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

kept us under surveillance from a hospital window.” When reporters began arriving at Waterman Memorial Hospital, the lawyers could tell them only that Deputy Yates was refusing to allow them access to their client. Akerman elaborated: they would see Irvin “when the law gives us our rights,” although he was convinced that McCall “is still in control of Irvin and all his activities, and it is my opinion that the only reasonable inference that can be drawn from McCall’s activities is that as long as he can prevent it, he will not permit Irvin to tell his attorneys the facts leading up to the killing of Shepherd and the wounding of Irvin.” It was obvious to the lawyers that McCall and Yates were hoping Irvin would die from his wounds before he had the chance to give a statement.
    Hours passed, and still no word from Truman Futch. With Irvin totally under the guard of Deputy Yates and the insidious Sheriff McCall in a room down the hall, the lawyers’ unease over their client, already critically wounded by the man responsible for his safe transfer to Tavares, continued to grow. When they voiced their concern to hospital officials, one doctor, outraged at the presumption of the sheriff’s department, simply stormed past the unacknowledged, startled Yates to check on Irvin’s condition. And two FBI agents flashing shields and identification managed to intimidate a flustered Yates out of his post while they proceeded, unbeknownst to the lawyers and the reporters, to interview Irvin for forty-five minutes, until an attending nurse intervened because the patient “appeared to be in pain.” Shortly thereafter rumors were circulating around the hospital that Irvin had told an “entirely different story” of the events that led to Shepherd’s death and his own injuries.
    Willis McCall, meanwhile, had barricaded himself in his room with Assistant State Attorney A. P. “Sam” Buie, the former University of Florida football standout who had aided Jesse Hunter in the prosecution of the Groveland Boys, as well as McCall’s old friend Judge W. Troy Hall, who also happened to be in charge of the coroner’s inquest into the manner of Shepherd’s death. Together they had worked on McCall’s statement detailing the events of the previous evening, so that by the time the FBI agents Wayne Swinney and Clyde Aderhold arrived at the sheriff’s bedside, he was ready to talk. With their notebooks in hand, the agents followed McCall through his tale of the prison transfer that landed him as well as Irvin in the hospital and Samuel Shepherd in the morgue.
    McCall, Yates, and the two prisoners had left Raiford in the early evening, the sheriff avowed. McCall had dropped off Yates at his car in Weirsdale, and he had then followed the deputy across the Ocklawaha River Bridge. He’d lost sight of Yates’s taillights where the clay road curved. About the same time, he’d begun to feel a strain on the steering wheel, and when he pulled the car over, he noticed that the tire was “half way down.” So he had radioed Yates and told him to send someone from the Gulf service station in Umatilla to fix his flat. Right then, McCall said, Samuel Shepherd spoke up about having to relieve himself.
    “He said, ‘I will piss in my britches if you don’t let me out.’ I said, ‘All right damn it get out and get it over with.’ Those were my exact words, and I opened the door, and they both got out of the car, and just as they stepped out of the car, and just as Shepherd was straightening up from getting off the seat, he hit at me with a flashlight and yelled to Irvin to ‘get his gun’ and he hit me with the flashlight.”
    The agents were busy scribbling. McCall continued: “At that time one of the boys, I don’t know which one, grabbed me by the shirt . . . grabbed me by the hair of the head and had hold of my shirt and my hair, and then I grabbed for my gun and got to it before either one of them did and started shooting it. I just had to do it, it was either me or them and I beat them to my gun.” The sheriff had emptied his gun; then, with Shepherd and Irvin lying in a ditch, McCall had made another radio call to Yates. “The niggers tried to jump me!” he’d screamed. “I had to shoot them!”
    The sheriff reenacted parts of the shooting for the agents. He showed them his torn shirt, his broken eyeglasses, the powder burns on his coat. He answered their questions. He also told them that he was not willing to give