Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  Mabel wanted to know exactly what they were watching. Pearl couldn’t remember, but a few days later she wrote to tell Mabel that she’d found the TV Guide for the night in question—they’d watched an old movie, Turn Back the Clock, from 11:00 p.m. to 12:30 a.m., and then the Jack Paar show until 12:45, when the neighbors left. Pearl made them sandwiches, and Jesse had eaten his from a plate on the floor, where he was working on a “plastic model car putting on spinner hub caps,” while his parents talked and watched the news. After the network sign-off, Pearl had “cleaned up crumbs & ash trays,” and then the three of them had gone to bed.

  They’d barely gotten to their rooms—Charles and Jesse in the room with two single beds, Pearl by herself in the other—when they’d heard a loud crash outside the house. It was the dead tree falling in the vacant lot next door—at 1:18 a.m., Pearl was absolutely certain. The noise had set the neighborhood dogs to barking, but after a minute or two, “everything seemed peaceful.” Pearl checked that the doors were locked and turned off the lights. The three of them were all in their beds by 1:20 a.m.

  In the timeline that Mabel was piecing together, with near certainty she placed Jesse on the floor of the Daniels house with his model cars “at the very moment a man was lurking around the big house up the main road, watching to make certain a husband was not there as an intended victim returned from an evening in Leesburg.” In the room where Jesse slept with his father, there was only three feet of space between the two beds. Jesse’s bed, she noted, squeaked, as the Daniels family, living on a veteran’s pension, couldn’t afford box springs. That squeak and the fact that Charles was, as he affirmed, a light sleeper—“With my heart like it is, I’m awake a half dozen times in the night”—had Mabel convinced that, as Charles said, “If that boy had gotten out of that bed, I’d surely have heard him.”

  Pearl recalled a few more details that might prove Jesse had been neither absent from the Daniels house that night nor present at the scene of the crime. First, “If he had slipped out and gone up to that house, and then tried to sneak back in, our dog would have barked at him until he found out it was Jesse.” Also, if he had gone out, he would have had sand on the soles of his shoes and would have tracked it into the house. And there was also the matter of the intruder’s undershorts, which were supposed to have been left at the scene, a key piece of evidence. “Well, it so happens that Jesse sleeps in his shorts and puts on clean ones when he gets up in the morning,” Pearl told Mabel. “He was wearing shorts when he got up that next morning, and I’d swear they were the same ones.” If Jesse had done as his accusers said and left his shorts at the Knowles house, Pearl pointed out, “When he got home then, he would have had to move out the ironing board that stands against the bureau where his shorts are, opened the drawer to get clean ones—all of this in the dark, mind you. Believe me, it just wouldn’t have been possible for him to do it without us hearing him—for Charlie and I have trained ourselves to hear his every move because of his sickness.”

  As she’d promised Pearl, Mabel had contacted Howard Dixon in an attempt to reignite the ACLU’s interest in Jesse’s case. A few days after she and Pearl returned from Chattahoochee, Dixon responded. He was, he said, “urgently trying to further our investigation into the McCall situation” and was hoping to return to Lake County soon, “with the prospect of achieving some results.” Dixon indicated that he’d also sent a letter to LeRoy Collins, in which he urged the governor to investigate McCall and to demand the results of fingerprint evidence “that could either confirm or deny the guilt of Jesse Daniels.” He informed Mabel, too, that the chairman of the ACLU in Miami would be coming to Mount Dora to discuss Jesse’s case. The chairman, Dixon noted, was committed to maintaining constitutional rights, “even in the darker areas of Florida.”

  Vera Rony of the Workers Defense League, whom Mabel had also approached, expressed an active interest in the case as well. “I think it is most important for all of us to do what we can to get young Daniels out of the crazy house,” she wrote. “From my knowledge of these places, which is not considerable, I know that if you are not crazy when you go in, you can certainly become so in short order.”

