by Gilbert King
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THE DISTANCE and the price of bus tickets allowed Pearl and Charles Daniels only one visit a month to Chattahoochee. Pearl usually made the trip alone, and she’d return home with more questions than answers about her son’s condition. Letters to the institution would follow. The drop in Jesse’s weight alarmed her; wasn’t there “something in the way of a tonic or medicine” the doctors could provide to “help build him up”? She worried about his medications, though she had been assured by Jesse that the pills (Tofranil) he’d been given for depression had “helped his feelings quite a lot.” She fretted that the gifts, supplies, and dollar bills she sent as regularly as she could afford weren’t reaching him.
Mabel, meanwhile, wrote again to Governor Collins regarding Jesse’s case, which prompted Collins to write to Florida State Hospital superintendent W. D. Rogers and ask for further clarification as to Jesse’s mental competence and his ability to aid in his own defense, were he to stand trial on rape charges. Rogers replied that Jesse could not be released without the consent of the Fifth Circuit Court.
Not satisfied with the response from Chattahoochee, Mabel again sought out a lawyer to assist in the case. Her friend Walker Kennedy, who had unsuccessfully defended Odom, and his young associate Tom Champion devised a legal strategy that focused on a Florida statute allowing the court to commit defendants verified as “insane.” In a letter to a psychiatrist at Chattahoochee, Champion argued that while physicians at the hospital had found Jesse to be mentally deficient and “retarded,” nowhere in the hospital’s report to the court had he been deemed “insane.” The aim of this strategy was not to free Jesse, but to get him transferred to another institution “which might be more in line with his disability.”
Virtually any institution might have been less worrisome for Jesse than Chattahoochee. Kenneth Donaldson was forty-eight years old when he was committed to Chattahoochee in 1957, the year before Jesse Daniels arrived. The Philadelphia native had been visiting his elderly parents in Florida, and they had become alarmed when he’d voiced his suspicion that a neighbor up North had been poisoning his food. Donaldson had been treated for paranoid schizophrenia at a Philadelphia hospital earlier that year, and his father had feared that he was once again suffering delusions and fostering dangerous, irrational thoughts. His parents had thus signed an “inquisition of incompetency,” which authorized deputies to place Donaldson under arrest. When Donaldson attempted to explain to a cellmate at the Pinellas County jail that his arrest was due to a misunderstanding and that officials would soon see “that I’m not nuts,” the cellmate replied ominously: “You don’t know these people. They’ll put you in Chattahoochee. You can’t get out.”
Sure enough, lacking legal representation, Donaldson was committed against his will to Florida State Hospital, where he spent every waking day engaged in a Kafkaesque battle to prove that he was being illegally imprisoned. Throughout his hospitalization, he kept meticulous diaries, which he successfully hid from hospital staff. He also managed to smuggle out letters—to newspapers like the Tampa Tribune, to lawyers and politicians—where he described the squalid conditions, institutionalized abuse, scarcity of staff, and lack of medical treatment at the facility.
The patients on Ward 1, where Jesse Daniels was also housed, were particularly affected by constant noise, Donaldson wrote. “We lived in aimless pacing plus stress.” When Donaldson complained about the severely limited access to doctors and treatment, Dr. J. B. O’Connor, the physician who had also been charged with Jesse’s care, told him that he was receiving “milieu therapy”—“a euphemism for confinement in the ‘milieu’ of a mental hospital.” Donaldson recalled telling a morning attendant shortly after his arrival how he wasn’t “nuts” and didn’t belong on the ward. In a rare moment of candor, and even of empathy, the attendant commented, “We’re getting tired of having so many railroaded here.”
Donaldson didn’t think that Jesse Daniels belonged at Chattahoochee any more than he did. Donaldson saw Jesse as a “slow, timorous individual” who was “neither retarded nor crazy.” For both patients, though, the years were passing, and the warning from Donaldson’s former cellmate was proving true.
In the fall of 1959, a letter written by a patient in the colored male department at Florida State Hospital was smuggled out and delivered to the NAACP. Signed “Patient X”—out of fear of “retaliatory action”—the letter described the hospital’s treatment of black patients as, in effect, institutionalized slavery. They were forced, for instance, to clean up the white patients’ dining room and do their laundry, and if they failed to comply, on the orders of white supervisors they were “beaten with metal chains, leather belts, rubber hoses and boards,” sometimes to the point of unconsciousness. The conditions described by Patient X got front-page coverage in black newspapers like the Chicago Defender, which bannered its exposé “Bare Florida Slavery.” White newspapers picked up the story, and the Tampa Tribune carried out its own investigation, taking the hospital to task for its brutal treatment of patients.
The negative publicity spurred the Committee on State Institutions to conduct a thorough study of the conditions at the hospital. Its report, released in early 1961, was grim in its discoveries of cruelty, abuse, violence, and extremely low morale among both patients and staff. It found especially troubling the white male department, which had become a dumping ground of sorts: “Criminal patients, sexual psychopaths, elderly feeble and helpless patients and teen-age boys” were crammed in there together, in wards that were maintained more as “detention wards for inmates than hospital wards for the sick.”
