Last weekend, on February 6, Catherine Walker and I were emailing back and forth about our plans to interview people familiar with the unsolved civil rights murder of her father Clifton Walker 46 years ago. Around mid-afternoon we had a breakthrough; Catherine wrote to tell me about her conversation with the son of a possible eyewitness to the planning of the murder:
I explained to him how important today is: “DADDY’S birthday” How I need his Dad’s # to speak with him to move forward with the Justice quest. He understood.
For months, Catherine Walker and I have wanted to speak with a black man who reportedly witnessed the planning of the murder at Nettles Truck Stop, about 6 miles north of Woodville, MS. The FBI documents say the man
left the vicinity of Woodville, Mississippi, immediately after the murder of Walker … he [said he] knew what would happen if he continued to hang around.
Some Woodville residents who know the possible eyewitness have told me they saw him about four years ago and that he told them he was at the truck stop on the night of the murder, February 28, 1964, and the planning of the murder was what he saw there.
I was pretty sure I’d located the possible eyewitness, and I was in Louisiana, so Catherine and I were making plans to go see him ourselves. Over the last year, both Catherine and I have been in touch with our subject’s son, who lives in Baton Rouge, LA. The son told us that his family is actually kin to the Walkers and that he knows some of Catherine’s cousins well. He has information about the murder that he’s heard from extended family currently living in Louisiana who were in Woodville in 1964. The son has been eager to help. He’s shared the information with us, but he hasn’t felt comfortable arranging a meeting with his father. We originally thought he was trying to protect his father, but he eventually revealed to Catherine that he and his father do not get along.
We wanted the son to tell us his father’s general location or phone number so I could verify that my information was correct. Finally, on Clifton Walker’s 83rd birthday, the son came through, and his information matched mine.
The man we were looking for was at church when we got to his place. His wife and a slew of grandkids were all hanging out in a shotgun shack in a working class black neighborhood outside of New Orleans.
We sat in Catherine’s car outside the house and waited.
A few weeks after his 37th birthday, on February 28, 1964, Clifton Walker was ambushed on the deserted, unpaved Poor House Road, outside Woodville, MS. He was on his way home from the 3-11 pm shift at the International Paper plant in Natchez, MS. Gunmen shot up his car, blew out all the windows, and shot Clifton Walker at close range, multiple times in the head. No arrests were ever made. Walker’s wife Ruby died in 1992 not knowing what really happened. Clifton and Ruby’s five children are still in the dark about the murder.
For the two years I’ve known Catherine, we’ve been gaining on the case, but the progress is slow. We have a collection of federal and state documents, but we haven’t obtained any new documents for over a year. Many of the people mentioned in the documents are dead. Few of them who are still living have been willing to talk. People with knowledge of the case are dying off.
But on Sunday we were feeling hopeful. Catherine made a good connection with the wife of the possible eyewitness when we went up to the house and found out he was at church. Afterwards, while we sat in the car waiting the man to return, Catherine said:
I’m glad he’s in church. That means he’s gonna come back with the spirit in him and he’s gonna be really nice to us. That’s what he’s gonna do. He’s gonna talk to us.
Even if he doesn’t, if he was afraid, he can just tell us what he heard, what he knows that made everyone else think he knew too much. That would help.
Our man came back from church in the late afternoon and we talked with him at length. Though he admitted knowing the people in Woodville that I talked to, he denied having any first hand knowledge of the murder.
But he had some other information we did not expect him to have. He recalled an encounter with the FBI in 1964.
The FBIs came up to my house. They had his picture and all that where he got shot. They had him naked, laying out on the table.
According to him, the photo showed that Walker was shot on his right side—twice in the shoulder, twice in thigh and twice in the lower leg. He also said that the right side of Walker’s face was shot off “on an angle,” as if he was leaning over to the right when he was taking it in the face.
The information our interviewee recalled from the FBI’s photo comports with first- and second-hand accounts of numerous bullet holes in at least one side of Walker’s car. It also potentially corroborates what Catherine’s mother Ruby told her—that she, Ruby, was told by FBI agents in 1964 that they found empty shotgun shells all along the banks of the road where Walker was shot. Our new information about the wounds on just the right side of Walker’s body could also help to establish with more certainty the sequence of events that occurred out on Poor House Road.