  Mabel tracked down Bill Fisher in Leesburg. The police chief stated he had no doubts that Sam Wiley Odom’s confession to the rape of sixty-year-old Kate Coker, made before Willis McCall and his deputy, “was on the level.” He noted not just the “strong similarity” between the Coker rape and the Knowles rape but the proximity of Odom’s house to the Knowles residence and the attacker’s having disrobed down to his socks before entering the women’s homes. When Fisher confronted Odom with fingerprint evidence from the Coker house, Odom had ruefully replied, “That’s the only one where I forgot to wear gloves.” Even if that were true, Odom had still managed to leave behind incriminating prints at both the Rutherford and Howard houses. More important to Fisher, Odom had freely admitted to breaking into the homes of women whose husbands, he believed, were not at home.

  Although Fisher had been restrained recently in his criticism of Willis McCall, the sheriff’s behavior had not ceased to bother him. A reporter from the Leesburg Daily Commercial had been present at the sheriff’s department on the morning of Odom’s arrest, but since then McCall had barred the press from questioning the suspect; nor had his department released any statements. The uncharacteristic silence of an office “that gloats over the ‘crime record’ of Negroes,” as Mabel put it, disturbed Fisher equally. So did McCall’s refusal to share with him any of the evidence critical to the Knowles case, and to Jesse Daniels’s fate, and his dismissiveness of the questions Fisher had raised.

  Finally, Fisher admitted to Mabel that he had never believed that Jesse had committed the attack on Blanche Knowles. Still, candid as he was in his assessment of the investigations into the two rapes, he refrained from disclosing the one crucial detail he had gleaned on his visit to Fair Oaks. He did not feel he could break Alfred Bosanquet’s confidence to anyone, not even the Mount Dora Topic reporter who despised Willis McCall as much as he did.

  Fisher’s disclosures took the shape of a story that, to Mabel’s mind, demanded a wider audience. So, in the hope of bringing national attention to Jesse Daniels’s case, she submitted an impassioned piece to both the New York Post and the Christian Science Monitor. A decade earlier, both the Post and the Monitor had covered the Groveland Boys case, and she’d maintained connections with reporters and editors at both of the papers who had become well versed in McCall’s machinations.

  “Has politically powerful Sheriff Willis McCall at last outwitted himself?” read the opening to her story. “The rabid segregationist Lake County sheriff is in a predicament now that could lead to serious charges being placed against him and also involve attachés of the Florida Fifth Circuit Court here,” she continued. As grounds for those “serious charges,” she cited McCall’s successful execution of a “well-laid plan to have a 19-year-old mentally-retarded white youth committed to the state’s mental hospital at Chattahoochee as ‘insane’ and thereby convicted without trial on a charge of raping a prominent Lake County woman last December”—all in the sheriff’s “frantic effort” to protect “power citrus growers.” However, this time, Mabel suggested, McCall might have “extended himself too far,” as evidenced by a recent rape case that “has exploded into the news here to upset the sheriff’s plans.”

  That article summarized the events of December 17 that had led to Jesse Daniels’s institutionalization, along with the more recent, strikingly similar rape case for which Odom had been arrested. And there was a shocking new detail, too, which had been recounted by Jesse Daniels’s “distraught” mother. “Fighting valiantly,” Mabel reported, Pearl had been working in the watermelon fields to raise funds for Jesse’s defense. It was in the melon fields, among the “hard-eyed, segregationist white workers” of Okahumpka, that Pearl had “heard the talk”—talk that “the Ku Klux Klan intends to ‘get’ the Negro before he is tried.�
�� Given the history of lawlessness and violence within the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, Mabel did not doubt the truth of Pearl’s claim.

  Mabel reported that, on her advice, Pearl had “immediately wired Governor Collins a warning, and asked that Odom be protected for his own safety as well as to permit the investigation into whether or not he is guilty of the December attack.” At the same time, Mabel acknowledged that the chances of Jesse Daniels’ receiving justice by gubernatorial intervention were impeded by the fact that “the family of the December victim and their attorney are politically powerful in the state.”

