Beneath a Ruthless Sun Read online

  Over the next few days, FBI agents interviewed everyone present at the Big Scrub cabin on October 4. The statements of the law enforcement officers varied little. Their accounts included descriptions of two strong, young black men “wrestling” for guns and engaging in a “hell of a fight” with the sheriff in their attempts at “resisting arrest.” None of the lawmen was willing to provide a signed statement, however, the FBI noted. (Because “that was all bullshit,” according to Griffin, and as he remembered it, the two airmen never resisted arrest—“They were meek.”)

  As for the photographs, McCall informed the FBI agents that they “were not available,” and he “refused to furnish any copies or negatives.”

  The FBI withdrew. The photographs disappeared from public scrutiny. The story faded into yesterday’s news. McCall was elected to a fourth straight term as sheriff. As his next-door neighbor, J. E. Peacock, observed, “It gets under a Florida Cracker’s skin to observe such frequent tactics as have been resorted to in efforts to break down the morale and efficiency of a man of Sheriff McCall’s caliber. It seems that his County has been singled out from time to time for the ravages of negroes upon white women and girls, and because of his efficiency and untiring efforts, he has likewise been singled out as a target for those opposed to genuine law enforcement.”

  Groveland, Big Scrub, and now Okahumpka—the rape of Blanche Knowles was exactly the kind of crime Mabel would have expected the sheriff to close, and Oldham to prosecute, swiftly—all the more so as it afforded them the opportunity to pack off to the electric chair the nephew of one of the most hated men in Florida. Yet both the sheriff’s department and the state attorney’s office had gone silent, and silent they remained for the time being.

  To Mabel, it made no sense.

  Frampy Cope Snack Bar in Okahumpka’s North Quarters

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sensational Lies

  THREE DAYS AFTER THE RAPE of Blanche Knowles, with Melvin Hawkins Jr. named as the lead suspect, and Sam Wiley Odom still behind bars at the Lake County jail, Sheriff Willis McCall and Deputy James Yates returned to Okahumpka. Their investigation was about to take a curious turn. Yates parked his cruiser at the end of Bugg Spring Road, by a one-story house once owned by a Confederate officer, and knocked on the door. The man who answered was Charles Morhart, a thin and stylish forty-nine-year-old former dental professor who had moved from Virginia to help his sister, Augusta Branham, manage the family citrus grove after the death of her husband.

  In rural Lake County, Charles Morhart had been living a quiet if slightly eccentric life as “an asexual bachelor” in this house adjacent to his sister’s, just off the Knowles’s property. Morhart’s nephew, Joseph Branham III, remembered him as “Unkie,” “a jovial intellectual who loved boating.” Unkie was a magnet for women, “but he didn’t seem very interested in them.”

  The Branhams, like everyone else in Okahumpka, were aware that Bubba Hawkins was being held for the rape of Blanche Knowles, so they were surprised when McCall and Yates showed up at Bugg Spring to ask questions about Morhart’s whereabouts on the night of December 17. “They were very interested in Charles,” Joseph recalled, and especially interested in his shoes—“He wore these Navy Last shoes, with no treads and flat soles, that he would buy at Getzel’s Department Store in Leesburg.” As he had done with Bubba Hawkins, Yates confiscated the shoes.

  Charles Morhart may have been eccentric by Lake County standards, but he was also well-to-do and well connected. He knew a lawyer in Leesburg named P. C. Gorman, who moved in the same circles as the men of the Leesburg Quarterback Club. Gorman also sat on the board of the Citizens National Bank of Leesburg with Joe Knowles and Red Robinson, the Knowles family attorney. Telephone calls were made and conversations ensued in Tavares. In short order, Morhart’s shoes were returned, with an apology for the “misunderstanding.”

