Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  On December 4, 1971, Frank J. Doughney, an ex-cop from New York whom Graham had previously employed as an investigator at Volusia County Legal Services, arrived at Chattahoochee with a court order authorizing him to transport thirty-three-year-old Jesse Daniels home to his mother.

  “You should have seen the parting,” Doughney told Mabel Chesley. Jesse’s ward mates had brought him “a huge bag of candy,” and “black and white together,” they “hugged him and cried with joy over his release.” Jesse told them, “It’s the happiest day of my life. The best day I’ve ever had.”

  Kenneth Donaldson was not among the patients bidding Jesse good-bye. Since he’d had no charges filed against him, and thus no court order holding him, Donaldson had been released a few months earlier by Dr. Hirshberg, along with the secret notes and diary entries he’d compiled from his fifteen years at Chattahoochee. One of the first things Donaldson did upon being freed was to meet with an attorney in order to prepare a lawsuit against Dr. O’Connor and Florida State Hospital for confining him against his will.

  The first thing Jesse Daniels did upon being freed was fill his stomach. Because it was late afternoon when they’d left Chattahoochee, Doughney decided they’d spend the night in a Tallahassee hotel and drive to Daytona Beach early the next morning. Doughney took him out to a restaurant that was a politicians’ favorite, and Jesse regaled him with stories about the food at Chattahoochee—“hard as a rock,” and the rumor on the wards was that the bacon came from cadavers—as he cut into his steak. “I hope I can forget about those fourteen years,” he told the former New York cop.

  Jesse passed the next morning’s drive by identifying the make and provenance of passing cars; despite his long incarceration, he could unerringly peg each license tag’s serial number to the correct county. Jesse had also been following developments in the U.S. space program. “He recited to me the sequences of space shots, right up to Apollo 15 and all the way back to Gemini,” Doughney said. Newspapers had kept him abreast, too, of the war in Vietnam.

  Jesse Daniels’s reunion with his mother at Pearl’s tiny apartment on North Oleander Drive in Daytona Beach was documented by Mabel and a photographer. Dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and tie, Jesse was carrying a suitcase and his guitar as he walked down the driveway. Spotting him, Pearl burst into tears and hurried out to meet him, her arms extended to embrace the “lost boy” who’d finally come home to his “Momie.” The camera clicked; Mabel scribbled in her notebook. “It was as bad as a toothache when Jesse was gone,” Pearl said. “When my boy walked up to me I didn’t recognize him—his hair was thinner and he was so much older. All these years I was waiting to get my little boy back . . . and he came home a man.”

  Inside his new home, Pearl showed Jesse “the furniture she had reupholstered herself, the quilts she had made for their beds, the gifts she had squeezed out of her $87-a-month take-home pay.” In Jesse’s small room, Mabel inventoried “tie clasps, cufflinks and a wristwatch. Seven dress white shirts and several sport shirts and a suit she had been given for him.” Pearl had also fashioned for him a quilted beach coat; Jesse modeled it, and the photographer snapped another few photos.

  A few other gifts lay wrapped beneath a small Christmas tree—gifts that Pearl and Charles had brought to the Lake County jail in 1957 before being turned away by a heartless sheriff, and that had thus never been opened. There was a wallet, a belt, and a pair of shoes, slightly scuffed, that Jesse hadn’t been able to wait for Christmas to wear fourteen long years ago, just before he was picked up by Deputy Yates. Pearl had saved the gifts a second time, from the fire that had destroyed the Yalaha home. Now Jesse contemplated them, and all the time that had passed. “I’d like to be eighteen again,” he stuttered.

  Jesse had something for his mother as well. Seated on Pearl’s bed, he pulled a wad of bills from his pocket. “Mom,” he said, “I want to take you downtown and buy you the prettiest dress we can find.” He’d sold his radio to get the money.

  Mabel stole a moment of her own with the boy whose story she’d been following for fourteen years. His cheeks had hollowed and his hairline had receded, and he sported a two-day stubble. His “quiet voice,” though, had not changed, and he’d not lost his stutter. He’d also remained impeccably polite, with “ma’am” punctuating his responses to Mabel’s questions. Although it had been years since Mabel had last visited Jesse at Chattahoochee, Jesse recalled that her daughter had once accompanied her there, and he described Patricia in detail.

