Atlantic Beach: Bobby Jacobs House (by Taylor Hardwick) & Murder

by Tim Gilmore, 2/4/2024

1. To Build a City

This is a story about art and murder. Most artists know that creativity and destruction are intertwined, just as in Shaivist Hinduism, Shiva, “Destroyer of Worlds,” is also the creator. We’ll work our way to the murder(s), but we must start (and end) with art.

The four page spread in the January 1963 issue of Town and Country Magazine called it the “perfect house for a bachelor.”

Part of the challenge for Taylor Hardwick, one of Florida’s best-loved architects, was to build a “year-round beach house” that balanced complete privacy with the flexibility “to accommodate large numbers of guests when” Bobby Jacobs was “entertaining.”

When the architect-to-be Michael Dunlap was about 20, he got himself invited to pool parties at the house. “I remember Jacobs talking about the house,” Dunlap says. “He loved the architecture of Richard Neutra and he interviewed a series of architects to find one he thought was compatible with his vision.”

The result, says Dunlap, was “one of Hardwick’s best designs. It’s rare that there’s such a camaraderie between client and architect in terms of vision. It was a great opportunity for Hardwick to practice his skilled Mid-Century Modern aesthetic.” Later, Dunlap became a good friend of Taylor Hardwick and produced Hardwick’s book on his architectural career at the end of the older man’s life.

Bobby Jacobs was king of construction in Jacksonville and saw the relationship with Hardwick as a chance to explore new materials and ideas. Especially at the beach, the design called for the difficult balance of maximizing views while resisting the great angry forces of sea, sun and salt. With roof overhangs cantilevering elegantly over walls of glass, the house came through Hurricane Dora unscathed two years after construction.

Rows of columns held a roofing system of flat diamond shaped trusses shingled on top and finished underneath to a ceiling of thin cedar strips through which cool air flowed without vents. Lighting came from wall brackets, so no lighting fixtures “interrupted” the flow of the ceiling either.

As Dunlap explains, “a continuous beam supports the diamond trusses so you never see the bearing condition and it just looks like the glass is floating.”

And then there’s the swimming pool. In few other house designs does the pool seem so integral, as important a room in the house as the living room. The pool and house fit together like form and void, inside and outside, aboveground and below, the living room fitting the terrace and L-shaped pool like tongue in groove.

Jacobs’s pool parties were famous affairs. People called him a “socialite” and a “playboy.” Only the right people knew Jacobs was gay. Dunlap suggests Jacobs “had a stable of pretty blond girls to stand in at the conservative parties.” He adds, “Jacobs lived the good life here and one just as great in New York.”

Sarah Bohr, who owns the house today, laughs about certain women friends who could stand in as a girlfriend when the occasion called for it. Phyllis Fouraker, popular TV talk show host, played straight woman to his “straight man” at many a party.

Meanwhile, by the early 1960s, it seemed the company Jacobs had inherited upon his father’s death in 1950, the S.S. Jacobs Company, was building everything that was new in Jacksonville.

Jacobs’s cousin, Richard Hiller, called him “a reader, a thinker, a planner, a dreamer.” He remembered when Bobby Jacobs, seven years old, would tell adults “that when he grew up, he was going to go to Florida and build a city.”

2. Seminole Beach to Londontowne

On the front page of The Jacksonville Journal, March 7, 1974, beneath a photo of that elegant and sleek streamlined house, the caption said, “Jacobs was apparently abducted from his posh Seminole Beach home.”

Across town at the Londontowne Apartments on Lane Avenue South, 20 minutes after midnight, he’d leapt from his car and told an unarmed security guard standing on a sidewalk by the guardhouse, “I’m being kidnapped.” Jacobs had kept an apartment at Londontowne for the past five years.

Another man jumped from the car when the guard said, “You got to be kidding,” jabbed a blue steel .38 caliber snub-nosed pistol into the guard’s stomach and said there was no joke and the guard had better not call the cops.

Jacobs dashed into the guardhouse, grabbed the telephone and started to dial. The kidnapper followed Jacobs inside, saying, “Jacobs owes me some money and I’m gonna get it.” He said, “I’m not fooling around. I’d just as soon kill you as look at you.”

The unarmed guard, William Bryan, heard the gunman tell the armed guard inside, “This is the way you have to have it.” Then he fired twice, hitting Jacobs in the chest and the armed guard, 26 year old Thomas Hardin, in the back.