  On Sunday evening, December 22, after revisiting the crime scene, deputies Yates and Campbell stopped at the small, tin-roofed Cracker house on Bay Avenue where the Daniels family lived, just a few hundred yards west of the Knowles and Branham-Morhart homes. They told Charles and Pearl that they would like to talk to their son, Jesse. Pearl and Charles knew that Mrs. Knowles had said she’d been raped by a Negro and that one of the Hawkins boys was being held for the crime. So they didn’t see how Jesse, who’d learned of the rape only the morning after it occurred, could be of any help to the deputies, not to mention, as Pearl tried to explain, Jesse’s “condition,” which hindered his mental faculties.

  Nevertheless, Pearl invited the deputies inside. On the wall in the small living room hung a framed “God Bless Our Home,” and a school photograph of Jesse at eight, all smiles. It was Pearl’s favorite picture of her only child, taken just before the first of his three frightening bouts with rheumatic fever.

  As it happened, Jesse himself was at home, and Yates told Pearl that he wanted to take her boy to Tavares, to “ask him a few questions.”

  The request startled Pearl and Charles, but Jesse was not alarmed. “Sure, I’ll go. I’m not afraid. I want you to get the right man,” he said to Yates. “After all, my mother’s a woman.”

  Yates promised the Danielses he’d bring Jesse back home to them later that night. It proved to be a long night. As the hours passed, increasingly anxious and unable to sleep, Pearl and Charles told themselves that one of the deputies must have taken Jesse to his own home rather than drive the boy out to South Quarters in the middle of the night.

  Dawn broke. The worried parents shared a rushed breakfast before driving to the courthouse, where they waited for the sheriff’s office to open. And waited. Deputies offered the Danielses little help and no information, but they refused to leave. When state attorney Gordon Oldham arrived, he informed them that there was nothing to implicate Jesse in the crime but that Sheriff McCall “wanted to hold him a little while longer.” He also told them that they would not be permitted to visit with their son as long as the authorities were conducting an ongoing investigation.

  Helpless and with no knowledge of what their legal rights might be under the circumstances, Charles and Pearl realized that they needed an attorney, but they couldn’t afford to hire one. So they did the only thing they could do. They returned to South Quarters, where they continued to wait and to hope Yates would soon make good on his promise to bring Jesse back home to them.

  * * *

  —

  ON DECEMBER 24, Melvin Hawkins Sr. did what he usually did on Christmas Eve: He chopped down a Florida holly and stood it up inside the house, the dangling red berries affording nature’s own ornaments. This Christmas season, though, circumstances had cast a pall on any festivities. Melvin was alone in the house.

  After being held incommunicado for five days and nights, without a warrant or a hearing, Bubba Hawkins had finally been released by the Lake County deputies. To his family’s relief, he appeared to be unharmed. He related how, despite the efforts of McCall and his deputies to persuade him to confess to the rape of Blanche Knowles, he had refused; he recounted how they’d even driven him to Tampa to take a lie detector test. “They didn’t hurt me,” Bubba said. “Just called me a nigger.” But with the story still hanging in the air, unresolved, that a local white woman had been raped by a young black man, and with fears of vigilantism still running high in the Quarters, the family had thought it wise for Melvin Sr.’s wife, Alice, and the children—including Bubba—to decamp to Alice’s sister’s home in Leesburg until the situation in Okahumpka quieted down.

  Perhaps the phone call from the governor to Oldham had protected Bubba against a beating or worse. But for Mabel, it fell far short of the dedicated investigation into the boy’s detention that the sheriff’s action seemed to call for. She accused the governor of “fence straddling” and suggested that he was “either too hasty in obtaining the facts; misinformed of them, or he, like so many others, has no desire to tangle with Willis McCall.�
� Upon releasing the boy to his parents, she noted, McCall had said nothing to exonerate him, even though such incidents “are most damaging to race relations.” She expressed disappointment in the governor’s inaction, given his frequently declared “promises that he will not be over in a corner—washing his hands of it all.”

  Mabel tracked down Alice Hawkins shortly after her son’s release. Alice refused to discuss his whereabouts, but she did state that he would not be returning to Okahumpka anytime soon. “I know my boy couldn’t have had anything to do with it,” she said. “He was here with me all evening—we were popping corn. He’s a good boy who would like very much to go to college and make something of himself.”

