Justice Elusive 40 Years After Slaying

THE STORY SO FAR

On March 23, 1964, a black woman named Johnnie Mae Chappell was fatally shot near her home outside Jacksonville, Fla. Afterward, her children were dispersed and only one of four young white men arrested as suspects was charged in the case. Decades later, family members held a reunion, during which a detective revealed omissions in the initial investigation.

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JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Sheriff’s Det. Lee Cody said he’d never seen anyone who wanted to confess as badly as J. W. Rich.

The young man, Cody thought, 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.

“Are you making this statement of your own free will?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you been threatened?”

“No, sir.”

Rich said four white men, all 22 except for 19-year-old Elmer Kato -- had been drinking beer and driving around, listening to the radio describe race riots downtown.

Someone said, let’s go get a black person, Rich said.

Kato headed toward Pickettville.

“The gun was lying in the seat,” Rich said. “I was cutting the fool and I saw three [blacks] walking down the side of the road.”

“What caused you to shoot?” Coleman asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t mean to do it.”

The three black people had been less than 30 feet away when the gun was fired, Rich said.

Rich, Kato and Wayne Chessman, who all gave similar statements to Jacksonville sheriff’s detectives, were arraigned and pleaded guilty to murder. 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 the man who ran the sandwich shop inside the sheriff’s office, Cody said.

Next, they went to see the big boss to talk about the papers stuffed under Chief of Detectives J. C. Patrick’s chair pad.

“I’ll take care of it,” said Sheriff Dale Carson, who died in 2000.

Their whistle-blowing visit backfired. Patrick hauled both detectives into his office and ordered them to stay away from the Johnnie Mae Chappell case.

“Don’t try to rock this boat, boys, because the anchor’s too ... big,” both detectives recalled him saying.

Outside the chief’s office, Cody turned to his best friend: “Donald, what have we done?”

Both were fired months later for insubordination.

But on that hot afternoon, standing outside the chief’s office, the partners still believed in justice. A county grand jury indicted all four men on charges of first-degree murder.

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 of hard labor. He made parole after three.

The prosecutor, now dead, abruptly dropped all charges against the other three, citing insufficient evidence.

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.

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.

“Mrs. Chappell was a citizen of this country and I was sworn to uphold the laws of this country,” he said. “But it was a racist community and a racist department.”

The same year that Coleman’s daughter died, Rich was released from Florida state prison. He stumbled for decades from arrest to arrest for offenses including grand larceny, public fighting, and drunken driving, county records show.

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 refused.

Then he walked into the Chappells’ reunion. And the white former investigator became the black family’s ally in what became a quixotic fight for justice.

He helped search for more records, but they found little. He helped hunt for a lawyer. But no one would take their longshot case until Shelton Chappell met Bill Lassiter.

He didn’t think that the suit had much of a chance either. “But I had to help them,” he said. “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 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 as a teenager, he had accompanied his father to Klan rallies.

“As far as a black lady like that dying, it would just be crap under his feet,” James Patrick said of his father. “It wouldn’t even count to him.”

The Chappell suit 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 longshot. 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 defendants who weren’t tried.

Unlike other civil rights cases reopened in recent years and successfully prosecuted -- including the 1963 Alabama church bombing that killed four girls and the Mississippi murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers -- Chappell’s killer has already been convicted, albeit for a lesser crime.

Rich, interviewed in 2000 by a Florida newspaper about the Chappell lawsuit, appeared defiant. “They convicted me ... and I didn’t even do it,” he said.

Kato told the newspaper that he didn’t know Rich was going to shoot.

“Justice wasn’t done,” Kato said. “Even if it was an accident, three years in prison for killing a woman?”

In October, Rich told Associated Press that the Chappells “don’t have a damn thing on me.” Cody forced him to confess, Rich said.

Chessman did not return phone calls from Associated Press. Davis’ and Kato’s phone numbers are not listed, and they did not reply to registered letters requesting comment.

Cody has become a restless soul, spending his days between Jacksonville and Biloxi, Miss., where he likes to gamble on riverboat casinos. His obsession has eaten at him like a slow-moving cancer.

“It ruined my life,” Cody said. “I drove people crazy with this over the years.”

Coleman and his wife live near the ocean outside Jacksonville. His 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, and they shot her down on the side of the road like a dog,” he said.

J. C. Patrick, the chief of detectives, is dead. One night in 1968, his son James caught him beating his wife in a drunken rage. James Patrick, now 53, shot his father that evening in what was ruled a justifiable homicide.

Shelton Chappell still prays, but he no longer makes deals with God. He hopes that the Supreme Court will hear his family’s case, but he won’t despair if it doesn’t.

“One day, I will get to see my mother,” he said. “And I will rejoice with her.”