For three years we’ve had a 1964 Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol (MHSP) report that described the wounds to Walker’s head but made no indication of wounds to other parts of the body. In the report, highway patrolmen recount photographing Walker’s body at the funeral home at about 7:30 pm on February 29, before the pathologist had arrived to do the autopsy. The photo that the FBI reportedly showed our interview subject may have been one of the MHSP photos or it may have been from the autopsy which was performed later the same night. If this eyewitness report concerning the photo is correct, it raises questions about why such crucial details would have been left out of the MHSP report.
If there was a crowd of men firing on Walker’s car from the banks of Poor House Road road, that substantially increases the likelihood that there are still living perpetrators. And for each person directly involved, there are possible others with knowledge of the perpetrator’s actions.
If the FBI had the photo taken either by the MHSP or the coroner, then there were likely multiple copies and there is a better chance that the photo still exists somewhere. “I would like to even have those pictures,” Catherine said.
Exhuming James Chaney’s body could help identify others involved in the Ku Klux Klan’s 1964 killings of Chaney and two other civil rights workers, a world-renowned forensic pathologist says.
That’s because X-rays show two bullets were never removed from Chaney, said Dr. Michael Baden of New York City. “They’re still in his body, and they could be matched to the weapons that did it.”
The FBI contacted Baden last week about his findings.
Chaney’s brother, Ben, said he and his family support an exhumation. “If they (FBI agents) want to take the bullets from my brother, we’ll do that,” he said. “Whatever they need.”
This evidence first came to light in 2005, when Baden and pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne were studying the X-rays and other evidence for the 2005 prosecution of Edgar Ray Killen—the Klansman who was convicted that year on manslaughter charges for his role in orchestrating the killings of the three civil rights workers.
After the defense agreed to the facts, prosecutors didn’t call the two forensic pathologists as witnesses.
Baden said he decided to request the exhumation after hearing the FBI was now reinvestigating the trio’s killings.
No murder weapons were ever found in the trio’s killings, but former inmate Larry Ellis, who had a prison cell next to Killen in 2007, recently told FBI agents that Killen talked of a murder weapon being buried on his property. Killen, who was a part-time preacher, lived in Union.
If a gun was recovered, it still could be tested to see if it fired the fatal bullets into Chaney, Baden said. “And there might still be DNA and fingerprints on the weapon.”…
According to a confession by Horace Doyle Barnette, Klansman Alton Wayne Roberts grabbed Schwerner, 24, and shot him once, then grabbed Goodman, 20, and shot him once. Jordan then joined Roberts – and perhaps others – in shooting Chaney, 21, to death.
Ballistics confirmed that bullets removed from all three bodies came from two different .38-caliber pistols.
Why weren’t the pathologists called to the stand in 2005? Roberts is dead but, as noted in the article sidebar, four suspects are still living:
Olen Burrage of Philadelphia
Pete Harris of Meridian
former Philadelphia police officer Richard Willis of Noxapater
Jimmie Snowden of Hickory
In 2005, there were as many as 9 other living suspects. Not knowing all that was involved in accomplishing a successful prosecution of Edgar Ray Killen, I allow there may have been reason to limit testimony once the defense agreed to the facts in the case. But without more information important questions linger, pointing to possible cover-ups.
Ben Chaney has said that when pursuing the indictment of Edgar Ray Killen in 2005,
the District Attorney did not vigorously in the grand jury proceedings pursue the indictments against … the remaining people that participated in this crime.
After the Killen trial the prosecutors misrepresented crucial facts in the case. Prosecutors ambitious to right four decades of denied justice should have viewed the trial as an important discovery tool for bringing new evidence to light. Instead, new evidence has remained hidden four and a half years while suspects have been dying off.
Justice and the truth require swift, efficient and determined action. When it comes to these decades old cold cases, there is no time for selective disclosures of evidence.The Justice Department and the state of Mississippi must pursue this evidence without delay.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on November 22, 2009 at 3:27 pm
45th Annual Mississippi Civil Rights Martyrs Memorial Service & Conference March for Justice in Philadelphia, MS, June 21, 2009. Marchers carry crosses with names of Civil Rights Era murder victims. (Brian Livingston/Meridian Star)
July 4, 1964 was the last time Julia Dobbins saw her brother, JoEd Edwards. Eight days later, he went missing. Rumors were that the Klan took away the 21-year-old Black man and murdered him. His mother died in 1990 never having learned what truly happened to her son.
