Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  So Hunter prompted: “Do you mean that they put their private parts into your private parts?”

  “Yes, sir, they did.”

  “All four of them did.”

  “Yes, sir, they did,” said Norma, confirming the taction of private parts. She need not have said anything more. A white Southern reporter whispered to a Northern newsman, “That’s all, brother. The next move is up to the U.S. Supreme Court. This Irvin is convicted here and now.”

  Hunter proceeded to what occurred after the rape, when, Norma said, the black men were trying to decide what to do with her. “One of them said to me, which would I rather do, ride on down the road with them and be killed or get out and walk, and I said that I would get out and walk, so they got me out of the car. . . .” And Norma ran. She hid in the woods, she said, “until almost daylight,” then walked to Okahumpka, where she waited until Lawrence Burtoft opened up the café.

  Glossing over any words that Norma may have exchanged with Lawrence Burtoft, the state attorney returned to details of the rape. “Now, Norma,” Hunter asked, “did you fight those Negroes in that car?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t.”

  “Why didn’t you fight them?”

  “Because I was scared to.”

  “Did they threaten you?”

  “Yes, sir,” Norma said.

  “In what way?”

  “They said if I made any noise or screamed or hollered or tried to do anything, they would shoot me.”

  “Did they have a gun?”

  “Yes, they did.”

  Frustrated by Norma’s reluctance or refusal to forward her story, Hunter led her further. “Now, Norma, you submitted to those Negroes because you were afraid of them?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you say they had a gun and made threats to you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you say this defendant sitting here in the courtroom is one of those men?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That is Walter Irvin?” Hunter practically pleaded.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Will you point him out to the jury?”

  Norma Padgett pointed vaguely in the direction of Walter Irvin. That two of the Groveland Boys were now dead and another was doing hard labor on a chain gang in South Florida no doubt robbed the moment of some of its drama, but Norma’s limp gesture held not a lick of the electricity she’d generated when she had risen in the witness box at the Lake County courthouse and with her finger extended had pointed at each defendant in succession.

  “The nigger Shepherd . . . the nigger Irvin . . . the nigger Greenlee.”

  Jesse Hunter’s case for the prosecution rested almost singly, and strongly, on his certainty that no jury in Lake or Marion counties would ever accept the word of a black man over the testimony of a young blond farm girl who had accused him of rape. So he had Norma accuse her alleged rapist again, then again and again.

  “Now, Norma, this is a very important thing,” Hunter stated with emphasis. “I want you to tell this court and jury whether or not that is one of the Negro men that raped you that night in the back seat of that automobile.”

  “Yes, sir, it is.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Yes, sir, I am sure.”

  “You are positive he is one of the ones who raped you that night.”

  “Yes, sir,” Norma said, and five times more she said she was sure when five times more Hunter asked her, for he wanted to be absolutely sure that the jury was sure that Walter Irvin was one of the four black men who had raped her.

  Marshall had decided, and announced, that neither he nor any other black attorney would be cross-examining Norma Padgett before a white, male jury in Marion County. Mabel Norris Reese saw wisdom in the decision. “You had a farmer jury, a white woman had been raped by negroes and this was in their minds,” Reese said. “There was no question at all. They weren’t considering evidence. They had their eyes fastened on Hunter . . . it would have been suicide for Marshall to get up and argue anything in the jury.”

  Careful not to display any antagonism toward the state attorney’s witness, Akerman had Norma review her account of the events that culminated in Willie’s fight with the four black men. Then, barely acknowledging the alleged rape—for the defense strategy was not to question the allegation of the rape but to raise reasonable doubt as to Irvin’s involvement in it—Akerman focused on Norma’s arrival in Okahumpka, on foot, outside Burtoft’s Café. In the first trial, because Hunter had chosen not to call Lawrence Burtoft as a witness, the prosecution’s narrative had omitted Norma’s conversation with the owners’ son in the café. To Akerman, Norma responded that she knew Lawrence Burtoft, the young man who’d let her inside the café, and she testified that she had asked him for a ride to the roadside spot a few miles away where she had left her husband. She could not, however, recall anything further about their conversation, she said.

