Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  Governor Collins was close to his decision on the Irvin matter when, on September 21, 1955, a petition came across his desk. It came bound in a well-traveled book that apparently had made its way around Lake County about five years before, when a young woman had circulated it. A poet, an activist, a supporter of world peace, an opponent of capital punishment (and a private investigator with the Owens Detective Agency in Miami)—she’d roused some curiosity and no alarm. No one knew quite what to make of her, with her peace pin and her farm dresses. She was friendly enough, a harmless sort of girl and maybe a little naïve, and she seemed to know the Bible. She talked a lot about justice and the death penalty. She was collecting signatures in her book, “to abolish capital punishment.” She’d gotten hundreds of them—it wasn’t many, she knew—no matter that people like Willis McCall tried to shoo her away. Most people, though, listened to what she had to say. Simple people, hardworking farmers and housewives, they invited her into their weatherworn shacks scattered around the Bay Lake swampland; they offered her meals and a place to stay. They might feel strongly against the blacks, but they firmly believed, and said so, that capital punishment was wrong. God-fearing country Baptists, they knew that by their deeds and tenets they, too, would be judged someday. The girl believed that every signature was important, that each could make a difference, and that collectively the signatures could change a mind or bestow mercy or realize a truth that people had not yet dared to speak: the pen was a mighty instrument.

  The book lay open on the governor’s desk. It had come to Collins from the well-known Reverend Ben F. Wyland, the leader of a group of fifty churches in the state of Florida. Idly the governor flipped through the pages of the petition as he pondered whether to spare the life of Walter Irvin. A signature caught his eye. There, on the page before him, among the hundreds of Lake County residents declaring in the strokes of a pen their opposition to capital punishment, he read: “Norma Tyson Padgett.”

  Epilogue

  (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records)

  THE STATE,” Governor LeRoy Collins said, “did not walk that extra mile—did not establish the guilt of Walter Lee Irvin in an absolute and conclusive manner.” Collins’s decision to commute Irvin’s sentence, he told reporters, had been weighted heavily by a letter from former state attorney Jesse Hunter, which had reinforced the governor’s own feelings about the case. He explained, “My conscience told me it was a bad case, badly handled, badly tried and now, on this bad performance, I was asked to take a man’s life. My conscience would not let me do it.” On the basis of Hunter’s letter and the findings in Bill Harris’s investigation, not to discount the presence of Norma Lee Padgett’s signature on a petition proposing the abolition of capital punishment, Collins had led the State Pardon Board to a unanimous approval of the Groveland boy’s “long-pending plea for clemency.”

  Probably in an effort to offset the inevitable political consequences of his decision, Collins, who had that week been featured on the cover of Time, also impugned the NAACP for its involvement in the case, which was “prompted by the bare fact that the defendant is a colored man rather than by careful evaluation of the circumstances of his guilt or innocence.” The censure infuriated Thurgood Marshall, however pleased he may have been by the action taken by the governor and the pardon board to end the long battle for Walter Irvin’s life. In response, Marshall declared that Collins’s commutation in fact vindicated the NAACP’s position that Irvin had been “the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice.” Marshall also, in turn, reproached the governor, whose “every statement” regarding the NAACP had been “completely in error,” for following “the pattern of other southern officials in using the NAACP as the whipping boy for the repeated injustices against Negroes in the south.” Had the NAACP not intervened, Marshall asserted, all four Groveland boys would be dead, and Collins “would not have had to request the pardon board to commute Irvin’s sentence.” One thing Marshall had to concede, however, was that, as one newspaper stated, “it took far more political courage [for Collins] to spare the life of this Negro than it would have taken to let him go to the electric chair.”

  For Walter Irvin, the play of politics in the commutation was superseded by gratitude and relief, and hope. “I want you to know that, as long as I live I must, and I will, with all sincere, look to you as my earthly god,” Irvin wrote to Governor Collins. “Now that my health is failing, I do hope and pray that I will be able to go free someday because I feel, as I have, and I did for a lifetime, live a clean and law abiding life, Sir!”

