Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  After the scuffle, Vickers was carried to the “creech tank”—a “six foot square stainless steel cell,” which had no toilet or running water—and put on a “punishment diet” of peas and carrots. For seven days, however, Vickers did not, or could not, eat. Then the jailers began to detect a “bad smell” outside the tank: “It was not a jailhouse smell,” one of them said. Another of them noticed that Vickers was vomiting up “black foam.” The inmate was removed to Waterman Memorial Hospital, where he died.

  At the coroner’s inquest, all three trusties testified to a version of events in the jail that corresponded with McCall’s account, in which the sheriff claimed only to have “popped” Vickers a few times on the back of the head. The cause of death was determined to be “acute peritonitis as a result of a blow to the lower abdomen incurred by mischance or accident, said blow inflicted by person or persons unknown.” In announcing the verdict, the presiding judge stated that Vickers “was mistreated somewhere . . . but that the jury had no testimony to point to anyone.”

  Since assuming the governorship, Reubin Askew had received numerous letters from Mabel Chesley in which she’d urged the removal of Sheriff Willis McCall from office. Unlike the cowed or politically apprehensive governors whom the sheriff had outplayed over his twenty-eight-year reign, Askew needed no urging. Unconvinced by the verdict, and reluctant to allow Gordon Oldham to conduct his own investigation, Askew dispatched officials from the FDLE “to assist” the state attorney. In addition, he sent his general counsel, Edgar Dunn, to Tavares, where he met with Judge Troy Hall—no friend of Willis McCall—to request that a grand jury be impaneled outside Lake County, because Askew suspected that the county sheriff might be “a principal suspect” in the death of Tommy Vickers. Judge Hall moved the case to Orange County, infuriating McCall. The governor also requested that ten material witnesses in the Lake County jail be immediately transferred to Orange County “for their safety.”

  While McCall was waiting for the grand jury on the Vickers case to convene in Orange County, Thomas Woods returned to central Florida to proceed with his investigation into the matter of Jesse Daniels’s reparations. The hearing resumed on May 31, with Graham and Husfeld calling several residents of Okahumpka’s North Quarters, who testified that they were among the dozens of black men initially rounded up for questioning in the rape of Blanche Knowles. Primary among them was Melvin Bubba Hawkins, who had since, on a football scholarship, gone on to Bethune-Cookman College, where his uncle Virgil had worked and studied. Bubba told Graham that on the night he was taken into custody by Lake County deputies, he stood over six feet tall and weighed 210 pounds, every bit the star halfback he’d been for Carver Heights Negro High School. Jesse Daniels, Graham noted, had at the time weighed only 130 pounds.

  Oldham’s testimony took up most of the court’s first day back. Unperturbed, nearly yawning at times, the state attorney maintained that he was “still convinced Daniels is guilty,” although he conceded, “If someone could prove to me that he is not guilty, I would be the first to admit it.” Daniels’s guilt or innocence, however, had “nothing to do” with Jesse’s confinement at Chattahoochee. “I think he would have been there anyway,” Oldham contended.

  When Graham asked Oldham why he’d initially told reporters that law enforcement was seeking a “young Negro,” Oldham responded that he was “often misquoted in the press.”

  “Did you ask for a retraction of the story?” Graham asked.

  “No,” Oldham admitted.

  Finally, to Special Master Woods, Oldham voiced his objection to Blanche Knowles’s being subpoenaed, on the grounds that “she still suffers from the experience and testifying would be too upsetting.”

  Bill Donaldson, the polygraph expert on whom McCall and Oldham had relied to administer lie detector tests on several suspects in the days following the Okahumpka rape, testified that in his report on Jesse Daniels, he’d noted that the subject had responded “intelligently” and appeared to be “no different than anyone else” he’d examined. The boy had not impressed him as “being mentally retarded” but, rather, had “seemed like a normal human being”; nor had he detected a stutter in the subject’s speech. Reviewing the test results on Jesse Daniels, Donaldson had concluded that the subject was being deceptive and that he had “either committed the rape or knew who had.” When Donaldson had finished his tests, he said, he had communicated his findings to Sheriff McCall and to Joe Knowles—both of whom had been present at the polygraph examination.

