Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  Jesse Daniels might have seen freedom a dozen years sooner had Governor LeRoy Collins not depended on Gordon Oldham to investigate Sam Wiley Odom’s claims. Oldham’s report to the governor had neglected to mention Odom’s account of the rapist’s claims that he’d been paid five thousand dollars to kill Blanche Knowles, that men were waiting for him outside in a car, or that a baby lay asleep in the victim’s bedroom—details that had been purposely kept from the public and that were corroborated in Blanche’s own statement. In Reed’s estimation, Gordon Oldham had failed to point out to Governor Collins or to anyone else any of “the discrepancies in the Daniels confession and none of the striking similarities in the Odom and Knowles statements.”

  Instead, Oldham had focused on the presumably false names of the rapist and his accomplices, which Odom had supplied, and, having quickly determined that no such persons existed, had reported to the governor that Odom must have been lying. Commissioner Reed believed that Odom put forward other untruths and deceptions, including what Blanche, in her interview with Gordon Oldham, had alleged her attacker to say—that he had decided not to kill her because “during the war I got all the killing I could want.” Aside from being convinced that Jesse Daniels would never have uttered such a phrase, investigators initially assumed Blanche Knowles’s attacker might have served in the military. That is, until Lester W. Thompson, a criminal investigator and polygraph expert with the Florida Sheriffs Bureau, advised that the statement “During the war I got all the killing I could want” should not necessarily be taken literally; it was a common expression, he explained, equating the phrase to cultural hyperbole: “That’s a typical colored remark. It is the boasting of a Negro.” In fact, Blanche’s attacker had vowed not to harm her if she agreed not to tell anybody, ever, of the rape—the very same vow Odom had made to Kate Coker.

  With his last-minute disavowal of the claim that Jesse Daniels was innocent, Odom seemed to have been grasping at his last straw—his “one straw out of a million”—in a gambit for his life that had played into Oldham’s hand. Odom had sought mercy when he’d placed that final phone call to Oldham, in which he’d admitted to his “hoax” and begged for his life. Instead, he’d provided Oldham an advantage, for the state attorney had then recounted to the press how Odom had rendered his eleventh-hour plea and recanted. Mabel Chesley, with a skepticism bred by long familiarity with Lake County politicking, viewed the phone call as Oldham’s final trick at Odom’s expense, in that Odom had been encouraged to believe that a last-minute apology to the state attorney might stay his execution, just as he’d likely been duped into making a false declaration of his own innocence in the Knowles rape.

  Whatever secrets the young man from North Quarters had withheld, however, they had expired with him at the turn of a switch one late-August afternoon in 1959. As Mabel wrote, “The truth died with Odom in that stiff-backed chair in Raiford State Prison.”

  Evvie Griffin was not the least bit skeptical of the possibility that under the circumstances, McCall and Yates would release a guilty black man to frame an innocent white one for the rape of a socially prominent woman. “Hell, yes . . . that would not surprise me one bit,” he said. His former partner Tom Ledford agreed. “Yates did whatever Willis told him to do,” he said. “He was one sneaky son of a bitch, and he got away with it every time.” Ledford contemplated the scenario for a moment, then added, “They’da had that nigger killed, though.”

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  IT WAS THREE YEARS since Special Master Thomas Woods had begun investigating the Daniels case, and he admitted to reporters that he’d been “very skeptical” of Jesse’s innocence until he’d started to examine the evidence. By the end, though, he’d had no doubts. “Buttressed by . . . years of investigation and mountains of evidence,” he noted, he and his staff had been “led to the inescapable conclusion that the claimant did not commit the rape for which he was charged.” Jesse Daniels “has been victimized by our society,” Woods contended, and was “entitled to some compensation to live out the remainder of his years without undue hardship.” Having duly considered Richard Graham’s proposed compensation of $122,640, he recommended, instead, that the State of Florida award $200,000, nearly twice the amount Graham had filed for. Woods recommended, further, that Pearl be compensated $30,000 for the pain and suffering she had endured. The Claims Committee agreed readily to those amounts. “But, more critical than monetary damages in this particular case,” Woods pleaded, “would be the Legislature’s declaration of innocence, which would mean more to this young man and his family than great wealth.”

