Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  “The room was completely dark,” Blanche told him, and added that she “was unable to see the man at all.”

  It was apparent to everyone—to Oldham, to Knowles, to their fellow Clubbers, and to Blanche—that Karl wanted more, and that he was determined to get it. If the atmosphere in the room had been tense upon his arrival, it was now bristling with apprehensiveness and an edgy defensiveness. This did not deter Karl. He posed the critical question that Blanche had yet to answer in any public statement. Was she now confident as to the identity of the man who had broken into her Okahumpka home on the evening of December 17, 1957?

  Blanche replied that yes, she was now confident.

  Karl asked her to identify her assailant by name.

  Standing next to her, ostensibly supporting her, was the man to whom Blanche had been married for almost a quarter of a century—the successful citrus and melon man, mayor of Leesburg, and Bull Gator of the Quarterback Club, Joe Knowles. Surrounding them both, expectant, was their coterie of long-loyal associates. To speak the truth? Mrs. Joe Knowles really had no choice. She answered the question.

  “Jesse Daniels.”

  Sheriff Willis McCall being arrested by FDLE agents Al Albright and Rick Hernan

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A Newspaper Woman

  “I BELIEVE THE FAIN STATEMENT may provide the break we have been seeking.”

  There was hope in the message, from FDLE commissioner William Reed to U.S. attorney John L. Briggs. Yet the hope was tempered by both men’s awareness that under Karl’s questioning, Blanche had identified her assailant as Jesse Daniels. If she were to give the same testimony before the grand jury, under oath, it would be difficult if not impossible to procure indictments on criminal conspiracy charges. Reed thus suggested, in his letter to Briggs, that it might be worthwhile to propose that “as an investigative tool” Blanche Knowles submit to a polygraph test. “I say this from the standpoint,” Reed wrote, “that she appears to be a very strong willed woman and this might afford her a crutch to lean on and thereby excuse her truthful testimony against her husband and the other conspirators.” Should Blanche fail a polygraph test, he reasoned, the U.S. attorney might have some leverage to persuade Joe Knowles, who was not a target of the investigation, to cooperate.

  On the first day of grand jury proceedings in Jacksonville, Briggs told reporters, “It is fair to assume that any person who knows anything about this case will be called before the grand jury.” “Any person” included Willis McCall and Gordon Oldham, deputies James Yates and Leroy Campbell, former attorney general James Kynes, former state senator Frederick Karl, Sam Powell, and the Lake County coon hunter Lloyd Harrison. Mabel Norris Chesley and Blanche Knowles were also called.

  Notably absent from the witness list was Earle Fain Jr. But Sam Powell was on it, no doubt in order to provide Briggs with the opportunity to question a close friend of Joe Knowles’s about his activities that long-ago morning and thereby to learn, with the witness under oath, if Fain’s statements could be substantiated.

  As Richard Graham learned from the DOJ attorneys who attended the proceedings, McCall and Oldham had attempted to negotiate for immunity, but the request had been denied, and so they were “sweating it out in the courtroom hallway.” (McCall told reporters that he’d never sweated the charges, even for a second. “This has been a political harassment thing from the word go.”)

  Although testimony and proceedings in federal grand jury cases are sealed, the communications between investigative agencies shed light on the challenges that Briggs and the DOJ were facing. In one such communication, Ed Miller, who as legal counsel for the FDLE attended the proceedings, wrote to U.S. attorney Briggs that some of the witnesses’ testimonies “strike me as excellent examples of the very real but incredible problems faced by the citizens of Lake County for many years.” One witness, Miller noted, “quite calmly, in my considered opinion, perjured himself for reason that he seemingly has an abiding conviction that he can do so with impunity.”

  Presumably, Blanche Knowles testified before the federal grand jury, as in her statement to Frederick Karl, that she had initially misidentified Jesse Daniels as a black man because the room was totally dark. Also, since Earle Fain was never called as a corroboratoring witness, it seems plausible that Sam Powell, and any other Quarterback Club man called to testify, denied that any conspiratorial conversation had taken place in that Buick on the morning of December 18. Even under oath, the Club men would not break their bond. With no conspirators, there was no conspiracy. As the focus of the investigation had been to prove the conspiracy, not to determine Jesse Daniels’s innocence or guilt, DOJ attorneys notified the FDLE that “lack of corroborating evidence to support a conspiracy theory” had prompted them to close the case.