  “What did you tell him?” Akerman asked.

  “I don’t remember what I told him,” Norma replied. “I was crying. I don’t remember now what I did tell him.”

  Not convinced, Akerman tried to probe further. He wanted to establish that Norma had told Burtoft she’d been “taken off by four Negroes”: “You did not tell him that?” he asked.

  “No, I did not.”

  “You did not discuss with him whether or not those things happened to you?”

  “No, I didn’t tell him anything about it, I was just getting him to take me down there,” Norma answered.

  “That is all,” said Akerman, resigned. It was beginning to appear that the only hope for the defense lay with Lawrence Burtoft, if they could get him to court in time to testify.

  Of Norma Padgett’s moment in the retrial of Walter Irvin, the award-winning journalist Richard Carter wrote, “You watch her on the witness stand. You listen to her story. You note the righteous ferocity with which the prosecution defends that story. You note the timidity with which the defense challenges it. You count the dead . . . Ernest Thomas . . . Sammy Shepherd . . . maybe Walter Irvin . . . and you realize that it’s perfectly all right to starve a Southern white woman and deprive her of education and make her old before her time, but by God, no damned outsider is going to dare question the sanctity of her private parts, the incontrovertibility of her spoken word.”

  The state attorney called Deputy James Yates, and Marshall studied the “gum-chewing husky in a red corduroy jacket”: the officer who had tried to bar the NAACP special counsel’s hospital visit with his client; the sheriff’s man who found it a “funny thing” and offered “no comment” when asked by a reporter if he’d shot Irvin; the law enforcer who had so badly beaten the Groveland Boys that even the FBI pressed for his indictment; the deputy who, special investigator J. J. Elliott warned Marshall, “is going to get you.”

  As he had in the first trial, Hunter led Yates through his testimony, and as he had before, the deputy stated that the plaster casts he’d made of tire tracks and footprints at the rape scene “exactly” matched the soles of Irvin’s shoes and the tread of tires on James Shepherd’s Mercury. On cross-examination, again as before, Yates admitted to Akerman that he’d had no formal training in making casts, nor had he made the casts until hours after the alleged rape, by which time Irvin had been arrested and both the shoes and the car had been placed in the sheriff’s custody. Asked if he was familiar with the scientific devices used in “protecting the integrity” of the tracks, Yates replied, “No, I don’t know what you mean.” Furthermore, Yates noted, he had not been able to deal with footprints and tire tracks in a more timely manner because he’d had to attend to “that woman,” Norma Padgett, who “was hurt and I had to get her back to the doctor, and I came on out there later, and poured the tire casts.”

  An irritated state attorney rose for redirect examination. Hunter did not appreciate Akerman’s belittlement of the deputy’s expertise in crime scene techniques. To rehabilitate his witness in the eyes of t
he “farmer” jury, Hunter offered some plainspoken down-home common sense as opposed to the highfalutin language of scientific expertise. “Now, Mr. Yates,” Hunter began, “did you ever hear of what he calls ‘integrity’ of those tracks? Did you ever hear of that before?”

  “No, sir, I never have,” Yates said. “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “You were not looking for integrity of tracks, were you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You were looking for the tracks, were you not?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That was your business, was it not?”

  “Yes, sir,” Yates agreed.

  “And you just looked and saw that those were the same tracks that fitted those shoes, did you not?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And as to whether or not those tracks had integrity, you were not interested in that, were you?”

  “No, sir,” Yates replied.

  “And you know those shoes made those tracks, do you not?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And that is the old common Florida way of putting it, is it not?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Then the state attorney introduced Walter Irvin’s pants, which Yates had obtained from Dellia Irvin without a warrant not long after he and Campbell had beaten the man unconscious in jail. Holding up the evidence, Hunter asked, “Now, Mr. Yates, are there any smears on the front of these pants?”

  “Yes, sir, there are,” Yates said.

  “There are smears all down the side?” Hunter asked.

  “Yes, sir, there are.”