  Lake County did not take the news of Irvin’s commutation well. Judge Truman Futch presided over a grand jury called to investigate the State Pardon Board’s action on the grounds that Collins had been influenced by “Communist pressure tactics.” The judge did allow, though, that the governor may have been “the innocent victim of a clever deception,” apparently implemented by a communist agent. For, Futch claimed, “startling documents”—like a petition protesting capital punishment, it would appear—had come into his possession to prove that “at least one person suspected of being a Communist agent had been sent into Lake County” and that efforts “to gather information on this case . . . have transgressed both the law of God and man.” Sheriff McCall enlisted two of the signatories to the petition, Norma Padgett and her aunt, to testify before the grand jury that any signature of theirs on any petition had to have been obtained by a “ruse,” as they had not knowingly ever signed any such document. The governor refused to testify. Being “accountable only to his conscience,” Collins stated that he would not participate in any secret grand jury proceedings, although he was perfectly willing, he said, to answer any questions “in the Cabinet room with the press and public present.”

  Truman Futch’s special and unprecedented grand jury investigation elicited negative editorial comment from Mabel Norris Reese in the Mount Dora Topic. Her protest won her, first, the load of dead fish that was dumped into her front yard. Second came the hand grenade that was tossed at her house; the explosion was heard five miles away, but fortunately neither she nor her family was home at the time. Sheriff McCall was “investigating.”

  In the end, the Lake County grand jury found that Collins and the State Pardon Board had acted within their legal rights to commute Irvin’s sentence. The jury did, however, rebuke the “smearing of the good people of Lake County and its law enforcement officers” by Tom Harris of the St. Petersburg Times as well as Reverend Ben F. Wyland’s “obtaining and circulating a petition seeking clemency for Irvin.” Wyland had also written to Collins, stating that both Norma and Willie had signed the petition at a time “when feelings ran high,” and emphasizing the “victim’s” compassion. “If this woman who suffered most could show mercy and forgive her enemies surely we could follow such a worthy example.”

  No fan of the governor, Sheriff McCall was not satisfied by the outcome of the grand jury’s investigation, not with his friend Fuller Warren planning another run at the governorship in the next election. So McCall hatched a plan to embarrass the sitting governor outside the grand jury room, and again he enlisted the aid of Norma Padgett. At a Washington’s Birthday parade in McCall’s hometown of Eustis, just as Collins was leaving the Grandview Hotel, two Lake County deputies escorted a “neatly dressed” and not so forgiving Norma Padgett over to him, and in front of hundreds of parade-goers, she accosted the governor, screaming, “You’re the one who let out the nigger that raped me! How would you have felt if that had been your wife or daughter?”

  HIS BODY ILL, betraying him, but his conscience finally clear, Jesse Hunter lived long enough to see Irvin’s sentence commuted. He passed away in February 1956.

  IN MARCH 1960 Deputy James Yates found himself in strangely familiar circumstances. A middle-aged white woman claimed she had been raped in the city of Fruitland Park. She was fuzzy as to details of the crime, except that maybe one of her attackers was in his forties or
fifties, and the other was about seventeen years old. So Yates picked up two black citrus workers, no matter that they were in their early twenties, and after they confessed to the crime under interrogation, the deputy confiscated their shoes. The victim, who had been ruled incompetent by the court and committed to a mental institution shortly after the attack, did not take the stand for the prosecution. The alleged rapists were convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair, almost solely on the basis of footprint evidence.

  The NAACP got involved, and this time got lucky. A week before the scheduled execution of the two men, Noel Griffin, one of McCall’s deputies who had worked on the Fruitland Park rape case, disclosed to a Florida NAACP lawyer that the defendants had been framed by the Lake County Sheriff’s Department. According to Griffin, Deputy Yates had used the defendants’ confiscated shoes to make plaster casts of their footprints not at the crime scene but in another deputy’s backyard. Griffin’s allegations were confirmed by the FBI, whose analysis showed the soil mixed in the plaster casts to be consistent with that of the deputy’s backyard. Furthermore, the FBI concluded—as had Thurgood Marshall’s expert witness, Herman Bennett, in the Groveland rape case ten years before—that when the defendants’ footprints had supposedly been left, their feet had not been in their shoes. The fact of the falsified evidence enabled the NAACP to rescue both men from electrocution; a federal judge overturned their convictions.

