My parents went straight to see him. After coming over and examining me, Dr. Rush agreed to treat me pro bono. On July 2, 1968, three days after my capture, a large, heavily armed police convoy transported me from Matty Hersee Hospital directly to an operating suite at the Rush Foundation Hospital. Police were everywhere. They surrounded the building, guarded every entrance, and patrolled the corridors and stairwells inside the building.
As I was being prepared for surgery at the Rush Foundation Hospital, I considered myself extremely fortunate. For starters, I was alive. Plus, I was about to have my shattered arm fixed by one of the best surgeons in the country—for free. Although I was a prisoner, I was being held in far better conditions—at least for the moment—than I would have dared to hope. I was young and I was clever. And one day I would be strong again, strong enough to escape. Freedom beckoned. So did the Cause.
The last thing I remember is the anesthesiologist asking me to count backward from one hundred.
“Ninety-nine, ninety-eight . . .”
The facilities at Rush were much better than at Matty Hersee. After surgery the orderlies wheeled me into a private room—at a time when most hospital inpatients were doubled up in smaller rooms. That part of the floor was designated off-limits to all but members of the massive police garrison and a few select doctors and nurses. Police officers stood watch in my room and in the hall outside around the clock. Other officers waited in the room across the hall. No one was going to get close to me without passing a screen of Meridian police.
* * *
While I was in surgery at Rush Hospital, Kathy Ainsworth was being buried in Magee, Mississippi, a sleepy little town about halfway between Jackson and Hattiesburg. I had asked my parents to send a large spray of flowers to her funeral, and they did. Against her husband Ralph’s wishes, the Ku Klux Klan had turned out in full strength wearing their signature white robes, memorializing her as a martyr. In full sympathy with the Klan, Kathy’s mother described her as a martyr for the Cause.
Kathy was raised in Florida and attended Coral Gables High School, graduating with honors. She babysat often for Adon Taft, the religion editor of the Miami Herald newspaper, whose family loved her and thought she was the ideal example of a young woman. Kathy went on to attend Mississippi College, a Baptist school in Jackson, Mississippi.
At the time of her death, Kathy was teaching fifth grade at the Lorena Duling elementary school in Jackson. She was loved by her husband, her students, and their parents, and was well respected in her community. Her Klan involvement and death under such circumstances was a shock that sent her students and their parents into heartbreaking bewilderment and disorientation. How could such a kind, genteel schoolteacher also be a secret terrorist? They could not reconcile the Kathy they knew with the person they discovered she was.
* * *
When I awoke from surgery, I discovered another IV drip in my left arm. My immobilized and heavily bandaged right arm was searing with an unrelenting, sharp pain even worse than before.
A nurse came and delivered a dose of narcotic mercy that quickly returned me to painless and peaceful unconsciousness.
It was the first of many such shots.
For the first few days at Rush Hospital, I was fed intravenously and kept heavily sedated. I was given regular injections of Demerol, a potent painkiller. Gradually, however, I developed a tolerance to it, which meant increasing the size or frequency of the dose—and the risk of addiction. My doctors decided against increasing my dosage. For more than two weeks, I endured excruciating pain in my right arm. This was aggravated and amplified by the awkward and uncomfortable position in which I had to lie. Night after night I suffered through agonizing hours of intermittent sleep and intense, throbbing pain.
Nonetheless, the hours turned into days, and my condition stabilized. The IV drips were disconnected. I began eating solid food again. I quickly learned to write and eat with my left hand. Until then it had never occurred to me that I would have so much appreciation for such a simple pleasure as eating. And what a good feeling it was when the orderly shaved me each morning!
I gained strength with each passing day, and despite the horrible wounds in both my legs, the nurses were soon walking me around the room and down the hall. “The danger of blood clots or pneumonia far outweighs the risk of getting up and walking a little each day,” they said. With a nurse on each arm, I took my first, short, unsteady steps toward recovery. The unspoken question was, recovery to what?
