The explosion had separated the roof of the cab, the hood, and the driver’s door from the main frame, while the passenger door remained attached by one hinge. All of the window glass was shattered. Bits of Jackson’s flesh were found in the wreckage and on neighboring lawns, and one of his shoes was blown fifty yards away into a ditch. Inexplicably, all four tires and the spare remained inflated and attached to the crushed frame.13
Jackson’s body was taken from the hospital to Curtis Funeral Home. Pathologist Dr. Leo J. Scanlon, who eight months earlier had performed the autopsy of Ben Chester White, disclosed after his examination that death had been instantaneous. Jackson’s buttocks and abdomen were ripped open, his aorta severed. Scanlon noted there was a “complete divergence of the mesoteric root from the intestine.”14 In 1965 and 1966, Jet had published pictures of the injured Metcalfe in his hospital room and the disfigured face of the murdered White. In 1967, the magazine published two graphic photographs—one from the back and one frontal—of Jackson’s body lying on its side atop a table at the Curtis Funeral Home. His buttocks appeared as a mass of chunky flesh torn to bits.
FBI lab experts discovered only one significant piece of evidence—a leg wire from an electric blasting cap used for seismographic work in oil-field exploration and production. The cap was used to charge what was obviously a significant amount of dynamite or a form of nitroglycerin, but the explosive material was water soluble, and all evidence had been washed away by rain.15 The investigation determined that a high-explosive charge had been placed under the truck’s cab outside the frame directly below the driver’s seat. But what had the bomber used to activate the blasting cap that detonated the nitroglycerin? Immediate interest was focused on the wiring of the taillights, brake lights, and left rear turn indicator. The taillights had been activated when Jackson turned on his headlights for the short ride home, while the brake lights would have been used any number of times before he came to the point on Minor Street where the explosion occurred. Evidence indicated that at that location, Jackson would have as a matter of routine turned on his left turn signal for the upcoming turn onto Pine Street. Lab experts surmised that an “electric blasting cap could be caused to detonate when the left turn signal was turned on by stripping insulation from the turn signal wire, attaching one wire of the (blasting) cap to the turn signal wire and other wire of the cap to ground.” It was a simple but deadly procedure that would have taken less than five minutes to execute.16
The night after the murder, Evers led a meeting at Rose Hill Baptist Church. The next day, two thousand blacks marched to the Armstrong parking lot to protest the employment of Klansmen at the plant. Natchez police chief J. T. Robinson called the murder “low, low, low.” He predicted an arrest, but blacks were not convinced. Mississippi governor Paul Johnson called the killing “heinous and senseless,” while Mayor John Nosser described it as “a wanton slaying.” Local white legislators also publicly condemned the murder, while a $35,000 reward—$25,000 from the City of Natchez and $10,000 from Armstrong—was established for the arrest and conviction of the killers. At a meeting on the courthouse steps, Evers told the crowd that the gathering was in part a protest of “the social inertia of our white brothers who piously condemn violence after it occurs and refuse to work for democracy in the absence of violence.” A grief-stricken Exerlena held her five children close in the days to follow and wondered why her husband had been killed over something as simple as a promotion.17 But was her husband the main target?
IN ADDITION TO analyzing the crime scene, the pickup, and the Jackson autopsy, the bureau launched an investigation that eventually would involve 180 agents following leads throughout the South. Unpaid overtime hours reached 8,396. Bureau automobiles were driven more than 200,000 miles. By the end of 1967, the expense of the probe reached $300,000, the current equivalent of $2 million.18 WHARBOM brought the bureau to the realization that though Natchez was the heart of Klan violence, Concordia Parish was its soul. While Natchez was the center of general Klan communications through the Armstrong Tire and Rubber Company plant and the International Paper Company mill, Concordia was the Klan’s protective den, the sheriff’s office its protector. The only exception was when a segment of the Klan world intolerant of drinking, gambling, and prostitution attempted to shut down the Morville Lounge and the bawdy houses that were paying the sheriff piles of cash to operate. Otherwise, deputies joined the Klan in its projects and informed individual Klansmen when the FBI was asking questions about them.
