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Anna Marie
Aquash |
Johnnie Mae
Chappell
Long road to truth
A woman's
children wait 32 years before they learn what happened in a Civil
Rights-era race-based slaying that still haunts investigators
By Deborah Hastings, The
Associated Press, Dec. 01, 2003
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -It was pitch dark along U.S. 1, but
Johnnie Mae Chappell kept searching. That wallet held every cent
she owned.
Somewhere on this roadside
it had silently dropped from her torn and soggy grocery bag.
Now she was retracing her steps, headed back to Moncrief Road,
where just like yesterday and the day before that, she had trudged
off the evening bus after a 30-mile ride from the rich part of
town, where she scrubbed the floors of white women.
Her home was in Pickettville,
the poor part of town, where everyone was black. The date was
March 23, 1964. Race riots raged downtown over segregation laws
that decreed that black people weren't good enough to even drink
from the same water fountain as white people.
But in mind-set and geography,
the weary inhabitants of Pickettville were miles from rebellion.
As she walked, Chappell enlisted
two sympathetic neighbors. One swept the lonely beam of his flashlight
across the weeds and tall grass. A car passed, its headlights
flicking over the intent trio.
Then they heard a bang.
For nearly 40 years, the death
of Johnnie Mae Chappell has tainted everyone associated with
it and everyone who loved her: the chief of detectives accused
of ignoring her killing; two white investigators who bucked their
boss to fight for justice; and the Chappell children forced into
foster care.
On the unlit four-lane country
highway leading out of Pickettville, the taillights of a speeding
car faded from view. Chappell, 35 and the mother of 10, sank
to her knees and grabbed her belly.
To Tildia Sanders, who lived
four blocks from her, and to Albert Smith, who lived two streets
over, she said, "I've been shot."
They got her across the open
road to the lights outside Banner Food Market. Someone called
for a "colored" ambulance. Someone ran to get her husband,
a strong man who worked two jobs.
Inside the ambulance -- a hearse
with no medical equipment, dispatched by a black funeral home
-- blood soaked her white shirt and black-and-white skirt. A
.22-caliber bullet was lodged in her pelvis, fired by a 22-year-old
white man she had never met.
Willie Chappell held his wife's
hand on the way to Duval Medical Center.
She bled to death before they
got there.
A stranger
calls
At the Mount Ararat Baptist
Church, an aging white man eased himself onto a wooden pew, surrounded
by more than 100 relatives of Johnnie Mae Chappell. The stranger
carried a mighty burden.
This was the church where Johnnie
Mae had met her second husband, Willie. This was where her children
worshipped after she died, until the county sent them to foster
homes, where some were beaten, some were neglected, and all lost
touch with each other.
The date was March 23, 1996.
The reunited family sang We Shall Overcome. The white
man, whose name was Lee Cody, joined in.
In the morning paper, he had
seen a photograph of Shelton Chappell kneeling at his mother's
grave, just outside the church where Cody now sat.
The accompanying article said
Shelton Chappell hoped to bring his family together on the 32nd
anniversary of their mother's death. Her nine remaining children
were spread across three states, and none of them knew the whole
truth about her killing.
After all these years, Shelton
Chappell wanted to talk about it with them.
Shelton Chappell was born four
months before his mother died. He grew into a gentle, guarded
man. Life had taught him to be frugal with trust, especially
when it came to white people.
He was only 4 or 5 when county
welfare workers placed him in a juvenile detention center with
his four older brothers. He still doesn't know why.
There, "another little
boy kicked me and broke my nose," he remembers. "That
was my first encounter with a white person."
Much of Florida had long been
more Deep South than Yankee resort.
In Jacksonville, four years
before Johnnie Mae Chappell was shot, Klansmen had gathered at
a downtown park on a morning remembered as "Ax Handle Saturday."
They stood in the back of pickups, in a city that was 45 percent
black, and distributed ax handles and baseball bats to white
men enraged by the prospect of racial equality.
They swarmed inside Woolworth's,
where blacks could shop but not eat, and dragged teen-agers from
the local NAACP's Youth Council off their lunch-counter stools
and beat them in the street.
A month before Chappell's killing,
a homemade bomb had exploded in the house of a first-grader whose
mother sent him to an all-white school.
Chappell's children have only
one photograph of their mother, and it is from a magazine. She
is lying on a morgue table, a sheet pulled to her chin. Her husband
looks down on her, his face frozen in disbelief. The image was
captured by a Jet magazine photographer assigned to the
riots.
"She hated having her
picture taken," said Alonzo Chappell, Shelton Chappell's
older brother.
