Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  Another detail arrested Albright’s attention when he was combing through the interviews with Sam Wiley Odom that had been subpoenaed by Special Master Thomas Woods for the claims bill hearings. It was a detail that, apparently, Willis McCall, Gordon Oldham, and assistant state attorney James Kynes had considered to be of no particular consequence. But why, Albright wondered. Odom’s statement that Blanche’s rapist had been paid five thousand dollars to kill her, possibly by her husband, was, to Albright’s mind, too significant to ignore.

  Joe Knowles’s affairs were no secret in Lake County, and agents were able to find people willing to talk in confidence about the Leesburg mayor’s indiscretions. They set their sights on Mary Ellen Hawkins. The business venture she had set up when she’d first moved to Naples in December 1957 had failed, and Hawkins had decided to return to Washington, where she’d taken a job as an assistant to a Georgia congressman. Her subsequent marriage to the president of a savings and loan association in Georgia had ended in divorce after eleven years, and in 1972 Hawkins had once again settled in Naples, where she had become a political reporter for the Naples Daily News. She was blissfully unaware that her brief affair with Joe Knowles fifteen years earlier was about to bring two FBI agents knocking on her door.

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  BY THE SUMMER OF 1972, so relentless had the FDLE’s investigation into the Tommy Vickers and Jesse Daniels cases become that Gordon Oldham was feeling more than the heat of the season. In June, Mabel Chesley had written an editorial praising Governor Askew for his good start in “ridding Florida of the long engrained blot on its reputation” by suspending Willis McCall from office. “The spotlight now should turn to State Atty. Gordon Oldham,” she wrote, since it was Oldham who had prosecuted Shuler and Chatman on a rape charge based, as federal judge Charles Scott had ruled, on “tainted and falsified evidence.” Mabel pointed to Judge Scott’s strongly worded decision in which he’d characterized as “reprehensible” the prosecution’s misconduct in the case and declared, “A strong and free nation can’t abide this type of justice.” Mabel concluded the editorial with a provocative flourish: “There is much, much more in [Scott’s] opinion in condemnation of prosecution tactics and constitutional violations in Lake County to raise strongly the question: Why is McCall’s sidekick, Gordon Oldham, still in office?”

  Mabel sent a copy of the June editorial to Edgar Dunn (whom she was now addressing as “Ed”) at the governor’s office. In the accompanying letter, she answered the question her editorial had posed regarding Oldham still being in office. “Of course, he shouldn’t be. He’s next for removal,” Mabel wrote, and as cause, she asserted that the state attorney “has been hand in glove with McCall down through the years.”

  By July, Oldham was trying to distance himself from the embattled sheriff of Lake County. To that end, he placed a “terse” call to the director of the FDLE, William Troelstrup. Oldham informed the director that he had “no interest in the Sheriff McCall investigation” and that he was “tired of getting phone calls from people in the area” saying FDLE agents had contacted them and made “possibly criminally libelous statements concerning him.” If the governor wanted to investigate him, Oldham said, “that is fine,” but he reminded the director that he would be state attorney for five more years. Then he hung up.

  In August, after Willis McCall’s acquittal in the Vickers case, Edgar Dunn met with civil rights attorneys from the Department of Justice to assure them Governor Askew’s office and the FDLE “will be most happy to assist your investigation in whatever way we can.” One month later, the DOJ stated that it was “very interested in the Jesse Daniels Case.” In lieu of subpoenas, the governor himself formally requested all state records about the cases of Jesse Daniels and Sam Wiley Odom.

  In a report based on a study of all the available evidence from the FDLE, the FBI, and the legislative hearings, attorney Ben Krage of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Criminal Section cited four individuals for prosecution of civil rights crimes and concluded that the “named subjects”—Willis V. McCall, Gordon G. Oldham Jr., James L. Yates, and Leroy Campbell—had “sought the incarceration of Jesse Daniels knowing he was innocent of the crime charged. The subjects employed fraud, perjury, coercion and intimidation to further that end and for 14 years suppressed evidence of Daniels’ innocence, thus maintaining his deprivation of liberty.” Krage recommended that the case be “presented to a federal grand jury at the earliest convenience.”

