Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  “Did you recognize either of those boys?” McCormick asked.

  “No,” Wass said. “Not especially. But they could have been those boys.”

  But neither Shuler nor Summers resembled either of the men she’d described. Of course, the lighting in the hospital was different from that in her home at night, Wass said, and at any rate one’s sense of sight might not be the most reliable means of identification. The statement left McCormick confused. “I know the smell of Mr. Glenn’s voice or breath,” Wass explained. “I have been around him enough that I can tell, just the same as you can tell that girl’s breath.” (She indicated the stenographer.) “It was real dark, but couldn’t you tell the smell of her complexion and the smell of her body if she was two feet in front of you?”

  “No, I couldn’t,” McCormick said.

  “Oh, I think you can tell,” Wass said. “Everybody has skin that is different.”

  McCormick left the interview convinced that the case was in trouble. Wass could not identify either Shuler or Summers, and worse, their ages did not match her description of her attackers. McCormick arranged to have Gordon Oldham meet with the victim. The state attorney emerged from his interview with the same opinion. He found Wass “completely incompetent,” unfit for the witness stand. In fact, to eliminate the risk of her testimony ever being heard in court, he had her committed to Florida State Hospital at Chattahoochee. Without an eyewitness, the state would have to take its chances with the physical evidence found at the scene of the crime.

  By March 12, word about the confusion around the identities of the rape suspects had reached a group of Klansmen in North Florida, and Willis McCall had heard murmurs of a planned lynching. At a meeting of the Mount Dora Dunkers Club, McCall asked J. T. “Bud” Huett—the club president and a longtime police officer who’d recently been promoted to police chief—to take a ride up to Jasper, close to the Georgia border, and have a talk with the men who were making noise up there.

  “Okay,” Huett told the sheriff. “I’ll take Tom Ledford with me.”

  McCall peered into the darkness as Ledford stepped forward. “Willis’s eyes got big as silver dollars,” Ledford recalled. “That’s when he knew about me.” Dunkers Club leaders didn’t want anyone getting involved in situations of this sort if they weren’t “in the unit.” (Huett himself would gain notoriety a few years later when he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee on Klan activities. He offered testimony about the Dunkers Club and its possible Klan affiliations without benefit of an attorney—unlike previous witnesses—until, apparently recognizing that he was getting in deep, he refused to answer further. “I didn’t know you were going to give me the third degree here,” he said.)

  “Okay,” McCall told Huett, now that he understood about Ledford. “Take him and go.”

  They went, and the two placated their fellow Klansmen up north with assurances that McCall would bring the “right niggers” to justice.

  Two months later, the trial began, with circuit judge D. R. Smith presiding (Truman Futch having passed away in March). The state attorney’s office had worked out a deal for Levi Summers on the condition that he testify against Shuler and Chatman, both of whom claimed that they had been forced into giving “involuntary confessions.” Shuler said that he had been physically abused and that deputies had “threatened to turn me over to a mob if I did not cooperate,” whereas Chatman attested that he’d been kept in a “steel-enclosed cell with no windows and nothing but a mattress to sleep on for two days” and that he’d been told he would not be allowed to see his wife until he confessed. Both Shuler and Chatman were represented by Francisco Rodriguez of the NAACP, who argued that the confessions had been obtained through use of brutality and therefore should not be introduced at trial. Judge Smith disagreed; he allowed the two signed confessions to be introduced as evidence.

  Also introduced into evidence were casts of a dozen or so perfect footprints. Griffin knew that Yates and Clark had collected all three suspects’ shoes. Yet when he’d asked Yates about the condition of footprints he and Ledford had attempted to preserve at the crime scene by covering them with buckets and pots, Yates had told him that the prints hadn’t been complete enough to make plaster casts. In May, however, as Oldham was rehearsing the state’s witnesses in preparation for the trial, Griffin had mentioned the hard rain that had fallen in the early hours of the investigation. “Don’t mention the rain,” Oldham had interrupted him. “It will mess things up.” At trial, Ledford had testified about covering the footprints at the scene with pots to protect them, but when asked if the plaster casts in evidence had been taken from those he’d covered at the scene, he’d replied truthfully that he could not say, since he hadn’t been present when the casts were made.

