Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  On August 18, Mabel and Pearl were escorted into the interview room at Raiford; Lenninger waited outside. Odom, in handcuffs, was led in by a guard; he took a seat across from the two women. The three of them engaged in some small talk for a few minutes. Then abruptly Odom remarked that he had only six days to live, as he was scheduled to go to the electric chair on Monday. The utterance seemed to make him anxious and “bitter,” Mabel noted. It also lent her the opportunity to steer the conversation toward her purpose. She suggested to Odom that he should not go to his death with a burden on his conscience.

  “Don’t talk to me about conscience, lady. I ain’t got any,” Odom riposted.

  He was “twisting in his chair,” Mabel jotted in her notepad, but after a minute or so, he seemed to settle down and said he would like to continue the conversation. “I’m not afraid to die. Everyone’s got to go some time, ya know.”

  Mabel brought up the Kate Coker rape. “Sure, I did it,” Odom admitted, “and I’m not proud of it. I had been drinking wine and ’shine, and it was the ’shine that told me to do it, and I did. I was foolish and I know it.”

  Mabel scribbled her notes. Pearl sat silent, her eyes fixed searchingly on the boy.

  “I’d like to make a statement,” Odom said to Mabel. “Would you print it?” Mabel nodded.

  “I don’t think Jesse Daniels is guilty,” he said. “In fact, I know he isn’t guilty.”

  At that, Pearl leaned in anxiously.

  “Wiley Sam,” she implored, addressing him as he was known in Okahumpka, “then who did it? You’ve got to help us.”

  Again, Odom shifted in his seat, but he answered cagily. “Can you come back up here just before?” he said. “If you come back just before they take me, I’ll tell you about the Blanche Knowles case.”

  Mabel and Pearl pleaded that now was the time for him to tell them what he knew, but Odom replied only, “I didn’t do it.” Then he offered, “I’ll confess if you want me to. Sure won’t hurt me any now.”

  “No, Wiley Sam,” said Mabel, emphatic. “We sure don’t want that. We want only the truth.”

  But she’d been preempted. Deputy Yates, Odom disclosed, had paid his own visit to Raiford, just before Odom’s case went to the pardon board in July. He’d asked Odom to write out a statement, which, as he recalled it for Mabel, read: “I am going to be electrocuted for raping Mrs. Coker but I did not rape Mrs. Knowles.”

  More than a year after Odom’s conviction and death sentence, Yates had driven to Raiford to have him sign a statement asserting that he hadn’t raped Blanche Knowles? That roused Mabel’s suspicions. She asked Odom if he’d signed.

  “Sure, I signed it,” he said. “In fact, I wrote it out. It makes me laugh . . .” And laugh he did—“a deep, rolling chuckle,” Mabel noted.

  The two women urged Odom to tell more of what he knew, and he turned to the subject of the Coker rape. He remarked that another man had been with him that morning, a detail that startled Mabel, because in no accounts of the crime had the presence of a second person at the scene been mentioned.

  “He got me to do it,” Odom said. “And with all that ’shine I’d been drinking, I fell in with his idea. He was supposed to be the lookout while I went in, and then I was supposed to sit in the car while he went in. But he run out on me—when I came out, he was gone.”

  As Odom spoke, Mabel recalled how it had been reported that Blanche Knowles had waited until she heard a car leave before she called for help, out of fear that her attacker might return. Which was why deputies had initially searched for tire prints outside the Knowles home, only to let that point drop when they arrested Jesse Daniels.

  “I tried to tell the law about him,” Odom said, referring to his companion, who was always “boasting of attacks and attempted attacks on white women.” But the officers were not interested. “They said, ‘Boy, we got you—you’re the one we want.’”

  Mabel tried to pin Odom down. “Do you really think he’s the one in the first case, Wiley Sam?”

  Again, Odom was elusive. “You come back,” he said, urging Mabel to return just before he went to the chair. “I’ll really talk then.”