The kidnapper then pointed the pistol to his own throat and fired. Hardin died immediately. So did the gunman. Doctors and police were optimistic for Jacobs, somebody saying, “The bullet went right in and out again,” missing vital organs.

Investigators found several conflicting forms of identification on the killer, but matched his fingerprints with 31 year old Raymond Beauchesne. He’d purchased the gun under the name Anthony Franklin Nolan and had “a three page rap sheet from all over the country,” said Homicide Investigator Jim Suber, who added that Beauchesne “was once arrested by the FBI. Mostly it was auto theft.”

He’d been staying in Jax with relatives after bonding out on narcotics charges and had an address in Atlanta and another in Worcester, Massachusetts. While staying at 3220 Herschel Street in Jacksonville’s Riverside in 1971 and ’72, he’d been arrested four times for carrying concealed firearms. In Jacobs’s car, investigators found $900 in 20s, 10s, fives and ones and another $705 on Beauchesne’s person.

Hardin’s supervisor at Oxford Security said he’d just moved to town from Waycross, Georgia in November. Like Beauchesne, he was armed with a .38, the supervisor said, “but never got a chance to go for it.”

3. Skyline’s the Limit

“The Skyline’s the Limit for Jacobs,” promised the Jacksonville Journal headline on August 11, 1962. A photo showed the handsome young businessman on a windowsill, grin balanced by chiseled smile lines, the old Independent Life Building in the background. The caption said, “Jacobs Looks Out on His Other Buildings from Atop His Latest, the Universal Marion. His Other Contributions Are, From Left, The Independent, The Jacobs and The 400 Building.”

The story quoted National Real Estate Investor magazine, which the Journal noted “is published in New York City” and featured Jacobs on a 1960 cover. Jacobs “has been,” the magazine said, “the driving force behind development activities in Jacksonville.”

Another photo showed Jacobs holding a white railing while looking up and off into the distance, standing before the honeycomb of his newest construction project, the Universal Marion Building, designed by Ketchum and Sharp of New York. The caption says, “The Building and the Builder” and “U-M Building Rises Behind Jacobs.”

The profile called him “modest and soft-spoken.” Jacobs refused, the story said, “to tell how the business has grown since his father, the late S.S. Jacobs, founded it in 1927.” Jacobs also headed construction projects in Baltimore, Birmingham, several locations in Pennsylvania, various towns throughout Georgia and in Winter Park, outside Orlando.

He’d built the Thunderbird Motor Hotel in Jacksonville’s Arlington and his new indoor shopping center Roosevelt Mall near Jacksonville’s old-money Ortega area had opened to great fanfare the previous August.

Then came the long parade of other titles, memberships and achievements. Collector of abstract art. President of Jacksonville Council of the Arts. Board of directors of Jacksonville Art Museum and Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra. Jacksonville University / Community Chest / Chamber of Commerce / Downtown Council / Committee of 100.

Jacobs lives, the ’62 profile said, “unmarried” and, “in the summer at a spectacularly contemporary home at Seminole Beach that was designed by Jacksonville architect Taylor Hardwick. The rest of the year, he resides with his mother, Mrs. Florence Jacobs, in a house on Donald Street.” The architectural feature in Town and Country was closer than six months away.

Jacobs flew to “out-of-town commitments and conferences” on his personal plane, a “twin-engine Beechcraft.” Florida Trend Magazine had cemented his “reputation as a fabulous host,” noting a “party he gave at Beauclerc Country Club,” where “the ladies got orchids, all the guests got a chance to hear French chanteuse Vicky Autier, and the party got into the late Danton Walker’s column in The New York Daily News.”

Everything Bobby Jacobs does, The Jacksonville Journal said in 1962, “he does with a flourish – and Jacksonville’s skyline is beginning to show it.”

4. Gentle Guardian

Back across Jacksonville from Londontowne, meanwhile, March of ’74, investigators found a large bloodstain in Jacobs’s master bedroom. Then they found his dog, a big black boxer named General, shot twice and partly buried beside the north walkway, with, an investigator named Kesinger said, “just one little white paw sticking out.” They attributed the blood in the bedroom to General. The house showed no sign of forced entry.

Newspapers bulletpointed Jacobs’s bio. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, the 51 year old bachelor had grown up in Jax, attended the Bolles School and Yale, successfully shepherded his father’s construction company for the last quarter century. His mother had died less than a month previously.