He was 6 when his mother died.
"She was like a duck, with all of us trailing behind her,"
he remembers. He doesn't remember much else.
She had five daughters from
her first marriage. They were sent to live with relatives on
their daddy's side after she died. Alonzo Chappell doesn't ask
the women about his mother, although they are eldest and knew
her best.
"They took it the worst,"
he explains.
Shelton Chappell reckons that
he lived with eight or nine foster families. For a little boy,
he carried a big weight.
"My father came to visit.
Sometimes he had my brothers with him," Shelton Chappell
recalls. "I would be so sad to see him go. I didn't want
him to leave me."
His brothers sometimes ran
away and made their way back to the tiny cinderblock house on
Pipit Avenue, where their daddy still lived. But the county always
caught up with them, and back they went to the homes of strangers.
All the family knew about their
mother's killing was a story repeated for years throughout the
black community: A man named Parnell had shot her and died not
long after.
Shelton Chappell made a promise
to God.
"If you allow me to live
to be an adult," he prayed, "and let me find out who
killed my momma, I will not take vengeance into my own hands."
When Shelton Chappell was 17,
his older brother rescued him from foster care.
"I took him back to Miami
with me," Alonzo Chappell said. "I opened up a barbecue
joint on the weekends, and Shelton started working in electronics."
Searching for
truth
In 1995, when he was 31, Shelton
Chappell returned to Jacksonville. There were questions he could
no longer ignore. There was a promise he had to keep.
He went to the city library.
His mother's shooting had received passing mention at the bottom
of a front-page story about the race riots.
Its date: March 24, 1964. Its
headline: "Large Area Is Terrorized By Negroes."
He went to the Jacksonville
Sheriff's Office. A records supervisor went through every homicide
file from 1964. There was none marked Chappell, he said.
The only record with her name
on it was an old microfilm of index cards bearing case names
and file numbers. "CHAPPELL, Johnnie Mae CF 35," was
typed at the top; CF meant colored female, 35 was her age. Written
underneath, in loopy cursive, was "Confidential File."
Shelton Chappell went to the
county courthouse. He was handed a thin file containing few court
documents. On one, he saw a name he didn't know -- J.W. Rich.
The man had been charged with first-degree murder in the killing
of Johnnie Mae Chappell. Three others had been charged as well.
Shelton Chappell didn't tell
his father.
"He had lived this tragedy
for 30-some years," Shelton said. "I didn't want him
to relive it. He never got over it."
Willie Chappell died six months
later, at age 80. Only then did Shelton Chappell tell his siblings.
Then he started planning the reunion.
He persuaded the local paper
to write about it. He hoped the story would make someone come
forward -- someone who could help the family make sense of the
past.
They got Lee Cody, a former
sheriff's department detective.
When the reunion ended, Cody
strode up the church aisle. "Who's in charge of this reunion?"
his deep voice boomed. Everyone pointed at Shelton Chappell.
Cody grasped the man's firm,
black hand in his wrinkled, white one. "Shelton," he
said, "you have no idea what really happened. I can tell
you because I was there."
He and his partner, Donald
Coleman, had solved the murder of Shelton Chappell's mother five
months after it happened, he said. But in the end, no one wanted
to hear about it, he said.
Their crusade for justice got
them fired, and four men got away with murder, the partners believed.
To this day, they are still
obsessed.
"It was just pure racism,"
Cody said. "They didn't give a damn about that poor woman.
They just wanted to make sure four white boys didn't go to jail
for killing her."
Cody began his story at the
beginning. He is not a man to be hurried, even though his audience
was Chappell's youngest son.
He had just made detective
when he was paired with Donald Coleman in 1964. Both were brash
and ambitious, Cody more so.
He was so rambunctious that
he started each shift by rifling the lieutenant's in-box. In
a little notebook he kept in his pocket, Cody wrote details from
the daily patrol logs of other officers.
On March 24, he jotted "dark
color car heading north at a high rate of speed" from the
handwritten report of two sergeants responding to a shooting
on U.S. 1 in Pickettville.
"No information or evidence
could be found," the report concluded. "Investigation
continuing."
Five months passed. On a hot
August day, Coleman and Cody were sharing a meal at a local drive-in
called the Freezette, popular with young people and police officers.
They were intrigued by the
weird behavior of Wayne Chessman, a local tough. He sauntered
up to their table and began rambling about getting his life together
and getting a good job.
The detectives made noises
about that being nice and kept eating.
A few days later, it happened
again. This time, Chessman told the detectives to come find him
if they ever needed help. Help with what? Cody wondered.
