The story of the first West Palm Beach officer slain
WEST PALM BEACH — The first West Palm Beach police officer slain in the line of duty was shot in the head with his own gun. His alleged killer’s lawyers invoked the same arguments that now are part of “stand your ground” and “Black Lives Matter.” And, astonishingly for Jim Crow Florida, they got his conviction overturned.
And yet William Payton’s 1924 death was forgotten, even as a 3-foot tombstone marks his grave at Woodlawn Cemetery.
It took nearly seven decades for the city to honor him, largely on the diligent volunteer work of three modern-day colleagues in blue. But now he stands with the city’s other fallen officers as National Police Week began Sunday and National Peace Officers Memorial Day is marked today.
One of those three, retired West Palm Beach Police Capt. Wendy Morse, said the circumstances of Payton’s death, and the level of his convicted killer’s punishment, don’t change anything.
“Absolutely not,” Morse said last week. “He still was an officer killed in the line of duty.”
‘Family quarrel’
Of all calls, the one that makes police the most nervous is a domestic. The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund and the U.S. Department of Justice, in a study of officer slayings from 2010 to 2014, said 20 of 91 deaths — more than 1 in 5 — resulted from domestic disputes.
That’s the kind of call William Morgan Payton answered on Saturday, Feb. 9, 1924.
He was born March 18, 1889, in Martinsville, Indiana, about 30 miles south of Indianapolis. In 1887, the Hoosier State had about 2 million people. Florida had fewer than 400,000. There was no West Palm Beach, at least not officially. The settlement would not be incorporated until 1894, and then with a population of about 500.
The 1910 census lists Payton in the U.S. Army at Fort Riley in Kansas. He later served in France in World War I. The 1920 census puts him at Fort Ethan Allen in Vermont, where he was listed as a sergeant. Some time after that, he showed up in boomtown West Palm Beach. He became an officer in 1922.
The first reference to Payton is in an October 1922 newspaper article saying he was in the first contingent of traffic officers on Clematis Street. An increase in cars had driven West Palm Beach police leaders to assign two white-gloved policemen to direct traffic from 5 to 9 p.m.
A year before Payton was killed, he was a player in the first slaying of a Town of Palm Beach officer. It led to a lynching, one of Palm Beach County’s most shameful events.
Early on June 3, 1923, Officer J.N. Smith confronted three men he caught illegally butchering a sea turtle. He was shot to death. At about 3 a.m. June 7, a group of men went to a rooming house where Henry Simmons lived and ordered him out. They drove him to the spot in Palm Beach where the policeman had been killed and hanged him from a tree. Sheriff Robert Baker said flatout that Simmons could not have been one of the three men and that Baker was “sorrier than I can say.”
Payton had been on duty that night and was grilled as part of an inquest. He denied knowing anything and was not disciplined.
The day he died, Payton was two months shy of his 35th birthday. His wife, the former Marion Esther McGinnis of Vermont, was 28. They lived at 852 Dobbins St., about five blocks south of Southern Boulevard between Parker and Georgia avenues.
Richard “Chester” McLendon lived at 710 Third St. — since renamed Fifth Street — 2 miles north of Payton’s home. He was born Dec. 15, 1896. He would testify he was born in Valdosta, Ga., and grew up in Jacksonville. His occupation was listed as hotel employee.
On Feb. 9, 1924, West Palm Beach police got a call to “go over into negro town,” according to the appeal brief McLendon’s lawyers later wrote to the Florida Supreme Court. McLendon and his wife, the court brief said, had had “a sort of negro family quarrel.”
McLendon’s wife, Edna, would testify that no “licks were passed,” that this strictly was a shouting match. She said Payton asked if her husband had threatened her.
“He ask me three times,” she said, “and I told him no. The last time he said to me, ‘You don’t have to be afraid. He is not going to hurt you.’ ”
Payton told McLendon he was under arrest. McLendon refused to go. Edna McLendon said Payton then grabbed her husband. She said she told him, “Chester, if he wants you to go, go ahead.’ ”
According to the brief by McLendon’s lawyers to the Supreme Court, “A general scuffle followed.”
‘Did you shoot that pistol at all intentionally?’ ‘No, sir’
McLendon would stand trial less than a month after the shooting. Witnesses both black and white, testifying for both the state and the defense, described the frantic moments that ended with a policeman dead.
“They both of them got hold of each other just the same as two couple dancing, and they went tussling around,” Arlington Strachan, who was in the home at the time, would testify. “I told him (McLendon) to go with the officer, no use resisting against him; be harder for him.”
Strachan said McLendon broke free from Payton and shouted “get back, get back.” Strachan said he ran out the back door and heard the gun go off twice.
Fewer than eight minutes after Payton had left police headquarters for McLendon’s home, “a second call came in, saying that the policeman has been killed,” city Police Chief Leonard Bailey would testify. He said he found Payton “lying on the floor with his head in a pool of blood.” Payton died either at Good Samaritan Hospital or on the way, the chief testified.
