A TOWN WITHOUT PITY—Jason Vuic

In the 1980s, the tiny town of Arcadia, Florida, was “fifty miles and fifty years from Sarasota.” With its cowboy roots, low-wage agricultural industries, and violent frontier history, Arcadia was a curious mix of the desolate ranchlands of West Texas and the stately homes and bitter race relations of the South. In A Town without Pity, award-winning author Jason Vuic recounts two heartbreaking stories from Arcadia that rose to national prominence at the end of the Reagan era and forced the town to reckon with not only AIDS hysteria but also the legacies of a racist past. 
This book delves into the case of James Richardson, a Black migrant worker accused in 1967 of poisoning his seven children. Richardson spent twenty years in prison due to suppressed evidence for a crime he didn’t commit. Vuic also tells the story of the public mistreatment of the three Ray brothers, white school-age children with hemophilia who contracted the HIV virus from a tainted medicine called factor VIII. The Rays were barred from attending their local church and school, and when their house burned down in a mysterious arson, reporters dubbed Arcadia the “town without pity.”
Through extensive use of newspapers, court records, and interviews, Vuic shows how the actions of authorities and residents left little room for the voices that spoke up against bias, harassment, and coercion. At the same time, this cautionary tale places Arcadia as a microcosm of many small towns in the late twentieth-century United States, reminding readers of the staying power of social divisions and prejudice even after the achievements of the civil rights movement. A TOWN WITHOUT PITY: AIDS, Race, and Resistance in Florida's Deep South—Jason Vuic

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
killers in true crime history and the authors that have
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week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
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(00:30):
journalist and author Dan Zufanski.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Good Evening. In the nineteen eighties, the tiny town of Arcadia, Florida,
was fifty miles and fifty years from Sarasota. With its
cowboy roots, low wage agricultural industries, and violent frontier history,
Arcadia was a curious mix of the desolate ranchlands of Wetas,

(01:00):
Texas and the stately homes and bitter race relations of
the South. In a Town without Pity, Award winning author
Jason Viewick recounts two heartbreaking stories from Arcadia that rose
to national prominence at the end of the Reagan Era
and forced the town to reckon with not only aids hysteria,

(01:21):
but also the legacies of a racist past. This book
delves into the case of James Richardson, a black migrant
worker accused in nineteen sixty seven of poisoning his seven children.
Richardson spent twenty years in prison due to suppressed evidence
for a crime he didn't commit. Viewick also tells the

(01:44):
story of the public mistreatment of the three Ray brothers,
white school aged children with hemophilia who contracted the HIV
virus from a tainted medicine called Factor eight. The Rays
were barred from attending their local church and school, and
when their house burnt down in the mysterious arson, reporters

(02:07):
dubbed Arcadia the Town Without Pity. Through extensive use of newspapers,
court records, and interviews, Viewick shows how the actions of
authorities and residents left little room for the voices that
spoke up against bias, harassment, and coercion. At the same time,

(02:28):
this cautionary tale places Arcadia as a microcosm of many
small towns in the late twentieth century United States, reminding
readers of the staying power of social divisions and prejudice,
even after the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement. The
book they were featuring this evening is A Town Without Pity,

(02:51):
aids race and resistance in Florida's Deep South with my
special guest author Jason Viwick. Thank you very much for
this interview. And welcome to the program. Jason Viewick, thank you,
thank you for having me. Now I know that you
write that you were born nearby in Punta Gorda, which

(03:16):
is very close to Arcadia. As you write on this book,
you write upstream in the river of Thyme. Tell us
about this Arcadia, which you write is one of the
most out of place places in Florida.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
Well, you know, people have visions of Florida with palm
trees and beaches and women in bikinis and spring break.
And I grew up in southwest Florida, kind of between
Sarasota and Fort Myers, in the old fishing town of
Punta Florida. We were on Charlotte Harbor where a river
came out to the harbor and then the harbor went

(03:54):
out towards Boca Grand Santa Bell Captiva, beautiful places. But
we were on a brown harbor, you know, a muddy
harbor with horseshoe crabs, and it smelled in the in
the winter, in the dry season. Right, we were in
a fishing town. It wasn't this glitzy Florida that everyone thought,
you know, and I loved it for that reason. It

(04:16):
wasn't truist heavy. But we were along I seventy five,
you know, between Tampa and Naples, and then from Naples
to Miami, we were on the Tammiami Trail. We were
in the sunbelt right though. We were a lot of locals,
a lot of old families. We were still part of
the New South, the New Florida. But about twenty five

(04:38):
miles just upriver from US into the interior of Florida,
it was a town called Arcadia. And when I was
in college, people would say, hey, Florida boy, you know,
how how is your spring break? You know, they had
visions of me on a surfboard or something, and I'd
be like, come on, man, I you know, have you
ever been to Arcadia? You ever been to a Moccholey,
You ever been to LaBelle? You know. I would name

(04:59):
these these really tough farming communities. And Arcadia was a
cattle in Orange Town from way back from the eighteen nineties.
It was in corporated in the eighteen eighties, and it
was right on the edge of what we called the
ninety mile Prairie. People don't really think about this, but
Florida was America's first cattle state. It was where the

(05:22):
Spanish brought cows over. These cows were left to grow freely,
and so when the Spanish left Florida and the British
left Florida, it was possible in the eighteen sixties and
seventies and eighties to actually round up their own cows.
You could come to Florida, oftentimes a walled Confederates South

(05:45):
Georgia settlers. They called them crackers, you know, not in
a derogatory way. These were what old white settlers called themselves.
You could come out into the prairie to hunt cows.
So we didn't have cowboys. We had cow hunts, and
so Arcadia very early on was was a cattle depot.

(06:07):
It was even called the Deadwood of Florida. They'd have
gunfights in the streets, brothels, range wars in the eighteen nineties.
I mean, this was like the Oklahoma Territory or you know,
the wild West. Well into the twentieth century.

Speaker 2 (06:23):
You say that the population of Arcadia, Florida was in
nineteen sixty was fifty nine hundred, fifty nine hundred people.
You you write about December twenty third, nineteen sixty four,
and some parathion bags were found in the peace river,
tell us about the parathion, what it is and what

(06:48):
had happened.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
Sure, sure, Well, you know, into Arcadia had a tough history,
you know, of racism, you know, a tough, hintry history
in the early twentieth century, number of lynchings, there was
some clan activity, and certainly segregation was you know, the
order of the day. Prior to the nineteen sixties, Arcadia

(07:12):
also was really remote. You know, they would say, we're
fifty miles in fifty years from Sarasota, right, So this
farming community really handled its own affairs, large companies or
very rich cattle families or orange grow families. And in
nineteen sixty four, one of the local grove owners pulled

(07:35):
one of his his you know, ranch hands or his
his workers to throw some parathion bags into the river
to get rid of these bags. And that's what he
said publicly. Well, these bags parathion was you know, about
to be banned orange grove and secticide. I mean, very
little bit of this dropped from crop dusters. I mean,

(07:57):
you know, like one pound of parathion on something like
that and one hundred gallons of water was enough, you know,
to spray over your groves to get the insects off
your oranges. You know, this this parathion was very dangerous
stuff and they needed to get rid of it. And
so this ranch hand simply threw the parathion into the river, right,

(08:18):
and those bags were discovered. You know, it was like
forty or fifty bags, I don't remember, but it was
a lot of parathion. It was enough to kill every man,
woman and child in the city. And they actually threw
those bags right across the river from the city's water
intake valves where they would process the water for drinking.