  Bubba Hawkins made it home to his family for Christmas, but Sam Wiley Odom was not so fortunate. Evidently the Lake County Sheriff’s Department wasn’t quite done with the brooding, husky teenager from North Quarters. Yates held him a few more days, and then, without fanfare, the last black suspect in Blanche Knowles’s rape walked free.

  * * *

  —

  PEARL AND CHARLES DANIELS spent a sad Christmas Day in Okahumpka. Again they had been rebuffed by the sheriff’s department. “I packed all of his Christmas presents and went to the jail but they wouldn’t let me in,” Pearl told Mabel in an interview for the Topic. The next day, Pearl tried yet again, this time with Charles; they brought clean clothes for Jesse, and Pearl had baked a batch of his favorite cookies. She said the clerk first hesitated, and then relented. “Well, I want to do the right thing,” he’d said, and led the Danielses upstairs to the jailer’s office. They’d been waiting there for over an hour when Willis McCall spotted them. Shaking, as if “trying to get his composure,” the sheriff bellowed, “Remember what I told you yesterday—that you wouldn’t see that boy? Well, that still goes!”

  The Danielses’ plight worsened, quickly. With McCall thwarting them at every turn, they placed all their hope in Yates’s decency in his promise to bring Jesse back home. Not so decently, the deputy invaded their home. While they were attempting to visit their son in Tavares, Yates was driving back to Okahumpka. When he discovered that no one was home at the Daniels house, he decided, without a warrant, to step inside and have a look around. Inside Jesse’s room, the boy’s guitar and a pair of undershorts caught the deputy’s attention.

  On Saturday, December 28, at the sheriff’s office, McCall and the state attorney held a hastily assembled press conference at which Oldham announced that they were now holding a nineteen-year-old white youth for the rape of the Okahumpka housewife ten days earlier. Jesse Daniels had confessed to the crime, McCall said, and Melvin “Bubba” Hawkins, along with the other twenty-two black suspects, had thus been “cleared of all suspicion.” As for earlier reports that the attacker was a Negro—which had led to the detainment of the nearly two dozen black men—Oldham explained that because the house was dark at the time of the incident, the victim had been unable to discern the features and skin color of her attacker.

  “We haven’t left many stones unturned, I don’t think,” the sheriff broke in, and he assured the reporters that they had the right man in Jesse Daniels, as the boy had in fact confessed to the crime. He confirmed that Daniels had no criminal record and that he was “mentally retarded”; yet, reporters noted, McCall “would not disclose what led to the arrest of the young citrus worker.”

  “What of the diamond-shaped heel print?” asked one reporter, and another followed up with, “What about the shorts found at the scene?” The undershorts and heel print, they’d been previously told, provided evidence that linked Bubba Hawkins conclusively to the crime.

  McCall was dismissive of any inconsistencies; he simply assumed the attitude, Mabel wrote, “that the case was closed.” While he acknowledged that, yes, Daniels was the only white man among the twenty-three suspects, he pointed out that Daniels was also “the first man to be charged.” And the right man: “We’ve been working day and night on this case,” McCall said, and it was now solved. Jesse Daniels was being held without bond, and the sheriff was taking no more questions.

  Immediately after the press conference, McCall drove to Okahumpka to inform Jesse’s parents that their son had confessed to the rape of Blanche Knowles.

  Pearl went numb with the news. Choking back tears, she told the sheriff, “He couldn’t be guilty.”

  “He’s guilty all right,” McCall replied. “Why, he even told me the color of the rug on the staircase going up to the bedroom. And he described the furniture in the bedroom.”

  At that, Charles spoke up. “Look here, Sheriff,” he said. “This thing was supposed to have happened in complete darkness. You said because it was dark she couldn’t tell whether it was a Negro or a white man. How could my boy say what color the rug was?”

  McCall merely shrugged at the logic, and then suggested that maybe Jesse had “imagined” the color of the rug after seeing a picture in a magazine—reasoning, or lack of it, that only confused Pearl more, as did his admonition that Pearl and Charles not discuss the “rug business” with anyone. “The newspapers grab hold of it and make headlines this big,” McCall said, extending his hands wide, Pearl recalled, like a “bragging fisherman.”

