In his new book, "A Town Without Pity," author Jason Vuic recounts two stories from Arcadia.
One recalls an 1980's AIDS panic there, the other talks about the result of a racist past.
As Vuic tells WUSF's Cathy Carter what binds the stories together is a town fearful of change.
The interview below was lightly edited for clarity.
Jason, let's start with the story of the Ray brothers, three young white boys who had Hemophilia. They contracted HIV through tainted blood factor. I understand the town rose up because they didn't want their children going to school with the Rays.
People were incredibly fearful of AIDS in the 1980s and this trickled down into this small, insular town. The Ray brothers were like six, seven and eight. The father was a prison guard; the mother was a practical nurse. They told their school, and they were promptly kicked out. Their parents embarked on a very public fight with the DeSoto County School Board that would thrust this rural conservative town, kicking and screaming into the national spotlight.
This was covered on ABC World News Tonight, which is actually where the title of your book comes from, "A Town Without Pity."
Yeah, ABC sent John Quinones, and when it appeared, it was very sympathetic to the Ray boys.
Ricky Ray was a very handsome little boy, and he said, we wanted to be treated like normal children and the graphic said, A Town Without Pity — question mark. And from then on, it went nationwide.
And as the Rays went to court, the town really circled the wagons. They planned boycotts, and they have a big rally at the rodeo arena, and it just spiraled out of control.
But a federal judge did rule that barring the boys from school was illegal, and ordered the DeSoto County School District to reinstate the boys into regular school.
Yes. Dade County schools had kicked three Haitian immigrant girls out of school. They had received HIV from their mother in the womb, and not only had they brought them back, they had settled with them and apologized.
So, there was something irrational about the way that DeSoto County handled it. They should have asked, what have other counties done? Have they won in court? And the answer was no.
Now you were going to high school during this time in Punta Gorda.
Yes. My parents were school teachers, and my dad ran an elementary school on the way to Arcadia, so there were a lot of country kids.
So, when this blew up in Arcadia, we all were like, wow, what is happening here?
The week the Ray boys went back to school, there were bomb threats police in the hallways, and then that Friday night, the Rays were visiting family members and their house was set fire to.
So, the townsfolk believed the Rays did it for sympathy from the national press and national news reported the Rays had been firebombed.
No one ever proved who set the fire but that's really when Arcadia literally blew up.
Sadly, all of the Ray brothers died of AIDS. We lost the last Ray brother just a few years ago in 2023. Let's get into the parallel story you tell in your book which almost certainly had to do with racism.
Well, 20 years earlier, in 1967 there was a black migrant worker, a fruit picker, named James Richardson. He had seven children. Some of them were the babysitter, some were at school, but they all came home to eat lunch, and they all started to die. They had consumed parathion.
They brought Richardson in from the fields, and they asked him at the hospital, "do you have insurance?" And he said, "no, I tried to buy some meaning insurance for the bill, not life insurance," but a local sheriff immediately went with that as a motive.
The DeSoto County Sheriff at the time, a man named Frank Klein, arrested Richardson without any evidence of this guilt, even though there was a babysitter who gave the children the food, who actually had killed somebody before.
Yeah, she had been in prison for murdering her husband, and was locally known as a very tough woman not to be messed with. So, there are all these rumors that dogged the sheriff for decades. One was that he was taking a cut of gambling that she was running in the Black section of Arcadia called the Quarters.
So, Richardson is found guilty, and sent to Florida State Prison. But the story reemerges again one year after the Ray brother’s ordeal, when the Richardson case is being reviewed.
Sometime in ‘86 or ‘87 this Betsy Reese, the babysitter, had dementia, and she was telling her caregivers that she killed those children. And no one knows if she meant I did it, or I fed them the food. Our Governor, Bob Martinez, was kind of forced to appoint an outside investigator when the case landed on Inside Edition. Arcadia was the first ever episode. The evidence came out that Richardson didn't do it. That he didn't have insurance, and that they had buried the evidence of an innocent man.
James Richardson was eventually exonerated after spending 21 years in prison. Two really tough stories, but fascinating Florida history. What do you think these stories might mean for Arcadia and other small American towns that are coming to terms now with a troubled history?
One of the lessons is that when your elected officials act poorly, it's going to affect the town. When your mayor, your city councilman, your superintendent, your sheriff, don't act lawfully, you're going to pay. You're going to pay in terms of money. Which Arcadia did. The state will pay out to James Richardson, but you're going to pay in the popular consciousness.
Jason Vuic will talk about his book at Bookstore One in Sarasota on Monday, Nov.10. and at Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg Wednesday Nov. 12.