July 4, 1964 was the thirteenth day James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were missing. One month later, on August 4, 1964, the three civil rights workers’ bodies were found buried in an earthen dam on the property of a wealthy local businessman, Olen Burrage.
July 4, 1964 was the sixty-third day Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, two 19-year-old Black men, were missing. Eight days later, on July 12, partial remains of Charles Moore were found in the Mississippi River, near Vicksburg, MS and eastern Louisiana. The following day, partial remains of Henry Dee were also found in the river.
July 4, 1964 was the 127th day since fourteen-year-old Catherine Walker ran past the adults at the crime scene on Poor House Road in Woodville, MS to her father Clifton Walker’s car. Forever etched in her memory are the shattered windows, bullet holes in the door and her father’s blood still visible on the seat and car floor. Catherine’s mother Ruby died in 1992 never knowing who murdered her thirty-seven-year-old husband.
In 2005, after forty-one years, Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen, was convicted on three counts of manslaughter for his part in the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. In June 2007, after forty-three years, James Ford Seale was convicted on federal kidnapping charges for his part in the murders of Dee and Moore. No one has ever been charged with the murders of JoEd Edwards and Clifton Walker.
Numerous others were involved both in the Chaney, Schwerner Goodman and Dee-Moore murders. By 2007, all other known suspects in the Dee-Moore murders were dead, save one, named Charles Marcus Edwards, who testified against and helped convict James Ford Seale. In 2005 at least nine people were living who were arrested and/or indicted in the 1960s in connection with the murders of civil rights workers. Two weeks ago, just following the forty-fifth anniversary of the Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman murders, Jerry Mitchell reported that more might be prosecuted.
“This case is being actively reviewed by the Civil Rights Division and the FBI,” Alejandro Miyar, a spokesman for the division, told The Clarion-Ledger. “Our goal in investigating this case is to lend our assistance to authorities in Mississippi so that they may make a determination whether sufficient evidence exists for a state prosecution.”
Five suspects are still alive in the case, including reputed Klansman Billy Wayne Posey, who told Mississippi investigators there were “a lot of persons involved in the murders that did not go to jail.”
In February 2007, the FBI announced that it had approximately 100 Civil Rights Era cold cases that it was looking into. Each case seems inevitably to lead to others, including many not on the official lists. When, for example, Canadian documentary filmmaker David Ridgen set out to produce a film about the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, he soon found himself investigating the murders of Charles Moore and Henry Dee.
As I watched Summer in Mississippi [a 1965 CBC documentary], sequences flew by of the hundreds of frantic searchers from the US National Guard, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and local authorities who’d been ordered to scour the entire state and surroundings for the missing civil rights workers, beating bushes, flying helicopters, dragging swamps and rivers. The whole country was on edge. Would their bodies be found?
Then, a curious silence descends in the 1964 documentary when cigar-smoking white men in shirt-sleeves fish decomposing body parts out of the Mississippi River with sticks and bare hands. We see ribs and a femur, knotted loops of wire or twine, and a transparent, body-size bag being emptied out of the fetid water. The lazy, ever-present Southern droning of katydids is silenced by the penetrating voice of the late, great CBC narrator John Drainie: “It was the wrong body. The discovery of a Negro male was noted and forgotten. The search was not for him. The search was for two white boys and their Negro friend.”
I stopped the film and wrote down five words and a question, “wrong body”, “Negro male”, “forgotten”, and then simply, “who?”
Ridgen located Charles Moore’s brother, Thomas, who agreed to work with Ridgen and be the main subject in Ridgen’s documentary film about their investigation of the murders of Henry Dee and Charles Moore. Ridgen and Moore’s work together led to the conviction of James Ford Seale. Their work also led to the other living conspirator in the murder, Charles Marcus Edwards, making an unprompted public apology in the courtroom to the families of Henry Dee and Charles Moore. Edwards apologized again in private, and both Thomas Moore and Henry Dee’s sister, Thelma Collins, accepted the apology.
When I first met Thomas Moore and David Ridgen in March 2007, they mentioned another murder they had learned about. During their investigation, they were told by a retired Natchez police chief that there was another murder from 1964 in Southwest Mississippi that could be solved: the murder of a Black man named Clifton Walker.
A few months later, I was in Woodville to meet with a local NAACP official about another case I was researching. As I walked back to my rental car following the interview, a Black woman in her early 70s approached me.
