Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  Blanche’s cousin Priscilla Newell knew this dynamic firsthand. Her mother, Frances Bosanquet, had married a dashing outdoorsman, David Newell—he hunted with the legendary sharpshooter Annie Oakley, who wintered in Leesburg until her death in 1926, and he went on to become the editor of Field & Stream. David’s work in media necessitated that he live in New York for a large part of the year, and it was no secret in the Bosanquet and Newell families that he shared an apartment there with his girlfriend, a photographer who traveled with him. When the girlfriend eventually became terminally ill, David brought her to his home in Leesburg, and Frances ended up caring for her until her death, while David continued to travel for work.

  The economic displacement that affected women and children after divorce was as clear to the wealthy Episcopalians in Leesburg as it was elsewhere, but among them there was an extra element of social stigma to divorce that made it the solution of last resort to marriage problems. “Your daughter would be disgraced if she was divorced,” Priscilla said. “When somebody got divorced it was shocking news and you just didn’t do it.” The women of the citrus elite of Lake County were exactly the ones for whom Ladies’ Home Journal and other influential mass market women’s magazines of the day pumped out stories with headlines like “Divorces Are Not Crimes: They Are Tragedies.”

  So if Blanche Knowles’s marriage was hard, she did not let on. She was a mother first, and as Dr. Durham Young had observed in the hours after her rape, she was also “a rather stoic type of person . . . quite herself and very well composed under the circumstances.”

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  JUDGE MILLS’S RULING at Jesse’s competency hearing had disappointed Richard Graham, but it had not daunted him. As he told Mabel, he was not done trying to rescue his client just yet. He filed a motion for discovery with the court, which, if granted, would allow Jesse’s legal team to take depositions from the other participants in the case. More specifically, Mabel elaborated, discovery would allow them to question the alleged rape victim about her initial description of her attacker, and to interrogate McCall about the circumstances under which he’d obtained Jesse’s confession. They’d also have the opportunity to question the deputies who took Jesse in for questioning and searched his home, collecting his personal property without a warrant.

  On March 1, the Daytona Beach Evening News ran an editorial about Jesse’s case, asking, “Do the Mentally Retarded Have Civil Rights, Too?” On March 2, in a letter to newly elected Governor Reubin Askew, a liberal with a strong civil rights stance, Mabel praised Richard Graham for “virtually making a life cause of this man’s release” and pointed out how plainly Judge Mills was in McCall’s pocket. The more pressing concern, though, was justice, for “his mother and he have suffered enough.”

  Ted Husfeld went way back with Askew. Both of them had adopted children through the Children’s Home Society of Florida, and they had long sat together on the organization’s board. Husfeld, too, wrote the governor to ask for an investigation into the Jesse Daniels case. “On his behalf I would call upon the power of your office to afford this man humane relief; and even to the effect of pardoning him for a crime that I am firmly convinced he was wholly incapable of committing, and for which he has never been tried.” Although Husfeld had always abided by the decisions of the court, in this case he could not let the matter rest, for it concerned “a benign, timid, quiet, friendly and pathetic soul who has no friends in high places.”

  The letters from Mabel Chesley and Ted Husfeld caught Askew’s attention, and his general counsel, Edgar Dunn, promptly submitted a request to the clerk of the circuit court in Lake County for all transcripts and pleadings in the case. He contacted the executive director of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the newly formed government agency (formerly the Florida Sheriffs Bureau) that served as the state’s investigative arm, much as the FBI did for the U.S. Department of Justice. Dunn requested that the FDLE immediately share any information on the charge against Jesse Daniels.

  Graham, meanwhile, appealed to another Fifth Circuit Court judge, John Booth, who offered a deal: If Jesse Daniels pleaded guilty, Booth would put him on probation. Graham refused to bite. “For Jesse to plead guilty would have let all those people off the hook neatly,” he said, “all those people who had kept Jesse tucked away without a trial.”

