Both vehicles were pointed in the direction of Ferriday, three miles to the west. A few feet from the two cars was the mainline Mississippi River levee. The witness was continuing on to Ferriday when the Olds sped by him with a number of occupants inside. When questioned later, he told the FBI he was certain that neither Concordia Parish sheriff Noah Cross nor Deputy Frank DeLaughter was among the men he saw. He didn’t know Vidalia police chief J. L. “Bud” Spinks, but when shown a photo of the 1964 white Olds Spinks drove (which had a light mounted on the roof), the witness said that was not the car he had seen on the highway.16
For the next few days, the Buick remained parked on the highway across from the bowling alley before it mysteriously was moved onto a street beside the Dixie Lanes. Inside the Buick, a spot of blood the size of a silver dollar was found on the floor under the steering wheel.17 Word soon spread that the Buick’s owner, twenty-five-year-old Joseph Edwards, a porter at the Shamrock Motor Motel in Vidalia, was missing. Despite countless hours of searching and contacting friends and neighbors, his mother, Bernice Conner, had not been able to find her son. She had even checked the jail. In late July 1964, she reported to the FBI and the Natchez police that Edwards was missing. “The Klan got my boy,” she cried to FBI agent Billy Bob Williams, who had just been transferred from San Diego.18 Conner feared Edwards was dead.
Known by his friends as “Joe-Ed,” Edwards had grown up in Sibley, eleven miles south of Natchez. From an early age, he was playful, talkative, and restless. As he grew older, he spent much of his time gambling and chasing girls. In the 1950s, he moved with his grandparents from Mississippi to Clayton in Concordia Parish and attended but never graduated from Sevier-Rosenwald, the black school in Ferriday. He was small in stature, standing five feet, six inches, and weighing 160 pounds. He wore neatly pressed clothes and a wristwatch decorated with small diamonds.19
In 1961, when he was twenty-one, he entered into a common-law marriage with Augree Taylor. Deaf and mute, Taylor communicated by sign language or by writing. The next year, while employed by T. E. Mercer Trucking Company in Vidalia, Edwards was using gasoline to start a fire in a steel drum when the fumes ignited and flashed in his face. (Family members and friends recall him spending two days in the hospital but believe a grease fire on the stove caused the burns.) A cousin remembers that during his hospital stay, Edwards rather flamboyantly attempted to flirt with the white nurses. A few months after the fire, he was fired by his Mercer supervisor for dishonesty concerning a request for an advance on his salary.20
By 1963, Edwards and Augree had two children. By early 1964, however, Edwards was rumored to be seeing other women, including white women. In mid-February, when bill collectors were hounding Edwards, and Klansmen abducted and beat black men in Concordia Parish and Adams County, a Natchez doctor diagnosed the young man with psychoneurosis, a minor mental disorder caused by emotional stress. Two months later, he was treated at the Jefferson Davis Hospital emergency room with sodium luminal to relieve nausea and tension.21 Not long afterward, he got a job as porter at the Shamrock in Vidalia. One mile west of downtown Natchez, the Shamrock was a typical 1950s-style motel, located near the foot of the Mississippi River Bridge. The 58-room facility featured a long L-shaped wing of rooms connected to the registration office at the front. A few steps away, a separate building housed a busy coffee shop with booths, a restaurant, and a lounge. Sandwiched inside the motor court between the guest rooms and coffee shop were a swimming pool and covered sitting area.22
Edwards’s duties included mowing, cleaning guest rooms, and a host of odd jobs. Although he could enter a room to clean it, as a black man in the segregated South of 1964, he could not spend the night in one, nor could he use the bathrooms. Aware of the debate in Congress over civil rights legislation, Edwards expressed to his first cousin Carl Ray Thompson on more than one occasion his readiness for a new world. At the coffee shop that spring, Sonny Boyd, the son of Earcel Boyd, a preacher who worked at Armstrong Tire with Red Glover, sat alone eating a hamburger as his dad and other Klansmen met with Glover in an adjoining room. Edwards leaned his elbows on the counter and asked Sonny Boyd what had happened to his partially bandaged head, which Sonny had injured in an automobile accident. Sonny observed that Edwards also had a wound—on the side of his neck was a white scar, apparently from the burns he had received two years earlier.23
