7319 - Detective won't stop seeking justice

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It has been 41 years since Johnnie Mae Chappell was murdered by the side of the road. Her friends and family have never stopped fighting for justice.

JACKSONVILLE - Johnnie Mae Chappell lies dead in what was once a ''coloreds only'' cemetery, beneath naked branches and moss and time. Her murder is marked by a concrete headstone constructed by her late husband. Cannie Lee Cody visits the grave site now and again, and sometimes he brings a potted flower that blooms in precious pink until it dies in the forgottenness.

Cody, 75, a former Jacksonville sheriff's detective, arrested the four men who allegedly gunned Chappell down -- in one of the state's worst hate crimes -- during race riots more than 40 years ago.

But only one of the four accused men ever served any time.

Cody, the Chappell family and state Sen. Tony Hill, D-Jacksonville, have mounted another campaign to put the remaining three men who allegedly killed Johnnie Mae in jail. They have asked Gov. Jeb Bush to appoint a special prosecutor to the case. A decision could come as early as today, his office says. Attorney General Charlie Crist's office also is reviewing the case; the FBI and the Justice Department previously investigated corruption allegations and declined to pursue them further.

''This case has tormented me; it has torn my life apart,'' Cody says one cool Tuesday, head bowed, as he walks the desolate stretch where Chappell was killed. It is a four-lane road now, preferred by truckers who stop for fuel and favors at the EZ Food Store and Cheetah Club. ``All I want is justice for Johnnie Mae Chappell.''

Cody, a most righteous man, committed the tiniest details of the murder and investigation to memory. Writing letters, making phone calls and knocking on doors, he launched a pit-bull campaign to get Chappell justice. He has pressed five Florida governors, the FBI, President Bush, a state attorney and a federal grand jury to reopen the case and acknowledge an alleged cover-up.

In the process, he has lost his career as a detective, bellied up to more bars than he can remember and gone through more marriages then he cares to admit, the obsession having ruined them.

TWO SIDES

Cody is a thoughtful, gentle man with a boisterous laugh. Often mistaken for Santa Claus, he delights in teasing naughty children during the holidays. But behind the jolly facade is a driven man who lost his way a long time ago.

Cody, who has never stopped carrying a gun since Chappell was killed, will tell you in hauntingly plain language that few things good have happened in his life since that day in 1964, except his beloved relationship with Chappell's youngest son, Shelton, just a baby when his mama was murdered. He is acutely aware of all the loss; he is just powerless to surrender.

''She was murdered in cold blood,'' says Cody, his Southern drawl now pronounced. ``Nothing about that is acceptable.''

Unacceptable, he says, because this woman, a maid, a black mother of 10 when black wasn't good enough, deserves a just epitaph.

''For all these years, we never knew the truth about what happened to our mother,'' says Shelton Chappell, who now lives in Cutler Ridge. ``He never stopped trying to help.''

On that rainy Monday in March, Johnnie Mae Chappell was walking along New Kings Road in the northwest section of the city. She was distracted: She had gone to buy her children ice cream and dropped her wallet on the way from the store to her home just up the road.

At the same time, four friends were riding in a dark Plymouth -- just a few miles from where race riots had erupted. They would later admit in court documents that they were riled by the racial currents that raced unchecked through Jacksonville and much of the South. Someone in the car said ''Let's get a n-----,'' the documents show.

As Chappell searched the grassy patches, J.W. Rich shot her with a .22. She bled to death on the way to the only hospital in the city that would treat blacks.

LITTLE ATTENTION

Few people outside Chappell's family seemed to care. Her death was buried in an article about riots in the Florida Times-Union the next day. The children, left to a father who worked nights, were placed in foster homes. It would be decades before they found each other.

The case sat idle for months until Cody and detective Donald Coleman, too new and naive to know better, arrested Rich along with Wayne Chessman, Elmer Kato and James A. Davis. Rich was convicted of manslaughter by an all-white jury and served three years of a 10-year sentence. But lost files and a missing .22 caliber murder weapon -- the result of a police cover-up, Cody suspects -- hamstrung the prosecution of the other three. Prosecutors eventually dropped charges against those men, citing insufficient evidence.

Rich, Kato and Chessman still live in Duval County; Davis moved in the early 1990s. Rich did not return repeated calls for comment from The Herald. A man who answered the telephone at Chessman's home refused to give him messages seeking comment. Kato and Davis could not be reached for comment.

