Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  Next, Dr. Herbert C. Anderson, a board-certified psychiatrist with an impressive pedigree and a private practice in both Miami and Tallahassee, not only concurred that Jesse did not belong at Chattahoochee but also mentioned that a Dr. Gumanis there, with whom he had spoken extensively, was of the same opinion and had in fact brought Jesse before the staff “with the hope of gaining his release, and each time he was outvoted.”

  “You disagree with the diagnosis at the hospital, I take it?” Husfeld asked.

  “That’s a hard question to answer,” Anderson said. “I am under oath. I agree with his physician; his physician says he has repeatedly brought him before the . . . I think the phrase was ‘staff for release,’ and he had repeatedly failed to obtain his release. I have searched my brain and I guess my heart. I guess that’s what you do when you are in a situation like this, and I can’t understand, based on my experiences in Tallahassee, why this man is a patient at the Florida State Hospital. I am troubled by it.”

  Husfeld next called Gumanis himself. He testified to Jesse’s obedience and excellent conduct over his years at the hospital. When asked about any delusions Jesse might suffer, Gumanis acknowledged that Jesse had been known to express “paranoid ideas that he was framed and all of that, if that is a delusion.” But he was clear that Jesse had never been “actively psychotic.” Again, the only evidence of his delusion seemed to be the fact that he denied the crime of which he had been accused. Oldham, on cross-examination, got the Chattahoochee doctor to admit that the hospital considered Jesse Daniels “medically” insane and that his low IQ rendered him incompetent to stand trial. But Husfeld pushed the point: Had Jesse been found mentally incompetent by the doctors at Florida State Hospital because of his low IQ, or “because he was psychotic, because he denied committing a crime?”

  “I don’t know,” Gumanis admitted. “It could be.”

  And so they came to Jesse himself. Oldham declared his approval of the proposal to have him testify, and although he refused to offer Jesse immunity, he did agree to limit his cross-examination to the issue of sanity rather than questioning the witness about the crime itself. Mills, however, voiced concern that Jesse might inadvertently volunteer information during questioning. “I want to be very careful that none of us violate any of his rights,” he said. After a brief recess, it was decided that Jesse would not be called as a witness. Instead, Graham called Pearl. He had her explain the financial need that had brought her to Volusia County Legal Services, and the limits it had placed on her long struggle “to try to get the boy cleared and get him home where he can be with me.”

  And if Jesse were to be released, Graham wondered, what would he do?

  “I have a promise of a job,” Pearl said, and she explained that the Princess Issena Hotel had agreed to put Jesse to work in the kitchen. “If he was to go home tonight, he could go to work tomorrow.”

  “Do you think Jesse needs to be committed and confined in the mental institution?” Graham asked.

  “Definitely not,” Pearl answered, “because there is no program there that will build up the mind. It’s just to eat and sleep and be a living vegetable. I have been there.”

  “Jesse can’t even leave the building he’s in, is that true?”

  “That’s true,” Pearl said. “He cannot get out in the sunshine at all.”

  Oldham had no questions for Pearl, and Graham had no further witnesses, so Oldham now called his one witness for the state. Dr. Julian C. Davis, a psychologist at Chattahoochee, stated that the evaluations of Jesse Daniels that he had reviewed (he had not himself performed one) “have consistently shown him to be mentally retarded.” Under cross-examination by Husfeld, Davis affirmed that Jesse had been evaluated by doctors only eight times over a period of thirteen years and acknowledged that Jesse had scored a 74 on one of his most recent IQ tests—a score within the range of persons “who did not function as retarded.”

  Graham and Husfeld called one final expert to testify as a rebuttal witness: Frank Nibbler, a lieutenant detective with the DeLand Police Department, who had trained with the FBI in “interrogation and voice investigation and interviews.” At the request of Jesse’s lawyers, he had interrogated the defendant about his possible involvement in the rape of Blanche Knowles.

  Husfeld asked the detective if he was satisfied with the information and answers he had received from Jesse.

