Let’s See If The Feds Do Better In These New Cases Than MS AG Hood Did In Neshoba County

July 14, 2005

Authorities to probe 3 civil rights-era slayings in Miss.

By Jerry Mitchell

Federal authorities will examine three unsolved killings from the civil rights era, U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton said Wednesday.

"We just owe it to them," he said.

FBI documents show on May 2, 1964, Klansmen beat and killed 19-year-olds Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee in Franklin County, dumping their bodies in the Mississippi River. On Feb. 27, 1967, 37-year-old Wharlest Jackson was driving home, having been recently promoted to a "whites-only" job in Natchez, when a bomb planted under his truck exploded.

Lampton said it would behoove those with information regarding these killings to fess up now: "The first one to come forward is the one to get some consideration...."

Moore's brother, Thomas, met Wednesday with Lampton, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jack Lacy and FBI agent Kevin Rust.

"Mr. Lampton told me he'd take a personal interest in the case," said Thomas Moore, a retired Army command sergeant major who now counsels troubled youths in Colorado Springs, Colo. "I left his office with a lot of hope. I think he's going to do something."

Lampton said he was impressed with the veteran.

The FBI reopened the case involving the 1964 killings in 2000, and District Attorney Ronnie Harper said he's never considered the case closed. "I requested the assistance of the FBI," he said. "We stand ready (to prosecute) if they develop the case."

Lampton said since authorities already are looking into the pair's killings, he decided to include the Jackson killing as well....

The Clarion-Ledger has obtained nearly 1,000 FBI documents that detail both the extensive FBI investigation and the failure of Mississippi to pursue the killings of Dee and Moore. According to the document, the two were hitchhiking near an ice cream stand on U.S. 84 when a Klansman picked the pair up in a Volkswagen. The Klan had heard rumors of gunrunning by black Muslims and wrongly believed the pair knew something about it, according to the documents.

Klansmen took Dee and Moore into the Homochitto National Forest, where they beat them unconscious, loaded them into another car and dumped their bodies into the Mississippi River, according to the documents.

The men arrested at the time, James Ford Seale, then 29, and Charles Marcus Edwards, then 31, made admissions in the case, according to FBI documents. They were never tried, and both have since denied any role in the killings.

According to FBI documents, authorities confronted Seale and told him they knew he and others took Dee and Moore "to some remote place and beat them to death. You then transported and disposed of their bodies by dropping them in the Mississippi River. You didn't even give them a decent burial. We know you did it. You know you did. The Lord above knows you did it."

"Yes," Seale is quoted as replying, "but I'm not going to admit it. You are going to have to prove it."

When authorities arrested Edwards, he "admitted that he and James Seale picked up Dee and another Negro in vicinity of Meadville, Miss., and took them to an undisclosed wooded area where they were 'whipped,' " a Nov. 6, 1964, FBI document said. "States victims were alive when he departed the wooded area."

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