Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  “Now after the time that the boys came up to the house, sometimes when I’d see Jesse I’d wave to him,” Blanche continued. “I felt rather sorry for the boy . . . I thought that possibly it was health that was wrong with him. I felt something was. He acted strangely and never was with any other children. Except on that one occasion had I ever seen him with any other children.”

  Missing from the transcript, however, was one especially pertinent detail. It did not anywhere mention what Blanche had initially told Yates on the night of the rape: that the perpetrator was “a Negro,” a young Negro “with bushy hair.” Instead, it included Blanche’s veiled disavowal—pointedly elicited by Oldham—of that earlier claim.

  “Now, Mrs. Knowles,” the transcript recorded him asking, “the voice that talked that night, was it a very peculiar voice to you?”

  “Yes, it was,” Blanche said. “I told the authorities I had never heard a voice quite like it, and I never heard a white man speak like that and that was one reason that I at first thought it possible it might have been a Negro. But it was a very distinct voice, the way he spoke, his phrasing, his pronunciation and all. They were very distinct.”

  “Now,” Oldham asked, “did you hear that voice again after all this had taken place, in Tavares, with other voices?”

  Yes, Blanche said, she had recognized the voice, first on a recording that the authorities there had played for her, and then in a room in which several people whom she could not see were asked to repeat phrases she had heard on the night of the attack. “And again I recognized the voice.”

  Only two suspects in the Knowles rape were being held in the jail at Tavares at the time Blanche had supposedly been asked to make a vocal identification of her attacker: Jesse Daniels and Sam Wiley Odom. Bubba Hawkins had been taken to Tampa for a lie detector test.

  By the time of Blanche’s interview with the state attorney, Jesse Daniels had been arrested, indicted, and delivered to Chattahoochee for evaluation. Yet Oldham did not ask her if she thought Jesse was her rapist. Neither did Blanche at any point in the interview in any way link Jesse Daniels to the attack. Nor, for all the focus on voices, did she note the most distinctive characteristic of Jesse’s speech—the unmistakable stutter that impeded his every utterance.

  But it was not the doctors’ business to make sense of all that. Or of the perpetrator’s supposed remarks about killing and war experience and the five thousand dollars, which anyone who had conversed with Jesse would surely have found difficult to imagine him saying. No, the doctors had received a transcript, just as they had requested. And once again, they did not let down their friends in Lake County.

  * * *

  —

  RESTLESS AND WORRIED but ever determined—she had to do something to help her son—Pearl Daniels continued to seek signatures for her petition attesting to Jesse’s good character. She wrote letters to the doctors at Florida State Hospital; she inquired about her son’s health, she asked how he was adapting to his new surroundings. Daily she waited at Merritt’s store in Okahumpka for replies to arrive from Chattahoochee in the afternoon’s post.

  She strived to raise money so she could pay the bus fare for a visit to Jesse. At an antique shop in Fruitland Park, she attempted to pawn her husband’s broken timepiece; desperate though she was, she found the five-dollar offer unfair as well as unacceptable. (“It will run,” she told Mabel, “if only I had a key to wind it.”) To save money, she canned more beans; to make money, she picked up work in the melon patches of Okahumpka. Her body got tired and her feet were swollen; she admitted to Mabel that she was having pains in her heart. “Should go to Dr. but can’t afford it,” she wrote. “It’s painful & weakening, but I’ll probly live.”

  Understanding that Sam Buie had no further interest in her son’s cause, and without any resources to hire an attorney, Pearl set to investigating the case herself. “Keep learning more things,” she wrote to Mabel, “but if it’s any help or not is the thing. Mrs. Twiss—a neighbor said [Deputy Doug] Sewell told her that he got a phone call at 5 minutes past 3 a.m. about the rape. That Mrs. Knowles had called Red Robinson’s wife + the wife call’d Red, so he could call the law??? Then Red was where—I wonder??” Pearl had no other news, “but I’m trying to be all eyes + ears so to learn.” She closed her letter with the hope that Mabel might drop Jesse a short note (“Do whatever you can for our darlin”). As an afterthought, she asked the reporter if she might have any “used unwanted jars.”

