Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  On August 25, Francisco Rodriguez of the NAACP in Tampa delivered a letter to Collins, advising the governor that he was now representing Sam Wiley Odom and that he had filed a petition for a stay of execution so that he might have “sufficient time” to file an appeal. He was, he said, of the “firm conviction that there might be a basis for reversal of the guilty verdict rendered” in Odom’s case, though Rodriguez did not elaborate.

  That same day, Jimmy Kynes returned to Raiford, not to interview Odom but to help him construct a statement regarding the rape of Blanche Knowles. In essence, the statement repudiated everything Odom had alleged in his interviews with Mabel and Pearl, John Lenninger, Oldham and Yates, and Kynes himself over the previous week. “I don’t know nothing about that Knowles case,” Odom now said, and what he’d said he knew was “all wrong.” He confessed that “the reason I told you that story is that I knowed I only had one straw out of a million and I grabbed that straw.” He admitted that his acquaintance with Clarence Stephenson and Bill was “just a bunch of fictitious stuff,” a story he’d invented to get a reprieve—and he “didn’t know what a reprieve was until I went back to my cell and looked through my dictionary.” Finally, he denied having any idea as to who actually had raped Mrs. Knowles. “The main reason I came up with this story was to prolong my execution . . . I didn’t get what I wanted, but I did get four days more to live . . . I’m strictly against Capital Punishment.”

  Gordon Oldham was wrapping up his investigation for Governor Collins when he received word from Kynes that Sam Wiley Odom had recanted his prior statements regarding his involvement in and knowledge of the Knowles rape, and had signed a statement to that effect. His report to the governor, which included the statement along with affidavits from seven witnesses, concluded Odom had lied about the actions of “Clarence Stephenson” and other accomplices on the evening of December 17, 1957. Odom’s final statement, the state attorney affirmed, “is a true one.”

  The governor received Oldham’s report on August 26. By then he had already answered Odom’s letter, assuring Odom that he had read it but declaring that, under the law, he must pay for his crime with his life. Collins said he would pray that God grant Odom “mercy and forgiveness.”

  Odom’s execution was scheduled for the morning of August 28. Francisco Rodriguez and the NAACP lawyers would have no time to prepare an appeal. The night before, DeWitt Sinclair attended to Odom’s last meal: “a good dinner” capped off with “about a quart of ice cream.” At about eight p.m., Odom asked permission to make one last telephone call. Sinclair consented, and he led the prisoner, in handcuffs, to a desk down the hall from his cell.

  Gordon Oldham answered the phone when it rang in his Leesburg home; it was a call he’d “remember for the rest of my life.”

  “I’m guilty of what I did, Mr. Oldham,” Odom said, “but all I want to do is live. I don’t want to die.”

  Oldham tried to explain that the case was out of his hands.

  “You can call the governor,” the boy pleaded. “I don’t want to die tomorrow.”

  The state attorney explained again that there was nothing he could do. Then, quietly, he hung up the phone.

  It might have appeared to the public that Sam Wiley Odom had only been grasping at straws in his final days. Certainly he was out of his depth. Without a lawyer at his side, he’d been unable to navigate the political quagmire surrounding the case, and his attempt to save Jesse Daniels from punishment for a crime that he seemed to know Jesse did not commit had backfired. But what was it he’d been so “green” and “dumb” about when he’d first “come up here”? And what was it he’d wised up to in “the death room”? Rumbling under his interviews with Pearl and Mabel, with Oldham, and especially with Yates was that undercurrent of betrayal—as if he had been promised something that he had not received. But what? What had he given (and to whom), and what had he failed to get in return? And however much he’d invented, was there perhaps, among the straws he’d grasped in vain to forestall his fate, an attempt to tell the actual truth?

  On the morning of the 28th, the newspapers were full of Odom’s repudiation. “Odom Admits Hoax to Delay Death,” trumpeted the Orlando Sentinel. Collins again postponed the execution, but only for five hours; he was traveling back to Tallahassee and wanted a little more time to absorb Gordon Oldham’s report. By the time he arrived at the capital, he had made his decision. “I will expect the penalty of the law to be enforced by those responsible at such time they find proper.”

