Son’s Questions in 1964 Killing Find Keys in Unquiet Minds

Last in an occasional series

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- His mother bled to death in the back of the ambulance during the long ride to the hospital that accepted blacks. She was the mother of 10, and he was her baby, just 4 months old.

The city was aflame with race riots that night in 1964, but Johnnie Mae Chappell was not out setting fires. She had gone for ice cream for her family. She was in front of the Banner Food Market on New Kings Road when four white men in a dark blue Plymouth drove past. One of them shot her in the abdomen.

“Mister police officer,” she told the white policeman who was first at the scene, “I’m going to die.”

By year’s end, four men were arrested and charged in her death, and three of them confessed. But only one was tried, and he was convicted of a reduced charge of manslaughter when jurors concluded it was a joy ride by young toughs and the gun had gone off accidentally. He served three years in prison.

Criminal cases against the other three were never pursued.

Johnnie Mae’s boy, Shelton Chappell, is a man now, and he has been piecing together the events that took away his mother. He questioned his reluctant father before his death, and pored over the few court records that still exist. Only in the last few years did he come to fully understand what happened that night, and what followed her death.

He learned that the brief homicide report was hidden from investigators. That there are no incident reports, no crime scene photos. That the murder weapon disappeared from the evidence room, and is missing to this day.

And that the two white deputies who investigated the case were fired after complaining of a cover-up.

He learned all this from the fired deputies themselves, now well into retirement.

In 1996, one of them, Lee Cody, came across a newspaper notice about a Chappell family gathering to mark the anniversary of their mother’s death.

Cody was living on a houseboat nearby. He had long ago moved on with his life after his days as a sheriff’s deputy.

“And I thought, that’s Johnnie Mae’s son,” he said. “I knew I had to tell him.”

He waited in the shadows at the back of the hall during the family reunion, then nervously stepped forward. The tall, white-haired white man gently shook hands with the small, determined black man.

They formed an alliance that has since been joined by another voice from the past: a man who implicates his own father in the cover-up, then-Chief of Detectives J.C. Patrick.

Their testimony is at the center of a civil lawsuit filed by Shelton Chappell in federal court against city and police officials in Jacksonville and all four men, asking for a jury trial to air the family’s complaints of a wrongful death and attempted cover-up. The suit is under review by the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta; a judge initially threw it out because it was filed too late.

In recent years, a handful of white men have been convicted in slayings of blacks in the 1960s, raising hopes in other long-dormant civil rights cases. The most recent was the conviction of Bobby Frank Cherry for his role in a Birmingham, Ala., church bombing that killed four black girls nearly 40 years ago.

But there are scores of unsolved, race-driven killings of blacks that never will be resolved. And even the relative handful of old cases that are being revived appear to have slim prospects for successful prosecution. Witnesses and suspects die, paperwork is lost, evidence is thrown out. In many cases the original investigations were so shoddy that there is little evidence to resurrect decades later.

The case of Johnnie Mae Chappell has not been taken up by law enforcement authorities--partly because one of her assailants was convicted at the time and sent to prison.

But to some, the seemingly reckless handling of the case showed a criminal justice system rooted in time and place, and betrayed the unwillingness of a white-run community to demand justice for all when the victim was black and the killers were white.

The son wants a justice that goes beyond the short prison sentence served by just one of the men in the car, something that makes the city of Jacksonville pay, something that acknowledges his mother died a martyr in the civil rights movement.

“If they want to take me to jail, I’m willing to go to jail; I’m willing to die for this cause,” he said.

Where Jim Crow Ruled

At the time of the killing, March 23, 1964, Jacksonville for several days had been convulsed by race riots, touched off when a group of blacks staged demonstrations at downtown hotels and restaurants for equal rights and opportunities. The local newspaper described them as “a mob of howling Negroes.”

Mayor Haydon Burns deputized 496 white firefighters to combat “hit-and-run” groups of protesters. He was angry that President Johnson was about to sign the Civil Rights Act giving blacks access to public facilities and new voting protections.

The mayor was running for governor at the time, under the Jim Crow segregation banner. He was elected to the post that November.

For decades, Jim Crow ruled the city. Whites, including police officers, were known to beat blacks, shoot their dogs and throw live alligators into black-only swimming pools.

Earlier on the day of the Chappell homicide, about 10 fire-bombings erupted. Three men were wounded. About 200 were arrested, most of them black.

It was clearly not safe to be out. But Shelton’s mother walked to the market anyway. When she returned to the family’s small green house on Pipit Street, on the city’s far north side, she realized her wallet had fallen through a hole in her shopping bag.

So she retraced her steps. Across a field and three blocks from home, she came back upon the small market. With her eyes presumably fixed on the ground, it is doubtful she ever saw the dark sedan come roaring by, or at first recognized the blast as anything other than a backfire.

Even in the dark she must have been an easy target, clearly visible in her white jacket, white blouse and a white-and-black skirt. For anyone firing out of a passing car window, even just for fun, Johnnie Mae Chappell would have been hard to miss.

