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hey everyone this next episode contains some pretty harsh language and some of it's racially sensitive so if that
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bothers you fair warning thanks they said they were riding around in a race riot that was going on in
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jacksonville drinking beer now may i say what they said yeah let's go get a [ __ ]
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it was march 23 1964 a woman named johnny may chappelle walked to a small store to buy some groceries for her
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family she was 35 and had 10 kids one of the things she bought at the store was ice cream she threw the ice
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cream and her wallet and the rest of the groceries in a paper bag and started to
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walk home as she was walking home she realized the ice cream had sweat through the bag and
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the bottom had split open and then when she got home she realized she was missing her wallet she thought
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it might have fallen out so she went back to the road to retrace her steps as she walked she met two friends they
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helped her look they were all african-american at the same time four young white men
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were driving around the area listening to the race riots on the radio they had a gun on the dashboard their
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names were jw rich wayne chessman elmer cato and james alex davis these four punks drove past and j.w rich leaned out
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the window with a 22-caliber pistol and fired hitting mrs chappelle and killing her
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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
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she bled internally and because getting rescue out here at the time was you know for a black person the
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ambulance was an old panel truck uh it took forever to get here and there was no medical services
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on board so she essentially bled to death before they could get her to the hospital
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it was four months before lyndon johnson signed the civil rights act of 1964 outlawing segregation
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our producer lauren spore grew up in jacksonville hearing about this episode and today she brings us a story of a
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hate crime and the men who walked away i'm phoebe judge and this is criminal [Music]
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we all want to think of florida as not part of the deep south but it is absolutely especially
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jacksonville very much part of the deep south this is my dad bob spohr he's a lawyer and so is my mom and my
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brother and even my brother soon to be wife so when i see my family we always talk about their cases
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my dad likes to talk about this case in particular he's worked on it pro bono for a number of years
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and last time i went home he drove me to the spot where johnny may chappelle was
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killed and over there is the food market where she had gone to shop for some groceries
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including ice cream for her kids the night she was killed the police showed up and took down a report
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they talked to the friends who were walking with her and wrote down the color of the shooter's car dark blue
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but it sped away and the friends couldn't see much in the dark chappelle's murder was briefly mentioned
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in the newspaper the next morning and a story about the race riots the headline was large area terrorized by negroes
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there were no other news stories and from what anyone can tell there was no investigation my name is kaney
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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
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tried to keep up with all of the homicides that occurred and he'd taken note of the chappelle case he worked
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that neighborhood a lot one night five months after the murder something bizarre happened as usual when
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we were on that side of town at night we would stop by the free set and have dinner the freeze that was a diner cody
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and his partner donald coleman were eating steaks when a young guy came in someone they sort of knew as a bar
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fighter his name was wayne chessman before he left he came by the table and he said
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sergeant he said i just wanted to let you know that i've straightened my life up and i of course
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responded and i said that's good wayne i'm glad to see you get ahead son and he left and donald asked me said
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that's kind of strange when i said that morning strange that's weird [Music] about a week later they were back at the
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free zet and wayne chessman showed up again this time in a dark blue plymouth he came in again and came up to us and
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uh and he said if i can ever help you with anything let me know i told sergeant coleman i said donald i
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said they were involved in the murder of that mrs chappelle on the black woman that was killed on u.s one there's no
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doubt in my mind about it and that's probably the vehicle that was driven cody chalks it up to detectives
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intuition which seems a little hollywood to me but it was enough to convince his
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partner it went to wayne chesman's house and asked him to come down to the police
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station cody had a plan he got a bible from the station's little lending library and underlined the
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commandment thou shalt not kill with a red pen and so i pulled the bible out and spun it around putting in front of
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his face and i said wayne look at that commandment underline and read and you have any comments
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and he just blurted it right out he said sarge i didn't i didn't kill her i didn't shoot her i was just in the car
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just like that and i said kill who shot what what he said that old black woman out on the us one
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i said that's what i thought and i said would you be willing to give us a statement
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and he said yes sir [Music] three of the four men came in and confessed the fourth guy had left town
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with the army and their confessions were transcribed by a court reporter they told the detectives where to find the
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gun and cody and coleman went to pick it up but there was a problem when they got to the police station
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there was no file for chappelle there was no evidence of this woman ever being killed in duvall county not one
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record was there cody said his boss would often keep files in his office so he and coleman
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waited for the chief to leave and started snooping through his papers they rambled through drawers and filing
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cabinets but they weren't finding anything about chappelle and as we got up the leave he saw the corner of a
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white piece of paper sticking out from under the chair mat the hard mat that you rolled
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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
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worried to death that the chief was going to come in and find us doing that anyway
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that just so happened to be the addendum written by the uniformed officers that night of that murder and it had a case
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file fixed a number fixed to it so somebody had put it under the floor mat yeah along with about 50 or 60 other
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documents that we didn't have time to look but by that time we had the case number
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so we went back to the lorecas division to double check and there was no case file with that
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number on it so we knew then that what had happened cody alleges that police chief jc patrick was intentionally
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hiding files and why would he do that he's a racist obviously this is cody's opinion it could have just been shoddy
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police work but it is hard to imagine a white woman's murder file winding up under a floor mat in 1964.