(08:39):
I mean, it was a miracle that, you know that
the people in Arcadia didn't die like Beaupoul, India. And
so this was kind of a you know, this presage
what was to come this this murder in nineteen sixty
seven of seven children from parathion poisoning. You write that

(09:02):
parathion was also sold as a roach killer in the
poorer areas of in cities. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean Florida.
You know, think of think of Florida before air conditioning.
Think of Florida before the Interstates. Right, Florida was an
agricultural state. It had you know, orange grove sugar, you know, citrus,

(09:23):
also phosphate mining cattle, and so it had a lot
of towns like Belglade and Cluiston and a Mocholy and
Arcadia in the south that were kind of like grapes
of wrath, you know, with with workers in camps, sometimes
off grid, migrant encampments with no power, you know, really

(09:43):
tough you know stuff, really tough stuff in the history
of American agriculture, and so it wasn't uncommon for these
poor areas with no ac you don't have roaches Florida
roaches are disgusting and very famous, and they would sell
parathion in little baggies to spread out on your floor
sometimes in your houses, to kill the roaches. Well, the

(10:06):
problem is little children crawl on the floor. People drop
food on the floor and pick them up a chicken
wing or a piece you know whatever, a sandwich. People
you know have what the two second rule or whatever
it is, and children would die. People would die around
Florida parathion poisoning. And it's really unknown how many, but

(10:28):
it was enough for even the state to say, enough
with this, enough with the parathion. It's going to kill
your workers. You know, we need to get this stuff
out of our fields, which had really happened by the
mid nineteen sixties. I mean, this was why the orange
grove owner in Arcadia was telling his worker to get
rid of the parathion. He meant to bury it, I believe,

(10:48):
which would still be horrible, but the guy threw it
in the river.

Speaker 2 (10:54):
You're right that blacks were day wage farmers, fruit pickers, porters, stevedores, cooks, butlers,
grannies and maids. You also talk about James Richardson and
his wife, Anime Richardson working in the fields and the
use of parathigh on, especially on the fruit fields and

(11:16):
the orange groves. So tell us about James Richardson and
his wife and their seven children.

Speaker 3 (11:23):
Okay, so that's the background Arcadie, Right, this tough southern town.
It's only twenty five miles from Punting Order on the coast,
it's fifty miles from Sarasota, but it's remarkably remote, remarkably
you know, racist and tough. You know, it's a tough,
tough place. In those days. This was before the great

(11:44):
influx of Hispanic workers, you know, with segregation was still
in place. Arcadia had seasonal African American workers. Right prior
to the Civil Rights Movement, African Americans had had very
very little access to jobs, to better jobs, especially local
and state government jobs, federal jobs, and so a lot

(12:06):
of them were migrant workers. And Arcadia had an area
of town, the black part of town, was called the Quarters.
First time I read that, I'm like, oh, that that's awful,
and I came to realize that it wasn't a reference
to slave quarters. Arcadia was built after the Civil War.
It was a reference to migrant laborers. Again like Selina's, California,

(12:28):
or the valley in southern Texas. I mean, this was
where workers would come seasonally to pick the oranges. And
so this man named James Richardson, he was about thirty.
He was a garbage man at times in Jacksonville or
in the Daytona Beach area, and he and his common
law wife. You know, there were so many migrant workers

(12:52):
they posited James as kind of they depicted him as
a big amiss, but he wasn't. Migrant laborers would have relationships,
but you know, they're not in their town where they
got married. Where are they going to get divorced? How
are they going to pay for this. Many of them
were illiterate in the fifties and sixties, and so it
wasn't uncommon for marriages to fall apart and to you

(13:14):
would remarry or pick up with someone else because your
migrant laborers, you might not see your wife or your
husband again. So James had his third wife. Essentially they
were not married. They had a blended family of seven children.
You know, she was in her thirties too. By all accounts,
he wasn't a bad guy. You know, he would run

(13:36):
out of money and not pay for his children, and
sometimes she would go to the court to get him
to pay money. But then other times they'd be back
together and he'd be playing with the children. But most
people in Arcadia saw him as a decent person. He
certainly wasn't violent. He was hard of hearing. He may
have had some sort of learning disabilities, we don't know,

(13:58):
but he wasn't an educ man, and he didn't have
any money, and they were living in the quarters in
this old four or five apartment kind of duplex. I
can only guess. I've seen pictures that's been torn down.
What they called it a hotel at one time, but
I think it was, you know, a two story, cheaply
built old you know, Molby duplex that was rented out

(14:23):
to migrant laborers. And I think one or two of
the apartments were completely shut off, I believe. I don't
even it had running water. I don't think it had
a bathroom inside. I'm not sure. But the entire family
lived in there. They had children ages you know, two
to seven, somewhere in elementary school at the local Smith

(14:44):
Brown School, which was the segregated elementary school that had
segregated high school. The others were at home, you know.
And so each day Ani May, the wife and James,
or each evening they would make food, usually something that
would keep like rice, beans and rice, some sort of dish.
They would put it in an old, beat up refrigerator

(15:06):
that wasn't plugged in, and then they would go out
into the fields and a next door neighbor, as a favor,
would watch over the little ones who essentially played in
the yard and roamed around freely while the other ones
and so what happened was Anime made the food, James

(15:27):
helped they put it in this refrigerator. They had some
of the food, it was beans and rice in a
dish called hogshead, and then they went out in the fields. Well,
during the middle of the day, the babysitter had been
watching the kids the chill. She opened the food fed
it to them for lunch. The older children had come
home from school that had an open lunch period, and

(15:50):
they all ate. The kids went back to school, and
maybe an hour later, the ones at school began convulsing
at their desks, boaming at the mouth. He just one interviewee.
One person testified in court. The little girl was she
was like seven. Maybe she was holding the edge of
her desk rigidly and shaking and looking up towards the heavens,

(16:11):
boaming at the mouth. I mean, this girl was dying
of violent death. Someone had put parafigh on in the fruit. Right.
We don't know who did it or how you know.
It could have been on purpose, it could have been
an accident. But all of the children begin dying, both
at home and at school. And that's when the local

(16:32):
sheriff and the local judge and the media get involved.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. Now you talk about DeSoto County Sheriff Frank Klein,
and you read about his reputation and his record before
this incident. Tell us a little bit about county Sheriff
Frank Klein and coroner Judge Gordon Hay.

Speaker 3 (17:02):
Hay. Yes, you know, these small counties and you can
look back all over the South. They were kingdoms to themselves, right,
You truly had to be corrupted in a very public fashion,
were overtly violent in a very public fashion. The media
would have to get involved. And again De Soto was

(17:23):
far out, you know, and so many sheriffs were known
for being kind of judge and jury, you know, acting extraitially.
And Frank Klin wasn't especially liked by a lot of
people in town, but he had been very successful as
a deputy in rounding up people who were stealing cattle.

(17:45):
Believe it or not, in the fifties and sixties, Arcadia
has still had cattle rustlers on occasion. You'll still hear
people stealing cows today out into Soto County. And so
Klein had the backing of you know, you know, powerful
cattle families and people wanted to order in those days.
And there was a fear in the sixties, you know,

(18:07):
of of African Americans of desegregation of nineteen sixty seven
was the summer of rage, you know, riots in cities
all over America, right it was. It was a very
testy time. And so Kline wins his election and is
going to be the sheriff, you know, from you know,
sixty six or sixty seven, you know, all the way

(18:27):
up into the nineteen eighties. And so Kleine comes to
the hospital to see what's going on, and because there's
a death, he's accompanied by a local judge, a judge
who had been in some capacity a judge for like
fifty years, Gordon Hayes. He had been the youngest judge

(18:49):
at the time in Florida, maybe in Florida's history, you know,
right out of college. I think he was running for
judge in an election, just that he had graduated from
law school and didn't even have his de ploma in hand.
They were going to mail it to them. They both
come to the hospital and James and ani May are
rushed in from the Orange Grove, you know that one

(19:10):
of their four men drives them in. They don't know
what's going on. They get to the hospital and a
nurse comes up, and he's informed by a nurse and
by a local white minister in the small chapel in
the church, all of your children have died, all all
of your children. And so Anime collapses on the floor

(19:33):
and James reportedly is just stunned, stunned, and a nurse
comes in and says, do you have insurance? Right? Meaning
you know, from as far as I could tell, just
being an average Joe, meaning do you have insurance to
pay for the medical bills right from you know, dealing
with the seven kids? But James, James doesn't have medical insurance.

