has a pulse—a good pulse,” McCall said. “I hope he makes it.” At the same time, McCall’s boyhood friend, the judge and county coroner W. Troy Hall, was charged with conducting the inquest. In the glare of the headlights from the dozen and more cars that had gathered on the clay road, Hall had hastily assembled a jury of six “friends of Sheriff Willis V. McCall,” including Marie Bolles.

  Once the ambulances had arrived, both McCall and Irvin had been taken to Waterman Memorial, just six miles away in Eustis. Irvin, who had been given an injection of Demerol, had arrived in “extreme shock,” unconscious and unable to answer any questions. Examination had indicated “gurgling” and “sucking” sounds emanating from two bullet wounds to his upper body and another to his neck. Doctors had removed a “lead pistol ball” from his right shoulder. They had noted that, aside from “extreme shock from hemorrhage,” Irvin’s mental status was normal, and within hours he’d become “oriented as to time, person and place and willing and apparently able to answer questions readily.”

  The next morning at the hospital, McCall and Yates, though able, were not willing to take any questions from the press. Speaking on behalf of the sheriff, Judge Hall addressed the reporters who had gathered at Waterman Memorial, and as if he were confirming the results of his own coroner’s inquest—he reported that he himself had seen “a batch of the sheriff’s hair” in Irvin’s hand—he delivered essentially the same statement he’d worked out with McCall the night before in the sheriff’s hospital room. Some in the press corps were beginning to wonder how a county official acting as the sheriff’s spokesman in regard to the shooting was also going to be able to conduct an impartial inquest into the shooting victim’s death.

  McCall was willing to pose for a press photograph in his hospital bed. He was wearing dark, polka-dotted pajamas; behind him stood his wife, Doris, and son Malcolm while his younger son, Donnie, sat on the bed. “I’m just happy to be here with my arm around this boy,” McCall told the photographer from the Orlando Morning Sen
tinel. As the newspapermen were shuffling out of the room, the sheriff, no doubt anticipating the news items he’d be obsessively clipping over the next few days, halted them with some parting words. “I expect I’ll get a lot of criticism for this,” McCall said, “but I’d rather be criticized than dead.”

  Walter Irvin’s family tried to visit him that morning as well. Desperate to see their son before he slipped into a coma or died like his friend Samuel Shepherd from gunshot wounds, Cleve and Dellia Irvin had arrived early at Waterman Memorial only to be denied visitation rights by Deputy James Yates at the door to Walter’s room. They had no recourse, it seemed, especially since the NAACP lawyers had left the hospital to meet Thurgood Marshall at the airport, and Cleve Irvin was scared and confused, subject to rules and procedures he had long given up trying to understand. Rights were what white people told him to do; he knew no law beyond that. So he would not even think to question the authority of Deputy Yates. Instead, with his wife he turned and walked away.

  He was spotted in the corridor by the British reporter Terence McCarthy, who had covered the rioting in Groveland for the New Leader in 1949. The two men spoke, and Cleve, his anxiety reducing his voice to a whisper, for he did not want Dellia to hear, implored, “Please give me a truthful answer. . . . If my boy has to appear to give evidence against Mr. McCall, do you think they will kill us? Will they kill my other children? Should I take them away from here? You know, we didn’t move like Mr. Shepherd [Samuel’s father, Henry] did—because they didn’t tell me, like they told him, that we weren’t to come back to live here [after the rioting]. Do you think it’s safe for us here now?” As much as McCarthy wanted to assure Cleve Irvin that he and his family would be safe, especially now that Thurgood Marshall was coming, the reporter remained silent. “To Mr. Irvin’s questions,” he knew, “there could be no truthful answer.”

  One man did manage to visit with Walter Irvin that morning. He was feeling the weight of his years; his health wasn’t good, and it would soon take a turn for the worse. He hadn’t much stomach for what he had witnessed on the dark road near Umatilla not twelve hours before. “Visibly shaken,” he had watched the performance of Lake County’s sheriff: McCall stumbling around his car, feigning concern for Irvin, telling everyone how blessed he was to survive. Till then, either the sheriff hadn’t known Irvin was alive or, worse, he’d known and hadn’t wanted anyone there to attend to the injured man before he died. One thing was certain, something wasn’t right.

  Doubt and suspicion had followed the old man home, and he’d telephoned his friend Mabel Norris Reese. “Guess what. McCall’s shot those niggers,” he’d said, and Reese, aghast, unable to speak, had simply let the old man tell his story while she took notes. “Mabel,” he’d said, “I don’t believe those boys attacked the sheriff at all. I think it was deliberate.” He’d said what he’d concluded.

  So, the next morning, his step slow but his direction sure, the old man was walking down a brightly lit hallway of Waterman Memorial Hospital. One hand tucked into his red suspenders, he smiled warmly back at the nurses—everybody knew him. At the doorway to Walter Irvin’s room he offered Deputy James Yates a firm nod of his head, but he did not break his deliberate pace. He paused at the side of Irvin’s bed; he’d gotten what he wanted, a private moment. He surveyed the room, made sure it was the two of them alone. He leaned forward, looked Walter directly in the eyes. Then, in a whisper, Jesse Hunter began to speak.

  CHAPTER 16: IT’S A FUNNY THING

  Walter Irvin at Waterman Memorial Hospital, Eustis, Florida. (Federal Bureau of Investigation)

  THIS IS WHAT human rights means in the United States! This is the American way of life,” shouted Soviet foreign minister Andrei Vishinsky from a podium at the United Nations to Security Council members and the world. He was brandishing a copy of the New York Post trumpeting, in an extra edition, the latest shocking news to come out of Lake County about the Groveland Boys shooting. “I think some people should look after their own business before sticking their noses into other people’s business,” Vishinsky scoffed.