  “I interrogated him quite lengthily,” Nibbler said.

  “Was he able to withstand the interrogation?”

  “He didn’t crack, as the saying goes,” Nibbler said.

  On cross-examination, Oldham suggested that Nibbler, as a detective, did not qualify as an expert to evaluate the defendant’s mental capacity. “Do you feel that psychiatrists or psychologists are more qualified than you are?” Oldham asked.

  “Much more,” Nibbler said.

  “No further questions,” Oldham said.

  Testimony ended at 4:35 p.m. Judge Mills indicated that he would need about an hour to “digest” the evidence before making a ruling, and he asked the attorneys if they would be willing to wait. “We would like to wait,” Graham said, “if we can get a ruling tonight.” Oldham did not object. Nor did Judge Mills object to Graham’s request to make a “thirty second argument on the law in this case” before the recess.

  Graham said, “I would just like to urge the Court to keep in mind that this is not an irreversible decision. If the Court says Daniels can stand trial now, later on you could change your mind, if it turned out he were making a spectacle of himself in Court, or obviously didn’t understand the proceedings.” But if they simply sent him back to Chattahoochee, “chances are, he’s going to stay there the rest of his life, and without having had the chance to stand trial on this charge.”

  Mills responded judiciously. “I will soul search, and I will do my best to apply the facts to the law fairly and impartially.”

  Ted Husfeld added that the evidence they had presented showed a “sane man” who did not need “to be locked up in a building where he cannot walk in the sun or do occupational therapy, or to be locked up with insane people.” In thirteen years, he reminded the court, he had exhibited “no behavioral problems whatsoever.” No one had said that he was “psychotic or suffering from delusions, and no one has presented a picture of anyone other than a man with a low IQ.”

  Asked if he, too, would care to comment, Oldham was brief. “The Court must decide as it feels it should,” he said, “but by taking a defendant out of the State Hospital when the people at the Hospital feel that he’s not ready to be out, I think, could possibly be a bad precedent. That’s all I have to say.”

  The court recessed. Ted Husfeld had to return to DeLand, so Graham waited alone for the court’s decision. When word came down that Mills was ready to issue a ruling, McCall strode back into the courthouse that for nearly three decades had been his domain, his Stetson his crown. In every courtroom Graham had been in, the bailiff would have made him take his hat off. But in Lake County, “No one was going to mess with McCall.”

  Graham took a seat beside Jesse and Pearl. The court came to order, and Judge Mills began to read from the bench. “It is an awesome decision for me to reach,” he said. “However . . . the Court finds that the defendant has failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that the defendant is at this time competent to undergo trial, to cooperate with his attorneys, to assist them in his trial; and so that counsel might have the benefit of the reasoning in which this decision was reached, it was done on the basis that the witnesses who testified favorably for the defendant only saw him on several occasions and for very short periods of time, in most cases under an hour; whereas the witnesses who testified that in their judgment and expert opinion the defendant was incapable of going to trial, have had an opportunity of being with, treating, administering tests to the defendant over a period of years, and therefore in weighing the evidence, I�
�ve put more weight on those who, in the judgment of this Court, had a better opportunity for a longer period of time to observe and arrive at their opinions.”

  Oldham wasted no time in offering to prepare the order to have Jesse Daniels returned to Chattahoochee, adding that he would be glad to arrange for the sheriff of Volusia County to be responsible for Jesse’s transportation.

  Stunned though he was, Graham asked to approach the bench. “May I make one comment, Your Honor?” he said. “I have a very definite opinion myself that the statute and the rule which provides that the defendant can be committed involuntarily because he has been charged with a crime without showing that he is dangerous or needs treatment, is unconstitutional. I would ask this Court not to change its ruling that he is insane, but to not return the defendant to Chattahoochee, [and] to release him to the custody of his mother, because automatic commitment to an institution without showing of need or dangerousness or potential danger to himself or to society, is a denial of his due process of law and equal protection of the laws.”

  Gordon Oldham quickly responded. “To that I would object, Your Honor.”