  On April 10, in an effort to keep Jesse’s story in the news, Mabel wrote again about Richard Graham’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, likening Jesse’s plight to that of an indigent Florida drifter named Clarence Earl Gideon. Arrested for breaking and entering in 1961, Gideon, unable to pay for an attorney, had defended himself in court, where he’d been convicted and sentenced to five years at Raiford. From his cell, in a five-page petition handwritten in pencil, Gideon appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in what ultimately became the landmark case Gideon v. Wainwright. The Court ruled that under the Sixth Amendment, states must provide counsel in criminal cases for defendants who cannot afford an attorney. “Gideon had no attorney to write his brief,” Mabel wrote. “Daniels does.” Graham himself, she noted, had described Jesse’s situation as “being sentenced to life imprisonment without proper judicial findings.”

  One month later, Mabel at last received reason for hope. The United States Supreme Court had handed down an order to show cause, compelling the State of Florida to legally justify Jesse Daniels’s confinement at Chattahoochee—a sign that it was considering Graham’s case. As Mabel reported in a front-page story for the Daytona Beach Morning Journal, the justices “strongly questioned the statute under which Daniels is being held which permits incarceration without a legal determination of insanity.” In their order, they cited a previous case in which a similar statute had been overturned. The Court gave Florida attorney general Robert L. Shevin until the end of the month to respond. It was a remarkable development, and, Graham said, “the biggest day of my legal life.”

  The news was remarkable for another reason. After the Groveland Boys rape case and the Virgil Hawkins integration case, the Jesse Daniels appeal would become the third civil rights suit rooted in Okahumpka, with its population of about three hundred, to reach the United States Supreme Court. The previous two cases had at length effected some measure of progress, if not true justice for the defendants. Walter Irvin, after having his sentence commuted to life by Governor Collins in 1955, was paroled in 1968. In the case of Virgil Hawkins, the State of Florida, after throwing up roadblock after roadblock, had had to read the legal writing on the wall and bow to the inevitable: It would no longer be able to keep black students from attending the University of Florida College of Law. In acceding, however, the state managed to inflict an additional indignity on the long-suffering petitioner. In June 1958, it agreed to begin accepting qualified black applicants without delay, on condition that Hawkins would withdraw his own application. Selflessly, and unwilling to deprive other black students the opportunity of a higher education, Hawkins accepted the deal, and in September of that year, the College of Law admitted its first black applicant. Hawkins “opened the door but he never walked through it,” said W. George Allen, the first black man to earn a law degree there, in 1962. “He was my hero.”

  Now, in 1971, legal momentum was building for Jesse Daniels for the first time in more than thirteen years. Upon receiving the Supreme Court’s order, Graham had driven to the News-Journal to show the letter to Mabel, who’d persuaded the editors to banner the story on the paper’s front page. “She’d done her best to keep this story alive,” Graham said. “Until then, many people in the community thought Mabel was just pushing another liberal cause.” But now that the U.S. Supreme Court was showing interest in the Daniels case, Graham said, “it turned those thoughts around. They don’t issue an order to show cause unless they mean business.”

  Graham had another appeal pending—the February ruling in Judge Mills’s court—with the Second District Court of Appeal of Florida, so that, as Mab
el optimistically put it, “it may be a race to see which court finally disposes of the Daniels case.” Meanwhile, Governor Askew had taken a critical step: He’d removed J. B. O’Connor as superintendent of Florida State Hospital and replaced him with Dr. Milton J. Hirshberg, giving him explicit instructions to investigate the Daniels case.

  Hirshberg, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, had served in the Iwo Jima and Okinawa operations during World War II and had gone to flight school before resigning from the Navy and attending medical school at Yale. Now, in his new position at Chattahoochee, he opened the patient file that had been marked “H-O-L-D” by Dr. O’Connor nearly fourteen years earlier. It contained the signed confession to rape as well as the correspondence from Sam Buie assuring O’Connor that Jesse was indeed guilty of the charge and urging the doctor not to hurry to evaluate the new patient’s fitness for court. Hirshberg, however, didn’t just read the file; he also got to know Jesse. By the end of the summer, they’d formed a bond.