  In any event, neither paper expressed interest in publishing the story. As one historian noted, press coverage of interracial rape cases had diminished after World War II, as the editors of mainstream—white—newspapers sought “both to avert mob violence and to preserve the appearance of a law-abiding society.” And the fact that blame might have landed unfairly on a white youth rather than a black one did nothing to help encourage interest. The story ended up running in the Mount Dora Topic alone—a pattern that would continue to ensure that hardly anyone outside its small readership had the slightest indication that something might be amiss in the increasingly strange case of Jesse Daniels.

  Still, Mabel persevered. She wrote again to Howard Dixon at the ACLU, this time in hopes of convincing the experienced criminal attorney to intercede in the Odom case, and—should the rumors Pearl had heard in the melon patches prove to be true—to keep Sam Wiley Odom alive.

  By a county court order on April 8, Odom was indicted for the rape of Kate Coker. He was remanded to the custody of the sheriff of Lake County and was to be held without bond. A trial date was set for May 12. The court deemed Odom’s mother and stepfather, Laura and Frampy Cope, to be insolvent and thus unable to pay for his defense. Because, like Jesse Daniels, Odom had been accused of committing a crime punishable by death, he was entitled to court-appointed counsel. Judge Futch assigned his defense to Walker M. Kennedy, a sixty-six-year-old attorney from Mount Dora. Jury selection and trial testimony began that same day.

  Kennedy mounted a less-than-spirited defense for a teenage client facing death by electrocution. In his opening statement he declared that he himself “did not deny the guilt of the accused,” and so “we simply ask for the mercy of this Jury for this boy.” Later, in tears, he’d tell Mabel that he’d expected nothing short of a guilty verdict and a death sentence in Judge Futch’s courtroom. Still, Mabel had to admit, Kennedy afforded Odom more of a defense than Sam Buie had offered for Jesse Daniels. At least Kennedy had pleaded with the all-white, all-male jury to consider Odom’s circumstances. He’d described how, as a boy, Odom had had to stop attending the Negro school so that he could work in the fields and groves of Okahumpka. “His lack of education and understanding of right and wrong were factors to be taken into consideration,” Kennedy had argued.

  Less convincing in Kennedy’s closing statement was the claim that Odom had “heard older men—Negroes returning from farm work in the North—boast of white women they had known there, and the youth’s impression was fixed that all white women were ‘loose.’” Kennedy asserted that “these women are the ones really responsible for this crime.” And he pleaded, “None of you would press the button that would electrocute this boy. Don’t make it possible for someone else to do it.” The tactic was not an uncommon one in rape cases in the South in that era. As historian Lisa Lindquist-Dorr points out, “Not only did some women bring their assaults on themselves, some whites seemed to believe, but some white women’s characters were already so compromised that their having been violated did not represent a threat to the social order. They were not sheltered under the mantle of white womanhood with its attendant promise of protection.” Although such instances were rare, Dorr notes, “White southern men . . . despite their rhetoric to the contrary, were not so willing to endow all white women with the unfettered power to accuse black men of rape.”

  Sam Wiley Odom did not benefit from either of Kennedy’s arguments. By the end of the afternoon, state attorney Gordon Oldham was presenting his closing argument, in which he reminded the jurors that, despite Sam Wiley Odom’s plea of not guilty in court, the defendant had, on the morning of his arrest for the rape of Kate Coker, confessed to the crime before Deputy Yates and Sheriff McCall. Oldham also called the jury’s attention to the fact that the defendant had not taken the stand “to deny that he was guilty of the crime with which he was charged”—a seemingly blatant violation of Florida law, which stated that no prosecuting attorney shall “be permitted before the jury or court to comment on the failure of the accused to testify in his own behalf.” Oldham’s ploy did not elicit an objection from the defense.

  With testimony and arguments complete, Judge Futch addressed the jurors with the charge that they must be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that “there was a penetration of the private parts of the female, Kate Coker, by the private parts of the male defendant, Sam Wiley Odom . . . and that it was done by force.” Futch further informed the jury that “whoever is convicted of rape shall be punished by death unless a majority of the jury return with the verdict of conviction a recommendation to the Court for mercy.” In that case, Futch stated, “the punishment shall be by imprisonment for life” or less, “in the discretion of the Court.”

