Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

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  THE SAME WEEK that the coroner’s jury was assembled to investigate Vickers’s death in May 1972, Evvie Griffin received what felt like some long-overdue good news: U.S. District Court judge Charles R. Scott in Jacksonville overturned the guilty verdicts of Robert Shuler and Jerry Chatman. Griffin had been providing case assistance to attorney Tobias Simon, Mabel Chesley’s friend and fellow committee member from the Florida Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Simon had stepped in to take up the Shuler-Chatman appeal and had presented the case in federal court. Judge Scott concluded that the evidence against the men was “fraudulently manufactured” and that searches had been made without warrant. Reserving his harshest words for state attorney Gordon Oldham’s office, Judge Scott ruled that the “suppression” of the alleged victim’s statement regarding her inability to identify her attackers, as well as her conflicting answers about whether she’d actually been sexually assaulted, was “highly reprehensible,” as it was “not solely for the prosecution to decide for the court what is admissible.”

  It was bad news for Oldham, but the following month brought worse news for Willis McCall. In June, a grand jury in Orange County indicted the Lake County sheriff on a charge of second-degree murder in the Tommy Vickers case. The prisoner’s death, the jury said, was caused by an act “evincing a depraved mind regardless of human life.” Governor Askew immediately suspended McCall from office, and Judge W. Troy Hall appointed a former FBI agent as acting sheriff.

  Rick Hernan was the FDLE case agent in charge of the Vickers investigation. Once the indictment had been handed down, he had to devise and execute a plan to remove Willis McCall from office and place the Lake County Sheriff’s Department under new command. He decided to have FDLE agents drive in a multi-car caravan to Tavares and there arrest the sheriff. “We wanted Al Albright to read McCall his rights,” Hernan said. “That was the plan. But Al had car problems en route and we had to keep the caravan moving.”

  The black special agent, however, did not arrive too late to be photographed while serving the sheriff his suspension—the sheriff who, only a few months before, and seven years since passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, had finally been forced by order of a federal judge to desegregate the jail facilities and to remove the “Colored” and “White” signs from the courthouse walls. McCall balked at signing the governor’s suspension order and demanded that Albright “take your people and get out.” Albright did not oblige, and the sheriff was subjected to the added humiliation of being photographed as he was being fingerprinted in his own jail. He then posted the thousand-dollar bail. “I am innocent,” McCall told reporters, and vowed that Lake County had not seen the last of him. “Like MacArthur, I shall return.”

  As always, McCall played the victim and blamed his adversaries for trying to bring him down. “This is the NAACP, the Civil Liberties Union, and a few local enemies collaborating like they always have,” he alleged. He also claimed that this new investigation into his conduct did not worry him. The Vickers case, he said, was the “forty-ninth time” he’d been probed. “My back is like a gator’s hide,” he bragged to reporters. “You just bend the needle when you try to stick it in.”

  A trial was set for August, and Governor Askew appointed Florida Supreme Court justice James Adkins to preside. Grand jury testimony is historically secret, but Adkins, in a highly unusual move, decided that, as McCall had signed a waiver of immunity, which allowed his own words to be used against him in court, the sheriff’s grand jury testimony would be admissible in the Vickers murder trial, which was being moved to nearby Marion County. McCall’s unflattering estimations of his enemies would thus be made public. One of the grand jurors, for instance, had asked the sheriff, “Sir, you . . . kept saying . . . ‘they are out to get me.’ Who are you referring to, Sir?” In reply, McCall had named a number of people, including Judge Troy Hall—“about the two-facedest man I ever saw”—before zeroing in on the “Daytona Beach newspaperwoman,” Mabel Chesley, who, he’d averred, was waging an all-out war to bring him down. “I don’t know whether she is a Communist,” he’d elaborated, “but she surely writes like one in the newspapers. She is pro-Communism and anti-establishment [on] most everything, and the people that’s against the establishment, whether they be white or black without any lawful purpose are usually the people that are out to get me.”