  On September 10, in a letter to Husfeld and Graham, Hirshberg stated that, as it was his intention to operate the hospital “in accordance with high professional standards,” he did not feel that justice was being served by keeping Jesse locked up, and he wanted to do whatever he could to get him released. With the letter, Hirshberg enclosed several scholarly articles on the topic of determining mental competency for trial. “I see the man in an impossible bind, just as other people do,” Hirshberg wrote, “that he is denied a trial because of an alleged mental defect which would serve as his adequate defense if he were ever to go to trial. This cannot be justice by any sense of the word.” In short, he added, “I personally believe he is competent to go to trial.”

  Already, Hirshberg had had Jesse moved to less restrictive quarters, despite the criminal charges against him. That summer, Jesse had at last been permitted to walk the grounds and feel “the sun on his face, and the fresh air, and the shade of live oak trees.”

  Word of Hirshberg’s assessment of Jesse Daniels made its way to the Office of the State Attorney in Lake County, of course. Gordon Oldham, in a letter to the new hospital superintendent, criticized his meddling in Jesse’s case and hinted that the doctor “should be careful if he ever had to come to Lake County.” Soon thereafter, Hirshberg began receiving anonymous telephone calls reminding him of the hospital’s regulations, whether he supported them or not. He was forced to move Jesse back to the criminal ward. In October, in an interview with a reporter about the challenges he was facing at Chattahoochee, Hirshberg indicated that “foot-dragging” in the courts had kept some patients institutionalized for unacceptable lengths of time. “But,” he added, perhaps out of concern over Oldham’s thinly veiled threat, “I don’t want to get into a hassle with state attorneys. I just want to do a good job.”

  On November 17, 1971, the race to see which court would rule on Daniels v. State was decided: The Florida Second District Court of Appeal in Lakeland sent Graham a telegram informing him that the court had reversed the Lake County Circuit ruling. “It doesn’t get any faster than that,” Graham said, observing that “the Judges were not pleased with this version of Lake County Justice.”

  Contradicting the lower court’s finding, the ruling found that testimony showed “conclusively that Jesse Daniels is now properly oriented as to time, place and person, and could aid his lawyers in the defense of his case.” In closing, the court noted, “In a case such as this, where the evidence is overwhelmingly contrary to the findings of the trial court, the appellate court has the authority to enter a reversal . . . Accordingly, we reverse the order of the trial court and remand with directions to enter an order declaring Jesse Daniels competent to stand trial.”

  Martin Dyckman, one of the best-known political reporters in Florida, wrote a feature story for the St. Petersburg Times titled “He Was Sentenced to a Living Death.” Dyckman interviewed everyone from Gordon Oldham to Mabel Chesley, and Jesse himself, who told him, “It’s been nothing in the world but pure torture since I’ve been here in this place.” Dyckman wrote critically of Sam Buie, holding him partly responsible for Jesse’s incarceration at Chattahoochee. It was his interview with Gordon Oldham, however, that proved to be the most revealing.

  Oldham admitted that the case against Jesse Daniels hinged on a confession that he, as state attorney, was not certain would stand up in court. Pushed about the specifics of Jesse’s confession, particularly his statement that he had told the victim who he was—“Is that you, Joe?” “No, it is me, Jesse Daniels”—Oldham replied that the confession was wrong, without elaborating. “He didn’t identify himself to the victim,” Oldham said. “That was never said to her.” Then, distancing himself further from the substance of Jesse’s statement, Oldham made clear that he had not been present at the confession, which, the boy claimed, had been taken from him at gunpoint. “I’ve never talked to Jesse Daniels in my life, other than to say hello in a courtroom,” Oldham said. “I don’t talk to defendants. Confessions are the jobs of law enforcement agencies, not the state attorney.” As for Blanche Knowles’s identification of her attacker initially not as a nineteen-year-old white boy (with a stutter) but as a black man, Oldham explained, “It was dark in the house. Her basic identification was on the voice—that of a person she felt was ‘ignorant country’ or black.”

  The state attorney was noncommittal as to whether he would continue to oppose a trial for Jesse Daniels. “I’m inclined offhand to feel that should be determined by the judge, and we would probably have a hearing,” Oldham said. He did acknowledge, though, that Supreme Court rulings since Jesse’s arrest, like the 1964 Miranda decision limiting the use of confessions in criminal trials, “could wash out his case.” Oldham noted, “I would have to see if I had sufficient evidence in light of those cases.”

