by Gilbert King
Regarding Mrs. Knowles, Jesse admitted to the doctor only that he knew her and that he had once gone to her house in Okahumpka to ask for “some oranges”—adding that he also knew Mr. Knowles and the “two young boys.” Jesse then asserted that “he had never had any sexual relations with any girl,” although, in a “child-like” fashion, he related how, one time in Leesburg, he and a girl went to see a movie together. He also told the doctor that he still slept with a teddy bear and evidently, O’Connor remarked, “saw nothing wrong with continuing to do so.” While Dr. O’Connor made note of Jesse’s avowed sexual inexperience, it did not, to his mind, undermine his conclusion that Jesse “had performed the act with which he is charged.”
After correlating the results of the testing and the substance of the interviews with the patient, Dr. O’Connor and another psychiatrist on staff had concluded that Jesse was “mentally deficient to such a degree that he is incapable of managing his own affairs, and also incapable of properly consulting with his counsel in his own defense.” Because the patient “cannot be trusted to look after himself and his affairs without undue risk to himself and others,” it was, in their opinion, necessary, “for the protection of society,” that Jesse be deemed “medically mentally incompetent” and that he should be “committed to a Mental Institution for an indefinite [period] inasmuch as the prospect for any substantial improvement in the future is extremely remote and there is no specific therapy known at present for this type of mental disorder.”
On March 14, Pearl and Charles Daniels arrived at the county courthouse in Tavares for the hearing that would seal their son’s fate. Sitting restlessly in the gallery, they could see only the back of his head at the witness table, a deputy beside him. Mabel of course was there as well, and she observed how Jesse tried not to look at McCall, his head jerking back and his eyes lowering whenever a snatch of overheard conversation drew his attention to the jury box.
Mabel had a companion at the hearing, a man in a suit whom McCall did not recognize. Convinced that the editor was up to no good, the sheriff approached the man, who identified himself as Howard Dixon, an attorney from Miami. McCall immediately turned to Futch to challenge Dixon’s right to sit in on the hearing. Dixon informed the court that he would be taking no part in the proceedings; he had arrived only as an observer, which was his right as an American citizen. McCall then proceeded, in open court, to aggressively question Dixon about his background, and the lawyer admitted that he worked for both the American Civil Liberties Union and the Workers Defense League. The sheriff pulled out a bound copy of a 1948 report by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which he often carried with him, and began citing instances in which the ACLU had been accused of such subversive activity.
Dixon was taken aback, but in spite of the sheriff’s grandstanding, he was allowed to remain with Mabel in the courtroom. Judge Futch handed Dr. O’Connor’s report to Buie, and together with Oldham and Red Robinson, representing the Knowles family, the four men held a brief conference out of earshot of the press. Upon returning to the bench, Futch asked his secretary to bring him the “commitment order,” which to Mabel’s ears sounded as if a decision had already been ordained.
When the hearing formally began, Buie announced to the court that he believed it was “unnecessary to call the doctors who had examined the defendant to appear as witnesses.” Tapping the papers he held, he told the court, “I have read, and studied very carefully, their report, and I join with them in the statement they have made.” The former state attorney “praised the two doctors highly,” and Judge Futch similarly commended Buie for his service as court-appointed counsel. The judge, wearing an eyepatch under his glasses, did not whittle; instead he proceeded to read, “in sonorous tones,” the prepared ruling.
As he had in the “Hello Baby” case a year earlier, Futch commended Buie’s integrity. Then he got to the point. “This court,” he declared, “upon due consideration of said report finds the defendant to be incompetent and insane, and the Honorable A. P. Buie, attorney for the defendant, having waived the presence in person of the aforesaid experts and consented to proceed upon the aforesaid report, it is now therefore ordered and adjudged that the defendant Jesse Daniels, is in fact insane and incompetent to conduct his defense in this cause.” Affixing his signature to the order, Futch committed Jesse Daniels to Florida State Hospital at Chattahoochee “for care and treatment for such time and term of years as may be necessary,” and prescribed that he “be not released from the aforesaid institution or its custody without the consent of this Court.”