  On January 15, 1973, a federal grand jury convened in Jacksonville. More than two dozen witnesses, including Joe Knowles and Mary Ellen Hawkins, had been subpoenaed to testify. In response to a letter Hawkins had thereupon written to Knowles, he had telephoned her and “expressed his sorrow for the trouble” he was causing her. Sam Powell, Joe’s close friend and fellow Quarterback Clubber, had also called Hawkins to ascertain details about her interview with the FBI and the date she was scheduled to testify.

  In preparing their notes for the grand jury, attorneys for the DOJ credited the FDLE for its “absolutely zealous and quite thorough investigation,” but noted that some evidence, including the testimony of Blanche and Joe Knowles, could be uncovered only by the grand jury. Of particular concern to the DOJ attorneys was Joe Knowles’s “sudden absence on the night of the rape,” and then, upon his return to Lake County, the “active role” that he’d “assumed . . . in the investigation of his wife’s rape.” They advised that “Knowles can be expected to be hostile and uncooperative”—all the more so now that the attorneys had finally gained access to Blanche Knowles’s interview with Gordon Oldham, which corroborated discussion of the alleged murder-for-hire plot put forth by Sam Wiley Odom. While FBI agents were examining the banking records of Joe Knowles and Mary Ellen Hawkins for any evidence to support the “rumors” of a five-thousand-dollar payment to kill Blanche Knowles, the evidence already in hand, the DOJ attorneys opined, “lends to the suspicion that [Joe] Knowles may have been involved.”

  Learning that the Daniels case would be going to a federal grand jury, Joe Knowles had informed his family, with dismay, “It’s coming up again.”

  Former state senator Frederick Karl, now serving as a consultant for the state and still ramping up to introduce the Claims Bill for the Relief of Jesse Daniels in the legislature, had been fully briefed on the case by Richard Graham before he met with Gordon Oldham. Oldham assured Karl that Daniels was guilty of raping Blanche Knowles, but this did not entirely persuade Karl, who availed himself again of the investigative reports and remained troubled by the case. By mail, he requested Oldham’s clarification on a key point; the state attorney did not reply. In a phone call, he pressed Oldham further as to “why the investigation shifted from a black suspect to a white one.” Oldham’s equivocal answer— the investigation had been conducted not by Willis McCall or James Yates but by an “outside expert,” the polygrapher Bill Donaldson from Tampa—hardly satisfied Karl, who informed the state attorney he himself would have to interview Blanche Knowles.

  For that purpose Karl traveled to Leesburg in February 1972. Up to that point, Blanche Knowles had never submitted a signed statement or affidavit describing what had transpired in her home on the night of December 17, 1957. Not since her testimony before a Lake County grand jury in January 1958 (conducted by Oldham) had she ever testified orally as to the events—ever raised her right hand and sworn to tell the truth and nothing but the truth under threat of perjury charges—because the case against Jesse Daniels had never gone to trial. At none of the hearings related to the case had Gordon Oldham ever called her as a witness, because, he professed, it would be “too upsetting” for her to have to recount, in public, details of a trauma still distressful in her memory. And Richard Graham had never pressed to have Blanche testify, on his hunch (correct, as it turned out) that if he didn’t, Oldham would be more inclined to drop the rape charge against Jesse. Graham suspected, however, that Oldham had other, less empathetic reas
ons not to call Blanche as a witness. For one, it would open her up to troublesome questions about the evening of December 17, such as: Where was Joe Knowles on the night of the rape? Did the attacker tell you that he was paid five thousand dollars to kill you?

