With the recent passing of Lee Cody, the last of the “county mounties,” a 60-year-old vendetta comes to an end.
Cody was a county patrolman and later a detective in the Duval County Sheriff’s Office before consolidation. His partner was Donald Coleman.
Cody, Coleman and two other detectives, Ray Headen and Claude West, were fired by Sheriff Dale Carson by Carson, who called them insubordinate. A court upheld his action.
But the four decided to keep on with their quest. They were labeled the “county mounties” because mounties always get their man.
But they didn’t get Carson. Despite decades of accusation and investigations, not a charge was leveled against Carson, one of the most honest people I ever knew.
Cody was the leader and he found a cause — a murder that he and Coleman had investigated, involving a woman who was shot while walking down New Kings Road.
They learned that four men had been in the car. All were arrested and the one identified as the shooter was sent to prison.
Because the victim had black skin, Cody and Coleman tried to make it a “civil rights” case. They accused the chief of detectives, J.C. Patrick, of hiding evidence.
I always got along with Patrick but he was not exactly of sterling character. Apparently, he was a bully and a wife-beater and his own son killed him one night to protect himself and his mother.
So, they might have had a case on Patrick, who could not mount a defense due to being dead and they ran with the story.
The gullible media lapped it up because of the race angle but thorough investigations by grand juries and various agencies found nothing on Carson.
With the other three fired officers dead, Cody pushed on alone determined to defame the man who had fired him. He wrote a self-published book.
Cody always insisted he only wanted justice done. But the criminals were arrested and punished, so justice was done.
Cody was a clever guy and became a top-notch used car salesman after he left the sheriff’s office. It was a remarkable example of someone devoting their entire life to revenge. In the end, however, it was another case of Don Quixote in action, and the windmills remain standing.