New Evidence: Murders in Mississippi
Aug. 30, 2001 -- Though the bloody murders of three Mississippi civil rights workers happened nearly 40 years ago, new evidence may lead investigators to finally charge a Ku Klux Klan member for the deaths of the three men who helped blacks registers to vote.
Following is an unedited transcript of PrimeTime's investigation:
CHARLES GIBSON, ABCNEWS Three young men, all in their 20s, all on a crusade to do good work in a hostile place far from home, all murdered. A terrible crime that still sears the American conscience more than three decades later. For all these years, one question has remained: Who was behind the killings of the three civil rights workers? Tonight PrimeTime uncovers new evidence and new witnesses that led us on a trek into rural Mississippi to the prime suspect, a Baptist preacher who still lives about a mile from where the men were shot. Connie Chung has the real life events behind "Mississippi Burning."
CONNIE CHUNG, ABCNEWS (VO) It happened near here one steamy summer night almost 40 years ago. But a few people must still know the terrible truth about the bloody murders. And now, the pressure to speak up might finally be pushing that dark secret out of these back woods.
(OC) This setting just feels eerie, doesn't it?
BOB STRINGER Perfect.
CONNIE CHUNG In what way?
BOB STRINGER Perfect with the ghosts of Mississippi.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) Ghosts, some might say, that come back to haunt an elderly Baptist preacher, a Baptist minister still leading the faithful from his sanctuary. Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore.
MIKE MOORE Preacher Killen would have to be on the top of the list of the people we're targeting at this time.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) Though the Ku Klux Klan has been suspected, Moore is confident he will at last be able to charge someone for the infamous murders of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, the three civil rights workers who were killed in these woods in 1964 for helping blacks register to vote. And now, a PrimeTime investigation reveals new evidence in old FBI files. The surprising secret of a jury that set the preacher free. An old Klansman prepared to go public with new evidence. And there is this man:
(OC) Was your conscience bothering you?
BOB STRINGER For a long time.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) Bob Stringer says he can trace the case back to a Klan meeting at an old church deep in this forest. He came back to the church, he says, at the center of it all. The secret starts here, he says. This is where the Klan put out the order to kill.
(OC) Did you have an urge to go tell someone?
BOB STRINGER No. If I had told someone then I wouldn't be here today to tell anybody probably.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) The church is packed at that moment in 1964 when imperial wizard Sam Bowers delivers his speech, calling for action against civil rights workers. At his side, a teenager, a loyal protege named Bob Stringer.
BOB STRINGER Sam Bowers was my idol.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) Outside, Stringer says Bowers turns to this man, a young preacher named Edgar Ray Killen, and orders him to kill Goatee, the name he used for Michael Schwerner.
BOB STRINGER Sam made a statement, to the preacher, he said Goatee was like the queen bee of a beehive. If you eliminate the queen bee in the beehive, the workers will go away.
CONNIE CHUNG What did he mean by that?
BOB STRINGER Kill him.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) The next month, Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney disappear.
(OC) Do you believe that preacher Killen carried out or helped to mastermind the killings of those three civil right workers?
BOB STRINGER I believe he carried out Sam's orders.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) The bodies are found miles from the murder scene, buried in an earthen dam. The last time they had been seen, 44 days earlier, they were in the custody of the local sheriff's department.
JOE SULLIVAN, FORMER FBI AGENT It smacks of a law enforcement escapade.
CONNIE CHUNG (V)) Joe Sullivan, now 84, led an FBI probe that resulted in 18 arrests, including the local sheriff, his deputy and a policeman, a former sheriff and some local businessmen. Plus, Preacher Killen and Wizard Bowers.
JOE SULLIVAN The intermediary was Preacher Killen.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) Sullivan says when he hears Stringer's story from the church, it matches his own theory.
JOE SULLIVAN So they became buddies in crime.
CONNIE CHUNG Sam Bowers and Preacher Killen?
JOE SULLIVAN Yeah.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) While most of the suspects were never convicted, seven were found guilty of civil rights violations, but none served more than six years in prison, and no one was ever charged with murder.
MIKE MOORE It was a different time back then.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) Attorney General Mike Moore.
MIKE MOORE This case was never prosecuted as a crime against the state of Mississippi. And we are going to try to do that.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) He admits the state is late. Half the defendants are now dead, including the alleged lead triggerman. And Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers is currently serving life for another murder. But there is the matter of preacher Edgar Ray Killen.
(OC) Do you have a message for Mr. Killen?
MIKE MOORE Preacher Killen, we're—we're coming after you as hard as we can.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) PrimeTime has identified still-classified FBI files, including informant reports detailing how the murders were carried out and the alleged involvement of law enforcement. First, the deputy sheriff arrests Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner and takes them to the jail. Meanwhile…
JOE SULLIVAN Preacher Killen prepared the party that was to take care of them later.
CONNIE CHUNG Meaning?
JOE SULLIVAN Kill them.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) Those classified files contain statements from informants who said, ‘Killen organizes a posse, tells them the civil rights workers are in the jail and need quote, "Their asses tore up." He makes sure everyone has guns, shows them where to lay and wait and says, 'We have a place to bury them and a dozer to cover them up.' The deputy then releases the civil rights workers from jail into a deadly trap.'
JOE SULLIVAN They were pursued by police and other cars, taken to country road some distance away from the point of arrest and shot.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) The men who were FBI informants then, and who named Preacher Killen as a key figure in the plot, include a policeman who also said Killen recruited him into the Klan, a chaplain for the KKK, a confessed Klansman present at the murder scene and another participant in the killings.
(OC) Were each of these men able to independently connect Preacher Killen with the murders?
