Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  1 Mouth Harp

  Dr. Eaton, in his evaluation of Jesse upon admission, noted that the patient “seems unconcerned, behavior co-operative . . . Wants to have his harmonica . . . Insight and judgement nil.” The patient also seemed to be under the impression that he would be resident at Chattahoochee for only “two or three months,” Eaton remarked, as Jesse had told him, “I’ll sure be glad when this is all over and I go home with my dad and mother.” In all, Eaton observed, “This boy gave the impression of being rather simple, and seemed to be obviously defective.” His diagnosis—“Mental Deficiency, Moderate”—was based on an IQ of 60, which placed Jesse in the “low-grade Moron” category. While Jesse evidently understood the nature of the charge against him, Eaton noted, the boy continued to deny it and stated calmly that he’d been framed. “I didn’t have anything to do with it,” he said.

  Jesse also told Eaton that “he had only been near the woman’s place once in his life,” and he was not referring to the alleged late-night visit that he had detailed, supposedly “of his own free will,” in his confession. Dr. Eaton included a photostat of the typed, two-page confession that had been provided by Jesse’s court-appointed counsel, Sam Buie, in his file on patient A-27378. In the file, too, was a note that Eaton had made regarding a telephone call from Sheriff McCall, who had told him that “all the investigations indicated that he [Jesse] actually did commit the act.” With particulars as to the results of those investigations, Dr. Eaton was able to question Jesse more probingly about the charges against him and about his movements on the day of the attack.

  Jesse’s memory seemed to Eaton to be “fairly good for the immediate past, and probably is fair for the distant past,” but the boy had “no idea of dates.” He knew what year it was, but he could not name the month, and he seemed to think there were twenty-four months in a year. When asked how many weeks in a year, he’d replied, “There are ten weeks, isn’t there?” He’d incorrectly placed the crime he’d allegedly committed in November.

  Still, Dr. Eaton noted, Jesse was able to accurately relate specific details about his activities the days before and after the rape. This time, however, Jesse made no mention of coon hunting with a neighbor on the evening of December 17. He recounted for Eaton that on the night of the crime, before he’d gone to bed, he’d been watching television late, but he couldn’t have left the house after his parents were asleep, he said, “because all of the doors are quite noisy.” He recalled the police cars and barking dogs that overran Okahumpka in the early hours of the morning, and he recounted how he had gone on his bike to the grocery store, where he’d heard a deputy tell a woman that a Negro had raped a white woman. Jesse also said that he himself did not know a “thing-in-the-world” about the rape case, but that when the sheriff and the deputies kept asking him question after question after question, he “got mixed up at the time and admitted doing it.” He couldn’t “explain why the woman who was raped said that he was the one who had done it,” so he guessed that maybe “she was afraid.” About what, he told Eaton, he could not imagine. He related, too, how, on the one occasion he’d gone to the Knowles house to ask for some oranges to eat, Mrs. Knowles had kindly obliged. He described her as being “well-dressed, very attractive looking,” and he figured she had at least a high school education.

  Jesse also told Dr. Eaton that his mother, after learning that Jesse had confessed, instructed him to “tell everybody that he did not do it.”

  In exploring Jesse’s sexual history, Dr. Eaton recorded a number of details that Jesse had shared with O’Connor. According to the patient, he had never had sexual intercourse “with any girl or woman.” He had once asked a girl to a movie in Leesburg, so that he could “buy her some candy” and have “real clean talks with her,” he said, and insisted to the doctor that he “treats all females with respect.”

  When Eaton asked Jesse if he knew why he was at the hospital, Jesse responded without hesitation. “Treatment,” he said. When asked to elaborate, he told Eaton that he didn’t think anything was wrong with his mind. He did have bad dreams, though. Which was why he slept with a teddy bear, as he had been doing ever since he could remember. If a bad dream awoke him in the middle of the night, his mother would comfort him; Jesse told the doctor how she’d lay a toy stuffed baby penguin on the bed beside him and whisper him back to sleep.