(19:56):
He thought, she you know, life insurance, like James didn't
even really underst stand, and he said no. I tried
to buy some last night the other day from a
white itinerant insurance salesman walking through the quarters. And I
thought that was so weird. I mean, how strange or

(20:19):
what are the odds of an insurance salesman coming through
the quarters, going door to door? I thought, what kind
of business is that? I mean, in this day and age,
it just sounds crazy. But I happened to interview an
old a sheriff from another county, and I mentioned the
story and he said, oh, my father did that, a
white sheriff. And I'm like, your Dad went door to
door in Florida in these counties, and he said, oh, yeah, yeah,

(20:42):
you know, you could sell policies out of your office
to middle class and richer white families, but if you
wanted any part of the business of all these migrant laborers,
you had to go to them. And they would pay
higher deductibles, they would pay more money for less insurance,
and it was very lucrative. And I still it blows

(21:04):
my mind. But it wasn't that uncommon that that once
a week some some salesman from somewhere would go door
to door and a salesman, a white insurance salesman named
Gerald Purvis, had come through the quarters, knocked on James's
door and had sat down with him to sell him
a policy. Right, And so that's when Annie May is

(21:27):
making the food right. The babysitter was there at the
time too, and James says, yeah, you know, how much
for life insurance for everyone? Right? And you can imagine
a migrant labor and dangerous jobs, you know, falling office hitters,
grow of ladder. You know, you're holding forty and fifty
pounds sacks doing other jobs where you could be killed.

(21:50):
You know it wasn't uncommon at all for very very
poor migrant laborers to pay for insurance once a week
out of cash when they were paid, or twice, you know,
once every two weeks. And so James said, well, how
much would it be for life insurance for everyone in
the family. And then the insurance man said this much?

(22:12):
And then he said, well, how much would it cost
to double it? And he said this much and he
wrote it down on a business card, you know, which
on the back had little lines how you know how
much this policy would be?

Speaker 1 (22:25):
What term?

Speaker 3 (22:26):
And he just filled it out and he said, well,
it'd be this much money. And James says, I don't
have it. And he asked the babysitter, can I borrow money?
And she said no, I don't have any money. And
so James said, come back, come back next week when
I'm paid, and the insurance salesman said, okay, you know
I will, but I won't be back until whatever day.

(22:46):
So there was no policy, no plan, nothing signed, and
no records at all submitted to the insurance company. Right
and so right away in the chapel of the hospital,
James says to the nurse, I tried to buy some insurance,
but I didn't have any money, and you know, that's

(23:09):
what he says. But right away the corner, the judge
who's the corner, and Sheriff Kline glom onto that immediately
to that idea that he had insurance. But these are
two different questions, right, do you have medical insurance for
this deal or do you have life? You know, that

(23:30):
wasn't even part of it, but they ran with that,
and so the judge claims that he spoke to richardson
the corner and Richardson said he had life insurance, while
the nurse and also the insurance salesman later but the
white minister who was there said James said he never

(23:52):
had insurance. So we get two conflicting statements, won by
a very well known and powerful local judge and won
by a local white minister who who they completely conflict.
But it doesn't matter. Sheriff Kleine races back with Hayes
with the corner back to the Richardson residence where he

(24:15):
begins collecting things for the state. He goes four or
five times, I believe five times, and he says that
the smell of parathion was so strong you could taste it. Right.
He said it was like putting a penny in your mouth.
Never put a penny in your mouth. That was it.
And he said it was so strong as you walked
into the house. Right, That was his claim. Those were

(24:37):
his words. And soon he begins focusing on James Richardson
over everyone else, everyone else involved in Richardson becomes you know,
the chief suspect.

Speaker 2 (24:50):
You say that they searched the home. They went back
five times for the source, as later called the murder weapon,
the source of the parathion, searched an area, including a shed,
and didn't find any parathion. Tell us about the discovery
of parathion and the shed to follow the day.

Speaker 3 (25:11):
Yeah, this is this is crazy, you know. And so
you know, I spoke to law enforcement and other in
other jurisdictions in Florida, and I spoke to a man
who became a sheriff in my home county who was
from Arcadia. He grew up there and left and went
one county over. And he said that that the police
training was nonexistent in those days in Arcadia. They didn't

(25:35):
have kits in the back of their cars, like gloves.
They didn't have any inkling of how to handle a
crime scene, none at all, and including the sheriff, and
and so they're traps about and once he focuses on Richardson,
they're looking for evidence that Richardson did it. Well, they

(25:55):
do not find any parathion. They find it everywhere. It's
dusted all over the place, it's in clothes, it's just
all over the apartment, which is bizarre. You know, if
James is going to kill the kids, you would put
it in the food. You wouldn't throw it all over
the apartment where you yourself would be. And so you know,

(26:17):
who knows how it got there, honestly, But Kleine did
not really focus on the babysitter. And this blows my mind.
It was a woman named Betsy Reese. She was in
her early forties, kind of a tough Mannish woman who
was somewhat of a character in the community, but one

(26:40):
that people were noticeably afraid of. She had killed her
first husband some years before, right and in some sort
of domestic spat. Had been given a twenty year sentence
but let out after only two years, which is so odd.
And she had a number of children in the community.
She had an a adult daughter and a granddaughter and

(27:03):
she was the one watching the kids. And there were
stories that she didn't like James. There were all these
whispers that she had maybe a lesbian relationship with Annie May,
the wife, that's unconfirmed. There was another story that James
had taken her second or third husband to Jacksonville and

(27:24):
left him there because the man didn't want to live
with her anymore. So there were whispers that she was
mad at James or you know, giving her husband a
ride or helping them leave her. Right, there were all
these rumors that were unsubstantiated that you know, Betsy Reese
was mad at James for some reason. But she was

(27:46):
certainly an odd, odd bird. She wore dungarees, you know,
she was just a strange woman, even you know, in
the quarters in those days. And so Kleine is looking
for this parathion. He goes back. His deputies are searching,
even he's the sheriff of DeSoto County, but also the

(28:08):
Arcadia Police Department, a very small police department. They're tracing
about and looking, and they do not find any parathion, right,
and it should be in some sort of bag. But
it's also odd though no one had been using parathion
for a number of years. They're not selling it in
the store. So whoever had this it's an old bag, right,

(28:29):
it must be. And so they're searching and there's an outbuilding,
like a little greenhouse type building that's largely empty. There's
a bag of line in it for gardening. But that's
not going to kill anyone. It wouldn't be pleasant on
your throat. But lime like that isn't like parathion. And
so they search it nothing. They go out there four

(28:49):
or five times. They search all the outbuildings. They search
everywhere but Betsy Reese's apartment, which is mind boggling. So,
you know, like a day or two later, they're interviewing
Betsy Reese and a local drunkard, a man who was
known for being drunk quite a lot, Charlie Smith. Charlie

(29:12):
Smith comes in and tells him that he found a
bag of parathion in that outbuilding. This is after the
police had searched it four or five times. He said
he heard up on you know, I was over here
and I was up on the Orange Avenue, which is,
you know, the kind of MLK Boulevard today, the central
Black business district. I was up there and you know,

(29:32):
I was worried about kids. I heard this, I you know,
I heard I heard from this guy and this guy.
And he couldn't really tell the sheriff where he had
heard about it, but the story kept changing, but he
knew there was a bag of parathion in the shed.
So he and Betsy Reese. I don't know, what are they,
you know, citizen detectives. I mean, it's just foolish to

(29:55):
even think about. Or are they they lying? Are they bullshitting?
What are they doing? But they find this back They
go in after it's a crime scene. It should be
completely taped off. It doesn't exist. There no one tapes
off anything. They go in this shed and they supposedly
find a bag of parathion, an old bag open that

(30:17):
the police and the sheriff's deputies did not find, including
Klein himself. Right, So now Klein runs ahead, though he
doesn't say this is the source, he begins to imply
that they found the source of the parathion you talk
about that.

Speaker 2 (30:35):
They approach state Attorney Frank Schwab, and he is has
a quite a lengthy, letigitous reputation and record, and but
Schwab wants to talk to Gerald Purvis, and so he
interviews him. But at the same time you mentioned that

(30:56):
Klein and Hayes are claiming that Richard had double indemnity
and had asked for that and claimed that he knew
he had or believed he had insurance and asked for
double indemnity. Yes, tell us how Frank Schwab proceeds with this, Okay.