  McCall and Yates made the long drive up to Raiford to serve as witnesses to Odom’s execution through three glass windows that provided a clear view into the death chamber. A handful of other witnesses were already seated when they arrived.

  Odom appeared to be calm when the guards led him to the chair and as they fastened leather straps to his arms, his legs, his waist. He made no statement. “He even smiled,” Yates recalled, “when the hood was placed over his head.” At 1:38 p.m., the switch was thrown; at 1:44 p.m., Sam Wiley Odom was pronounced dead, and his convoluted accounts of the night Blanche Knowles was raped, along with whatever truths might lie within them, were silenced forever.

  In Okahumpka, a heartbroken Laura Cope could barely talk to reporters. She recalled the day that Sam had been arrested by Lake County deputies after the rape of Blanche Knowles; how the meal she’d set out on the table for him was still there when she came home from work. She told one reporter, “I think they like to railroad some and let others go.” She thought “a person like that . . . doesn’t have much of a chance.” She said that she was against capital punishment, and that she never believed her son was guilty of the rape for which he’d been executed. But, she added, “he might have been.”

  PART TWO

  Mabel Norris Reese and daughter Patricia, 1959

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Way of Justice

  THE SUN WAS JUST BEGINNING to set on December 5, 1959, when Officer Jack Hyde of the Mount Dora Police Department responded to a call regarding a domestic incident in East Town, the black section of the city. A woman named Mamie Lee Floyd, it appeared, had been removing some old furniture from her former home when she’d discovered that an itinerant yard worker named Joe Henderson had been squatting in the abandoned house. He had threatened her, and she had called the police.

  To Hyde, a veteran police officer who’d retired after twenty-two years with the overburdened Baltimore Police Department and relocated to tranquil, slow-paced Sylvan Shores, the call seemed to be routine. He was standing with Floyd outside the house and taking down her statement when the front door was flung open, and Joe Henderson fired on Hyde with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Hyde crumpled to the ground, dead.

  Within minutes, other patrolmen and the fire department had arrived. Henderson greeted them, too, with his twelve-gauge; one of the shots struck fireman George Hall in the head. Next on the scene was Hyde’s partner, twenty-nine-year-old Tommy “Buddles” Ledford. Grabbing his buckshot-loaded Browning automatic, Ledford ran around to the back of the house. Darting between cars parked in the yard, he crept closer to the house, then took cover behind a ramshackle shed. Henderson spotted him and fired three times from a first-floor window, just missing his target but not the chickens in the coop behind Ledford. Feathers flew. Ledford scooted out of Henderson’s line of fire and was hiding behind a hedge when the back door of the house cracked open. Ledford didn’t hesitate. One shot from his Browning felled his quarry. Warily, he crossed the yard to the back door, put his foot on the barrel of Henderson’s shotgun, and, grabbing the dead man by the collar, dragged him to the street. “I wanted that bunch of niggers to see him,” Ledford remembered.

  By the time Mabel Norris Reese arrived on the scene, two dead men lay on the ground in front of the Floyd house, and an ambulance was rushing George Hall to the hospital.

  Mabel cornered Ledford. “Did you have to shoot him?” she asked.

  Dum
bfounded, Ledford replied, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Did you try to talk to him?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am. He was shooting at me.”

  Ledford knew Mabel by reputation as a “hell of a newspaper woman”—but “crazy.” He recalled that “she belonged to the NAACP or something, and she hated Willis McCall with a purple passion.” Indeed, when McCall appeared at the crime scene that evening, the reporter slipped away.

  McCall soon heard from witnesses about the heroics of the young policeman who had brought the incident in East Town to an end. “You come work for me,” he said to Ledford. It was more an order than an offer.

  Thomas Lloyd Ledford had been born in Missouri to “a poor dirt farmer and sharecropper who got tired of cotton and corn” and decided to give citrus a try. The family moved to Mount Dora and settled on Grandview Street, “in the last house in the white section,” Ledford recalled, adding pointedly, “but we wasn’t in Pistolville”—Pistolville being the “cracker district” where Mount Dora’s poor white laborers lived. The Platt family had settled in the Pistolville neighborhood for a spell until the Klan chased them out, and so had James Yates.

