What do you say after bad men die?
Ex-Imperial Wizard Bowers Dies in Prison
By HOLBROOK MOHR Associated Press Writer
November 5, 2006, 9:04 PM ESTJACKSON, Miss. -- Former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Samuel H. Bowers, who was convicted eight years ago of ordering the 1966 bombing death of a civil rights leader, died Sunday in a state penitentiary, officials said. He was 82.
He died of cardio pulmonary arrest, said Mississippi Department of Corrections spokeswoman Tara Booth.
Bowers was convicted in August 1998 of ordering the assassination of Vernon Dahmer Sr., a civil rights activist who had fought for black rights during Mississippi's turbulent struggle for racial equality. He was sentenced to life in prison.
"He was supposed to stay there until he died. I guess he fulfilled that," Dahmer's widow, Ellie Dahmer, told The Associated Press on Sunday. "He lived a lot longer than Vernon Dahmer did."
Booth said that the Klansman died at approximately 11:30 a.m. in the Mississippi State Penitentiary Hospital in Parchman, a sprawling prison carved out of the cotton and soybean fields in the impoverished Mississippi Delta.
Dahmer, who championed equal voting rights for blacks, died at the age of 58 after being fire-bombed outside his Hattiesburg-area home on Jan. 10, 1966. The attack came after Dahmer announced that residents could pay their poll taxes at his grocery store, which was next to his home. The home and store also were torched.
When the Dahmer family awoke to honking horns in the pre-dawn hours that January morning, two carloads of Klansmen were waiting outside. They firebombed Dahmer when he exited the home, according to court testimony during a four-day trial in Forrest County Circuit Court in 1998.
Dahmer was able keep the Klansmen at bay with a shotgun while his family fled, but flames had already seared his lungs and he died in his wife's arms about 12 hours later.
During the trial, prosecutors claimed Bowers ordered the attack after becoming enraged that Dahmer was trying to register blacks to vote....
Bowers had a history of violence and served a prior six-year sentence after being convicted in 1967 on federal charges of violating the civil rights of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.
The three civil rights workers were stopped by Klansmen while in Mississippi in an effort to register black voters in 1964. They were beaten and shot and buried in an earthen dam. Bowers allegedly approved the killings as head of the KKK....
Dahmer's widow said Bowers' death brings little closure to a wound she has nursed for decades.
"It won't bring Vernon back," she said. "I lost a wonderful husband and my children lost a father. We lost a community leader. We lost a Christian man who saw good in people."
(Whole thing.)
There was a enough evidence to convict Bowers in 1967 on federal charges in the murders of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman but supposedly not enough to indict him on state charges in 2005. That leaves nine living suspects in the murders of the three civil rights workers.
In addition to Edgar Ray Killen, who is now serving time on manslaughter charges, there was sufficient evidence to arrest and/or indict on federal charges related to the murders the following men in the 1960s, all still living:
Jimmy Arledge - presently living, Meridian, MS
Olen Burrage - presently living, Philadelphia, MS
James Thomas “Pete” Harris - presently living, Meridian, MS
Tommy Horne - presently living, Meridian, MS
Billy Wayne Posey - presently living, Meridian, MS
Jimmy Snowden - presently living, Hickory, MS
Jimmy Lee Townsend - presently living, Philadelphia, MS
Richard Willis - presently living, Noxapater, MS
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