Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  L. B. DE Forest was having no problems insinuating herself into the daily life of the Lake County communities she visited. She had contacted the ministers at various churches and set up meetings with church members to discuss the abolition of capital punishment. The Baptists and the Methodists were especially supportive of her cause; a Catholic priest, on the other hand, advised her not to waste her time. “Prisons breed criminals,” he’d averred, and “no matter how much is done for them, they plan for one thing, escape and freedom. They will kill to free themselves, if they are given the opportunity.” She spent several hours with Judge F. R. Brandon of Groveland, who avouched his opposition to “chairs of torture” and entered his signature in her “book” petitioning support of her abolitionist campaign. The judge also offered some personal views on the Groveland Boys case; he “knew one of the boys who were arrested for rape, and thought the punishment too severe,” and he deemed the Tysons and Padgetts to be “drinking, shiftless, no-account white trash.” A newspaper editor in Leesburg meanwhile agreed to publish her poem “Mother Love.” And her “World Peace” pin continued to rouse interest among the county residents. She was making useful connections.

  Not everyone was receptive to Miss De Forest’s cause. On August 4 in Leesburg, she’d spoken with some of the younger police officers and firemen who had been quite willing to sign her book until the chief of police, Bill Fisher, convinced them that to do so might not be wise. On that same occasion Miss De Forest met the man she’d been warned to stay clear of in Lake County. He was wearing his white Stetson as he lumbered toward her. He looked askance at her peace pin, and her petition. When she voiced her disfavor of capital punishment, enlisting names of abolitionist supporters like Alex Akerman, he growled that Alex Akerman was “no good,” and as for her stance on the death penalty, he dissented, “ ‘An eye for an eye’ is the justice I believe in.” Then Willis McCall showed her his back and walked away.

  More than a few whites that Miss De Forest encountered—Harry McDonald, for one—firmly believed that the Groveland Boys had confessed to rape, as the sheriff had so widely advertised. If De Forest didn’t believe it, Harry suggested she visit the state prison in Raiford, where “she could hear it from their own lips.” Sure though Harry was, on the night of the rape, he himself, as night watchman at Edge Mercantile, had crossed paths with Charles Greenlee miles away from the crime scene. In Harry’s opinion, all four defendants “should have been shot on the spot and not cost the state the expense of a trial.”

  Curtis Howard signed Miss De Forest’s book. When she looked more closely at the signature, however, De Forest discovered that the shifty Howard had written down the name of a coworker, Marvin Smith. And Marvin Smith, it turned out luckily for Miss De Forest, knew “the Padgetts and their friends intimately.” Newly wed, Smith and his wife, Marian, the organist at the Baptist church, obliged De Forest with a tour of Groveland. As they drove past the cement shack that had housed the Blue Flame, Mrs. Smith noted that it had been “closed after the rape incident but is now rented to a negro family.” Mrs. Smith also noted that Norma and Willie “were acquainted with the four colored boys”—not surprisingly, as Norma came from “poor whites” and “did not bear a very good reputation.” Another of Howard’s friends and coworkers, Thomas Virgil Ferguson, “had nothing good to say about the Padgetts,” either. As De Forest wrote in her report, Ferguson “was disgusted with the Padgetts, and believes they could tell more, if a little pressure were used.”

  With her peace pin and petition book, L. B. De Forest continued to make her way toward Bay Lake, the clannish swampland in the south of Lake County, an area where she assumed most outsiders felt, and were, unwelcome. Seemingly oblivious to danger, and determined to find Willie Padgett, she boarded a bus in Leesburg on August 2. She got off the bus in Groveland and asked the proprietor at the station where Padgett lived. He suggested she talk to “Ma Padgett,” who lived in a house on Main Street. Ma Padgett invited the pleasant young woman in for lunch. De Forest was surprised by the hospitality.

  As it happened, a son had borrowed the family car, so Ma Padgett wasn’t able to drive her unexpected visitor down to Bay Lake; however, one of her neighbors, a Mrs. Flowers Cockcroft, was willing to help. A short while later, Miss De Forest was traveling over a dirt road with Mrs. Cockcroft and her young children—with the wife and children of the man who, as Terence McCarthy had briefed De Forest, had led the night-riding mob in Groveland—past the scattered bricks and charred remains of Henry Shepherd’s home. Mrs. Cockcroft remained silent, her eyes focused on the road before her.