Chessman walked outside. He
got into the dark blue car of Elmer Kato, another neighborhood
troublemaker.
Cody's mind flashed to his
notebook. "Dark color car headed north."
Chessman, the partners agreed,
was acting guilty.
They didn't know who had been
assigned to investigate the Chappell case and they didn't much
care. They drove to Chessman's house, where Cody told the young
man that they just might need his help after all.
Would he come to the station?
There, the trio filed into an interview room. Chessman sat down.
Then Cody pulled a stunt that
he and Coleman never tire of telling.
Cody opened a Bible, slid it
in front of Chessman and pointed to the fifth commandment: Thou
shalt not kill.
Coleman had to will himself
not to laugh out loud. Until that moment, his hard-living partner
had no use for Scriptures.
But Chessman, according to
the detectives, didn't think it was funny. He began to sob. He
hadn't killed anyone, but J.W. Rich had. Chessman had just been
riding in the back seat with another man named James Alex Davis.
Kato had been driving.
Patrol officers were sent to
arrest Rich and Kato and bring them in. Davis had joined the
Army, and was stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C.
A court reporter was summoned
to the Sheriff's Office.
As the partners tell it, Coleman
went looking for the Chappell case file. He was gone a long time.
The detectives' division was
so small that a shout could be heard from anywhere in the building.
Cody stuck his head out the
door of the interview room and yelled, "What's taking you
so long?"
"I can't find the file,"
Coleman hollered back.
They ended up in the office
of J.C. Patrick, the chief of detectives. Sometimes case files
went into his office and stayed there for days.
But there was no Chappell file.
Coleman sat in the chief's chair; Cody perched on the desk. "What
are we going to do?" Cody asked.
Then they noticed an inch of
white paper peeking from the floor pad under the chief's chair.
They pulled it out. It was
the daily log sheet filed by the patrol sergeants who responded
to Chappell's shooting -- the same handwritten report Cody had
read five months ago in the lieutenant's box.
Which meant, according to the
partners, a file had not been started on the slaying, and it
had not been assigned to a detective.
There were another 20 or 30
pages stuffed under the pad. Coleman and Cody said they didn't
fish them out. They didn't want to know what else was under there.
They walked out of the chief's
office with the log sheet. They opened a case file for Johnnie
Mae Chappell.
Still Seeking Justice
A
slain woman's family continues the fight for a conviction and
a measure of closure
By Deborah Hastings, The
Associated Press, FLORIDA TIMES-UNION ARCHIVES VIA THE ASSOCIATED
PRESS, Dec. 02, 2003
Lee Cody, a former deputy who
investigated a 1964 Florida slaying, stands near the site where
Johnnie Mae Chappell was gunned down.
FLORIDA
The story so far: On March 23, 1964, a black woman named
Johnnie Mae Chappell was shot near her home outside Jacksonville,
Fla. Afterward, her family was split up, and none of her children
knew the whole truth about her killing. Decades later, family
members held a reunion, during which a detective revealed omissions
in the initial investigation.
Sheriff's detective Lee Cody
had never seen anyone who wanted to confess as badly as J.W.
Rich.
The young man appeared plenty
upset, Cody thought. It seemed he couldn't talk fast enough.
The interrogation began at
1 a.m. on Aug. 11, 1964, according to the court reporter's transcript.
Cody's partner, Donald Coleman, asked the questions.
Rich said four men -- all white,
all age 22 except for 19-year-old Elmer Kato -- had been drinking
beer and driving around, listening to the radio describe race
riots downtown, where black men and women were setting fires
and throwing bricks.
Someone suggested that they
"get" a black resident, Rich said, using a racial slur.
Kato drove across the 20th Street Expressway, headed toward Pickettville.
"The gun was lying in
the seat. It was a joke," said Rich, who said he saw three
black people walking along the road. Again, he used a racial
slur to describe them.
"What caused you to shoot?"
Coleman asked.
"I don't know. I didn't
mean to do it."
Rich put the .22-caliber pistol
back where he got it -- on the front seat between him and Kato.
The three people had been less than 30 feet away when the gun
was fired, Rich said.
Rich, Kato and Wayne Chessman,
all of whom gave similar statements to Jacksonville sheriff's
detectives, were arraigned and pleaded guilty to murdering Johnnie
Mae Chappell. James Alex Davis, extradited from North Carolina,
where he was serving in the Army, pleaded not guilty.