  In its report, the twenty-three-person grand jury was especially critical of the Lake County authorities who had conducted the coroner’s inquest. Indeed, the report found the conduct so questionable that it called for a separate inquiry into the “operation of the jail.” What disturbed the jurors even more was the fact that Sheriff McCall had met with the trusty witnesses prior to their testimony at the coroner’s inquest and had made it clear that “they must testify according to the account stated to them by McCall.” The report concluded, “Each prisoner believed that unless he so testified, he would be punished after returning from court to the jail.”

  In the testimony of the three trusty witnesses—Willis June and the Huffman brothers, Jack and Bobby—at McCall’s murder trial, discrepancies with their grand jury testimony became crucially evident. Willis June’s court appearance made headlines when he admitted that he’d lied before the grand jury. Asked why by the prosecutors, June “surprised the defense” by stating, “I was afraid of getting killed, that’s what. I was a black man in Lake County.” He and the other trusties were all “afraid of getting killed, man. Afraid of getting [our] brains beat out like a dog. If I was to tell you everything that happened, you’d sit down and cry.”

  As McCall’s trial progressed, the scope of the FDLE’s investigation of him broadened beyond the Vickers case. Rick Hernan had been discovering how justice worked in the sheriff’s department—with payoffs for ignoring activities like distilling moonshine or running bolita games, a type of lottery popular but illegal in Florida—and how rehabilitation translated into free prison labor for work on Willis McCall’s land in Umatilla. “There are lots of rumors of misconduct,” Governor Askew’s general counsel, Edgar Dunn, told reporters, and the governor was determined not to ignore a single one of them.

  Al Albright was one of the agents poking around Lake County, and the Jesse Daniels case in particular roused his investigative instincts. Everyone he questioned about Jesse and the Knowles rape was still, after fifteen years, hesitant or plain unwilling to speak about it, at least initially. But, with McCall now looking more vulnerable, and with a little Albright persuasion, some county residents were beginning to open up. Albright’s investigative skills led him eventually to Leesburg, where he found a path into the circle of Willis McCall’s decades-long and (mostly) loyal confidants.

  “Al Albright was the greatest interrogator I’ve ever seen in law enforcement,” Rick Hernan attested. “He had a conversational way about him that is hard to put a finger on. He’d start asking questions and people just opened up to him. It was something to see.” One of those people was Carl Klaber, a longtime Lake County grovesman who’d known the sheriff since 1940, when McCall was working as a fruit inspector. “Willis McCall is a murderer,” declared Klaber, who insisted that Albright keep his identity confidential, “and a lying, scheming, no good son-of-a-bitch.” He estimated that McCall “has killed or has had killed between twenty-five or [sic] thirty people.”

  Albright and Hernan found one interrogation technique particularly useful in Lake County. “We would sit down with witnesses and look them right in the eye,” Hernan recalled, “and we’d make it very clear that they were not the target of our investigation. Then we would remind them that lying to an agent is a criminal offense.” Once the message landed, witnesses became cooperative, especially now that a perception was taking hold around the county that Sheriff Willis McCall might finally be taken down.

  The more that Albright and Hernan explored the underbelly of Lake County, the more they realized that the
fears of its citizens were not misplaced. They learned, for example, the fate of a fifteen-year-old black youth, James Farmer, who in 1969 was being held not for a crime but for competency hearings, as his parents had claimed he was “suffering from hallucinations and a fear that someone was trying to kill him.” Two days before Christmas, Farmer, who’d begun having outbursts in the Lake County jail, was transported by a deputy and two trusties to Northeast Florida State Hospital at Macclenny for evaluation. After the deputy in charge had completed the paperwork for Farmer’s admission, he returned to his cruiser, where he discovered two healthy trusties pointing to a dead boy in the backseat. The coroner’s inquest determined the cause of death to be “sickle cell disease.” An alarmed reporter notified the FBI of the suspicious death, but their investigation went nowhere.

  Farmer’s case, Albright and Hernan came to see, was not exceptional. Too common were the accounts of violence and brutality at the hands of the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, and the investigators soon understood why Governor Askew had demanded the transfer of the inmate witnesses in the Vickers case to Orange County for their safety. Like Willis June, trusty Bobby Huffman, though white, had concerns about the authority—and virulence—of Willis McCall. Testifying in the murder trial as to why he’d lied to the grand jury, Huffman said that he’d felt pressure to protect McCall. Under cross-examination he told McCall’s defense attorney, “I was scared of the sheriff.”