Within the week, police had arrested a “real estate salesman” named G. Jefferson Willard, as co-conspirator in an attempt to extort $25,000. Jacobs had attended a dinner at Willard’s house at 541 Beach Avenue the night of his murder. When he prepared to leave around 10:30 that night, he found he had a flat tire. Now Raymond Beauchesne appeared. He’d lived off and on at Willard’s house. It’s unclear from old news stories if Jacobs and Beauchesne knew each other. He offered to change the tire if Jacobs would give him a ride.

Later, while Jacobs recuperated in a hospital room, detectives interviewed him and found that Beauchesne asked to be dropped off at the Seminole Beach exit ramp, near Jacobs’s home. At the time, Seminole Beach was the name for a desolate spot between Atlantic Beach and Mayport, where Jacobs had chosen his homesite atop a tall dune with nothing but coastal scrubwoods around and no other houses in sight.

Jacobs agreed to drive Beauchesne to his house, from where he’d walk to the ramp, but when Jacobs turned off his burglar alarm, Beauchesne pulled a gun and a pair of handcuffs from a bag and told Jacobs to get inside. The privacy of the bachelor pad, which made for such exclusive pool parties, also promised a perfect crime scene.

Inside, Beauchesne killed Jacobs’s dog. Though the big boxer was named General, Jacobs told detectives, “The dog was very gentle. He didn’t even try to bite him.” Then he handcuffed Jacobs and said he’d do to him what he’d done to his dog if he didn’t give him $25,000. Jacobs said he only had $1500 at home, but had more money across town in his Londontowne apartment.

On the drive across the city, Beauchesne sat in the passenger seat, his gun aimed at Jacobs and said, “I’ve been watching you for some time.”

5. House as Statement of Being Human

Sarah Bohr has known this house for almost 30 years. After the death of Bobby Jacobs, some of his colleagues in construction set their sights on this oceanfront property, split the house into three condo units and surrounded it with impinging townhouses.

Sarah, an attorney, bought her first condo here on her salary from Legal Aid in the 1990s. Strange plot twists, happenstances and tragedies led her way forward. She now owns all three units and rents out two for a minimum of 90 days at a time.

She’s inherited teak furniture, including her father’s desk, and hired Michael Dunlap to extend Hardwick’s design in several slight additions, honoring the genius of the original vision. Taylor Hardwick walked through the house with her in his final years. He hated the New York interior designer Bobby Jacobs had chosen. Mid-Century Modern was all about clean lines; what role in such sleek geometry had leopard spot carpets?

The house lives on, thanks to Sarah Bohr, despite strange juxtapositions of beach business politics, property disputes and historical and artistic irreverence. She didn’t come to this house from inherited wealth. The property’s value has increased exponentially since Sarah first made this house home. Ironically, scores of development buzzards would love to descend on this former home of a developer to demolish it and build at least two McMansions here. The site, they say, is “underutilized.”

Sarah grew up in Falls Church, Virginia, down the street from Frank Lloyd Wright’s smallest design, the Pope-Leighey House, which was saved from demolition for construction of Interstate 66 by relocation to Alexandria, Virginia when Bobby Jacobs’s Taylor Hardwick house was three years old.

Surely this house deserves national landmark protection too. Other Hardwick houses, like the George Varn house in Ortega, have been destroyed in recent years.

A complicated situation, which led to Sarah’s ownership of the whole house as three condo units, developed around the swimming pool, to which townhouse residents have access by right of easement for nine months of the year.

What could be stranger? Taylor Hardwick saw the swimming pool as a room in the house, counterpart to the living room. Watching the angles of roof overhang and glass wall and terrace and pool interlace in the February sun, it seems blasphemous that the townhouse has seasonal rights to this room of Sarah’s house.

The seclusion of Bobby Jacobs’s legendary parties contrasts with the windows of townhouses eyeing the pool with easements and fantasies of demolition. The house is a statement of rarest and highest human artistic expression. Sarah has saved it as such.

6. Aortic Escrow

Bobby Jacobs had survived Beauchesne’s gunshot to the chest in March 1974, recounting to detectives from his hospital bed the events of those two hours from leaving G. Jefferson Willard’s dinner party through the shooting of his beloved boxer named General in his bedroom to the triple shooting at Londontowne. He hung on, but his grip weakened.

