Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  At that point, Yates and Oldham resumed pressing Odom for the identities of the other men in the Chevrolet that night, and Odom finally complied. He gave them two names—Willie Jones and J. C. Washington—as well as the names of the places where he said they worked.

  “Do you believe the Daniels boy guilty or do you believe Clarence Stephenson?” Yates asked.

  “I know he isn’t guilty,” Odom replied.

  “What do you base that on?” Yates asked.

  “Base it on my case.”

  “Your case and his case ain’t got nothing to do with one another,” Yates told him.

  “Same kind,” Odom said.

  “You are guilty?”

  “Sure I am,” Odom said. “I told you I was.”

  “What makes you think he was not?”

  “That boy ain’t got enough sense to do that.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Sure, I know him. I seen him every day,” Odom said. Jesse Daniels would sometimes come into the Quarters and sell fresh perch that he had caught to Sam and his mother.

  “He goes hunting,” Yates submitted, “and he’s got sense enough to do everything else. He’s just childish, that’s all.”

  “He ain’t got that much sense,” Odom disagreed. “I see him riding down the road, cars blowing horns at him.”

  Still, Yates argued, it took hardly any sense at all to steal into a house like the Knowleses’. “How did he get in the house?” Yates asked. “Do you think it takes much sense to open a screen lock?”

  “No, but another thing about that house,” Odom said—Clarence knew a lot about it, and Odom wanted Yates to explain how that could be.

  “What do you mean?” Yates asked.

  “He went in there,” Odom said.

  “What did he tell you about the house?” Yates asked. “If he went in there, how did he say he went in?”

  “In the front door.”

  “Then how did he go?”

  “He didn’t say,” Odom answered vaguely. “He said something about some stairs. That’s what he said and then I don’t know but I believe he is guilty. He might not be, but it appears like he did [it].”

  Was that the only basis for Odom’s opinion? Yates asked.

  “Daniels, I will tell you if you want to know,” Odom said, “he ain’t smart enough.”

  “Ain’t it a fact that he got pretty good sense, but it takes him a long time to think?” Yates asked.

  “Might be like that.”

  “You ask him a question and give him a long time to answer and he will answer, won’t he?”

  “I don’t know about that,” Odom said. “I ain’t had too much sense myself. I didn’t know how to use it. But that cat know about it.”

  “This newspaper woman,” Yates said, “did she suggest you say anything to us different than what you have said?”

  “She told me to tell what I know to her.”

  “Did she suggest any bad thing to tell?” Yates asked.

  “Just what I know, that’s all.”

  Yates paused, and after a moment returned to the matter of Odom’s conversation with John Lenninger, particularly the lawyer’s suggestion that Joe Knowles might have been involved in the crime against his wife. “He said that Joe Knowles paid you to do that?” Yates asked.

  “No,” Odom replied, “he said that’s what it look like.”

  “So, in other words, you are going to die without . . . that attorney, what he was suggesting . . .”

  “No,” Odom interrupted. “I said I asked him, ‘Do you believe I did it?’ and he said, ‘I know of only one suspect,’ and he said I was the number-one suspect.”

  “Have I ever said I believe you did it?” Yates asked.

  “No,” Odom answered. “He said you wouldn’t believe I did it.”

  “You didn’t, did you?” Yates as much asserted as he asked.

  “No,” Odom said. “I could tell you something. I wasn’t going to tell you nothing about that and was going to die with it, but they kept after me . . .”

  “You don’t want to leave here with people thinking you did it,” Yates said.

  Pleased with the direction that the interview had at last taken, Yates prepared to wrap up the session. There was another point, though, that Odom wanted to clarify further. He reiterated that the break-ins, to which he had confessed, were attempted robberies only; he’d had no intention to rape either Amelia Rutherford or Opal Howard. “I ain’t ever tried to take no other women,” Odom insisted, “and I been working in the fields right around them, and I ain’t tried to take them. I can’t understand why they said I did.”

  “Well,” Yates responded with alacrity, “I believe that statement right there.”

  “Sure, that statement is true,” Odom affirmed.

  “In fact, I believe everything you told me.”