  Mabel encouraged Pearl, but she knew that Jesse’s commitment order, once it had been signed by Judge Futch, had put in place legal obstacles that would be extraordinarily difficult to overcome for a family with no financial resources. She did write Jesse a short note, and she got together a few jars to help Pearl with her canning. She wanted to bolster Pearl’s optimism, but Mabel’s own hopes for the boy were fading.

  And then something happened that changed Mabel’s sentiments and Jesse’s prospects. In the early morning hours of April 1, three blasts from a policeman’s shotgun echoed out over the palmetto brush on South Fourteenth Street in Leesburg, just down the road from where Blanche Knowles was sleeping. A suspect had been taken into custody. Mabel soon learned of the arrest, and the charges. She knew immediately what it meant. At her office, she rolled a fresh sheet of onionskin into her old Royal and began to type the words that would bring new hope to a mother and her boy.

  “And then,” she tapped, “a rapist struck.”

  Sheriff Willis McCall, flanked by deputies James Yates and Leroy Campbell

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Well-Laid Plan

  SOON AFTER DAYBREAK on April 1, 1958, Leesburg police chief Bill Fisher received an urgent call informing him that a young black man had been caught fleeing the scene of a rape, and was shot by one of his officers. That the alleged victim was a middle-aged white Leesburg woman was enough to rouse Fisher from his bed, as his department had recently been investigating some breaking-and-entering incidents at the homes of white women in Leesburg and Okahumpka.

  First, on March 11, days after Jesse Daniels had been transferred to Chattahoochee, Mrs. Amelia Rutherford awakened in the middle of the night to the sounds of someone in her Leesburg home. Her scream apparently frightened the intruder, who quickly fled the scene. Then, two weeks later, Mrs. Opal Howard, a woman in her early thirties who lived only a block away from Blanche Knowles, awakened from an uneasy sleep “to find a man bending over her” in the dark bedroom. Her scream stirred her husband from his sleep, and the “partly undressed” intruder ran from the house. Fisher had lifted fingerprints from both houses, which he’d sent to the more sophisticated crime lab at the Orange County Criminal Investigation Bureau. After interviews with both women, police investigations had focused on possible black suspects. To date, none had been apprehended. But this latest incident sounded similar, and the suspect whom Deputy Yates had taken into custody might, Fisher reasoned, be the same man he was seeking. He wanted to be present for questioning. He drove to Tavares and slipped in through the back door of the Lake County Courthouse to await Willis McCall.

  The chilly relationship between the two men had grown chillier since Fisher’s unsuccessful run for McCall’s job in the last election. “Fisher hated Willis,” Evvie Griffin recalled, adding that the bespectacled, forty-seven-year-old police chief, though a staunch segregationist himself, believed that McCall was a corrupt bully and a disgrace to law enforcement. Fisher was also well aware that the sheriff was the law in Lake County, and he would need to tread lightly in McCall’s domain. When Yates and McCall arrived with the suspect in tow, he turned out to be none other than eighteen-year-old Sam Wiley Odom, who’d been detained for the rape of Blanche Knowles, then released after Jesse Daniels was apprehended. Odom’s shoulder was bandaged, and his arm was in a sling. Under questioning, he stated that he was a tenth-grade night student at the Carver Heights Negro School in Leesburg, and that by day he worked in an orn
amental nursery. Colorful and talkative, he freely confessed to the rape, early that morning, of sixty-year-old Kate Coker, who worked as caretaker of an invalid woman.

  The night before, Odom related, he had walked from his home in North Quarters to a section of South Leesburg that was only blocks away from the home of Joe Knowles’s mother, where Blanche and Joe had moved with their children after the attack in Okahumpka. He was “getting high” on moonshine when he fell asleep in an empty garage on South Sixth Street. He woke up early the next morning, and on his way back to the Quarters he got the idea to break into a house he had come upon. He took out his switchblade and was in the process of cutting the phone wires when a milkman spotted him and asked him what he was doing.

  “I’m looking for my boss man,” Odom told him.

  A woman poked her head outside the door to see what was going on, and the milkman yelled to her, “Go get your gun!”

