by Gilbert King
Mabel Norris Reese, who had heard Walter Irvin describe twice, and quite believably, what had occurred at the roadside on the night of the prison transfer, was not convinced by the physical evidence: “The nail on the tire was so obviously planted that it made you sick that people would stand there, look at it and believe it.”
FBI photograph of the nail in Sheriff Willis McCall’s tire. (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
Hall then had McCall lead a walk-through of the roadside incident. Noticing that the ground was dug up where Shepherd and Irvin had been lying after being shot, Hall asked, “Was this ground dug up in this manner at that time?” McCall said no, as he surveyed the three square feet of overturned sand and clay, and explained, “The F.B.I. has been sifting it, trying to find the bullets.” One bullet in particular—the bullet, still unaccounted for, that had passed through Irvin’s neck—posed a significant challenge to the credibility of McCall’s and Yates’s rendering of the prisoners’ daring attempt to escape. According to the sheriff, he had fired the six rounds in his gun at the same time as he had backed away from the two prisoners when they’d attacked him. By Walter Irvin’s account, however, the last shot had been fired by Deputy Yates, when he had stood over Irvin, who was lying faceup on the ground, and had aimed the gun straight down. The bullet, which had struck mostly soft tissue and muscle as it had cleanly penetrated Irvin’s neck, would probably never be found if, as McCall claimed, the prisoner had been advancing toward him when the sheriff had fired his last shot. If, on the other hand, Irvin had already fallen to the ground when the bullet coursed through his neck, it might well have been found in that three-foot-square patch of sand and clay.
The jury reconvened at the Community Building in Umatilla. Hall extracted, or coaxed, a few more details of the shooting from McCall—what caliber revolver he’d carried, what time Yates arrived, whom the sheriff spoke with over the radio—and then produced a series of witnesses, including Umatilla’s mayor and a town councilman, who had appeared at the roadside in the dead of Tuesday night in order to establish that the sheriff had fired in self-defense: from first to last, every witness testified he had seen strands of McCall’s hair clutched in Irvin’s hand.
The coroner having constructed a case of self-defense and the judge having essentially exculpated the self-defender, Hall allowed the sheriff to remind the jurors, press, and spectators that he himself had acted as the protector of the Groveland Boys: he had on previous occasions safely transported Shepherd and Irvin between Tavares and Raiford, and in July 1949 he had even hidden them at his home in Eustis “until I got permission to put them in Raiford the first time in order to protect them” from an angry mob.
“You did that to protect their lives, is that correct?” Hall asked.
“Yes, I did,” McCall answered. “If I was going to do something like they have said that I have done, I would have done it long ago. I just want to say that I am very thankful that I am still here instead of in my grave today.”
“Now, Sheriff,” Hall asked, “did you or one of your deputies make a special trip to the blood bank in Orlando on Tuesday night in order to get whole blood from them for the treatment of the prisoner?”
“Yes,” McCall replied, “one of my deputies did. And I also signed a release for his operation, because no member of his family was here to do it, and so I signed a release for the doctors to operate.”
Stetson Kennedy, in his coverage of the inquest, observed that McCall was treated as a “guest of honor” whom neither the judge nor the jury would dare to question on any point that might give credence to Irvin’s accusations. Nor did Governor Warren’s special investigator Jefferson J. Elliott, as it turned out. His bearing authoritative and his manner persuasive, Elliott presented himself as a man of science for whom evidence comprised not the ambiguities of eyewitness accounts or the contradictions of oral testimony but rather the objectivity of forensics: the kind of evidence that he detected in his state-of-the-art mobile crime lab; the kind of evidence that did not lie. Evidence like the powder burns on the coat of Sheriff Willis V. McCall. “I believe that this is the most important piece of evidence that we have before this jury,” Elliott announced solemnly to the jury as he noted the location of the powder burns on the left arm of the coat, thus indicating that the sheriff’s left arm was raised at the time of the shooting, not pointing down, and thus supporting McCall’s claim that he was “trying to fight somebody off or hold somebody off . . . which indicates to me some sort of struggle that was going on at the time of the shooting. He certainly was not target shooting.” Thus was the hearing closed.