  Mabel and Pearl left the interview room, and John Lenninger took his turn with Odom. Initially he got no further. Odom told him, too, to come back on Sunday, the night before his execution, and said he would disclose everything. Lenninger, however, was not easily diverted or dismissed. An hour later, when he emerged from the interview room, he was, Mabel noted, “tense with excitement.” Odom had given Lenninger the name of the man he claimed had raped Blanche Knowles and, afterward, “boasted of the crime.”

  “We worked fast then,” Mabel noted. Back in Mount Dora, she put in a call to Governor Collins, and “the new development was turned over to him.”

  Collins issued a four-day stay of the electrocution. The official reason, according to prison superintendent DeWitt Sinclair, was the temporary absence of the governor from the state because of a light-plane crash in Maryland, in which his twenty-four-year-old son, LeRoy Collins Jr., a U.S. Navy lieutenant, had sustained serious injuries. Collins and his wife had thus flown to Maryland to be with their son. The governor, Sinclair indicated, “doesn’t like to have an execution when he is out of state.”

  Mabel, however, believed from her conversation with Collins that the governor was likely to order an immediate investigation into Odom’s possible involvement in the rape of Blanche Knowles. She contacted the offices of the NAACP in Tampa, which had vast experience and success with death-penalty appeals, and Robert Saunders agreed to lend his support. Still, a four-day reprieve would not allow much time to garner evidence to justify an appeal on Odom’s behalf, in order then to be able to shape a case for the release of Jesse Daniels. And the next day brought setbacks. Collins’s office sent word that the investigation would be “turned back to Lake County authorities,” with state attorney Gordon Oldham—the man who had prosecuted Jesse Daniels—in charge of the probe.

  Mabel now fully suspected that a conspiracy had been afoot to frame a young, white, mentally retarded youth for a rape that appeared to have been committed by a black man. Yet the question remained: Why?

  That Sam Wiley Odom had “implicated a man in another rape case”—a rape case more infamous than his own—made front-page news across the state. Asked for a statement in response to Odom’s reported claim that Jesse Daniels did not rape Blanche Knowles, Oldham said he had no comment. But the state attorney’s casual dismissal of a reporter’s question apparently masked a genuine concern. That night—August 21—a Florida Highway Patrol cruiser driven by Yates’s friend Bryant “Hamp” Spears took Oldham, Yates, and court reporter Janice Burleigh back up to Raiford.

  Just after midnight, a guard again led Odom into the interview room. Oldham sat at the table, with Yates and Spears behind him and Burleigh at her stenography machine. Odom sat down opposite Oldham. From the start, the interview had a decidedly antagonistic feel.

  “Sam, I want to find out what you know about that rape at Okahumpka,” Oldham said.

  “I don’t know anything I want to tell you,” Odom said.

  “You don’t know anything about it?”

  “I know about it,” Odom answered, “but I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Well, if you don’t know anything about it,” Oldham suggested, “I will go ahead and report to the Governor’s office and tell him you state you don’t want to talk about it at all or don’t know about it.”

  With that point apparently settled, to Odom’s indifference, the young inmate turned his attention to Yates. He accused the deputy of falsifying a statement that Odom had made by making it seem that Odom had admitted to attempted rapes other than that of Mrs. Kate Coker, when, Odom contended, he had admitted only to breaking into the women’s homes. That statement, Odom noted, had been presented to the pardon board.

  “You were th
ere, Mr. Yates,” Odom said. “I didn’t tell you that.”

  “Them’s your words, aren’t they?” Yates replied.

  “No, sir, them ain’t my words.”

  “You didn’t sign that?” Yates asked, waving the statement before the boy. “That ain’t your signature?”

  “No,” Odom said.

  “That ain’t your signature?”

  “No.”

  “How come that notary public swore to that as being the truth and put her seal and signature right there?” Yates asked.

  Odom was adamant. “That ain’t my signature. When I signed my statement it was blue ink . . . I told you everything that I knew about it and I ain’t told you anything about taking other women. I ain’t told nobody that.”

