Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  On Bay Avenue, the Volvo slowed in front of a small Cracker house. The porch wasn’t bare in Jesse’s memory. He could picture his daddy, set for the day on a rusty metal chair under the tin awning as he waved to his son pedaling away, a fishing pole fixed to his handlebars. Between the porch posts had hung the laundry line where Pearl would hang his rain-soaked clothes after another summer downpour had drenched the boy on his bike. Jesse stared at the old house. He’d not seen it since he’d left it, days before Christmas in 1957, when Deputy Yates had guided him into the backseat of the Plymouth Belvedere he’d parked there, on that sandy spot in front of the house. “I sure miss my mother and father,” Jesse said.

  Mabel turned the car toward the road that once, at summer’s dusk, blazed a rust-colored trail into the torrid blood-orange sun hanging in the western sky over Sumterville. Now paved with asphalt, the county road took the sedan by a stretch of pasture, away from Bugg Spring, to the once grand Knowles home, long fallen into disrepair. The two-story Georgian frame house appeared vacant, and the grounds, overgrown with scrub and weeds, evidenced neglect. Mabel idled there for a moment, allowing Jesse a glance at the big house in the little town he’d called home. The sweet, juicy satsumas Blanche Knowles had placed in his hands . . . the fish he’d sell to Wiley Sam, the black boy he knew from the Quarters . . . whatever thoughts and memories ran through Jesse’s mind, he’d kept to himself. His last moments in Okahumpka were his alone.

  Mabel put her foot to the gas pedal. The sedan accelerated. The evening darkened on a ghostly reminder of a ruinous mid-December night.

  Deputy Noel “Evvie” Griffin, 1957

  Epilogue

  THE DEBATE OVER HOUSE BILL 2431 to compensate Jesse Daniels for the damages he’d suffered by wrongful imprisonment proved to be just as contentious as the claims bill for his mother. To combat it, Gordon Oldham drove to Tallahassee, registered as a lobbyist, and, in the hallway outside the House chamber, coached Lake County representative Richard Langley on how to argue against the bill.

  “When this boy was arrested, he was immediately appointed an attorney,” Langley began, and the misstatements grew from there. “Not some twenty-four-year-old kid out of law school, but Sam Buie. Sam Buie had been a state’s attorney for twenty-four years. He knew the law as it was in 1957 as good as anybody in this state. He talked with the parents before he represented the boy. They asked him to try to get the boy committed to Chattahoochee. They waived a hearing. He was examined by three medical doctors in Chattahoochee who said he is not competent to stand trial. How can a state’s attorney bring him to trial if Chattahoochee has ruled he’s not competent to go to trial? So where’s the fault of the state’s attorney for not bringing him to trial?”

  Langley not only falsely summarized the Daniels case; he also mischaracterized the results of the federal investigation. “The grand jury in Jacksonville considered this case not two years ago,” Langley asserted, “and found absolutely no fault. No fault whatsoever.”

  At that point, committee chairman Jerry Melvin, incredulous, interrupted. “Mr. Speaker, might I ask Mr. Langley, did you refer to the grand jury report, Mr. Langley, in your remarks?”

  “Yes, sir,” Langley admitted.

  Melvin noted that Special Master Woods had been allowed to review the grand jury report “to determine certain facts but that if he revealed any evidence or any information contained in that special report . . . he would be prosecuted.” How then, he asked the representative, “do you know the contents of that grand jury report?”

  “Mr. Melvin,” Langley responded, “my argument is [the jurors] were given all the information and all the investigatory product and they did not make any finding.” Langley, in other words, had not in fact seen the grand jury transcripts. He had simply delivered the message that Oldham wanted the legislature to receive: that Jesse Daniels belonged in a mental institution, and that no indictments had been brought in the case—although it was far from true that the U.S. attorney had found “no fault.”

  Immediately, several legislators rose to defend both Woods’s investigation and his recommendation for compensation. “I’d like to say to you, Mr. Langley, that if I had my choice tomorrow between fourteen years in a regular prison or fourteen years incarcerated with the criminally insane, I would take the fourteen years in prison,” one declared. Another agreed, and suggested that “the gentlemen who keep insisting that he wasn’t imprisoned, he was in a mental institution” should go try out “the monkey cages up in Chattahoochee” for themselves.