On June 26, 1974, three months after the shooting, Circuit Judge Everett Richardson delayed the trial until the end of September. Dr. Joseph Lowenthal had explained to the court that Jacobs remained in Intensive Care, having suffered, at the end of May, “an acute dissecting thoracic and abdominal aortic aneurysm,” a tear in the inner layer of the aortic wall. The early optimism of the bullet entering and exiting his chest with no vital damage was gone.

By December, a Jacksonville Journal headline said, “Bobby Jacobs’ Illness May Jeopardize Case.” Willard might get off the hook. The State could dismiss the grand jury indictment against him if Jacobs’s worsening heart condition kept him from testifying. “We can’t try the case without him,” said Assistant State Attorney Brent Shore. “Willard,” the Journal explained, “is believed to have set up the kidnap-ransom attempt.”

Jacobs’s health deteriorated. Debtors gathered round. They sought to move Jacobs’s properties in Jacksonville and Orlando into receivership, claiming Jacobs lived lavishly off rents without paying the banks. His attorneys argued for increased flexibility by escrow.

Raymond Beauchesne hadn’t killed Bobby Jacobs right away. Sometimes a murder takes time. Sometimes a victim takes years to die. More than two years after the shooting, Bobby Jacobs was finally nearing his own exit.

7. Avante-Garde-Historic

Bobby Jacobs died on Friday, June 11, 1976, more than two years after sustaining that gunshot to the chest. The day before, Jacobs had undergone open-heart surgery at University Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama. He died in the hospital’s cardiac Intensive Care Unit.

Jacobs’s obit mentioned Raymond Beauchesne’s suicide, while noting, “Another man, G. Jefferson Willard was indicted for murder, robbery, conspiracy and assault to murder, but charges were dropped after Jacobs’s physician told the court his patient’s heart problems, caused by the gunshot wound, had not improved.”

George Jefferson Willard died in Tallahassee in 2010, 65 years old. Born in Miami, he’d owned restaurants in Key West and Palm Beach and served as president of the Florida Restaurant Association. His recipes had been published in the prestigious magazine Bon Appetit. His Atlantic Beach house, the site of Bobby Jacobs’s Last Supper, has been demolished. The site awaits new construction.

Already, by the time of his obituary, Jacobs’s legend had moved beyond touch. Though the manager of Londontowne Apartments said he’d found the developer collapsed on the sidewalk and covered in blood, Jacobs’s Florida Times-Union obit quoted Kent Kelley, a “business associate,” saying, “After he was shot, he was still standing up and phoning. He called the police, then he called an ambulance. Then he called a doctor and told him to meet him in the emergency room.”

Much is missing from this story. Even by the mid-1970s, Jacksonville papers couldn’t say Jacobs was gay. Calling him a “bachelor” made him suspect in the wrong direction. This city’s construction king wasn’t after its daughters. Oh what stories, once upon a time, his hetero women stand-ins, suspiciously strong and tall, could’ve told.

How did Jacobs relate to Willard? Or, perhaps more intriguingly, Beauchesne to Willard? Jacobs and Willard conceivably had business in common, but whence Raymond Beauchesne, petty criminal arrested up and down the East Coast? Why and how had Beauchesne lived “off and on” with Willard at Atlantic Beach?

And is there anything to make of the strange echo of Beauchesne wanting to walk to the Seminole Beach ramp where a decade earlier banker’s son Glen Monroe was found murdered? In 1982, Jacksonville Beach Detective Ray O. Headen said, “It was common knowledge that Bobby Jacobs had paid off” Chief Homicide Investigator J.C. Patrick. Monroe’s murder was never solved.

About what, a stranger sometimes asks, do I write? I’ve said, a time or two, “architecture and murder.” It’s not what I think I’ve taken as my subject. I write about cities and the eerie patterns of history, how space becomes place, memory in the land, how the earth contains the world, redeems it, stays sacred.

Unfortunately, Thomas de Quincey’s 1827 essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” offers little help. Though de Quincey writes, “Murders have their little differences and shades of merit as well as statues, pictures,” and so on, he stays rather beside the point.

Sarah Bohr’s long relationship with this house touches each intricacy of history and addition, or adaptation. The flow of cedar planks beneath diamond trusses toward sand dunes. The floating of glass walls in invisible bearings. The accidents of politics of condo boards and beach real estate sharks.

In the central space of this house, in the irony of historic avant-garde, Sarah’s expanded her space toward the ocean, teak on the sides and glass to the sea, a glorious contradiction, deeply cavernous, cylindrically deep and wooded, yet at its opening, wide open to the ocean and the light.