The jurors needed little more than half an hour to find that Samuel Shepherd’s death was “justified by reason of the fact that Willis V. McCall was at that time acting in line of duty and in defense of his own life.” McCall was cleared of any wrongdoing.
On Monday, November 12, Judge Truman Futch issued a statement of the court. Contrary to his previous determination, he had decided not to impanel a grand jury in regard to the shooting death of Samuel Shepherd. “At that time,” Futch wrote, “I did not know that the Coroner’s jury could or would be able to conclude its work; nor did I know how thorough its work might be. Usually the work of a Coroner’s jury is perfunctory and superficial, but in this instance, I am of the opinion that the Honorable J. W. Hunter as State Attorney and the Honorable W. Troy Hall, Jr., as County Judge and ex officio coroner, together with members of the Coroner’s jury, have done a thorough job insofar as any criminal liability of any one is concerned in connection with the death of the prisoner Samuel Shepherd. . . . There is now no need for a grand jury in Lake County, Florida, and none will be impaneled at this time.”
The Honorable J. W. Hunter, however, had not entirely willingly associated himself with the inquiry into Samuel Shepherd’s death. After the coroner’s inquest, he issued his own cryptic statement, on which he later refused to elaborate, that he had participated in the investigation “only as I have been directed to do by [Judge Hall].” Hunter’s unease with the verdict in Hall’s inquest and with Futch’s decision not to impanel a grand jury almost certainly stemmed from information that had not reached the coroner’s jury on November 10 and would be withheld from the public record by virtue of Judge Futch’s action on November 12.
On Sunday, November 11, FBI agent Robert Wall contacted both the state attorney Jesse Hunter and Judge Hall to apprise them that the FBI had located a bullet “directly beneath a blood spot where victim Irvin was lying after the shooting incidents.” The agents had “dug a hole about ten inches deep” and with their fingers had sifted through the “sandy loam-type soil,” in which they’d found a .38-caliber bullet. The FBI believed that the single slug buried in the sand directly below the position of Irvin’s neck had traveled at a slight angle straight downward into the sand. Lab tests would later reveal that the bullet’s high-speed passage through the sand had obliterated any markings that might identify conclusively the specific gun from which it had been fired.
For Hunter, the new evidence was conclusive enough to confirm his suspicions that Sheriff Willis McCall and Deputy James Yates had in essence committed murder, especially in light of other information that the FBI had been sharing with Hunter over the past two days. Walter Irvin had told the two FBI agents who’d invaded his hospital room that after Yates had shot him, he had watched the deputy and the sheriff as they’d huddled in the glare from the headlights of McCall’s Oldsmobile 98: The sheriff “reached up and grabbed his shirt with his hand and tore it,” and Irvin “heard him tell Mr. Yates, we got to make it look like they tried to escape.” Jesse Hunter knew Willis McCall; he knew there was more fact than fiction in tales like those relating how the orange groves of Lake County were “fertilized with niggers that Willis McCall had killed”—if need be, with Deputy James Yates at his side. Jesse Hunter didn’t like piss in his whiskey.
At their private get-together that Sunday, Agent Wall had offered to make the FBI evidence available to H
unter and Hall “for probable use before the Grand Jury.” When Hall had subsequently advised Truman Futch that the FBI had located the missing, last bullet, the two judges came to the decision, quickly, that there was “no need for a grand jury.” The last bullet need never be mentioned, in or outside a county courtroom, since the FBI would not be releasing its report to any other party. Disgruntled by the judges’ decision in regard to the grand jury, Hunter wished to dissociate himself from all the proceedings of the past few days. He did not appreciate having his good name used in a whitewash.
