Wadding from a shotgun shell was found inside the car, which was towed to a Woodville car dealership. Walker’s body was turned over to a black-owned mortuary in Natchez. It was obvious as his clothes were cut from him that the attack had not been a robbery—his wallet had $148 inside. Williams and Williams Funeral Home had already begun embalming by the time investigators arrived shortly after 7:30 p.m. The process was halted until a pathologist could perform an autopsy. A review of the body by the MHSP indicated no powder burns, but embalmers had already partially cleaned the wounds, thereby contaminating key evidence. No fingerprints were retrieved from Walker’s vehicle due to another unalterable mistake: the coroner’s jury, according to Sheriff Netterville, “had gone all over the car.” Among the six members of the panel was Mathis, who had discovered Walker’s body. The next morning, investigators found two pieces of gunshot wadding at the crime scene, one from a twenty-gauge and another from a twelve-gauge.56
There were many stories as to why Walker had been murdered; most concerned alleged passes at white women, including a seventeen-year-old. A handful of suspects were identified, but there was no direct evidence tying any of them to the murder. (The sheriff’s office, the MHSP, and the FBI’s revived probe a half century later never mentioned the men most likely to have killed Walker.) These suspects could be linked to a part-time waitress who had previously worked at Nettles’ Truck Stop. Geraldine Vines had been an employee there during the fall of 1963 when the revolt within the Original Knights was leading to the creation of the White Knights in Mississippi. Vines claimed that during September or October 1963, a few months before the murder, Clifton Walker had made a pass at her. Vines said she immediately ordered Walker out of the cafe.57
MHSP investigators asked Vines if she had told anyone about the incident. She said she had told her three brothers and her two brothers-in-law, one of whom was Douglas Byrd, who in 1963 was the Grand Dragon of the Mississippi Realm of the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. (After his banishment that December, he became a White Knight.)58 Adams County sheriff Billy Ferrell, whose term ended that year, had told the FBI in September 1963 that he suspected Byrd was involved in the arson of a black church on lower Palestine Road near Natchez. The sheriff also reported that one of Byrd’s closest associates was Claude W. Fuller, an IP employee who by February 1964 had left the Original Knights to become a member of the White Knights Sligo unit.59 In 1966, Fuller would be charged in the murder of a black farmhand. Another of Byrd’s closest associates was Tommie Lee Jones, who had been involved in the attempted abduction of James White. Jones lived just four miles from the IP plant and as an active Klansman would have been aware of the allegations against Walker.
Five years after the murder, an FBI informant was riding in a car with Glover in the Woodville area. The informant asked Glover about the attempted 1964 arson of an African American Masonic lodge by Glover’s wrecking crew, which included Jones, Thore L. Torgersen, James L. Scarborough, and James “Red” Lee. The lodge was located in Laurel Hill, a community along US 61 in northern West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, near the Wilkinson County, Mississippi, line. The lodge was the site of voter registration clinics led by local black activists and the Congress for Racial Equality during the fall of 1963. Glover told the informant that Jones and Torgersen were preparing to ignite gasoline inside the lodge but aborted the arson when lights were turned on nearby. Don’t ever mention this, Glover told the informant, because something else had happened on the night of February 28, 1964, that he wanted to shield from the authorities. The aborted arson occurred the same night Clifton Walker was ambushed. The lodge building, which still stands, is located ten miles from the Walker crime scene.60
4
SUPERIOR BY BLOOD
AS KLAN VIOLENCE moved eastward from Concordia Parish, Louisiana, and the southwestern Mississippi counties of Adams and Wilkinson during the spring of 1964, rumors flamed that African American militants—figured to be Black Muslims—were stockpiling weapons in preparation for an insurrection or, as some termed it, a race war. In Franklin County, Mississippi, members of the White Knights klavern centered in Bunkley, eight miles south of the county seat of Meadville on US 84, suspected that a nineteen-year-old black lumber mill worker in Roxie was an insurrectionist.1 Henry Hezekiah Dee stood out to Klansmen partly because he wore a head scarf. Klansmen considered the bandana, like the goatee, a revolutionary statement.2 While there was no evidence Dee was involved in revolutionary activity, the Klan’s hysteria over the growing momentum of the civil rights movement and potential federal legislation was at panic level. Dee had within the past year returned from an extended visit with his aunt in Chicago. Had he traveled north, Klansmen wondered, to plot an uprising with his militant black brothers?3