  On July 7, 1960, after deliberating only slightly more than an hour, the all-white male jury convicted Shuler and Chatman of rape, with no recommendation for mercy. Judge Smith sentenced them to death by electrocution in September at Raiford.

  Outside the courtroom, Griffin ran into Lucius Clark. Where, he wondered, had Clark found those perfect footprints Oldham had introduced into evidence? He and Yates had poured the casts in Clark’s backyard, the deputy answered without hesitation, elaborating with some pride on the process by which they had made a more pronounced hole in the cast so that it would better match the sole of one of the defendants’ shoes.

  That gave Griffin pause. He recalled talk around the department about the footprints in the Groveland case, and the perfect plaster casts of them that had likewise been entered into evidence after Yates had confiscated the shoes of the defendants, and how the casts had been mysteriously broken before the defense had had a chance to examine them. He recalled how, after Jesse Daniels had been sent off to Chattahoochee, Yates had bragged of discovering a guitar pick on the floor of the Knowles home. As it turned out, all the physical evidence Yates had collected—the undershorts, the footprints, the guitar pick—had proved to be immaterial, because Jesse Daniels had not had his day in court, and it appeared he never would. Still, it all pointed up why Willis McCall had made Yates his chief criminal deputy: “Yates got shit done for Willis.”

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  BY AUGUST 1960, the Reeses had no choice but to sell the Topic. It was no longer economically feasible for Mabel to devote the time necessary to meet the Topic’s editorial demands while also writing for the Daytona Beach News-Journal, and she couldn’t afford to hire help. The competing Mount Dora Herald itself survived only a year, but that was long enough to do permanent damage to the Topic by luring away advertisers who never returned. “McCall eventually did get to me financially,” Mabel admitted.

  Paul had always been supportive of Mabel’s crusades for justice in Lake County, despite the economic consequences. “He never said quit,” Mabel recalled. But the financial stress generated by the decline and eventual failure of the Topic had taken its toll on their marriage. With Patricia off at college, she and Paul had talked about moving to Daytona Beach together, but by September that prospect had become tenuous. Paul relocated to South Florida to be closer to his daughter from a previous marriage. Mabel left Lake County for Daytona Beach, where the editor of the News-Journal, Herbert Davidson, and his wife, Liliane, welcomed her on board full-time.

  The couple had met at the Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia University and graduated together in 1918. When Herbert’s father, Julius, had purchased majority interest in the News-Journal in 1928, the Davidsons had moved to Daytona, and they had been working at the paper ever since. The Davidsons and Mabel shared a similar journalistic vision, and mission. In assuming her new position, Mabel promised to continue her pursuit of justice through journalism while also reporting and writing editorials on important civil and governmental issues in Daytona Beach. “I feel the newspaper has to take this sort of leadership,” she said. “It’s a newspaper’s responsibility to the community.”
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  TOM LEDFORD’S MARITAL PROBLEMS had deepened. Gossip brought to Evvie Griffin’s attention that Ora Mae was sleeping with another deputy on the force and that the lovers were planning a rendezvous at Willis McCall’s cabin in the Scrub. Griffin felt he had to tell his partner. Ledford made up his mind to confront his wife there. Bud Huett agreed to accompany him, to ensure that the situation, and his friend’s quick temper, didn’t get out of control. “Bud wouldn’t let me take my gun,” Ledford recalled.

  The scene that greeted them on their arrival at the cabin confirmed the rumor Griffin had heard. Yet to his own surprise, Ledford realized that the sight of his wife and her lover did not enrage him. He was simply depressed by what his eye could not deny, and dismayed when he saw that his young son was also present. He told Ora Mae on the spot that he wanted a divorce, which a court granted to him a few months later. He got custody as well, but his son did not want to live with him.