  “You do?” Odom asked.

  “I did.”

  “How about now?” Odom asked.

  “I don’t know. Are you telling the truth?”

  “I am,” Odom said. “I was jawing you about not knowing nothing about it.”

  “About the Okahumpka case?”

  “Yes, I am telling you now.” He told Yates that he didn’t think Clarence Stephenson had been lying about the rape. Nor should Yates disbelieve him now, because “I ain’t got nothing to lose. No good lying.”

  By then, more than a couple of hours had passed. “I ain’t intended to talk to you all night long,” said Odom, and he readied himself to leave. But if they picked up Clarence Stephenson for questioning, he assured them, they’d learn a lot more about the Knowles case. He had started to rise from his chair when he thought of something else he wanted to ask, and sat back down.

  “You check with that woman to see what she say?”

  “What woman?” Yates asked.

  “Knowles,” Odom answered, as if confident that he was familiar with facts about the case shared by only a few. “Did she tell you anything about what I told you here?”

  “No,” Yates said. “One of the troubles with the other people is that they don’t know what Mrs. Knowles told me.”

  “I don’t know what she told you either,” Odom noted. “All I know is what Clarence told me and I don’t know whether it’s talk or not, but he say he got paid to do that. He got paid to kill her.”

  “That attorney didn’t suggest you say that, did he?” Yates asked.

  “He said, ‘Sam, maybe Mr. Knowles paid some guy to kill her,’ and he say, ‘Do you think he did?’ And I said, no, I didn’t think he did. I know Mr. Joe pretty good while I was working and he seemed like a nice man. I don’t think he would do anything like that.”

  Now the interview seemed to be over. Gordon Oldham asked Sam if he had anything else on his mind. If so, he said, “I would like to hear it before we go.”

  “I ain’t got nothing on my mind,” Odom said.

  And with that, a guard led him back to his cell on death row.

  Before the others left Raiford, Gordon Oldham spoke with the guard who had attended Odom the day before, during his interviews with Mabel and Pearl, and then with Lenninger. The guard confirmed that he had been present for both interviews and that none of the three had pressured Odom into making statements or admissions. Nor had they made the prisoner any promises. Odom had spoken freely, he told them, when he said that Jesse Daniels hadn’t raped Blanche Knowles, but he knew who had.

  * * *

  —

  LAKE COUNTY WASN’T quite finished with Sam Wiley Odom. Gordon Oldham returned with Yates to Okahumpka to continue his investigation, but the next day he dispatched assistant state attorney James W. Kynes Jr. up to Raiford. Like Sam Buie, Jimmy Kynes had been a football legend at the University of Florida; he’d been drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers but chose instea
d to play in Canada. After a season, however, he’d returned to Florida to study law at Gainesville, and by 1959, his promising legal mind had brought him to the state attorney’s office. He interviewed Odom in the presence of prison superintendent DeWitt Sinclair and a stenographer.

  Once again, with a four-day stay of execution and his life on the line, twenty-one-year-old high school dropout Sam Wiley Odom would attempt to steer his way through an aversive interrogation without the aid of counsel.

  Odom appeared to be more at ease with the hulking former football star than he’d been with the duplicitous Deputy Yates. Oldham had not shared with Kynes transcripts of Blanche Knowles’s statement in his office the previous winter, or of his own prison interview with Odom of the day before. Without the benefit of any prior briefing, then, Kynes set out to construct with Odom a timeline of his whereabouts and actions in the hours leading up to the attack on Blanche Knowles.

  Earlier in the evening of December 17, Odom said, he and his uncle had attended a night class at Carver Heights Negro School, after which he had gone back to North Quarters and watched the fights on NBC with a friend who lived a few houses down from the Hawkins family. Then, Odom said, he’d gone out to visit a cousin, Joe Smith, at the snack shop he ran in the Quarters. There, some neighborhood men were trying to get a game of whist going when Clarence Stephenson and a man Odom identified only as “Bill” showed up. The pair were looking for “entertainment” and something to drink, they said, so the three of them—Odom, Clarence, and Bill—had driven to Leesburg, where Clarence and Bill were “drinking pretty heavy.” Odom, having indulged only in soda pop, had driven Clarence’s 1951 Chevrolet back to Okahumpka.