Speaker 3 (31:15):
It's Shob, Frank Schaba. Shob is the local state's attorney,
district attorney out of Bradenton. Right. He's a Northerner. He
moved down. He went to Stetson Law in Florida. But
a very grim, very tough, what one writer called a
bulldog prosecutor. Right. This was a win at any cost,

(31:38):
take no prisoners law and order district attorney. But he
is not from Arcadia. He lives in this newer sun
belt area Bradenton. Right. It's still old Florida, it's still
an old town, but he's certainly not from inland Arcadia.
And so the press descends upon, you know, southwest Florida.

(32:02):
I mean you even get the New York Times down
Miami Herald, right, and so they start to write about Arcadier,
write about this old southern town that seems to be
out of you know, a Faulkner novel. It was really
eye opening for writers who were from the coast, you know,
coming year. No condominiums, no three bedroom, two bass stucco

(32:23):
houses with with you know, pools. This wasn't Sarasota, this
wasn't Fort Myers, right, And so shab and Hayes begin
having press conferences and I mean, Klein, excuse me, the sheriff,
Frank Klein, I don't know. Maybe he sees this as
his moment to shine, to his moment to be I

(32:47):
don't know, the deputy dog who knows. But he starts
to tell the press. You know, we've found the culprit,
insurance was the motive, and we've found the murder weapon.
That kind of stuff, right, I mean, you know, sheriffs
aren't really supposed to make other than factual statements. You know,

(33:08):
they're really not, because it can skew a jury pool,
It can cause you know, the media to get into
a frenzy. It could really cause problems for any kind
of prosecution. So you're generally supposed to arrest someone, state
the facts of the arrest, state the charges, and then
hand it over and keep your mouth shut, right, shab

(33:29):
just didn't know that, right, This is the biggest case
to ever come anywhere near De Soto County. And so
he's blabbing and blabbing and blabbing and shob The district attorney,
you know, fifty sixty miles away, is going, man, shut up, right.
We need to take this to a grand jury. This
isn't your business to air out, you know, And especially

(33:53):
when they don't have a true murder weapon, especially when
purpose the insurance salesman is adamant that he did not
sell insurance, and so what kind of insurance Klein is
running with? Richardson said he had double indemnity life insurance.

(34:15):
Richardson had no clue what the term double indemnity was, right,
The idea that if there's some sort of foul play,
like like in the movie Double Indemnity, You know, people
don't really know what that is, it's simply double the
insurance in cases of foul play. Right, He didn't have
any such insurance purposes, like, I don't even know what

(34:36):
you're talking about. And he said to investigators numerous times
he did not inquire about double indemnity life insurance. In fact,
the policy that Richardson even inquired about was for accidental death. Right,
So there's no way that. I mean, it's just nonsensical, right.

(34:58):
You know that this motive of insurance had too many
holes in it, right? Could Richardson have thought that? I
don't believe so, But you know, fine argue that in court.
But you know, right away Klein runs with this motive
that it's double indemnity, and that sounds bad and so
all over the country, but especially in Florida newspapers. Sheriff

(35:20):
sees insurance motive. Sheriff sees insurance motive. Great bad news,
bad news for Richardson and shob as the DA is saying,
wait a minute, wait a minute, let's let's hold back
on this a little bit. But the sheriff really ran
out ahead and kind of forced the hand. I believe

(35:42):
of this district attorney. You know, he's not around for
me to interview, you know, he the district attorney would
it would later be adamant that Richardson, you know, had
had done it again without any real verifiable motive and
certainly no murder weapon. But at first the sheriff and
the DA didn't like each other. They didn't like, and

(36:04):
I believe the DA at first thought, this is going
to be hard to prosecute. You know, you're making it
harder for me because the sheriff wouldn't shut up.

Speaker 2 (36:13):
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. Now you talk about Klein and Gordon Hayes
judge coroner. There was resistance with Shob DA Shob State
Attorney Shob. So they circumvented that by having and calling
a coroner's inquest. Tell us about this coroner's inquest and

(36:38):
why it got the results for Klein and Hayes that
they most seriously desired.

Speaker 3 (36:45):
Yeah, you know, you can, you know, and I'm not
an attorney, and I'm sure attorney's listening to this will know.
But but very rarely in Florida you would see corner's
inquest when you know, when it's difficult to figure out
how a body has come to be a body, how
someone has died, you know, usually a corner, like a

(37:06):
real medical examiner, will examine and say it's homicide, it's suicide,
it's accidental that you know whatever. But there is a
way in under laws that the corner can have an inquest,
which is essentially like a mini grand jury, and they
can listen to evidence and they can file charges, right,

(37:27):
they can file charges, say way a grand jury can
now shaw the DA you know, one county over further
into Bradenton out on the coast, doesn't want to do that.
He wants to go to his own grand jury. And so,
for whatever reason, Kleine and Hayes, we're adamant about bringing
charges against this black man who had now been arrested.

(37:49):
They arrested the wife of anime and James child you know,
some sort of child neglect endangerment charge so they could
hold it. So they're in the DeSoto ca on jail.
Animey is you know, in one area alone, and James
has various roommates and cellmates. And so they hold this

(38:11):
corner's inquest and they arrest him for murder after a
lie detector test. It's Florida Department of Law Enforcement fdl
E brings a man in. There's no record of what
questions were asked. Light detector tests aren't admissible in Florida
courts virtually every court as far as I know, because

(38:33):
they bring up false positives. And Richmond and Richardson could
not hear well, and so he's asked questions and he
doesn't pass. They say he fails. But again there's no
record ever submitted to the courts. There's no record in
the thousands of pages that the FDL E sent to

(38:54):
me or the FBI or the local courthouse of what
was in this test. Also, no one knows who was
in the room. And so that's another thing I'll bring
up in a second. Was he intimidated? And the answer
is yes, he was. It's not admissible. So James is
arrested and immediately when he fails this lie detector test,

(39:19):
the deputies are running out of the room, going, he
did it, We got him, we got him. He did
it right, because they don't even know. These dim wit
deputies don't even know that it's not admissible. And so
Richardson then is now a killer, right, a killer? And
the press is wondering, you know, you know, and Arcadie

(39:40):
had moved on from its earlier history of lynchings and
clan and you know, it still wasn't a pretty place,
but it wasn't you know, in the heat of the night,
but there was fear. Even the press was like, are
people going to run into the jail and lynch this guy,
or are you know, are they going to kill him?
Which wasn't gonna happen, but I mean, you know, that
was the atmosphere. And again he had lost his seven children, right,

(40:04):
I mean, he's got to be got to be out
of his mind, right. And so then the next thing
that happens is they want Richardson to confess and they're
interviewing him and interviewing him and interviewing it. And really
only one, as far as I could tell, out of
all the papers that I found, only one interview with
Richardson survived. And they're supposed to have talked to him

(40:27):
for hours and hours and hours. Well somewhere along the line.
This blows my mind. And this is when I know
something was wrong that the local sheriff and I don't
quite know whose idea it was, the sheriff or the
district attorney, but they reached out to an African American

(40:47):
deputy in a mocaly. A mocaly is a tough tomato
and sugar town, a real tough migrant labor town in
Callyer County where Naples is, but north of Naples out
into the prairie. And his name was bad Boy Boom,
John Boom b O O M. And he was a

(41:10):
hulking African American deputy, one of the first deputies in
the state of Florida, who was known for beating confessions
out of African American prisoners. You know, he was kind
of the lackey who served the white sheriff of his county.
And you'll see, you know, I looked up Boom and
I thought, how am I gonna you know, I heard

(41:32):
of Boom, and I heard this reputation, But how am
I going to you know, find this How am I
going to find evidence that Boom used to beat prisoners? Right?
And I'm looking through old newspaper articles and there was
one from the seventies and Boom is retiring, and the
in the article from the Naples Daily News is like, oh,
John Boom from an older day when you could just
beat up prisoners. And they're telling stories of Boom beating

(41:56):
the ship out of prisoners, like in the paper, like
those were the days. And I even find a line
from Klein who says, you know, we bring in Boom
to talk to these people. It's very you know, racist rhetoric.
You know, we find that they don't want to talk
to us, but we bring in Boom and he sure
gets him to talk. He doesn't leave any marks, so