Her husband, Willie, was at home with the children. He had finished plowing a neighbor’s field, and he was tired. At word of the shooting, he rushed out to New Kings Road, just in time to climb in the back of the “colored” ambulance.

Johnnie Mae was dead before they reached the black hospital. The next morning, her killing would rate a bare mention in the Jacksonville newspapers; the Journal gave it 35 words in a roundup about the riots.

The state of Florida broke up the family, ruling that Willie Chappell, working as a cement finisher and a gas station attendant when he wasn’t plowing fields, could not properly raise the five boys and five girls.

Five months after the killing, no arrests had been made. That was when Deputy Cody met a young white man at the local Freeze-It drive-in. The man seemed to want to talk but then drove away.

Cody said he and his partner, Donald Coleman, noticed that the man, a local tough named Wayne Chessman, was driving a dark Plymouth.

They drove to Chessman’s home, peeked through the front screen and found him lounging on a sofa. They brought him downtown and Cody placed the Bible in front of him, turning to the part about “thou shalt not kill.”

“He started swearing,” Cody said, and then suddenly blurted out a stunning admission. “He said, ‘I didn’t shoot her. I didn’t shoot her. I didn’t shoot her. I was just riding in the car.’ ”

Chessman talked plenty. Cody said he implicated the others, and the deputies arrested all four, including the shooter, J.W. Rich. Three of them, including Rich, agreed to talk. The deputies said the men told them they had gone out joy riding and they were out to “get” a black.

Normally, accomplices are just as culpable as a shooter, and the deputies were ecstatic: As far as they were concerned, they had solved the murder. But when they went looking for the case file in the squad room, it was not there.

They checked the office of J.C. Patrick, the chief of detectives who was away at the time. There, under Patrick’s chair, Coleman spied a piece of paper sticking out from beneath the rug. He pulled it out, and realized it was the Chappell homicide report.

It was all of a page and a half. It did note, however, that Patrick had been at the scene. It described the victim as a “colored female age 35.” The suspects were “unknown at this time,” the report said.

Cody also located a one-page supplementary report. Another “colored female” had reported hearing a “bang,” but when police searched the area for clues “no information or evidence could be found.” The report did not even mention that the bullet had been recovered.

Cody was amazed that so little police work had been done. It appeared to him that his superiors had shelved the investigation. “Can you imagine what we were thinking then?” he asked. “Obviously, the chief of detectives had obstructed justice in a capital civil rights murder case.”

The deputies pressed ahead. They located the gun, a blue-steel revolver similar to a target pistol, after their suspected assailants helped lead them to it. The deputies bagged it and placed it in the police property room.

They complained to the sheriff about the original handling of the case, and the next morning confronted Patrick. As Cody remembers it, Patrick’s face turned “blood red.” He ordered them out of his office and, before slamming the door behind them, warned, “Don’t you try to rock this boat, boys, because the anchor’s too goddamn big.”

The deputies were taken off the case. Soon they were assigned jobs serving warrants or acting as bailiffs. Eventually they were labeled as disruptive employees, and a year later, fired.

They took new jobs driving garbage trucks at the Jacksonville shipyard, and from the sidelines Cody watched the justice system take its course.

The arrests stood. The men withdrew their guilty pleas, but then were indicted by a grand jury. Yet, only Rich was prosecuted. His trial lasted two days.

He testified that they were passing the pistol around in the car when “I just picked it up and looked at it and the gun just went off.” He refuted Deputy Coleman’s testimony that they were out to “get” a black.

Prosecutors never entered the .22-caliber handgun into evidence at the trial, making it physically impossible to tie the bullet to the gun that killed her.

Deputies Cody and Coleman do not know what became of the gun.

The jury deliberated for one hour. Charged with first-degree murder, which carried the death penalty, Rich was convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter. He was sentenced to 10 years and made parole after three. The state dropped the charges against the other men.

After the trial before an all-white, all-male jury, juror James P. Loos told the newspapers: “I think it was just a bunch of boys horsing around at night. They were out there harassing blacks and accidentally killed a woman.”

Loos, now 71, a retired electrical plant technician, repeats his story today. He recalled that they passed the bullet around in the jury box. The bullet appeared scratched or dented, he said.

Rich’s defense attorney described growing up on a farm where hogs were slaughtered. The hogs were shot between the eyes, and the bullets were dented when they hit the skull. The Chappell bullet, he reasoned, must have first hit the pavement and then ricocheted into Johnnie Mae’s right side.

“They were messing around in their car,” Loos said. “I don’t believe in my mind they had planned to kill anybody. They were young and they ran off, and most of them got away.”

Some years later, Patrick, the chief of detectives, was drunk one day and beating his wife when their son James came home from hunting. He heard his mother’s screams and ran upstairs with his shotgun. He fired one shot of No. 4 duck load into his father and, he recalls, “blew him in half.”

Chappell Kin Scattered

After his mother’s death, Shelton Chappell passed through a series of foster homes. He never really knew his family, with all the siblings scattered about. He was an adult by the time he began to reacquaint himself.