  In his summation of Jesse’s admittance interview, Dr. Eaton determined the patient’s speech, aside from the stutter, to be “often quite hesitant, his comprehension extremely poor, his responses are very sluggish to commands, and his movements are inclined to be rather slow. His answers, at times, are quite irrelevant, and often very inadequate, and, obviously, quite unlearned.” In concluding his report, Eaton stated that the patient had “no loss of contact with reality . . . but just seems to be a rather dull sort of person.” Then, with a stroke of his pen, Dr. Eaton assigned patient A-27378 to the white male department.

  An attendant escorted the new arrival down the long, foul-smelling wooden corridor—“the Tunnel of Shit,” as it was commonly called—that led to the general wards. In the white male department, country music was blaring on transistor radios. In Ward 5, to which Jesse had been randomly assigned, long-timers were playing cards, their games frequently punctuated by shouting matches; the ward was reputed to be one of the more violent in the department. More recent inmates, confused or in a haze, “paraded fitfully back and forth.” The new arrival looked on in bewilderment.

  A guard escorted Jesse down a hallway to his new living quarters. From the doorway he surveyed the room: dozens of beds that lay beneath rows of harsh fluorescent ceiling lights; an unfamiliar device (the electroshock machine); the patients—some of them shuffling aimlessly about, some writhing in fits of agitation, others blank-eyed and rigid in catatonic stupors. The guard pointed him to his bed and turned his attentions elsewhere. That night, nineteen-year-old Jesse Delbert Daniels would be lying on the bed’s thin mattress without his teddy bear or his penguin doll. His eyes wide open, unable to sleep, he’d wait for the silence to come. And after it finally did, he’d be startled awake, not by his bad dreams but by the dull moans and piercing screams around him.

  In late February, Gordon Oldham drove the two hundred fifty miles to Chattahoochee for a meeting with Jesse’s physicians. Dr. O’Connor followed up on the visit with a letter to Oldham, in which he stated that in addition to the copy of Jesse’s signed confession already on file, “We believe that it would be of value in our present psychiatric studies in his case to have also available the testimony given by the victim, if it is possible for you to furnish same.”

  On March 3, Oldham responded. He informed O’Connor that “in order to clear up all possible facts, I brought Mrs. Knowles back into my office and took more testimony from her.” The enclosed transcript, he noted, was a “rough draft,” and he made clear that he would “appreciate it if this report would be kept completely confidential as between you and any other doctor working in this case.”

  According to the transcript, on the evening of December 17, Blanche and her three children had stopped by Bosanquet Florist in downtown Leesburg just after dark. She was meeting up with her parents there and the family was planning to go on to the Rotary Christmas party together. About the same time, Joe called the shop to tell Blanche that he would not be able to join the family for the festivities because he had to leave immediately for Tampa to attend to an emergency business matter. Blanche did not question what he told her. Governor Collins, after all, was currently traveling around the state to confer with citrus growers and packers in the wake of the recent devastating freeze. Still, she was disappointed. She decided she’d let her boys go to the Christmas party with her parents while she drove back to Okahumpka with one-year-old Mary.

  A little before seven p.m., Blanche parked the car behind the house. She fixed herself supper, then fed the baby and put her to bed upstairs. About two hours later, Alfred and Ruth Bo
sanquet dropped off their grandsons but did not come inside. At nine-thirty, after watching a bit of television with the boys, Blanche took them upstairs to bed. Once they’d fallen asleep, she retired to her own room. The Knowleses slept separately in twin beds, and Mary was already sleeping in a crib at the foot of Blanche’s bed.

  The curtains on three of the four bedroom windows were already drawn; the fourth was partially open. Blanche changed into her nightgown, settled herself in the bed, turned out the bedside light, and “went sound asleep.”

  At approximately one o’clock in the morning, Blanche awoke. She’d felt the touch of a “very cold hand” on her skin beneath the bed covers. She stared hard into the darkness, toward the bedroom door, as she “had a feeling that somebody had just started out of the room” and was perhaps going to “a little hallway closet.” She assumed it was her husband, back home from Tampa, and she called out his name.

