Rob McGee
Rob McGee, the Trapingus County deputy sheriff, was the decisive lawman in the capture of John Coffey and, years later, a reluctant keeper of a secret that haunted him. Unlike his corrupt and incompetent superior, Sheriff Homer Cribus, McGee was a capable and instinctively fair officer whose actions on the day of the murders—and his subsequent silence—shaped the course of the case. He emerges as a figure caught between the demands of his job and a dawning, unwelcome knowledge that the wrong man was condemned to die.
Role in the Capture of John Coffey
When Marjorie Detterick called the sheriff's office in panic after discovering her twin daughters missing, it was McGee who took the call. He listened to her babble for perhaps two minutes, then cut her off with four or five quick, curt questions—"like a trained fighter's flicking little jabs to the face," as Paul Edgecombe later described them. Within minutes, McGee had organized a posse, summoning Bobo Marchant and his dogs, and set off in pursuit. While Sheriff Cribus would have been finishing his first brandy-sweetened coffee, McGee had already put together a working manhunt. When the posse reached Klaus and Howie Detterick, who were stumbling desperately through the woods, McGee made a crucial decision: he ordered the father and son to unload their weapons, telling them it was safer for everyone. In truth, he had only the Dettericks surrender their loads, a move that almost certainly saved John Coffey's life, preventing a summary execution by the grieving father.
The Confrontation on the Riverbank
McGee led the posse to the riverbank where they found John Coffey sitting with the bodies of Cora and Kathe Detterick curled in his arms, howling at the sky. It was McGee who stepped forward, hunkered down, and spoke to the weeping giant in a quiet voice. When Coffey hushed at once, McGee looked into eyes that were bloodshot from crying yet somehow "untouched... distant and serene." He later told reporter Burt Hammersmith that they were "like the eyes of an animal that never saw a man before." McGee asked Coffey his name, and Coffey replied, "John Coffey, like the drink, only not spelled the same way." When McGee spotted a bulge in Coffey's chest pocket and asked if it was a gun, Coffey said it was "just a little lunch." McGee reached in and pulled out a bacon-tomato sandwich and a jelly fold-over wrapped in newspaper and tied with butcher's twine. There were no sausages—Bowser the dog had gotten those. After Coffey said, "I couldn't help it. I tried to take it back, but it was too late," McGee placed him under arrest for murder and then spit in his face.
The Doubt and the Silence
Years later, after John Coffey had been sentenced to death and was awaiting execution on E Block, Paul Edgecombe traveled to Trapingus County to investigate his growing suspicion that Coffey was innocent. He sought out McGee, who had become the acting authority in the county. Edgecombe laid out his evidence: that William Wharton had worked at the Detterick farm weeks before the murders, that Wharton had a history of sexual offenses against young girls, and—most crucially—that John Coffey could not tie a knot, making it impossible for him to have re-wrapped the lunch that was found in his pocket after feeding the sausages to the dog. McGee listened, and though he vehemently did not want to hear it, he agreed to go and question Klaus Detterick. He did so, and what he learned—that the hired man who painted the barn had given the name "Will Bonney" (Billy the Kid's real name)—confirmed Edgecombe's theory. Yet McGee also knew that Sheriff Cribus would never reopen the case. "It proves nothing, you know that, don't you?" he told Edgecombe, his face sick. He admitted that if he spoke up, he would lose his job, and he told himself that when Cribus retired or died, he would get the job and things would be different. "He'll tell himself, 'After all, it's only a Negro. It's not like they're going to burn a white man for it,'" Edgecombe later recounted. McGee never acted on what he knew, and John Coffey was executed for a crime he did not commit.