  “You told Mr. Yates about that,” Oldham interrupted. “That other house you went into before you went to Mrs. Coker’s.”

  “I didn’t try to take no other women,” Odom insisted.

  “What were you trying to do?” Oldham asked.

  “Rob them,” Odom replied. “I wasn’t going to take no other women. That’s what I told you in my statement. That hurt me. I don’t mind dying for something, but nothing like that.”

  “You don’t want to die telling a lie, do you?” Oldham asked.

  “No.”

  Oldham did not want to revisit the Kate Coker rape case, or any other case in Lake County in 1958 for that matter. He had driven up to Raiford for one reason alone. He pulled from his briefcase a different statement. “You signed that paper,” Oldham said, pointing to the document. “Now do you remember this paper?”

  Odom scanned the document, his eyes settling on the signature. “I signed that, yes sir.”

  Oldham then had Odom read aloud the statement he’d told Mabel and Pearl about, in which he declared that he hadn’t had anything to do with “the rape case in the Knowles house.”

  “Do you remember giving Mr. Yates that statement, Sam?” Oldham asked.

  “Yes, I remember giving it to him.”

  “Do you remember being on the lie detector machine?”

  “That’s right,” Odom said.

  “And you stated you didn’t have anything to do with this case?”

  “That’s right,” Odom said, “on the lie detector, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Daniels, he ain’t guilty,” Odom said. “I will tell you that.”

  “Who is guilty?” Oldham asked.

  Odom did not answer.

  “Did you talk to Mrs. Reese yesterday?” Oldham asked.

  “Sure, I talked to her,” Odom replied. “But I didn’t tell her who was guilty.” He explained that he’d told only the lawyer, Lenninger, the name of the man who had raped Blanche Knowles.

  “How come you say you know something about it?” Yates asked.

  “I know something about it.”

  “How come you say that now?”

  “You want to know about it?” Odom asked.

  “Well,” Yates said, “I know about it. I investigated it just like yours. Now, if you know something about it, you better tell me.”

  “I know about it,” Odom said, “but I ain’t telling you about it.”

  “I am the man to tell about it,” said Yates.

  “I told you too much the other time,” Odom fretted. “That confession . . . the other thing.”

  “Look at me, Sam,” Yates said. It wasn’t a request.

  “I ain’t going to look at you,” spat Odom. “You can listen to me. If you don’t want to, you can take me back to the hole. I say I know about the case. I know about it.”

  With that, abruptly, as if he’d finished with the interview, Odom rose from his chair. The guard, his hands pressed firmly on Odom’s shoulders, persuaded him back down. “The man is still talking to you,” the guard reminded him.

  “If you know something about this other case, you ought to let me know about it,” Yates said.

  Odom told Yates that he’d had second thoughts after signing the statement in which he’d professed ignorance about the Knowles case. “Didn’t I tell you I started to write you a letter when I read that statement?” Odom asked.

  “Yes,” Yates replied, but noted that Odom hadn’t said it was about the Knowles case.

  “No, I was dumb when I wrote that,” Odom said. “I was green when I went into the other room and I was dumb when I come up here. The death room wised me up.”

  “You been doing some thinking?” Yates asked.

  “Yes, and some thinking I should have done. I am sorry that I did it,” he said, referring to the Coker rape, “but that don’t mean nothing.”

  “What about this Okahumpka case?” Yates asked.

  “I will tell you what I know,” Odom said. “Cat told me that he did it. That he raped that woman.”

  “Who?” Yates asked.

  “I ain’t going to tell you who told me that,” Odom said, even though he’d given Lenninger the name of the man the day before.

  “Well, if you don’t tell me his name, what can I do about it?” Yates asked.

  Odom hesitated a second or two, then said, “His name is Clarence. Clarence Stephenson.” And Odom had been with him and two other men in a 1951 Chevrolet, he said.

  “Tell me who else was there,” Yates said.

  “No, I ain’t telling you,” Odom snapped. He was willing, however, to talk about Clarence. “He said he was paid to do it. He wasn’t paid to rape her. He was paid to go out there and get her out of the way.”