  In December 1962, the two deputies, James Yates and his accomplice, were suspended and indicted by an Orange County grand jury on charges of perjury and conspiracy. Convictions would have carried life sentences for both, if James Yates and his deputy accomplice had ever made it to court, but the case was so long delayed that the statute of limitations expired. Both deputies were reinstated by Willis McCall, with back pay.

  FULLER WARREN’S SPECIAL investigator J. J. Elliott was off by twelve years when he forecast that McCall’s shooting of Shepherd and Irvin would guarantee the sheriff three more terms in office. In fact, McCall served seven consecutive terms as sheriff of Lake County. In his twenty-eight-year tenure, on various charges of misconduct, McCall was the subject of dozens of investigations. Not a single charge stuck. The sheriff’s personal reign of terror ended in 1972, when he was indicted and suspended from office by Governor Reubin Askew: the sixty-two-year-old McCall had kicked to death a mentally retarded black prisoner in his cell. Although McCall was acquitted of the charges, the time he’d spent defending himself in court had prevented him from campaigning effectively enough to win that year’s election. Still, he was only barely defeated in his bid for an eighth consecutive term.

  Willis McCall’s name surfaced often in the ongoing FBI investigation into the murder of Harry T. Moore and his wife. For four decades and more McCall denied any involvement or knowledge. Not long before his death in 1994, he avouched, “I never hurt anyone . . . or killed anyone who didn’t deserve killing.” The FBI ultimately laid responsibility for the bombing in Mims on the KKK and named four likely suspects, two of whom, Earl Brooklyn and Tillman “Curly” Belvin, belonged to the Apopka Klavern, as did McCall, and both men had participated, according to FBI informants, in the Groveland riots. Seven KKK members were indicted for perjury in regard to their whereabouts that Christmas night when Moore was murdered. Frank Meech, an FBI agent who investigated the Moore killings, was critical of the Department of Justice for having the seven “indictments quashed for the ‘Tranquility of the South.’ ”

  The case remains unsolved, though not for want of Stetson Kennedy’s efforts. In the sixty years since the explosion beneath that modest wooden house in an orange grove, Kennedy never stopped trying to solve the murder of Harry T. Moore. He filed Freedom of Information Act requests to access FBI cases files, he hunted down witnesses, he continued to pressure Florida attorneys general and the state’s governors for action, and he lived to see the Moore case reopened three times: in 1978, 1991, and 2005. Stetson Kennedy died in Florida in 2011 at the age of ninety-four.

  IN THE EIGHT YEARS Charles Greenlee had been serving at Belle Glade State Prison Farm, he’d been a model inmate. He had worked his way off a chain gang and onto a road construction crew. He liked his new responsibilities; he enjoyed having more freedom. So much so that one day in 1957 he simply walked away from the work farm, and eighty miles to the north, in Fort Pierce, he found a job and in six weeks had settled into a “model life.” That’s when he was apprehended, and returned to Belle Glade. In July 1960 Greenlee was awarded parole. He married, raised a family, and built a successful heating and cooling maintenance business in Tennessee, where he lives today.

  Norma and Willie Padgett’s marriage did not last; they finalized their divorce in July 1958. Norma remarried, but is now a widow living in Georgia.

  Miss L. B. De Forest . . . vanished.

  In 1961 Jack Greenberg succeeded his mentor as the LDF’s director-counsel at the NAACP when President John F. Kennedy appointed Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Greenberg is the former dean of Columbia College and is currently the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. Professor of Law at Columbia Law School in New York.

