Willis V. McCall is the sheriff of Lake County, Florida (where George Starling’s hometown of Eustis is located). He is a notorious racist and segregationist, and he frequently abuses and murders Black suspects throughout his long tenure (1944 to 1972). In the 1940s, he uses a vagrancy law as an excuse to arrest, fine, and torture Black men at random, and in 1949, he becomes nationally famous for killing two Black rape suspects in cold blood. Later, he goes to extreme lengths to oppose federal school integration laws, and he manages to keep many services segregated into the early 1970s—among the latest in the nation. He gets investigated for misconduct 49 times, but he never faces any legal consequences for his actions. He finally loses reelection in 1972, after kicking a developmentally disabled Black man to death. His reign of terror epitomizes not just the brutality of Jim Crow, but also the way that the state officially sanctioned and sustained it.