(42:17):
we don't ask any questions. He says that in the paper, right.
And so Boom is brought in from a county with
De Soto league. You know, it's three, if not four
counties away, probably ninety miles seventy five miles away. That
has nothing to do with the case, nothing to do

(42:37):
with the jurisdiction. He's brought in to essentially beat up Richardson,
you know. And Richardson claim later that Boom put a
gun in his mouth, right, And so he arrives, Boom arrives,
and James is in jail with various ne'er do wells,
three or four African American street to gamblers, you know,

(43:01):
guys who were in and out of jail all the
time that the police know. And they're looking out the
jail window and one of them says, Boom is here.
Boom is here, and they knew him, and everyone got quiet,
and Boom and Richardson, who was not in trouble, who
had not been in trouble with the law before, you know,
minor things. But I don't I don't think he'd ever

(43:22):
had any or any real arrests. Was was like, who's
who's Boom, what's happening? And they're all going, oh man,
this is bad for you. And it was right, And
so there's talk. Pete Gallagher, the Saint Petersburg Times writer
later wrote for the Miami Herald Seminole Tribune, told me
that Boom Boom admitted to him that he beat up Richardson.

(43:46):
He threatened his life, threatened a confession, wanted him to
make a confession. And in the line he had, they said,
you know, did you do this? Because man, those were
frontier times, you know, they they told me what to do,
had to do it. That's what you did, right? He
was guilty and then he said he had to be right.

(44:06):
And so there's evidence, great evidence that Richardson was coerced
or scared. And the thing is, to his credit, he
refused to admit that he killed his children. Now, finally
Cline apparently gets these three men who are in jail

(44:26):
with Richardson, whom he had never met prior to this time,
to say under oath that he admitted in prison to
killing his children. So these were jail house snitches. And
so what I think happened, and I can only surmise
this is that Kleine and Hayes ran out ahead, got
in front of the press, and then it dawned on them,

(44:48):
especially Cline, very dimly. We don't have the evidence. We
don't have the evidence, so they quickly manufactured it. One.
They brought in a thug, you know, policeman, a deputy
known for beating up people. They brought him into intimidate
or to hurt Richardson into a confession, and when that
didn't happen, they simply manufactured. It looks like they manufactured

(45:13):
admissions to three jailhouse switches. So the sum total of
Richardson's arrest and was the murder weapon, which wasn't a
murder weapon, was found right by Betsy Reese, who was
a suspect, and the insurance man's business card. The sheriff

(45:35):
will claim over and over that it was a receipt
when it was not a receipt. So there's no motive,
there's no murder weapon, and the only evidence against Richardson
is the testimony of three jailhouse snitches whom the sheriff
himself had found.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
Also right that there's a client has a bombshell and
said that testified that he'd received a from a Jacksonville, Florida,
from detectives at Duval County Sheriff's office and told them
that at least three other children of Richardson's had died
in recent years from parathion poisoning, where in fact only

(46:17):
two belonged to James, and they died of natural causes,
one for a softening of the brain due to infection
and another one died from an electrolyte imbalance. In neither
instance was there any foul play. But as you write,
in neither instance, the jury did not know this information.

Speaker 3 (46:37):
Oh yeah, you know. So we have this corner's jury
in Arcadia, and according to Pete Gallagher, who covered the
case in the eighties and it reopened, Frank Klein hand
picked the jurors, the sheriff hand picked the coroner's jury jurors.
And so he then waits. He has this big file

(46:59):
of papers. So he's the last one to testify, and
he opens this file and he's just putting his hand
on us. We have a lot of information here about
Richardson and other and I've heard from the shame and
so he claims, he claims under oath that he's received

(47:20):
this call from Jacksonville, and yes, there were Richardson children
who had died, right one Richardson wasn't even James's child,
and James had a number of children, and he wasn't
there first of all. And so Kleine implies, he doesn't
say it, but you know the insurance motive, you know.

(47:41):
And so it looks to the average person from DeSoto
County that James was a serial killer, that he's killing
off children for insurance money when he never got any
money for any child dying. There's no evidence that any
of one of them was poisoned. Right, And the sheriff
in Duvalci he later says, well, whoa, whoa, whoa. I

(48:01):
never said that. I never said that. But it didn't matter.
You know, by that point, the corner's jury had you know,
issued u you know, a warrant or warn't for his arrest.
You know that he was, you know, indicted, essentially indicted
for murder, premeditated murder. Now what's crazy about all this

(48:22):
is the sheriff does not consider Betsy Reese a suspect.
He really didn't. He didn't search her house at first,
which may explain that the paratheon bag was in her house.
I do not know her apartment which was right next door,
that she could have easily taken the bag out and

(48:44):
put it in in in that in that outbuilding because
she didn't want to be searched later. Right. But Kleine,
you know, really didn't treat her as a suspect. Right.
He interviewed her again and again, and the questions weren't
did you do it? Or what do you know about this?
But tell me about Richardson. Right, So people were wondering

(49:06):
what is up with that.

Speaker 2 (49:09):
Let's get to November sixty seven and you write about
the elected president of the Florida chapter of the DOUBLEACP
was a Baptist reverend named Joel Atkins. And also this
inquest got the attention of a Daytona Beach personal injury attorney,

(49:30):
John Spencer. Robinson and Robinson asked Atkins if the n
DOUBLEACP intended to defend Richardson, and they had said yes,
and so he was added to the list of attorneys
and then Richardson became his client, and John Spencer Robinson

(49:52):
enters into this incredible story.

Speaker 3 (49:55):
Robinson, John Robinson was a Daytona Beach kind of real
estate some personal injury attorney who had never really been
in a criminal court. He was a white liberal dogoter,
you know, a guy who had done a lot of
good things like boys clubs, and you know, he helped
run the United Negro College Fund, fundraising for a local

(50:16):
African American college. He was a good dude who had
been in politics locally, and he knew the head of
the NAACP, and he called them and said, are you
watching what's happened on TV? Are you watching what's happening
to this Richardson guy? I want to represent him? And
so he takes on representation of Richardson. Now by this point,

(50:38):
Frank Schaub, the district attorney, is kind of forced to
get involved. Right, Klein is screaming up and down. They've
got the they've got the coroner's jury indictment. And now
Frank Schab takes this evidence, these three snitches, you know,
the bag of parathion, the insurance, even though there's nothing

(50:59):
there really, he gets a grand jury in Tampa to
indict and so there's a trial in Fort Myers in
Lee County. They move it out of DeSoto County and
John Robinson does his best, but he's completely overwhelmed by
Frank Shap. Frank Schab is one of the best attorneys
in Florida. He's got the power of the state behind him.

(51:20):
He once beat f Lee Bailey in court. And Robinson
has no ability, really, and he does a poor job
of sussing out the problems he really does. You know,
as much as I admire the guy for being the
only one who really wanted to help Richardson, he does
a terrible job and inclined allows or Cline testifies that

(51:43):
he got a receipt. That Richardson got a receipt, so
he perjures himself under oath in the least, he made
a very bad mistake and Chab let him say it right.
Chob missed it, or let him say it, and Robinson
didn't object. So Richardson's going to get the death penalty right.

(52:07):
People think he is guilty, and so in May of
nineteen sixty eight, he goes to Rayford and spends the
next twenty years in jail.

Speaker 2 (52:19):
You introduced another incredible character with a incredible record himself,
Mark Lane. Attorney Mark Lane, tell us about this character.

Speaker 3 (52:30):
Mark Lane, and so you know the press knew something
was wrong. Right, this all smelled. The number one question
is if the sheriff could walk into the duplex and
spell the parathion that it was so overpowering, then why
would the children eat the food? Right? It's absurd? Right?

(52:52):
You know that clearly there was something wonky with this story.
Either he was lying or exaggerating, or you know that
the babysitter would have noticed this food was rancid. And
so the press got a hold of it. It was
in like US News, it was in Time, it was
in all these magazines, and this fascinating, if not somewhat crazy.

