Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  Mabel’s exposé of the failings inside the county jail, coupled with a statement from Governor Collins regarding the “deplorable conditions” in which juvenile offenders were being held, had prompted the Lake County Children’s Committee to call an emergency session. But McCall had played the victim, and played the committee, asserting that some people cared more about conditions in the jail than they did about the safety of their sheriff. So it was that conditions on the ward remained as they had long been, and since Florida law defined offenders under the age of twenty-one as minors, it was here that white, nineteen-year-old Jesse Daniels was now being held for rape.

  McCall decided to honor the Danielses’ request for a visit, and they followed him back to Tavares. “You can see him for just one minute,” the sheriff advised them as they stepped inside the courthouse elevator. “But I warn you,” he added, “you can’t discuss the case with him. Not one word. Do you understand?” Pearl nodded.

  As they approached the cells, Pearl spotted her son almost immediately. From behind bars, Jesse “looked at us as if we were strangers.”

  Pearl leaned close. “Son, I hate to see you here so bad,” she said. Jesse simply stared at her.

  “Kiss me, Jesse,” she said again, and slowly, “like someone in a trance,” the boy moved forward and brushed his lips against Pearl’s face. Reaching through the bars, she caressed his face, trying to give him assurance with her hands and her voice. “It’s all right, son. We love you . . . and we believe you.”

  That motherly avowal spurred the vigilant McCall to action. He grabbed Pearl’s arm and wrenched her backward so fiercely that he nearly tossed her to the floor. “That does it! That’s it!” he squalled. “You broke your promise. Now you’ll never see him again!”

  As he hustled the Danielses from the ward, Pearl managed a glance back at her boy, who looked to be numb with fear.

  A news story in the Daily Commercial trumpeted Jesse’s arrest with the headline “Feeble-Minded Boy, 19, Held in Assault Case,” while other stories noted the strange turn of events in Lake County. “A white laborer has been arrested and formally charged in a rape case here which saw a colored youth held incommunicado for five days, shattering the ‘colored-man-did-it’ tale of the alleged victim,” read one story, which also noted the governor’s intervention on behalf of Melvin Hawkins. Black newspapers ran headlines that reflected their perplexity, and that of their readers: “Victim Says ‘Negro Did It,’ but White Man Admits Florida Assault.”

  A prominent Okahumpka man volunteered to set up a Jesse Daniels Defense Fund and to act as its treasurer. In only a few days Pearl received numerous one- and five-dollar donations from blacks and whites alike. On Mabel’s advice, Pearl traveled thirty miles west to Inverness, in nearby Citrus County, where she introduced herself to George Scofield, a well-respected criminal attorney affectionately known around central Florida as the Colonel. Scofield agreed to do a preliminary investigation into the case on retainer, which Pearl could cover with the defense fund donations, but she would have to raise additional money if he was to undertake Jesse’s legal defense.

  When news of the defense fund reached the sheriff’s department, McCall invited the acting treasurer to his office and played him a recording of Jesse’s confession. The man withdrew his support for the fund.

  To bolster the case for Jesse’s defense, Pearl canvassed South and North Quarters for signatures to an affidavit declaring that Jesse was “completely harmless”: that he had played with girls in the neighborhood for years and had demonstrated “no interest in sex at all.” Thirty-two residents signed, including a man who ran a filling station in Leesburg and had been fired, Pearl said, for maintaining Jesse’s innocence.

  In his initial investigation of Jesse’s case, George Scofield traveled to Tavares, where McCall played him the recording of Jesse’s confession. Then he told Pearl that he estimated his fee for representing Jesse would be two thousand dollars—“not exorbitant for such capital cases,” as Mabel noted, but an amount that floored Pearl. As it was, the Danielses were barely scraping by on Charles’s pension of one hundred dollars a month, plus whatever extra money Pearl and Jesse might bring in. Scofield understood, but, as he apologetically explained, he could not mount an adequate defense in what would be a time-consuming death-penalty case without sufficient funds. He was able to offer Pearl one bit of good news, though: He had been able to convince McCall to permit her another visit with her son. He advised her to go as soon as possible, as Jesse was in a “critical” situation at the jail.