  ON NOVEMBER 7, 1951, the Groveland Boys case again exploded onto the front pages of newspapers around the country. Locally, the St. Petersburg Times bannered “Lake Rape Case Negro Shot, Killed” across the top of its front page, and the following day, an editorial stated that “the shooting of the Groveland defendants was inexcusable” and called the incident a “terrible black eye” for Florida justice. Reporters like Stetson Kennedy, who was covering the story for the Nation, were pouring into Lake County, many of them checking into the Fountain Inn in Eustis.

  Amid the firestorm of publicity across the nation and even abroad over the killing of Samuel Shepherd and shooting of Walter Irvin, Thurgood Marshall landed at the airport in Orlando, where he was met by attorneys Alex Akerman, Jack Greenberg, and Paul Perkins. When they arrived at Waterman Memorial Hospital, awaiting them was a throng of journalists eager for comment from “Mr. Civil Rights.” Marshall’s presence amplified the importance of the recent events in Lake County, for sure; yet, comfortable though the NAACP’s most public figure was with the press, he cut the reporters short. His first order of business that day was to talk to his client, Walter Irvin.

  About the same time, special investigator Jefferson Jennings Elliott had pulled into the hospital parking lot in his 1950 Ford coupe, which comprised a “primitive mobile crime lab outfitted with kits for identifying semen, blood, and fingerprints; paraffin for detecting recent gun firings; portable lights for illuminating crime scenes; and a complete autopsy kit.” Elliott had been sent to Eustis by Governor Fuller Warren’s office to “check all angles” in McCall’s shooting of the prisoners—and to “let the chips fall where they may.” Heavy-jowled, with a big belly that hung over his belt and a large fedora tipped awkwardly on his head, Elliott might have walked out of a hard-boiled detective novel. Adjusting his round, horn-rimmed glasses, he told the reporters, “Well, boys, I’m here, but that’s all I can say.”

  Hoping to keep within Lake County’s jurisdiction any inquiries into the fatal shooting, Willis McCall had asked Judge Futch to have a “court-appointed elisor” investigate the death of Samuel Shepherd, but Futch had declined, stating, “the Governor said he wouldn’t recognize such a person.” Instead Elliott would be conducting the investigation; so, on Wednesday, November 7, with a court stenographer in tow, the governor’s man was leading Marshall, Akerman, Greenberg, Perkins, Mabel Norris Reese, seven other members of the press, and a “special nurse” into Irvin’s hospital room.

  The feeding tube was still taped to the patient’s face; Irvin was weak but lucid. The room grew very quiet in anticipation of the rumored “entirely different story” from Sheriff McCall’s version of events. Alan Hamlin, the court reporter, steadied his stenographic machine. Marshall stood by Irvin’s side. J. J. Elliott had his notebook and pen ready. Greenberg, Perkins, and Akerman had heard the rumors, too, but they knew no more than anyone else what specifics might make their client’s story “entirely different.” Also, as Reese would report, “This was the first time Marshall saw Irvin, so there could be no coaching.”

  “No one’s going to hurt you,” Alex Akerman said softly to Irvin before he began the questioning. From the outset it was evident that despite the trauma Irvin had suffered, he was sustaining no memory loss. His voice was breathy, strained, but his responses were crisp, and he delivered his answers without mental hesitation. He described being taken out of Raiford at night; he recalled being handcuffed and told to sit in the front seat. He remembered that Sheriff McCall had let Yates out of the car at Weirsdale and had then followed the deputy, now in his own car, down a clay road while talking to him on the radio. Up to that point Irvin’s account of the prison transfer mirrored McCall’s, but after Yates had driven out of sight, when the sheriff was rattling the wheel and claiming something was wrong with the tire, Irvin’s version diverged. McCall had gotten out of the car to check the tire, but, in Irvin’s account, McCal
l hadn’t then radioed Yates about contacting the Gulf service station as the sheriff had stated.

  Instead, in Irvin’s telling, the sheriff had leaned in at the open door and yelled at the two prisoners, “You sons of bitches, get out and get this tire fixed.” The problem was, Irvin “did not see any tires in the back, but we had to obey, because he was the Sheriff, and so we went to get out, and [Shepherd] he taken his foot and put it out of the car, and was getting out, and I can’t say just how quick it was, but he shot him, and it was quick enough, and he turned, the Sheriff did, and he had a pistol and shot him right quick and then right quick he shot me, shot me right here [indicating right upper chest] and he come on and when he shot me, he grabbed me somewhere by my clothes, and snatched me . . . he snatched both of us and that threw both of us on the ground, and then I did not say anything.”

  “Were you still in the car when he shot you?” Akerman asked.

  “I was just getting out,” Irvin said, “but the bullet knocked me into the car, and then he snatched me out.”

  Irvin paused. The silence in the hospital room hung heavy. You could hear the scribbling of pens on notebook paper. The stenograph clicked, stopped. Without prompting Irvin continued.

  “I didn’t say nothing, so . . . after he snatched me, he shot me again, in the shoulder, and still I didn’t say anything all the time, and I knew that I was not dead.”

  Irvin recounted that McCall had run around the car to get to the radio. He’d called the deputy sheriff. “I heard him say ‘I got rid of them, killed the sons of bitches’ but I still did not say anything. . . . I heard him say ‘Pull around here right quick . . . these sons of bitches tried to jump on me and I have done a damn good job of it.’ I wondered what he meant by that, because we hadn’t done that . . . and then in about five or ten minutes Deputy Yates was there.”