In 1967, Concordia sheriff Cross needed the Klan’s political support more than ever as he faced three formidable opponents in his reelection bid. There were elections in Mississippi, too, but every county there was guaranteed a new sheriff, since the incumbents could not serve two consecutive terms. In addition to the Jackson car bombing, the FBI was intensively investigating a number of other cases, including its first probe into the killing of Joseph Edwards and a second look at the three-year-old murder of Frank Morris. A number of beatings and arsons, most in Concordia Parish, were also reviewed. The bureau placed the ongoing probes into the Morville Lounge and the 1965 beating of William Cliff Davis in the Ferriday jail under its WHARBOM umbrella. The FBI was now certain that the violence would never end until its agents talked to every known Klansman, rooted out their hiding places, and infiltrated the SDG so thoroughly that Red Glover’s growing paranoia would stop him from acting and break up his terrorist cell.
In the first days of the investigation, agents interviewed 334 persons living in a 15-block area along Jackson’s 6-block route from the plant to the site of the explosion. No one reported seeing anything suspicious. Most people had been inside their homes since it was dark, cold, and raining.19 After reviewing personnel records of current and former Klan members at Armstrong, agents followed up with interviews of every known Klansman, especially those with violent tendencies and backgrounds. The prime suspect was Red Glover. In the days ahead, informants pointed to other suspects as well, and agents set out to account for their whereabouts at the time of the bombing. Agents were most interested in interviewing members of the SDG.
E. D. Morace, who had implicated Glover, James “Red” Lee, and Sonny Taylor in the Metcalfe bombing, was among the first to be contacted. Morace provided one of the first big leads when he reported that in early December 1966 he had accompanied Glover to the home of Elden Hester, known by SDG Klansmen as the “Junk Man” (his code name as the handler of explosives). Hester was a quiet man considered peculiar by many of his Armstrong coworkers. He lived in Franklin County, Mississippi, and had been a member of Clyde Seale’s White Knights klavern and a customer of the mechanic Earl Hodges. Inside his home, Hester had shown Morace a number of canisters he was storing for Glover. They were labeled Nitramon S and Nitramon S Primer, powerful explosives manufactured by E. I. Dupont and used locally for seismic work in the oil field. Hester also showed Morace a portrait of Confederate States of America president Jefferson Davis that had been stolen from the lobby of the Natchez hospital bearing his name. The painting had been stolen, Hester said, so that Davis would not have to look down at the “mixed racial status of the hospital” following integration.20
THE BUREAU HAD LOOKED at developing E. L. McDaniel as an informant as early as 1965, but he was considered completely untrustworthy. However, by late 1966, after his ouster as grand dragon of the Mississippi UKA, McDaniel was unemployed and broke, and he became an informant. Anything McDaniel said was likely taken with a grain of salt, but the FBI had to consider the information. Contacted a few days after the Jackson bombing, McDaniel claimed that he had been approved for membership in the SDG but declined to join, an obvious lie since the bureau was beginning to understand that admission into the terrorist Klan unit came only at the invitation of Red Glover. Secondly, McDaniel claimed that in late December 1966, SDG members were told to establish alibis because “something was going to happen” to Metcalfe in early January 1967. To thwart an attempt on Metcalfe’s life, McDaniel sai
d that he took it upon himself to call the men he considered the likely suspects (without identifying them to the bureau). He claimed he disguised his voice and said that if anything happened to Metcalfe, “We are going to arrest you.” McDaniel told his FBI handler, special agent Benjamin Graves, that he was satisfied that this deception had ended the plot against Metcalfe. A furious Graves, who had contacted McDaniel in mid-December, twice in January, and twice in February prior to the Jackson bombing, asked, “Why are you just now telling me this?” McDaniel answered, “It just slipped my mind.”21
Later, as the bureau’s second probe into the Morris murder intensified, McDaniel had another “Oh, by the way” moment. For three years, Frank DeLaughter and law enforcement in general had been the main suspects in the Morris arson. But McDaniel had another story to tell the bureau that may have been designed to take the heat off his friend DeLaughter and place the focus on a group of Silver Dollar Klansmen who paid no attention to McDaniel’s Klan authority. McDaniel claimed that Morace, James Scarborough, Tommie Lee Jones, and T. L. Torgersen had committed the arson. McDaniel’s dislike for Jones dated back to 1963, when Jones had launched a wrecking crew attack on his own without seeking McDaniel’s authority. McDaniel said Morace had asked him to authorize Jones and Torgersen, now UKA members, to come to Ferriday and whip Frank Morris for flirting with white women. He also claimed that Morace had requested that if the four men were ever arrested, to rush to Concordia and get them out of jail. When asked why he didn’t tell the FBI this three years earlier, McDaniel answered that he feared those Klansmen would harm him if he talked. For a man who counted as a close friend murderous Jack Seale—feared by other Klansmen—the claim seems suspect.22