  Damaging though Donaldson’s testimony was to Jesse Daniels, its significance would fade after Graham questioned the next witness, Leesburg native Margaret “Sis” Hickman, the secretary and notary public at the Lake County Sheriff’s Department. Efficient, candid, and matter-of-fact, Hickman claimed to remember clearly the occasion of Jesse’s confession. She certainly related details. It had taken place in the ID room of the Lake County jail, with deputies James Yates and Leroy Campbell standing behind Jesse Daniels as he “orally”—and “calmly and clearly, without a stutter”—described his rape of Blanche Knowles. When he’d finished, she’d left the ID room to type the statement. On her return, she’d read the confession back to Jesse Daniels, who was sitting “slouched in a chair.” In her presence, he’d signed the confession. She’d notarized it.

  At that point, Richard Graham handed Hickman a photograph of Jesse Daniels at age nineteen and asked if the picture helped her recall any other details about that December 1957 day in the ID room of the jail. Hickman considered the image of the boy and without hesitation replied, “I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

  Graham then asked Margaret Hickman to describe the man who had confessed to rape fifteen years ago in the ID room of the Lake County jail.

  “He had kinky black hair,” she said, and a murmur rippled across the hearing room. Turning toward the special master, she added, “He was a dark Negro—that is, dark brown.”

  Abruptly, Woods called a recess. As Margaret Hickman, confused by the reaction, was ushered from the room, Woods retreated into the jury room with the attorneys representing Jesse Daniels and the counsel from the attorney general’s office, “all gasping in utter astonishment.” Pacing the jury room, Woods let the implications of Hickman’s testimony settle into comprehensibility. “Someone should write a book,” he said.

  The special master and the attorneys all agreed that the surprise testimony of the notary public demanded further investigation outside the hearing room, and that agents from the FDLE should also be involved. The attorneys decided that they would take both Jesse Daniels and Margaret Hickman, in separate cars, to a lounge on the outskirts of Lake County. There, Richard Graham and Mabel Chesley observed the proceedings. Jesse was seated on a stool at the counter, and on her arrival, Hickman was escorted to a table. Then, brought face-to-face, they were asked if they’d ever seen each other before. Both responded that they had not.

  Immediately Hickman grasped the point of their meeting. “Is this Jesse Daniels?” she asked.

  The attorneys nodded. Hickman stared at the man whose face bore the strain of fourteen long years in Chattahoochee. Overcome with emotion, she began gasping for breath. Graham watched in astonishment as a devastated Hickman practically collapsed in her chair.

  “But it was a Negro whose confession I took,” she sobbed. “I WATCHED a Negro sign that confession.”

  No one in the lounge doubted the notary public’s memory. Jim Mahorner, counsel for the attorney general, sent word of the stunning development in the case to Ed Dunn at Governor Askew’s office. The attorneys left Hickman to the FDLE agents, who questioned her more specifically about the confession. The agents noted that Hickman “stoutly maintains that the Jesse Daniels who made the confession under scrutiny was black.” The agents determined, too, that Hickman’s memory was clear on this because of a particular moment in the confession, when the suspect “sneered” at Hickman, stating: “When I w
as through I asked her if she enjoyed it, and she said ‘Yes.’” The implication had offended Hickman; she told the FDLE agents that she “became most angry at this because the Negro looked at her as if to imply that she would also enjoy having intercourse with him.” She was sure that her memory of his remark and her reaction was accurate, for it had been etched in her mind, agents noted, not least because Margaret Hickman had attended Leesburg High School with Blanche Bosanquet and knew her well. “I’m a personal friend of the victim,” she told the agents. “I would not get this crime confused.”

  When presented with the actual confession document, Hickman readily acknowledged that the notary signature on it was hers. As she realized what had occurred in the ID room at the Lake County jail, she was affronted, the agents observed, by the now evident fact that “Deputy Yates tricked her in some manner.” Of that she had “no doubt in her mind.”