* * *
During my time at Rush, the only visitors I was allowed were members of my immediate family. My father and mother, though separated at the time, worked together and came to see me as often as police would permit—almost daily at first. My brother, sister, grandmother, and girlfriend faithfully accompanied my family on the many trips but were made to wait downstairs and rarely got to see me. I was amazed at their love and support. How could they still love me in light of all that I had done? I had ignored my family’s warnings about getting involved with extremists and as a result had brought shame and disgrace on our entire family. That was a big deal in a traditional Southern town like Mobile. But that didn’t matter to them now. There was no finger-pointing, no saying “I told you so.” Far from disowning me, they were doing everything they could to help me, at great personal and financial expense. Their love was healing.
One afternoon about ten days after my transfer to Rush, I received a surprising visitor. In a major exception to the no-visitor policy, an attorney from Laurel, Mississippi, was permitted to visit with me. Percy Quinn had been sent by Sam Bowers, imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, to see how I was doing, to reassure me of Klan support, and to learn the details of the police ambush. Quinn was not the most sought-after of the Klan’s roster of lawyers, which confirmed to me that my situation looked hopeless. But he offered to represent me and try to arrange bond. He later confided to my family that there was nothing he could do to get me released on bail.
A few days later, I was scheduled for more surgery on my arm.
Early on the morning of my surgery, a nurse woke me up for an injection. A few minutes later two orderlies came in and placed me on a gurney. At least half a dozen policemen with submachine guns and sawed-off shotguns surrounded me. They wheeled the gurney to the elevator and down to the operating suite. When we reached the operating room, where a number of other officers were waiting, my escorts seemed noticeably relieved.
The surgery went well, and in a couple of days I was back in my routine. Then, one morning, a couple of new nurses came to my room. They were physical therapists and had come to teach me how to exercise the fingers of my right hand. I obediently flexed and exercised my fingers several times a day. Little by little I regained near-normal use of my hand.
During those long days and nights of recovery, I read from a Gideon Bible that was on the bedside table, looking for encouragement, hope, and maybe some answers. But as I tried to read the New Testament, I found it difficult to understand, especially in the Elizabethan language of the King James Version. And the few verses I had used to justify hatred of Jews and blacks and my fight for “God and country” were of scant comfort. So I gave it up and concentrated on getting answers to the questions that had most needled me since the ambush.
How had the police discovered our plan?
What had gone wrong?
Unlike other Klan groups, our team operated in a well-organized, sophisticated, professional way. We took the strictest security precautions. We had made only one exception—allowing the Roberts brothers to be part of the planning of the operation without being present for it.
Day after day, as I lay in bed with my eyes closed, I would catch snippets of conversation between the policemen guarding me. Sometimes the officers would discuss the incident with me. Overall, that was a mistake, because their comments and questions only succeeded in giving me clues about what they knew. It soon became clear that the Meridian Police Department had obtained considerable inside
information on the Meyer Davidson operation. As I put the pieces together, it appeared that the Roberts brothers were the most likely source.
I also learned that around four thirty on the afternoon before the bombing attempt, someone had telephoned my grandmother, asking to speak to Thomas Tarrants III. He said he had to get in touch with me right away. My grandmother told him I wasn’t there. The caller then asked if I had gone to Mississippi. My grandmother replied she didn’t know where I was but that she would “give anything in this world to know.” Like the rest of my family, she had not seen me for several months.
Before hanging up the phone, the caller emphasized, “I’ve got to get him right away!”
I’m sure someone had called to warn me of the ambush in Meridian. Was it someone on the Meridian Police Department? Or someone else who had learned of what was about to happen?
Then, toward the end of July, during my last week in Rush Hospital, a stranger in civilian clothes walked into my room and announced that he was Officer Mike Hatcher. Officer Hatcher was the police officer that I’d blasted with my submachine gun after he jumped out of his car. I hit him three times in the chest, once in the heart. He had undergone open-heart surgery that saved his life. Despite near-fatal wounds and the major surgery to repair them, he looked healthy and fit.
