Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

neighbor, De Forest wrote, “scoffed at the rape theory—said it was false.”
    Mrs. Burtoft had other neighbors who knew “true facts,” too, neighbors who had even signed affidavits as to what they’d witnessed on the morning of July 16, 1949, just outside their Okahumpka home. Clifton and Ethel Twiss were already awake that Saturday morning when, sometime between 6 and 6:30 a.m., they heard a car slow down in front of their house. They heard the motor turn off, and a moment later, when Clifton Twiss “heard the motor start up again,” he looked out his window and saw her: a young lady, “quite small and slender,” in a light pink dress; she was carrying a white handbag. She did not look disheveled, and she did not seem to be panicked. She walked away from the car, “about 4, 5 or 6 feet away—walking toward Center Hill,” and when she got to the fork she simply paced back and forth for about thirty minutes, Twiss stated—he and his wife had taken turns observing her through binoculars. They’d thought she was a hitchhiker, but it seemed funny to them “that a lady would be hitching a ride at 6 o’clock in the morning.” The small, dark car had driven past the Twiss house “on the way to Groveland,” after the lady had been dropped off; a white man was driving. Both Mr. and Mrs. Twiss had agreed to sign statements about what they’d seen that morning, but they had refused to testify on behalf of the defense: “Wouldn’t do to be called ‘nigger lover,’ ” Clifton Twiss said.
    One of Rowland Watts’s sources had informed him that the initial “police alarm,” which had been radioed before Norma was found, may have indicated that the deputies were searching for a Buick. Indeed, when Deputy James Yates showed up at the Groveland jail on the following morning, one of the first questions he asked Charles Greenlee was “Where’s that new Buick or old Buick you was in?” Also, the Twisses were later shown pictures of a small, dark Buick, which, they’d said, resembled the car outside their house on the morning of July 16. And Curtis Howard had testified in court that on July 16 he had been driving a ’46 Buick. “I know you realize the significance and value of untangling the Buick car and Curtis Howard’s activities that night,” M. C. Thomas wrote to Watts, who had begun to suspect there was a “probability that [Howard] knew the Padgetts before” that weekend in July.
    Watts’s suspicions about Curtis Howard were well-grounded. In the days following the alleged rape, Howard had told several people around Lake County that “it was he who had discovered and rescued [Norma Padgett] as she wandered in the woods.” By the time of the trial, however, his story had become more consistent with Norma’s account. In court Howard had testified that after Willie Padgett arrived at Dean’s filling station in Leesburg and told Howard that Norma had been kidnapped, Howard phoned his uncle, Deputy Leroy Campbell, who appeared at Dean’s in a matter of minutes and took Padgett away in his car to investigate. That might have been the end of the story for this average filling-station attendant who placed a helpful call to police, but it wasn’t. Around 6:30 a.m., after he was relieved at Dean’s, Howard was on his way to Groveland for a cup of coffee when, he’d claimed, he spotted a young blond girl “sitting in the grass” by the side of the road. Howard slowed his car. He knew that his uncle, a deputy sheriff, had set out with Willie Padgett to find his seventeen-year-old wife, who had been kidnapped by four black men a few hours earlier—he’d even told people afterward that on leaving work he’d gone to look for the girl himself—yet, inexplicably, after seeing a young girl (in a torn dress, by Howard’s account) sitting in the grass by the side of the road just after sunrise, Curtis Howard did not connect her to Padgett’s missing teenage wife. He’d testified that he “didn’t pay too much attention” to the girl and kept driving on to Groveland.
    At about 7 a.m. Howard arrived at a café in Groveland. There he ran into his uncle and another deputy, James Yates, along with Willie Padgett. They had still not found Norma Padgett, and Curtis Howard still made no mention of the girl he’d seen only minutes before. Instead, at Yates’s request, Howard agreed to drive Padgett home; Willie wanted to change his shirt. In the eight-mile ride to Bay Lake they made two stops at