  That Graham had chosen not to force Blanche to testify under oath as a strategy in the best interest of his client did not, however, impede or in any significant way affect Karl in his purpose. Neither did the aura of intimidation that hung in the air when he was introduced to the Knowleses in their Palmora Park home, where they were flanked by members of the Quarterback Club, among them an old friend of Karl’s and a fellow state senator, Welborn Daniel. Also present were Oldham and assistant state attorney John McCormick, along with the Knowleses’ attorney, Red Robinson.

  From the outset the meeting was tense, as Karl was pressured by all parties to back off his demand to interview Blanche. Joe in particular, Karl recalled, “clearly indicated his displeasure.” But Karl was determined that he’d not leave Leesburg without her statement, for the Jesse Daniels case was no longer a local matter. Governor Askew was watching its progress with keen interest, as were the commissioner of the FDLE, the Florida legislature, and the U.S. Department of Justice. If elected officials and powerful citizens had criminally conspired to frame an innocent man for a crime he did not commit, it was essential that the victim be put on record. The time had come for Blanche Knowles to speak.

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  THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, having decided its investigation required a follow-up visit with Mary Ellen Hawkins, dispatched FBI agents to Naples. Hawkins, entirely cooperative, told the agents that in January 1958, about a month after their December 17 rendezvous, Joe Knowles had come to Naples to tell her what had happened since. “Concerned that something may have happened to his children,” Joe had driven at a speed well above the legal limit back to Lake County, where he’d learned his wife had been raped by “a white mentally retarded neighborhood boy,” although “people in the neighborhood” did not believe he’d done it. Knowles also recounted to Hawkins that the rapist had “threatened the baby and told Blanche . . . he had been paid $5,000.00 to kill her.”

  On the morning after the attack, about the time when Knowles had been leaving the Tampa police station, a few members of the Leesburg Quarterback Club who’d heard about the rape had conferred and decided that one of them—Sam Powell, as it had turned out—should attempt to intercept Joe before he’d arrived back in Leesburg. A prominent building contractor, president of the Leesburg Chamber of Commerce, and one of Joe’s closest friends, Powell had known exactly what “business” had taken Joe to Tampa. Hawkins could not recall if Joe had told her why Powell and the other Clubbers had thought it necessary to meet and speak with him before his return home. If, as the FBI agents suggested, it might have concerned “a plot to kill Blanche Knowles,” Hawkins claimed ignorance and largely dismissed the possibility, but “if there was one, she does not believe Joe Knowles or Sam Powell had anything to do with it,” said the FBI report. The report noted as well that at this point Hawkins had asked if she was being interviewed by the FBI as a possible suspect. She “denied that she ever had any hope of Joe Knowles getting a divorce and marrying her.” Nor had she ever shared a joint bank account with Joe, and she had no objection to agents’ examining her old bank records for any suspicious five-thousand-dollar transactions.

  Hawkins admitted to still feeling “great remorse over the affair” and “blaming herself for what had happened to Mrs. Knowles.” But for her, she reasoned, Joe “would have been at home, and the rape probably would never have occurred.”

  Horrified by the news of Blanche’s ordeal, Mary Ellen Hawkins had terminated her relationship with Joe Knowles on that January day in 1958, although she told the agents, “Joe did try to renew it several times.”

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  TAKING CUES FROM THE FBI REPORTS, Al Albright began to cultivate contacts inside the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, and one deputy led him to Earle Fain Jr. According to the deputy, Fain, a longtime Leesburg resident and member of the Quarterback Club who owned a Cadillac dealership, supposedly had insider information about the rape of Blanche Knowles. (Earle’s family had once owned the Fain Theater on Main Street, where young Blanche Bosanquet used to park the family Chevrolet while she spotted planes with her father on the roof of the Leesburg National Bank.)