  “Joe, is that you?”

  No response. Maybe, Blanche thought, one of the boys was not feeling well, or maybe he’d thrown off his bedclothes and gotten chilled, “since the hand that touched her was so cold.”

  “Come back in the room,” Blanche said.

  Still, no answer. Wide-awake now, she sensed the presence of someone hovering in the darkness just outside the bedroom door. A minute passed. Sitting up in her bed, she listened intently to the silence.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  She sensed hesitation. Then movement. Barely discernible, a shadowy tall figure was stepping into the dark room. Certainly it wasn’t either one of the boys, and it wasn’t her husband, either.

  “Who is it? What do you want?” she asked.

  A man’s voice answered; she could not see his face. “I’ve got a gun,” said the voice, soft but tinged with unmistakable menace. “Don’t turn on the lights or I’ll shoot you.”

  Her heart pounding in fear, Blanche leapt from her bed, shielding herself with a sheet. “Get out! Get out! Get out!” she screamed.

  The voice silenced her with a command. “Do as I say or I’ll shoot you.”

  Blanche was still clutching the bedsheet when the faceless figure of a man grabbed her hand. The sheet fell from her shoulders to the floor.

  “Turn loose,” the man said, and motioned vaguely at the bed.

  “Oh, God. Not that,” Blanche said, comprehending what he meant.

  “Don’t say anything or I’ll shoot,” the man said again.

  As he closed the space between them, and as Blanche extended her hands to brace herself against contact, her hands crossed with his and she realized that he wasn’t holding a gun. “I told him so,” she said to Oldham.

  At that, the man wrapped both his hands around Blanche’s neck. “You do just as I say or I’ll choke you,” he said.

  “I felt like he meant it,” Blanche recalled. “I couldn’t breathe while he had his hands there. And so then he touched my hips and told me to get in position. I don’t know exactly what he intended for me to do, but I didn’t move.”

  “I can’t,” she told the man, and he pressed her into position himself, which was when she realized that he was already naked, except for the pair of socks she could tell he was wearing “by the way his feet hit the bedclothes.” He was also, “as far as I could ascertain, exceedingly cold,” and he did not have “a complete erection.” His effort to perform “the act” was “very feeble and inexperienced,” Blanche observed, and noted, “As far as I can figure out he never got any more of an erection.” He “definitely didn’t know quite what to expect several times, or what he wanted me to do, or what he wanted to do himself.” He seemed confused, rattled.

  Aiming to prevent a wretched violation from escalating into a violent assault, Blanche tried to calm him. She was patient and cooperative; her words were gentle. “At one time I almost felt like maybe he was a little afraid that if I kept talking I might talk him out of it,” she recalled, “because he became very insistent that I be quiet.”

  “Don’t talk,” he ordered her.

  The rape did not last long. “Possibly not more than one or two minutes,” Blanche estimated. It ended with a question.

  “Did you enjoy that?” her assailant asked.

  “No,” Blanche said. It was, she reflected, an act she had never experienced “with anyone except my husband.”

  Her reply elicited momentary silence. Then:

  “Well,” the man said, “in that case I’d better go.”

  His “almost apologetic” tone surprised Blanche. It was “like he felt I had had a dance with him and he’d stepped on my toe . . . so he’d leave me.”

  He rose from the bed. He was facing the doorway, but vacillating, as if there was something he needed to say. Having defused a potentially violent situation by not resisting, Blanche recalled, she didn’t want to risk angering him now, not with her children sleeping nearby. So she’d hear him out, she decided, whatever he felt compelled to say.

  Still, he stood silent and slightly hunched in the doorway. The pause was awkward, though it allowed Blanche the opportunity to slip back into her nightgown. Then, turning again toward her, he spoke.

  “I came up here to kill you,” he said.

  Blanche was silent.

  “During the war I got all the killing I could want. But if you ever tell anybody I was here, I’ll come back and blow up the camp. There’s two men waiting for me down there in the car.”

  Blanche hardly knew what to make of his statements, let alone how to respond to them, so she simply listened without comment.