While the Shamrock was a popular stopping point for travelers and a meeting place for Klansmen, it also did a bustling restaurant and lounge business. Pimps and prostitutes frequented the motel. There was a legendary brothel on Rankin Street in Natchez known as Nellie’s, named after Nellie Jackson, who had first opened her establishment in the 1920s, and it was rumored that she sent some of her prostitutes to entertain guests at the Shamrock. The ten-mile section of the Ferriday-Vidalia highway known as “The Strip” offered its customers gambling tables, poker games, booze, greasy barbecue sandwiches, ladies of the night, and bouncers who beat senseless many unruly customers or debtors. It was rumored that Edwards was involved in some of this activity. Some people said that while working at the Shamrock, Edwards had begun pimping black women to white men. Some also believed that he was pimping a white prostitute whose son drowned in the motel pool on June 27, but the relationship was never proven. Edwards told his cousin Carl Ray that he had been threatened after accidentally walking into a room where a white couple was having sex. He told several friends he dated white women. Friends begged Edwards to stop his interracial affairs and quit the Shamrock, as Klansmen frequented the coffee shop and restaurant. Edwards didn’t see the problem.24
AT THE SHAMROCK MOTEL coffee shop during the late spring of 1964, Red Glover expressed frustration and anger at the leaders of all three Klan groups—the Original Knights, the White Knights, and the United Klans. The constant infighting and arguments over leadership disgusted him. The southern way of life was under attack as a second civil war neared, he believed, and all the while, Klansmen were wasting time arguing over formalities and chains of command. Meanwhile, hundreds of civil rights workers were mounting a campaign to register blacks to vote in Mississippi. Congress seemed hell-bent on passing a civil rights act that would place white and black children on the same buses and in the same schools, cafeterias, and bathrooms. To Glover, the prospect was unacceptable.25
Glover was prepared to bust the heads of northern agitators, white and black, and their southern co-conspirators. He didn’t think he needed the permission of a Klan officer to do the work that needed doing. At the Shamrock, Glover gathered his trusted inner circle and told them that he was launching his own secret underground cell—a Klan within a Klan. There would be no robes, no formal meeting place, no officers, no oaths, no cross burnings, no ceremonies, and no dues. Everything would be done simply and in absolute secrecy. He would recruit only hardcore Klansmen, those who already had blood on their hands and who held sacred the privilege of going head-to-head against the communist agents of the federal government that intended to ram integration down white people’s throats. Admission would come only at Glover’s invitation. His men would work in teams. They would kill whenever he thought necessary. Racial mixing of any kind, but especially between white women and black men, would be met with deadly force.26
Glover’s symbol of unity was the silver dollar. To each of his first recruits that spring, he handed coins minted in the year of their birth. Glover chose only men he believed would keep their mouths shut until death. The FBI would identify this Klan within a Klan as the “Silver Dollar Group” and cite as its objective “the total segregation of the races by whatever force necessary.”27
AS THE NATION celebrated Independence Day on July 4, Edwards drove his mother, whom he called “Bean,” and his nineteen-year-old sister Julia from Natchez to Clayton to the home of his grandparents, Jake and Mary King. A host of family members gathered for a holiday barbecue. Julia recalled it being a happy day. On the way home, “Bean” playfully fussed at her son for driving too fast and j
oked that she would never ride with him again. “Don’t say that, Bean,” Julia said to her mother. “You don’t ever know!” It was the last time Julia saw her brother.28
On Monday, July 6, Edwards finalized the purchase of a 1958 white-over-green Buick four-door sedan from Purvis Pontiac in Ferriday. He made a $50 down payment on the $495 vehicle. Three days later, James Goss, a forty-three-year-old Louisiana probation officer and welfare caseworker, checked into the Shamrock. Every week, Goss visited Concordia Parish to run down clients, many of whom were delinquent in child-support payments. Goss was a big man, standing six feet, six inches, and weighing 265 pounds. His size had always garnered attention. In 1937, at age sixteen, he had attended the first Boy Scout jamboree in Washington, D.C., and a newspaper had noted that he was the biggest Scout in America, towering over his fellow Scouts and their leaders. In World War II, he served in the South Pacific before returning to the northern Louisiana town of Ruston in 1945. After a series of jobs—including telephone operator on a military base and mail carrier—he landed a position in 1961 with the Louisiana Department of Public Welfare as a caseworker for dependent children.29