  Gordon Oldham was also dealing with adultery issues—his own. The state attorney had been carrying on an affair with Audrey Dillard, the socialite wife of Charles Dillard, a prominent businessman and member of the Leesburg Quarterback Club. In the fall of 1960, Charles caught them together in St. Petersburg. The strain this put on the Dillards’ marriage extended to the family’s social dealings with Gordon Oldham, and the acrimony intensified when it became clear that Audrey was not interested in patching up her marriage to Charles but wanted to leave him for Oldham. Charles decided to grant her wish. With Audrey in tow, he confronted Oldham at his Leesburg office and announced that he’d gladly divorce her so that the two could continue their relationship. Oldham was stunned. “Oh, no,” he told Dillard. “I’m married.”

  The confrontation in Oldham’s office aggravated the already bitter relations between the Dillards and Oldham. Indeed, there was a rumor afoot of a plan to have Oldham killed, when McCall waded into the conflict. The sheriff, who knew the Dillard family well, intervened on Oldham’s behalf, it was said, and “smoothed the thing over.”

  Only then Charles Dillard failed to show up for a Quarterback Club trip to Baton Rouge, where the Gators were playing the Louisiana State University Tigers. A Dillard family member said Charles had canceled because Gordon Oldham was also going, but it soon became apparent that Charles Dillard had in fact disappeared. A search was mounted, and his body was eventually found in a cabin in the Ocala National Forest, “the top of his head blown off.” When a family member notified Audrey of the gruesome discovery of her husband’s body, he felt “from the way she acted” that she “might have already known about the death.”

  What you believed about how Charles Dillard died depended on whom you listened to. Jack Hooten, a grove service operator and Lake County commissioner from 1956 to 1958, had joined the Klan “mainly to find out who were in the Ku Klux Klan and what was going on,” as he later told investigators. What he found out was that Sheriff Willis McCall was the “main power” behind the Klan in Lake County—that he “controlled it.” Hooten also stated McCall “has either killed a lot of people or had something to do with people being killed in Lake County,” more often than not to his personal advantage. Since Dillard’s death, Hooten noted significantly, McCall had “been able to control Gordon Oldham” as if the two were “bed partners.” “No one should underestimate the power of Willis McCall in Lake County,” Hooten asserted, “and his capability of doing dirty work to anyone who opposes him.”

  Tom Ledford, however, claimed to have seen Dillard’s suicide note, which, he recalled, was “mostly about how he wanted his estate split up.” Dillard family members were convinced that Charles’s death “wasn’t anything but suicide,” as evidenced by a two-page handwritten note on a table in the cabin and by “a high powered rifle between his legs.” One said, “I know Charles took his life over a piece of tail. It was his pride that got in the way.” And the same family member professed fondness for the “firm but fair” sheriff of Lake County: “Tell it straight about McCall. He was a good man.”

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  PEARL DANIELS was worried about her husband. “We have just got to do something,” she wrote to Mabel, or Jesse’s father was going to “go out of his mind. He’s like a wild frantic thing.” Pearl herself was feeling desperate. By the end of 1960, her hope that the state attorney’s office would bring her son to trial, and so free him from Chattahoochee, was just about gone.

  Mabel, however, perceived a new opportunity for Jesse’s release. W. Troy Hall, who had run unopposed for county judge on the Fifth Circuit Court after Truman Futch’s death in March 1960, seemed in general to have resisted the pull of Willis McCall’s influence. The judge had become friendly, too, with Pearl, and Mabel believed that he had also become convinced of Jesse’s innocence. The lawyer Tom Champion agreed, and in February 1961, he filed a petition in Hall’s court requesting that Jesse Daniels be transferred from Florida State Hospital at Chattahoochee to Sunland Training Center in Gainesville, where Jesse’s needs would be more suitably met. He provided correspondence indicating that the Gainesville facility would approve of such a transfer. All that was needed was a court order.

  One week later, Gordon Oldham filed a motion to dismiss the petition on behalf of Jesse Daniels, and a few days after that, he filed a motion to disqualify Judge Hall from the case. In June, Oldham filed a third motion, in which he called for the state to “delay further hearing on said petition of the Defendant.” The court found Oldham’s motions “without merit,” but the state attorney did succeed in one respect: Judge Hall was removed from the case and replaced by circuit judge Carroll W. Fussell.