McLendon testified after Payton “got his pistol I knocked it out of his hand and when it fell to the floor it shot, and me and him were scrambling for it, and I beat him to it, and I struck him aside the head with it, and it shot. He tried to catch me and he fell in the front room.”
That second shot apparently killed Payton. According to court records, the bullet went in about an inch above and behind his right ear. McLendon said he ran to the nearby home of his mother, where officers later would find the officer’s gun in a woodpile. He said he did not know he had killed Payton.
Defense lawyer E.B. Donnell: “Did you take the pistol with the intention of killing him?”
McLendon: “No, sir.” Donnell: “Did you shoot that pistol at all intentionally?”
McLendon: “No, sir.” Prosecutors argued the lack of powder burns on Payton showed he was killed from a distance, not in a struggle. And they submitted test firings made into targets of paper and cloth that they said backed their contention.
After two days of trial, on the evening of March 8, the all-male jury deliberated for 90 minutes. It voted “guilty.”
The law at the time allowed for just one sentence: death.
“The little black man showed no sign of emotion,” a Palm Beach Post article said.
On Sept. 11, 1924, just six months after the slaying of William Payton, Baker stepped into McLendon’s jail cell and read him the order of execution. McLendon had been the first person in Palm Beach County to get a death sentence after the electric chair had replaced hanging in 1923, and he was set to be the first person in Florida to go to the chair, according to the Historical Society of Palm Beach County and the Florida Department of Corrections. His death was set for the week starting Sept. 29.
But McLendon’s lawyers appealed, and Gov. Cary Augustus Hardee recalled the execution order on Sept. 22.
McLendon’s lawyers, in what was bold talk in that era, argued that “we do not know of any law that permits a police officer to go into some home and by force pull that person out and compel him to go to jail.” They said their client, “this little negro,” had “a right to defend himself in his home and to resist an illegal arrest.”
On July 29, 1925, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial. The high court said it cannot be presumed that test firings which were done with targets of paper and cloth would produce the same results as the actual shooting.
In 1926, McLendon was found guilty of manslaughter and was sentenced to 15 years. The 1930 census shows McLendon as an inmate at the state prison in Raiford, north of Gainesville. In July 1933, McLendon was pardoned. He died four years later at his mother’s home. He was 40.
McLendon’s mother died in 1942. McLendon’s home on Fifth Street now is a vacant lot. The 1½-story wood frame building was demolished in July 1987.
‘ ... should be honored’
William Payton was buried Feb. 11, 1924, at Woodlawn Cemetery. The funeral cost $170.50, plus 50 cents for clothing. By Feb. 12, a fund for Payton’s widow was up to $1,400 — about $22,000 in 2018 dollars — and the police department expected that number to double in the ensuing 24 hours, a Palm Beach Evening Times article said. In 1926, the city would mandate insurance for all its employees.
On May 18, 1924, three months after her husband’s death, Marion McGinnis Payton married railroad worker George Earl Horn. The 1931 city directory shows the two living at the Payton home and listed George as a barber. The couple had three children and moved to the Baltimore area. That marriage ended, and Marion married a third time in 1935 in her native Vermont and bore another child. She died there on Dec. 15, 1958, at age 63. She’d outlived her first husband by nearly 35 years.
West Palm Beach police don’t know how it happened, but somehow the department lost track of Payton’s death. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that the department again knew about him and his death, mostly through research by then-police Lt. Greg Parkinson and then-Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter. Both now are retired.
In June 1999, Reiter had stumbled across the 1926 death of Palm Beach Capt. John Cash as the officer tried to rescue a woman. Next to it: A clipping about William Payton. Reiter found no Payton in his department. He picked up the phone and called Parkinson.
“Could he be one of yours?” Reiter asked. Parkinson told him, “We’ve lost eight men in the line of duty. Officially.” Payton was not among them.
Parkinson found police ledgers that listed Payton. Then a death certificate. Then Payton’s grave at Woodlawn.
Payton “should be honored as our first police officer killed in the line of duty,” Parkinson wrote in October 1999 to then police chief Ric Bradshaw, now the Palm Beach County sheriff.
Around 2014, police Lt. Wendy Morse stepped in.
The department keeps a wall of honor listing all officers who died in the line of duty. Morse wanted to flesh out each one’s story. As genealogy databases and other document collections have gone online, Morse was able to learn more. After 26 years at the department, the last as a captain covering the city’s north end, she retired Sept. 30. She stayed on with the city as head of its Office of Public Life. But she continues to work on Payton’s story.
At Woodlawn Cemetery, Payton’s 3-foot-high, white marble tombstone, near the front of the graveyard, features a flying dove. Then the dates of birth and death. And the epitaph, “Safe in the arms of Jesus.”
The day Parkinson visited Payton’s grave in August 1999, he planted a small U.S. flag, “in honor of our department.”
This month, Parkinson returned to the grave and placed his hand over the marker. Officers such as Payton, he said, “dedicated their lives to making the town, the world, a better place. A safer place. Not all of them walked away from that job.”