  Odom sprinted away through an apartment property and found a spot to hide. The coast clear, he decided he’d have another try at a break-in. He chose a house on South Fourteenth Street. After he’d stripped down to his undershorts and socks, he severed what he believed to be the telephone wires, and again he got caught—not by a milkman but by a yapping white dog that pounced on him and started biting his leg. The commotion roused the household, and when Kate Coker came outside to investigate, Odom grabbed her by the arm and forced her back inside. He pushed her through the kitchen and into the living room. There, on a settee, he raped her. The invalid woman under Coker’s care lay confined to her bed, unable to move.

  After the attack, Odom threw on the clothes he’d left outside and raced over to the old Okahumpka Road that led back to the Quarters. When he caught sight of Deputy Yates’s cruiser, though, he darted into the woods. With more police arriving at the scene, Odom attempted to hide himself in the palmetto brush. That was where Patrolman Charles Padgett spotted him. He ordered Odom to halt, but the youth made a run for it. Padgett fired, the blasts of his shotgun shattering the morning quiet. His first two shots missed; the third sprayed a load of buckshot into Odom’s shoulder. The youth halted, and surrendered. Padgett and Yates took him in handcuffs back to the house where Coker claimed she had been attacked, and she positively identified Odom as her attacker. The officers then jailed him in Tavares.

  “There’s just one thing I want to know,” Odom said after admitting to the rape. “How did they get in touch with you? I cut the phone wires so they couldn’t call.”

  McCall shrugged; the woman had made a phone call, he said. Fisher stated the obvious: “You must have cut the wrong wires.” But Odom insisted he’d cut the right wires. Then, taking a different tack, he considered, “If I had just taken another road, you never would have caught me. But I guess anybody that does this will end up getting caught.”

  Yates and Fisher continued their questioning, but Odom seemed unable to admit, or even to grasp, the mistakes he’d made that had led to his apprehension. Several times he recalled his post-rape conversation with the victim. “She promised she wouldn’t tell no one if I didn’t hurt her,” he said, as indignant as he was incredulous.

  McCall had worse news for Odom: Florida law invoked a mandatory death sentence for rape, he said, “unless the jury recommends mercy.”

  Before the close of the interview, Odom admitted to Fisher that he had been involved in other break-ins around Leesburg and Okahumpka. Indeed, the fingerprint evidence that Fisher had collected would eventually tie Odom to the incidents involving Amelia Rutherford and Opal Howard. In both cases, Odom would be charged with breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony.

  Bill Fisher was pleased when he left Tavares. He was certain that Odom had cased the homes of at least two of the women he’d targeted, as their spouses traveled frequently or worked night jobs. It was only by happenstance that Opal Howard’s husband was home on the evening that Odom paid his felonious visit. Also, Fisher noted, in both the Rutherford and Coker incidents, the attacker (Odom, by his own admission) had almost entirely undressed before entering the intended victims’ homes.

  But something nagged at Fisher. Why had neither Yates nor McCall explored the possibility that Odom might also have been responsible for the rape of Blanche Knowles back in December—a rape that had occurred barely a stone’s throw from Odom’s house? Hadn’t Blanche told deputies that her attacker was a husky Negro with bushy hair? At least forty pounds heavier than Jesse Daniels—that description certainly matched Sam Wiley Odom. Indeed, Odom had initially been picked up and held in connection with the attack, along with Bubba Hawkins—until Jesse was apprehended, that is. But wasn’t Odom interrogated about the December rape in Okahumpka? When Fisher had raised the point, McCall and Yates were quick to declare the Knowles case definitively closed. And when Fisher asked about a palm print that had been lifted from the Knowles house and sent for analysis to the lab in Orange County, McCall had brushed away the question with a flick of the wrist. Leery of seeming to play politics with the sheriff he had tried to unseat, Fisher did not persist, and he “drew away” from McCall and Yates.

  Still, before he definitively closed his own book on Sam Wiley Odom, Fisher thought he’d take a ride over to the Bosanquet place and ask a few questions. He found Blanche’s father at home. The two men stood together, surveying the grounds of an estate built in another century, as Alfred struggled to put words to the calamity that had befallen the Knowles and Bosanquet families.

