The Bones of Marianna by David Kushner

Author:David Kushner
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: True Crime, Society, Biographies & Memoirs, Reporting, Murder & Mayhem
Publisher: The Atavist
Published: 2013-09-29T04:00:00+00:00

Seven

The White House Boys’ appearance on CNN hadn’t just caught Cooper’s eye—it had also gotten the attention of Governor Charlie Crist, who, under mounting pressure, agreed to launch a state-level inquiry into the abuses at Dozier. In December 2008, Crist ordered the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to locate the graves on Boot Hill, identify the remains, and determine if any crimes had been committed, as well as investigate the claims of abuse during the White House Boys’ tenure at the school. It was a daunting assignment. “We’re dealing with witnesses alleging certain acts committed in some instances fifty or sixty years ago,” Mark Perez, chief inspector for the FDLE, told me.

Hatton, Walters, and other supervisors from the era were dead, but Perez’s team did manage to interview Lenox Williams, who was retired and living in Marianna. Under oath, Williams, who became superintendent in 1966, downplayed the accusations of abuse. He said the boys received “spankings” with a leather paddle in the White House as a last resort but that he limited them to less than 12 licks.

Williams also denied any knowledge of sexual abuse on campus but said he had confronted the guidance counselor Robert Currie—now dead—about allegations that he had made inappropriate comments to boys and sometimes approached them in their cottages at night. From that point on, Williams said, Currie stopped his come-ons. Williams said he had also intervened with—and ultimately fired—a Catholic priest at the school whom the boys had also accused of inappropriate sexual advances. When investigators asked about the allegations that children had been killed and secretly buried at the school, Williams said the White House Boys were spreading “a cock-and-bull story.”

There was one figure from the White House Boys’ stories who could still speak to what happened: Troy Tidwell, the man known to the Dozier boys as the One-Armed Bandit. Now 84 and hard of hearing, Tidwell refused to submit to an interview with the FDLE investigators. (He also did not reply to my attempts to contact him for this story.) But he did give a video deposition in 2009 to attorneys for a group of White House Boys who had filed a civil lawsuit against him and several state agencies over the alleged abuse. Tidwell appeared in the video a gray-haired and mild-mannered old man, eyes hidden behind thick glasses. Over his red button-down shirt, a blue blazer draped thinly where his left arm would have been.

Twice married and a father of two, Tidwell had retired from the school in 1982 and still lived in Marianna, where he had spent his entire life. In a gravelly drawl, he spoke of his youth in the town, of how he had left school after the 11th grade and taken odd jobs, driving trucks and working construction. In the early 1940s, he had found a supervisory job at a Gainesville school for physically and mentally challenged children but headed back to Marianna after 16 months to care for his ill mother.

Tidwell had joined the staff

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