“You a reporter?” she asked.
She wanted to tell me about Clifton Walker and about a number of other murders of Blacks said to have taken place in her tiny southwest Mississippi town.
The following day, by odd coincidence, I got a hold of Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol documents on the Walker murder. A few months later, a Freedom of Information Act request yielded FBI documents on the case. In the Clifton Walker FBI file, there is passing mention of seven more murder victims. None of these seven names are on the current FBI lists of victims.
Other reporters who investigate Civil Rights Era cold cases have similar experiences.
Jerry Mitchell, who pioneered investigative journalism on this subject over twenty years ago, said in an email:
Working on an unpunished killing from the civil rights era inevitably leads to the discovery of more. I remember while working on the James Ford Seale case, I ran across a story in microfilm that showed that Seale had actually killed yet another African American, running over the elderly man in his truck in 1966, just a day after the man had voted for the first time. Seale was never prosecuted.
Four days later, Morris took his last breath in Room 101 at the Concordia Parish Hospital. He suffered a long, agonizing death with third degree burns over 100 percent of his body. A Baptist minister said he never saw a man so severely burned as Morris, who was blinded by the flames.
Nelson’s reporting has helped bring about the recent announcement that the case may go before the Concordia Parish Grand Jury. Nelson hadn’t looked into cold cases from the 50s and 60s before the Morris murder caught his attention, but inevitably others emerged. In an email to me, Nelson explained how he learned about JoEd Edwards.
I first heard about JoeEd in the lone article about the Frank Morris case written by John Herbers for the New York Times in December 1964. I called Herbers and he could vaguely remember mentioning JoeEd’s name in the story but did remember that a porter from a Vidalia motel had been missing a few months prior to the Morris arson. I started asking around in the black community and found a number of people familiar with JoeEd’s case. And the story took off from there and continues to take me in new directions—even this week.
Thompson said DeLaughter beat his three companions with a white fire hose throughout the night. Thompson said the young men screamed so loudly that their voices reminded him of “pigs squealing.”
There is much, much more of this, of course, and from other years and in other states. In 2005, for example, John Fleming, editor at large of the Anniston Star, discovered that James Bonard Fowler, the Alabama State Trooper who allegedly shot Jimmie Lee Jackson on February 18, 1965, is still alive and well and unrepentant. Jimmie Lee Jackson was the Black protester in Marion, Alabama whose murder sparked the Selma to Montgomery March. Several days after he was shot and beaten, Jackson died of an infection in the Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma. Fleming interviewed Fowler, who, in 2005, admitted to the shooting. Fowler claimed self-defense and was confident he would not be prosecuted. In 2007, however, Fowler was indicted on state murder charges; the trial is currently on hold over procedural issues.
Fleming has recently uncovered new information about the racial murder of Willie Brewster in Anniston, AL and is working on many of the Alabama and Georgia cases on the FBI’s list; he has also heard of many others that have not been cataloged. Fleming cited two cases he has not yet looked into deeply, in an email to me:
a case in Perry County [where Jimmie Lee Jackson was killed] of a shopkeeper who shot a teenager in the back for back talking him and a Green County case of a man who had his tongue cut out and [was] left to die.
Fleming also learned of at least one other incident involving Fowler:
I discovered that he had shot another man in 1966, a drunk driver who he got into a fight with after he was arrested. It was ruled self defense at the time.
Nelson said to me:
There’s no question that one case leads to another. Individuals who had some information on JoeEd told me about cases of black men who were beaten. This led to some other arsons of black and white businesses and homes and so on. It’s hard to keep count, but the magnitude of these crimes is overwhelming and the leads never seem to end.
At one of the 45th anniversary memorials to Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner two weeks ago, Michael Schwerner’s widow, Rita Schwerner Bender, said:
she hopes federal authorities will lend their assistance not only to [the Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman] case but also to any other case where enough evidence exists to pursue prosecution. “The clock is ticking,” she said. “Time is running out.”
***
Correction
I erroneously stated that “Nelson has reconstructed what were likely Edwards’ last hours—being brutally beaten with a firehose, allegedly by then Concordia Parish Sheriff Frank DeLaughter, inside the Ferriday jail.” That sentence has been replaced with the current passage, above, detailing allegations of Carl Ray Thompson concerning DeLaughter.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on July 3, 2009 at 2:24 am
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
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