  Even Richard Graham’s opposing counsel, James G. Mahorner, who represented the State of Florida in the Special Master’s investigation, agreed with Woods’s decision, informing the legislature that in the case of Jesse Daniels, the evidence “substantially supports a finding of innocence.” He found the amount of compensation appropriate. Pearl was overwhelmed by the recommendation. “Thank God for delivering Richard Graham,” she told reporters. Graham pointed out that Pearl ought to thank God for delivering Mabel Norris Chesley. “It was all because of Mabel. She drove the case from the start and she never gave up on Jesse,” Graham asserted, and Ted Husfeld concurred: Mabel’s conscience “would not let her accept something she knew in her heart was wrong . . . She wouldn’t give up the fight, even though crosses were burned in her yard and every other damn thing was done to intimidate her.”

  House Bill 2431, when it came finally to the floor of the Florida Senate, indeed declared the innocence of Jesse Daniels and agreed to compensate him for “the losses, damages and injuries he suffered through no fault of his own as the result of wrongful imprisonment.” Citing “the mental anguish and deep hurt” he had endured by being wrongfully deprived of his freedom, the bill warranted that the State of Florida “has damaged him in a manner for which he could never be compensated and which could never be erased from his mind.” Acknowledged, too, were the roles played by Pearl and Mabel in gaining Jesse’s freedom. “But for the unfaltering belief in his innocence by his mother,” the bill read, “and but for the exhaustive efforts of a newspaper woman who campaigned throughout the state for justice on behalf of Jesse Daniels, he would have languished in the criminal section of the Florida State Hospital, untried and unheard, in all probability for the remainder of his natural life.”

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  THE APOLLO ERA WAS OVER. By 1974, the skies above the Atlantic coastline had grown mostly quiet. Economic stagnation and a recession had effectively ended America’s post–World War II economic boom, rocket launches from Cape Canaveral had dropped off dramatically, and workers had been laid off by the thousands. Up the coast at the Princess Issena, the glory days, and nights, had ended. The resort hotel, now failing, had reduced its staff. Among the casualties was Jesse Daniels.

  At thirty-six, Jesse was known around Daytona Beach, as he had been in Okahumpka seventeen years before, as the guy on the bike. Pedaling up and down the streets of the resort town with a cigarette dangling from his lips, he’d go looking for any kind of menial job that might be available. His history limited his prospects. As he later acknowledged to a reporter, “When they find out I was in an insane asylum, they tell me ‘we have no work.’” Still, he found part-time employment as a dishwasher, a busboy, and a cook’s helper while he waited, and waited, for the Florida Senate to approve his compensation.

  While on his bike, Jesse would sometimes spot Mabel in her car. She never failed to honk her horn, and he would wave to Mrs. Reese, as he still called her. He and his mother dined regularly at Mabel’s home, where Jesse enjoyed talking with Patricia about the old days when they were growing up in Lake County; they both remembered the good fishing there. “Sometimes,” Jesse recalled, a sheepish smile on his face, “Mrs. Reese gave me a beer.”

  Astride his two-wheeled green cruiser, Jesse would frequently also see Richard Graham. In anticipation of a surge in
urban development that never came, Graham had purchased a few small, run-down properties in Daytona Beach, one of which he’d allotted, rent-free, to the Volusia County Mental Health Association. It was there that he and Jesse were most likely to run into each other, as almost daily Jesse cycled by the offices to check in with the social workers—they helped people like him, people who had “problems with living”—and Graham would slip Jesse some cigarette money, to help tide him over.