(53:16):
Attorney Mark Lane got involved. He saw it in a magazine.
He was speaking at the University of South Florida, rented
a car and he drove over to Arcadia to ask
some questions to see if he could write a book. Now,
who was Mark Lane? Mark Lane was a former New
York assemblyman who was kind of a mixture of a

(53:36):
yellow journalist, pamphleteer, activist lawyer. He was always behind very
liberal causes. He represented Jane Fonda during her drug arrest.
He was the first person to write about the Kennedy
assassination almost immediately saying that it was a conspiracy. And

(53:57):
he was the one to popularize kind of the grassy
nol conspiracy theories.

Speaker 2 (54:02):
Right.

Speaker 3 (54:03):
But he was a moneymaker. He loved to be out
ahead of issues. He loved to be on talk shows.
You know. He was a radical activist who often was
more concerned with Mark Lane than he was with the issues.
For example, he had Lee Harvey Oswald's mother on a
stage in Manhattan just weeks after the assassination, right, and

(54:24):
he was charging, you know, ten dollars a ticket. And
so this is what he would do. Later. He represented
James Earl Ray, He represented Jim Jones at Jonestown. You know,
this was a celebrity lawyer of the kind of Kardashian ilk, right.
And so he comes to Arcadia and writes a book.
He writes a book and publishes it in nineteen seventy

(54:46):
called Arcadia, in which he just excoriates the town, implying
that the babysitter did it and later implying that the
sheriff had improper relations with the babysitter's daughter, a white
sheriff in a black woman, which wasn't proved. Also implying
that the sheriff ran like bolita rackets, which was like

(55:08):
illegal gambling, that Betsy Reese, the babysitter ran. You know
that he had all these reasons to pin the crime
on Richardson and to take the heat off of Betsy Reese.
None of that was proven, but that would follow the
sheriff for decades.

Speaker 2 (55:24):
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. You talk about this book and you say
it was a dud with sales, and it was a
dud in the press, and it was dubbed a call
a rush to print instead of a rush to judgment.

Speaker 3 (55:44):
Yeah, his first book was rush to judgment about Kennedy.
And someone made the joke that you know, this book Arcadia,
and it was bad. It was half of it was
a trial transcript that he had edited. He just rushed
through it, and there were mistakes to stake Robinson for Richardson,
and he you know, did lots of things and it

(56:05):
just really wasn't very good and it certainly didn't help Richardson.
People who reviewed the book. One person wrote, yeah, there's
probably something here, but we don't really believe Mark Lane.
Most people don't he's too shrill. Somebody wrote that they
wish Ralph Nader had written it, and then maybe we
think there was something there that we'd believe in, right,

(56:27):
And so Richardson languishes, Mark Lane moves on to other things.
He represents Jim Jones later and is actually in Jonestown,
and Richardson has forgotten, you know, for for decades. And
one thing will change, and that's in nineteen seventy nine
or nineteen eighty. There's a local kind of ne'er do well.

(56:48):
I use that word a lot, of a white guy
from Arcadia. You know, he goes into bars and he fights,
and he gets arrested for pod and you know, just
a local knucklehead. Remus Griffin, a white guy. He's in
his early twenties, and he's dating a woman who's the
secretary to the assistant district attorney, an old Arcadia lawyer

(57:11):
who worked with Frank Klin back at the time this
case was being prosecuted. And this man reportedly had a
problem with alcohol and he would come into work sometimes blotto.
That was the story reported into the press. And he
would say to his secretaries, which they alleged he said,
I put an innocent man in prison. I put an

(57:32):
innocent man in prison. He would blubber that that's what
they reported. And so the secretary comes home and she says,
you know, Remus, he says, he put an innocent man
in prison, and he also said he has the files
in the office. And Remus doesn't like the police. He's
been in jail himself for dumb things. He's like, hold

(57:53):
on what and he gets the story and then one
night he goes, honey, can I borrow your car keys?
I'm gonna go get some cigarette or something like that,
and he goes to the office, breaks in, essentially, you know,
commits a crime. You know, he uses the key and
he finds the evidence, the original case files, right, and

(58:15):
he steals them. Now, the number one thing he is
going to find is that the insurance salesman's interviews in
the minister's interviews, both of which said that Richardson did
not have insurance, were not turned over to the defense. Right,
this was exculpatory evidence and this was going to free
James Richardson.

Speaker 2 (58:37):
So that information he wants to take it to still
his attorney, Richardson's attorney, Robinson. What does Robinson say about
this newly discovered evidence.

Speaker 3 (58:50):
Yeah, I mean by this point, Robinson again, he's a
good man, I think, and he's befriended James Richardson. He
even hasn't moved over to a prison here Daytona Beach,
Whererobinson is from, and he visits him, he writes him
he probably puts money in his prison canteen, right, but
he is, I believe, probably ashamed the way he defended Richardson.

(59:12):
You know, it was already stacked. You know. I feel
for the guy, but he did a bad job, and
he was banking on getting Richardson out after a twenty
year term or something like that, maybe a twenty five
year term, and that if he you know, and Richardson
was seen by prisoners as an innocent man, right. Even

(59:32):
a prison warden said he was an innocent man. He said,
everybody in here is innocent, but James is innocent, right,
And so Robinson didn't want to upset the Apple card. Plus,
you have this crazy dude on a telephone he doesn't know,
saying I broke into a DA's office or a lawyer's

(59:52):
office and I got the box. Well that's stolen, that's
stolen material. And what if there's nothing in it, right,
And so Robinson is like, I don't need to do this.
I don't want it. I don't want the box. And
then you know, this remiss is like, well what do
I do? Right? If the sheriff really is this corrupt,

(01:00:13):
which again, you know, who knows. There's no evidence that
people always said he was corrupt. There were all these
FBI in DEA and FDL reports, but he was never prosecuted.
The sheriff never had any charges against him. But if
he really was that corrupt, maybe I'm gonna end up
in the piece where you know, maybe someone's going to
kill me. And so he gives the box to a

(01:00:34):
woman who used to work for the Sheriff's department, who
does not like the sheriff. And she's moved out past
Clewiston in the middle of almost to the Everglades and
in a place called Devil's Garden, right, this crazy semi
housing development way out in the middle of nowhere. And
she keeps the box for the better part of a decade, right,

(01:00:57):
And it's going to resurface in a babysitter in a
nursing home. Betsy Reese, she's now in her sixties, she
has dementia, she has Alzheimer's. Keeps saying out loud, I
killed them children, I killed them children. And she's gonna
say it more than a hundred times once that Once

(01:01:19):
that rumor starts getting back to the quarters that Betsy
Reese is talking. Betsy Reese is talking. Now does she
mean that she killed the kids or does she mean
she did it on accident? Who knows? She couldn't testify,
But that filters to the quarters, which filters to John Robinson,
and it filters back to Mark Lane, who rushes to

(01:01:42):
Arcadia to have you know, a kind of a truth
to power rally. You know, let's not hide from the
truth anymore, and let's see what we can find and
open this case again.

Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
So how does this movement to release James Richardson, how
does it proceed? What does Mark Lane do?

