Criminal - Can't Rock This Boat

Episode Date: July 29, 2014

In March 1964, a 35-year-old African-American woman named Johnnie Mae Chappell was walking along the side of the road in Jacksonville, Florida. Four white men were driving around listening to the local race riots on the radio. They had a gun on the dashboard. As they passed Chappell, one of the men leaned out the car window and shot her to death. As the police investigated, evidence began to mysteriously disappear, making it impossible to punish the men who admitted to committing the crime. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So if that bothers you, fair warning. Thanks. They said they were riding around in a race ride that was going on in Jacksonville drinking beer. Now, may I say what they said? Yeah. Let's go get a nigger. It was March 23rd, 1964. A woman named Johnny Mae Chappelle walked to a small store to buy some groceries for her family. She was 35 and had 10 kids. One of the things she bought at the store was ice cream. She threw the ice cream and her wallet and the rest of the groceries in a paper bag and started to walk home. As she was walking home, she realized the ice cream had sweat through the bag

and the bottom had split open. And then when she got home, she realized she was missing her wallet. She thought it might have fallen out, so she went back to the road to retrace her steps. As she walked, she met two friends. They helped her look. They were all African American. At the same time, four young white men were driving around the area listening to the race riots on the radio. They had a gun on the dashboard. Their names were J.W. Rich, Wayne Chessman, Elmer Cato, and James Alex Davis. These four punks drove past, and J.W. Rich leaned out the window with a.22 caliber pistol and fired, hitting Mrs. Chappelle and killing her.

It's so close to the road. I mean, it must have hit her at such close range. Yeah, and it was just a.22 caliber bullet, but she bled internally, and because getting rescue out here at the time was, you know, for a black person, the ambulance was an old panel truck. It took forever to get here, and there was no medical services on board, so she essentially bled to death before they could get her to the hospital. It was four months before Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing segregation. Our producer, Lauren Sporer, grew up in Jacksonville, hearing about this episode. And today, she brings us a story of a hate crime and the men who walked away. I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is Criminal. We all want to think of Florida as not part of the Deep South,

but it is absolutely, especially Jacksonville, very much part of the Deep South, but it is absolutely, especially Jacksonville, very much part of the Deep South. This is my dad, Bob Sporer. He's a lawyer, and so is my mom, and my brother, and even my brother's soon-to-be wife. So when I see my family, we always talk about their cases. My dad likes to talk about this case in particular. He's worked on it pro bono for a number of years. And last time I went home, he drove me to the spot where Johnny May Chappelle was killed. And over there is the food market where she had gone to shop for some groceries, including ice cream for her kids. The night she was killed, the police showed up and took down a report.

They talked to the friends who were walking with her and wrote down the color of the shooter's car, dark blue. But it sped away and the friends couldn't see much in the dark. Chappelle's murder was briefly mentioned in the newspaper the next morning in a story about the race riots. The headline was, Large Area Terrorized by Negroes. There were no other news stories, and from what anyone can tell, there was no investigation. My name is Caney, C-A-N-N-I-E, Lee Cody, Jr. Lee Cody was a detective at the time in Jacksonville. He wasn't assigned to the case, but he tried to keep up with all of

the homicides that occurred, and he'd taken note of the Chappelle case. He worked that neighborhood a lot. One night, five months after the murder, something bizarre happened. As usual, when we were on that side of town at night, we would stop by the Frisette and have dinner. The Frisette was a diner. Cody and his partner, Donald Coleman, were eating steaks when a young guy came in, someone they sort of knew as a bar fighter. His name was Wayne Chessman. Before he left, he came by the table and he said, Sergeant, he said, I just wanted to let you know that I've straightened my life up. And I, of course, responded. And I said, that's good, Wayne. I'm glad to see you get a head sign. And he left. And Donald asked me, he said, that's kind of strange, wasn't it? I said, that's more than strange. That's weird. About a week later, they were back at the free set and

Wayne Chessman showed up again, this time in a dark blue Plymouth. He came in again and came up to us and he said, if I can ever help you with anything, let me know. I told Sergeant Coleman, I said, Donald, I said, they were involved in the murder of that Mrs. Chappelle, the black woman that was killed on US 1. There's no doubt in my mind about it, and that's probably the vehicle that was driven. Cody chalks it up to detective's intuition, which seems a little Hollywood to me, but it was enough to convince his partner. They went to Wayne Chessman's house and asked him to come down to the police station. Cody had a plan. He got a Bible from the station's little lending library and underlined the commandment, thou shalt not kill, with a red pen. And so I pulled the Bible out and spun it around, put it in front of his face, and I said, Wayne, look at that commandment underlined in red,

and do you have any comments? And he just blurted it right out. He said, Sarge, I didn't kill her, I didn't shoot her, I was just in the car. Just like that. And I said, kill who? Shot what? He said, that old black woman, I don't know who that's from. I said, that's And I said, kill who? Shot what? He said, that old black woman out on New West Warren. I said, that's what I thought. I said, would you be willing to give us a statement? And he said, yes, sir.