Morace’s FBI handlers eventually asked him whether he was involved in the Morris arson. He acknowledged that during 1964 Ferriday Klansmen had made allegations against Morris, including that he was flirting with white women, that he was allowing interracial liaisons between white women and black men in the back of the shop, and that Morris had insulted Frank DeLaughter’s wife by trying to make a date with her, a story the FBI had discounted. As investigator for the local Klan klavern, Morace said he found the allegations to be untrue and that a project to whip Frank Morris had never been approved. Yet he did offer one possible motive for the arson—that “hard feelings” had resulted between Morris and the deputy over a pair of cowboy boots and DeLaughter’s pattern of not paying Morris for his work. Morris certainly was not the first merchant to be stiffed by the deputy, who was well known in the parish for his bullying tactics, including taking whiskey or stock off a merchant’s shelf without paying.23
Another informant corroborated Morace’s story. Convicted felon Coonie Poissot, the Klansman DeLaughter had run out of Ferriday in late 1965 after Poissot witnessed the deputy’s apprehension of William Cliff Davis prior to his beating, was secretly returned to the area, where he showed the FBI Klan haunts and outlined several projects in which he was a participant along with Red Glover. Poissot said that before he fell out with DeLaughter, he had spent time riding with him in his patrol car. During those rides in late 1964, he said DeLaughter claimed to have beaten Morris because he “wasn’t acting right.” On the night prior to the arson, again on a ride in the patrol car, Poissot said the deputy was furious with Morris because he had refused to extend DeLaughter any more credit and failed to repair a pair of shoes without payment in advance. Poissot also told agents that two months later in February 1965, DeLaughter recruited him and Preston Conway, a dealer and bouncer for Blackie Drane, to steal fishing seines and netting from the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Department warehouse in Ferriday.24
There was more. Poissot said that in late November 1965, he had been riding with Glover and Kenneth Norman Head when Glover bragged about the Metcalfe bombing three months earlier. In a signed statement, Poissot said, “I recall saying something to the effect that it wasn’t a good job and Red Glover said, ‘If I had wanted to kill him I would have put the thing under the dashboard instead of under the hood,” or words to that effect. I recall that at this point Kenneth Head spoke up and said something about Red Glover being an expert in explosives. Head said further that he and another Klansman acted as lookouts while the explosives were being placed in Metcalfe’s car.”25 While no mention was made of Sonny Taylor, who as an informant later acknowledged his involvement to the bureau, Poissot’s statement corroborated that Glover was the mastermind. Such statements, however, pointed to the problem with informants: They were often self-serving and rarely incriminated themselves in acts of violence. Additionally, their identities are protected, and they can’t be forced to testify. Jim Ingram, the legendary FBI agent involved in many major Mississippi cases, from the Neshoba County murders, known as Mississippi Burning (MIBURN), to WHARBOM, said that SDG informants would “only lead you to a certain point and stop there.” More importantly, there was a line of incrimination involving murder that no SDG Klansman, unlike those involved in MIBURN, would ever cross.26
FROM MORACE, the FBI learned that eight Klansmen met for coffee at the Chef Truck Stop Café in Vidalia on February 20, 1967, one week before the Jackson bombing. In addition to Glover and Morace, those in attendance included Head, Scarborough, Hester, and Donald Holland, a feed mill operator from Meadville. Morace said the other two men in the group were both Armstrong employees, but he didn’t know their names. One was in his early twenties. During the meeting, Glover informed Morace that the turn signals on his GMC pickup were faulty and needed repair before he could get an inspection sticker. He asked Morace, who was a mechanic, how the turn signal wiring worked. Morace told him. He also told agents that six or seven months earlier Glover and Jones had suggested that someone shoot or bomb the black man driving Metcalfe to work. Jones had just returned home from back surgery at the time of the Jackson bombing and seemed an unlikely participant.27 In the thousands of pages of FBI documents on the case, there is no other mention of Jackson being specifically targeted, whereas Glover’s passion to kill Metcalfe never cooled.