  Norma and Willie were not at home. Nearby, Norma’s aunt was, and she introduced Miss De Forest to her “very cordial” family and invited her to spend the night. She met Padgetts and Tysons and Tomlinsons, who were also related, and she observed that they “live in a primitive way” in Bay Lake: “No bathrooms, out-houses a distance from the house; electric lights and oil stoves.” On fifty acres of Tyson property were “a horse, cow, hogs, chickens and tractor,” as well as a smaller house, owned by Norma’s uncle, in which Willie and Norma were living together again. That Betty Lou Tomlinson, Norma’s cousin, “talked about the case quite frankly” with the visitor did not sit well with other of the relatives: The Joiners especially “did not like the idea,” De Forest wrote. Betty Lou affirmed that the Groveland Boys had been offered liquor “to repay them” after they’d stopped to help Norma and Willie by the side of the road—an important narrative detail omitted in the trial testimony.

  Late in the afternoon of August 2, on her tenth day in Lake County, L. B. De Forest found herself finally face-to-face with Norma Padgett, at a prayer meeting. Norma was holding a newborn boy in her arms. A year after her alleged rape by the Groveland Boys “Norma had just given birth to a white child,” De Forest reported, and also noted that Willie “seems fond of his baby.” He was now working at a nearby sawmill and “finishing a course in farming.” Norma and Willie took a liking to the stranger; they, too, invited her to stay overnight and to go fishing with them the next day. Miss De Forest said yes, twice. In her bag she’d been carrying around a baby gift; an embroidered bib, should she and Norma eventually meet. Norma accepted the bib with a smile.

  The friendliness and hospitality emboldened De Forest. She began circulating among the parishioners at the prayer meeting of the Bay Lake Missionary Baptist Church. They admired her peace pin; they wondered about her book. She explained that her book was a petition to abolish capital punishment, and the Bay Lake Baptists nodded. They leafed through the pages, surveyed the signatures. De Forest handed one woman her pen. The woman turned to the last page of signatures and penned in her name. The book and pen were passed from one Bay Lake resident to another, from Tysons to Padgetts to Tomlinsons to Joiners. “None of the Padgetts are in favor of capital punishment,” De Forest wrote.

  Miss De Forest spotted Willie Padgett. He was standing beside Norma, Norma with a baby in her arms. De Forest thought that maybe “they would help to save the two boys from the chair, and shorten the life sentence of the youngest boy, even if . . . they committed the alleged rape.” She approached the young couple with a smile on her face, with the pen and book in her hands.

  THURGOOD MARSHALL WAS in New York on November 6, the day before preliminary motions were scheduled to begin in Tavares. He was planning to fly into Orlando on the seventh. Perkins, Greenberg, and Alex Akerman, who had returned to Florida for the trial, would deal with the hearings on the motions the defense had filed. Akerman was staying at the San Juan Hotel, as was Greenberg, who had requested a 7 a.m. wake-up call to allow sufficient time for him and Akerman to drive comfortably to the Tavares Court House with Perkins for a 10 a.m. appearance before Judge Futch. The defense had moved for a change of venue and for the disqualification of State Attorney Jesse Hunter as prosecutor on several counts, including the failure of the prosecution to notify defense counsel of witness Lawrence Burtoft, and its dissemination to the press of the defendants’ alleg
ed confessions, which would clearly have then become inadmissible as evidence. The probability of success in the removal of Hunter as prosecutor was slim, but the possibility for a change of venue was strong, given the Supreme Court ruling and Justice Robert Jackson’s concurring opinion citing the original Lake County trial of the case as “one of the worst menaces to American justice.” In another county, at the very least, the Groveland Boys would be relieved of any further court-ordered interactions with their greatest menace of all, Sheriff Willis V. McCall.

