[3] The time and place of the lynching were provided to the news media in advance and reported on nationwide, attracting a huge crowd.
[4]: 126 The spectacle lynching had been announced to take place at the Cannady farm, but the crowd had grown unruly, and a smaller group murdered Neal in secret.
When the sheriff refused, they began rioting, assaulting the courthouse, attacking black people in the area, injuring 200, and looting and burning houses.
Eventually, Governor David Sholtz called in more than 100 troops of the National Guard to suppress the white rioting.
At 6:30 A.M. the next day, they found her body poorly hidden in the woods, under the cover of two logs and a pine tree branch.
[2] County Sheriff Flake Chambliss became focused on two suspects: Claude Neal, a 23-year-old black farmworker who lived about a quarter mile away, and Calvin Cross, who was white.
[2] Sheriff Chambliss had received reports that Neal had been in the field near the same water pump that Lola had gone to and that he was gone for about two hours before going home.
[5][2] One was that she had been murdered by a white man, who later asked Neal's mother and aunt to wash his clothes and possibly offered them payment.
[2] Another was that a white man from Malone, in Jackson County, had already confessed to killing Cannady, and that he had given Neal money in exchange for trading clothes with him afterward.
[2] In Pensacola, Sheriff Herbert E. Gandy did not want to keep him in the Escambia County, Florida jail because it was not believed to be sturdy enough to withstand an attack.
[2] In order to keep Neal's location a secret, he was booked on charges of vagrancy under the alias of John Smith.
The governor of Florida was apprised, but said local officials had to request his aid in order for him to send in the National Guard, and they had not.
[3] A large group gathered at the farm formed to witness the Neal lynching; estimates of the crowd's size ranged from hundreds to several thousand.
[2] When they learned that the Cannady family was on the move, the crowd quickly caught up, but when Neal was still not shown, the group grew increasingly restive.
[2][7] The men holding Neal took him to a spot in the woods near Peri Landing along the Chattahoochee River for the murder.
[7] Claude Neal was tortured and subjected to castration, his genitalia were stuffed in his mouth,[8] he was stabbed, burned with hot irons, and he was raised and lowered in hanging before he finally died.
[2] A mob formed outside the courthouse, with over two thousand people having arrived by noon, but they were too late to see Neal's body.
According to historian James R. McGovern, this reaction contributed to mass lynchings losing some of their previous social acceptance.
[5] At the same time, Jessie Daniel Ames was organizing Southern white women to oppose lynchings, and had obtained 40,000 signatures toward this goal.