Devils Walking

by Stanley Nelson

  When, during a federal grand jury proceeding in 1972, Cross was asked about the ministerial alliance that asked him to close the Morville Lounge, the sheriff was indignant: “That was a Baptist preacher and the Methodist preacher, the priest and the president of the nuns came up there and they organized a ministerial alliance. They told me, ‘They are running a [whore] house down there.’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know nothing about it.’ They said, ‘Well, you go down there and close it or we are going to beat you . . .’ and I said, ‘You all just go ahead and beat me, by God.’”56 When asked about the Klan exchanging gunfire with lounge operators, he claimed that could not have happened: “I couldn’t tell you one Klan member in the parish of Concordia,” he said, although he himself was an honorary member of the UKA.

  Cross also denied he had hosted a party for other sheriffs at the lounge, an event everyone in Concordia Parish knew about. Later, Pfeifer learned from two serving sheriffs that Cross had sought their influence from residents in their parishes selected to the federal jury hearing his case. At Cross’s second trial (the first ended in a hung jury), two of the sheriffs met with him privately in a vacant room at the courthouse. They notified the sheriff they intended to tell all.57 Margaret Johnson Mulligan, a black woman from Ferriday who cooked at the lounge in 1965, was the most effective witness. She testified to watching the sheriff’s lounge party and said that Cross lost playing blackjack. Drane’s dealer, known as “Big,” complained when he had to reimburse the sheriff for his hefty losses.58

  Despite all of the controversies surrounding him, Cross was reelected in 1971 by more than 2,100 votes. On July 1, 1972, he began his eighth term in a ceremony on the courthouse grounds. He had been in office longer than any other sheriff in Louisiana at the time. DeLaughter, who had previously pled guilty to involvement in the promotion of prostitution at Morville, was already in federal prison. His wife, Lula, now on the sheriff’s staff, and deputies and members of the office staff took their oaths as well. Fifty spectators watched as Cross wept afterward.59 Eight months later, he was in federal prison in Fort Worth when his convictions on two counts of perjury and one count of jury tampering were affirmed on appeal. Due to illness, he was pardoned after serving more than a year of his six-year sentence. DeLaughter also served slightly more than a year in federal prison. Neither man would ever wear a badge again. Cross died in 1976 at the age of sixty-eight.

  Although a number of federal prosecutors pursued the Morville case for six years, it was Pfeifer who made it happen. Pfeifer later received a letter of commendation from his boss. “I am appreciative,” J. Edgar Hoover wrote. The cases involving Morville and the Davis beating resulted in the only convictions in the massive WHARBOM probe, although hope would arise again in 2007, when a new generation of Justice Department lawyers and FBI agents reopened the files in the wake of the indictment of James Ford Seale in the Dee and Moore murders.

  EPILOGUE

  New Investigations

  THE EMMETT TILL Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2007, named after a fourteen-year-old black child murdered in 1955 in Money, Mississippi, was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2008. (After a white male jury found them not guilty, Till’s killers confessed to the homicide to a Life reporter.) As a result of the Till Act, the Department of Justice and the FBI were directed to investigate and coordinate prosecution with state and local law enforcement of the civil rights–era murders that happened on or before December 31, 1969. By May 2015, the FBI had closed 105 of 113 cold cases involving 126 victims. In June 2016, the bureau closed its Mississippi Burning investigation.

  During the spring of 2007, Janis McDonald, a professor at the Syracuse University School of Law, visited the Concordia Sentinel office. She was researching a book that had a Concordia Parish connection, and someone had sent her to me because of my interest in local history. After we began talking, FBI agent Sheila Thorne, who handled the bureau’s community relations for the New Orleans division office, called me. As I questioned her about the Frank Morris case, McDonald listened. When I hung up, she asked me about Morris. A former civil rights lawyer, McDonald was intrigued by the murder. She left me her card and expressed a keen interest in keeping up with the case. A few days later, I called her and asked for help. She told Paula Johnson, a colleague at Syracuse who also taught criminal law, about her visit to Ferriday. Johnson immediately agreed to work with us. The two professors quickly enlisted twenty-five criminal law students who volunteered to do research.