  After high school, Tom Ledford joined the Army, where he trained as a medic, and was sent to Korea. He was attached to the 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, which, in October 1951, fell under attack on Pork Chop Hill, north of Yeoncheon. For seventy-two hours, surrounded by the enemy, Ledford and thirty-four other men braved heavy fire. Ledford’s automatic rifle got shot out of his hands. Desperate for weaponry, he ran the fifty yards to the nearest bunker, where he found a machine gun in a canvas bag, along with ammunition and a tripod. “I weighed two hundred twenty pounds and was all muscle then,” Ledford said, “so I had to run the gun back up the hill”; three others carried the ammo. By the time they had set up the gun the enemy had mounted a counterattack, and hundreds of Chinese troops, many of them bearing no arms, were charging half-blind up the hill. A wounded line medic fed the five-hundred-round belts into the machine gun as Ledford fired steadily into the enemy troops—“a seventy-five-yard-long train, caught in the open with no place to go.” By his hand, Chinese fell by the dozens.

  After his discharge in 1953, Ledford returned to Lake County, where he took a job and married Ora Mae Knight of Eustis, who chose as her maid of honor none other than Emily “Apache” Brown—the skinny girl who would later set up the two black airmen for arrest at Willis McCall’s cabin in the Scrub. Around the same time, Ledford joined the Dunkers Club, a front for the Mount Dora chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. He was recruited by his father, a longtime member, who lamented, “It ain’t the same as it was. It’s more politics now.”

  The Dunkers met at a clubhouse built by a cattleman in the woods on Lake Jem, some fifty yards off the road. Its members, “usually about thirty men, standing in the dark,” came from Lake, Orange, and Seminole counties. The meetings, as Ledford’s father had complained, focused mostly on politics and “situations.” “A big citrus man came in, running for state senator,” Ledford recalled. “He wanted our support. But we didn’t like him.” “Situations” had included the Platt family’s moving into Pistolville and putting their children in the public school, or “if a nigger raped a white woman . . . or there was breaking into homes.” As Ledford saw it, the Dunkers Club worked with law enforcement, not against it, unless the police and sheriff’s departments failed to deal properly with a situation. “If it was handled by the police, it would be ignored. But if it wasn’t handled right, we’d do it ourself.”

  By the late 1950s, Mount Dorans had gotten used to seeing the cavalcade of cars carrying men in white robes and hoods through the town’s streets at night, bound for East Town. There the hooded Klansmen would burn crosses at the corner of Grandview and Grant Streets, to keep “niggers in line.” Ledford recounted the process. “You build the cross at the location. You take a posthole digger and go two feet down. It’s already wrapped with cheesecloth. Then you pour gas and soak the cloth, stand it up and burn it.”

  Ledford recalled it was the Dunkers who’d burned a cross on the front lawn of the Reeses’ home, because Mabel had been “stirring up a ton of trouble” with her newspaper and the club had decided she needed some lessoning. He admitted knowing some of the men responsible, and noted that it was his brother, Roy, who’d painted the cross on the sidewalk in front of the Topic’s office. And although Ledford himself had not thrown the bombs that exploded in Mabel’s yard, he had supplied the materials—munitions that he’d taken from Camp Blanding, the training base for the Florida Army National Guard just east of Raiford, which were “probably equivalent to a half stick of dynamite.” He had ended up giving them to Ty Parker, a boy he’d known in high school. “Ty liked me and he hated Mabel,” Ledford said. “The whole town had turned against her. Integration did not take well in Lake County.” Parker wasn’t in the Dunkers Club, Ledford noted. “He just wanted to scare her. I saw him later and asked, ‘Did you scare her?’ and his eyes lit up. ‘Hell, yes!’”