Speaker 3 (01:02:01):
Yeah, Well, the Remus found the box in like eighty
and so this is nineteen eighty eight, right August of
nineteen eighty eight. Mark Lane comes in and he's got
this this testimony which he knows he can't use in court,
but it's enough for him to rabble routs, right, that's
what he does. He's very good at this I love
Lane as a character. He needs to be a you know,

(01:02:23):
a Netflix series of craziness, right, And he comes in
to the former segregated school Smith Brown, and he has
kind of a rally where he says, I believe he's innocent.
I spoke to this man, and he plays a tape
from James Richardson, thank you all for believing in me,
and he goes, if anyone has any new evidence, if

(01:02:44):
anyone you know has anything new to say, don't be afraid,
come forward. Who everyone leaves except for the last person
in the building, Remus Griffin. Guy, a white guy and
a cowboy hat walks up and he says, I got
a box and explains where he got it and explains

(01:03:04):
what's in it. And so that box eventually goes from
Devil's Garden from this woman's you know, trailer park to Robinson,
who gives the box the Lane, and from then on
Lane starts working the press. I mean, he's he's remarkable,
you know. He gets the Richardson case as the first

(01:03:24):
ever episode of Inside Edition, right, and so he starts
digging through this. He gets Steve Joffrey, of a Hollywood
producer and writer that he's worked with in the past,
involved Steve Jaffee, he gets you know, they sell the
rights to the the David Wolfer Productions, which did roots right,

(01:03:45):
So they're they're they're starting to try to make money
on this, to monetize this, but they're also starting a
letter writing campaign to the governor. You know, they they're
they're just playing the press incredibly well, which is what
that's his sweet spot, that's what he does. And finally
the governor of Florida realizes that there's something here. I've

(01:04:06):
got to address this. The Congressional Black Caucus gets involved.
You know, there's thousands of letters arriving at the Governor's mansion,
Free James Richardson, Free James Richardson. And finally he appoints
a Miami attorney at a Miami State's attorney, Janet Reno,
to look into the case. Right this is in nineteen

(01:04:30):
eighty nine, early nineteen eighty nine, and she starts to
investigate the case, to look through the files, and Department
and Law Enforcement FDL officers are driving around the state
interviewing people involved until they come up with with what
they believe is the answer.

Speaker 2 (01:04:50):
And what is Mark Lane's narrative for this crime.

Speaker 3 (01:04:55):
Mark Lane begins insisting flat out that the sheriff was
having an affair with Betsy Reese's daughter, that he was
a white sheriff in a segregated town in the sixties
who was having an affair with a black woman, and
that they even had a child. There was that woman's

(01:05:17):
child was mocked mercilessly. She was light skinned by the
African American community. You know, just a sad, sad story.
And it breaks my heart for you know, Betsy Reese's
children through this, because Frank Klein would eventually take a
DNA test to prove that the child wasn't his. I mean,
that proved that he didn't have an affair. No, but

(01:05:39):
you know, it was that level of kind of gloves
were off, you know, and Lane would say, they lied,
they put an innocent man in prison, They did it
to hide an extra marital affair. Again, none of it
was proven, but it was so nasty that it dogged
Klein's family, and it dogged Reese's family, and it really
dogged Arcadia. And then you know, he becomes personally opposed

(01:06:05):
and angry at Frank Shab and these two begin to
butt heads Shab actually sues him for slander, like a
thirty million dollar lawsuit, but none of that goes anywhere,
right because the evidence will will come forward that Shab
buried these exculpatory interviews, which is an utter no no.

(01:06:26):
And in legal circles, I'm sure your listeners know. I mean,
you don't do this, right, you do not do this.
Janet Reno is going to march in, I believe in
May of nineteen eighty nine, march into Arcadia and it's
a you know, just an explosive rehearing of the evidence,
and essentially the whole case gets thrown out, the whole

(01:06:46):
thing gets no prost and Richardson is released.

Speaker 2 (01:06:51):
What happens afterwards with this? You talk about comedian faned,
comedian Dick Gregory.

Speaker 3 (01:06:59):
Yeah, yeah, I mean that was an odd, odd little
entry into this. But Mark Lane actually, back in the sixties,
I believe in nineteen sixty eight ran kind of a
mock presidential ticket with Dick Gregory. Dick Gregory, the black
comedian ran for president and Mark Lane was his running mate, right,
I mean, it wasn't very serious. It was like the

(01:07:21):
Hippie Freedom Party ticket something like that. Lane was still
friends with Gregory, and Gregory came to the courthouse. I
know that a number of Florida reporters Pete Gallagher, Peter Gallagher,
and Charles Flowers were writing for the Seminole Tribune and
the Miami Harold. They did amazing jobs for a reporter

(01:07:42):
for the Sarasota Herald Tribune, Wayne Hicks, Greg Pittman, as
well to Saint Petersburg Times all covered this case. Lane
Lane just got out ahead of this trying to sell
the movie rights right, and Gallagher and Flowers got out
of head of this, and they wanted to sell their
movie right.

Speaker 4 (01:08:01):
So everyone is trying to get a piece of Richardson,
and including Annie May, his wife who had stuck with him,
that Richardson will divorce and she sues him in case
he gets any kind of payout from the state. So
it kind of devolves into this this ugly, kind of
celebrity focused bizarre You know, everyone wants a piece of James,

(01:08:25):
even the people who have helped him get out. You know,
Mark Lane, I kind of see is this CD character
for all he did and I depict him as that
kind of a parasitical type lawyer.

Speaker 3 (01:08:36):
You know, are you trying to do good, you're trying
to be famous, right or both? But I have to
say that Mark Lane did the lord's work in getting
Richardson out of prison. I mean CD or not. He
got this man out of jail by by yelling his
loud yelling from the mountaintops and getting him on inside
edition that he did not do it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:59):
You right. He was seventy five years old and in
ill health and his job with Dick Gregory ended and
by early nineties he was at his sister's house in Jacksonville, Florida, penniless.
He became a minister while he was in prison, but
he lived off of small movie rights advances from Hollywood
producer Steve Jaffey and Jaffee you say Richardson had divorced

(01:09:22):
Annie May and remarried, but he signed this film contract
negotiated by Jaffe with CBS, and the day after he
had a heart attack and ended up in Wichita, where
a wealthy cardiologist, Joseph Galicia, offered treatment for free and
offered him a job as a caretaker and lived on
his ranch. Tell us a little bit about what happens

(01:09:44):
with Richardson after this in terms of.

Speaker 3 (01:09:48):
Sure Sure Richardson. He was well liked. People liked him,
other prisoners liked him, people who met him liked him.
He wasn't some sort of Svengali. He was just a
kindly man who had gone through hell. And there's no
evidence whatsoever. I mean, did I know, Do I know
if he did it or not? No? I can't say

(01:10:11):
that looking back. But have I found a single sentilla
of evidence that he put the parathion in the kid's food? No,
not at all. In fact, it looks like there's no motive.
There's no mot or weapon. It looks like he was railroaded. Right.
But the problem was, under Florida law, Richardson could not
receive compensation unless he had been unless there was evidence

(01:10:35):
to show that he was innocent, or that he had
been proclaimed innocent by a court. Janet Reno came in
and the judge simply declared the proceedings null and void
and released him. Right. The state of Florida could have
filed new charges, right, and so James could not get
any compensation. Other people in Florida did, and so there

(01:10:58):
was a movement later, I mean well into the two thousand.
So Richardson gets out in nineteen eighty nine. He's a
poor health, he has no skills, he's you know, getting
up there in years. He's you know, destitute. So he
goes to live with his former cardiologist who feels for him,
who has a special needs daughter, and James and his

(01:11:19):
new wife kind of become caretakers of his property and
they kind of watch over the girl. Right, So this
shows you what kind of person he is, right, And
so finally there's a movement in Florida to get richardson compensation,
which he finally receives the state of Florida. The state
legislature actually unanimously passes a state law and I can

(01:11:43):
only paraphrase, but it's it's narrowly written like if you
were convicted of a crime from this period to this period,
like literally in his window, and the proceedings were thrown out,
you're eligible for compensation. So it was it was a
law written for one man, right, both left and right.
In a notoriously conservative law and order state. They voted

(01:12:06):
unanimously to give him compensation. And I think he received,
you know, like one hundred grand a year paid out
over twenty years. But that was in twenty fourteen, so
he was out of prison and destitute longer than he
was in prison, right, which is incredible, right, twenty five,
twenty six years out, twenty years in and to think

(01:12:29):
about this, he lost his children. I mean, you know,
this man lost seven children then did a twenty year
bit for a crime he didn't commit. Horrible, horrible, horrible story. Right.

Speaker 2 (01:12:43):
Yes, let's Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. Now the commencement of this incredible story twenty
one years in prison, falsely convicted, railroaded by a district jorney.
And Gordon Hayes has quite a bit of blame in

(01:13:04):
this case as well. But this book is called The
Town Without Pity, AIDS, Race and Resistance in Florida's Deep South.
There is a case that intersects in Arcadia, which makes
this story more important because very close to the time
that this AIDS related story is going on, both cases intersect.