  Odom paused, and for a moment Burleigh’s tap-tap-tapping halted as well.

  “I don’t know if it was talk or what,” Odom continued. “But that’s what he said. That’s why I started to write you that letter but Cat told me not to do it.”

  Yates clearly didn’t like what he was hearing. “Now, we drove over a hundred miles to come up here tonight—”

  “Sure you did. I did too when I come up here,” Odom noted, not without irony. He repeated his disinclination to cooperate with the deputy who had played him false. Once more he sounded a note of betrayal. “You said I had a record,” Odom said, again invoking Yates’s statements to the parole board and sounding injured, like someone who’d been promised one outcome and given another.

  “Now, I ain’t done nothing to you, have I?” Yates asked.

  “You could explain to them. I had a lot of respect for you and I told the ladies”—referring to Mabel and Pearl—“that I had you pegged as one of the best men that worked there in Tavares. I figured you was on the level.”

  Again, Yates tried to steer the conversation back to the names of the other men who, Odom was claiming, were in the car the night Blanche Knowles was raped. He didn’t succeed.

  “When you said I had a record, that hurt me,” Odom continued on his own track. “I ain’t scared to die, but I didn’t even harm the woman,” he said, meaning Coker. “I didn’t hurt the lady. That guy told me to do it and I did it. That ’shine I was drinking, it told me to do it, and that’s what happened.”

  Once more Yates pressed Odom for names, and once more Odom refused to divulge them, except to say, “You pick up Clarence Stephenson. You might get something . . . The guys, if I tell you their names, they could get messed up.”

  “How could they, just for telling something they knew?” Yates asked.

  “For holding out like that.” Lenninger, Odom explained, had thought that “Mr. Joe paid me to go in there and do that.”

  That got Yates’s attention, and Oldham’s. “Paid you?” Yates asked. “He tried to get you to say that?”

  “He said nobody would believe that,” Odom replied. Then he shared another of Lenninger’s theories—that maybe Joe Knowles “wanted to marry another woman.”

  “He told you to say that Mr. Joe paid you?” Yates asked.r />
  No, Odom answered, that was what Lenninger thought, not what he’d told Odom to say.

  “You mean he suggested that might have happened?”

  “Yes, he asked me if I knowed him and I said yes.” Odom also knew Joe Knowles’s brother, Tim, he’d added, and the lawyer had asked him a second time if Joe had paid him. “I said no, if he paid me I would say so,” Odom told Yates.

  “This would be a mighty late time for you to take pay for that, wouldn’t it?” said Yates.

  Blanche’s statement to Gordon Oldham—in which she’d mentioned that her attacker had told her, “I was paid five thousand dollars to kill you. Wouldn’t you like to know who paid me that?”—had never become public, but Yates was aware of it. Yet neither Yates nor Oldham now pursued Odom’s lead, which, however speculatively, tied the crime to a financial transaction and possibly tied Odom himself to the crime.

  “But you believe Daniels is guilty?” Odom asked.

  “That is not the point, what I believe,” Yates said.

  “Yes it is,” Odom countered.

  “No,” Yates snapped, “what I believe and what the court believes might be two different things.”

  “I am telling you,” Odom said. “He is not guilty.”

  Yates strove again to get Odom to admit that the lawyer was putting words in his mouth, but Odom insisted that he himself had done most of the talking and Lenninger “did the listening.”

  “He asked me did I know Mr. Joe real good,” Odom said, “and I said, ‘Sure, I worked for him.’ And he asked me did I know how he stood, and I said he was real nice. And he said they would pay to have Daniels convicted. They wanted him.”

  “They can’t burn him,” Yates said of Daniels. “Did this woman suggest that you say anything? The newspaper woman?”

  “She told me to tell the truth, was all she told me,” Odom said.

  “What did she mainly do?” Yates asked. Had Mabel told him that Jesse had been home all night?

  “She said she know he didn’t do it,” Odom said. “And she ain’t the only one that knows.”