  When Kynes asked for more information about Bill, Odom said, “I don’t know anything about Bill.” Not being privy to the details of the previous day’s not-yet-transcribed interview, Kynes was unable to press Odom about a number of other discrepancies Odom introduced. He now told Kynes that only three men were in the car on the night of the Knowles rape, whereas he’d included a fourth man—J. C. Washington—in the Chevrolet when he’d been questioned by Oldham and Yates. Nor did Odom mention a Willie Jones to Kynes, although it was possible that “Willie” was the same person as “Bill,” whose surname he had perhaps forgotten or was intentionally withholding.

  On their return to Okahumpka, Sam recounted, Clarence had said that he wanted to talk to Joe Knowles, who’d promised him a job, and asked Odom if he knew where Joe lived. That was how it happened that Odom had driven Clarence and Bill over to the Knowles house, alongside of which he’d parked the Chevrolet.

  “How long had you known Joe Knowles?” Kynes asked.

  “Well, I have worked for Mr. Knowles,” Odom said, “but he don’t know me personally from anyone else.”

  “What kind of work did you do for him?”

  “I have worked in watermelons for him. Watermelons, and I have picked fruit for the company.”

  “Did you know his wife?” Kynes asked.

  “Not personally,” Odom said.

  “Ever seen her?”

  “Yeah, I have seen her,” Odom said. “Round and about. Going from Okahumpka to Leesburg, I guess.”

  Odom recounted how Clarence had first gone around to the back door of the house but had ended up entering in the front; and how he and Bill had listened to music on the radio until Clarence came back out—about forty-five minutes later, Odom thought. “His arm was scratched up,” Odom had noticed.

  “Where was his clothes?” Kynes asked.

  “His clothes was under his left arm,” Odom said. “Didn’t have on anything. He had his shoes there under his arm.”

  “Barefooted?” Kynes asked.

  “Bare feet,” Odom replied, then corrected himself. “He wasn’t exactly in his bare feet. He had a pair of socks on.”

  “Get moving,” Clarence had ordered Odom, so he’d started the car and driven “down the road a little piece.” That was when Clarence realized that he’d lost his shorts. He wanted Odom to drive back to the Knowles house to get them, but Odom had refused.

  Clarence said he’d “raped a woman in there.” The reason he’d gone to the house in the first place, he told Odom and Bill, was “that he had got paid to murder this woman.”

  “That he got paid to murder this woman?” Kynes asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Who did he tell you paid him?”

  “He didn’t say,” Odom said.

  “Did he show you any money?”

  “Yeah, he showed me some money,” Odom said. “I don’t know exactly the amount but he had a pretty good sum of money.”

  Kynes asked Odom if he’d told anyone else about the incident, and Odom said that he’d told no one. The attorney pressed Odom for details about Clarence’s intents and actions. “Did he say he had gone in there to kill her?”

  “Yes sir,” Odom replied. “Said that after he’d seen this baby there, that he couldn’t go through with it. Said that he couldn’t kill her on account of that baby was there.”

  “So his intents were to go in there and kill her, is that right?”

  “That’s right,” Odom said.

  “What was he gonna kill her with?” Kynes asked. Did Clarence have a gun or a knife? Odom said he didn’t know.

  “And he saw the baby in there,” Kynes said. “Where did he say the baby was?”

  “He didn’t exactly say where it was.”

  “Said the baby was there and he changed his mind about killing her and raped her instead, is that correct?” Kynes asked.

  “Yes.”

  Kynes flipped through the pages of his notepad, then paused. “Now what else do you know about the Knowles case that you haven’t told me?”

  “Well, that’s about all,” Odom said. Except for what he had not yet mentioned: “I told you about having that money,” he said. “Got $5,000.00 to do that, but he didn’t tell me who gave him this money.”