  “I was paid five thousand dollars to kill you.” The words, spoken with import, hung in the air.

  When Blanche failed to respond, he prodded, “Wouldn’t you like to know who paid me that?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  The man seemed to be debating with himself; and then, forgoing the question he’d raised, he asked another.

  “Would you like to know where I live?”

  “Whatever you want to say,” Blanche answered, curt, her patience wearing thin. She immediately regretted her tone.

  “Well, if you act like that . . .” the man chided her, his mood darkening. “Don’t you act sly to me.”

  “You tell me whatever you’d like to tell me,” said Blanche, hoping to repair her damage to their tenuous rapport. “If you’d like to tell me that, I’ll be glad to hear it.”

  “Just for that I’m not going to tell you.”

  He did not tell her, either, what he was missing when he got down on his hands and knees and “started hunting for something on the floor.” His search apparently unsuccessful, he stepped into the hallway, but in a few seconds he returned to the bedroom and resumed his quest. “It was not in a particularly intelligent manner, because he kept hunting over exactly the same spot . . . fanning out with his hand in front of him, patting the floor right hard, trying to find something that he apparently thought was there.” He rose to his feet, his hands empty. What he’d been looking for—a piece of clothing? a weapon?—Blanche did not know.

  She’d stood by quietly, warily, in her carefulness not to incite him, and prayed that he’d just leave. He seemed to be prepared to go when he warned her “not to tell anybody, not to turn on any lights after he left, not to phone anybody, not to ever tell anybody ever.” Then he warned her again.

  Finally, in a few “fast steps,” he hastened to the stairway, which he’d barely begun descending when he went tumbling all the way down seventeen of the steps to the bottom. He crashed into the gate that Joe had installed to keep little Mary from crawling up the steps. “There’s nineteen steps in that stairway, so he fell a good ways,” Blanche noted.

  The man scrambled to his feet, and Blanche heard him run to the back door. He “pulled quite violently,” so violently that she thought he might have pulled it off the hinges when he exited the house. She waited three
or four minutes, until she was sure he had gone, hurried to retrieve her sleeping boys, then bolted shut her bedroom door.

  That was the entirety of Blanche’s account of the incident itself, as provided to the doctors by Oldham. It was a much more detailed narrative than the one Blanche had given to Yates on the night of the attack. If the doctors were looking to it for confirmation that Jesse’s insistence on his innocence was delusional, they could certainly have found it. There were a number of details that matched his signed confession—the perpetrator’s nakedness but for his socks, his incomplete erection and fumbling in the act, his mysterious searching around on the floor. It included the detail that had caught Pearl’s attention—Blanche asking, “Is that you, Joe?”—but not Jesse’s self-incriminating response.

  The transcript also included a striking admission. Blanche Knowles acknowledged to the state attorney that she knew Jesse Daniels, that he was the boy on the bicycle who’d pedaled past her house virtually every day—“five to ten times” a week, she estimated. “Quite often when I’d get in my car to go to town to take the maid home in the afternoon I’d see him on his bicycle stopped under, I believe it was a big oak tree, right on the edge of our property, on the edge of our grove,” Blanche said. “And any times when you’d go past him when he was on the bicycle he’d always stop and pull over to the side while you went by.”

  She recalled one occasion, a few months before the rape, when Jesse came to the house with two younger boys and asked for some oranges—satsumas, to be precise, which, Blanche told Oldham, “are an early tangerine.” “I told them yes,” she recalled, “and I think I said to Jesse, ‘Did you have some?’ And he said, ‘Thank you, Ma’am,’ or something like that.” It was the same occasion that Jesse had recalled and related in his interview with Dr. Eaton.

  Not long after, Blanche “was by the 10 cent store with my little baby and a woman came up to me very, very friendly. I had no idea who she was, but she was talking about [how] she’d never seen my baby before, and then went on to talk about her baby.” The friendly woman, Pearl Daniels, pointed to her nineteen-year-old son, Jesse. “That was her baby,” Blanche told Oldham.