  Still, Langley persisted, arguing so stridently for a reduction in Jesse’s compensation that one of his colleagues asked why he had introduced an amendment to give Jesse anything at all.

  “Evidently, some members of this House need to salve their conscience,” Langley replied. “I don’t. Frankly, I’ll vote for zero if you want to put an amendment up there.”

  Again Chairman Melvin rose, now apoplectic at Langley’s repeated misrepresentation of the facts in the Daniels case. He admonished his colleagues to take a deeper look at the actual evidence in the report. “There’s a lot more to it,” Melvin said. “I ain’t gon’ give up, I’m gon’ keep lookin’ . . . Somewhere back there, there’s something in that woodpile that I don’t like. And all you’ve got to do is read this testimony word for word and you’ll understand that it is the state, through the state’s offices and the state’s representative and other people, that did this person wrong.”

  Melvin had his supporters, but Langley did, too, including Vince Fechtel Jr., a friend of Joe Knowles and a fellow Lake County representative, who argued that the State of Florida would be setting a “dangerous precedent” if it fiscally compensated claimants like Jesse Daniels who purported they’d “lost their personal liberties.” And in the absence of Special Master Woods, who, as a representative lamented, “could have answered very specifically many of the legal questions that have been glazed over and have been obscured” by “these two gentlemen from Lake County,” Langley prevailed: The legislature voted to reduce Jesse Daniels’s compensation from the recommended $200,000 to $75,000. “I don’t believe that $125,000 is a bad day’s work, frankly,” commented a self-satisfied Langley afterward.

  Indisputably, his success owed much to Gordon Oldham, whose influence in the case of Jesse Daniels extended beyond the Florida Legislature—even to the special master himself, who, despite having accumulated copious evidence pointing toward a criminal conspiracy, absolved, however faintly, the state attorney from Lake County. “Nothing in this report shall be considered, in any way, to be derogatory to the handling of this case by the State’s Attorney, Gordon Oldham,” Woods wrote. “The State’s Attorney, working with the facts as given, handled the case in a reasonably prudent manner, and there is no intent by the Special Master to offer criticism of him or his office.”

  Journalist Martin Dyckman, who knew both men, considered Thomas Woods a man of character and ethics; he noted Woods had learned a sobering lesson a few years before, when a bill he had drafted to compensate families of prisoners killed in a work-camp fire started by inmates had been defeated by Pork Chop legislators because, they said, “had the men not broken the law, they wouldn’t have been in prison.” Dyckman believed that “experience may well have conditioned Woods to say what he needed to say to get a claims bill passed—always an uphill task in the Florida Legislature.” And, he added, “what Woods did not need to say on Jesse Daniels’s behalf was anything that might further antagonize Oldham, who had powerful friends throughout the political establishment.”

  Mabel Chesley outright blamed Oldham, first for having “railroaded” Jesse to Chattahoochee and then, with the help of his friends in the House, for sabotaging the claims bill. Richard Graham did not disagree. “If you’re looking for . . . a culprit in this whole story, don’t put it on Willis McCall,” he told a reporter after the legislature’s vote. Armed with his law degree, “Oldham is the most dan
gerous man in Lake County.”

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  UPON HIS RELEASE FROM CHATTAHOOCHEE, Kenneth Donaldson sued Florida State Hospital in federal court for violating his constitutional rights by confining him against his will. “I’m so angry,” he said. “I’ll go anywhere to talk about this. I’m angry because it took fifteen years out of my life without any legitimate reason. I made hundreds of friends [who] died there. They weren’t any crazier than I was.” Donaldson won his suit and was awarded $38,000 in damages. The hospital appealed, and the case went ultimately to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Donaldson v. O’Connor, a landmark 1975 decision for mental health law, the Court ruled unanimously in his favor, on the grounds that “a State cannot constitutionally confine . . . a nondangerous individual who is capable of surviving safely in freedom by himself or with the help of willing and responsible family members or friends.”