  Progress on the claims bill had apparently stalled in the Florida Senate, while Pearl and Jesse continued “to scrimp and set aside dreams.” In the little town of Green Cove Springs, Pearl sold her hand-sewn quilts. She grew bell peppers, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, and cranberries in her small garden, and she kept a storage shed well stocked with canned preserves. “You never know what’s going to happen in this world,” she said. “Jesse and I might have to hide out some day and we’ll have a lot to eat for a long time.” Pearl was not being entirely fanciful. After all, she’d known what it was to lose a home to fire, and she continued to live in fear of reprisal for being on the wrong side of Willis McCall. So did Jesse. Whenever he caught sight of a car with Lake County license plates in the vicinity of Pearl’s trailer, he’d come bursting inside, his chest heaving, and “furiously strum his guitar” to relieve his anxiety.

  Meanwhile, Pearl was having fainting spells and severe headaches. “Oh, there are pains and not enough money to see a good doctor,” she’d say, “but there are others who are worse-off.” Others less fortunate, at least in Pearl’s eyes, lived all around her in Green Cove Springs, and many were the neighbors she’d provide for with her canned preserves. In fact, Pearl had been “classed as 100 percent disabled,” according to Mabel, and had been advised to avoid strenuous activity. That did not include fishing, and from time to time Mabel would drive north to St. Augustine and west to Green Cove Springs. She and Pearl would kick off their shoes and, once Mabel had lit up her low-tar cigarette, wade once again with their fishing poles into the shallow waters of the St. Johns River, the way they’d used to do nearly twenty years before, until a devil of a man in a tall white Stetson had run them both out of Lake County.

  Reporters besides Mabel had been tracking the case of Jesse Daniels, and on occasion one of them would turn up in Green Cove Springs for a follow-up. With Pearl by his side, Jesse shared his modest dreams with one reporter: “I was looking forward to buying a camper and touring the country. The only wheels we have now is my bicycle. I’d like to buy the land next to our trailer, but we can’t afford it. We won’t starve, though . . . I’ve seen worser days. I spent the best years of my life in a place worser than death.” The pauses in Jesse’s responses grew longer when the reporter asked about Chattahoochee; much of what had happened there Jesse was still unable, or unwilling, to talk about.

  Jesse’s release from the institution and his exoneration gratified Pearl more than the delay in compensation disturbed her, the reporter noted. “I’m so thankful to God they finally admitted my young one didn’t do it,” she said. “You can bet there was lots of people that figured Jesse did it, seein’ how he was locked up so long.” Out of Jesse’s earshot, she confided to the reporter that “Jesse really feels the loss. He knows he’ll never make up for all those years. He came up to me the other day and said, ‘You know momma, it just doesn’t seem right that I’m 36 years old. It don’t feel right. I don’t feel like I should be any older than 19 or 20.’”

  “I’m still not adjusted to society,” Jesse himself confessed to the reporter. “I thought I’d never get out—that I was put there for the rest of my life. I don’t like to think about bein’ free because it reminds me of bein’ locked up. I can’t ever forgive for what’s happened. It cost me fourteen long years and destroyed my teenage life . . . I still have nightmares about that place. I dream about it all the time. There wasn’t a day went by that I wouldn’t have minded dying right on the spot.”

  In April 1975, about the same time that Pearl was diagnosed with cancer, the Florida House of Representatives finally convened to vote on Special Master Thomas Woods’s recommendation that she be compensated thirty thousand dollars for her pain and suffering, as well as for financial losses incurred by her son’s incarceration. Representative Richard Langley of Lake County, a longtime friend of both the Knowles family and Gordon Oldham, took the floor to argue against the measure. “We don’t owe her anything but our sympathy,” he contended, because her son was in fact incompetent and insane. For proof, Langley circulated a copy of Jesse’s original commitment order by Judge Truman Futch, which Gordon Oldham had delivered to the legislator hours before. The State of Florida had rightfully committed Jesse Daniels to Chattahoochee, Langley argued, and had otherwise in no way injured Pearl.

  Frustrated by this last-minute turn of events, the chairman of the House Claims Committee urged his colleagues in the legislature to rely not on Langley’s interpretation of the case but on the Special Master’s Report. If they only took the time to read it, he advised, wielding his thick copy, they’d want “to investigate a lot of other people.” Then, his voice rising in outrage on behalf of Jesse Daniels, he declared, “There ought to be a bunch of people in jail instead of him!”