Goss met Edwards on his first stay at the Shamrock. During a later stay, he met a twenty-two-year-old switchboard operator and registration clerk named Iona Perry. The daughter of a sawmill worker, Iona was a pretty woman who had been diagnosed with polio as a child. She had missed school for a year, and when she returned to elementary school, she was in a wheelchair. Her classmates cheerfully took turns pushing her from class to class. She never missed school after that and always made good grades. Like many of her classmates, she came from a poor family and ate biscuits dipped in sugar syrup for lunch.30
Goss was immediately attracted to the young motel clerk, although he was married and the father of a teenage son and a recently married daughter only a year older than Iona. He was impressed by Iona’s determination to earn her own way in life despite the crippling disadvantages of polio that required her to wear braces on her legs and use crutches to walk. Initially, he didn’t tell Iona he was married. Soon a romance bloomed, and Goss even considered divorcing his wife. As he checked into the Shamrock on July 9 during his routine Thursday visit, Iona began to cry. She told Goss that a short time earlier, as she walked from the switchboard to the bathroom, Edwards had grabbed her arms and kissed her on the lips against her will. Goss was furious. After taking Iona home to Natchez, he returned to the Shamrock in search of Edwards, but he already had left work for the night. Twelve hours later, on Friday, July 10, Goss drove a block east on the highway to the Concordia Parish Courthouse, where he saw Spinks, Cross, DeLaughter, deputies Bill Ogden and Ike Cowan, and jailer Ernest Clark. Goss pulled Spinks aside and related what had happened at the Shamrock the night before. He wanted Edwards charged with assault. Spinks told the deputies about the alleged incident.31
On Saturday, Spinks, accompanied by Natchez Police Department captain J. L. Wisner, a known Klansman, visited Iona at her boardinghouse in Natchez. The forty-five-year-old Spinks had been elected police chief a few months earlier. Iona told them that she had no desire to press charges against Joseph Edwards and was furious that Goss had reported the incident. She wished she had never said anything to him. As the two officers departed, however, Spinks told her not to worry because Edwards “would be taken care of.”32
The FBI would learn in 1967 from E. D. Morace, a Ferriday Klansman and FBI informant, that in early 1966 Vidalia Klansman Kenneth Norman Head, while drunk, said that Spinks had asked Glover to “take care of” Edwards. Head said that he, Glover, and Thomas “Buck” Horton had killed Edwards but didn’t say how. He reportedly said that Edwards “wouldn’t be popping up” in the river, meaning that Edwards’s body was not thrown into it.33
The thirty-five-year-old Head was a mechanic who operated the DX Service Station on Carter Street. He had once served as Exalted Cyclops of the Vidalia Klan. Head was known to live “for violence” and was convinced of an impending race war. Like Head, the twenty-eight-year-old Horton had served in the Marines. According to a military psychiatrist, Horton had suffered an emotionally unstable childhood and had difficulty controlling his temper.34
At 10:30 p.m. on July 11, the night he went missing, Edwards stopped at Robert Taylor’s bar in Ferriday. He drank two beers and told Taylor that he was “shitting in high cotton” because he was heading to the Shamrock to meet a white woman. “Stay away from those white girls,” Taylor warned. Around 11 p.m., Edwards arrived at the motel.35 Whether he actually met a white girl at the Shamrock, or was simply lured there as part of a police/Klan setup, is unclear. What is certain is that his murder wasn’t the only violence of the night. Before dawn, sixteen miles south of Natchez in Kingston, home of the Sligo White Knights unit, two African American churches—Bethel Methodist Episcopal and Jerusalem Baptist, located six miles apart—were burned to the ground before dawn, mere hours before Sunday church services were to begin. At daylight, Klansmen abducted a fifty-five-year-old white man named Dewey White in the Monterey area of Concordia Parish and beat him. With his black fishing buddy sitting in his car, White had a day or two earlier walked into Buckley’s Café on Horseshoe Lake and ordered two hamburgers. The owner, looking through the window at the black man, asked White if he planned to “bring that nigger” into the café. White answered no but reminded the owner that his friend Lewis had every right to enter under the new civil rights law. The proprietor furiously cursed White, who realized immediately that he had stirred up a hornet’s nest. He quietly paid for his burgers and left the café.36 A few hours later on July 12, Charles Moore’s body was found off Parker’s Landing. Henry Hezekiah Dee’s body would be found the next day.