  In a short time, they began sending paper gold, including copies of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings involving local Klansmen. They sent Don Whitehead’s 1970 book, Attack on Terror: The FBI against the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, which made the earliest public mention of the Silver Dollar Group and connected this Klan cell to the murders of Morris and Wharlest Jackson. The professors also sent newspaper articles, including one on the Morris murder by John Herbers of the New York Times, the first of many 1960s journalists I had the honor of getting to know. Before long, the professors got approval from the law school dean to teach a course on investigating real civil rights–era murders, with the Morris case as the centerpiece. In the meantime, they made several trips to Louisiana, and their interest spread to cases in other states, resulting in their cofounding the Cold Case Justice Initiative at the university. Over the years, they have held events for the families of victims and have linked them with many big names in the civil rights movement. Thanks to McDonald and Johnson, I met Rosa Williams, Frank Morris’s granddaughter, in person at a program at Syracuse. Later, I experienced the joy of seeing Ferriday’s Robert “Buck” Lewis recognized for his years of activism as president of the NAACP and the Ferriday Freedom Movement. Although his home had been bombed in 1965 and he had faced months of harassment and death threats by the Klan and local police, he had survived and persevered. He shared his experiences before an audience that included civil rights icons Diane Nash and the Rev. C. T. Vivian. Lewis was so happy, he burst out into song.

  IN JANUARY 2008, U.S. Attorney Donald Washington of Lafayette visited the Concordia Sentinel office with a team of lawyers, two FBI agents, and Paige Fitzgerald, deputy chief in charge of the Cold Case Initiative at the Department of Justice (DOJ). Fitzgerald recently had been involved in the prosecution of James Ford Seale, and Washington had been unfairly vilified in some circles in the racially charged Jena 6 case in LaSalle Parish, Louisiana, that resulted in a march of more than 15,000 people on the town of 3,400. Demonstrators claimed that six black teens were treated unfairly by the local justice system.

  In 2001, President George W. Bush had appointed Washington, who is black, as the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, which includes forty-two parishes west of the Mississippi River. The choice of the West Point graduate to spearhead the Morris probe could not have been better—his heart was in it. After the DOJ/FBI initiative was announced, Washington eagerly awaited word of what cases his office would be assigned. The FBI and lawyers in the DOJ Civil Rights Division criminal branch made the assignments. Washington intended to push his cases with urgency and with appropriate manpower. I was later surprised to learn that when FBI director Robert Mueller announced the initiative, the DOJ and the bureau were only beginning the process of obtaining the old case files of the victims. Not only is getting the documents a time-consuming chore, but someone has to read them. In June 2009, the Syracuse professors handed me several disks containing seven thousand pages of unredacted pages of the WHARBOM file that included documents on the 1960s FBI investigations of the Jackson, Morris, and Joseph Edwards cases. Students from law schools at Syracuse, Howard, and Catholic Universities spent three weeks using digital cameras to photograph the file. When McDonald and Johnson showed Washington some of the documents on Edwards, he excused himself from the room. He was furious with the FBI. The bureau had told him there was no Edwards file. A few months later, McDonald was back at the archives and was astounded to find that the WHARBOM pages ha
d been heavily redacted since the students had photographed them.

  A key to success in a civil rights cold-case murder investigation is a U.S. attorney who personally pushes the case forward. U.S. attorneys have a lot of leeway. Early on, Washington realized that if the Justice Department did a standard investigation, valuable time would be lost. The witnesses and perpetrators in these cases were aging and dying off, so it was important to move forward as quickly as possible. He wanted to generate public interest in the Morris case and liked the fact the Concordia Sentinel was publishing stories about Morris and other cold-case murders almost every week. As a result, his office and the FBI were getting leads. A visit to the newspaper made sense to him, but he later told me that Fitzgerald was not happy with the visit. The department had concerns about a third party impacting the investigation in an adverse way. Also at the meeting was Syracuse’s McDonald, yet another outside party the DOJ lawyers weren’t comfortable around.