  DOJ attorneys also pointed to the problems presented by the statute of limitations in prosecuting a fifteen-year-old criminal conspiracy case. Which raised the question: Had the violation of Jesse Daniels’s civil rights occurred upon his indictment in 1958, or had criminal conspiracy defined the case for the entire term of Jesse’s institutionalization at Chattahoochee? The question was never legally resolved, and that lack of resolution added another reason to end the inquiry. In the opinion of DOJ Civil Rights Division investigator Carlton Stoiber, the case would “not have been successful and would have detracted limited resources from more current civil rights cases.” If still another reason not to pursue the Daniels case further was needed, there was this: Although he was “somewhat embarrassed to confess this non-legal perspective after forty years,” Stoiber later recalled, “it could have shifted attention and blame to a black man, with all the negative and potentially violent reactions from the white community in Florida.”

  With the inquiry ended, Briggs acknowledged, “There are many conflicts that cannot be or have not been resolved. There are many questions still unanswered, which in all probability, may never be.”

  While the investigation into the Jesse Daniels case did not in the end produce enough clear and decisive testimony to warrant indictments on criminal conspiracy charges, the conclusions of the investigators themselves held little ambiguity. In a letter to Governor Askew, Reed baldly expressed disappointment that the DOJ had decided to close the case. “In spite of the very real legal and practical obstacles inherent in an investigation of a fifteen year old crime,” Reed found good reason to take pride in the investigative work of his department’s agents and in the cooperative effort of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. He minced no words: “Although no competent substantial evidence sufficient for criminal prosecution could be adduced at this late date, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this crime was committed; there is also no question in my mind that those persons who perpetrated the offense of sending Jesse Daniels to the State Hospital at Chattahoochee for a crime which he did not commit are well aware that we know the extent of their guilt and that any such future actions which might be contemplated by them or their associates will not be tolerated by the State of Florida or the United States.” The FDLE report on its investigation, which Reed submitted to Governor Askew on October 16, 1972, concluded, “There has now been collected and documented sufficient data to clearly and positively indicate a continuing and ongoing criminal conspiracy between Gordon Oldham, Willis McCall, James Yates, and others which had as its main object the wrongful incarceration of Jesse Daniels.”

  Special Master Thomas Woods had decided to delay the Florida Legislature’s investigation into the Jesse Daniels case until Briggs had completed the grand jury hearings (which had been further delayed by Briggs’s being tasked with the “dirty tricks” investigation of President Nixon’s political operative Donald Segretti during the Watergate scandal). Now that the Daniels inquiry had ended, Woods filed a suit against the U.S. attorney, in which he petitioned for access to the grand jury transcripts on the grounds that they were essential to determine the merits of the Daniels claims bill. Th
e suit came before federal judge Charles R. Scott in Jacksonville. A judge highly regarded by civil rights groups, as President Lyndon Johnson had noted on appointing him to the bench in 1966, Scott was already more than familiar with the names Oldham, McCall, and Yates. It was he who had recently overturned the verdict in the Fruitland Park rape case, citing “reprehensible” prosecutorial misconduct. In a rare decision regarding the disclosure of grand jury testimony, Judge Scott ruled that “the public interest in secrecy is outweighed by the public interest in limited disclosure”; he granted Woods access to the transcripts but put constraints in place so that their content would remain “inaccessible to the general public.” In his ruling, Judge Scott declared that the case was “replete with indications that a tragic miscarriage of justice was perpetrated against Jesse Daniels . . . [by] persons cloaked with the awesome authority of the state.”

  For more than three years, Special Master Thomas Woods had been evaluating all of the evidence that, with the assistance of the FDLE and the FBI, he had accumulated through his legislative hearings, investigations, and interviews. His access now to the federal grand jury transcripts prompted him to interview anew witnesses called or referenced in the conspiracy case—among them Earle Fain Jr., Lloyd Harrison, and Mary Ellen Hawkins—who might have evidence pertinent to the claims case. Woods’s charge as special master was to determine whether the state had been “negligent in charging the claimant with the crime of rape.” As Governor Askew had requested, Woods had been assiduous.