Bunkley was home to aging Klan leaders Archie Prather and Clyde Seale, the White Knights klavern’s Exalted Cyclops. They were relatively well-off farmers whose families had been county residents since the nineteenth century. Prather turned seventy-five in 1964 and, like Clyde Seale, who was sixty-two, was considered a mean and fanatical racist. Seale was the father of four sons, two of whom were violent Klansmen.4 The youngest, James Ford Seale, a twenty-eight-year-old truck driver, was a member of his father’s Bunkley Klan and was considered as hateful as the man who raised him.5
In 1963, the Seales and Prather had banished the pastor of the Bunkley Baptist Church after he disagreed with Prather’s Sunday school comments that there were circumstances when blacks should be killed. Once, while brandishing a sawed-off shotgun, James Ford Seale had bullied the nervous pastor, asking, “What do you think would happen if I just walked into a nigger joint and started shooting?”6 The younger Seale was so confrontational that he had rushed onto a school bus one morning to confront a fourteen-year-old girl who had gotten into a scrap with his daughter.7
When discussing alleged gun smuggling by black militants in the spring of 1964, Charles Marcus Edwards, a young father of four and an IP employee, told fellow Klansmen about Dee.8 Edwards alleged that Dee acted like a militant and that he occasionally from a distance peeked through a window at Edwards’s wife. Immediately, the Bunkley klavern leadership decided to interrogate Dee. Edwards was working in his garden on May 2, a Saturday, when Klansmen came by to inform him that Dee had been spotted in Meadville. Edwards laid aside his hoe and left with the men.9 When James Ford Seale, alone in his white Volkswagen, approached Dee, the teenager had been joined by a friend, Charles Eddie Moore, who was also nineteen. A talented football player and well liked, Moore had recently been suspended from nearby Alcorn A&M College for taking part in demonstrations seeking more social activities on campus. The boys were hitchhiking on the highway near an ice cream stand called the Tastee Freeze. Dee was heading to the Haltom Lumber Company in Roxie to pick up his paycheck of $29.43, while Moore was headed home.10
In addition to Seale, the Klan wrecking crew included Edwards, Clyde Seale, Archie Prather, and Curtis Dunn, who were watching from a pickup nearby. Although the teens had been looking for transportation, they declined Seale’s offer of a ride before he commanded them into his car, claiming he was an IRS agent looking for illegal whiskey stills. At the nearby Homochitto National Forest, Seale covered the boys with his shotgun as the other Klansmen pulled up.11
The men tied the two captives to trees and beat them with beanpoles, trimmed saplings used in gardens to support the weight of growing bean vines. Limber and strong, a bean stick makes a powerful weapon, producing a “swish” sound with every swing. In powerful hands, it can strip bark from a tree or flesh from a human. The men struck the teenagers thirty to forty times over thirty minutes, all the while interrogating them: Who is “stirring up all the niggers” in Franklin County? Where are the guns?12 Neither teen knew anything about Black Muslims or insurrectionists or gun smuggling. They pleaded for mercy. Hoping to end the torture, one of them falsely claimed that a local black pastor, the Rev. Clyde Briggs, was hiding guns in the Roxie Colored Baptist Church. A World War II
veteran and teacher, Briggs had been involved in black voter registration.13
While James Ford Seale and Dunn stayed behind with the teens, Clyde Seale, Prather, and Edwards headed out. As they left, Edwards asked Dee an ominous question: “Are you right with the Lord?”14 The three Klansmen stopped at Meadville, where they told Sheriff Wayne Hutto and Deputy Kirby Shell what had transpired. Hutto, like Odell Anders in Adams County and Charles T. Netterville in Wilkinson County, had only been in office since January. He had no training in law enforcement and considered his most important job to be county tax collector. Rather than arrest the Klansmen, who were in the process of committing the crimes of kidnapping and assault, Hutto traveled with them to the Roxie church while Deputy Shell and a state highway patrolman located Reverend Briggs and brought him to the site. Without a warrant, the Klansmen searched the church but were unable to find any guns.15
