by Safran, John
“I can smuggle myself to Australia?” he says hopefully.
“Yeah,” I say, in the moment, half believing he can.
• • •
From my window seat I can see Jackson shrinking below me. I crack my neck.
I pull The Commission from my backpack, turn on my reading light, and continue where I left off.
So many wild stories. Richard is fighting with his father. Richard tells him he killed a wildcat and his dad doesn’t believe him. He’s angry at Richard for lying. Richard returns to the woods and drags the wildcat back home. His father still doesn’t believe him. “How do I know, Richard, someone else didn’t kill the cat? Things are not always what they appear to be.”
Then on page 282, Richard writes—although he didn’t know it at the time—an obituary to himself and his half-made-up-in-his-head white nationalist way of life:
Swallows return to Capistrano, elephants to their burial ground, and salmon to their birthplace. Englishmen go down to the sea in ships. Without the flock, the herd, the community, or the nation, the species withers, falls prey to its enemy, and dies out.
EPILOGUE #1
EPILOGUE #2
EPILOGUE #3
April Fools’ Day 2014, an e-mail pops into my inbox that I assume is a joke. It says that Vincent, not three years into his sentence, has been released from prison. This offender will not be under constant correctional supervision. If you have any concerns about your immediate safety, contact your local law enforcement agency. I soon learn it is not a joke. That day, Vincent, like Richard, had found himself facing a man with a knife. The man, a fellow prisoner, stabbed him through the eye. One month later I’m on the phone to Vincent’s stepfather, Alfred Lewis. He tells me the last time he saw Vincent he was breathing through a machine, not moving, his head wrapped like a mummy. Doctors had removed the eye. Alfred tells me authorities won’t keep the family updated on his condition. At time of publication Vincent has been moved back into prison, into the hospital unit of Mississippi State Penitentiary.
May 2013, Chokwe Lumumba is elected mayor of Jackson. February 2014, Chokwe is found dead. A Mississippi councilman says he was assassinated: So many of us feel, throughout the city of Jackson, that the mayor was murdered. National black leader Louis Farrakhan eulogizes: You who know Mississippi . . . a black man being mayor and trying to do right by all the people is not a mayor that those people want. The more conventional explanation is sixty-six-year-old Chokwe suffered heart failure.
May 2014, Precious Martin dies in an accident when his four-wheeler ATV hits a curve and flips.
Was I a naive fan when I reenacted Billy Idol’s photoshoot or did I already sense I was playing with fire? By the time I met Richard Barrett, in the last US state to fly the Confederate flag, I was an unambiguous Race Trekkie. As was Richard, in his own way. He showed off his bona fides in pamphlets like this one, grinning with Klansman Edgar Ray Killen, the subject of Mississippi Burning.
The coonhounds of white separatist Jim Giles seemed to be able to sniff out that I wasn’t of pure Aryan stock, despite my blending in with a baby-blue sweater. Below, journalist Earnest McBride. He had the leads, but I had the car. What a match.
Snooping around the Murder House. (Are you even allowed to snoop around the Murder House? “Easier to get forgiveness than permission” is something I learned early in my snooping career.)
Poking my nose where it arguably didn’t belong didn’t always get results. No smoking gun (or literal one) in the garbage behind Richard’s Nationalist Movement headquarters. But in a drawer in a trailer in a forest there were photos of him in his army days and as a child with his sister. A sister! Could I find her?
The Confederate soldier that greets every black person on his or her way to Rankin County courthouse, presumably including Chokwe Lumumba (above right), one of the killer’s elusive lawyers, who I finally caught at the Martin Luther King Day festivities. Plenty of Secret Society black folk at the festival, too, much to the annoyance of Earnest McBride.
Mississippi portraits. Eddie Sandifer (top left), the gay civil rights activist who saw Richard in action in the 1960s. James Drew (top right), who says he watched from his cell as Richard slipped jail with suspicious ease. Investigators Tim Lawless and Wayne Humphreys (middle), who first questioned Vincent McGee. And Curtis Rumfelt (below), who grew up on Richard’s street and found him to be a creepy houseguest as a boy.
Facing a back street, Mississippi’s State Capitol building is petulantly turned away from Washington, in a sulk after losing the Civil War. Inside (above right), Representative John Moore distanced himself from Richard, despite having been named in the dead man’s will.
Exhibit A: The knife Vincent says Richard threatened him with, in the woods where he threw it the night of the killing. Exhibit B: The photo of Vincent his defense lawyer Mike Scott told me was taken by Richard.
My encounters with Vincent started with a glimpse of him in court as he delivered his plea. It got stranger from there.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Madeleine Parry for research assistance, photography, and general Harper Lee–ing in Mississippi; Earnest McBride for helping far more than reflected in the book; staff at Mississippi Department of Archives and History; all Mississippians in the book, and others who graciously gave their time and expertise; Lally Katz for Melbourne-based Harper Lee–ing; Team Race Relations from Princess Pictures and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation; Kevin Whyte, Georgie Ogilvy, and Token for care and haggling; Ben Ball and Penguin; and Laura Perciasepe and Riverhead.
I have changed the names of Richard’s sister and Vincent’s “white” girlfriend and her mother. Jim Giles’s address has also been changed so you can’t easily take him up on his offer to fight. I have also made minor edits to documents for grammar and clarity. A version of this book was published as Murder in Mississippi in Australia.
Check out the six-part John Safran’s True Crime podcast via johnsafran.com.
Got a lead for my next true crime story? Hit me up at [email protected].