  Seventy-two-year-old state representative Maxine Baker of Dade County had followed both the Daniels and Donaldson cases closely. As chair of the Subcommittee on Mental Health and Retardation, the matronly Baker, working the corridors of the state capitol in her cat-eye glasses and pearl necklaces, had long been outspoken about not only the conditions at Chattahoochee but also the “dignity and human rights for mentally ill persons.” In 1971, she set out to comprehensively revise Florida’s century-old mental health laws. To that end, she brought Richard Graham to Tallahassee to draft legislation that would protect the due process and civil rights of citizens admitted into the state’s mental health facilities. The Florida Mental Health Act, more commonly known as the Baker Act, went into effect in 1972 and has since served as a model for many states undertaking similar reforms.

  Graham himself went on to be elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 1988. In 2002, he was appointed judge of the Seventh Judicial Circuit by Governor Jeb Bush; he retired from the bench in 2012. He lives in Ormond Beach, Florida, with his wife.

  Al Albright was later promoted to special agent in charge of the FDLE’s Orlando office. Afterward, he taught criminal justice and sociology at Florida Southern College in Lakeland. He died in 2005.

  Like Mabel Chesley and Pearl Daniels, Allen Platt and his family were chased from Lake County. “I wouldn’t have treated a dog the way they treated me,” Platt later said of his experiences there.

  Robert Shuler and Jerry Chatman were within hours of being executed by the State of Florida in August 1962 when Evvie Griffin revealed that deputies Yates and Clark had manufactured evidence against them. To this day, Griffin insists that his tracking dogs, Buck and Red, had correctly identified Charlotte Wass’s attackers. Yet despite the medical testimony presented at trial, Griffin, like Wass herself, was never convinced a rape had taken place that night in 1960. By ensuring that Shuler and Chatman were tried for rape, a capital crime, McCall and Oldham could seek and win death sentences, which surely would have been carried out had Griffin not gone public with his accusations.

  In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled death penalty statutes unconstitutional, a decision that commuted the sentences of hundreds of death-row inmates nationwide, including Shuler and Chatman. Their convictions were upheld in 1974 when a federal appeals court ruled that Griffin’s testimony “could not be believed,” and that his and Ledford’s accusation of manufactured evidence was “overwhelmingly refuted” by Gordon Oldham and other Lake County officials on the scene. In a familiar refrain, the decision read, “The evidence clears Mr. Oldham of any reflection on his professional integrity.” Ultimately, Judge W. Troy Hall resentenced Shuler and Chatman, effectively securing their release, as they had by then spent more than two decades in prison. Their commutation had ensured that Sam Wiley Odom would be the last person in Florida executed for nonhomicidal rape.

  From his family’s ranch in Eustis, Evvie Griffin continued to speak out about corruption in the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, and in the late 1970s, he campaigned actively against Sheriff Malcolm McCall, which earned him a wooden cross and a mock grave on a sandy lot not far from his home. In 1980, Griffin himself ran for the office and unseated McCall; he served two terms as sheriff of Lake County. One of his most vocal critics was Willis McCall, who wrote countless letters to the editors of local newspapers, criticizing the new sheriff’s policies, and Griffin himself. “There was no love lost between the two of us,” McCall told a reporter. Griffin still lives in the same Eustis house where he was born. He keeps a gun always within reach.

  Tom “Buddles” Ledford passed away in Tallahassee in 2016 at the age of eighty-six.

  Mary Ellen Hawkins, “the grand dame of Collier County politics,” served ten consecutive terms in the Florida House of Representatives. The Republican from Naples was known as a fierce advocate for women’s rights, the environment, and the arts. She lives in Tallahassee.

  Sheriff Willis McCall died in 1994, and remained adamant until the end that Jesse Daniels had raped Blanche Knowles. “He was just as guilty as he was a moron,” McCall said. In 2007, Lake County commissioners voted unanimously to remove the road signs on Willis V. McCall Road, which ran past the former sheriff’s home in Umatilla, and to rename it County Road 450A. “He was a son of the old South,” his son Douglas said at the time. “He was investigated more times than the Kennedy assassination and they never found anything.”