  At thirty-three, Jesse still had a future, and he had plans. “I want to be an auto mechanic still,” he told Mabel, and she noted in her story that working on cars had been his dream ever since he was a young boy in Okahumpka, painting and assembling tiny model automobiles in South Quarters, “before his world was shattered.” As a mechanic, Jesse reasoned, “I’m going to earn a lot of money some day so I can pay Mr. Graham for all he’s done for me.”

  “And I’m going to be a musician too,” he said, pulling the guitar from its case. He opened his impromptu concert for Mabel, Pearl, and the photographer with one of his favorites: “Oh, Lonesome Me,” a country song written and recorded by Don Gibson in December 1957, the same month that Jesse was apprehended for the rape of Blanche Knowles. Looking his mother in the eye, he rested the guitar on his thigh, and in a deeper voice unaffected by his stutter, he crooned.

  Well, there must be some way I can lose these lonesome blues

  Forget about the past and find somebody new

  After she’d bade Pearl and her boy good-bye, Mabel returned home to her typewriter. “For now, I close my own personal book on the Jesse Daniels case,” Mabel wrote, “a book I began those fourteen years ago as the editor of the weekly Mount Dora Topic. I smelled something fishy in the arrest, and I dug into the circumstances. I campaigned with that awfully limited power of the press that is a weekly. I campaigned still more with the News-Journal. Then the St. Petersburg Times also took up the cause. At last, a bewildered man-child is free now to develop his capabilities.”

  A few weeks after Jesse’s release, Gordon Oldham did what Richard Graham had predicted he would have no other choice but to do. He quietly dropped the fourteen-year-old rape charge in the hope that the sordid story would once again disappear from the newspapers and public memory. It didn’t work out that way. In the weeks and months that followed, light would be cast into the darkest corners of Lake County, and uncomfortable, long-buried truths would emerge. Mabel would have no choice but to reopen her personal book on the case of Jesse Daniels.

  Pearl and Jesse Daniels in Green Cove Springs

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Someone Should Write a Book

  “WE’LL START OFF a brand new year with happiness.” With that resolve, Pearl Eisentrager ended 1971. On December 31 she had learned that Gordon Oldham had filed a formal nolle prosequi in Lake County Court, officially discontinuing all action in the prosecution of Jesse Daniels for the rape of Blanche Bosanquet Knowles. The state attorney did not, however, in any way acknowledge the defendant’s possible innocence; rather, he stated it to be “pointless” to proceed, in that Supreme Court rulings like the 1964 Miranda decision, which limited the use of confessions in trial, posed difficulties in the prosecution of this case, as did “a lack of availability of witnesses.” Further, Oldham noted, a trial “would be a considerable cost to the taxpayers.” The state attorney expressed his confidence “that if I’d have tried Jesse Daniels at the time he was indicted, I would have convicted him,” although he acknowledged that, had Jesse been convicted with a life sentence in 1958, “he probably would have been paroled before now.”

  Oldham’s decision disappointed Richard Graham, who had been looking forward to “taking everyone’s dirty underwear out of the closet in a trial.” And Oldham’s statement that should Jesse become involved in another crime, he “would not be so fortunate to be found not guilty by reason of insanity,” offended Graham, as Jesse
had been adjudged to be sane. In Graham’s assessment, Oldham had behaved like a coward.

  Still, the nolle prosequi brought unequivocal relief to the Daytona Beach household where Pearl and her son had been attempting to fashion life anew for Jesse in the two weeks since he’d returned home. Carl Warner, the chef at the Princess Issena, where Pearl still worked as a maid, had given Jesse a job as a cook’s helper, and Pearl had only praise for her son’s new boss. “He has several retarded employees,” she noted. “He’s just as kind to them as their own mothers could be.”