  Hunter passed the pants to the jury. Marshall’s incredulity at Hunter’s country-boy performance about “integrity” for the jurors now yielded to fury. The pants had not only been admitted into evidence by Judge Futch against the motion of the defense but had also been admitted without laboratory examination. Scientific analysis of the evidence—a free service provided by the FBI to local law enforcement—would have almost certainly determined whether or not the stains on Irvin’s pants derived from the defendant’s “emission of seed,” but Hunter had apparently decided, as he had with Norma Padgett’s medical examination, not to take the chance that science might not support the prosecution’s narrative. Not when he could have the jurors eye the evidence in “the old common Florida way.”

  Hunter retired to the prosecution’s table. For the defense, again, as in the Lake County trial of the Groveland Boys and in the coroner’s inquest into Samuel Shepherd’s death, even the evidence seemed to be prejudiced and the verdict predetermined. Frustrated, Marshall and Akerman whispered to each other; enough was enough, they decided. Akerman approached Yates.

  “Now, Mr. Yates, is it true that the defendant Walter Irvin has accused you and the sheriff of Lake County, Florida, of attempting to murder him?”

  Hunter leapt to his feet in objection. Futch sustained.

  “May it please the court,” Akerman said. “It shows bias on the part of this witness toward the defendant.”

  Alex Akerman didn’t wait for a ruling. He returned to his seat beside Marshall.

  CHAPTER 20: A GENIUS HERE BEFORE US

  From left to right: Paul Perkins, Jack Greenberg, Walter Irvin, and Thurgood Marshall. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)

  NORMA PADGETT LEFT any strutting to be done in the courtroom to the fourth witness for the prosecution. Tall, dark-haired, and movie-star handsome, the twenty-three-year-old Curtis Howard, wearing “a spread collar and a sharply-cut suit,” swaggered with an athlete’s confidence to the front of the courtroom. And vowed to tell the whole truth, so help him God. Howard would break his share of vows over the next few years, as countless affairs and sexual indiscretions with young ladies up and down Lake County would land him three times in divorce suits—all three of them with the same wife: his high school sweetheart, and Leesburg High cheerleader, Libby Dean. No question, the sweet-talking Howard did have charm.

  With all his charisma and his slightly crooked, mischievous smile, Howard had come back to Ocala for the trial from Montgomery, Alabama, where he’d been stationed after his enlistment in the army. Three questions into his testimony on Wednesday, February 13, Howard began breaking his vow to tell the whole truth. The Leesburg native told State Attorney Jesse Hunter that he was currently living in Montgomery with his wife, but, in fact, Howard had run out on Libby in 1950, after she became pregnant with twins, and he had left her in Florida when he’d moved to Alabama. He and Libby were presently in the process of getting their first divorce.

  As in the first Groveland Boys trial, the state attorney took Howard through the events of the early morning hours on July 16, 1949, and, as before, Howard related that he had been working the overnight shift at Dean’s filling station, which was owned by Libby’s father, when, at about 2:30 or 3 a.m., Willie Padgett pulled into the station in his 1940 Ford. Willie looked like he’d been hit above the eye; blood had dried on the side of his face. He told Howard he’d had some trouble.

  “Just tell what happened,” Hunter coached his witness.

  “Well, he gave me information that his wife had been raped,” said Howard.

  Hunter immediately addressed the “mistake” in Howard’s response, and the witness corrected himself, saying that the wife had been “kidnapped and carried away” instead of “raped.” For, by Willie Padgett’s own testimony, he at that point knew only that four black men had abducted his wife, not that they had raped her. It was because of slips like these, which could produce contradictions and inconsistencies in the prosecution’s narrative, that Hunter pressed Lake County’s law enforcement personnel to allow the FBI only written statements (which Hunter helped prepare) and to refuse the agents any oral interviews. Hunter could not wield the same control over Walter Irvin, who told FBI agents that in the early hours of Saturday morning, July 16, before Norma Padgett had been found, Deputy Yates asked him, “Why did you rape that white woman?” Also, a Florida highway patrolman, who, on that same Saturday morning, had driven Irvin and Shepherd from the Irvins’ house to the scene of the alleged robbery and kidnapping, told the FBI that he had heard the two suspects being questioned by deputies Yates and Campbell about the “rape.”