The hearing had lasted scarcely more than five minutes. In disbelief, Mabel wrote, “No one asked Jesse nor his parents if they wanted the doctors called. No one asked them if they agreed or disagreed with the findings about the boy who had no chance to be heard, and who was being judged insane with no more proof of insanity than an unproven charge that he had committed a crime, and with a strange confession as the only evidence against him.” The parents, she observed, were not provided with a copy of the report, nor was it read for their benefit. Apparently, Mabel noted, the need for “cooperation” between the state and the defendant to ensure justice, which Judge Futch had proclaimed in court weeks earlier, applied only to the prosecutor, the defense attorney, the sheriff, the judge, and the Knowles family’s attorney—it did not extend to the defendant and his family.
Furthermore, Mabel pointed out, the commitment order on Jesse “did not refer to the charge against him, nor did it reveal the fact that a psychiatric report on the youth had found him guilty of that charge, nor did it say that nowhere in the report was there any designation of ‘insanity.’” The psychiatric report on which Jesse’s commitment was based was “unique in Florida law,” because, without benefit of a trial by jury, “the youth was branded as guilty of the charge against him by two doctors who had neither studied the evidence nor heard any defense.” Psychiatrists, Mabel reasoned, “are not legally endowed with the right of determining a man’s innocence or guilt—only with the right to determine the state of his mental capacity.”
Once she realized fully the implications of the judge’s ruling, Pearl Daniels broke down. In tears, she watched as the sheriff slapped handcuffs on her son’s wrists and told him to “come quietly.” Pained by his mother’s anguish, Jesse mumbled, “I don’t know how quiet I’ll be,” as McCall led him up to the jail to await transport back to Chattahoochee. Pearl could only mouth good-bye. And so the case against Jesse Daniels was closed, and would be filed away as solved by the Lake County Sheriff’s Department and the circuit court.
Deputy Evvie Griffin’s Plymouth Belvedere was idling outside the courthouse. Over the past few months, in transporting Jesse back and forth to the mental hospital in Chattahoochee, the deputy had gotten to know his gentle passenger well enough to realize there was no need to keep him bound in handcuffs in the backseat. Jesse liked Griffin; he was the “nice deputy,” who always had peanuts and a bottle of Coca-Cola waiting for him in the car. One time, he and the deputy had flown, just the two of them—Griffin was the only trained pilot in the Lake County Sheriff’s Department—up to Chattahoochee in the department’s Cessna 172 Skyhawk. It was Jesse’s first ride in an airplane. On the way from Chattahoochee to Tavares the previous day, as they’d sped through the Apalachicola National Forest, Griffin had flipped on the sirens from time to time; that always brought a smile to the face of the boy. Today was likely to be their last trip together. Evvie put the Plymouth into gear.
After Griffin delivered the boy to the hospital attendants at Chattahoochee, he set out alone on the long drive south to his home in Eustis. His first year with the Lake County Sheriff’s Department had been nearing its end the night of the rape. He recalled how Blanche Knowles had stated with certainty to Deputy Yates that she had been raped by a “husky Negro”; and how Griffin and his fellow deputies, with bloodhounds leading them from the Knowles house straight into North Quarters, had rounded u
p dozens of black men as suspects in the case. Griffin, who’d been running bloodhounds since he was a boy, had learned to trust their keen sense of smell, especially when what they smelled lay in an article of clothing freshly recovered at a crime scene. And he had seen Jesse’s confession, which had been taken, he knew, by Deputy Yates after the boy had been locked up in the juvenile ward for several sleepless nights and days.
Rape case of Mrs. Joe Knowles of Okahumpka, Fla.,
Wednesday, Dec. 18, 1957, at approximately 1 a.m.
Present in the I.D. Room of the Sheriff’s Department in the Court House, Tavares, Fla., were LeRoy Campbell, deputy sheriff
James L. Yates, Deputy sheriff and the defendant, Jesse Daniels.