In Natchez, Jack Seale received a call from his father, who, mindful of gossipy operators, said the code word, “Kiwu,” a distress signal that meant: “Klansmen, I want you.” Seale and fellow KKK member Ernest Parker headed for Clyde Seale’s farm, where Dee and Moore were being held.16 Jack, a married father of three, operated a trash pickup service in Natchez, where he lived. He was stocky and strong, with an arrest record dating back to his navy days.17 Parker, thirty-five, was the wealthiest Klansman in Mississippi and Louisiana, maybe in the South. Well respected in the white community, he owned thousands of acres of valuable land in both states, resided in Natchez, and was self-employed in the cattle, dairy, oil, and timber businesses. As a zealot Klansman, Parker used his money and time to support the Klan’s offensive against integration.18
At Clyde Seale’s farm, James Ford Seale restrained Dee and Moore with twine and covered their mouths with duct tape. His captives were bleeding so copiously that the Klansmen used a tarpaulin to line the trunk of Parker’s red 1964 Ford Galaxie 500.19 Link Cameron, an African American man who lived along Bunkley Road, was parked in a briar patch having an amorous encounter with a woman in the backseat of his car when he heard the unmistakable sound of moaning coming from a car emerging from Seale’s farm.20 Parker and the Seale brothers headed west via US 84 through Natchez, crossed the Mississippi River Bridge into Vidalia, and began the remaining forty-mile leg of their journey. They traveled through Ferriday and at Clayton turned north on US 65.
By now, Dee and Moore likely were certain of their fate. Bound and crowded in the pitch dark of the trunk, their mouths taped, they were probably unable to communicate on the ninety-minute drive. The Klansmen’s destination was an island along an offshoot of the Mississippi River bordering Madison Parish, near the town of Tallulah in northeastern Louisiana. In 1964, Parker and his brother Robert Lee Parker III of Tensas Parish owned thousands of acres on the island, where they hunted, fished, and raised cattle. Some in Natchez referred to it as Parker Island, but it is most commonly known as Davis Island.21 The Parkers had built a boat landing on the Louisiana side of Old River and used a barge to transport themselves and supplies, as well as vehicles and livestock, over to the island, where they had camps, sheds, barns, and other outbuildings.22
Once at the landing, the Klansmen opened the trunk and were astounded to find Dee and Moore still alive. Jack Seale asked one of the boys if he knew what was going to happen. There is no record as to whether there was a response.23 The Klansmen tied Dee to a 1944 Willys Jeep engine block, and the Seale brothers rowed out into the water and dumped Dee overboard. Then they returned for Moore and threw him overboard in the same manner. The teenagers drowned immediately.24
TWO DAYS LATER, on Monday, May 4, Ernest Gilbert, head of the White Knights’ Klan Bureau of Investigation, met Ernest Parker and Jack Seale in Natchez at a quiet spot on the bank of the Mississippi River. Seale and Parker told Gilbert that they had “put two niggers in the river.” After learning that the two boys had been alive when dumped overboard, Gilbert complained that the treatment was inhumane. “I didn’t want to shoot them,” Jack Seale replied. That would “have gotten blood all over the boat.”25
Parker feared that if the Jeep motor block were found, authorities could trace the serial numbers back to him. This worry, rather than the memory of what they had done to Dee and Moore, was keeping Parker and Jack Seale from sleeping at night. Something else also was bothering Parker: His brother Lee, when crossing Old River to the island, liked to dip his hand into the water for a drink. Lee Parker was unaware of the murders, and Ernest Parker told Gilbert he was petrified by the thought of his brother drinking water “off a dead nigger.”26
Now a cover-up was launched. Clyde Seale considered Charles Marcus Edwards the weak link in the Bunkley Klan’s wrecking crew. Although Edwards had taken part in beating the two teenagers, he had not participated in their drowning. Clyde Seale warned him to remain silent and to “make damn sure” his wife kept quiet as well. Edwards was as terrified of the Seales as were others in Franklin County.27 He also felt bound by the so-called Christian oath of silence he took when joining the White Knights to battle Satan’s communist-led conspiracy to mix the blood of the races. Edwards knew that revealing the secret acts committed by the Klan to ensure white supremacy would earn him a death sentence as well.28 But deep in his soul, Edwards felt guilt and remorse. Had he never brought up the name of Henry Hezekiah Dee at a Klan meeting, Dee and Charles Moore would still have been alive.