Coleman and Cody went looking
for the gun, which belonged to Chessman. He had sold it to the
owner of the Freezette, who sold it to a sheriff's dispatcher,
who sold it to "Blind Jim" Nobel, who ran the sandwich
shop inside the sheriff's office, Cody said.
Next, they went to see Sheriff
Dale Carson, to talk about the papers stuffed under the chair
pad of J.C. Patrick, the chief of detectives.
"I'll take care of it,"
said Carson, who died in 2000.
Their whistle-blowing visit
backfired. Patrick hauled both detectives into his office. Stay
away from the Chappell case, Patrick yelled.
"Don't try to rock this
boat, boys, because the anchor's too ... big," both detectives
recalled him saying.
The partners had complained
before about corruption in the sheriff's office. But the Chappell
case, they said, was the last straw. Both were fired months later
after being accused of insubordination.
But on that hot afternoon,
standing outside the chief's office, the partners still believed
in their case. A county grand jury indicted all four men on charges
of first-degree murder.
And then the case imploded.
Rich, Kato and Chessman changed their pleas to not guilty. The
gun vanished from the property room and was never seen again.
Trial was set for Dec. 1, 1964.
Rich went first. By 1:30 p.m. the jury had elected a foreman
and begun deliberating.
It took one hour and four minutes
for 12 white men to declare Rich guilty of manslaughter, a much
lesser charge. He was sentenced to 10 years at hard labor. He
made parole after three.
The others weren't tried. The
prosecutor, who is now dead, cited insufficient evidence and
dropped all charges.
After they were fired, Coleman
and Cody drove garbage trucks for a living. Then Coleman sold
insurance and started a carpet company. He did well at both.
But he didn't do as well at
letting go. His wife begged him to forget Chappell and focus
instead on their sick daughter, who died in 1968 at age 14.
Cody drifted in and out of
jobs, and watched more than one wife walk away over his obsession
with a dead woman.
The same year Coleman's daughter
died and Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis,
Rich was released from Florida state prison. Outside, he stumbled
for decades from arrest to arrest, county records show, for offenses
including grand larceny, public intoxication, public fighting
and drunken driving.
Cody couldn't give up his fixation.
He asked four governors to reopen the Chappell case. All said
no. He wrote letters to federal and state authorities, who also
said no.
Then he walked into the Chappells'
reunion. And the white former investigator became the black family's
ally in a quixotic fight for justice.
He helped search for more records,
but they found little more than what Shelton Chappell already
had. He helped hunt for a lawyer. But no one would take their
longshot case until Shelton Chappell met Bill Lassiter.
He didn't think the suit had
much of a chance either. "But I had to help them,"
he says. "No one else would."
In 2000, Lassiter filed a federal
lawsuit on behalf of the Chappells against the city of Jacksonville
and the four defendants. It claimed that the family's civil rights
were violated by a racist conspiracy to bury their mother's murder.
They were long past the four-year
statute of limitations for bringing such a suit. But Lassiter
argued that the clock shouldn't have started ticking with the
murder itself. Rather, he said, it should have begun when the
family first heard from Cody.
The suit produced one more
improbable ally -- James Patrick, the only child of J.C. Patrick,
the chief of detectives who fired Coleman and Cody.
In a deposition supporting
the Chappell lawsuit, he testified that he had accompanied his
father to Klan rallies as a teen-ager. His father, he said, beat
him and his mother, drank vodka at breakfast and consumed more
than a quart a day.
"As far as a black lady
like that dying, it would just be crap under his feet,"
James Patrick said in an interview. "He wouldn't care. It
wouldn't even count to him."
His father often brought home
guns from the sheriff's office evidence room, sometimes keeping
them, sometimes giving them to friends, his son testified.
The Chappell suit, however,
was rejected by trial and appellate judges who ruled that the
statute clock began ticking at the time of her murder.
The family's last resort is
the U.S. Supreme Court. It is a very long shot. Most of the murder
evidence is gone, and most officials involved with the case are
dead -- factors that also hinder opening new criminal investigations
against the Chappell defendants who weren't tried.
In October, Rich told The Associated
Press that the Chappells were "wasting their time. They
don't have a damn thing on me." Cody forced him to confess,
Rich said.
Coleman and his wife live near
the ocean outside Jacksonville. He is a big-hearted man with
graying hair whose eyes fill with tears when he speaks of what
he lost -- his daughter, his law enforcement career, the chance
to speak for Johnnie Mae Chappell.
"That poor woman didn't
do nothing to nobody," he said, sitting at his dining room
table holding a copy of Rich's confession. "And they shot
her down on the side of the road like a dog."
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Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