I, Jesse Daniels, having been advised of my Constitutional Rights, and an explanation of same given to me by Deputy Sheriff James L. Yates, do hereby make the following statement of my own free will and without promise or threat of any kind.
On December 17, my father, mother and I sat up and watched TV till the station signed off the air, the station being Channel 6, Orlando. Then my father, mother and I went to bed and went to sleep.
I woke up sometime later and went outside out the back door, my father and mother still sleeping and were not awakened by me going out.
I walked around the south side of my house out onto the road, and walked north down to the Sumterville Road. There I turned east and went down to Mrs. Knowles house. There was no lights on at the house, and I walked down the south side of the house where the driveway goes and to the front walk in the front and the front door. There I stood about twenty-five minutes looking down toward Bug Springs and Okahumpka, and went up to the front screen which was fastened and shoved it open. Then I shoved the wood and glass doors open and they were stuck like a door in damp weather when it swells up. I walked on to the foot of the stairs and there I took all my clothes off except my sox. I went up the stairs and turned to the right at the top of the stairs and went into the bed room then I looked on the bed where Mrs. Knowles was laying, then back at the bedroom door.
Mrs. Knowles was waking up and she says, “Is that you, Joe,” and I says “NO, it is me, Jesse Daniels and she says let me turn on the lights and see who it is.” I said, “If you do I will kill you.”
Then I got in bed with her and asked her to get in position which she did. I then put my penus in her and started performing a sexual intercourse, but my penus slipped out and I asked her to put it in for me because it had got soft, but I had to put it in myself.
When I was through I asked her if she enjoyed it, and she said “Yes.” I then started out of the bedroom but I heard something fall on the floor that sounded like a little piece of wood and I got down on the floor to see what it was and felt around with my hands, but could not find anything. I then went back down stairs and put on my clothes all except my shorts, which I could not find because of the darkness. I walked out the front door like I come in and went home. My mother and father was still asleep and I went to bed without awakening them.
The shorts that you found at Mrs. Knowles house with the number 26 marked on the label are my shorts, the ones that I left at Mrs. Knowles because I could not find them in the dark.
This is the truth to the best of my knowledge, and I have made this statement without any threats or promises.
(Signed) s/ Jesse Daniels
Witnesses
s/ James L. Yates
s/ LeRoy Campbell
Sworn and subscribed before me this 27th day of December 1957
s/ Margaret M. Hickman
Notary Public
The confession was as confounding to Griffin as it had been to anyone else. It made plain nonsense out of the roundup of young black men and the days-long delay in apprehending Jesse. Then there was the matter of the stutter. The kid couldn’t go five seconds without stuttering, but he and Blanche were supposed to have had a lengthy conversation before and after the rape?
Then I got in bed with her and asked her to get in position which she did. I then put my penus in her and started performing a sexual intercourse, but my penus slipped out and I asked her to put it in for me because it had got soft, but I had to put it in myself.
Not likely.
“The only thing that boy knew to do with his pecker was to piss through it,” Griffin said.
Male ward at Florida State Hospital, Chattahoochee
CHAPTER SEVEN
No Suitable Place
JESSE DANIELS ARRIVED in Chattahoochee with the words of Willis McCall echoing in his mind. Walking Jesse back to his cell in Tavares after the hearing and the signing of the commitment order, the sheriff had gleefully informed the boy that now he’d be going to the “crazy house,” as that was where he belonged, after all. “You’re a crazy son of a bitch,” McCall had told him. “Crazier than forty hells.”
“No I’m not,” Jesse said. “I’m a nice guy when you get to know me.”
“We know everything there is to know about you,” McCall had replied, and locked the cell.