  At a March 1961 hearing, Champion argued that Jesse Daniels was, according to the Florida State Hospital psychiatrists’ report, a “mentally defective child” who should never have been sent to Chattahoochee. Nowhere in the report, Champion noted, had Jesse been diagnosed as “insane.” Futch alone, speaking for the court at the sanity hearing in 1958, had deemed him so without any kind of corroborating assessment. Oldham quickly pointed out that Jesse’s attorney at the time, Sam Buie, had waived the need for such corroboration. The court agreed, and the legal setbacks mounted. Pearl Daniels was running out of options, and Charles Daniels, his health failing, was running out of time.

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  BY AUGUST 1962, time was also running out for Robert Shuler and Jerry Chatman. Since the close of their trial, the NAACP had appealed their convictions, made their case to the Florida pardon board, and filed petitions to stay their executions, all to no avail. They were scheduled for the electric chair at Raiford in less than a week when, out of the blue, according to Robert Saunders, a man from Lake County showed up unannounced at NAACP headquarters in Tampa and asked to speak with an attorney there. “He says that it involves the two black men who are supposed to die in the chair,” Margie Johnson, Saunders’s secretary, informed him.

  Waiting in the reception room was a white man wearing cowboy boots and blue jeans held up by a belt with a big silver buckle, and carrying a Stetson. He looked, Saunders thought, uncomfortably out of place. No one would ever have imagined the day that Evvie Griffin would turn up, hat in hand, inside NAACP headquarters. But he had a story he’d decided finally to tell.

  Saunders summoned a colleague, attorney Francisco Rodriguez, to his office. The three men shook hands. Then Griffin launched into a tale of unparalleled corruption and bigotry, Saunders recalled. “He confessed that Chatman and Shuler had been accused intentionally and fraudulently and that the convictions had been attained based upon trumped-up evidence,” and recounted what he had learned from Deputy Lucius Clark about the plaster casts. Griffin “had decided that he could no longer stand idly by and see injustice continued,” Saunders said.

  Rodriguez moved quickly. That afternoon he petitioned for stays of execution, citing the new evidence. As quickly, Judge Hall stayed both executions for forty
days, to allow the NAACP attorneys time to prepare an appeal. Then Judge Hall made a phone call.

  Fifty miles away in Daytona Beach, a reporter hung up the phone, sharpened a few pencils, and picked up her notepad. Then she drove west, back to Lake County, to confront her old nemesis once again.

  James Brock, manager of the segregated Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, pouring muriatic acid in the motel pool near protesters

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  If It Takes All Summer

  TOM LEDFORD HAD KNOWN his days in the Lake County Sheriff’s Department were numbered once he refused to “play along” with Gordon Oldham’s line of questioning and vouch for the integrity of Deputy Yates’s footprint casts during the Fruitland Park rape case trial. Before Ledford’s appearance in court, Oldham had summoned the deputy to his office and told him, “This is what you’re going to testify to: You covered the prints and Yates and Clark poured them.” Ledford was dumbfounded. “I’d get twenty years if they caught me lying,” he recalled.

  McCall, too, had turned on the deputy. “I was Willis’s fair-haired boy for a while,” Ledford said. “Not after that.” Sure enough, McCall soon dismissed Ledford from the department for his “overbearing tactics,” but Bud Huett quickly hired him for Mount Dora’s police force.

  Evvie Griffin’s fall from McCall’s grace occurred in a moment of naiveté. He was riding with McCall in the sheriff’s Oldsmobile when he felt compelled to share some disturbing information he’d learned: A fellow deputy, Doug Sewell, was taking payments from moonshiners in Volusia County and also running “chicken fights” in Pine Lakes. The disclosure was not appreciated. McCall responded with a cold stare, and they passed the rest of the ride in stony silence. The next day, Griffin was suspended for a week without pay.