  When Dyckman remarked that Oldham “sounded rather eager” for Graham to have Jesse Daniels plead insanity, Oldham replied, “That is a good defense since he’s been legally insane for thirteen years. That would place a more terrific burden on me.”

  “Hell, no!” declared Graham on learning of Oldham’s suggestion. Having already stated plainly that he was not going to entertain a guilty plea in order to free Jesse Daniels, Graham was not in any way disposed to afford Oldham the opportunity to “close the file with a solved crime.” He hoped that the Second District Court’s ruling would prompt Oldham to assume a professional level of cooperation with the defense in its preparation for Jesse’s day in court. He tried to appeal to Oldham’s sense of decency. “Just let him go,” Graham pleaded with the state attorney, pointing out the length of time that Jesse Daniels had already been locked up. But “there was no talking to him.” Oldham stood firm in maintaining Jesse’s guilt. He even fought Graham’s motion of discovery, which was routinely employed in criminal cases, to force the state to produce the evidence relevant to the case. “Oldham fought us every step of the way.”

  He was “forcing us to gamble,” Graham recalled. “Here we are fighting for trial without being able to know whether they have any evidence.” In his brief before the District Court, Graham charged that key documents had vanished mysteriously from Jesse’s hospital file, including the transcript of the victim’s testimony that Oldham had sent to Dr. O’Connor—Oldham’s accompanying cover letter to O’Connor was there, but not the transcript itself. Along with the transcript had vanished Blanche’s acknowledgment that she had known Jesse as the boy on the bike. Missing, too, were details of the process by which she had identified the voice of her attacker. Nor could Graham see how she had previously failed to characterize the voice as ‘ignorant country’ or black, as Oldham was claiming, or to link Jesse Daniels to the attack at all.

  Apparently lost, too—when “moving offices,” according to McCall—were the Lake County Sheriff’s Department files on the Knowles rape case, in which the deputies had recorded, presumably, that Blanche’s first description of her rapist was of a “young, husky Negro.” With
the files missing, Graham did not expect to gain any helpful information by deposing McCall or Yates, who had been tasked with the investigation. Furthermore, “No one in Lake County would talk about this case,” Graham said. “One of my best friends from law school was from Lake County, and when this Daniels case came up, he never spoke to me again.”

  Nonetheless, Graham pursued his motion for discovery, because, even lacking the missing materials, he suspected that Oldham did not want him taking depositions from Blanche or Joe, or from Willis McCall or any of his deputies, even though the sheriff’s department had successfully weathered so many inquiries and investigations in the past.

  He also suspected that the Knowleses themselves were not eager to go to trial. He knew that Oldham really needed only one witness to convict Jesse Daniels at trial, and should someone of Blanche’s stature take the stand and, before a jury, point to her former Okahumpka neighbor as her attacker, it would be difficult for any lawyer to make a winning case for the defense—especially in Lake County. But, Graham said, “I had more faith in Blanche, that she wouldn’t testify against Jesse and commit perjury. She’d had enough of that lie.” Moreover, a spokesman for the Florida attorney general’s office had told Martin Dyckman that Jesse would “probably not have a trial. He probably will get out.” That led Graham to believe that he was right in his hunch that Oldham was not going to be able to bring Jesse’s case to trial because Blanche Knowles was refusing to testify to his guilt. On his faith and on that hunch, Graham had decided not to force Oldham’s hand by seeking a subpoena for Blanche Knowles.

  Before preparing a defense in the event of a trial, Graham had another, more pressing matter at hand. The Second District’s ruling allowed the state fifteen days to appeal. Absent an appeal, because Dr. Milton Hirshberg had certified his patient to be “harmless to society,” Jesse Daniels could be released on his own recognizance while he awaited trial. True to form, Oldham took all fifteen days to determine that he’d not appeal the ruling. Then a circuit judge further delayed the application that Graham had filed for Jesse’s bail. The delays did not faze Pearl. “I’ve waited nearly fourteen years,” she said. “I can wait a little longer if I have to, and so can the boy.”