  When Pearl tried to arrange the visit, however, McCall refused to honor his word to Scofield.

  By early January, with Jesse’s grand jury appearance approaching, desperation had taken up residence in the Daniels home. On Mabel’s advice, Pearl appealed to Collins.

  “Governor Collins,” Pearl wrote, “my son is 19 years old, true—but in many ways he is like a little boy . . . who depends on us to cover him during the night, to come wake him from his nightmares.” That a boy with Jesse’s manifest disabilities should have suffered McCall’s middle-of-the-night interrogation and relentless pressure tactics to force him to “confess to a lie” was tantamount to “brain-washing,” she asserted. She herself had had a taste of the sheriff’s mode of intimidation on her one brief visit with Jesse. “Am I supposed to be manhandled by him?” she asked the governor. “What law is that, Sir?”

  Pearl’s letter mentioned as well that Mrs. Knowles had originally claimed she’d been raped by a Negro; and that indeed the bloodhounds had led deputies to North Quarters—not to South Quarters, let alone to the Daniels house. And what had the Daniels family been doing there, on the night of the rape? They’d watched the Late Show on television, and at about 1:20 a.m., Pearl had put Jesse to bed. He slept in the same room as Charles, who, due to his heart condition, slept lightly, often waking four or five times a night, and was “thus able to hear the youth in the night,” should Jesse be disturbed by bad dreams. Jesse simply could not have left the room without Charles knowing it, Pearl maintained. Nor was he capable of the capital crime of which he had been accused. “Gov. Collins, to do such a thing would take a very clear mind to plan and perform,” she wrote. How would a boy with Jesse’s mental deficiencies be able to find out where Blanche’s “business-man husband would be, or how to get out of his house, go a quarter of a mile, break in and commit such and return home without some noise?” She closed by imploring Collins, “In the mercy of God, and you as a father, will you please help my boy?”

  Mabel incorporated quotations from the letter in a Topic news story describing how deputies had “descended on Jesse Daniels, the village half-wit,” and calling for an investigation into the case. The story did not please McCall, who continued to deny the Danielses access to their son and accused Mabel of authoring the letter herself but incorporating some misspellings to make it appear that the letter had been written by Pearl.

  Nor was Mabel’s cozy relationship with Hall lost on McCall, or on Oldham. In all likelihood she was sharing with the judge the ongoing developments in the Danielses’ situation, and now she had intervened with him to postpone Jesse’s preliminary hearing until Hall returned from an upcoming trip to Tallahassee. The postponement, Mabel figured, would afford Pearl and Charles at least a bit more time to secure funds for their boy’s defense.

  The day Hall left for Tallahassee, Oldham, forgoing a preliminary hearing, took the case directly to Judge Truman Futch and requested that a special grand jury be impaneled to hear the case. Futch complied. The end run staggered even Mabel. She got in touch with Hall, who was furious but not surprised. The case had been snatched from his hands.

  Pearl contacted Oldham’s office and pleaded with the state attorney that she and her husband be allowed a visit with their son. Oldham conceded that there was no reason why they shouldn’t be, but said that only the sheriff could grant the request. A call to Judge Hall elicited sympathy, a
nd a similar deferral to the sheriff. So Pearl returned to Tavares and begged McCall to permit her a visit. Again, the sheriff denied her.

  She was standing on the sidewalk outside the courthouse, in tears, when from somewhere above her a painfully familiar voice called out.

  “Mommie, are you coming to see me today?”

  From the barred window of his cell in the juvenile quarters on the fourth floor of the courthouse, Jesse had spotted his mother on the sidewalk below. Pearl called back to him. She tried to assure him that she would see him soon and that everything would be fine.

  “Mommie, I want to tell you something,” Jesse said. “I want to tell you what the man did to me.”