  “Are you nervous, Mr. Huffman?” the lawyer asked.

  “I’m always nervous,” the trusty replied, perhaps with good reason. Just weeks after testifying against McCall, Huffman was released from jail. After he’d had a celebratory drink with his teenage wife at a tavern in Fruitland Park, a stranger approached the couple outside and pointed a 20-gauge shotgun to Huffman’s head. The police said he’d taken the “full load of a blast in his face, neck and chest” at point-blank range; he was killed instantly.

  In June, Albright met with the Klansman Jack Hooten, who told him, as he had told investigators a dozen years before, that McCall was the “main power” behind the Klan, and that he “has either killed a lot of people or had something to do with people being killed in Lake County.” Albright’s questions about the Jesse Daniels case prompted Hooten to relate how Leesburg police chief Bill Fisher had traveled to Tallahassee to present Attorney General Richard Ervin “with evidence of who raped Joe Knowles’s wife”—and how, when Gordon Oldham learned of Fisher’s trip, he’d told him to “stay out of the case.” The Knowles family “was influential in Lake County and pressure was on to arrest and convict someone for the rape,” said Hooten; so, he alleged, Oldham and McCall had conspired to charge Jesse Daniels. He urged Albright to continue his investigation and to speak with Bill Fisher, who “might reveal what he knows of the case” now that McCall had been suspended.

  Albright interviewed Fisher, and the police chief related to him the details of his 1959 meeting with Ervin in Tallahassee. Fisher had told Ervin that Jesse Daniels had been framed for the Knowles rape, which, Fisher was convinced, had been committed by Sam Wiley Odom. Any doubt he’d had was eliminated by his conversation with Alfred Bosanquet at Fair Oaks: Because “it would not look good in newsprint that Blanche . . . had been raped by a Negro,” as Alfred had put it, “emphasis was then placed on Jesse Daniels because he was a mentally deficient person who lived near Blanche Knowles.”

  To further his investigations into the Daniels case, Albright attempted to gain access to the sheriff’s department files on the Knowles and Fruitland Park rapes. In that effort, Rich Hernan served two subpoenas on the interim sheriff, Frank Meech. Meech demanded that Deputy Malcolm McCall, the former sheriff’s son, abide by the subpoenas; however, when Hernan arrived to claim the documents, the “visibly upset” deputy stalled. He called Oldham’s office and spoke to him for a while, and after he hung up, he “made every effort to block the service of the subpoena.” Eventually, Deputy McCall did release the Fruitland Park case files. The Daniels case files, he insisted, could not be located.

  On August 15, Al Albright made sure that he arrived on time at the Marion County Courthouse in Ocala, where the trial of sixty-three-year-old Willis McCall for second-degree murder was set to begin. Already seated in the gallery was former deputy Evvie Griffin, who did not want to miss the opportunity to see his longtime enemy led away in handcuffs to a jail cell of his own. “I wanted him to see my face every day in the courtroom,” Griffin said.

  What the former deputy saw on that opening day of the trial was a bulge in McCall’s right-hand pants pocket as McCall proceeded to the table for the defense. Immediately, Griffin left his seat to speak to Al Albright, who was standing near the wall to one side of the courtroom. “Willis has got a gun in his pocket,” Griffin told him.

  Albright sprang to attention. “You gotta be kidding.”

  “He’s got a Colt Cobra Airweight in his right pocket,” said Griffin, who knew that McCall always carried a roll of bills in his left pocket and the pistol in his right.

  Albright hustled over to a bailiff. Informed that he’d have to submit to a search of his person, McCall removed the Colt Cobra from his pocket and laid it on the table. Albright was dumbfounded. Carrying a concealed gun into a courtroom was a felony offense, but doing so while under indictment compounded the gravity of the violation. McCall was indifferent. He’d been carrying a gun in his pocket for years, he said; it was a habit, as natural to him as pocketing his keys or his wallet. (Evidently, it was a habit his sixteen-year-old daughter-in-law shared. In a courtroom search of McCall family members, a concealed handgun was discovered in her purse. She was arrested and turned over to juvenile authorities.)