Much of what happened is steeped in time and place. Jacksonville in the '60s was notoriously resistant to the civil and social changes of the era. Earlier in 1964, the city had been thrust into the spotlight for riots, racial intolerance and refusal to support the Civil Rights Act. The undercurrents were stirred by Mayor Haydon Burns -- running for governor as a segregationist -- who declared Jim Crow laws were here to stay. Blacks were terrorized with firebombs and beatings.

Cody said he believed he was working something bigger than a murder case. There was the dense band of police-officer blue. The impenetrable snarl of racism. And something else, real yet inexplicable.

He wasn't shy about his claims of a cover-up and police corruption. And on Dec. 16, 1965, 270 days after Chappell was killed, Cody and Coleman were fired for insubordination.

Cody was devastated. He was 35, on the force just seven years. He had grown up in Jacksonville, son to a pistol of a woman who believed in justice untainted by hue. He had dreamed big of a policeman's career. Of making the big busts. Of making Jacksonville nicer and safer, however clichéd that may sound. He had a wife, ''a good and fine woman who took care of home,'' and two children, 5 and 3.

But the options for an ex-badge with a bad name were few. Coleman, though saddened and supportive, finally let the case go. He stayed in town with his wife, going on to own a successful construction company and raise three children.

''What happened to Mrs. Chappell was horrible. What happened to us was terrible, but I had to go on,'' Coleman, 72, says softly.

ON THE ROAD

Cody took the first thing that promised a steady check: a trucker gig. For the next 20 years or so, he trudged from job to job, working at a shipyard, selling Volkswagens -- even becoming a private eye. But he kept writing letters to the state officials and making calls about Chappell.

In the off hours, Cody had begun to drink. He was a vodka man, first sipping socially, then constantly -- it was the only way to quiet the case in his head. But never fully numbed, he would find himself whiling away hours at bars, regurgitating the details to strangers.

Shelton Chappell was just 4 months old when his mother died. ''I have lived my whole life trying to figure out what happened to my mother. My family deserved to know and she deserves justice,'' he says.

In 1995, Shelton took a six-month leave from his job as an electrician in Cutler Ridge and went to Jacksonville to pursue closure.

A year later, Cody read an article about a memorial service being organized by Shelton. He attended. After the service, he approached Shelton with the truth about who killed his mother. They talked for hours. It's a conversation that continues today. Now, Shelton and Cody think of each other as family.

In the years after their meeting, the anger, the frustration, the sorrow -- everything Cody fought so hard to block -- came rushing back. He was on the case again, like it or not. He and Chappell partnered to undertake a legal odyssey, alleging in a federal lawsuit that Chappell's civil rights were violated by the Duval County Sheriff's office.

But their claim that high-ranking sheriff's officials criminally obstructed the investigation died when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case last year.

With the personal casualties racking up -- he had already lost great wives, great friends and great chunks of time -- Cody began to try to make peace.

It's not that he didn't want the men dragged back into court. It's just that he was losing, and quite suddenly he could see it.

He resigned himself to spending his last chapters nursing a junk lung made bad by the Korean War, holed up in a houseboat in Biloxi, off the Mississippi River. He loved fishing for flounder and gambling, nickel-and-dime stuff that gave him a buzz without robbing his pockets -- his income was fixed after such a patchwork career.

''It had gotten so I wasn't thinking of it every day,'' Cody says. ``I was actually trying to put the past behind me.''

Meantime, it was Chappell who took up making the calls, sending the letters, knocking on state and federal officials' doors. The growing national interest in re-examining civil rights cases gave him hope, and last year, the family asked State Attorney Harry Shorstein to reopen the case. He declined, saying a conviction in a case 40 years cold was unlikely.

''I will fight this tooth and nail until I get justice for my mother,'' Chappell says. ``I simply don't understand why this is at a standstill. What else do you need?''

IMMERSED AGAIN

Six months ago, Cody came back to Jacksonville to care for his mother. He had kept in touch with Shelton and before long found himself immersed in the murder once more.

''I didn't know what else I could do. I had written everybody, but said I am going to take one more shot. I went to see Sen. Hill,'' he says.

Today, Cody is far from retirement. He ambles around town in a brand-new black Scion, his cellphone and piles of important paperwork riding shotgun. He still makes dozens of calls on the case every day.

Now they wait for a decision, for justice, for relief.

''I can't say that I would have done this any other way,'' Cody says.

``There's no need for another investigation. That happened in 1964, all we need now is a prosecution.''