The Murder on South Palafox Street, Pensacola – July 1905

By Mike Simmons

I have a friend named Richard Wood who writes stories about interesting crimes in West Florida. Richard has spoken to the Pensacola Police Historic Society about the Martha Beck murders. On July 8, 2023, he wrote an article that occurred in downtown Pensacola on July 18, 1905, that bears repeating. If you want to get all of the details, visit his page at www.judgingshadows.com. His books are also worth reading. You can purchase one of them, Mayhem in the Florida Panhandle

Downtown Pensacola, Florida, in 1905, was a contradiction in terms. At night, it rocked with the disorderliness of sailors, lumbermen, military men, and ladies of the evening. By day, it was the epicenter of business from Mobile to Jacksonville, and north to Montgomery.

On a hot Pensacola afternoon, when the busyness of South Palafox Street mixed, not with the hum of computers or air conditioners, but with the rustle of newspapers and the creak of screen doors, violence stepped quietly through the front door of the “John White” Store.

John White was doing nothing remarkable when death found him.

He sat near the entrance of his store, afternoon paper open in his hands, the business he built from nothing humming around him. His seventeen-year-old son Eddie stood just a few feet away. Clerks moved about the floor. Customers browsed. It was an ordinary day…until it wasn’t.

William Fletcher Williams, a clerk employed by White, walked into the store, passed his employer without a word, then turned suddenly.

The revolver came up.

Two shots rang out.

John White never stood a chance.

A Good Man on South Palafox

John White was fifty-eight years old. Born in Austria, he had come to Pensacola thirty-six years earlier with little more than ambition and grit. He started small, selling tobacco and maritime goods on the street to sailors and dockworkers. But success followed him like a tide. Over time, his modest trade grew into the John White Store on South Palafox Street, the largest establishment of its kind in the city.

White was known as a fair employer and a generous man. Married, with four sons, Mario in New York, James managing the store, Eddie seventeen, and Tommy just fourteen, he had earned respect not only for his business sense but for his willingness to give young men a second chance.

That compassion would help seal his fate.

Five Shots That Changed a City

When Williams fired the first two shots, Eddie White heard him say, cold and clear:

“I don’t give a damn for any of you.”

Williams turned next on James White, the store manager and John’s son, shooting him in the chest. Blood soaked James’s clothes, but he stayed on his feet.

Then Williams pivoted again.

Edwin Dansby, manager of the furnishings department, was showing clothing to a customer farther back. A bullet struck him in the neck. He collapsed instantly.

Williams fired again, aiming at clerk James Nix, who barely escaped by diving behind a counter. The other employees, Ernest Elliott and Chris Hendricks, took cover near the rear of the store.

Five shots in all.

Only one missed.

Williams ejected the spent cartridges and began reloading.

James White, wounded and bleeding, lunged at him.

At that moment, Constable Charles Bobe, who had heard the shots from the sidewalk, rushed in with Robert McLellan and Cuyler McMillan. James White, unsure if he was dying, shouted through clenched pain:

“Take him, Mr. Cuyler, I don’t know whether he has killed me, or not.”

They tackled Williams, pried the revolver from his hands, and hauled him from the store. Crossing the Plaza, and met Deputy Sheriff Sanders. Told that John White had been shot dead, Williams replied flatly:

“Me, killed John White? I don’t remember anything about it.”

Death and Aftermath

James White was taken first to Dr. D’Alemberte’s office, then to the hospital. Edwin Dansby was rushed to St. Anthony’s, but there was little hope. He died just after 4 a.m. on July 22, 1905, and was buried at St. John’s Cemetery.

John White’s body was carried first to the undertaker, then to his home at 423 East Gregory Street. The house filled with mourners. He would be laid to rest at St. Michael’s Cemetery, the city he helped build watching quietly as one of its best men was lowered into the ground.

A coroner’s jury was convened that very day. Witnesses spoke. Evidence was examined. The conclusion came swiftly.

Williams was charged with first-degree murder.

The Trouble Beneath the Floorboards

The shooting didn’t erupt from nowhere.

For some time, merchandise had been going missing from the John White Store. Edwin Dansby received a letter from a friend in Century, a small town in northern Escambia County. The letter claimed that Archie Williams, William’s brother, was selling goods bearing John White’s markings.

Constable Bobe and Dansby took the train north. They found the items.

When confronted, William Fletcher Williams denied everything. Lacking airtight proof, and moved by sympathy, John White chose mercy. He dropped the matter and kept Williams on staff.

Others in the store did not forget.

Williams felt watched. Judged. Cornered.

He brooded. He drank. He stewed over imagined enemies with “dollars where I haven’t even got cents.” On the day of the shooting, he had been drinking steadily. Shortly before the attack, he stepped outside for a few minutes.

When he came back, the gun came with him.

“The Best Friend I Ever Had”

About thirty minutes after the arrest, a reporter named Percy S. Hayes interviewed Williams in his jail cell. Williams was drunk, sick, and reeking of vomit. When Hayes confirmed that John White was dead, Williams spoke freely – too freely.

He called White “the best friend I ever had.”

Said White helped him out of trouble.

Said others had poisoned White against him.

Said he wasn’t after White at all, just “other parties.”

And then, with a logic only bitterness can supply, he added that if White had “done right,” he would still be alive.

It was the kind of confession that blamed everyone except the man who pulled the trigger.

Trials, Mercy, and Public Anger

A month later, Williams stood trial for John White’s murder. The jury found him guilty of first-degree murder, but recommended mercy. Life imprisonment instead of the gallows.

Pensacola was furious.

Many hoped the second trial, for the murder of Edwin Dansby, which was moved to Marianna, would end differently. It didn’t. Another conviction. Another mercy recommendation. Another life sentence.

Two murders. Two lives lost. No execution.

The cost of justice: $6,000.

Williams waited in the Pensacola jail while the state decided where to send him. His father-in-law brought him meals. Some said he came from a “good family.” Others said good families don’t raise men who shoot employers in cold blood.

The Convict Lease and a Final Crime

By 1911, Williams was a trustee at a convict labor camp near Belmore, part of Florida’s brutal convict lease system, which was actually state-sanctioned slavery by another name. Trustees had privileges. Freedom of movement.

On August 11, 1911, Williams rode away from the camp on horseback.

Sixteen miles away, near Green Cove Springs, he targeted a lonely farmhouse.

Mrs. Jessie Meeks opened her door, believing her husband had returned. Williams shot her dead. Her sixteen-year-old son, Walter, ran toward the door and was shot in the leg.

Walter fought back.

He retrieved a shotgun. He fired. Once. Twice.

Williams collapsed in the road and died the next morning.

The killer of John White did not live to see middle age.

His body was returned to Pensacola and buried at Pine Barren Cemetery, north of the city, far from the marble storefronts of South Palafox Street where his rage first exploded.

Echoes on Palafox

James White survived his wounds and lived until 1943. Ironically, both he and William Fletcher Williams were born in August 1882, two lives forever bound by one violent afternoon.

Today, South Palafox is quieter. The storefronts have changed. But the echoes remain.

Because sometimes, beneath the hum of business and the rustle of newspapers, resentment waits, quiet as a man standing in a doorway, gun in hand.

And when it steps inside, nothing is ever the same.

Michael Earl Simmons is a retired law enforcement officer, criminal justice historian, and storyteller based in Pensacola, Florida. With more than three decades in policing, he has walked old crime scenes, handled yellowed case files, and listened to stories passed down long after the sirens faded. Through Sweet Tea Murders, he preserves the forgotten crimes of the South, not to sensationalize them, but to remember the people, the places, and the lessons they left behind. Because the echoes still linger.