  In the retrial, as in the first trial, Hunter, of course, took every precaution to forestall any impression that a “story” had been put in place by the prosecution. Still, he could not prevent every slip, especially as he wasn’t always working with the quickest of witnesses. Curtis Howard, however, came across as a model citizen who had gone out of his way to help a man in difficulty. Continuing his narrative, Howard recounted for the court how, after finishing his shift at the filling station, he had seen a young girl by the side of the road but had thought nothing of it, and had driven on to Groveland, where, as it had happened, he had run into Yates and Campbell, as well as Willie Padgett. He had then driven Padgett to Bay Lake, so he could change his shirt, and it wasn’t until Willie’s sister showed a picture of Norma to Howard that he had connected Willie’s missing wife with the girl he’d seen in the roadside grass back in Okahumpka.

  “Did you tell them that you thought the woman you saw was his wife?” Hunter asked.

  “Well, I told them that I thought I knew where she was,” Howard said, “and so we went and got in my car and went back down there to the intersection, and she was in another car with another boy by the time we got there, and I supposed that it was someone that she had gotten from that dining hall or dancing place.” Howard did not refer to “another boy” by name, nor did he give any indication that he’d recognized the “someone” with Norma. Yet they were not strangers, Howard and Lawrence Burtoft. They had been classmates at Leesburg High, where they had played together on the baseball and football teams.

  Hunter asked what happened next with Norma. Akerman objected on the grounds of hearsay. Futch overruled. Howard responded: “Well, I asked her if she was hurt in any way, and she said that her legs were hurt and bleeding, and said that her clothes were torn, and she was all
messed up and dirty, and I asked her if the men did anything to her, and she said that ‘all four of them attacked me,’ and she described what had happened from that time.”

  “What was the condition of her clothes?” Hunter asked.

  “Well, they were torn and messed up, and as I remember it, some of her underclothes were hanging down beneath her dress, and her dress was torn.”

  As one reporter observed of Howard during his testimony, he was “as smooth as Willie is bucolic.” Leroy Campbell’s nephew was also providing Jesse Hunter with splendid testimony for the state’s case in the event that Lawrence Burtoft should take the witness stand for the defense.

  Hunter excused the witness, and in what was surely the missed opportunity of the trial, Alex Akerman declined to cross-examine. The state rested its case. Curtis Howard returned therewith to Alabama.

  The first trial might have won Curtis Howard some commendation in the communities of Lake County; in his own household, at least, he might have been seen as a hero of sorts. But he wasn’t. The Groveland case was never mentioned in the Howards’ home, and shortly after the trial Curtis and Libby’s marriage began to crumble into divorce. First married at the age of twenty, Curtis and Libby would remarry and divorce two more times, but at no time in the wobbly course of their relationship would they speak of the role that Curtis Howard played in the conviction of Norma Padgett’s alleged rapists. Kim Howard, Curtis and Libby’s daughter, would remember the contention in the household over her father’s carousing and womanizing and lying but nothing of Curtis Howard’s testimony about the girl in the roadside grass when he appeared in the most illustrious trial to take place in central Florida.

  “My mother was a saint to put up with him,” Kim Howard said, for Libby was fully aware that her husband was committing serial adultery. “There were just so many young girls that he would go off with. He was indiscriminate, and so charming and charismatic that there was no end to the girls. He couldn’t stop. My parents’ second divorce involved my father getting our babysitter pregnant.” Her father was also an unapologetic racist, Kim Howard claimed: “He and Uncle Leroy were very close. He would do anything for him.” So, when for the first time she learned about the Groveland Boys trial, Kim Howard said, “My first thought was, ‘Curt, what did you do now? What did you get yourself mixed up in?’ My father didn’t drive past Norma Padgett. He wasn’t stupid. Knowing my father, he had something to do with that girl. He’d gotten himself mixed up in something. If he was really a hero, and my mother believed it, we would have heard about it.”