  A few days later, on the morning of January 9, Jesse Daniels was “hustled before the grand jury,” as Mabel put it. Joe Knowles arrived with his wife, and both were reported to be “in the courthouse but not in the courtroom” during the selection and swearing in of eighteen jurors. In his address to them, Judge Futch stated that the accused was charged with criminal assault and stressed that it was “not within your province to consider the mental condition of the person charged.”

  Gordon Oldham presented the case and then led several witnesses, including Sheriff McCall, Dr. Durham Young, Deputy Yates, and Blanche Knowles through their testimony. Jesse’s recorded confession was entered into evidence and played for the jurors. Waiting in the corridor outside the courtroom before he himself was called to testify, Jesse was able to hear his own voice stammering on McCall’s incriminating tape. Called to the witness stand, he stuttered badly as he tried to tell the jury that he was not guilty, but Oldham, in a “lashing kind of voice that would be bruising to a sensitive soul encased in a ten-year-old mind,” fired questions at Jesse in such staccato fashion that he became “confused, afraid, and could not explain to them why he was not guilty—could not tell the grim-faced men staring at him why he had made a confession.” His brief appearance over, a deputy escorted him back to his cell. In her coverage of the proceedings, Mabel noted that Jesse had appeared before the grand jury “without benefit of an attorney, without even consulting with his parents.” He was, she wrote, “literally a ten-year-old facing a potential life and death matter alone.”

  Shortly thereafter, George Scofield, although he was still not officially representing Jesse, went to see McCall again and managed to persuade him to allow the boy’s parents another brief visit. McCall agreed grudgingly, but again, only on their promise not to discuss the case with their son. With a guard in hearing distance, Pearl stiffened when Jesse leaned into her and whispered, “Mama, I’m not guilty.” Fearful that their visit would be curtailed, she simply held Jesse close and hushed him with assurances that help would be coming soon, though from what quarter she could not say, as she and Charles could not imagine raising enough money to pay Scofield’s fee.

  Governor Collins did not respond directly to Pearl’s letter, but he did send two investigators to Okahumpka to look into the Daniels case. Pearl and Charles explained to them how Jesse could not have raped Mrs. Knowles on the night of December 17, and how he had been languishing in jail without the benefit of a lawyer. But once again, McCall deployed the recording of Jesse’s confession, and that, Mabel reported, “was the last the parents heard from the investigators.”

  Mabel suspected that little would come from any investigation into the matter. “The powerful sheriff has been investigated by governors before,” she noted, “and has always wiggled out of it like Houdini, leaving his victims holding the bag.” Indeed, he set out to do some wiggling shortly after the governor’s men had quit Lake County. He invited Charles and Pearl to his office.

  On their arrival, he sent a deputy to bring Jesse down from the jail upstairs. While they waited, the sheriff cautioned them neither to speak to nor to question their son at any point. Then the session commenced—as “strange in the annals of justice” as any, Mabel reported—and they were forced to witness their son confess again to a capital crime. Throughout the interrogation, McCall guided Jesse with prompts like “Now tell how you did [this]” and “Tell how you did that,” as bit by bit he extracted from the “dazed” boy a stuttered admission—“like a parrot speaking”—to the rape. When it was over, Pearl and Charles watched as the deputies removed their helpless son from the sheriff’s office.

  As they were leaving, McCall warned them not to discuss Jesse’s confession with anyone. Pearl thought she knew why. Even orchestrated as it was, there was a key point in the confession that made no sense. McCall’s questions had been eliciting from Jesse responses describing how he’d snuck out of his house and walked over to the Knowles house, how he’d taken off his clothes before he’d slashed the screen door and gone upstairs, how he’d lingered for a moment in the doorway of the bedroom, how the woman in the bed had heard a noise and stirred, and then she was awake.

  “What did she say?” McCall asked Jesse.

  “‘Is that you, Joe?’” the boy said.

  “And what did you say?” McCall asked next.

  “‘No, it’s me, Jesse Daniels.’”