  Just after sundown on November 6, one hundred fifty miles north of Orlando, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin were expecting soon to be leaving the Flat Top—the windowless, white-concrete maximum-security facility enclosed by a wall inside the Florida State Prison in Raiford—where they’d spent the last two years in their individual cells. The Flat Top, built in 1935, housed only the most violent offenders, and a small room in the middle of the rectangular structure housed the electric chair. It had been used ten times since the two Groveland boys had been incarcerated there. Shepherd and Irvin could at least hope that they would not be facing electrocution now that the Supreme Court had overturned their convictions and Thurgood Marshall was handling their case. Both men were wearing their prison-issue pants with a dark stripe down the side. Shepherd had thrown on a sweatshirt and a baseball cap as well, and Irvin had put on a light jacket for the drive down to Tavares. They waited in their separate cells for the prison transfer that would take them back to Lake County for their hearing in the morning.

  That evening a black prisoner in handcuffs had been delivered to Raiford from Lake County by Sheriff Willis McCall and Deputy James Yates. Killing two birds with one stone, they’d dropped off the new inmate and were now picking up the two Groveland boys on death row. They escorted the two prisoners, cuffed together at their wrists, to McCall’s brand-new 1951 Oldsmobile 98 with the Rocket V8 engine. McCall ordered both men to sit in the front seat; Irvin entered first. Yates got in the back. Once they had driven outside the main gate, the law officers voiced some thinly veiled threats and made a show of drawing and aiming their pistols. “I am ready now for anything,” McCall boasted, but the two prisoners had become so accustomed to the sheriff’s ways that “we didn’t pay much attention to them,” Irvin said.

  The sedan smoothly rode the pavement on the long, quiet drive down U.S. 441. It was a cool evening, and McCall had turned on the car’s heater. He turned east off 441, toward Weirsdale in Marion County, and at the intersection of Weirsdale and Umatilla roads, he pulled up next to a car at the roadside. It was Yates’s car; the deputy had met the sheriff at the intersection for the drive up to Raiford. The deputy asked McCall to wait until he made sure his engine started, and when it did, Yates headed east on County Road 42, which ran through the Florida scrub and longleaf pines of Ocala National Forest. McCall followed slowly behind. Several miles on, both cars turned south on County Road 450, a little-traveled, unlit clay road. It wasn’t the quickest route to the Lake County jail, Irvin knew, and he knew, too, he’d get nowhere asking McCall questions. They had crossed into Lake County; they were not far from Umatilla and Willis McCall’s house in Eustis. The sheriff knew the back roads well.

  Over the radio, McCall told Yates, “Go on ahead.” Yates answered okay, and the two prisoners watched the taillights of the deputy’s car flicker as it sped away and, taking a curve, disappeared. McCall hit his siren briefly, then began to rattle the steering wheel.

  “Something is wrong with my left front tire,” the sheriff said as he pulled off to the side of the road. He reached under his seat for a large metal flashlight with a red band around it and got out of the car. After checking the tires on all sides, he slid back into the driver’s seat and continued down the same dark road. Yates was nowhere to be seen. The Oldsmobile had gone maybe two miles when McCall rattled the wheel again, and again he stopped the car and got out. He kicked the right front tire.

  The door of the sedan swung open. “You sons of bitches,” McCall said, “get out and get this tire fixed.” Samuel Shepherd set one foot down on the sandy soil. As he stepped into the dark Florida night, behind him, cuffed to him at the wrist, his friend Walter Irvin stumbled out of the car. The sheriff stepped back from the door. He drew his gun from his holster.

  THURGOOD MARSHALL WAS sleeping soundly at 409 Edgecombe Avenue when the telephone awoke him early in the November morning. It was Alex Akerman, calling from the San Juan Hotel in Orlando.

  “Well,” he told Marshall, “we don’t have any more case, because you don’t have any more defendants.” Half awake, Marshall struggled to grasp what Akerman was telling him. “They were killed tonight by the sheriff,” Akerman said.

  The phone rang at 7 a.m. in Jack Greenberg’s room at the San Juan. Roused from his sleep as he’d requested, he picked up that morning’s Orlando Morning Sentinel, which had as usual been slid under the door. He was jolted awake by the headline splashed across the front page:

  Lake County Sheriff Shoots Two Negroes

  Willis McCall standing before his Oldsmobile 98. Samuel Shepherd (facedown) is dead, and Walter Irvin is critically wounded. (Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida)

  Greenberg tried to focus on what he was reading. Smaller headlines jumped out at him: “Officer Kills Suspect in Attack Case.” “Pair Enroute to Hearing Try Escape.” The name Sheriff Willis McCall was everywhere on the page. McCall had shot the Groveland boys. Shepherd was dead. Irvin was in the hospital, critically wounded. Tried to escape?