  There was one woman on the floor, however, who was not taken in by the Lake County contingency on that April afternoon in Tallahassee. Like Mabel Norris Chesley, she’d spent years as a reporter learning the ins and outs of local politics while she searched for truth. Her only political experience had been in serving as a congressional aide in Washington, D.C., almost two decades earlier. But in 1974, the divorced single mother of three small children made the unorthodox choice to run for public office, even though some of her would-be constituents thought she was “not a good mother” because of her decision.

  As the first female and first Republican state legislator to represent Collier County, Mary Ellen Hawkins listened to the chairman read “the most emotional bill we’ve ever had as far as the legislature goes.” She had, of course, a different perspective on the case from that of her colleagues, having been drawn into it by her affair with Joe Knowles nearly twenty years before. After she had been questioned by the FBI as a possible conspirator in a murder-for-hire plot, had her banking and finance records scrutinized, and been called before the federal grand jury, no evidence had ever materialized that linked either her or Joe Knowles to a conspiracy to kill Blanche, and it was entirely possible that the mention of a five-thousand-dollar payment for murdering her was just another of Sam Wiley Odom’s untruths. In any event, Hawkins insisted that her vote on the claims bill had nothing to do with her connection to the Daniels case. “I decided based on the merits and facts of the case,” she said, and she rejected Langley’s arguments and voted to compensate Pearl Eisentrager “for the loss of services and companionship of her only son, Jesse D. Daniels, as a result of his wrongful imprisonment.”

  Hawkins’s vote was not enough to tip the balance. The House, “utterly misled by Langley,” Mabel reported, had been “bamboozled” into believing Jesse’s commitment legal and proper. After a “short but furious debate,” she wrote, Langley had skillfully “maneuvered a 50–37 tactical vote” to kill Pearl’s claims bill and deny any chance of compensation.

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  JESSE DANIELS was waiting on the steps outside the Volusia County Mental Health building on U.S. 1 in Daytona Beach. He was wearing the same suit and tie he’d worn upon his release from Chattahoochee five years before. When the Volvo sedan pulled up, he slid into the backseat. Mabel Chesley was at the wheel, and in the passenger seat was Patricia, now thirty-five and an elementary school teacher in Volusia County. Conversation was muted, inconsequential, their minds roaming elsewhere, as they drove the eighty miles west to the funeral. In March 1976, at the age of sixty-one, Pearl had succumbed to her long illness.

  She was buried between the graves of Jesse’s father, Charles Daniels, and her second husband, Thomas Eisen
trager, in Sumter County’s Center Hill Cemetery. The funeral went largely unnoticed, but among the few who came to pay their respects were Richard Graham and his wife, Bunnie.

  After the service, Mabel offered to drive back to Daytona Beach by way of Okahumpka, it being a day for good-byes. The late-afternoon light was dwindling by the time the sedan crept past the Okahumpka country store where once the boy on the bike had picked up the daily post and listened to Mayo Carlton play tunes on his fiddle. Jesse might not have been good at tallying sums or marking time by a calendar, but he wasn’t wanting in memories of people and everyday events, and he remembered how Mayo used to promise he’d keep Jesse safe from those who said or did unkind things. “Don’t you worry about one God blessed thing,” he’d once told Jesse. “Won’t nobody harm one hair on your head.”

  At the old depot, scrub grass and tiny saplings were sprouting between the station’s long-idle tracks. One could barely see the rusted rails where, twenty years before, shirtless black men, their arms strained and torsos lustrous with sweat, stacked watermelons by the thousands onto scores of straw-padded railcars bound for the North. The melon business had since moved farther south, and trains no longer ran through Okahumpka. Jesse remembered when, and why, they had.

  Many of the weather-beaten shacks alongside the sandy lanes of South Quarters were deserted, too. Dog pens and chicken coops sat empty on sandspur-patched lots. The hamlet had lost nearly half its population over the past two decades. Okahumpka had become a ghost town.