  Margaret Hickman’s revelatory testimony prompted the FDLE agents to follow up with Tampa polygrapher Bill Donaldson. The FBI report from the January 1959 investigation had included Donaldson’s signed statement in which he claimed that he’d interviewed Blanche Knowles in the sheriff’s office five days after the rape. According to his statement, he had also been present with Yates when Jesse Daniels was brought in for questioning later that night, and he had spoken with Jesse’s parents and with Jesse himself before administering the lie detector test, which had quickly led to Jesse confessing to the rape.

  When the FDLE agents interviewed Donaldson after his testimony before the Florida Legislature and Special Master Woods, however, they heard a very different version of events. He had never been allowed to interview Blanche Knowles, Donaldson told the agents, because Joe Knowles would not allow it—he’d simply declared it “could not be done” and any information Donaldson needed he’d have to get from Joe. (Had he been allowed to speak directly with Blanche, Donaldson later noted, he would have been able to frame his questions to the suspects more specifically.)

  Donaldson then produced his own, more muted version of Hickman’s courtroom surprise. He was certain that the only suspects he had questioned were black, and only one of the subjects had evidenced deception in his tests—“a seventeen- to eighteen-year-old Negro.” When shown the alleged Jesse Daniels test results, Donaldson was at a loss to explain why the letters “W” and “M,” indicating the subject was a white male, were circled next to Jesse’s name, because he had not questioned any white suspects. Donaldson made clear that his only responsibility in the Daniels case was administration of the polygraph tests and that, contrary to what both Oldham and McCall had asserted in the special master’s hearings, he was “in no way in charge of the investigation.”

  Once he’d confirmed for Sheriff McCall and Deputy Yates that his lie detector test of “Jesse Daniels” had shown deception, Donaldson had returned to Tampa. A few days later, he now confessed to the agents, he’d received a white sport coat in the mail. The note accompanying it read, “Thanks. Willis V. McCall.” Donaldson estimated the coat to have cost about one hundred dollars.

  Recognizing that his responses to the FDLE’s questions were significantly discrepant from the signed statement he’d provided to FBI agents fourteen years earlier, Donaldson admitted, in his FDLE interview, to being “most concerned with his reputation as a polygraph examiner.” Whether because of fear of facing perjury charges or the wrath of Willis McCall, Donaldson, the FDLE agents noted, “displayed extreme reluctance to modify his testimony before the legislature.”

  Clearly, the Jesse Daniels case had been riddled with both fraudulent evidence and falsified documents. In addition, with so many machinations by James Yates, the deputy who’d “investigated” both the Groveland and the Fruitland Park rape cases, some details never got considered at all. For example, there was this seemingly innocuous sentence in Jesse’s alleged confession: “I then started out of the bedroom but I heard something fall on the floor that sounded like a little piece of wood and I got down on the floor to see what it was and felt around with my hands, but could not find anything.”

  “A little piece of wood”? Was this detail meant to refer to Jesse’s guitar pick, the piece of crime-scene evidence that Yates had bragged to Deputy Evvie Griffin about confiscating from the Daniels home without a warrant and planting at the Knowles house? Perhaps, then, it was more script than coincidence that a similarly worded “search” for an object on the Knowleses’ bedroom floor had appeared in the now missing statement Gordon Oldham claimed to have taken from Blanche in March 1958: Her assailant had gotten “down on his hands and knees and started hunting for something on the floor, and it was not in a particularly intelligent manner, because he kept hunting over exactly the same spot . . . fanning out with his hand in front of him, patting the floor right hard, trying to find something that he apparently thought was there.”

  Griffin, for one, had believed that Yates was fraudulently “strengthening the case” against Jesse Daniels, should the case ever go to trial. But where would this “little piece of wood” have fallen from, if the suspect was wearing only socks when he entered the Knowles house?

  * * *

  —

  MABEL CHESLEY TOOK Woods’s comment regarding Hickman’s revelations—“Someone should write a book”—as a cue for an editorial in the Daytona Beach Sunday News-Journal: “A Book There Should Be, and Its Title: ‘McCall.’”