  Walter Irvin (right) survived being shot by Sheriff Willis McCall.

  (Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida)

  None of it made sense to him. Greenberg got on the phone immediately to confirm that the paper had gotten the story right. Yes, Shepherd was dead, but Irvin had survived the shooting. Akerman had already called the FBI’s Miami office, saying he “wanted to furnish information with regard to a murder.” Thurgood Marshall would arrive in Orlando later in the day. Perkins rushed off a telegram to Governor Fuller Warren to request an immediate investigation into the “killing of Samuel Shepherd and mortal wounding of Walter Irvin by Sheriff Willis McCall.” The three lawyers sped off to Waterman Memorial Hospital in Eustis, where Irvin lay in critical condition.

  Greenberg, Akerman, and Perkins, as the attorneys for Walter Irvin, were granted permission to speak with their client in the company of a doctor and a nurse. They had barely glimpsed Irvin—in a white hospital gown, his head propped up on two pillows, strips of adhesive tape that ran diagonally from below his left jaw across his nose to the corner of his right eye, a red rubber nasogastric feeding tube inserted through his nose and ending in his stomach—when they were intercepted by a burly man with “the build of a blocking back” and a shoulder holster and pistol “draped over his 250 pound frame.” Akerman had stepped toward Irvin’s bedside as he’d asked his client to tell him “exactly what happened. Just tell the truth as you’ve always done,” but before Irvin had been able even to attempt a reply, the burly man ordered the three lawyers out of the room: “You might as well go away because I ain’t going to let you in.”

  Greenberg had heard enough of Franklin Williams’s hair-raising stories about the hulking, sadistic deputy James Yates to know whom they were confronting. Akerman explained to the deputy that they were visiting by permission of the patient’s doctors, and he cited specific language from Florida Statute 901.24 allowing an attorney to meet with his client, in private if so desired. The statute did not convince Yates to grant the lawyers access to their client; instead he made them wait in the hall while he disappeared into another room. On his return, Yates apprised the lawyers that they’d have to receive written permission from Judge Truman Futch in order to get past the deputy’s 250-pound blockade. “I have orders not to let anyone talk to this boy,” Yates said.

  He had gotten his orders from Willis McCall, who himself had been admitted into the hospital. In a room down the hallway from the man he had shot, he was, accordin
g to the doctors, “suffering shock and a heart condition.” Akerman attempted to reach Judge Futch, while, as Greenberg noted, “Yates kept us under surveillance from a hospital window.” When reporters began arriving at Waterman Memorial Hospital, the lawyers could tell them only that Deputy Yates was refusing to allow them access to their client. Akerman elaborated: they would see Irvin “when the law gives us our rights,” although he was convinced that McCall “is still in control of Irvin and all his activities, and it is my opinion that the only reasonable inference that can be drawn from McCall’s activities is that as long as he can prevent it, he will not permit Irvin to tell his attorneys the facts leading up to the killing of Shepherd and the wounding of Irvin.” It was obvious to the lawyers that McCall and Yates were hoping Irvin would die from his wounds before he had the chance to give a statement.

  Hours passed, and still no word from Truman Futch. With Irvin totally under the guard of Deputy Yates and the insidious Sheriff McCall in a room down the hall, the lawyers’ unease over their client, already critically wounded by the man responsible for his safe transfer to Tavares, continued to grow. When they voiced their concern to hospital officials, one doctor, outraged at the presumption of the sheriff’s department, simply stormed past the unacknowledged, startled Yates to check on Irvin’s condition. And two FBI agents flashing shields and identification managed to intimidate a flustered Yates out of his post while they proceeded, unbeknownst to the lawyers and the reporters, to interview Irvin for forty-five minutes, until an attending nurse intervened because the patient “appeared to be in pain.” Shortly thereafter rumors were circulating around the hospital that Irvin had told an “entirely different story” of the events that led to Shepherd’s death and his own injuries.