  Mills stated that he did not have the authority to grant the allowance Graham had requested, but Graham had not yet given up. He asked the judge if he could “get a ruling based on the evidence,” which, he said, “was uncontradicted in this one respect . . . that Jesse Daniels does not constitute a danger to himself or society. All the doctors from Chattahoochee or defense doctors agreed on that one point.”

  Mills had no objection, but Oldham did. “That was not the purpose of the hearing,” he reminded the judge, who’d been fixed in McCall’s cold, steady glare.

  At that, Mills changed his mind. “Well,” he said, “I’m going to stick with my original ruling.”

  Without Ted Husfeld to support him, Graham sensed that the power in the courtroom had shifted—back to where it always did, toward the sheriff of Lake County. “Your Honor,” Graham pleaded, “I’m asking you to do that as an act of humanity toward a defendant. No one thinks he is dangerous. Where he is, he’s not allowed to go outside in the sunshine. He’s not allowed to play pool because he’s got charges on his head, and the defendants with charges on their heads are treated in one way at the institution.” And he again emphasized “the gross Constitutional inequities of the commitment statute.”

  Judge Mills, however, had heard enough. “You’ll have to make that argument to the Supreme Court, not me,” he said. “I’m merely the trial court.” And with that he rose from the bench. “Court’s in recess.”

  Volusia County deputies led Jesse toward the elevator, with Pearl following closely behind. In the hallway they passed Willis McCall, who was holding court with Gordon Oldham outside his office—the office where Pearl had begged, thirteen years before, for permission to visit her son in jail; the office where Jesse had, “like a parrot,” at McCall’s prompting, confessed to the rape of Blanche Knowles.

  Once the elevator doors had closed, Pearl could no longer contain herself. She had been convinced that at long last her son would be coming home to Daytona Beach, free on bail while he awaited trial. She’d told a reporter how she’d fixed up his room and laid out clothes for him. Now she clasped Jesse in her arms and sobbed. “Thirteen years shut up for something he didn’t do. May God have mercy on those who put him there.”

  Richard Graham climbed into the blue 1965 Dodge Dart that he’d been driving since his law school days. He pointed the car east, away from Tavares. Behind him, the sun had begun to set over Lake Dora. He started his drive home slowly, as in his mind he reran—and tried to make sense of—what had just happened in court. Everything Mabel had warned him about had come to pass. He’d been steamrolled by Gordon Oldham, and Willis McCall had lent his own intimidating touch to the afternoon’s proceedings by arriving in court for the verdict and hard-staring Judge Mills into complicity with the state attorney. Nothing in Graham’s law classes at Stetson had prepared him for this. Nothing in his experiences with the U.S. Army JAG Corps, with Volusia County Legal Services, or at his father’s firm, either. He’d requested nothing more than a fair trial—the right of his client to defend himself in court. Yet the request had been denied.

  Graham put his foot to the gas pedal. Bunnie was waiting at home and he wanted to be with her. As he sped by the pastures outside Mount Dora, a wave of remorse rose from his gut. He’d failed Jesse Daniels. Pearl and Mabel, too. Overcome by emotion, Graham pressed his foot down on the brake. He brought the Dodge to an abrupt halt, off the road, on a long, thin stretch of Bahia grass. The sickly sweet aroma of orange blossoms hung in the air. His hands covering his face, the lawyer broke down in heaving sobs. Dusk turned to dark on the quiet road out of Lake County.

  Blanche Bosanquet Knowles on her wedding day, 1948

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Faith in Blanche

  BY 1971, FLORIDA WAS GROWING by leaps and bounds. In the years that Jesse Daniels had been locked away at Chattahoochee, the state’s population had ballooned to more than seven million—an increase of about 70 percent since 1957. Though Walt Disney himself had died five years before his vision for an East Coast theme park was realized, Walt Disney World opened in Kissimmee in October 1971, bringing nearly eleven million visitors to central Florida in its first year of operation. To capitalize on the surge in tourism, the Florida Citrus Commission named a popular singer and former beauty pageant queen, Anita Bryant, as its spokesperson, and in a highly successful promotional campaign she reminded Americans that “breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine” and beckoned consumers to “come to the Florida Sunshine Tree.” Citrus production, up 14 percent from the previous year, reached a record high of two hundred million boxes of fruit.

