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

defendants by scripting a scenario contrary to his own official record on the events of July 15–16.
    McCall paid a visit to Ernest Thomas’s parents, too. Then he drove them from Groveland to Tavares, where Ethel and Luther Thomas were also jailed until the date of the trial. Jesse Hunter needed Ethel Thomas for the prosecution’s case, which hinged in part on establishing Ernest Thomas’s whereabouts the night of July 15, and McCall thought it likely that a friendly, private conversation, albeit in jail, would convince the grieving mother to cooperate. Her son Ernest was dead, and with the Klan shooting at the Blue Flame, Ethel Thomas didn’t have many options if she wanted to stay in Groveland. If the High Sheriff could see to it that she’d be able to run her juke joint, what harm would she be doing by agreeing to testify for the state?
    Henry Singleton need worry no more about the crystal-gazing racketeer or cocky Ernest Thomas cutting into his bolita throws. He might have worried a little, though, about McCall, who, as Singleton knew better than most, was not of a mind to do favors for a black man without expecting something in return. So it wasn’t much of a surprise to anyone in Groveland that the name of Henry Singleton—bootlegger, bolita dealer, nightclub owner, stool pigeon—showed up on the list of witnesses for the prosecution.

CHAPTER 11: BAD EGG

    The New York Post was the only newspaper to publish a photograph of Norma Padgett at the time of the trial.( New York Post )
    I F I WERE asked if the woman was raped, I would have to answer ‘I don’t know.’ ”
    It was not what Willis McCall wanted to hear. He had come to the Theresa Holland Hospital in Leesburg for the physician’s report on the examination of Norma Padgett after the alleged rape. He left in a huff—after a brief, unsatisfying conversation with the examining physician, Dr. Geoffrey Binneveld—and headed back to Tavares with a notarized copy of the document and with some bad news for State Attorney Jesse Hunter. The medical evidence did not support Norma Padgett’s claim that four men had raped her.
    In mid-August, when the existence of the examining physician’s Report of Accident was leaked to the NAACP in New York, Thurgood Marshall soon had the FBI scrambling to locate the doctor and the document. It took some digging by Special Agent Watson Roper of the Miami bureau, but on August 30, at the small, private Theresa Holland Hospital in Leesburg, he was querying the young (at thirty) though “highly regarded” Dr. Geoffrey Binneveld on the matter of Norma Padgett. While “the confidential Doctor-Patient relationship” disallowed his providing a signed statement to the FBI without written permission from Norma Padgett, Binneveld did allow Roper to read and take notes on his physician’s report.
    Norma Padgett had appeared at the whites’ entrance to the hospital with her father, Coy Tyson, and her husband, Willie Padgett, on the morning of July 16. In the absence of the senior physician and founder of the hospital, Dr. Howard Holland, Binneveld had attended. The father and husband remained in the waiting room while in an exam room the doctor explained the procedure they’d follow. He noted that the girl appeared to be in “emotional shock” and that, if what she was saying was true, she had not slept in more than twenty-four hours, as she had spent the night hiding and wandering in the wooded area outside Okahumpka. In his external examination he found scratches on both knees and on the palm of her right hand; the soles of her feet were “irritated.” When he had proceeded to the pelvic examination, he observed that the labia majora and labia minora were “very red and irritated” and there were “several small mucosal lacerations about posterior fornix” as well. He attributed a small amount of blood present in the vagina to her regular monthly menstrual period, then in its last stages, since he otherwise “found no evidence of tears or wounds in the vagina other than the lacerations mentioned above.” Laboratory analysis of a vaginal smear revealed “no spermatozoa were present in the vagina, nor were any organisms resembling gonococci found.” Binneveld’s conclusion to the report read: “Finding—Traumatic vaginitis,” a noninfectious inflammation that might result from vaginal exposure to a condom, soap water, or douches, among numerous other possibilities.
    Because he had not examined the