ORLANDO, Fla. _ Nearly 70 years after a young white housewife said she was kidnapped and raped by four black men near the Lake County citrus town of Groveland, Florida is closer than ever to clearing the men's names.
The case known as the "Groveland Four" will be up for discussion Friday at the first Clemency Board meeting of newly sworn-in Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Cabinet. A full pardon _ the highest act the board can take _ would bring the most significant resolution yet for the families of the men, now all deceased, whose lives were ruined by a racist criminal justice system.
Quietly, though, there's a counter-campaign at work.
Norma Padgett, who was just 17 when she said she was assaulted by the men, is still alive and her family is trying to halt efforts to posthumously vindicate Samuel Shepherd, Walter Irvin, Ernest Thomas and Charles Greenlee.
It's been almost seven decades since she has talked publicly about the night of July 16, 1949, though a member of the Shepherd family claims Padgett apologized to Samuel Shepherd's brother during a brief encounter 20 years ago.
Two of her sons said the family is writing letters to DeSantis, insisting that Padgett told the truth when she identified the men as those who kidnapped and raped her.
Padgett and her husband, Willie, said the four men approached them on a dark stretch of road near Okahumpka, where the couple's car had broken down, and at first helped, but then hit Willie Padgett and took his wallet. The four put Norma Padgett in their car, drove away and raped her in the backseat, she told police.
"My mom don't lie," Curtis Upshaw said. "She's a good Christian lady."
Upshaw, who grew up in the Groveland area just like his mother, declined reporters' requests to interview Padgett, who is now 86.
He didn't offer any counter-point to evidence that suggests the crime never happened. The case was documented in "The Devil in The Grove," a 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Gilbert King, and "The Groveland Four: The Sad Saga of a Legal Lynching" by Gary Corsair.
Upshaw conceded wrongs may have been committed by former Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall, a central figure in the case and notorious segregationist who died in 1994.
"Whatever Sheriff McCall did is on Sheriff McCall, but they're still callin' my mama a liar," Upshaw said. "Every time they talk about it, they call her a liar. She's not a liar."
Shepherd and Irvin, both 22, who were best friends and from Groveland, were beaten along with Greenlee, 16, in the jail after their arrests. Thomas, 26, a friend of Greenlee's, was shot and killed by a posse as he fled to the Panhandle days after the alleged crime.
Three years later, McCall shot Irvin and Shepherd as he drove them from the prison in Raiford to Lake County, before they were set to stand trial for a second time after their first convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. McCall claimed the men tried to escape, but Irvin, who survived the shooting, said McCall forced them from the car and shot them point-blank. Greenlee was not included in the second trial because, as the only defendant who received a life sentence rather than death at the first trial, he chose not to appeal.
DeSantis, the Republican former congressman who was sworn in on Tuesday, said just before Christmas that "acts of evil" were committed against the accused "for crimes they did not commit" and promised to take up the case.
All five elected constitutional officers in Lake County, including Sheriff Peyton Grinnell, wrote a letter to DeSantis last month calling for the "exoneration and vindication" of Shepherd, Irvin, Greenlee and Thomas.
Lake Property Appraiser Carey Baker, a former state lawmaker who signed the letter, said he would be "shocked" if the Cabinet fails to take action.
"This particular instance is such a horrible tragedy and blight on Lake County's past that I think it's important that we address it," he said.
Like some other state officials, Baker told the Orlando Sentinel he didn't know Norma Padgett was alive and has family still living in Groveland.
It's unclear whether Padgett or her family played any role in former Gov. Rick Scott's decision not to grant pardons in the case after Groveland and Lake County governments apologized to the men in 2016 and the Florida House of Representatives apologized in 2017. Documents related to clemency review, including any letters submitted by Norma Padgett's family or others for or against a pardon, are exempt from Florida's public records laws.
Family members of the four accused say they have waited long enough for their names to be cleared.
Henrietta Irving, a sister of Irvin who worked for Padgett's family in the 1940s, said the men are innocent.
"This woman knows those boys were killed for nothing," said Irving, 86, of Miami who attended her brother's trial. "Common sense will know that these boys didn't rape nobody."
Vivian Shepherd, niece of Samuel Shepherd, said she expects long-overdue justice to happen soon.
"I believe there's a time and purpose for everything, and this is it for us," said Shepherd, a secretary at a Clermont high school. "We've been fighting for this and looking to get our names cleared. We can't bring them (the accused) back and it's not only them _ we feel the pressure and pain as well. ... Our names, they have a stain on them and we want them cleared."
A pardon by the Clemency Board "forgives guilt" from convictions. Technically, only two of the men _ Greenlee and Irvin _ are eligible because Thomas was killed before he could ever stand trial and Shepherd was shot dead by McCall after his first conviction was overturned.
Another possibility is an exoneration, which would wipe the criminal charges from the men's records and officially declare they did not commit the crime _ an action that can be taken after the Florida Department of Law Enforcement reviews the case. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi asked FDLE for such a review "to begin the process" of clearing the men's names and an FDLE spokeswoman confirmed such a review is underway.
Among the most compelling evidence that the crime never happened:
_ An FBI report obtained by King, the author of "The Devil in The Grove," through a Freedom of Information request revealed statements to FBI agents by Norma Padgett that contradicted her trial testimony. One witness, Lawrence Burtoft, was the first to see Padgett after the alleged attack and told prosecutors that she told him she was kidnapped but never mentioned being raped. Burtoft also said she told him she couldn't identify her attackers. Prosecutors withheld that information from the defense. When Burtoft testified at Irvin's second trial, Padgett changed her story and said she told him the details about the attack.