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cody and coleman decided to go over the chief's head straight to the sheriff and
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we told him what we'd learned and showed him what we had and he was appalled of course
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but he said don't don't do a thing until you hear from me this is terrible the next morning when we
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came in we heard from chief patrick uh can i say what he said yeah it's profane yeah go ahead
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he can slam the door and he he said let me tell you two [ __ ] something you can't rock
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this boat boys that anchor's too big soon after both detectives were fired they were told they'd violated
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departmental rules despite the lack of evidence the state attorney's office decided to go ahead
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and try the case they started with jw rich the guy who'd fired the gun the all-white all-male jury deliberated
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for one hour coming back with a verdict of manslaughter rich was sentenced to 10 years in prison
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and got out after only three and even though they'd confessed the three other guys in the car that night
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were never brought to trial after their mother's death johnny may chappelle's kids all ten of them were
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removed from their father's custody the girls were sent to live with relatives and the boys were sent to a juvenile
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shelter until foster homes could be arranged once we got in the juvenile show they
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split us from each other so we had no one no one this is shelton chappelle he was
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an infant when his mother died and he grew up entirely in the custody of the city of jacksonville in the juvenile
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shelter the boy's home group homes foster homes 10 foster homes according to shelton one of the hardest
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things was that his family didn't know much about his mother's murder his father heard rumors that the killer
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was an african-american man who died soon after but as shelton got older he started asking questions and doing his
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own research and that's when he finally learned the name jw rich then in 1996 he called all of his
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brothers and sisters together for a memorial service for their mother there was an announcement in the newspaper
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meanwhile things weren't going too well for detective cody at that point in time i was so disgusted
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with everything in this world i i didn't have a telephone didn't watch television i had a little houseboat i
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lived on down at the beach there was a little restaurant in the marina early one morning he was walking through and
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he happened to see the newspaper on one of the tables and i saw the name chappelle and that of course piqued my
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answers and so i started reading it come to find out shelton the youngest son was
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in jacksonville going to have a memorial service on his the date of his mother's
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death and i later learned that he'd been trying and trying and trying to get some uh information out of the
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sheriff's office about his mother's death there was none and and i knew he wasn't gonna they
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weren't gonna tell him anything so i thought about it and i said you know i those people will never know what
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happened how their mother was violated they'll never know it unless i tell them so in truly cody style he decided to get
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involved he showed up at the memorial service he said young man you don't know half of the story and say
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what are you talking about you say well i'm the officer who caught the killers who killed your mom
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i'd ask him to sit outside with me in the lobby there of the church for a while and i said son i'm telling you
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yeah i know you're trying to find out some information about your mother's death but you won't find it out they
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became good friends and still talk on the phone all the time they want the same thing for the other
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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
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complicated while there's no statute of limitations for murder there are a lot of other
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things in play like the speedy trial rule which says that because the charges were
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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
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we know there's men out there who 50 years ago were involved in a brutal murder they confessed to their
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participation in that murder and yet the state of florida for a number of reasons
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cannot and will not bring them back to a courtroom and that's the most frustrating thing for me
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is to try to sit and talk with shelton and and his brothers and sisters and explain
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how that can be [Music] for almost 20 years shelton and cody have tried to reopen this murder
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investigation cody wants a federal grand jury to hear the whole story and they've
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had a bunch of lawyers help them out they even went on oprah and all this time the four guys from the
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car were just living out their lives in jacksonville a reporter for the city's alt weekly
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susan cooper eastman went to find the shooter jw rich and ask him straight up his side of the story
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conveniently he'd never moved in 2006 he lived in the same house he lived in in 1964.
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inconveniently he wasn't home but a lady on the street told her jw is at the bar where he always is i could
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see jw rich sitting right there on the bar stool he was very thin and he was very drawn
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you could kind of see i think a little bit of that rabble rouser in him he was 63 years old and spent eight
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hours a day in that bar the bartenders kept a special mug for him and a jacket in case it was cold
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when he walked home at night he says the way the bullet flew it couldn't have hit her
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and that even he might have remembered hearing it hit like a sign or you know a stop sign or
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something like that like that he was sure the bullet that he just shot into the air
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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
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that the media had gotten the story all wrong and that they were torturing him and he
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could never have justice because he could never clear his name after talking with him did you believe he was tortured
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by it he was tortured and you know maybe he would have been a drunk anyway or been a drinking anyway
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but i chose to see him as shutting his eyes blurring his mind you know convincing people around him having
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people around him who were telling him no no no you're not a murderer you're a good guy
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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
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talked with him and just this month another of the four men passed away elmer cato that leaves
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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
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but in order to do that there's got to be something that makes it federal like crossing state lines or dumping the gun
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on a military base and they've looked they've subpoenaed these guys again and again hoping
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they'll say something that could trigger federal charges i remember one of them it was very poignant he said at the end
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of the interview he looked at the prosecutor and he said is this it does this mean this is
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finally over and the prosecutor to his credit said no this is never going to be over you know
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i know a lot of people i'd say 50 years you should be over it listen i'll never be over it
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if it was my four brothers and i had killed black or white i don't think it would be over i want
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justice the fact is finding any resolution is just going to get harder if not impossible
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so much of the case rests on the original confessions of the men in the car the ones collected by cody when he
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pulled out the bible that night and those confessions have disappeared half of the accused are dead
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cody's partner donald coleman is dead the only other person who witnessed those now missing confessions is cody
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himself and that doesn't bode well i'm the only fact witness alive anything else anybody says about this is
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hearsay so what will happen if nothing if you pass away before anything happens it's over unless i tell it
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it has no factual basis how old are you sir [Music] in january i'll be 85. and do you feel optimistic do you think
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something's gonna happen no no i don't [Music] lauren sport [Music] criminal is produced by lauren eric
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mendel and me julian alexander does our episode art you can find more episodes on itunes and if you like what we're
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doing you can subscribe and leave us a review we're on facebook and twitter at criminal show i'm phoebe judge and this
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is criminal