Pastor's fame extends beyond 66 Sims murders

Gerald Ensley
| TLH Flashback

(This column first appeared in the Tallahassee Democrat on October 23, 2011.)

He lived in Tallahassee for only five years in the 1960s, but the late Pastor C. A. Roberts left a considerable legacy.

He was a captivating orator and a charismatic personality who developed a following. He was chaplain to the Florida House of Representatives and the Florida State football team. He pushed the city’s largest church, First Baptist, down the path of integration.

And yes, he was an incorrigible womanizer and a murder suspect.

Saturday was the 45th anniversary of the Sims murders. On the night of October 22, 1966, Robert and Helen Sims and their 12-year-old daughter Joy were tied up, shot and stabbed to death in their home on Muriel Court, off Gibbs Drive. Many people in town were attending the Mississippi State-FSU football game; The bodies were found by another Sims girl who came home after a babysitting job.

The Sims murders are the most infamous murders in Tallahassee history. These are often described as the moment when Tallahassee lost its innocence as a sleepy Southern town and its residents realized that modern violence existed everywhere. Fear gripped the city for weeks, gun sales soared, and Halloween trick-or-treating was even canceled after nine days.

The Sims murders were never solved; but Leon County Sheriff Larry Campbell and Henry Cabbage have suspects. Campbell was one of the lead investigators on the case in 1966 and spent decades pursuing a solution. Cabbage, a local historian, spent years working on a book, compiling reams of interviews and official records.

Cabbage considers two high school students who live nearby, a boyfriend with sick tastes, and his girlfriend as the prime suspects. Campbell interviewed them and they are both still alive. But Campbell won’t say anything other than, “Boyfriend and girlfriend are very interesting people.”

The problem in solving the case, which has been examined by hundreds of experts for 45 years, is that there is no evidence. The murder weapons were never found. There was no DNA analysis in 1966. As Campbell said: “I could go to the grand jury and get an indictment, but I could never (prove anything) in court.”

But the most popular suspect in 1966 was Cecil Albert Roberts, then pastor of First Baptist Church, who was at the FSU football game as team chaplain. Rumor has it that he was having an affair with church secretary Helen Sims, who resigned a few days ago. Rumors also claimed that Roberts left the game for a time and returned with cuts and scrapes.

But Campbell and researchers studied game films and found Roberts was visible on the sideline for all but a few minutes; they never missed it long enough to get past the town and back. When they interviewed him, they could not find any cuts or scratches on him.

Although his role remains legendary and investigators interviewed him several times, Roberts was ruled out as a suspect.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that CA had nothing to do with (the murders),” Campbell said. “He was simply a victim of circumstances and his own foibles.”

These “weaknesses” were Roberts’ numerous romantic triumphs. Although Campbell and Cabbage are certain that Roberts never had an affair with Helen Sims (in fact, Helen Sims probably resigned from the church because she was upset with Roberts’ advances), he had affairs with many women. Campbell said that in the weeks after the murders, “older women, college students and women of all stripes” contacted investigators to confess to relationships with Roberts, fearing they too would become involved in the case.

In fact, Roberts left Tallahassee in January 1967 because he allegedly got an FSU student pregnant. His departure was punctuated by a resolution by the Florida Baptist Association, authored by Malcolm Johnson, that newspaper’s then-editor and a member of the association, condemning Roberts’ “life of gross depravity” and recommending that his ordination be revoked.

Roberts, his wife and four children moved to Texas, where he taught at Stephen Austin University. He later moved to the private sector as a consultant to churches. In 1978, 47-year-old Roberts died in a car crash in Texas.

Although death put an end to his involvement in scandal, it did not eliminate his important role in the civil rights movement.

FSU communications professor Davis Houck is co-editor of “Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965.” The book is a compilation of speeches by white pastors who advanced the cause of racial integration in their churches at the time.

Houck and his co-editor are preparing Volume 2 of the book, which will include a speech Roberts gave to Southern Baptist clergy in New Mexico in August 1964. The speech is a fascinating and frank account of efforts to allow blacks to worship at Tallahassee’s First Baptist Church.

Roberts describes being hired in April 1962 by First Baptist, then Tallahassee’s largest church (4,500 members) and “the great symbol of segregation and racial prejudice in Tallahassee,” said retired Florida A&M professor Charles U. Smith. local civil rights movement.

Roberts described his growing belief in racial integration, the resistance he faced from his parishioners, how he considered resigning, how a group of black FAMU professors persuaded him to stay to promote progress and the dissolution of his church’s resistance.

In 1963, when Roberts first floated the idea, the First Baptist congregation voted 900 to 20 against allowing Black people to attend services. A year later, shortly before Roberts’ speech in New Mexico, the congregation voted to continue excluding Blacks by a narrow vote of just 640-626.

“Something extraordinary was happening that convinced over 600 people that this was what the church was supposed to do,” Houck said. “Are we going to blame it all on CA Roberts? No, but he was clearly leading his congregation in that direction.”

In fact, two years later, in 1966, First Baptist admitted its first Black members. Today, about 300 of the church’s 3,800 members are minorities, and Doug Dortch, pastor since 1994, holds Roberts in high esteem.

Although Dortch had never met Roberts, he “learned everything you needed to know but was afraid to ask” from the First Baptist congregation, who wanted Roberts to be aware of his “checkered past.” Dortch praises Roberts as a dynamic speaker — “People told me stories about sitting on the balcony steps listening to him because there wasn’t room in the dugout,” Dortch said — and praises his legacy in Tallahassee.

“We are now as integrated a Baptist church as you can find anywhere, and we count that as one of our strengths,” Dortch said. “I am grateful that we are so far beyond racial discrimination. And I attribute that to pastors like CA Roberts. He undoubtedly contributed to the integration of this church.”

Gerald Ensley was a reporter and columnist for the Tallahassee Democrat from 1980 until his retirement in 2015. He died of a stroke in 2018. The Tallahassee Democrat publishes Tallahassee history from Ensley’s extensive archives in the Opinion section every Sunday through 2024. TLH 200: Gerald Ensley Memorial Bicentennial Project. About two dozen copies of a book of Ensley’s columns are still available only at the Midtown Reader, 1123 Thomasville Road, or 1123 Thomasville Road. midtownreader.com. Proceeds and contributions from the sale of the book were used to create an endowment scholarship for journalists trained at FSU, and we also launched this project to celebrate our 200th anniversary.

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