Three of the four men came in and confessed. The fourth guy had left town with the Army, and their confessions were transcribed by a court reporter. They told the detectives where to find the gun, and Cody and Coleman went to pick it up. But there was a problem. When they got to the police station, there was no file for Chappelle. There was no evidence of this woman ever being killed in Duval County. Not one record was there. Cody said his boss would often keep files in his office, so he and Coleman waited for the chief to leave and started snooping through his papers. They rambled through drawers and filing cabinets, but they weren't finding anything about Chappelle. And as we got up to leave, he saw the corner of a white piece of paper sticking out from under the chair mat,

the hard mat that you roll your chair on in the chief's office. He said, I wonder what that is. I said, I don't know. So we lifted up that mat, worried to death that the chief was going to come in and find us doing that. Anyway, that just so happened to be the addendum written by the uniformed officers that night of that murder, and it had a case file, a number fixed to it. So somebody had put it under the floor mat. Yeah, along with about 50 or 60 other documents that we didn't have time to it. So somebody had put it under the floor mat? Yeah, along with about 50 or 60 other documents that we didn't have time to look. But by that time, we had the case number.

So we went back to the Lurecas Division to double check, and there was no case file with that number on it. So we knew then what had happened. Cody alleges that police chief J.C. Patrick was intentionally hiding files. And why would he do that? He's a racist. Obviously, this is Cody's opinion. It could have just been shoddy police work, but it is hard to imagine a white woman's murder file winding up under a floor mat in 1964. Cody and Coleman decided to go over the chief's head, straight to the sheriff. And we told him what we'd learned and showed him what we had. And he was appalled, of course. But he said, don't do a thing until you hear from me. This is terrible.

The next morning when we came in, we heard from Chief Patrick. Can I say what he said? Yeah. It's profane. Yeah, go ahead. He slammed the door and he said, let me tell you two motherfuckers something. You can't rock this boat, boys. The anchor's too big. Soon after, both detectives were fired. They were told they'd violated departmental rules. Despite the lack of evidence, the state attorney's office decided to go ahead and try the case. They started with J.W. Rich, the guy who'd fired the gun. The all-white, all-male jury deliberated for one hour, coming back with a verdict of manslaughter. Rich was sentenced to 10 years in prison and got out after only three. And even though they'd confessed, the three other guys in the car that night were never brought to trial.

After their mother's death, Johnny May Chappelle's kids, all ten of them, were removed from their father's custody. The girls were sent to live with relatives, and the boys were sent to a juvenile shelter until foster homes could be arranged. Once we got in the juvenile shelter, they split us from each other. So we had no one. No one. This is Shelton Chappelle. He was an infant when his mother died,

and he grew up entirely in the custody of the city of Jacksonville. In the juvenile shelter, the boys' home, group homes, foster homes, ten foster homes. According to Shelton, one of the hardest things was that his family didn't know much about his mother's murder. His father heard rumors that the killer was an African-American man who died soon after. But as Shelton got older, he started asking questions and doing his own research. And that's when he finally learned the name J.W. Rich. Then in 1996, he called all of his brothers and sisters together for a memorial service for their mother. There was an announcement in the newspaper.

Meanwhile, things weren't going too well for Detective Cody. At that point in time, I was so disgusted with everything in this world. I didn't have a telephone, didn't watch television. I had a little houseboat I lived on down at the beach. There was a little restaurant in the marina. Early one morning, he was walking through, and he happened to see the newspaper on one of the beach. There was a little restaurant in the marina. Early one morning, he was walking through, and he happened to see the newspaper on one of the tables. And I saw the name Chappelle, and that, of course, piqued my interest. So I started reading it. Come to find out Shelton,

the youngest son, was in Jacksonville going to have a memorial service on the date of his mother's death. And I later learned that he'd been trying and trying and trying to get some information out of the sheriff's office about his mother's death and there was none and I knew he wasn't going to they weren't going to tell him anything. So I thought about it and I said you know I those people will never know what happened how their mother was violated they'll never know it unless I tell them. So in true Lee Cody style, he decided to get involved. He showed up at the memorial service. He said, young man, you don't know half of the story. I said, what are you talking about? He said, well, I'm the officer who caught the killers who killed your mom.

