Can't Rock This Boat | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

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

In March 1964, a 35-year-old African-American woman named Johnnie Mae Chappell was walking along the side of the road in Jacksonville, Florida. Four white men were driving around listening to the local race riots on the radio. They had a gun on the dashboard. As they passed Chappell, one of the men leaned out the car window and shot her to death. As the police investigated, evidence began to mysteriously disappear, making it impossible to punish the men who admitted to committing the crime.

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Episode transcripts are posted on our website https://thisiscriminal.com/.

Episode 8 originally published July 29, 2014 https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-eight-cant-rock-this-boat-7-29-2014

Brief Summary

The episode recounts the murder of Johnny May Chappelle and the flawed investigation that followed, highlighting racial injustice in 1964 Jacksonville.

Key points

The Tragic Story of Johnny May Chappelle. In 1964, Johnny May Chappelle was killed in a racially charged incident, leaving her family shattered.
Detectives Uncover Hidden Files. Detectives Cody and Coleman discover missing case files related to Chappelle's murder, suggesting a cover-up.
A Long Fight for Justice. Shelton Chappelle and Detective Cody have been trying to reopen the investigation for decades.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I didn't have a telephone, didn't watch television.

Detective Cody reflects on his life after the case.

10:00WatchSep 2, 2022

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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