  Fitzgerald was a proven cold-case prosecutor, and Washington found her generally cooperative and quick to respond. He also liked Cynthia Deitle, whom Mueller named to head the FBI’s cold-case unit. Deitle met with the New Orleans special agent in charge and worked closely with the office in getting the cases investigated. Although Washington thought a good effort was initiated, he realized that “if you don’t stay on top of it, a month can pass in the blink of an eye and nothing gets done.”1 He found some agents more energetic than others and personally requested the transfer of one agent who wanted to close the Joseph Edwards case before much work had been done. Washington was aware, too, that agents typically spent eighteen months to two years in one office. Heather Koch, a young agent from a small town in Illinois outside Chicago, was one of several case agents to investigate the Morris case. She felt privileged to be involved in the historic investigation and devoted personal time to studying the case. When it came time to transfer, her request to remain in Louisiana to complete the investigation was denied. While this may be bureau policy, sending off a dedicated on-the-ground agent knowledgeable about a fragile case made no sense.

  Washington called a meeting to figure out a way for government investigators and lawyers, a weekly newspaper, and a university lawyer to work together in the race against time to solve an aging murder case. The meeting was held in the Sentinel’s break room. When the delegation of federal officials arrived with their umbrellas on a nasty winter day, I was overwhelmed and nervous, a novice in dealing with the FBI and DOJ, and I was glad McDonald was there. Washington was absolutely sincere, but the DOJ and FBI didn’t buy in. Their terms are a one-way street: You tell all, and they tell you nothing. I came to believe that it is impossible for a journalist to work with a government bureaucracy. There are ethical issues as well. But I trusted Donald Washington, and he trusted me. He came to Ferriday dragging along everybody he could find, willing and unwilling, because he wanted to solve Morris’s murder and knew that it and other cold cases needed an innovative and aggressive approach. From that day until he stepped down from his position in 2010, we quietly and confidentially worked together to solve the murder. When Washington left, the DOJ and the FBI for all practical purposes yanked the case from the U.S. Attorney’s Office and oversaw it at headquarters. Unfortunately, Louisiana and Frank Morris’s family lost a most passionate government advocate.

  IN MARCH 2008, Canadian filmmaker David Ridgen of Toronto, spearheading a new investigative initiative, wanted to know if I would be interested in collaborating with other journalists independently seeking justice in civil rights–era cold cases. He had worked on an investigation that had resulted in the 2007 arrest and conviction of James Ford Seale. One of Seale’s victims, Charles Moore, was the younger brother of Thomas Moore, Ridgen’s investigative partner. Their work bonded them like brothers.

  During Seale’s trial, Charles Edwards, in exchange for immunity, testified against his old White Knight comrade. Edwards also did something few Klansmen have done: He asked the victims’ families to forgive him. His courtroom request stunned Moore, who was sitting only a few feet away. In the previous years, Moore and Ridgen had confronted Edwards, who had steadfastly denied having been involved in the crime and had run them off his property and the church property where Edwards was a deacon. Charles Moore’s murder had filled his brother with a hatred of white people that had consumed him for a lifetime, and Edwards’s testimony and his plea for forgiveness left Thomas Moore speechless.2 The next day, Moore forgave him.

  In 2011, Moore and Ridgen returned to Franklin County to see if the reconciliation that had begun was real. One question Moore had long wanted to ask Edwards: “Do you ever think about my brother?” Edwards answered, “All the time,” adding that he felt the early death of his son was payback for the murders. In fact, Edwards said he occasionally returned to the forest where the boys were beaten and wondered, “Why did I do that?”3 Later, Moore and Ridgen were invited to go to church with Edwards in Bunkley. Moore participated in the Sunday School class Edwards taught, and the two sat together during the singing and preaching service. At Edwards’s house, they picked peaches and walked through the garden. Edwards had been in his garden in 1964 when Klansmen came to tell him they had located Henry Dee in Meadville. He laid down his hoe and went with them. By that time, Thomas’s brother had joined Dee in front of the Tastee Freeze trying to hitch a ride home.