(01:13:30):
Can you explain this case regarding the Ray brothers and
the Ray family?

Speaker 3 (01:13:36):
Sure? Well, you know, in a nutshell, I was in
high school in like nineteen eighty six, eighty seven, that
I was a freshman or a sophomore in Arcadia. Blew
up this is before we even knew about James Richards
It he had heard of him in the past, the
distant past. This is twenty years later. Three little white boys.
Their father was a prison guard, the mother was a

(01:13:58):
practical nurse, Salt of the Earth, Arcadians, country folk. These
boys had hemophilia, you know, which meant their blood didn't clot,
and so they took a protein that would help their
blood clot. It was called factor eight, and it came
from pool blood. These boys were real tough, you know.
They'd fall out of a tree and hit their knee

(01:14:20):
and they'd run inside and grab a syringe. In this
concentrated powder, mix some water in and inject it and
move on. Right. They had overcome hemophilia. But in the
early nineteen eighties there were no AIDS tests, and our
blood supply was unprotected and the pool blood that made
factor eight often came from people with hepatitis and with HIV,

(01:14:43):
and so these three little white boys contracted the AIDS virus.
Their doctor in Saint Petersburg said, tell your school board,
tell your principle that you know, they'll make some accommodations
for you. Well, this was Arcadia, and those are common
nations were get out, don't come right, and they even

(01:15:04):
kicked out a sister who did not he have hemophilia
and who did not have AIDS. And the town rallied
around the school board and essentially ostracized this poor family.
They were kicked out of church, their barber wouldn't cut
their hair, they got bomb threats, they were told to

(01:15:24):
leave town. And so a year before the Richardson case,
they actually went to a federal judge who ruled that
they're six, seven and eight year old boys. They are
not a threat to public health. They are not a
threat to your children in schools. AIDS could only be
transmitted through sex and needles. These aren't high school kids,

(01:15:44):
you know, these are elementary kids. And the town rallied,
and even though the judge said they have to come
back to school in regular school, the town boycotted. Half
The schools were empty, more death threats, more threats, and
at the end of the first week of schools that
the national media descended upon Arcadia and ABC News nightly news.

(01:16:09):
We only had four nightly news programs. Three called it
a town without pity. And so Arcadia was even before
the Richardson case. I would argue the most hated municipality
in the United States. I mean, I remember it. I
remember this Aid's craziness, that when the rest of America
had moved on from being afraid of AIDS, you know,

(01:16:31):
to being afraid of you know, sharing a toilet seat,
you know, like sitting on the same toilet seat, or
a bartender serving you a drink, you know, those silly
days of early AIDS. Arcadia is still held on to
these dumb beliefs. And so what happens is the Friday
night of the first week, the Rays are one town
over visiting family. Someone sets fire to their house. Now,

(01:16:56):
an uncle had been home sleeping, and so when the
news hit the press that the house burns down, and
so the national press reports that the Rays had been firebombed, right,
And so I had visions of Mississippi burning, you know,
I had visions even twenty five miles away, of rednecks
and trucks throwing Molotov cocktails. But the locals knew the

(01:17:19):
fire had started inside the house while an uncle was home,
and so locally they believed the Rays did it for sympathy,
while nationally people began to say, what the hell is
wrong with this town, right, and so you know, my
book is kind of a story of how this interior,

(01:17:40):
insular bit of Florida can continue to exist in a
state that you know, changes at warp speed. And how
the race story blew up in the national press and
made Arcadia famous. And then one year later we see
kind of old racism, old miscarriages of justice coming back

(01:18:00):
to bite Arcadia, you know, in the ass. Right. And
so two huge national events in one year, really one
calendar year, and all along.

Speaker 2 (01:18:11):
All of these stories really infuriated the townfolk that were
depicted as not changing with the times and being behind
and being racist. So Mark Lane had written a book
called Arcadia, and they really the residents really hated him,
and other journalists were depicting Arcadia as having something wrong

(01:18:33):
with it.

Speaker 3 (01:18:35):
Yeah, and I wonder what's going to happen to me? Right,
I'm sure, I'm sure I'll get the hate mail as well. Yeah,
And so this is my attempt to explain the ins
and outs of these two cases. Right, They've become like legend,
right where if you don't have a copy of Lane's book,
which has long been out of print and no one
bought it, and it was definitely yellow journalism, I'd say.

(01:18:59):
And you don't have access to the articles written by
the newspapers in the late eighties, you don't really know
about these stories, even if you're from our quie. You know,
I'm largely a Florida historian now, and so I really
wanted to explain how this community, you know, to me,
it's the same citrus and cattle community in twenty twenty

(01:19:21):
five that it was for the most part in nineteen
twenty five, right, And in Florida, you know, if you
know Florida, Dan, I mean, only thirty five percent of
Floridians are born there, right, So how the heck in
the town twenty five miles from Charlotte Harbor and fifty
miles from cs to Key, from from you know, from

(01:19:42):
Longboat Key in Sarasota, how this town can continue to exist? Right?
And so my goal was in using these two cases,
these these two cases of great injustice, to kind of
talk about how the town continued to be remote when
Florida was no longer remote following World War Two, Florida

(01:20:05):
was you know, Florida grows every decade at a rate
of about two and a half to three million people.
A decade. But Arcadia, you know, the population of that
town in DeSoto County really doesn't change in relation to that.
How that is how this town continues to be so rural,
so agricultural. It has probably the longest running rodeo in

(01:20:27):
America is in Arcadia, not in Texas, not in Oklahoma,
you know, not in Wyoming, but in Florida. Right, So,
you know this is kind of how racism and injustice
on the part of your elected officials, right, your sheriff,
you're district attorney, your school board members. They do something wrong,

(01:20:48):
it's going to come back to bite an entire town
like it or not, right, And that's what happened to
tiny Arcadia.

Speaker 2 (01:20:57):
You say, both of these stories are largely forgotten today.
Hopefully with this book that won't be the case. There's
no monuments or plaques or no commemorations, only seven small
graves of the Richardson children.

Speaker 3 (01:21:15):
Yeah right, I mean, you know they were and I
don't know now, but when they were buried, they were
buried in the black section of the cemetery of Arcadia. Cemetery.
Arcadia had very famously and very patriotically during World War
One and World War Two, This was a training ground

(01:21:38):
of flight schools. You know, these big open fields in
DeSoto County, these these ranches you could fly planes. And
so in World War One and World War Two, the
Allies would train pilots and a number of British pilots
crashed and died there. And so on Memorial Day or
I believe Memorial Day, you know, they had this wonderful

(01:21:58):
ceremony to our these pilots, right, and they've been doing
it for years. There was even you know, in years
past they would correspond with the widows. Right, this is wonderful.
But come on, now, what about your own residents that
were treated so terribly? You know, what about the Rays?
And what about Richardson? Right, he didn't do it, and

(01:22:20):
these children died in your town. You know, I don't
know how you commemorate this, or if you want to,
but somehow you know that there needs to be a
reckoning with poor James Richardson. It's certainly with the Rays.
The last Ray boy died not too long ago, shortly

(01:22:41):
after you know, Richardson would outlive the last Ray boy,
I believe. And they're all gone now, all the Ray
boys are gone, and Richardson is gone, and I really
wish Arcadia would would try to reckon in a way
that you know, we're not blaming you, but they're going
to take it that way, right, We're not blaming you.
Let's put the focus on the injustice that happened here.

(01:23:03):
Let's try to write some sort of historical wrong at
least in the record books.

Speaker 2 (01:23:09):
Yes, I do think this book will be reckoning. Thank
you so much for this interview. For those people that
want to find out more about your book, A Town
Without Pity, AIDS, Race and Resistance in Florida's Deep South,
can you tell us about a website or any social
media that you do.

Speaker 3 (01:23:26):
Yes, yes, really, just go to my website www. Jason
Viewick j A s O, N v U I C
dot com, or you know, to Amazon or University Press
of Florida. You know. Thank you, thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:23:42):
Thank you so much for this interview. Jason Viewick A
Town Without Pity, AIDS, Race and Resistance in Florida's Deep South.
Thank you so much for this interview. And you have
a great evening and good night.