I didn’t know what to say, so I asked, “How are you doing?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “And I want to let you know that I’m a better man than you are.” And then he left.
Since then I have wondered: What did that mean—his strength and stamina in surviving a more serious wound than mine? Or that he recovered before I did? Or maybe that the police had finally won?
About midmorning on August 2, after a month of hospitalization, Sheriff Alton Allen came to my room and said, “Gather up your stuff. You’re going to jail.”
3
PAYING THE PRICE
The Lauderdale County Courthouse was a large, gray stone building five stories tall. It loomed over an entire city block in downtown Meridian, housing both the courtrooms and jail cells. I was about to become familiar with both.
The arrival of the transport convoy was quite a procession. Uniformed police had sealed off all traffic on the street in front. Policemen and highway patrolmen with shotguns and scoped high-power rifles lined the front of the courthouse and along the street as well. Handcuffed and clad in pajamas and a bathrobe, I limped toward the building, encircled by my heavily armed bodyguard.
Once inside the building, I was taken by elevator to the fourth floor. There I met Buck Lewis, the jailer. Jangling his big key ring, Mr. Lewis inserted a large key into a heavy steel door. It opened into a chamber about twenty feet wide by thirty feet long.
Solid concrete walls held three windows with thick, dirty glass and fat steel bars. In the middle of the chamber, running lengthwise, was a rectangular, steel dining table. A small shower stall with no curtain was in a corner. This “day room,” as they called it, was where prisoners got out of their cells during the day to eat, sit around and talk, and play cards. Along the full length of one wall were four, four-man cells with sliding doors that opened into the day room. These cells were small—about seven by ten feet. Each cell had four bunks, stacked two high on either side, a face bowl, and a toilet just inside the sliding door. But all the cells were empty. I had the entire cellblock all to myself.
Mr. Lewis directed me into the first cell on my right and rolled the steel cell door shut behind me. Through the bars of my new cage, he handed me two clean sheets to cover the overused, filthy mattress on the steel bunk bed. Then, without another word, everyone filed out. The steel door to the cellblock banged shut with an imposing metallic thud.
Until this point, I had been kept in the antiseptic environment of a modern hospital. The police guards notwithstanding, I had been treated with dignity and care. I’d always had people around me. But the clanging of that cellblock door changed all that. Suddenly I was alone—totally alone. Isolated. I was in a dirty steel cage in a dirty, concrete room. In the dim light that passed through the dirty, steel-barred windows, I saw little hope for the future. The stark reality of my predicament was more than I could bear. For the first time since my arrest, I broke down. I wept uncontrollably.
For five years my life had centered on the Cause. I had passionately devoted myself to it, just as a man gives himself to his wife or his god. Indeed, for me the Cause had grown to be a god of sorts, as it dominated my thinking and my life. Everything was subordinate to it: family, career, relationships, reputation, and the varied pleasures of life. I lived for it. I sacrificed and suffered for it. If necessary, I was willing to die for it.
Captured and caged in a cell, I could no longer pursue the Cause, though I was as devoted as ever. My work would fall to others while I languished in prison. With everything I had built my life on now lost, my reason for existence began to disappear, along with my identity. I became very depressed. My life was over, or so it seemed. I could see no point in continuing. To die would be better than to live.
Because of the persistent pain from my injuries, I was given a daily oral dose of a powerful painkiller by the jailer, who didn’t ensure that I actually swallowed it. A large enough dose would be fatal, and peacefully so. I decided to save up the pills and take them all at once. I reasoned that death would end my misery and open the way to heaven. In my youth I had prayed to accept Christ as my Savior and had been assured that I would go to heaven when I died. This belief had enabled me to face dangerous situations in the past without fear of death, and it was only natural that I would invoke it now.