  Pearl could not stop puzzling over that supposed exchange. If Jesse had given Blanche Knowles his name, “why was he not picked up for the crime the next morning?” she wondered. Almost everyone in Okahumpka knew Jesse Daniels—the boy on the bike—including Blanche Knowles herself.

  Disregarding McCall’s warning, Pearl decided to discuss the whole matter of Jesse’s confession with Mabel, who was suitably aghast at the latest goings-on in the sheriff’s office, and similarly suspicious.

  In a second letter to Governor Collins, Pearl detailed the meeting in the sheriff’s office and again questioned the legitimacy of her son’s confession. McCall, she was convinced, not only had pressured her son into admitting to acts that he was incapable of committing but also had essentially put the words describing them in Jesse’s mouth. “It was given sentence by sentence,” she wrote, “exactly like an obedient child reciting his well learned lesson.”

  Pearl wrote, too, of her visit with Jesse in his jail cell—how he had whispered to her that he was not guilty, and how she had hushed him for fear that the guard would overhear and intervene. Still, he’d managed to whisper a bit more to her. “Someone there,” Pearl wrote to Collins, “is telling the poor child he’s going to Raiford,” to the electric chair. And even as she again hushed him and the guard approached, Jesse had returned to what he’d called down to her in January, on the sidewalk below the courthouse: A man had “done something” to him.

  Sheriff Willis V. McCall

  CHAPTER SIX

  You Will Not Turn Us Down

  ON JANUARY 9, the grand jury in State of Florida v. Jesse Daniels handed down a true bill indicting the Okahumpka youth for assault on the grounds that in the early morning hours of December 18, 1957, Jesse Daniels, “with force and arms . . . then and there did ravish and carnally know, by force and against the will of her, the said Blanche Bosanquet Knowles.”

  After the indictment, McCall continued to torment Jesse’s parents by capriciously limiting their visits with him. In a letter to the governor, Pearl said that she knew she had been further antagonizing the sheriff by turning to Collins for help, and that he was punishing her for it: “McCall takes great pleasure in showing his authority over poor folks he thinks cannot fight back, or know their rights.” But, she said, “the child needs us.” And they needed him. “His father is old and a sick man; he is permanently and totally disabled, and failing very fast. Is it right to allow a spiteful sheriff to refuse this ex-veteran visits with his only child when both lives are so short, and when a wire or call from you could solve the situation?”

  Pearl had an additional concern. The sheriff’s department, she claimed, was holding as evidence the pair of Jesse’s undershorts that Yates had taken from their home several days after the crime. “Is this to further trap an innocent child, or to swap with those found at the assault scene?�
� In closing, she lamented her and Charles’s inability to hire an attorney, despite their efforts. “We are poor but decent, honest, Christian people.”

  Collins, who had been following the case from Tallahassee, relayed to the press that he had corresponded with the mother of the accused, and had advised her that Lake County would have to provide the Danielses with a lawyer if they could not afford to hire one. The governor’s involvement, amplified by Mabel, chagrined county officials. Judge Futch quickly issued two orders: McCall was to have the prisoner in court at ten in the morning on the following Monday, January 20; and Pearl and Charles were to be present to help Futch determine whether Jesse would need court-appointed counsel. When the Danielses appeared as ordered, Jesse was already seated next to McCall, who once again forbade them and Mabel to speak to the boy. Pearl spoke up only to confirm that she and her husband could not afford an attorney.

  “You may rest assured that the attorneys appointed by this court will see that your son gets a fair trial,” Futch told them. “I am sorry that you did not make the request sooner.” Then, in open court, he took aim at Mabel, though not by name. “It is evident from items appearing in the newspapers that you people have been receiving and acting upon poor and dangerous advice,” Futch said. “It is equally evident that whoever has been advising you is either ignorant on the matters where they have advised you or else that they have deliberately misinformed you.” He found it regrettable that Pearl should have allowed her letter to Collins to be published, and he suggested that the local press was interested only in discrediting his court. Justice, he opined, was more often reached “by cooperation on the part of the State and the defendant, than by bickering and recrimination.”