Tag Archives: Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office

The Armory

Click below for this week’s story, or navigate the city through the search bar or the direction buttons at the top of the page:

Truly this story has it all. The old Armory has stories enough for a hundred cities. There’s no way to tease it adequately. Urban exploration. Thousands of concerts, from opera to Janis Joplin and the Allman Brothers. Political debates and politicians’ funerals and boxing bouts. Stories of integration (James Weldon Johnson, Duke Ellington, Marian Anderson) defiant against Jim Crow. And a call for a future.

2020 Protests Continue (Confessions, Consciousness, Change)

Click below for this week’s story, or navigate the city through the search bar or the direction buttons at the top of the page:

For more than a week, the protests have flooded the streets, demanding police release body cam footage. This crowd does me good. In my depths, stories from decades before I was born churn a historical conscience. The Confederate monument has again been vandalized. I ask Donal Godfrey, whose house the KKK bombed when he was six years old, if this time really is different. 

Halloween-week story: Spence Auto Sales and Ottis Toole Death Car

Click below for Halloween-week’s story, or navigate the city through the direction buttons at the top of the page:

It was November 1983, six months since Spence had last seen Ottis Toole, the great fake serial killer. Detectives thought they could pin the Ottis Toole death car and a rusty machete to Spence Auto Sales. Two months later, Spencer Bennett was dead. 

New Story: Jacksonville Beach: New Trinity, Killing the Devil, and the Murder of Vera Gould

Click below for the full story:

After the three young people stabbed K.’s grandmother to death in her Jacksonville Beach home, newspapers quoted them calling her “Satan,” themselves “the New Trinity” and Lex Hester, one of the most prominent men in Jacksonville’s political history, “the Antichrist.”