  Ledford had been working at the Lake County Sheriff’s Department for only a few months when he responded to the report of a prowler in Eustis. On his arrival, two Eustis police officers, Captain Jesse Burrow and auxiliary patrolman Harold Blumenberg, were questioning a “slightly intoxicated” fifty-three-year-old black man named William Bowen, known to the officers as Neckbone. Neckbone was in high spirits, joking with one of the officers about having been drunk earlier in the evening. A splotch of blood had dried under his nose, and his clothes looked as if he might have been lying on the ground. The Eustis policemen were about to release him, but Ledford, in an “extremely authoritative” manner, advanced on Bowen and shoved him toward his cruiser. Ledford pushed Bowen into the rear seat and then drove away.

  At about one a.m., Burrow and Blumenberg were summoned to the Lake County jail in Tavares. William Bowen’s body was lying on the hallway floor between the booking desk and the cellblock; “a large smear of blood” discolored the right hallway wall and blood had pooled on the floor next to the body. Bowen’s face and head appeared to be badly bruised, bloody, and cut up. Glover Johnson, who owned a funeral home in Eustis, took Blumenberg aside and pointed out the skull fracture on the left side of Bowen’s head as well as a severe trauma to the back of his head, which caused a deputy to snap at Johnson to “stop meddling and take that nigger away.”

  Elmer and Delmer Wilkinson, teenage brothers who were locked in the cellblock at the time, told Blumenberg that during the night they’d heard what sounded to them like an older black man “begging not to be locked in a cell.” In a small shaving mirror that Delmer held through the bars, he’d seen two deputies, one of them Tom Ledford, “supporting a Negro male by the arms.” The commotion got louder—the black man protesting, the deputies swearing—and then the brothers had heard “three loud slapping noises” before everything went silent. After a few minutes, they’d heard voices, at once animated and hushed, and flashbulbs popping. A black trusty—a prisoner given special privileges—told the brothers that “a man had been beaten to death in the hallway.”

  A brief article in the Orlando Sentinel reported that William Bowen had “collapsed and died while being booked” at the jail. McCall told the paper that in a few days, after an autopsy had been performed, the results would be turned over to a coroner’s jury. Deputy William Hamner, who photographed the body, said that “there was nothing to indicate the death was not from natural causes.”

  Ledford later stated that he and two other deputies were escorting Bowen to a cell when Bowen “gave out a small cry, threw his arms out, and started to fall to the floor.” Ledford caught him, he told investigators, and “lowered him to a sitting position on the floor leaning against the wall.” He said that Neckbone was prone to seizures, and he recalled that in the jail that night Bowen had had a “fit,” and that he had “grabbed him until his fit was over.” He denied striking, or seeing anyone else strike, the prisoner. T
he coroner’s jury concluded that Bowen had died of natural causes. No charges were filed, and the case was closed. The results were not surprising; as Ledford admitted, McCall controlled the coroner’s juries by filling them with “people Willis knew.”

  Kiser Hardaway’s family owned Superior Cleaners in Leesburg, which provided uniform dry-cleaning services for the Lake County Sheriff’s Department. It wasn’t uncommon, he said, for a deputy, or even McCall himself, to drop into the store and request his service on a coroner’s inquest. What was expected of the jurors was clear, he said, recalling one such case, a homicide inquiry involving a deputy’s use of force. “Let me say it this way. I wouldn’t want my sons pulled over by McCall’s men.”

  Bowen’s wasn’t the only case in which a suspect or detainee met with questionable behavior on Ledford’s part. He himself later recounted how, answering a call at a Lake County public housing unit, “I went in and a guy raked me down the back with a linoleum knife. I grabbed him, slammed him, and played ‘pop-the-whip’ with him against the wall. Pop! Pop! Pop!”

  Not only had the suspect “died on me,” Ledford recalled, but when deputies called to the scene searched for the linoleum knife, none of them could find it until one of them spotted it “hanging in my wallet in my back pocket.” No investigation ensued, and no stories about the man’s death appeared in the local newspapers. “The nigger was a nobody,” Ledford recalled. “No family. He was just buried and that was that.” Willis McCall, when he heard about the mess of blood at the scene, told Ledford, “You should have just shot him.”