  Rather than argue the point with the sheriff, Pearl begged that he let her visit Jesse, who had now been separated from his family for four days and five nights. She prayed that the deputies, aware of his condition, were protecting him while he was in their custody, but she also knew the juvenile ward where he was being held was not a safe place for a boy with Jesse’s mental disability and emotional vulnerabilities.

  She’d learned of the conditions suffered by juvenile offenders from Mabel, who earlier in the year had toured the boys’ detention ward at the Lake County jail with her friend county judge W. Troy Hall Jr. “Lad in the Dungeon” was the headline to her exposé of the conditions under which juvenile offenders were being held. It described in painful detail five cases of “misguided humanity lolling in dreary cells,” one of them a sixteen-year-old boy in solitary confinement. He “peered from out of appalling darkness . . . in a cell with no light, no window, and with precious little air available through the inch-square grill work of the great door to the cell.” Convicted and jailed for auto theft, the boy had been locked in the dungeon for “extra punishment” after he’d disobeyed a jailer’s command. He was badly in need of a haircut, and standing dazed beside the toilet in a urine-stenched corner of the cell, he looked “almost like something out of Les Misérables”—or, as Judge Hall remarked, “like the dark ages. That’s the way they used to treat people hundreds of years ago.”

  The cell next to the “dungeon” confined a grown man who’d been judged to be insane and was awaiting an open bed at Chattahoochee, the notorious state mental hospital up in Florida’s Panhandle. All night long he’d run water at full force into the basin of the cell’s tiny sink, the boy told Mabel, and he’d make “strange noises” that rattled the boy so badly he couldn’t sleep. “I feel like I’m going crazy in here,” he said. One of the juvenile counselors had asked a deputy if the boy could be moved to another cell. “Let him sweat it out in there,” was the deputy’s response.

  Judge Hall was in the process of explaining to Mabel that Florida wasn’t supposed to even have windowless “sweat boxes” anymore, as they’d been deemed inhumane, when their tour was interrupted by the sudden appearance of Sheriff McCall. Having been tipped off by one of the jailers that his nemesis had gained access to the juvenile ward, he demanded to know how Mabel had gotten admittance. Hall replied for her; she’d asked him, he said, adding, “Someone’s got to let people know about it.”

  In this moment of standoff, it must have struck them both, sheriff and judge, how much their long relationship had deteriorated. They’d been boyhood friends, and together they’d grown into manhood. It was Hall who’d come immediately to the sheriff’s defense after the shooting of the two Groveland boys, and Hall who’d helped cra
ft the statement, delivered to the press and the FBI, positing that the action taken by the sheriff had been one of self-defense, as the two prisoners had jumped him in an attempt at escape. Hall, too, had been in charge of the coroner’s inquest that cleared McCall of any wrongdoing. Since then, however, like Jesse Hunter and Mabel herself, Hall had been increasingly offended by McCall’s displays of racism and violence, and he was no longer willing to defend or enable the sheriff’s brutality. The former friends had been clashing publicly and politically for the past six years, although the electorate continued to embrace both of them. (Hall liked to tell the story of a Lake County man who had informed him that he’d voted for both McCall and Hall: “I voted for Willis to protect us from the niggers. I voted for you to protect us from Willis.”)

  Turning his gaze away from the judge, McCall focused his wrath on Mabel. “The judge brought you here,” he spluttered, “but you’re not going any further. I’m not showing you anything. You wouldn’t tell the truth. You just tell sensational lies.” And he blocked their progress. He could not, however, prevent Hall from disclosing to Mabel that the five white teens in the ward had been jailed weeks earlier on charges ranging from auto theft to rape—no effort was made to separate first-time or minor offenders from serious criminals—and were still awaiting indictment. As for the black juveniles, they “could not be seen,” Mabel had written, “because they are in with adult prisoners, and adults are under the complete jurisdiction of the sheriff.”