  Ridgen’s filming over the years included Thomas Moore’s confrontations with Seale and Edwards, and eventually the conviction of one on the testimony of the other. “God did not give us the ability to forget,” Thomas Moore told me in 2012. “But we can forgive. I’ve been a different person ever since.”4

  And there with him was David Ridgen, his camera rolling. We worked together on the Morris murder and other cases, and I have found him to be one of the most generous men I have ever known. His work is an inspiration to any journalist who chases truth.

  A few days after Ridgen contacted me in early March 2008, one of his main collaborators, Robert Rosenthal, called. Rosenthal had recently been named executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) in Berkeley, California. He had previously worked as managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. Rosenthal invited me to a meeting at the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, at the office of investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell, a legend in the cold-case reporting field. Mitchell’s stories over the decades have led to the arrests and convictions of Klansmen in several old cases, including the 1964 Neshoba County, Mississippi, murders of three civil rights workers. I had first talked to Mitchell in early 2007 when he was writing about James Ford Seale and the 1970 plane collision in Concordia Parish that only Seale survived. Among the five dead in the other plane was Dr. Charles Colvin, who had been Morris’s attending physician in 1964.

  John Fleming, then a reporter with the Anniston Star in Alabama, also attended the meeting. Fleming’s reporting on the February 1965 killing of twenty-six-year-old voting rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson led to the 2005 conviction of former Alabama state trooper James Bonard Fowler. The killing had been one of the inspirations for the Selma-to-Montgomery marches that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The former cop told Fleming he shot Jackson in self-defense. Following Fleming’s story, Fowler was indicted for murder by a state grand jury. He was sentenced in 2010 to six months in jail after pleading guilty to manslaughter.

  Also at the Jackson meeting was Aynsley Vogel with Paperny Films in Vancouver. Her boss, David Paperny, was interested in joining the effort that would become known as the Civil Rights Cold Case Project, sponsored by CIR. The project would also involve Syracuse and other universities, as well as reporters, filmmakers, and researchers. Several participants in the program were asked by Harvard’s Nieman Reports in 2011 to write about the project.

  “Our unifying motivation,” Rosenthal reported, “was storytelling, justice and even reconciliation. I wanted to create a project of an ambitious sweep that would tell all the untold stories of killers, v
ictims and their families in ways that would tie together a shameful chapter in American history and link it in powerful arcs to today.” Fleming went right to the point: “If we, as journalists, don’t tell these forgotten stories, who will?” Ridgen wrote, “The investigative process that leads to the courtroom can be for long stretches a solitary and exhausting effort that feels as cold and bleak as the case itself. At such moments, advancing the case requires the precision and subtlety of a battering ram.” Hank Klibanoff, now the James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism at Emory University in Atlanta, was named managing editor of the project. He and Gene Roberts had coauthored The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. Klibanoff noted in Nieman Reports that during “the past 40 years our nation, at the federal and state levels, has reaffirmed its disdain for three kinds of criminal behavior characteristic of the Klan: organized crime, terrorism and hate crimes. Not allowing these unprosecuted cases to vanish—or those who committed these crimes to die without pursuit—fulfills that intent to track down and prosecute haters and terrorists. These crimes are so egregious and they are so woven into the context of who we Americans are today that we’re interested in telling the stories even when there is no living perpetrator.”5

  For a two-year period, Klibanoff edited almost every cold-case story I wrote for the Concordia Sentinel. I would e-mail him the article, and he would send it back. Sometimes he would return my original story with so many edits and questions that I considered setting fire to my computer. But once the changes were made, the improvement was obvious. I grew to welcome his edits because a better story would appear below my byline. His suggestions resulted in one of my favorite ledes: “Forty-four years have passed, but Leland Boyd can still recall the shock he felt as a 12 year old when he first saw the charred, smoking rubble of Frank Morris’s shoe shop on the morning of December 10, 1964.”6