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

wife or daughter?”
    H IS BODY ILL, betraying him, but his conscience finally clear, Jesse Hunter lived long enough to see Irvin’s sentence commuted. He passed away in February 1956.

    I N MARCH 1960 Deputy James Yates found himself in strangely familiar circumstances. A middle-aged white woman claimed she had been raped in the city of Fruitland Park. She was fuzzy as to details of the crime, except that maybe one of her attackers was in his forties or fifties, and the other was about seventeen years old. So Yates picked up two black citrus workers, no matter that they were in their early twenties, and after they confessed to the crime under interrogation, the deputy confiscated their shoes. The victim, who had been ruled incompetent by the court and committed to a mental institution shortly after the attack, did not take the stand for the prosecution. The alleged rapists were convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair, almost solely on the basis of footprint evidence.
    The NAACP got involved, and this time got lucky. A week before the scheduled execution of the two men, Noel Griffin, one of McCall’s deputies who had worked on the Fruitland Park rape case, disclosed to a Florida NAACP lawyer that the defendants had been framed by the Lake County Sheriff’s Department. According to Griffin, Deputy Yates had used the defendants’ confiscated shoes to make plaster casts of their footprints not at the crime scene but in another deputy’s backyard. Griffin’s allegations were confirmed by the FBI, whose analysis showed the soil mixed in the plaster casts to be consistent with that of the deputy’s backyard. Furthermore, the FBI concluded—as had Thurgood Marshall’s expert witness, Herman Bennett, in the Groveland rape case ten years before—that when the defendants’ footprints had supposedly been left, their feet had not been in their shoes. The fact of the falsified evidence enabled the NAACP to rescue both men from electrocution; a federal judge overturned their convictions.
    In December 1962, the two deputies, James Yates and his accomplice, were suspended and indicted by an Orange County grand jury on charges of perjury and conspiracy. Convictions would have carried life sentences for both, if James Yates and his deputy accomplice had ever made it to court, but the case was so long delayed that the statute of limitations expired. Both deputies were reinstated by Willis McCall, with back pay.
    F ULLER WARREN’S SPECIAL investigator J. J. Elliott was off by twelve years when he forecast that McCall’s shooting of Shepherd and Irvin would guarantee the sheriff three more terms in office. In fact, McCall served seven consecutive terms as sheriff of Lake County. In his twenty-eight-year tenure, on various charges of misconduct, McCall was the subject of dozens of investigations. Not a single charge stuck. The sheriff’s personal reign of terror ended in 1972, when he was indicted and suspended from office by Governor Reubin Askew: the sixty-two-year-old McCall had kicked to death a mentally retarded black prisoner in his cell. Although McCall was acquitted of the charges, the time he’d spent defending himself in court had prevented him from campaigning effectively enough to win that year’s election. Still, he was only barely defeated in his bid for an eighth consecutive term.
    Willis McCall’s name surfaced often in the ongoing FBI investigation into the murder of Harry T. Moore and his wife. For four decades and more McCall denied any involvement or knowledge. Not long before his death in 1994, he avouched, “I never hurt anyone . . . or killed anyone who didn’t deserve killing.” The FBI ultimately laid responsibility for the bombing in Mims on the KKK and named four likely suspects, two of whom, Earl Brooklyn and Tillman “Curly” Belvin, belonged to the Apopka Klavern, as did McCall, and both men had participated, according to FBI informants, in the Groveland riots. Seven KKK members were indicted for perjury in regard to their whereabouts that Christmas night when Moore was murdered. Frank Meech, an FBI agent who investigated the Moore killings, was critical of the Department of Justice for having the seven “indictments quashed for the ‘Tranquility of the South.’ ”
    The case remains unsolved, though not for want of Stetson Kennedy’s efforts. In the sixty years since the explosion beneath that modest wooden house in an orange grove, Kennedy never stopped trying to