One night, I took a handful of these pills, expecting to die. However, I eventually woke up in a daze, sick to my stomach, feeling terrible. Even worse, I was still alive. And I was still alone in the Lauderdale County Jail. No one even knew about my attempted suicide. Why I didn’t die is a mystery, since this particular medication had been responsible for many deaths from overdoses. My depression only deepened. And there was no way out.
Life in jail was routine, bleak, and terribly, terribly boring. Breakfast was served around 6:00 a.m. and consisted of grits, biscuits, syrup, fried bologna, and an egg. Later in the morning, the jailer brought in a couple of prisoners who swept and mopped the cellblock. Lunch was the best meal of the day: good home-cooked Southern food and corn bread. Snacks and sodas were also available at a reasonable price for those who had money to pay. These activities might have taken an hour or so of the day.
My primary coping mechanism was sleep. I slept as much as possible. As long as I was asleep, I didn’t have to face the misery of reality. When I wasn’t sleeping, I would read. I turned to the Bible again, once again looking for encouragement or answers. The jailer had allowed me to have a King James Version Bible that my grandmother had given me. But halfway through the Old Testament, I became bored and laid it aside. It was rather dry reading, sometimes confusing, and didn’t do anything for me. The only things left to read were the books and magazines that my parents brought me when they came to the jail on Wednesdays and Sundays, the two days prisoners were allowed to have visitors.
* * *
Several weeks after my transfer to the jail, two FBI agents came to visit me. Agents Frank Watts and Jack Rucker were warm, personable men, and for some reason I liked them—even though I hated the FBI at the time because it was fighting the Klan and other far-right groups. This was part of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), originally set up in 1956 to counter Communist and socialist organizations in the United States, then expanded in the early 1960s to cover white hate groups and civil rights groups.
Their visit came as no surprise. I was in a position to supply a lot of information they wanted. My testimony could put certain people in prison for a long time. I could help them solve a number of cases they could not break, so it was only a matter of time until a couple of J. Edgar Hoover’s agents would come calling. I knew what they wanted, and they knew I knew. Nevertheless, because
I agreed to talk with them, we all pretended that cooperation was at least an option. A number of possibilities were discussed if I did. Money and a reduced sentence were among them. Also, the idea of serving whatever sentence I got at one of the low-security federal institutions, which would be like a country club compared to Mississippi’s notorious Parchman prison, where I would probably be moved after my trial.
The truth was that my commitment to the Cause was undiminished, and I never had any intention of cooperating. No matter how miserable my present or future circumstances might be. I agreed to talk with them because they were likable guys, and I enjoyed matching wits with them. Had I known at the time what formidable opponents they were, I would have never agreed to talk with them. Frank’s previous assignment in the bureau was compromising KGB agents in the Soviet delegation at the United Nations and turning them into double agents for the United States.
Frank was a good, moral man and church member. During the course of our talks, he realized how much my radical beliefs and behaviors had warped my view of God. Concerned about my spiritual condition, he asked his pastor at First Baptist Church in Meridian to come visit me. Of course, I saw nothing wrong with my views and was suspicious of his pastor’s motives. Nothing we talked about changed my beliefs. However, I didn’t know it at the time, but Frank’s wife, Joyce, and the women in her prayer group were praying earnestly for me to be saved.
* * *
My trial was scheduled for November 26, 1968. I was charged with attempting to place a bomb near a residence, which was a capital offense under Mississippi law. Charges for the attempted murder of Meridian police officer Mike Hatcher were not pressed. The authorities told me they knew I had committed other crimes, but they were only interested in trying me for the bombing charge, the most serious of all. It was enough: the death penalty (which they were seeking) or life in prison (which would guarantee that I would no longer be a threat to society). As I had been caught in the act by many eyewitnesses, I was sure to be convicted.
Consumed by Hate, Redeemed by Love Page 3