Rather than lie low, however, the Bunkley klavern continued its attacks. Five weeks after the murders, they abducted and beat a white man for being too friendly with black people, and they attacked a young African American suspected of being among the local black militants. In the meantime, along a county highway, Seale ran over and killed another black man in what local and state authorities ruled an accident. But on July 12, a Louisiana man fishing on Old River at Davis Island hooked what appeared to be a human torso snagged in a log. The partial remains were determined to be those of Charles Moore. That same day in Concordia Parish, Joseph Edwards, a young porter at the Shamrock Motel in Vidalia, went missing; his car was found abandoned on the highway near Ferriday. The next day, July 13, the partial remains of a second body, that of Henry Dee, were retrieved from the river.29
The discovery of the bodies drew the immediate interest of the FBI. Since June 22, agents had been searching for three missing civil rights workers—James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner—in Neshoba County, Mississippi. The men were feared dead, but their bodies had not been found. Once Dee and Moore were identified, however, the nation’s focus returned to the Neshoba case.
Despite his concerns about being linked to the murders, James Ford Seale went on the attack in a letter to the weekly Franklin Advocate in Meadville. He urged citizens to fight the recently enacted Civil Rights Act of 1964 that was “supposed to help the nigger get equal schools,” warning that “they want to eat in the white cafe, sleep in the white hotel or motel, swim in the white pool, go to the white church, go to the white school. In short, they want to marry your white daughter, or live with her.”30
September brought a major break in the Dee-Moore case. Gilbert began informing to FBI agent Clarence Prospere in Natchez. The bureau determined that the “best way to corroborate information in this particular case is to locate the piece of physical evidence, namely, a jeep motor block alleged to be in the Mississippi River at a point near where the bodies were found.” Because Gilbert did not know where the beatings had taken place, the FBI was unaware that the crime scene was in a national forest. Had the agents known, they could have pursued federal charges. Without that knowledge, the bureau concentrated instead on assisting state authorities in developing murder charges against the Klansmen.31
In October, divers working under the FBI’s supervision recovered an army-issue Willys Jeep motor block near the Parkers’ landing on Davis Island. Attached to the block was a T-shirt containing human bones, and nearby, a skull was found. The motor block, determined to have been manufactured during the 194
0s, was potentially an evidential treasure.32 James Ford Seale and Charles Marcus Edwards were charged on November 6 with murdering Dee and Moore on warrants issued by Franklin County justice of the peace Willie Bedford. FBI agent Leonard Wolf informed Seale of what the bureau believed at that point: “We know that on Saturday afternoon May 2, 1964, you picked up in your car Henry Dee and Charles Moore, two Negro boys from Roxie. You and Charles Edwards and others took them to some remote place and beat them to death. You then transported and disposed of their bodies by dropping them in the Mississippi River. You didn’t even give them a decent burial. We know you did it, you know you did it, the Lord above knows you did it.”33
“Yes,” Seale responded, “but I’m not going to admit it. You are going to have to prove it. I’m not going to say anything more.” Never again did he answer any questions from authorities about the murders.34
Edwards, on the other hand, was nervous and afraid. Time and again, he expressed concern about his wife and children. The joint MHSP-FBI interview had gone on for nearly two hours before Edwards admitted that his wife had accused Dee of “peeping” at her from the roadway at night. Edwards admitted, too, that he had attended Klan meetings. Finally, he confessed that he was involved in the whipping of the two boys but said he knew nothing about their murders.35
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