  On the same day that Oldham dropped the rape charge against Jesse, Graham indicated to reporters that he had prepared a relief bill, in which he accused the state of negligence in illegally confining his client and, therefore, sought compensation for both Jesse and his mother. “The mental anguish and deep hurt [Daniels] suffered, through no fault of his own, have damaged him in a manner for which he could never be compensated and which could never be erased from his mind,” read the bill, which, Graham hoped, would be introduced in the next legislative session. The bill proposed compensation in the amount of $122,640, a figure based on loss of earnings at the rate of a dollar an hour for the time Jesse was held at Chattahoochee, and a smaller amount for Pearl, based on the time she had spent trying to free Jesse and on the amount she had saved the state by doing so. The very idea of compensation, though, caused Graham some ambivalence. “I don’t know,” he reflected. “How do you put a monetary value on what he went through?”

  When asked to speak at the Business and Professional Women’s Club in Daytona Beach on January 6, Mabel invited Jesse and Pearl to accompany her, as she’d chosen to address the role of the press in justice and civil rights cases. “Because a weekly newspaper speaks with a small voice,” Mabel told the gathering, “my role actually became that of buoying the faith of Jesse’s parents. They came to know that someone with at least some voice believed in their son’s innocence; that someone was unafraid to challenge McCall. It was after I came to Daytona Beach that the voice grew, eventually interesting the St. Petersburg Times and the Associated Press in an obvious miscarriage of justice. The combined voices of an angry press reached Governor Askew and the courts, and things really started moving toward the day of Jesse’s release and clearance.” Mabel applauded Pearl’s courage and tenacity, and she spoke glowingly of the dedication to Jesse’s case shown by Graham and Husfeld.

  Unlike Oldham, who had attempted to resist or delay every effort by Graham to grant Jesse Daniels his day in court, the Florida legislature acted on Graham’s relief bill with a sense of urgency. Graham had persuaded three lawmakers from Volusia County to sponsor the bill, and Senator Frederick Karl from Daytona Beach had agreed to introduce a claims bill in the legislature in January 1972. The Florida House of Representatives’ Committee on Retirement, Personnel and Claims appointed Thomas F. Woods as special master to oversee investigations and hearings related to the Jesse Daniels bill. Once he had taken sworn testimony, reviewed the documents in evidence, and weighed the attorneys’ written and oral arguments, he would submit a final “Master’s Report,” which would include recommendations on compensation. “There has never been a trial,” Senator Karl explained to a reporter. “So in considering the bill, the Legislature must decide guilt or innocence. We are in the position of rewarding a guilty person or refusing to grant damages to an innocent man who was confined for fourteen years of his life.”

  Like Richard Graham, Mabel Norris Chesley was disappointed that Jesse Daniels would not have the opportunity to clear his name in a Lake County courtroom. Still, the legislative hearings, over which Woods would preside, would become, in effect, Jesse’s trial, and they would have the advantage of taking place outside the jurisdiction of the Fifth Judicial Circuit and Oldham’s prosecutorial influence. For that, Mabel was ecstatic, and she looked forward to the day that Willis McCall would be subpoenaed to testify. As it happened, Mabel, too, was subpoenaed as a witness and ordered to appear in the Orange County court on the same day—March 2, 1972—as McCall.

  Jesse, in a navy blue suit and tie, arrived at the Orange County Courthouse with Pearl, who admitted to a reporter that Jesse was “terrified” and added, “I’m trembling a little myself.” Graham and Husfeld opened the hearing by calling Jesse’s former attorney, Thomas Champion, who provided background on the case. Graham next called a psychologist from Daytona to testify to Jesse’s sanity and then a psychiatrist from Florida State Hospital at Chattahoochee, who told Special Master Woods that the hospital had determined Jesse to be “sane although somewhat mentally deficient.”

  The next witness was Deputy James Yates, who testified that Jesse had become a suspect “after a pair of underwear was found near the rape victim’s home.” Under questioning by Graham, Yates appeared to have forgotten that after Deputy Leroy Campbell discovered the much-trumpeted size-34 underwear outside the Knowles house in the early morning hours of December 18, 1957, it was Bubba Hawkins who had been arrested for the crime. Not until five days later was Jesse Daniels taken into custody—no matter that his size-26 underwear had not been discovered at the scene of the crime but confiscated by Yates, without a warrant, from the Daniels house while no one was at home. Yates also testified that Jesse Daniels had made “a verbal confession, describing how he had entered the raped woman’s home.”

