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

they had raped her. It was because of slips like these, which could produce contradictions and inconsistencies in the prosecution’s narrative, that Hunter pressed Lake County’s law enforcement personnel to allow the FBI only written statements (which Hunter helped prepare) and to refuse the agents any oral interviews. Hunter could not wield the same control over Walter Irvin, who told FBI agents that in the early hours of Saturday morning, July 16, before Norma Padgett had been found, Deputy Yates asked him, “Why did you rape that white woman?” Also, a Florida highway patrolman, who, on that same Saturday morning, had driven Irvin and Shepherd from the Irvins’ house to the scene of the alleged robbery and kidnapping, told the FBI that he had heard the two suspects being questioned by deputies Yates and Campbell about the “rape.”
    In the retrial, as in the first trial, Hunter, of course, took every precaution to forestall any impression that a “story” had been put in place by the prosecution. Still, he could not prevent every slip, especially as he wasn’t always working with the quickest of witnesses. Curtis Howard, however, came across as a model citizen who had gone out of his way to help a man in difficulty. Continuing his narrative, Howard recounted for the court how, after finishing his shift at the filling station, he had seen a young girl by the side of the road but had thought nothing of it, and had driven on to Groveland, where, as it had happened, he had run into Yates and Campbell, as well as Willie Padgett. He had then driven Padgett to Bay Lake, so he could change his shirt, and it wasn’t until Willie’s sister showed a picture of Norma to Howard that he had connected Willie’s missing wife with the girl he’d seen in the roadside grass back in Okahumpka.
    “Did you tell them that you thought the woman you saw was his wife?” Hunter asked.
    “Well, I told them that I thought I knew where she was,” Howard said, “and so we went and got in my car and went back down there to the intersection, and she was in another car with another boy by the time we got there, and I supposed that it was someone that she had gotten from that dining hall or dancing place.” Howard did not refer to “another boy” by name, nor did he give any indication that he’d recognized the “someone” with Norma. Yet they were not strangers, Howard and Lawrence Burtoft. They had been classmates at Leesburg High, where they had played together on the baseball and football teams.
    Hunter asked what happened next with Norma. Akerman objected on the grounds of hearsay. Futch overruled. Howard responded: “Well, I asked her if she was hurt in any way, and she said that her legs were hurt and bleeding, and said that her clothes were torn, and she was all messed up and dirty, and I asked her if the men did anything to her, and she said that ‘all four of them attacked me,’ and she described what had happened from that time.”
    “What was the condition of her clothes?” Hunter asked.
    “Well, they were torn and messed up, and as I remember it, some of her underclothes were hanging down beneath her dress, and her dress was torn.”
    As one reporter observed of Howard during his testimony, he was “as smooth as Willie is bucolic.” Leroy Campbell’s nephew was also providing Jesse Hunter with splendid testimony for the state’s case in the event that Lawrence Burtoft should take the witness stand for the defense.
    Hunter excused the witness, and in what was surely the missed opportunity of the trial, Alex Akerman declined to cross-examine. The state rested its case. Curtis Howard returned therewith to Alabama.
    The first trial might have won Curtis Howard some commendation in the communities of Lake County; in his own household, at least, he might have been seen as a hero of sorts. But he wasn’t. The Groveland case was never mentioned in the Howards’ home, and shortly after the trial Curtis and Libby’s marriage began to crumble into divorce. First married at the age of twenty, Curtis and Libby would remarry and divorce two more times, but at no time in the wobbly course of their relationship would they speak of the role that Curtis Howard played in the conviction of Norma Padgett’s alleged rapists. Kim Howard, Curtis and Libby’s daughter, would remember the contention in the household over her father’s carousing and womanizing and lying but nothing of Curtis Howard’s testimony about