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

as a “guest of honor” whom neither the judge nor the jury would dare to question on any point that might give credence to Irvin’s accusations. Nor did Governor Warren’s special investigator Jefferson J. Elliott, as it turned out. His bearing authoritative and his manner persuasive, Elliott presented himself as a man of science for whom evidence comprised not the ambiguities of eyewitness accounts or the contradictions of oral testimony but rather the objectivity of forensics: the kind of evidence that he detected in his state-of-the-art mobile crime lab; the kind of evidence that did not lie. Evidence like the powder burns on the coat of Sheriff Willis V. McCall. “I believe that this is the most important piece of evidence that we have before this jury,” Elliott announced solemnly to the jury as he noted the location of the powder burns on the left arm of the coat, thus indicating that the sheriff’s left arm was raised at the time of the shooting, not pointing down, and thus supporting McCall’s claim that he was “trying to fight somebody off or hold somebody off . . . which indicates to me some sort of struggle that was going on at the time of the shooting. He certainly was not target shooting.” Thus was the hearing closed.
    The jurors needed little more than half an hour to find that Samuel Shepherd’s death was “justified by reason of the fact that Willis V. McCall was at that time acting in line of duty and in defense of his own life.” McCall was cleared of any wrongdoing.
    On Monday, November 12, Judge Truman Futch issued a statement of the court. Contrary to his previous determination, he had decided not to impanel a grand jury in regard to the shooting death of Samuel Shepherd. “At that time,” Futch wrote, “I did not know that the Coroner’s jury could or would be able to conclude its work; nor did I know how thorough its work might be. Usually the work of a Coroner’s jury is perfunctory and superficial, but in this instance, I am of the opinion that the Honorable J. W. Hunter as State Attorney and the Honorable W. Troy Hall, Jr., as County Judge and ex officio coroner, together with members of the Coroner’s jury, have done a thorough job insofar as any criminal liability of any one is concerned in connection with the death of the prisoner Samuel Shepherd. . . . There is now no need for a grand jury in Lake County, Florida, and none will be impaneled at this time.”
    The Honorable J. W. Hunter, however, had not entirely willingly associated himself with the inquiry into Samuel Shepherd’s death. After the coroner’s inquest, he issued his own cryptic statement, on which he later refused to elaborate, that he had participated in the investigation “only as I have been directed to do by [Judge Hall].” Hunter’s unease with the verdict in Hall’s inquest and with Futch’s decision not to impanel a grand jury almost certainly stemmed from information that had not reached the coroner’s jury on November 10 and would be withheld from the public record by virtue of Judge Futch’s action on November 12.
    On Sunday, November 11, FBI agent Robert Wall contacted both the state attorney Jesse Hunter and Judge Hall to apprise them that the FBI had located a bullet “directly beneath a blood spot where victim Irvin was lying after the shooting incidents.” The agents had “dug a hole about ten inches deep” and with their fingers had sifted through the “sandy loam-type soil,” in which they’d found a .38-caliber bullet. The FBI believed that the single slug buried in the sand directly below the position of Irvin’s neck had traveled at a slight angle straight downward into the sand. Lab tests would later reveal that the bullet’s high-speed passage through the sand had obliterated any markings that might identify conclusively the specific gun from which it had been fired.
    For Hunter, the new evidence was conclusive enough to confirm his suspicions that Sheriff Willis McCall and Deputy James Yates had in essence committed murder, especially in light of other information that the FBI had been sharing with Hunter over the past two days. Walter Irvin had told the two FBI agents who’d invaded his hospital room that after Yates had shot him, he had watched the deputy and the sheriff as they’d huddled in the glare from the headlights of McCall’s Oldsmobile 98: The sheriff “reached up and grabbed his shirt with his hand and tore it,” and Irvin “heard him tell