The FBI found this bullet buried in soil directly beneath Walter Irvin’s “blood spot.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
At Hunter’s urging, Governor Fuller Warren had been prepared to suspend Willis McCall or force him into temporary retirement on November 8, but by the next day the governor had changed his mind, with some help from the sheriff himself at their private nighttime meeting in a Jacksonville hotel. Apparently Warren had decided that his administration could weather another civil rights scandal better than it could bear further allegations of impeachable offenses that linked the governor to the interests of organized crime. The former might prove to be embarrassing to the author of How to Win in Politics, but the latter would be ruinous to his political future. By mid-November Warren’s office had again been flooded with letters and telegrams and editorials in local and national newspapers demanding that he intervene in the latest miscarriage of justice by Lake County officials in the Groveland Boys case. Governor Fuller Warren issued a statement through his assistant that he was “out of the city at the present time on a statewide speaking tour.” Aside from that, he had no comment.
Lake County newspapers viewed the decisions of the coroner’s jury and of Judge Truman Futch regarding a grand jury as a “complete vindication” of their sheriff: his shooting of Shepherd and Irvin had been justified as self-defense, and he would not face any investigation of possible charges against him by a grand jury. Northern and urban newspapers around the country, meanwhile, were reporting a whitewash operation not only at the county level but also at the highest reaches of Florida’s state government. Impugning everyone from Sheriff McCall to Governor Warren, editorials in the national press decried the lack of outrage over the lawlessness and “fantastic savagery” in “Florida’s Jungle.” No one was more incensed than Thurgood Marshall.
“Irvin’s story was so convincing,” Marshall said, “that all who heard it are certain that he and Shepherd were the victims of a deliberate cold-blooded plan to murder both of them before the retrial ordered by the Supreme Court.” Marshall fired off an angry telegram to Fuller Warren, in which he first chided the governor for meeting with Willis McCall the night before the start of the coroner’s inquest, then reproved the fact that “after this conference your representative J. J. Elliott testified in defense of McCall. All this fits directly into new pattern which has replaced old type of lynching. You still have an opportunity to demonstrate whether or not the state of Florida believes in fair play and justice.” Marshall requested that Warren replace both McCall and Elliott. “The answer is in your hands,” he wrote.
Marshall’s harshest indictment fell on Willis McCall. In an interview with columnist Arnold DeMille for the Chicago Defender, Marshall asserted, “This is the worst case of injustice and whitewashing I have come across in my career. There is no question in my mind or in the minds of others who heard Walter Lee Irvin’s statement that he and Samuel Shepherd were deliberately shot by Sheriff Willis B. McCall last Tuesday. The bullet hole in [Irvin’s] neck reminded him with every breath and every word that he, too, could have been dead and might yet die. Any man in that condition is certainly not apt to lie. In listening to Irvin tell what happened you got the impression that he still wondered why the Lord had spared his life.” Marshall then raised the obvious questions that the coroner’s inquest did not: “Was it necessary to shoot two men, handcuffed together, three times in ‘self defense’? Why would not the body of the dead man have prevented Irvin, who was handcuffed to him, from running or doing anything else? Why did Sheriff McCall have only himself to guard two persons charged with capital offense on a road late at night? If Sheriff McCall was that brave, why would he have to shoot them six times? The last, and final question, is: If Sheriff McCall was shooting to defend himself, how could the bullets be so well placed, that none of them went wild?”
Willis McCall didn’t collect and clip only local newspapers. He also culled less flattering notices of his achievements in office from black newspapers like the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier, which allied themselves editorially to the civil rights platform of the NAACP—an organization led by men who, in McCall’s estimation, “are no good at all.” The reversal of the verdict in the Groveland Boys case, argued by NAACP lawyers before the U.S. Supreme Court, McCall took personally, as an affront to his stature as an officer of the law in Lake County. The fact of the reversal and the prospect of the retrial had fueled further the sheriff’s resentment of the NAACP, twenty-eight months of it toward Franklin Williams, and his indignation at Thurgood Marshall, who was now slandering him in the Northern black press as a caricature of the Southern white racist sheriff. Not that reporters like Jay Nelson Tuck hadn’t recognized McCall’s bigotry with no help at all from the NAACP. In a New York Post article, Tuck expressed abhorrence at the “sheer, filthy offensiveness of it when Sheriff McCall tells a public inquest that he opened his car window in the rain ‘because the nigger smell got too strong.’ ” McCall preferred to present himself as a man who spoke the truth frankly, and if people couldn’t handle the facts of it, the fault was not his. “I don’t think there is any question about it that the white race is a superior race to the black race,” McCall once said. “I believe that’s a proven fact. In their native country, they’re still eating each other. We don’t do that.”