  “It would not look good in newsprint,” Alfred said, more circumspect than hesitant, that Blanche “had been raped by a Negro.”

  The statement confirmed Fisher’s suspicions, and began to make some sense of them. Blanche Knowles might have been the victim of a traumatizing rape, her father seemed to be saying, but at least Joe Knowles would be spared the indignity of having a wife who had been violated by a black man.

  If it was confirmation of a theory, however, the theory was one that Fisher felt obliged to keep to himself for the moment, for the English gentleman had spoken to him in strictest confidence.

  * * *

  —

  TWO DAYS AFTER Sam Wiley Odom’s arrest, Mabel Norris Reese drove to Okahumpka to pick up Pearl Daniels for the long drive north to Chattahoochee. They were both eager to see Jesse, albeit for different reasons. Mabel was eager to interview him, now that she finally had the opportunity. Pearl was simply eager to see her son.

  At the hospital, they signed in and were directed to the visitation room, where they were joined by Jesse. Mabel attempted to draw from the boy an account unscripted by McCall and his crew, but Pearl kept interrupting the long pauses between Mabel’s questions and her son’s stuttered responses with inquiries of her own—about Jesse’s health, his eating habits, his doctors, and how he was faring. Patiently, Mabel persuaded Pearl to restrain her motherly instincts until she’d managed to conduct her interview. And just as patiently, she extracted from Jesse the tale of coercion and confusion she’d suspected.

  “Talking like an excited child who could no longer hold a secret,” though frequently rambling to other subjects—his passion for music, his hobby of making toy cars out of wood—Jesse disclosed the details of his ordeal back at the Lake County jail. “For two hours,” Mabel wrote, “I listened to him pouring out the story that had not yet been told before a bar of justice.”

  Jesse described how Sam Buie had visited him in his cell and waved in his face a typewritten copy of the confession. His eyes wide with plea and apology, Jesse declared to his mother, “It’s a bunch of lies! Mama, they kept asking me so many questions I got confused.”

  McCall and Yates had taken him into a room at the jail to be interrogated. Yates was holding a piece of paper, and McCall was holding a gun, his .38 caliber Smith & Wesson—the same gun he’d used to shoot Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin, six years earlier. The sheriff, Jesse said, “held a pistol to my head and said I better sign my name or he was gonna
pull the trigger.” To drive home the threat, McCall had aimed the gun at the floor of the cell and fired a round. “He said he’d blow my brains out,” Jesse said, if he did not admit to raping Mrs. Knowles. “I didn’t want to but I signed my name where he said.”

  So that was what Jesse had so wanted to tell his mother—“what the man did to me.” It wasn’t the first time McCall had used such an interrogation tactic. During the Groveland case, defendant Charles Greenlee told lawyers that after he had been convicted and sentenced to life, McCall had brought him down to his office, held a gun to his head, turned on a tape recorder, and led the terrified sixteen-year-old through a series of leading questions designed, for McCall’s benefit, to “set the record straight” on Greenlee’s guilt. In fear for his life, Greenlee had told McCall what he wanted to hear—that he and the other defendants had raped Norma Padgett.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE LONG DRIVE back to Lake County, Mabel and Pearl were newly recharged about the prospects for Jesse’s case, given the news about Sam Wiley Odom’s arrest, and Jesse’s description of a coerced confession. Mabel pressed Pearl for details about her son—his behavior, habits, hobbies, jobs—to establish his good character. She urged Pearl, too, to recall every particular she could, no matter how insignificant or minor, about Jesse’s movements on December 17, so that they could construct a timeline of his actions—a timeline that no one had ever cared to know before, since Jesse had never been allowed to defend himself in court.

  That day, Pearl recalled, she and Charles had “burned off” a lot beside their home, and Jesse and three of his friends—local boys—had helped set fire to a dead tree. The blaze had caught the attention of a neighbor, Lloyd Harrison, who had invited Jesse to go coon hunting with him that afternoon. After the hunt, around 9:30 that evening, Lloyd had returned Jesse to the Daniels home, where Charles and Pearl were watching television with some of their neighbors.