JOE SULLIVAN Yes.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) The memorial service for the victims became a huge national event. In the crowd, a 12-year-old boy, mourning the loss of his big brother, civil rights worker James Chaney.
(OC) When you were singing "We Shall Overcome" at your brother's service, what meaning did it have for you?
BEN CHANEY Revenge. It meant that my brother's death would not be in vain and that someone would pay for his death.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) And yet, by 1967, three years after the murders, Killen and the others seemed anything but worried as they faced trial in the federal civil rights violations. The mood outside the court is more like a confederate pageant than a trial.
MAN (From file footage) Y'all better get them long drawers.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) In court, Killen offered an alibi supported by relatives who swear he was ministering at a funeral home on the night of the murders. And, in spite of all the other evidence and witnesses against him, Preacher Killen is set free by a hung jury.
NELL DEDEAUX He got away with it because the jury turned him loose.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) Nell Dedeaux was on that jury. That's she there, among the jurors as they leave the courthouse.
(OC) Were you convinced that Preacher Killen was guilty?
NELL DEDEAUX Yes.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) Today, Dedeaux says Preacher Killen went free thanks to a lone holdout on the jury. The woman in red, Willie Arnesen, who is now deceased.
NELL DEDEAUX She just didn't want to find Brother Killen guilty because he was a preacher.
CONNIE CHUNG Let me get this straight, she would not convict him because he was a preacher?
NELL DEDEAUX Right. Just because he was a preacher, and a preacher wouldn't do that.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) But there's more, an eerily similar murder plot also allegedly linked to Preacher Killen. It happened in a nearby town, Philadelphia, Mississippi, just three weeks before the murders. A young black man is arrested, accused of flirting with a white woman.
JOE SULLIVAN He was taken to jail, and in a fashion similar to the three civil rights workers, he was taken out in the evening for a ride.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) Statements in FBI files say the victim, Wilmer Jones, is released from the same jail by the same sheriff's officers, into the hands of Klansman, including Preacher Killen. He's driven to an abandoned farm to be shot and dumped in a well. But, at the last second, his life is spared by one of the Klansman who was also an FBI informant code-named JN-30.
(OC) What would have happened to Wilmer Jones if JN-30 had not been there?
JOE SULLIVAN He probably would have been killed.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) JN-30 might have been a crucial witness against Preacher Killen in that case and the murders because of the similarities. But because he was an important FBI mole inside the Klan, his identity remained secret until we found him last year during our investigation of another civil rights case.
(OC) Do you now regret being a member of the Klan?
ERNEST GILBERT You're damn right I do.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) His name is Ernest Gilbert, once a high-profile recruiter for the KKK, dazzling Klansman with his fiery rhetoric.
ERNEST GILBERT (From file footage) I think they ought to shoot down every damn nigger that goes out here to demonstrate.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) ...while secretly feeding information to the FBI. Ernest Gilbert says he vividly recalls the aborted murder plot and Preacher Killen.
(OC) Do you remember anyone who was a member of the White Knights of the KKK in Philadelphia, Mississippi?
ERNEST GILBERT Yes. Preacher Killens. He invited me to come up there and make a talk to his group of Klanspeople.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) Gilbert drives to an abandoned school gym, he fires up the crowd, then, he says, Preacher Killen asks him and several other Klansmen to come here, to the local jail, just as the sheriff and his deputy release Wilmer Jones.
ERNEST GILBERT And Killen said, 'That's the guy that we're supposed to take care of.'
CONNIE CHUNG Did you know what Preacher Killen wanted you to do with that young black man?
ERNEST GILBERT They wanted me to kill him.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) The gang of Klansman drives Jones into the woods.
(OC) Was that young black man scared? Nervous?
ERNEST GILBERT He was scared to death.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) At the last second, Gilbert says he saves the intended victim by confronting Preacher Killen with the idea that perhaps the young black man had not flirted with a white woman after all.
(OC) What did you do?
ERNEST GILBERT I walked over to Killen and told him, I said, ‘I don't think you're telling the truth.' And I said, ‘You got a gun. You want to kill him, you kill him.'
CONNIE CHUNG What did Preacher Killen say to you?
ERNEST GILBERT He turned plumb green. They evidently wanted that kid dead, but they didn't want it to—to fall back on them.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) He says they allowed their victim to escape, giving him money for a bus ticket on the promise that he never return.
MIKE MOORE What Ernest Gilbert knows is—is helpful to us.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore says Gilbert's memory of that night could help him prosecute Preacher Killen for the murders.
MIKE MOORE Some of the same people being involved, the same type of activity, going in and abducting someone from the jail, being let out of jail by the sheriff in the middle of the night.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) Today, the reclusive Preacher Killen lives on this farm, about a mile down the road from the place where Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney were murdered. He elude PrimeTime for weeks until we found him one Sunday night, Bible under his arm, ready to deliver a sermon to his tiny flock, but unwilling to talk about his past.
OFFSCREEN VOICE Are you Mr. Killen?
EDGAR RAY KILLEN That's nothing to you unless you're here to worship.
CONNIE CHUNG Preacher Killen professes to be a man of God and, in fact, he apparently still preaches at a corner Baptist church.
MIKE MOORE I suppose someone can appear to be a lot of things. He was called preacher when he was in the Ku Klux Klan. He was called preacher, you know, when Mr. Jones was abducted. He can preach all he wants to, but that may not be all he does.
CONNIE CHUNG (VO) At one end of a red dirt road stands Preacher Killen's church. At the other end, the place where three young men were murdered. And in between? Just the forest and Mike Moore's belief that somewhere in Mississippi, someone's conscience may yet be at work, gnawing, burning, ready to help bring justice after 37 years.