Norma Padgett, who as a young housewife falsely accused four black men of raping her near Groveland in 1949, has died at 92.
Her claims propelled a seminal criminal case that helped change the course of race relations and social justice in Central Florida and the U.S., although it took many years for it to be accepted widely as the miscarriage of justice it was.
Padgett’s July 12 death, first reported by the Washington Post, was confirmed by a spokesperson for the probate court in Taylor County, Georgia, where she passed of “natural causes.”
Norma Padgett and her husband Willie contended the men, who became known as the Groveland Four, approached them on a dark stretch of road near Okahumpka in Lake County, after the couple’s car had broken down on July 16, 1949. She was 17 at the time.
The four men were at first helpful, she told police at the time. But then she said they hit Willie, took his wallet, and raped her in the backseat of their car.
Padgett didn’t speak publicly about the case outside of a courtroom – even as doubts and some outrage percolated for decades – until she testified at a hearing of the Florida Clemency Board in 2019 and defended her accusation.
“You all just don’t know what kind of horror I’ve been through for all these many years,” she said, from her wheelchair. “I’m begging you all not to give them pardon, because they done it.”
Groveland Four accuser Norma Padgett speaks publicly for the first time since 1952
The most dramatic moment of that hearing – in which the board did grant pardons to the Groveland Four, who are all dead – came when Beverly Robinson, a cousin of Samuel Shepherd, turned to Padgett and declared: “You all are liars.”
That day Samuel Shepherd, Walter Irvin, Charles Greenlee and Ernest Thomas got the justice denied them in life. After the hearing, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he didn’t think the men were treated fairly at trial.
“I think the way this was carried out was a miscarriage of justice,” he said.
Within hours of Padgett’s original claim, a racist mob gathered from across Central Florida. The group burned and looted the home of Shepherd’s family and fired shots into other homes and businesses. Its actions drove Groveland’s Black families away – and many never returned. The Ku Klux Klan littered the streets with pamphlets, and the governor called in the National Guard.
Shepherd and Irvin, who were both 22, were best friends from Groveland, and were beaten along with Greenlee, who was 16, in Lake County’s jail following their arrests. Thomas, 26, a friend of Greenlee’s, was killed by a posse in the Panhandle after fleeing Central Florida days after the alleged crime.
Three years later, Irvin and Shepherd were shot by Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall, when he was driving them from prison in Raiford back to Lake County, where they were due to face trial for a second time after the U.S. Supreme Court tossed out their initial convictions.
McCall said the men tried to escape, but Irvin, who survived the shooting, said McCall forced them from the car and shot them point-blank.
The fury from the incident helped propel the career of Thurgood Marshall, a lawyer in the case who went on to become a Supreme Court justice, and drew nationwide attention to the quality of justice provided to Blacks in Florida.
Gilbert King, author of the book ‘Devil in the Grove,’ said in a Wednesday interview with the Orlando Sentinel that the greatest regret of his Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into the case was that he could not persuade Norma to talk with him. He said he flew to Georgia and they sat together outside her trailer, but she didn’t want to discuss the case.
“The reason for that, I believe, is she was a victim in the case, too, though not to the scale of the Groveland Four,” he said. “She was, I believe, strong-armed by an abusive husband and then the prosecutor and the sheriff, Willis McCall, to go along with the story.”
Her sons shielded her from interview requests. Her son, Curtis Upshaw, politely declined a request by the Sentinel in 2019.
Compelling evidence surfaced over the years that the crime never happened.
King obtained an FBI report through a public records request that revealed Padgett made statements to the agency contradicting her trial testimony.
A witness, Lawrence Burtoft, who was the first to see Padgett after the alleged attack, told prosecutors she told him she was kidnapped, but never mentioned being raped. He also said she told him she couldn’t identify her attackers, which was withheld from the defense. Burtoft testified at Irvin’s second trial, and Padgett changed her story and said she told him the details about the attack. Nevertheless, Irvin was convicted a second time.
A medical report by a doctor who examined Padgett after the fact didn’t find conclusive evidence that she was raped, and that was not turned over to the defense.
Greenlee was already in custody when the attack took place after he was accused of carrying a pistol without a license, King found.
Jesse Hunter, who prosecuted the case, wrote a letter to then-Gov. LeRoy Collins, asking him to commute Irvin’s sentence from death to life in prison as he doubted the man’s guilt. Collins did so in 1954.
Authors and historians have suggested that Padgett and her husband – whom she divorced in 1958 – made up the story of the rape in part to explain their volatile relationship. King reported that Irvin and Shepherd did stop that night to help, then Shepherd got into a fight with Willie Padgett after he made a racist comment, and eventually the two men left.
While fact-gathering for the exoneration motion, State Attorney Bill Gladson said he called Padgett’s home, but a man who answered wouldn’t hand the phone to her. Gladson asked if Padgett would be willing to provide a DNA sample that could confirm her story if it matched a key stain on a piece of clothing. The man who answered responded: “Leave us alone. We don’t want to do any more of this.”
“I’ve never said she lied, although I think she did,” Gladson said in an interview with the Sentinel Wednesday. “I’ve always said it was a stacked deck.”
Robinson, now 67, the cousin of Shepherd, offered condolences to Norma Padgett’s family when contacted by the Sentinel Wednesday. “However I think it is very tragic that she would pass away knowing the truth and she just chose to take it to the grave with her.”
King said he once hoped she would make a deathbed confession to what actually happened, but that hope died when she testified at the Tallahassee hearing. He nonetheless has some sympathy for her.
”It’s kind of hard to blame a 17-year-old kid facing those figures in that situation,” he said.
rygillespie@orlandosentinel.com, creyes@orlandosentinel.com, shudak@orlandosentinel.com