  Fain’s nervousness was immediately apparent to Albright. As he began to feel more comfortable with the FDLE agent, Fain confessed that he’d long been and still was afraid to report what he knew about the Jesse Daniels case. Albright, though, had done his research. Since 1970, Earle Fain Jr. had been chairing the Lake County Retarded Children’s Campaign, which encouraged contributions from business leaders and volunteers throughout the state. So, in his winning, easy way, Albright got to talking to Fain about the case of a Lake County retarded boy, Jesse Daniels, and Fain began to respond. He was “absolutely sure Jesse Daniels did not rape Blanche Knowles,” he said, and then he related what had transpired on the morning of December 18, 1957. In effect, his story picked up where Mary Ellen Hawkins’s had left off.

  Joe Knowles was a “ladies’ man,” Fain said, and he and Blanche had been having “family problems.” She did not like being left on her own in Okahumpka, as she was that night of December 17 while Joe “spent the night with a woman” in Tampa. On the morning of December 18, after Joe had returned to Leesburg and checked on his family, Oz Ferguson of the Leesburg Motor Company had picked Joe and Sam Powell up in his big Buick, along with Gordon Oldham, Red Robinson, and Fain himself. Then they’d driven around Leesburg, “discussing what to do about Blanche Knowles’s report of having been raped by a Negro.”

  “I be goddamn if Blanche is going to be accused of being raped by a nigger,” Joe sputtered in anger and frustration. Oldham had assured him that “he could handle the matter” and Joe was “not to worry about it.” Together the men of the Quarterback Club considered and agreed upon the advisability of “moving Blanche Knowles from Okahumpka to Leesburg” for her safety and well-being. And, Fain told Albright, they decided, after further discussion, that it was essential for Blanche to “change the description of her attacker being a Negro.”

  Next, Fain said, Oldham and Knowles contacted Sheriff Willis McCall, who was initially hesitant to comply with a plan that deprived him of the opportunity to be “hanging a nigger” for rape. In light of Knowles’s predicament, however, the sheriff acceded, and “arrangements were made to release the Negro suspects.” Chief Criminal Deputy James Yates was told to refocus his investigation. The Lake County Sheriff’s Department needed a white person that it could charge with the rape.

  Fain was abashed. He avowed to Albright he had personally thought the arrest and confinement of Jesse Daniels at Chattahoochee constituted “a gross miscarriage of justice.” Fain himself had later gone to Tavares to speak with Willis McCall about the measures taken against Jesse. In Fain’s view, the sheriff had rationalized his role in the conspiracy to frame an innocent white man for rape by asserting that Jesse “was from a poor family” and “would get better treatment in the State Hospital.”

  Fain told Albright that it was imperative for the agent to protect his identity at all costs, or Fain would be isolated “socially and business-wise.” Of particular concern to Fain was Gordon Oldham. “As long as Gordon Oldham is state attorney,” Fain said, he could cause him trouble. However, Fain added, if Albright could convince any of the other people in the car to tell what had happened, he himself would be willing to testify to the conspiracy.

  The day after their meeting, Fain contacted Albright. Gordon Oldham had phoned him to learn about the officer who’d visited Fain’s house. He’d wanted to know who the man was and if he was from the FDLE. He’d asked whether Fain had gotten the “tag number” on the man’s car and whether “any questions were asked about the Knowles rape
case.” Fain told Albright how he’d responded; he did not know the officer’s identity, he’d said, and had not told him anything about the case.

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  THE MEN of the Leesburg Quarterback Club were keenly aware that more than reputations and careers were at stake in the face of Frederick Karl’s authority and his resolve to interview Blanche Knowles. Should Blanche now, after fifteen years, choose—or dare—to speak the truth, she might expose her husband and a cohort of county and state officials, including Gordon Oldham, to serious criminal charges. Influential though the Quarterback Club was, its members were powerless to spare Leesburg’s first lady the indignity—or themselves the threat—of Karl’s inquiry. Blanche would have to speak.

  In response to Karl’s questioning, Blanche acknowledged that she had initially said the man who’d attacked her was a Negro. The admission prompted the senator to ask Blanche to explain, then, “her inability to tell the difference between a black man and a white man.”