THE SINCLAIR CASE
Chapter Four: The Football Legend
Why was the death penalty so important in “the Sinclair case”?
The answer is simple: political pressure from the Istrouma High School alumni (which I will call the “Istrouma network”) demanded nothing less.
The J.C. Bodden family by itself was not politically prominent nor was it financially dominant. It was a blue collar working class family that, like so many others in Little Dixie, had migrated from the farmlands of Mississippi to the flourishing petro-chemical industry in Baton Rouge during the 1930s and 1940s.
The crime I committed would have been “just another piddling robbery gone bad” had it not been for J.C. Bodden’s ties to the football legacy of Istrouma High School.
Bodden was a member of the widely heralded Istrouma High School Indians football team that gained almost unparalleled glory in the early-1950s with its historic championship runs. J.C. represented the heart and soul of those glorious “Friday night lights” in the Istrouma football stadium
Located in the middle of the segregated “Little Dixie” enclave, the school’s students represented the social and racial views of their parents. The Klan’s presence was entrenched in Baton Rouge in that era, and Little Dixie mirrored that presence. Why else would the residents of that North Baton Rouge neighborhood elected to identify itself with the racist Southern Confederacy. Robert E. Lee was the Civil War’s greatest general, not Ulysses S. Grant.
Founded in 1917, Istrouma took its name from the Indian word “red stick.” The school established a football program in 1935—a program that would ultimately achieve legendary success on the gridiron. It began in 1938, just three years after the team was formed, when the Indians captured their first Class 2A state championship. That success was followed by two more Class 2A state championships in 1950 and 1951—teams that Bodden was a member of.
The football program then joined Class 3A in which the Indians won state championships in 1955, 1956, 1957, 1959, 1961, and 1962
The popularity of the Istrouma Indians in the 1950s rivaled that of the LSU Tigers with some believing the Indians could outlast the Tigers in a matchup.
The killing of J.C. Bodden was a crime against that football legacy.
A Baton Rouge Baptist minister named John Greene told me in 1989 that ‘The killing of J.C. Bodden was a crime against football. That’s the worst crime a person could commit in Baton Rouge.”
Pastor Greene’s observation actually defined “the Sinclair case.”
In a February 1999 interview with local Baton Rouge radio personality Jim Inkster, Don Hooks, an Istrouma classmate of Bodden and one of the distinguished pallbearers at his funeral, put it this way:
“Billy Sinclair’s crime was that he killed a man with a million friends.”
In effect, my crime was not the killing of a store clerk but the killing of a football hero “with a million friends.”
The killing of a store clerk in Baton Rouge in 1965 did not warrant the death penalty but the killing of a football hero did.
One of Bodden’s friends was Billy Cannon. He and Bodden represent the spirit of the Istrouma Indians—Bodden the solid team player and Cannon the star of the team.
In 1955, Cannon scored 33 touchdowns from his running back position and amassed more than 100 yards rushing in 12 of Istrouma’s thirteen games that year—and he generally played only in the first half in those games. He rushed for 178 yards and scored three touchdowns as he led the Indians to a humiliating defeat of Shreveport’s powerhouse Fair Park team by a score of 40 to 6 to capture the state championship that year.
That undefeated ’55 Istrouma team has been called the “greatest high school football team” in Louisiana history. A theft conviction and a 90-day suspended sentence the summer of that year did not tarnish Cannon’s personal gridiron excellence or the team’s remarkable success in the fall of that year.
Although recruited by many other colleges despite his criminal background, Cannon chose LSU because it was close to home and because the university employed his father as a janitor and provided him with a job between semesters. He first played for the LSU Tigers as a sophomore in 1957.
Bodden, in the meantime, left football behind when he graduated in 1954. He joined the Air Force but always remained friends with Cannon as football glory engulfed the star running back. Cannon led the Tigers to their first national championship in 1958 and was the Heisman Trophy winner in 1959.
In a 1958 Sports Illustrated article, Roy Terrell described Cannon this way:
“Blessed with a magnificent physique, tremendous speed and an apparently bottomless supply of gutty determination, LSU’s bowlegged left halfback may be the best college football player in America.”
Many people in the college football world believed that Cannon was the character inspiration for Frank Deford’s 1981 book “Everybody’s All American” and the subsequent Dennis Quaid movie adaptation based on the book.