_ A medical report by the doctor who examined Padgett after the alleged crime did not show conclusive evidence that she was raped and was not turned over to the accused men's defense team.
_ Greenlee was already in custody of law enforcement when the attack allegedly took place after he was found carrying a pistol without a license, according to King's research.
_ Jesse Hunter, the prosecutor in the case, wrote a letter to then-Gov. LeRoy Collins admitting that he had doubts about Irvin's guilt and urged him to commute his sentence from death to life in prison. Collins commuted the sentence in 1954.
There was also a complicit local press, which was quick to side with McCall's brand of justice that was often dispensed in the Jim Crow South. When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1949 convictions, the unanimous opinion not only assailed Lake County's mistreatment of the accused but also biased coverage in local newspapers, which included the Sentinel, then known as the Orlando Morning Sentinel. The justices called the trial "but a legal gesture to register a verdict already dictated by the press and the public opinion it generated."
The NAACP appealed for donations to the legal defense fund with a pamphlet citing "the notorious Groveland, Florida, rape frame-up" and a Morning Sentinel editorial cartoon of four electric chairs under the caption "no compromise."
Historians and authors have theorized that Padgett and her husband, Willie, whom she divorced in 1958 and died some years later, came up with the story of the rape to explain away a volatile relationship that, on that night, left Norma alone on a dark stretch of road.
King reported in his book that Irvin and Shepherd did stop that night to help the Padgetts with the broken-down car. Shepherd got into a fight with Willie Padgett after he made a racist remark and, eventually, Shepherd and Irvin drove off.
By morning, Norma and Willie Padgett told police the four men robbed him and abducted and raped her.
Whether the story was true or not, the accusation quickly spiraled beyond the control of a 17-year-old girl who was suddenly under the pressure of her community and a powerful sheriff.
Within hours of the claims made by Padgett, a racist mob gathered from across Central Florida and burned and looted the home of Shepherd's family and indiscriminately fired shots into other homes and businesses, driving many of Groveland's black families away _ some for good. The Ku Klux Klan littered streets with pamphlets and the governor called in the National Guard to help keep the peace.
Lake County was far from alone in its struggle with racial tensions, but the case quickly became intimately linked with Groveland, where at least two of the accused lived, including where the home was set ablaze.
Groveland and Lake County officials have long been uncomfortable with the association. Today the Groveland historical museum contains no mention of the case.
The Lake County Historical Museum in Tavares, which once served as the jail and courthouse where the men were beaten and tried, has a photo of three of the men, though McCall, known for his brutality as sheriff, is cropped from the picture.
The tribute wasn't added until last year.
For all the uneasiness the case brings for some in Lake County, the families of the accused say their grief can't be softened without action by the Clemency Board.
Aaron Newson, 57, is a nephew of Ernest Thomas and became intrigued with the case in recent years. He provided a photo of a man he said is his uncle, the first such photo ever published, according to historians who have studied the case.
He said he remembers his mother and grandmother talking about the case.
"My grandmother ... she believed along with my mom that he had nothing to do with it," said Newson, a former corrections officer in New York. "Her thing was that he was in the wrong place, or his name was in the wrong place, at the wrong time."
His grandmother owned the Groveland-area bar the Blue Flame, which was shot at by the mob after the rape allegation was made. His family fled Lake County after that.
"When you see your mom and your grandmother crying for justice ... even though they're not here anymore, it's sweet to finally make sure that they got what they wanted," he said.
Irving, the sister of Walter Irvin, said she has carried her own guilt over his involvement in the case. He only returned to Groveland after serving in Word War II because she married James Shepherd, who also happened to be the brother of Samuel Shepherd, when she was just 16.
"That was the only reason he came home," she said while seated on her walker in her Miami living room. "He didn't want to see me at 16 go down the wrong road. ... I had no business getting married. I didn't know what I was doing."
Soon after, he was arrested and charged with the crime.
Irving remembers visiting her brother on Death Row: His head was shaved and he was crying.
"He said to my mom, 'Mom, don't let them put me in a hole,' " she said. "It came very close."
A last-minute stay spared Irvin's life, and his sentence was commuted. He was paroled in 1968, after spending nearly 20 years in prison, and lived in Miami near Irving. She helped him find a house and taught him how to ride the city bus. But, she said, he was different from the brother she knew growing up in Groveland.
"I know he was angry when he left this world," she said. "I just hope and pray he turned that anger loose."
He died a year after his release, apparently of natural causes, on his first trip back to Groveland.
Vivian Shepherd, niece of Samuel Shepherd, offers another reason for why the state should pardon or exonerate her uncle and the other men.
Padgett, she said, apologized to her father in 1998. Shepherd said her mother told her that Padgett stopped by their home in Clermont not long before James Shepherd died. Back in the 1940s, the Shepherd family farm bordered that of Padgett's family.
"My dad let her in and they sat on the porch and they spoke," Vivian Shepherd told the Sentinel of the encounter, which was first reported by King in The Atlantic magazine in 2017. "Dad said that she came to apologize and she said it never happened."
Asked whether his mother made such an apology, Curtis Upshaw said she did not.
But Vivian Shepherd offers a retort similar to Upshaw's about the veracity of her mother's story.
"My mom would never, never lie," she said.
