FBI finds transcript from 1955 Till trial

The unearthing of the 1955 trial transcript is a promising and important development. Also noted in the article is that FBI agents who investigated the case 50 years ago have been rehired for the new investigation.

05/17/2005
FBI finds transcript from 1955 Till trial
The Greenwood Commonwealth
From staff and wire reports

The FBI has found a transcript of the 1955 murder trial of two Mississippi men accused of killing Emmett Till, one of the most infamous crimes of the civil rights era.

"We found a copy of a copy of a copy," Robert J. Garrity Jr., special agent in charge of the Jackson field office, told the Jackson Clarion-Ledger Monday. "We had to painstakingly go through it and retype it."

Garrity wouldn't say where the transcript was found.

An all-white jury acquitted Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam in Till's Aug. 28, 1955, killing.

The defense suggested a group had planted the body. Several months later, Bryant and Milam confessed to Look magazine they had beaten and shot Till because the 14-year-old Chicago black youth had whistled at Bryant's wife at the family's grocery store.

Bryant and Milam have since died, and legal experts say a transcript is key to putting together the case against any living suspects. . . .

Garrity says the FBI has been looking for residents who had a connection with the killing and following up on eyewitness accounts.

Lent Rice, a Hernando private investigator, was poring Monday over back issues of the Greenwood Commonwealth that reported on the murder and subsequent trial in Tallahatchie County.

Garrity said Rice is one of several retired FBI agents who have been rehired to help with the investigation of the Till murder and the 1964 slaying of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County. The FBI has assisted the state in the prosecution of Edgar Ray Killen, a reputed Klansman charged in the Neshoba County murders. That case is scheduled to go to trial June 13 in Philadelphia, Miss.

Garrity said the retired agents have been enlisted "principally because they have original knowledge of the investigation and many of the people who were involved in the original criminal acts are more of the age of these agents. They are able not only to establish a rapport, but because they have knowledge of what happened decades ago, they are able to get to the heart of the matter quicker."

(Whole thing.)