  Yates’s testimony as to when and where Jesse’s underwear had been discovered was disputed by McCall himself, who was called by counsel representing the office of the attorney general. The sheriff, however, could not support his dispute with proof, because he could not fully remember, hard as he tried, many details about the alleged rape and Daniels’s subsequent arrest. Nor could he refer to departmental records on the case, as he told Special Master Woods with regret and apology, since “all notes taken by investigators,” Jesse’s purported confession, “and all other records regarding the case” had disappeared either by “misplacement or a loss in moving from one office to another.” When Graham finally had the opportunity to confront in court the man in the big hat who had stared him down outside Judge Mills’s Lake County courtroom the previous year, McCall responded with docility and apology. The experience was deflating, as McCall feigned regret upon regret: The case was so old, the records had gone missing, his memory was lacking. “He just brushed me off,” said Graham.

  Mabel took the stand late in the afternoon. She recounted for Graham how she had “conducted her own investigation, waged a campaign for Daniels’ release and agreed with professional opinions that Daniels was too nonaggressive to have committed a rape.” She bore no sympathy for the sheriff’s memory lapses or his office’s inadequacies. “She apparently had a green light from her paper to go after him,” Graham recalled. “McCall would try to intimidate everyone, but she’d look him right in the eye. She was not afraid of him.” For, as Mabel herself remarked, “I’m my own best protection. If anything ever happened to me, everyone in the state would know who did it.”

  On March 3, the second day of hearings, Graham and Husfeld called Pearl to the stand. She detailed her son’s whereabouts on the day and evening of the rape for which he had been charged. Then the lawyers called Jesse Daniels, who had been waiting outside the courtroom so he’d not hear his mother’s testimony. Jesse “verified his mother’s story.” Stuttering, he testified to Woods, “They told me I had to sign a confession. At gunpoint.” He said the piece of paper was “already typed,” but he wasn’t allowed to read it. “They said it was none of my business.”

  At the close of the hearings, Thomas Woods told reporters that he would evaluate the case back in Tallahassee, although he plainly expressed concerns about Jesse’s confession and indicated his intention to collect further testimony, particularly from Gordon Oldham and Margaret Hickman, the secretary who’d allegedly witnessed Jesse’s signing of the confession.

  Woods planned to return to court in Orlando within a matter of weeks, but new events in Lake County brought the p
roceedings to a temporary halt. Anyone who’d thought Willis McCall had grown docile by his twenty-eighth year in office didn’t know Willis McCall.

  In April 1972, a thirty-eight-year-old black man named Tommy J. Vickers was arrested and taken to the Lake County jail for failure to respond to a summons he’d received for driving a vehicle with an invalid inspection sticker. At the jail, Vickers, who had a history of mental illness and, possibly, brain damage from an injury he’d sustained in a motorcycle accident five years earlier, began kicking the door of his cell. As the ruckus continued through the night, the jailers ordered two trusties, Jack and Bobby Huffman, both serving a year’s sentence for aggravated assault, to move Vickers into a fourteen-by-fourteen-foot “tile tank” without bars or windows. Vickers resisted, and in the tussle that followed the two trusties bloodied the new inmate’s nose. They confiscated Vickers’s shoes to deter further kicking and threw a mattress into the tank. The jailers locked the door.

  The next morning, on their arrival at the jail, Willis McCall and Deputy Lucius Clark, along with the Huffman brothers and a third trusty, Willis June, went to check on the unruly inmate. What happened next is uncertain, but in the scuffle that ensued, the three trusties managed to subdue Vickers. Both Jack and Bobby Huffman later stated that while they pinned Vickers to the floor, Willis McCall repeatedly kicked the prisoner hard in the stomach, shouting, “This damn Nigger ain’t crazy! This damn Nigger ain’t crazy!” Willis June corroborated that account.