  In his final report, Woods held that the State of Florida “has placed the claimant in an almost impossible position of having to prove his innocence. However, after three years of hearings with this committee and investigation by the Federal Grand Jury, it would appear that the claimant may have done just that.” Whereas in a criminal trial, a defendant must be proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt, Woods noted, the standard set for his investigation to prove the defendant’s innocence had been more like “by absolute truth”—and “while ‘absolute’ truth is often unobtainable for mortal beings,” in Woods’s estimation, “at least 95% of the facts have been discovered in this case.” Compelling among those facts for Woods were two details absent from Blanche Knowles’s description of her attacker. She detected neither a “skunk smell” on his person nor, more remarkably, an impediment in his speech. Since Jesse “was well known for stuttering it would be reasonable to assume in an excited state of committing a rape,” he would have stuttered. Not only did Woods believe Jesse Daniels to be innocent in the rape of Blanche Knowles, but he also found that “the evidence strongly indicates that the actual assailant was, in fact, Sam Wiley Odom.” He had come to the conclusion that Odom would not have been able to describe the incident in so much precise detail if he had not been present at the scene.

  The evidence Woods had collected unquestionably pointed to a criminal conspiracy. But there was one more discrepancy that had eluded everyone to date. Al Albright, himself a polygraph examiner, had analyzed the results of the polygraph test Bill Donaldson had administered. The test had been based on responses to a mere seven questions that made no specific reference to the crime—Donaldson, as he’d stated, had “no specific evidence about the crime”—so Albright had deemed the results “essentially worthless.” Yet on closer examination, not entirely. The “Jesse Daniels” chart, particularly of the “breathing pattern,” had clearly indicated to Albright deception on the part of the subject throughout the test. Recalling Donaldson’s claim to have tested only black suspects, Albright understood the pattern in a new light. It signified “the fact that the person taking the test was lying about his identity.”

  That lie had eluded both Donaldson and Margaret Hickman, who had typed and notarized the confession of a black Jesse Daniels; or it had until the revelations at Special Master Woods’s legislative hearings on May 31, 1972. The DOJ declared “the most prominent fact indicating a conspiracy to deprive Jesse Daniels of a Constitutional right, is the false confession obtained from a black male purporting to be Jesse Daniels.” The enlistment of that black male by Deputy James Yates and the Lake County Sheriff’s Department to accomplish its deception had fooled not only the Tampa polygraph expert and the Leesburg notary but also quite possibly the Okahumpka rape victim herself. In her statement to Gordon Oldham, Blanche affirmed that she had identified the voice of her assailant at the Lake County jail both on a recording and from behind a closed door, when the suspect was “prompted” to recite specific sentences and phrases he had spoken to her on the night of the attack. On that occasion in the Lake County jail, Blanche, in fact, may very well have heard and recognized the voice of the man who’d attacked her back in 1957, but it was not the stuttering, hesitant voice of the real Jesse Daniels. Could the voice that Blanche identified behind that jailhouse door have belonged to Sam Wiley Odom, who was still in custody at the jail at the same time as Jesse Daniels? Could the young black man with “bushy hair” whom Blanche described to Yates as her attacker be the same young black man with “kinky hair” who confessed before Margaret Hickman?

  In his appearance before the special master, Deputy Yates had testified that Jesse Daniels had confessed to the rape within “twenty or thirty minutes and upon Donaldson giving him a polygraph test,” which, Yates claimed, Jesse had failed on the evening of December 23, 1957. However, the FDLE investigation found that Yates had not brought “Jesse Daniels” before Hickman until December 27. “It seems beyond reasonable belief,” the FDLE report stated, “that it would have taken four days to procure a confession from a youth of Jesse Daniels’ mental and emotional makeup.” Special Master Woods agreed, as the testimony in his hearings had indicated that Jesse was “highly suggestible”—according to one Chattahoochee physician, the boy “could easily have been convinced that he was the King of England.”