  “Indeed, a book is due on the bizarre case of mentally retarded Jesse Daniels,” Mabel declared, “nabbed in the little Lake County town of Okahumpka in 1957 by deputies for Sheriff Willis McCall and summarily packed off to the criminal ward of Chattahoochee.” To the injustices in Jesse’s case, Mabel added those in the cases of the Groveland Boys, the Platts, the black airmen who’d been entrapped and beaten in McCall’s cabin in Big Scrub—all of them cases on which she had reported and by which she’d incurred the wrath of McCall. Her list was neither complete nor completed, for the long-reigning sheriff continued to terrorize blacks as he had in the Fruitland Park rape case and, most recently, in the case of the now deceased Tommy Vickers.

  Yet, even as the details of the Daniels conspiracy, with the help of both intentional and unwitting participants, came to light, Mabel could not fathom what Willis McCall’s motivations had been, and she seemed almost resigned that the truth might never become known in the case of the boy on the bicycle from the tiny hamlet of Okahumpka.

  “It would take a Truman Capote” to capture Jesse’s “years of bewilderment, the cruelties he suffered and those he witnessed,” Mabel asserted. “A crack reporter with eons of time to spare needs to get at the core question: Why Daniels? Why did a white man suffer so, when it is the Negro that McCall hates?”

  It wasn’t a writer or crack reporter who found the answers to Mabel’s long-pondered questions. It was a gray-haired, heavyset, fifty-year-old Army veteran from northern Mississippi who was still in his rookie year at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. It was someone Willis McCall would never have imagined: the FDLE’s first black special agent.

  FDLE agent Al Albright

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Whether They Be White or Black

  ALFRED ALBRIGHT, the youngest of sixteen children, was born in Byhalia, Mississippi, in 1921. Both his father and his mother, William and Alice, were listed as mulattos in the United States Census. Shortly after Alfred’s birth, William, a farmer, deserted the family, and most of his sons moved north to Cincinnati in search of a better life. Alice became head of the household. “I am the product of a broken family,” Alfred wrote on his FDLE employment application. “I was reared in a poor, depressed, female centered atmosphere. After the death of my mother . . . the entire family disintegrated.”

  At age seventeen, Al Albright followed his brothers to Cincinnati. In 1943, he joined the Army. He’d served in England, France, Germany, and Austria when he was selected to attend the U.S. Constabulary School for military police training. He’
d also managed to take college courses during the time he was stationed overseas, which was most of his Army career. A reassignment to Omaha enabled him to complete his undergraduate courses for a bachelor’s degree from the University of Nebraska. In 1969, when a new posting took him to Norman, Oklahoma, Albright began work toward a master’s degree in public administration at the University of Oklahoma, but his progress was interrupted when he was reassigned overseas. In 1971, while stationed in Japan as an operations officer for the criminal investigation division of the U.S. Army, Albright applied for a civilian law-enforcement job with the FDLE, to which he would bring, as he wrote in his application, “twenty-three years of criminal investigation experience.” In the spring of that year, Albright traveled back to the United States for interviews at the FDLE Tallahassee office.

  “Although my life and the lives of my relatives have been turbulent,” Albright noted in his personal statement, “my proficiency and efficiency in achievements in the past performance of law enforcement assignments have not been adversely affected, but rather enhanced.” His FDLE interviewers concurred. In staff evaluations, Albright’s initiative, drive, energy, and ambition were all scored “outstanding.” The personnel director did not doubt his “very good potential,” and on his file wrote: “Colored applicant—very impressive.” Albright was offered a position as a special agent in the Orlando Field Office. He and his third wife, Marie, a Vietnamese woman he’d met and married in 1968, when he was stationed in Saigon, settled in Winter Springs, Florida.

  The FDLE’s investigation into the beating death of Tommy Vickers was ongoing when Al Albright joined the agency. Only months into his new job, he was assigned to Lake County—and plunged into the final throes of a Jim Crow South that he’d not experienced since his escape from Mississippi at the age of seventeen.