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

McCall’s Oldsmobile lay a tire, the tire that another of the sheriff’s friends, Spencer Rynearson, had changed shortly before most of the witnesses had arrived on the scene Tuesday night; lodged in one of the “grooves between the tread design” of the tire was, as Hall pointed out to the jury and the press, a box nail. Hall then addressed McCall: “I will ask you to examine this nail here in the tire and ask you to state whether or not it appears to have been worn by contact with the pavement.” After claiming that he’d never noticed the nail until “someone pointed it out to him,” the sheriff answered, “Yes, it is worn, it looks as if it had been in the tire while the tire was being run on; of course, it is a little rusty now.”
    Mabel Norris Reese, who had heard Walter Irvin describe twice, and quite believably, what had occurred at the roadside on the night of the prison transfer, was not convinced by the physical evidence: “The nail on the tire was so obviously planted that it made you sick that people would stand there, look at it and believe it.”

    FBI photograph of the nail in Sheriff Willis McCall’s tire. ( Federal Bureau of Investigation )
    Hall then had McCall lead a walk-through of the roadside incident. Noticing that the ground was dug up where Shepherd and Irvin had been lying after being shot, Hall asked, “Was this ground dug up in this manner at that time?” McCall said no, as he surveyed the three square feet of overturned sand and clay, and explained, “The F.B.I. has been sifting it, trying to find the bullets.” One bullet in particular—the bullet, still unaccounted for, that had passed through Irvin’s neck—posed a significant challenge to the credibility of McCall’s and Yates’s rendering of the prisoners’ daring attempt to escape. According to the sheriff, he had fired the six rounds in his gun at the same time as he had backed away from the two prisoners when they’d attacked him. By Walter Irvin’s account, however, the last shot had been fired by Deputy Yates, when he had stood over Irvin, who was lying faceup on the ground, and had aimed the gun straight down. The bullet, which had struck mostly soft tissue and muscle as it had cleanly penetrated Irvin’s neck, would probably never be found if, as McCall claimed, the prisoner had been advancing toward him when the sheriff had fired his last shot. If, on the other hand, Irvin had already fallen to the ground when the bullet coursed through his neck, it might well have been found in that three-foot-square patch of sand and clay.
    The jury reconvened at the Community Building in Umatilla. Hall extracted, or coaxed, a few more details of the shooting from McCall—what caliber revolver he’d carried, what time Yates arrived, whom the sheriff spoke with over the radio—and then produced a series of witnesses, including Umatilla’s mayor and a town councilman, who had appeared at the roadside in the dead of Tuesday night in order to establish that the sheriff had fired in self-defense: from first to last, every witness testified he had seen strands of McCall’s hair clutched in Irvin’s hand.
    The coroner having constructed a case of self-defense and the judge having essentially exculpated the self-defender, Hall allowed the sheriff to remind the jurors, press, and spectators that he himself had acted as the protector of the Groveland Boys: he had on previous occasions safely transported Shepherd and Irvin between Tavares and Raiford, and in July 1949 he had even hidden them at his home in Eustis “until I got permission to put them in Raiford the first time in order to protect them” from an angry mob.
    “You did that to protect their lives, is that correct?” Hall asked.
    “Yes, I did,” McCall answered. “If I was going to do something like they have said that I have done, I would have done it long ago. I just want to say that I am very thankful that I am still here instead of in my grave today.”
    “Now, Sheriff,” Hall asked, “did you or one of your deputies make a special trip to the blood bank in Orlando on Tuesday night in order to get whole blood from them for the treatment of the prisoner?”
    “Yes,” McCall replied, “one of my deputies did. And I also signed a release for his operation, because no member of his family was here to do it, and so I signed a release for the doctors to operate.”
    Stetson Kennedy, in his coverage of the inquest, observed that McCall was treated