The study cited testimony from present and former patients, who voiced complaints about “terrible” food—powdered eggs for breakfast, prunes at lunch, nearly inedible “bone stew” for dinner—and about overmedication. Many of the patients were “so doped up” they could hardly converse with investigators. If patients resisted medication, attendants forced the pills down their throats.
Attendants, many of them illiterate or alcoholic, were said to have no qualms about going through packages sent to patients, especially at Christmas, and routinely taking whatever they wanted before passing on the remainder. One patient in the white female department told how she’d been “thrown in a cage” with her clothes ripped off and then forced to sleep naked on a bare concrete floor. Another patient, in the colored male department, recounted random beatings and indignities like being required to work barefoot or insufficiently clothed.
John Epright, a patient in the white male department, testified that he had seen “patients being given shock treatment and packed in ice, or put in steel handcuffs for six months at a time, not for treatment but because these men tried to escape or did escape.” Some of the attendants “make patients have homosexual relations,” Epright said, and related how problem patients were put on “the Squad” and kept there for weeks. “That is where most of the beatings and brutal treatment occurs. Ask any patient at the hospital—he can tell you how he fears the Squad.”
Kenneth Holloway was one of those patients. In June 1959, when he got into an altercation with another patient, three attendants beat him and choked him, then strapped him “upside down from the bars for one hour” as punishment. An attendant named Joseph Craig confirmed such brutality, and disclosed that “attendants could beat the patients on the Squad as much as they wanted to” without fear of retribution from staff officials.
Mail got lost. Theft abounded. Suicides, suicide attempts, and self-mutilations occurred in all the wards. Medical treatment was, at best, inadequate, but narcotics, smuggled into the wards by attendants, were rife.
Because of the rape charge against him, Jesse was locked in the criminal ward with the most violent offenders. Doctors described him as “disoriented” when he first arrived at Chattahoochee, where his “docile” and compliant nature made him an easy target for other patients as well as for attendants. One pa
tient punched him in the face. In the event of such altercations, the attendants usually punished both parties, often by placing them in handcuffs for whatever period of time they chose. Sometimes, Jesse recalled, “the guards would take towels and try to choke us, just out of pure meanness.” It was the guards whom Jesse feared most. “They made me crawl on my knees and clean the commodes and do all sorts of things to earn tokens to pay them, so I could sleep on my bed,” he said. “Otherwise, we slept on the floor.”
The report corroborated this kind of abuse as common practice, and noted that attendants who “choke down disturbed patients for the purpose of subduing them” could always “fall back on a fabricated alibi that the patient was violent.” The problems created by overcrowding and incompetent attendants were compounded by a shortage of physicians. Before 1960, in the white male department, the report noted, “there was only one doctor responsible for the care and treatment of approximately 1,000 patients in wards one through ten and the maximum security building.” Because doctors were forced to devote “a large portion of their working day to answering court correspondence” as well as correspondence with the families of each patient, it was not uncommon, the report found, for patients to go years without seeing a physician.
Jesse endured the cruelty of the attendants and the arbitrary violence of other patients. Moreover, because he had been committed to the hospital by court order and in the face of criminal charges, he was housed on the criminal ward and under constant lockdown. To discourage escape attempts and attacks on attendants, the hospital administration had prohibited use of the yard for “patients with charges.” By March 1960, it had been two years since he had been outside the gloomy hallways of Chattahoochee. The most he could capture of Florida’s sun were the rays strained through a steel-grated ward window; it was his favorite place.
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IN EARLY 1960, Tom Ledford was assigned a new partner in the sheriff’s department: Evvie Griffin. Griffin proved to be a calming influence at a time when the new deputy much needed it: Ledford was having marriage problems; Ora Mae was sleeping around on him, he knew, and they had a young son to consider. Although by nature a man of few words, Griffin shared some of his own marital experience with his new partner. A decade before, at twenty, Griffin had married sixteen-year-old Nancy Driver. Barely a year later, she left him a note saying she’d gone to New York to pursue a career as a fashion model. She succeeded: Her image soon graced the covers of magazines like Vogue, Mademoiselle, and Harper’s Bazaar, and over time she landed parts in television shows and in movies like Blue Hawaii, starring Elvis Presley. She and Griffin had officially divorced in 1951, and Nancy Driver Griffin had changed her name to Nancy Walters.
Around midnight on March 10, Griffin and Ledford stopped for coffee at the Dona Vista Drive Inn just outside Umatilla. They were shooting the breeze with a few Eustis policemen when a report came in over the radio about a breaking-and-entering case in Fruitland Park, not far from the Bosanquet place. Also a “possible rape,” the radio operator added, and requested assistance from the Lake County Sheriff’s Department. The two deputies jumped into Griffin’s car, picked up the department’s tracking dogs, Buck and Red, and sped on to Fruitland Park.
When they arrived at the scene, they learned that the victim, a fifty-six-year-old white woman named Charlotte Wass, had stumbled, bloodied and disheveled, to a neighbor’s home, and had since been taken to Durham Young Hospital in Leesburg, where she was treated for a fractured skull and other injuries. Griffin and Ledford secured the area to prevent valuable evidence from being destroyed, including three partial footprints in the sandy soil that they covered with buckets and pots. Thunder rolled in the distance; rain was imminent.