  Franklin Williams was appointed by the Kennedy administration in 1961 to assist Sargent Shriver in organizing the Peace Corps. President Lyndon Johnson later appointed him ambassador to Ghana, but not before first consulting his friend Thurgood Marshall. “I would put Frank there without any hesitation,” Marshall told the president. In 1985, Williams returned to Florida to give an interview on the Groveland Boys case for the University of Florida’s Oral History Project. When the talk turned to Sheriff Willis McCall, Williams bristled. “This man is a, is a vicious killer,” Williams stammered. “Is he still alive?” he asked, and was answered yes. “I would not doubt,” Williams averred, “if he knew I were here today speaking. I would not doubt that he would come and try to kill me. I do not want to cross him.” Franklin Williams died in New York in 1990.

  Mabel Norris Reese shared Williams’s opinions of Willis McCall. Her fears fueled by dead fish and hand grenades, she left Lake County shortly after Governor Collins commuted Walter Irvin’s sentence. She divorced and remarried, and Mabel Norris Chesley, who counted Martin Luther King Jr. and other prominent black activists among her friends, committed herself as a reporter and columnist for the Daytona Beach Morning Journal to the advancement of the civil rights movement in Florida. She wrote regularly to Walter Irvin, and took occasion to visit him, throughout the years that he remained in prison at Raiford.

  January 1968 brought Walter Irvin his parole, with the stipulation that he not return to Lake County. Now forty, he had spent nearly half his life in prison. In Miami, where he lived with his sister Henrietta, he found work in construction, even with his impaired health, and tried to lead something like what people called a normal life. In February 1969, Irvin received permission from his parole officer to attend the funeral of an uncle in Lake County. He had been back in Willis McCall country for but a few hours when friends and relatives found him apparently sleeping in a car after the drive north; but he wasn’t sleeping. Walter Irvin was dead.

  Mabel Norris Chesley was suspicious. She did not doubt the depth of Willis McCall’s resolve to visit his county justice upon the Groveland boy, especially as he had failed to do so on that dark country road eighteen years before. The Lake County Sheriff’s Department report on Walter Irvin’s death stated that the forty-one-year-old black male had died of natural causes. A St. Petersburg Times reporter told Mabel that he had tried to speak to the doctor who’d pronounced Irvin dead. The doctor had hung up on him.

  ENCLOSED WITH THE letter to Justice Thurgood Marshall was the newspaper article by Mabel Norris Chesley on Walter Irvin’s death in Groveland, reportedly of natural causes. Marshall had by then been a sitting associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court for about a year and a half, and Walter Irvin had been free on parole four months less than that. For eighteen years Irvin had been imprisoned at Raiford, but Marshall had at least
been able to keep his promise to Dellia Irvin—he’d kept her boy out of the electric chair.

  The day before the letter arrived, Marshall had voted with his fellow justices at the Court to overturn a conviction of another sort, in Brandenburg v. Ohio. Ku Klux Klan leader Clarence Brandenburg’s speech against “dirty niggers” and “Jews” at a Klan rally had been captured vividly on film, on which evidence he’d been charged with advocating violence, convicted in a state court, and sentenced to ten years in prison. In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court had ruled that on First Amendment grounds the government could not punish abstract inflammatory speech. The Constitution was the Constitution, and Justice Marshall did not struggle with his vote.

  For a quarter century the younger Thurgood Marshall had fought in lower courts and argued in the highest one for constitutional rights, though not ever for white supremacists. At the NAACP the special counsel had championed politically disenfranchised and socially oppressed—and like Irvin, falsely accused—blacks in Oklahoma, Georgia, Alabama, Florida. The train rides south, the stifling courtrooms with their Jim Crow balconies, the vanes of fans rotating slowly overhead, the iron gates clanging, black men in shackles, men like Irvin, with bumps on their heads, welts on their arms, as they shamble shoeless to the defense table—with an article and a letter and a name, Walter Irvin, the past comes back: a sheriff and his deputies share a joke and a laugh with the judge as they turn their squinty eyes toward the no-good NAACP lawyers from up north.