  Social progress came more slowly to Lake County than economic progress, however. It wasn’t until 1970, sixteen years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, that the last black schools in Lake County finally closed. And tensions at the newly integrated high schools, already running high, mounted further when Willis McCall paid one of his frequent visits, with his vicious German shepherd police dog, Maggie, in tow to remind black students what county they were in.

  With Jesse Daniels packed off to Chattahoochee again, Gordon Oldham was hoping that his victory in Judge Mills’s courtroom would finally dispose of the case once and for all. The state attorney had succeeded not just in court but in the media as well. The two-day hearing in Tavares had garnered only scant newspaper coverage in Lake County, and Blanche’s name had been kept out of newsprint from the beginning. A Florida statute made it unlawful to publish the identity of a victim of a sexual offense, but it was no doubt Joe Knowles’s standing in the community that ensured that “journalistic discretion” would keep his wife’s name and also the latest legal maneuverings and hearings in the case from being trumpeted in the papers, as the Leesburg Quarterback Club counted several local reporters and editors among its members. Norma Padgett, the alleged rape victim in the Groveland case, who lived among the truck farmers and citrus pickers in the swampland of south Lake County, had not been able to count on similar discretion, and her name had eventually found its way into print.

  And the Knowleses’ social status had only risen. At the beginning of the year, the Leesburg city manager had ceremoniously handed Joe a gavel and a Bible and sworn him in as mayor. Joe could count on a much busier social calendar in the upcoming year, whether he was signing certificates issued for the city’s utility bonds or pushing discs for a newspaper photographer at the opening of a new shuffleboard court. Yet despite his new responsibilities, he would continue to devote time to the Melon Patch Players. The very next month he would be directing a lighthearted piece titled The Man in the Dog Suit, in which he cast first-timers beside veteran performers. The combination, Joe said, was “just what we need to put this comedy across.”

  Blanche Knowles had long participated i
n social activities of her own, with the Leesburg Women’s Club and the Bertha Hereford Hall Chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution, which had appointed her Good Citizenship Chairwoman. Once her three children were enrolled in grade school, however, she’d gone back to work, taking a job teaching English and math at Leesburg High School. The role of first lady of Leesburg put additional demands on her already busy schedule, requiring that she appear at various public events with her husband. “He is pretty good about giving me a few days’ notice,” she told a reporter from the Orlando Sentinel who profiled her in 1971. “Although sometimes things do become hectic. I become a short-order cook, or I may plan a meal, then serve it two or three evenings later.” Nonetheless, she found the time to make the dog suit for her husband’s play.

  If Blanche was keeping up appearances, it was a social skill she’d been schooled in from the cradle, by virtue of her time, place, and class. Rape in the South was still viewed largely as a violation of a man’s property rather than an act of violence against a woman. And adultery was a fact of life among the citrus elite. Mary Alice Herlong Pattillo, daughter of citrus baron and congressman Syd Herlong, grew up close to the Knowles family, and her family had vacationed with the Bosanquets in Ormond Beach each summer. One of her sorority sisters at the University of Florida was “Kat” Robinson, soon to become Mrs. Gordon Oldham. Like others, she recalled Joe Knowles as a good-looking ladies’ man around town—a town where men ruled the roost and the women understood their place. “There was a lot of womanizing then,” she said. “It was the custom, and the wives knew that the men fooled around. They just turned their backs on the affairs. The big thing was, don’t get caught.” Author Florence King explained this ability to look the other way as a relic of antebellum life that endured in “the cult of Southern Womanhood.” It was the same deliberate blindness that had “enabled the white woman to maintain her sanity when she saw light-skinned slave children, who were the very spit of Old Massa, running around the plantation.”