With police and other deputies taking statements from neighbors, Griffin harnessed up the bloodhounds in hopes of getting them on the scent before the rain began. A handkerchief that Ledford found at the scene led the dogs and the two deputies to the home of “an elderly Negro” about a mile and a half away. Inside, increasingly eager, Buck and Red pulled the deputies into a bedroom where two twenty-year-old black citrus workers, Robert Shuler and Levi Summers, lay sleeping. The bloodhounds, Griffin said, would normally identify suspects in this situation by putting “two front paws on the bed and then smelling,” but instead the dogs excitedly jumped into both beds.
After the deputies had placed Shuler and Summers under arrest and transported them to the Leesburg city jail, they proceeded to the hospital in order to question Charlotte Wass about the attack. Wass was still under sedation, a doctor informed them, though he was otherwise vague as to her condition and the nature of the attack. He would not state that the victim had been raped, so Griffin and Ledford treated the crime as an assault and battery. The two deputies returned to the crime scene at Fruitland Park, but by 3:30 a.m. the rain had become so intense that they could not continue their investigation. They picked up the two prisoners in Leesburg and moved them to the Lake County jail, where James Yates and another deputy, Lucius Clark, began questioning them. The interrogation led to the capture of a third suspect, twenty-three-year-old Jerry Chatman—arrested at Fain Theater later that evening.
Later, when Griffin ran into McCall and attempted to brief him on the case, the sheriff groused, “You got the wrong niggers.”
“They the right ones,” Griffin insisted. “Buck and Red jumped in bed with ’em.”
McCall huffed. He’d already had three suspects arrested in Oklawaha; now he’d be forced to release them and tell reporters they had only been “wanted for questioning.” Whoever the three were, it was clear to Griffin that McCall had intended, for whatever sinister reason of his own, to charge them with the crime, and he was upset that he had to let them go. To Griffin’s mind, this was yet another instance of McCall’s abuse of authority, and it added another to his growing list of questions about the integrity of the Lake County Sheriff’s Department.
On Friday, March 11, assistant state attorney John W. McCormick interviewed Charlotte Wass, the victim in what became known as the Fruitland Park rape case. The press described Wass as a “spinster,” although her neighbors referred to her as “the funny-acting lady” down the road. She was as gentle and “harmless as she was eccentric,” they said; and poor—so poor that she had no electricity or running water in her tarpapered shack. Every morning she’d show up at a neighbor’s home with a pail to “borrow” some drinking water.
Wass recounted for McCormick how on the previous Saturday evening, a few nights before the attack, some men standing outside her house had been tapping on her windows, pestering her.
“Say, let us in,” one of the men said.
“No, you can’t come in,” Wass replied. “It is bedtime.”
When the men persisted, Wass told them that a Negro woman down the road kept a shack for laboring-camp people. “I am sure she will take you in and give you something to eat and a place for the night,” she said.
The men left, but on Tuesday night they returned.
Again a voice said, “Let us in. Let us in.”
“Why, no, you can’t come in,” Wass answered, warning, “I will throw a pan of water at you if you don’t go on.”
At that, Wass said, one of them “ripped off” the back door, and a boy of maybe seventeen broke the window glass and hit her over the head—with what, she wasn’t sure, but she thought it might have been a hammer. Then an older man grabbed her.
“Twenty, twenty-one years old?” McCormick asked.
“Oh, no,” Wass said. “He must have been in his forties or close to his fifties.” The older man began strangling her, she said, while the younger one started rummaging through her house, looking for money.
“Whether he raped me or not, I don’t know,” Wass admitted, “because all I know is he kept strangling me, strangling me and strangling me.”
“Could you have blacked out?” McCormick asked.
> “I don’t know,” Wass told him, “but he never left my throat.”
Wass did know the boy, she said; she’d seen him around Fruitland Park, she was certain, and she’d recognize him if she saw him again. It was the older man, though, who concerned her: “I just begged him not to touch me and take his hands off me,” she recalled. “Now, I believe then he raped me, I really do.”
“Do you think you were unconscious when he raped you?” McCormick asked.
“Well, I think I was just so . . . he had his hands right here on my throat, right up under here,” she said. “Well, if a person would bend over you this way, he would have his hand right there, wouldn’t he?”
Wass thought it over, and focused on the older man. It occurred to her that she might have recognized him as well; she thought he might be a man who lived behind her and had bought a couple of turkeys from her. His build was similar.
“What is that man’s name?” McCormick asked.
“That is Mr. Glenn. He works for the dairy and he is a very good friend of mine.”
The older man was “about this fellow Glenn’s age?” McCormick asked.
“Yeah . . . he was probably younger, but he moved so quickly.”
“How old is this Mr. Glenn?”
“He must be about forty-five,” Wass said. “He has been very, very kind to me.”
“You think this man would be about forty, is that right?”
“Yes,” Wass said. “He was much older than this younger boy.”
Wass told McCormick that she’d had a look at the two suspects that morning at the hospital when Yates and Clark brought them by for identification purposes.