He knew little about his mother and still less about her death. His father, whom he sometimes visited, would not talk about it.

A neighbor, Marguerite Golson, lives near the old Chappell home. She is 85 now, and she saw the family split up. Their home, she said, was abandoned and then became a crack house. Today it is boarded shut.

“I knew Johnnie Mae. I’m a mother too,” Golson said. “She worked every day. She was nice. She always was in a hurry to go to work, or in a hurry to get home and tend to her children. You always saw her running for the bus.”

Willie Chappell spent the next 30 years keeping his head down, wary of demanding greater justice.

“He lived all alone afterward, with his dogs,” Golson recalled. “He cut wood. He lived independently and he didn’t bother anybody. He grieved a long time.”

Shelton kept pestering his father.

“Finally, he would share some of it,” the son said. “He said he saw one of the men go to jail, and I guess he thought justice was done. But if he had pushed it any further, they would have killed him too.”

In 1994, a year before the old man died, father and son visited the public library and police headquarters and the courthouse, searching for clues about the case. Shelton had taken a brief leave from his electrician’s job in Miami, where he has a wife and young daughter.

They were shown the only surviving piece of evidence: the bullet. “I looked for some blood on that bullet to make me feel something,” Shelton said. “But I didn’t see it.”

Shelton saved a little money and made a few more trips to Jacksonville, searching records, learning what little there was about her death, sometimes speaking out on his mother’s behalf. Along the way, he picked up some minor victories.

The city erected a small sign on New Kings Road, “Drive Safely in Memory of Johnnie Mae Chappell,” plunked in a field next to a yellow fireplug and a red fiber-optic cable.

A church in Georgia dedicated a stained glass window in her name. A civil rights memorial in Alabama added her to its list of martyrs.

Other efforts have foundered.

Four Florida governors have been asked to acknowledge that the criminal justice system in Jacksonville had failed the Chappell family; none has done so. The city has been asked to build a civil rights memorial in Johnnie Mae Chappell’s name; it has not.

But when former Deputy Cody contacted the Chappell family six years ago, Shelton knew his case had grown stronger. And then James Patrick stepped forward.

After killing his father, Patrick was briefly detained, then released when the state ruled the death justifiable. Only in his own mind does his father’s demise have any bearing on the case of Johnnie Mae Chappell.

James Patrick, now 51 and seriously ill, felt shame after learning about his father’s role in the Chappell investigation. He had heard the Chappell family was trying to get the case reopened. He offered to testify about his father’s racism and the slaying cover-up.

His father, he recalls, would rail about blacks and Jews, yell at the television whenever blacks appeared on screen, and often drag his boy along to Ku Klux Klan picnics.

“I believe in heaven and hell, and I think he went to hell,” the son says. “He did a lot of things wrong, just covering things up. That was enough to put him in hell.... She got shot aimlessly and my old man didn’t pay much attention to it. It was bad, it was all wrong. It was coldblooded murder.”

The willingness of the old deputies and the detective’s son to support the Chappell family’s campaign for justice seems to suggest how attitudes have changed. But maybe not.

When the family filed its lawsuit, their lawyer, a white man, soon found his office defaced, with KKK and other messages spray-painted on the exterior. Out at his farm, one of his horses was stabbed.

None of the four men hired a lawyer to contest the suit, but three of them wrote out in longhand their own responses and filed them with the court.

“There was not a conspiracy!” Rich wrote.

Chessman denied any wrongdoing, dismissing the killing as an “act supposedly ... committed almost forty (40) years ago.” Suspect Elmer Kato wrote a one-sentence denial of any allegations, and the fourth, James Davis, did not respond.

All four apparently still live around Jacksonville. They either could not be reached or declined to talk. Rich reportedly has cancer.

The lawsuit was dismissed in December by U.S. District Judge Harvey E. Schlesinger. He said the four-year statute of limitations had run out for such a claim.

The judge added: “There is no constitutional requirement that the sheriff’s department investigate crimes.”

The prosecutor, like the sheriff, is dead. Scott Makar, assistant general counsel for the Sheriff’s Office, called the ruling sound.

Makar also defended the decision long ago not to prosecute the other three in the car.

“If the guy who pulled the trigger just got manslaughter, are they really going to convict the other three?” he asked. “And what evidence is there today to show that those prosecutorial decisions were not appropriate?”

Shelton Chappell does not have much hope for his lawsuit.

What he does have is a photograph.

It was taken after the ambulance reached the hospital. A photographer for Jet magazine, in town covering the riots and hearing of the Chappell shooting, rushed to the emergency room.

The picture is grainy, and to see it today is to be suddenly saddened by time. Willie Chappell stands silent in a cotton work shirt, his head bowed, his face tumbling into grief. He is staring at his wife, lying on what appears to be a hospital stretcher.

She is captured in death, a white sheet pulled up to her chin.

A month later, when the magazine came out, he clipped out the picture and placed it on top of his dresser drawer. There it remained for 30 years, the only photograph he had of his wife. Now it is the only photo his son has of his mother.