  After twenty-nine years at the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, James Yates became police chief of Fruitland Park, where he spent another decade in law enforcement. He died in Orlando in 2000.

  Gordon Oldham was state attorney for the Fifth Judicial Circuit for twenty-eight years; he retired in 1984. By then he had personally prosecuted more than two hundred capital cases and sent at least fifty defendants to death row in Florida. “I thought it was great,” Oldham said months before his death in 1998. “A lot of them thought they’d get life [in prison]. They didn’t.” In 2000, the Lake County Bar honored Oldham by erecting a granite monument and dedicating an oak tree to his memory; the oak shades a stone bench outside the Lake County Courthouse.

  In 1976, twenty-seven years after Virgil Hawkins was denied admission to the University of Florida College of Law because of his race, he returned to Lake County bearing a law degree. After abandoning his fight to enter the University of Florida so that other black students might gain entrance there, he had instead sought a legal education up North. But his application for admission to the Florida Bar was rejected, on the grounds that the New England School of Law was not accredited when he’d graduated in 1964. Hawkins fought the decision, and once again his case reached the Florida Supreme Court. The debate was heated, but the court finally ruled in his favor. After a thirty-year struggle, Virgil Hawkins was sworn in to the Florida Bar as a member in good standing.

  “This is the proudest day of my life,” he said, indicating that he would return to Leesburg and Okahumpka to represent indigent clients. But, at seventy and in poor health, Hawkins was not equipped to begin a law career, and the pace of high-stakes criminal defense work soon overwhelmed him. One client, convicted of assault and sentenced to prison, argued in his appeal that Hawkins had botched his defense. It was Hawkins’s first felony case. The bar agreed with the client. Hawkins was also reprimanded for ethical complaints over client billing and placed on probation. In tears, he resigned from the bar.

  In 1988, Hawkins suffered a debilitating stroke. With his wife, Ida, unable to care for him in Leesburg, he languished in an Ocala hospital, where he died penniless. “I know what I did,” he said before his death. “I integrated schools in Florida. No one can take that away from me.”

  A Florida attorney named Harley Herman, one of the few whites to attend Hawkins’s funeral, was appalled by the state’s treatment of the Okahumpka native. At his own expense, and against considerable resistance from the legal community, Herman began pressing for Hawkins’s posthumous reinstatement to the Florida Bar. In October 1988, the Florida Supreme Court complied, noting th
at Hawkins’s heroic struggle for equality under the law should be recognized and apologizing for its “great mistake” in having barred Hawkins in his efforts to gain admission.

  Herman ultimately led an effort to persuade the University of Florida College of Law to name its library for Hawkins. What gratified Herman most, though, was the seven-foot granite monument commemorating Hawkins that was unveiled in 1991, at the edge of the Knowles family property on North Quarters Road. The monument, in effect, marks the gateway to the tiny Florida town where three significant civil rights cases that would reach the U.S. Supreme Court—those regarding Hawkins, the Groveland Boys, and Jesse Daniels—were ignited.

  By the 1990s, Lake County was trying to move on from the racially charged past, but by burying discomfiting truths rather than confronting them. No one talked openly about the rape of Blanche Knowles, not even in Leesburg or Okahumpka, and none except those involved in the case knew of any conspiracy, but rumors fueled by the puzzling particulars of the case circulated. “I always heard that Jesse Daniels painted his face black, and Mrs. Knowles scratched him and the paint came off,” said Virgil Hawkins’s niece, Gloria Hawkins Barton. “That’s how they found out it was a white person.” The actual sequence of events was much more complicated and bizarre, but to anyone familiar with the county’s social constraints, it would not have seemed implausible for the most powerful men of Lake County to falsely incarcerate a vulnerable white boy to protect the reputation of a white woman. “Blacks were seen as less than human, and Blanche was one of life’s flowers,” said longtime citrus grower William “B.G.” Floyd. “People would have looked at her differently. It kept Blanche from being a pariah.”

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