  It was early in the evening of May 12 when the jurors convened. Six minutes later, they returned to the courtroom. They found the defendant guilty, and recommended no mercy.

  Odom stood. “What have you to say why the sentence of the law should not be pronounced on you?” Futch asked him. Odom offered no response.

  Judge Futch ordered Odom to be transported to death row at Raiford state prison, “to be electrocuted until you be dead; and may God have mercy on your soul.”

  Without a recommendation of mercy, Mabel’s hopes of keeping Odom alive were fading as she and Kennedy considered next steps. Despite being certain of his client’s guilt, Kennedy felt strongly that “the jury was not fair to him. It was sort of a mob action.” The Ku Klux Klan had so far not gotten to Odom, as Pearl had heard rumored in the melon patches of Lake County. That much Mabel knew, and was grateful for. What the reporter likely did not know was that one week before Odom’s trial began, there was a rally of the Lake County Citizens’ Council held at Deputy Doug Sewell’s ranch in Umatilla. (At the time, the FBI was monitoring white Citizens’ Councils throughout the South; these organizations, despite proclamations to the contrary, were not immune to violence.) An informant in attendance told agents that the theme of the Lake County meeting was “Our Dedication to Our Fight for States’ Rights, and Americanism and Justice to All.” The principal speaker, he said, was the “Honorable Gordon G. Oldham Jr.” There were also short speeches by Sheriff McCall and Judge Futch, and according to the informant, approximately one hundred fifty men attended and “each signed a paper that was passed through the audience.” If members of the Lake County Citizens’ Council had also addressed other pertinent issues of the day at Deputy Sewell’s ranch, perhaps more discreetly, such conversations were not documented in the informant’s report.

  Kennedy promised Mabel that he would quickly prepare Odom’s appeal. Mabel herself had her mind on another miscarriage of justice. Approaching Futch outside the courthouse, she asked how long the judge thought Jesse Daniels would have to be retained at Chattahoochee. “I don’t know,” Futch replied, “but whether he’s guilty or not, that’s the place for him, with that mentality.”

  Whether he’s guilty or not? The response infuriated Mabel and prompted yet another letter to Governor Collins, pleading with him to open an investigation into the Jesse Daniels case and appealing as much to his concern for his state’s image as to his sense of justice. She was already aware of “one widely circulated national magazine” that intended to publish an article about the case. “I believe there are many things that are being neglected here in carrying out the laws of the state of Florida tha
t need attention,” she wrote, “but I would so hate to see that attention forced through ‘bad publicity.’”

  The “widely circulated national magazine” mentioned by Mabel in her letter to Collins was Coronet, a general-interest publication owned by Esquire. The magazine was planning to publish a feature story about Sheriff Willis McCall by William Peters, a New York writer. McCall had granted him an interview, the first he’d given to an “outsider” in years. Peters had contacted Mabel as a resource as well. She had loaned him her own clippings on McCall, and when he finished his story, he’d sent a draft to Mabel for her to read and comment on.

  Mabel hadn’t been shocked to find herself vilified by the sheriff, but she had been appalled by the openness with which he’d displayed his racism to a reporter for a national magazine. “We haven’t had any trouble except what’s been stirred up by outsiders, left-wingers, most of it Communist-inspired,” he’d told Peters. “My trouble here in Lake County hasn’t been with the niggers. It’s been with the NAACP and the Communist Party.” To prove it, McCall walked over to his safe, opened it, and pulled out a trove of newspaper clippings by which he’d identified his political opponents and perceived enemies. He told Peters that he kept another set of the documents in a bank vault so as to ensure that, in the event of loss, theft, or damage to his personal files, he “can still prove that this all started as a Communist conspiracy.”

  Settled back at his desk, McCall expounded on the issue that had been consuming him of late: the mixing of the races, the cause of which he lodged in the black man’s desire for white women. “It’s just a barbarous animal instinct that a nigger has that a white man don’t have,” McCall asserted. “The niggers have the idea now that the NAACP will get them out of it if they rape a white woman.”