  Testimony in the Vickers murder case ran five days. Throughout the proceedings, McCall made a show of his lack of interest by yawning, feigning sleep, or chuckling at the funny pages in the newspaper. Not even testimony that after Vickers’s death, Deputy Lucius Clark was overheard arguing with McCall, contending he “wasn’t going to lie for you this time,” seemed to ruffle the defendant. Apparently, he had no reason to be ruffled. It took little more than an hour for the all-white jury of four men and two women to acquit Willis McCall of second-degree murder.

  After the verdict, supporters gathered around the defense table. There was laughing, backslapping, and talk about where they’d be dining that night. McCall threw an arm around his wife, Doris, and left the courtroom flanked by his son Malcolm and the sheriff of Marion County. “By the time they hit the ground floor,” one reporter wrote, “it was just like Tommy Vickers had never lived.”

  Hernan had known that the Vickers case would not be easy to prosecute, given that the state’s key witnesses were convicted felons who altered their grand jury testimony and thus were easy targets for the charge that they were habitual liars. Still, neither Hernan nor any other FDLE agent doubted that McCall had viciously kicked Vickers repeatedly in the stomach. In an interview after the trial, one jury member said he thought that McCall was “probably guilty,” but, in acquitting the sheriff, the jurors had also to consider other, practical concerns. “We have to live here,” he said, “here” being a county with a still “active Klan presence.”

  The not-guilty verdict concluded the sixth trial in which a Florida governor had failed in an attempt to oust the sheriff of Lake County from office. The acquittal, however, did not move Governor Askew to reinstate McCall, as the former sheriff had committed an additional felony by carrying a concealed weapon into court.

  After his suspension from office and before his trial, McCall, undeterred by any prospects of bad publicity—or a possible guilty verdict—had been first in line at the Lake County Courthouse to register as a candidate for reelection. Asked by a reporter if he thought he could win an election in Lake County after being charged and tried for the murder of a black man in his jail, he’d said, “I don’t know if it will hurt or help me.” To another reporter, he’d observed, “I’ve done this eight
times now. It’s nothing new.” Although his campaign had been hindered by the preparation for his trial defense and then his appearances in court, just weeks after his acquittal McCall emerged victorious in the Democratic primary for sheriff of Lake County. With only a month until the general election, he began campaigning for his eighth consecutive term.

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  WITH THE VICKERS CASE HAVING FAILED to bring down Willis McCall, the FDLE focused its attention on what it now considered its best alternative: the Jesse Daniels case. FDLE commissioner William Reed, all the more determined to see McCall and possibly other elected Lake County officials brought to justice, informed Governor Askew that “investigation of this matter has been assigned top priority status and is being closely coordinated with the United States Department of Justice.” Reed had indeed already been in direct contact with John Briggs, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Florida, and DOJ attorneys. After they’d been briefed on the Daniels case, the FBI dispatched a team of agents to central Florida, where they launched the largest and most comprehensive investigation to which McCall had ever been subjected. But it was FDLE agent Al Albright who ultimately uncovered the secrets and lies that had lain buried in Lake County for more than fifteen years.

  In August, after McCall’s acquittal, Albright traveled to Green Cove Springs, the small town west of St. Augustine where Pearl and Jesse had moved into a trailer sitting just off a rural dirt road. Albright carefully walked Pearl through the days leading up to and immediately following the attack on Blanche Knowles. He fixed upon one small but important detail that Pearl had neglected to mention to Mabel Chesley or anyone else up to that point. On December 17, 1957, when Jesse had gone raccoon hunting with a neighbor, Lloyd Harrison, about the time the sun was setting, they’d come back sooner than expected, and without a coon, because they’d stumbled upon a skunk that had sprayed the three of them—Jesse, Lloyd, and Lloyd’s hound. Pearl remembered the skunk smell on Jesse being so bad that she’d had him remove his clothes outside and straightaway take a bath. The odor from the skunk spray had nevertheless lingered for days. Lloyd Harrison corroborated Pearl’s account of the hunt on the date in question. He told the investigators he had been sprayed many times while on coon hunts and “had never been able to get the smell off in one day’s time.” Yet in her statement to Gordon Oldham, it was noted, Blanche had detected no such smell.