Willis V. McCall may have been vindicated in Lake County, and he had dodged state criminal charges in the shooting death of Samuel Shepherd. Still, the need to set the record straight in the court of public opinion—to gain vindication by all—obsessed McCall. He had work yet to do, and he knew just how to do it, too.
CHAPTER 17: NO MAN ALIVE OR TO BE BORN
Flyer announcing Thurgood Marshall’s appearance in Miami, Florida. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records)
ANOTHER JOB DONE, special investigator J. J. Elliott allowed himself a moment of self-satisfaction as he headed back to his room at the Fountain Inn in Eustis. He had been doing well by Governor Fuller Warren. After Senator Estes Kefauver’s hearings had exposed the statewide corruption in Florida on live television in 1950, Elliott had gotten some payback for Governor Warren in Washington, D.C., where he’d uncovered “crap games, after-hour whiskey sales, and prostitution flourishing right under Kefauver’s nose.”
With an armful of newspapers headlining McCall’s exoneration, Elliott was fiddling with the key to his room when Stetson Kennedy spotted him, and joined the special investigator for a chat. After making some small talk with Elliott about bass fishing, Kennedy decided, on a hunch, to “play the ace up my sleeve”: from his wallet he pulled a “Klan Kard.”
An activist and folklorist as well as a journalist, Kennedy had traveled across Florida with Zora Neale Hurston during the Great Depression, when the two of them had collaborated on a WPA Florida Writers’ Project chronicling the sights and sounds of American folk life in turpentine camps, on railroad gangs, in soup kitchens, and the like. In the mid-1940s, Kennedy had infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia as part of his research for publications that sensationally exposed the organization’s activities and inner workings, its arcane rituals and “secret codewords,” to a fascinated public. In a 1947 letter, Georgia governor Ellis Arnall had credited Kennedy with uncovering evidence that “has facilitated Georgia’s prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan.” In 1951, he had not yet published I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan, a book that would have more clearly r
evealed his identity to Elliott. Kennedy handed the Klan Kard to the special investigator.
“Well, well!” Elliott said. “I see you know Mr. A-y-a-k [code for “Are you a Klansman?”] . . .”
“Sure do,” Kennedy answered, “and Mr. A-k-a-i [“A Klansman am I”], too.”
In reply, by Kennedy’s account, Elliott disclosed that he was a member of the East Point Klavern in Atlanta, and after a quick exchange in which he and Kennedy shared the names of people they both knew, Elliott “opened up immediately” to the reporter about the Groveland Boys case.
“On the basis of that Kard you just showed me,” Elliott said, “I don’t mind telling you that when those niggers were first delivered to the state pen they’d had the hell beaten out of them.” Elliott remarked, too, that Raiford officials “were so afraid somebody might try to pin the beatings on them,” they’d had the Groveland Boys photographed as soon as they’d arrived.
The conversation was interrupted when a fellow reporter showed up, and Kennedy excused himself, wanting to avoid any chance of his undercover work arising as a topic for discussion. He left with what he thought was a major scoop, although by then the FBI had already documented that the deputies Yates and Campbell had beaten the Groveland Boys. The other, perhaps bigger story was that Jefferson J. Elliott had admitted to being a member of the KKK: a detail that, to Kennedy’s mind, might point to a conspiracy on the part of the governor, himself a former Klansman, and his special investigator to whitewash a cold-blooded murder by Sheriff Willis McCall.