- Crime and Prosecution - Page 42

Six

At about the same time that Denny Martin returned from bringing Williams to Orlando, the itinerant fruit picker Felton Thomas1 approached an OCSO patrolman in a coffee shop on Route 50, between Winter Garden and Orlando.  Thomas said that he had information about what had happened at the store. 

Denny Martin picked up Thomas.  Frye and Jenkins brought him into the store and interviewed him. Thomas was a twenty-seven-year-old black man from Georgia who had been picking fruit since he was fourteen, when he had quit the seventh grade.  He spoke softly, with an occasional stammer.

Thomas told the detectives that he was standing around a bonfire in Oakland when Charlie Mays drove up in his van on the evening of the 24^th.  Mays asked Thomas to come along for a ride.  Thomas got in the van.

Mays drove into Winter Garden and up Dillard Street to Zeigler Furniture.  He told Thomas that he was going to pick up a color TV.  Mays stopped in front of the store. Nobody was there, and the store was dark, so Mays pulled around to the back corner of the building.  He parked in the rear lot of the Winter Garden Inn, against the chain-link fence that separated the two properties.

Mays and Thomas passed time with a conversation about betting jai alai; Mays told Thomas that he had won $400 the night before. 

Then a man whom Thomas did not know drove up in a Cadillac and told Mays, “Ain’t nobody here yet, Charlie.  Come ride with me.”

Mays and Thomas left the van and got in the Cadillac.  They drove out onto Route 50 and made a right turn onto an extension of Dillard Street that headed south away from town.  The pavement ended, and they were in an area of orange groves.  The man said he had bought three guns, and he wanted Mays and Thomas to try them.

From the interview:

Q  (JENKINS):  Okay, let me stop you and clear up a few things.  Now this man in the Cadillac, was he a white man or a black man?

A  (THOMAS):  He, he was a white man.

Q:  Okay, did Charlie introduce you to him?

A:  He introduced me to him.

[1]  That night he signed his statement to the police “Thomas Felton.”  For at least ten weeks, both prosecution and defense, as well as the local media, referred to him as “Thomas Felton” or “Buddy Felton.”