  The amount Clarence had claimed he was being paid to kill “this woman” was significantly higher than the five hundred dollars that Pearl had heard rumored in the melon patch—but unbeknownst to Kynes, it was exactly the same as the dollar figure in Blanche Knowles’s statement to Gordon Oldham.

  “This lawyer that came up here,” Kynes said, “suggested that you are the one that raped Mrs. Knowles, is that right? Is that what he told you?”

  “He didn’t tell me that I did it,” Odom explained. “Said that’s what he heard. He said that he heard people say that Mr. Joe gave me some money to rape his wife and afterwards kill her.” Or rather, Odom said, the lawyer had heard that a girlfriend of Knowles might have done so.

  Kynes did not pursue this wrinkle in the story either, but instead turned his questions to the rape of Kate Coker. Odom related how he and Clarence, as well as J. C. Washington and “Bill,” had been having conversations about what it might be like to have a white woman; and Clarence had told them “it was different between a colored woman and a white woman. Said you get more feeling out of a white woman.” Seeing Odom’s keen interest, Clarence had mentioned to him that he knew where he and Odom could find two women in Leesburg. “But he told me that if we got caught,” Odom said, “we would go to jail. He didn’t tell me nothing about no death sentence or nothing like that.” As it happened, Clarence—if there was indeed a Clarence—had not got caught; he had driven off and abandoned his accomplice.

  Like Oldham and Yates, Kynes took a stab at determining the influence of Mabel Norris Reese on Odom’s story. Had she herself fed him the killer-for-hire tale verbatim, or had she planted details about the case in Odom’s impressionable mind?

  “What did Mrs. Reese tell you about the Knowles case?” he asked.

  On this point, Odom did not budge. “She didn’t tell me anything about the Knowles case,” he insisted. “Ask me did I know anything about it. I told her I did.”<
br />
  “And what did you tell her?”

  “I told her I had to talk to my mother first before I tell either one of them”—them being Mabel and Pearl—“anything.”

  * * *

  —

  OLDHAM’S INVESTIGATION CONTINUED. He had Lake County deputies dispatched to round up the three men Odom had named, and the Florida Sheriffs Bureau dispatched a special agent to Okahumpka as well. But the search for Odom’s purported cohorts proved mostly fruitless.

  Oldham himself interviewed Odom’s cousin, who denied that Odom had visited him at the snack bar on the night of the Knowles rape and stated categorically that he’d never seen or met anyone named Clarence Stephenson—nor did he know a Willie Jones or a J. C. Washington. With the special agent present, Oldham spoke with Odom’s parents, Laura and Frampy Cope, neither of whom recalled having seen or heard Sam speak of a Clarence Stephenson, a Willie Jones, or a “Bill.” When the state attorney and the special agent tracked down Robert “Son” Nelson, the picking crew foreman who, Odom had claimed, was Clarence’s employer, Nelson said he’d never hired a picker named Clarence Stephenson. Neither had the owner of a Florida nursery ever employed a Willie Jones, contrary to what Odom had told Oldham and Yates.

  Over the next few days, the Florida Sheriffs Bureau searched state records for any trace of a Clarence Stephenson’s military service, driver’s license, or automobile tags, but it found no Stephenson who fit the description Odom had provided. Bill Fisher did find an arrest record for a J. C. Washington, but this Washington was known to have left the area more than a month before the Knowles rape.

  With news swirling about Odom’s information regarding the rape, Laura Cope drove to Raiford to speak with her son. She advised him not to admit involvement in any crime other than the one for which he’d been convicted, in the hope that the governor might spare him the death sentence for his first and only crime. She suggested that he write to the governor himself.

  Odom’s letter opened with an admission of guilt. He had raped Kate Coker on March 31, 1958, he said, and explained that he hadn’t known that he could die for the crime. “This is the first time I ever been in trouble and it was the first woman I ever attack,” he asserted, and noted that in all the time he had worked around white women in Okahumpka, “they will tell you that I never made advances toward them and that I always have respect for any of them.” He was “willing to pay for my crime, but not with my life but with my labor.” He placed his fate in the hands of the governor, who, whatever his decision, Odom believed to be a “righteous man”; and he hoped that the governor’s son would “recover well.”