I asked him to sit outside with me in the lobby there of the church for a while, and I said, son, I know you're trying to find out some information about your mother's death, but you won't find it out. They became good friends and still talk on the phone all the time. They want the same thing, for the other three guys in the car to go to trial. And in some ways that feels like a no-brainer, but my dad says it's complicated. While there's no statute of limitations for murder, there are a lot of other things in play, like the speedy trial rule, which says that because the charges were dropped in the 60s, the state can't just refile them decades later.

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. In other words, we know there's men out there who 50 years ago were involved in a brutal murder. They confessed to their participation in that murder. And yet the state of Florida, for a number of reasons, cannot and will not bring them back to a courtroom. And that's the most frustrating thing for me, is to try to sit and talk with Shelton and his brothers and sisters and explain how that can be. For almost 20 years, Shelton and Cody have tried to reopen this murder investigation.

Cody wants a federal grand jury to hear the whole story. And they've had a bunch of lawyers help them out. They even went on Oprah. And all this time, the four guys from the car were just living out their lives in Jacksonville. A reporter for the city's Alt Weekly, Susan Cooper Eastman, went to find the shooter, J.W. Rich, and ask him straight up his side of the story. Conveniently, he'd never moved. In 2006, he lived in the same house he'd lived in in 1964. Inconveniently, he wasn't home. But a lady on the street told her, J.W.'s at the

bar, where he always is. I could see J.W. Rich sitting right there on the bar stool. He was very thin and he was very drawn. You could kind of see, I think, a little bit of that rabble rouser in him. He was 63 years old and spent eight hours a day in that bar. The bartenders kept a special mug for him and a jacket in case it was cold when he walked home at night. He says the way the bullet flew, it couldn't have hit her and that even he might have remembered hearing it hit like a sign or, you know, a stop sign or something like that. Like that he was sure the bullet that he just shot into the air wasn't the bullet that killed her. The people in the bar didn't exactly say, oh yeah, and we believe it. But they said that the media had gotten the story all wrong and that they were torturing him and he could never have justice because he could never clear his name. After talking with him, did you believe he was tortured

by it? He was tortured. And, you know, maybe he would have been a drunk anyway, or been drinking anyway. But I chose to see him as shutting his eyes, blurring his mind, you know, convincing people around him, having people around him who were telling him, no, no, no, you're not a murderer, you're a good guy, you know, and that that was, he was in a little bubble there at the bar. J.W. Rich died a few years after Susan talked with him, and just this month, another of the four men passed away, Elmer Cato. That leaves two. At this point, there's only one way anyone could see jail time, and that's if they were brought up on federal charges. But in order to do that, there's got to be something that makes it federal,

like crossing state lines or dumping the gun on a military base. And they've looked. They've subpoenaed these guys again and again, hoping they'll say something that could trigger federal charges. I remember one of them, it was very poignant. He said at the end of the interview, he looked at the prosecutor and he said, is this it? Does this mean this is finally over? And the prosecutor, to his credit, said, no, this is never going to be over.

You know, I know a lot of people always say, 50 years? You should be over it. Listen, I'll never be over it. If it was my four brothers and I had killed black or white, I don't think it would be over. I want justice. The fact is, finding any resolution is just going to get harder, if not impossible. So much of the case rests on the original confessions of the men in the car, the ones collected by Cody when he pulled out the Bible that night.

And those confessions have disappeared. Half of the accused are dead. Cody's partner, Donald Coleman, is dead. The only other person who witnessed those now-missing confessions is Cody himself. And that doesn't bode well. I'm the only fact witness alive. Anything else anybody says about this is hearsay.

So what will happen if you pass away before anything happens? It's over, unless I tell it. It has no factual basis. How old are you, sir? In January, I'll be 85. And do you feel optimistic? Do you think something's going to happen? No. No. I don't.

Lauren Spohr. Criminal is produced by Lauren, Eric Menel, and me. Julianne Alexander does our episode art. You can find more episodes on iTunes, and if you like what we're doing, you can subscribe and leave us a review. We're on Facebook and Twitter, at Criminal Show. I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is Criminal. where fully managed cybersecurity meets human expertise. They offer a revolutionary approach to managed security that isn't all about tech.

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