  Even after Sam Wiley Odom, at Yates’s bidding, had refused to finger his neighbor Bubba Hawkins for the crime, Yates had not released Odom from his cell in the Lake County jail; nor did Yates free him after Jesse Daniels had been arrested for the rape. Pearl Daniels learned from Odom’s mother, Laura Cope, that her son had confessed to raping Blanche Knowles and, from another source, that Sheriff McCall had told Cope the Knowles rape “would not be put on her son” but on Jesse Daniels. This left Richard Graham to wonder: Had the Lake County Sheriff’s Department struck a deal with Odom whereby he, a confessed rapist, would be freed in exchange for his sworn and notarized admission to the crime, and a polygraph exam, not as Sam Wiley Odom but as Jesse Daniels?

  Late in December 1957, with the rape of Blanche Knowles now assigned to the more socially acceptable white Jesse Daniels, Sam Wiley Odom was released from the Lake County jail, where Jesse was waiting to be indicted. Willis McCall, who’d originally expected to be “hanging a nigger” for the rape of Blanche Knowles, would have been of no mind to let Odom go unpunished for his admitted violation of a white woman. No less than any member of the Leesburg Quarterback Club, the sheriff had a reputation to uphold. But perhaps Odom’s punishment would occur outside the legal system, as suggested by the rumors Pearl Daniels had told Mabel she’d heard in the melon patches of Okahumpka, of KKK plans to “get the Negro” who had raped Blanche Knowles. But that was after Odom had been taken into custody for the rape of Kate Coker. Couldn’t McCall, or the Klan, have gotten to Odom sooner?

  Had such a plan existed, it had apparently been scuttled, if unwittingly, by Odom himself. It had been only a few months between the time he had at last been released from jail as a suspect in the Knowles rape and the break-ins at the homes of Amelia Rutherford and Opal Howard. It was not until the break-in at the home of Kate Coker, however, that he had been shot and apprehended. Odom had subsequently confessed to the Coker rape, as well as the Rutherford and Howard break-ins; then, after a quick conviction and dispatch to Raiford, he’d waited to burn in the electric chair. It was thus that Sam Wiley Odom had ensured that his punishment for the rape of a white woman would not
be delivered by Willis McCall and the Klansmen of Lake County. That responsibility had fallen instead on the State of Florida.

  Reed’s report to the governor called attention to the “distinctly hostile” exchange between Sam Wiley Odom and Deputy Yates when the two of them spoke in August 1959 at Raiford, after Odom had told Mabel Norris Reese that he knew all about the Knowles rape. It’s not cynical to assume that, with Gordon Oldham overseeing and documenting the interview, not every sentence spoken that evening had necessarily been transcribed by, or even been uttered in the presence of, the stenographer. Plainly, though, Odom believed Yates had betrayed him when, before the pardon board, he had characterized Odom’s break-ins as attempts at rape. It seemed just as plain that the condemned youth was struggling, without legal assistance or experience, to use information about the Knowles rape as leverage in gaining the remission of his death sentence and, possibly, as a way to also save the life of Jesse Daniels. Odom’s motives aside, Reed had found it “interesting to note” that when Odom had asked the deputy if his account of the post-rape conversation between Blanche and her attacker was corroborated by what Mrs. Knowles had reported, Yates had said, “One of the troubles with the other people is that they don’t know what Mrs. Knowles told me.”

  What is certain is that Yates and Odom had conversations about the rape of Blanche Knowles after Odom was picked up in the initial sweep of the Quarters on December 18, 1957. Odom was, in fact, the last suspect to be released from custody. A year and a half later, with Odom awaiting the governor’s signature on his death warrant and Jesse Daniels locked up in a sunless criminal ward at Chattahoochee, Yates had nonetheless felt compelled to drive the hundred miles to Raiford in order to secure from Odom a signed statement declaring that he was not responsible for the rape of Blanche Knowles. For what purpose? And why, after witnessing Odom’s execution, could neither Yates nor McCall remember Odom’s insistence, in that heated exchange with Yates, that Jesse Daniels was not guilty of the Knowles rape? It simply wasn’t plausible. Indeed, as Reed remarked in the FDLE report, “this would appear incredible in light of the continuing notoriety attached to the Daniels case through the years.”