In May 1967, Taylor asked Glover about the Jackson bombing; specifically, he wanted to know how the bomb was timed to go off. Glover answered it was “no problem,” that by connecting the bomb to the turn signal wire, the explosive would not detonate until the turn signals were used. This was information that only the killer would know.28
Three days after the bombing, Roy Moore relayed to headquarters that agent John Pfeifer, still hot on the trail of Cross and DeLaughter in the Morville Lounge case, had advised Natchez resident agent Clarence Prospere about Hester. Prospere told Moore that if agents could confirm the description of Hester’s home as described by Morace, then maybe the bureau could obtain a search warrant.29
On March 16, a source told the bureau that Glover’s daughter-in-law, the wife of his stepson James Watts, had confided to a girlfriend that a large quantity of nitroglycerine and a painting of Jefferson Davis had been stored in the attic of the Wattses’ Vidalia home a short time prior to the Jackson bombing. That information indicated that the cache seen in Hester’s home in early December might have been moved. Inspector Sullivan immediately asked Hoover for a search warrant of the Watts and Hester homes. “It is entirely reasonable to presume,” Sullivan wrote the FBI director, “that a portion of these explosives could have been used in the preparation of a bomb placed under Jackson’s truck.”30 Hoover rejected the requests, stating that in the Watts case the bureau could not establish probable cause “that the instrumentality of the crime, the fruits of the crime or contraband, is presently at the place to be searched.” Hoover also advised there was no evidence the material had been transported interstate, nor that it was connected to the bombing. Even if the explosives were in the attic, they “would constitute neither an instrumentality nor a fruit of a federal crime. Explosives are not contraband under Federal law.” He suggested that local authorities were in the best legal position to pursue the matter, adding that the theft of the Davis portrait was a state crime.31
In connection with the Hester matter, it was also surmised that there was insufficient data to obtain a search warrant. District Attorney Lennox Forman in Meadville took the same stand on behalf of the state. But in Vidalia on April 17, a month after the search warrant request was denied, FBI agents Reesie Timmons and Benjamin Graves received permission from James Watts to search his attic. They found a .32 caliber Smith and Wesson hidden in a white sock but nothing else.32
The next day, at Harrisonburg, Louisiana, Glover picked up Taylor at his home for a drive to rural Franklin Parish. Of average height but stout and strong, Taylor was an Original Knight when taken into the SDG in 1965. He earned his living in logging and road construction and would lose the use of his right eye following a chainsaw accident. Prone to heavy drinking, he was a mean drunk, and deputies with the Catahoula Parish Sheriff’s Office always approached him in pairs when he was causing trouble. His stepsister recalled a day when Taylor beat his own son with an automobile fan belt after the child accidentally cut down a potato plant while hoeing the family garden. He was known to hoard whole milk in the refrigerator while making his children drink a mixture of powdered milk and water.33
Fearing the FBI was following him and that agents had “bugged” his vehicle, Glover steered his pickup along an evasive route to a farm in the community of Baskin on Louisiana Highway 15, thirty-five miles southeast of Monroe. Glover pulled into the graveled drive of a vacant house owned by Hester and handed Taylor his sawed-off sixteen-gauge shotgun to guard them as they entered the house. From a corner of the attic above a storeroom in the back, Glover retrieved five boxes. When Taylor prepared to open one, an army ammunition box, Glover snapped, “Don’t look in the boxes and you won’t know anything.” One box contained railroad fuses like one found outside a Concordia Parish nightclub burned by a Glover wrecking crew in 1964. (The club’s owner, Reef Freeman, had made the mistake of doing business with someone other than Blackie Drane.) Glover also handed Taylor a child’s toy drum—colored red, white, and blue—containing primer cord. Wrapped in a tarpaulin were eight to ten old shotguns Glover called “nigger guns” (he and Hester had stolen them in previous months from the homes of African Americans), along with shovels, axes, and tools. Glover told Taylor a seismographic company employee had obtained the “stuff”—meaning explosives—but offered no other information. They loaded the material into Glover’s truck and returned to Harrisonburg. Taylor never knew where Glover relocated the cache.34
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