What is certain is that Cannon’s college football accolades made him the NFL’s number one draft pick in 1960. He signed a $50,000 deal with the Los Angeles Rams but shocked the professional football world when he reneged on the deal by signing a three-year deal worth $100,000 with the fledgling American Football League’s Houston Oilers. It was the same kind of shady behavior Cannon exhibited in his Istrouma years. Oilers owner Bud Adams threw in a $10,000 gift for Cannon’s wife and sweetened the whole pot with a slightly used Cadillac.
Cannon led the Oilers to two AFL championships, leading the league in rushing in 1961 while doing it. He would later win another AFL championship in 1967 with the Oakland Raiders.
During his 11-year pro career, Cannon compiled a total of 8003 yards in rushing, receiving and punt returns while scoring 63 touchdowns. He was twice selected to the AFL All-Star team. He put the old AFL in the same conversation with the traditional NFL before Joe Namath completely legitimized the league with the quarterback’s guaranteed Super Bowl victory over the indomitable Baltimore Colts in 1969.
By 1965, Cannon had established a distinguished professional football career. He was a cherished sports legend and cultural icon in Baton Rouge.
That was the year that, unfortunately, I killed one of Cannon’s friends, J.C. Bodden.
And to this day, even in death, Cannon maintains a hero-status both in Baton Rouge and across the Louisiana football world despite a 1983 federal conviction for masterminding one of the largest counterfeiting rings in U.S. history. It has been reported that bad real estate investments and huge gambling debts compelled the football great to print $6 million in fake $100 bills that were of unusual superior quality, according to Secret Service reports.
Assistant U.S. Attorney in Baton Rouge at the time, Rand Miller, told the New York Times that Secret Service agents recovered $4,750,200 in “well-crafted” fake $100 bills. That left roughly one million counterfeit bills in circulation—fake money that was never recovered and it remains anyone’s guess as to who benefitted from it.
Miller said Cannon was the organizer of the “counterfeit ring” that involved other LSU sports figures. The Secret Service developed evidence that the counterfeit ring was also involved in drug smuggling. Although Cannon was never directly linked to any drug smuggling, a number of Baton Rouge’s more prominent citizens were arrested in major drug deals during the time Cannon’s counterfeit ring was in operation.
Whoever was involved in the drug smuggling connected to Cannon’s counterfeit operation were guaranteed anonymity after the football hero nipped the drug smuggling investigation in the bud with a quick guilty plea arranged by his attorney, Robert L. “Buck” Kleinpeter. He received a five-year prison term that he served in a federal correctional facility located in Texarkana, Texas. He actually served two and one-half years on the sentence.
“Your problem is Billy Cannon,” Louisiana State Police Detective Joe Whitmore told me in 1992. “It has always been Billy Cannon. I hate that motherfucker.”
Fifteen years earlier the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate expressed Cannon’s power this way: the newspaper said the road to political office in the capital city ran through Cannon’s dental office. Even as early as 1965 when he was just 28 years of age, Cannon’s social and political influence was enormous. His name epitomized the kind of raw political influence that had ruled Baton Rouge since the Huey Long era. The football legend was on a first name basis with politicians like Pitcher and LeBlanc.
It was Cannon, and scores more like him connected to Istrouma High School—especially the school’s football program—who applied pressure on Pitcher to seek the death penalty in my case. They would settle for no less than my execution in the state’s infamous “Old Gerte” electric chair for killing their friend.
In 1994, my wife, Jodie, went to Cannon’s dental office to ask him to stop the political pressure in my case. Although he denied using his power to personally influence any decision-making in the case over the years, he conceded that his name had probably been invoked by Bodden’s many football friends to bring political pressure against me. In effect, the football “Legend” said he didn’t personally apply pressure but he enabled others to do so in his name.
I never bought into Cannon’s “hands off” defense.. I was told over the years by too many law enforcement, corrections and government officials that the football legend used his power to influence decisions in “the Sinclair case.” In fact, he let it be known many times in many different circles throughout my forty year incarceration that I should have been executed and that I should have spent the rest of my life in prison.
Cannon died peacefully on May 20, 2018 in his home at St. Francisville, Louisiana just a few miles from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola where he had been employed in a cushy job as the prison’s dentist—an old football legend and ex-convict pulling the teeth of convicts.
I was freed from the Louisiana prison system twelve years before his death.
I really don’t know what his feelings were about my parole freedom in 2006 but I imagine they were about as indifferent as mine were when I learned about his death.