As it happened, Jesse Daniels was among a distinct minority, his parents never having threatened to send him to the “loony bin” up north. Nearly every child growing up in twentieth-century Florida had heard a parent or teacher say, “Keep acting crazy, and you’ll end up at Chattahoochee.” Or, in frustration, “You’re going to drive me to Chattahoochee.” A Florida newspaper editorial described the hospital in the 1950s as one of the most “kicked around and neglected of state institutions”—its wards overcrowded, its operation understaffed, its facilities and buildings inadequate. It was, said the paper, “a ‘crazy house’ for ‘crazy people,’ and people talked in hushed terms, if at all, if they had a relative or friend as a patient there.”
It hadn’t always been a crazy house.
In 1830, a decade and more after the First Seminole War, President Andrew Jackson pushed through Congress the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the president to relocate southern Indian tribes to federal territory west of the Mississippi River. The Seminoles resisted, and during the Second Seminole War (1835–1842), at a cost of twenty thousand dollars, the federal government built an arsenal strategically placed on high ground along the Apalachicola River; it became known as the Chattahoochee Arsenal. The arsenal continued to serve as a supply depot throughout the Third Seminole War, which began in 1855 and ended three years later, with most Seminoles surrendering. Those who escaped surrender, and starvation, retreated farther south to Okahumpka and beyond. Eluding capture, they proudly referred to themselves as the “Unconquered People.”
In 1861, when Florida seceded from the Union, the state militia took control of the Chattahoochee Arsenal. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the structure fulfilled another purpose for the state. Florida, like the rest of the South during the Reconstruction era, strove to retain an economy based, in effect if not in name, on the practice of slavery. The legislation of the Black Codes, or Jim Crow laws, criminalized free blacks for minor infractions and activities that were deemed legal for whites. The resultant surge in arrests and inevitable convictions inundated local jails with prisoners that they soon lacked space to incarcerate. The Codes created the need for a massive expansion of the prison system. So it was that Florida governor Harrison Reed petitioned the secretary of war to have the Chattahoochee Arsenal converted into a prison. In 1868, it became the state’s first penitentiary. Convict leasing was also instituted, whereby inmates were jobbed out as laborers, commonly to Florida’s lumber camps and turpentine farms, so that at the same time they were serving out their sentences under the laws of the state they were generating revenue for the state.
The prison’s first warden was Malachi Martin, an Irish-born carpetbagger from New York and a former colonel in the Union Army. Notoriously cruel and corrupt, he demonstrated a preference for strict military discipline and presided over what one historian described as “a horror den” of abuse and �
�a place of almost unrelieved brutality.” Martin also skimmed personal gains off the convict-leasing system. With prison labor he not only built a luxurious, octagon-shaped house on his two-hundred-acre estate but also operated the vineyard and winery he owned a few miles outside Chattahoochee. He was believed to have made a considerable fortune.
Yet even Martin was disturbed by the nature of the offenses that were landing so many young black men and boys in his prison. In a letter to Major General George B. Carse, the adjutant-general of the State of Florida, the warden expressed his concern that the increasing number of young boys being sentenced to hard labor at Chattahoochee for what he termed “trifling crime” was forcing the prison to house them in the same areas as the most hardened criminals.
Steadily increasing, too, among the prison population were mentally ill inmates, and by 1873, their pitiful situation at Chattahoochee prompted Martin to advise the state legislature in a letter that the penitentiary was “no suitable place for such unfortunates,” as it could not afford them any treatment. “I hardly know how to express my feelings on the subject,” Martin wrote. “I feel that it is inhuman not to provide a suitable asylum for our insane, and that the authorities will be held responsible hereafter for a gross neglect of their official duty if such an asylum is not provided.” In support of the warden’s plea, the prison’s surgeon, in his own letter to the legislature, implored the state to devise a plan to provide adequate care for the “lunatics” at Chattahoochee, warning, “As we sow, so we must reap.” The “lunatics” soon began to outnumber the convicts, whom they ultimately replaced. In 1877, with the passage of the Lunacy Law and an allocation of ten thousand dollars for conversion and maintenance of the facility, Florida’s first state penitentiary became its first mental hospital: the Asylum for the Indigent Insane.