Three months later, a commercial fisherman at Deer Park Lake along the Mississippi River seventeen miles south of Vidalia discovered flesh-like material near the shore. In 1967, when it intensively investigated the Edwards case, the FBI learned of the discovery and wondered if the fisherman had found Edwards’s remains. The bureau sent divers to search the lake on two separate occasions. FBI agent Billy Bob Williams had heard a rumor, as had others, in 1964 that Edwards had been hung up, skinned alive, and thrown in the river. More than forty years later, the Concordia Sentinel learned during its investigation that the origin of that rumor was a Ferriday prostitute who said she had been told that Ed Fuller, her boyfriend and Concordia gambling kingpin Blackie Drane’s chief enforcer, had committed the act, but it was never proven. She also indicated that Fuller was involved in the murder of Clifton Walker and the attempted murder of Richard Joe Butler.37
While only one informant pointed to Glover, Head, and Horton as Edwards’s murderers, several pointed to Concordia Parish sheriff’s deputies. The Rev. Robert Lee Jr. told the Concordia Sentinel in 2007 that not long after Edwards went missing, civil deputy Raymond Keathley told him, “the [line] deputies got Jo-Ed.” Keathley also told the bureau that in 1964, when he asked the deputies whose abandoned car was parked by the bowling alley, DeLaughter replied that it belonged “to the nigger who smarted off to the girls at the Shamrock. We won’t be bothered with that black SOB any more.” A female witness heard Deputy Bill Ogden say of Edwards, “That serves him right and they ought to bundle up all the niggers and get rid of them.”38
Probation officer James Goss, whose complaint put Edwards in the crosshairs of the Klan and the sheriff’s office, found himself in a vulnerable position when the flesh-like material was found in Deer Park Lake. He had asked Ogden earlier whether the sheriff’s office was going to arrest Edwards for the alleged indiscretion with Iona. When he asked Ogden at a later date about Edwards, he said Ogden told him to sink his victims away from the reach of fishermen. Goss asked what he meant. Ogden replied, “You ought to know! You put him there!” Until his death in 2009, Goss would recall many times to his daughter how Ogden and DeLaughter had tried to frame him in a Concordia Parish murder.39
According to Ferriday preacher Julian Massey’s interview by the FBI in 1967, Ogd
en told him that he and DeLaughter had pursued Edwards after receiving a complaint that he was causing a disturbance in a Ferriday nightclub. In Massey’s account, Ogden said they overtook Edwards at the bowling alley and pulled him over. Edwards jumped from his car and ran onto the levee. With DeLaughter chasing on foot, Ogden followed in his patrol car to the top of the levee, but he claimed Edwards got away. Picking up where Ogden’s story left off, a Klan informant told the bureau that he had heard from Louisiana Klansmen that Edwards was taken to the levee, “possibly to whip him, and they over did it.” The perpetrators had “rolled him [Edwards] down the levee, thinking he was dead or had buried him on the levee.”40
The FBI was given two different accounts, then. In one, an unmarked white Oldsmobile with a flashing police light chased Edwards from Vidalia. In the other, Ogden, in his patrol car with DeLaughter, chased Edwards from Ferriday. It seems significant that in both accounts, the chase ended at the bowling alley. After 250 interviews, the FBI closed the Edwards case in 1968 but would reopen it more than four decades later.
A FEW DAYS AFTER Edwards went missing, Agent Williams visited the new FBI offices on an upper floor of the downtown bank building in Jackson. The offices were still under construction. There was one teletype machine, a bank of telephones yet to be installed, wires sticking up in the floor, and a lone clerk sitting at the only desk.41 Williams was there to talk to Roy K. Moore, who had been named by Hoover as special agent in charge of that field office. There was not an agent in the country who hadn’t heard of the storied Moore. He had served seventeen years in the Marines before joining the bureau in 1940, where he trained new agents in the use of firearms. Moore had led the probe in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that claimed the lives of four girls.42 Fifty years old, Moore had some of his best work still ahead of him.
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