As he wrote in Nieman Reports, Jerry Mitchell believes it is his “job as a reporter to assemble whatever evidence exists and put it out there so everyone can see it. By doing this I hope to reveal how the system failed to provide justice. A friend of mine who happens to be a terrific investigative reporter has a button that reads, ‘I just catch ’em. I don’t fry ’em.’ That’s how I feel. My job as a journalist is to expose the truth, as best as I can determine it by the evidence I find and the interviews I do. It’s up to authorities whether they act on it or not.”7
Ben Greenberg, a freelance reporter and blogger from Boston, also became a part of the CIR cold-case project. His late father, Paul A. Greenberg, was a special assistant to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement. For years, Ben Greenberg investigated the 1964 murder of Clifton Walker in Woodville, Mississippi. When in 2007 the FBI reopened the Walker case, its efforts seemed sluggish and disjointed. Greenberg’s reporting in 2012, published in the Clarion-Ledger and USA Today, revealed what the Concordia Sentinel had discovered in its probes into other cold cases—that the FBI’s field agents were not given the time needed to comprehensively reinvestigate; thereby, through no fault of their own, the fieldwork was inconsistent. Agents still had their everyday work to do, and today’s terrorist suspects will always have priority over aging Klan suspects. The DOJ should have appointed a task force of a handful of agents to work these cold cases full-time.
The third agent assigned to the Walker case since 2007 told Greenberg that the FBI depended on the public for assistance “because we have resources and personnel limitations.” FBI headquarters in Washington countered that the constraints cited by the case agent didn’t exist. Ironically, while the FBI courted collaboration with journalists, the bureau often discounted comments made by witnesses reporters interviewed, claiming, “Individuals may profess to the media that they have direct knowledge of events that they later acknowledge to law enforcement was hearsay, rumor or opinion.”8
LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY professor-in-residence Jay Shelledy called me in April 2009. He holds the Fred Jones Greer Chair in Media Business and Ethics at the LSU Manship School of Mass Communications in Baton Rouge. One of his previous newspaper jobs included the editorship of the Salt Lake Tribune, with a newsroom staff of 175. Shelledy asked me to talk to Manship students about my cold-case work. I brought Robert Lee III of Ferriday with me. Lee, who died in 2016, looked like a linebacker for a professional football team. For years, Lee introduced me into black communities from Ferriday to Fayette, Mississippi. Once, when we were en route to talk to a man I believed might have information on one of the killings, I asked Lee what we would do if the man refused to see us.
“Oh, he’ll see us,” Lee said. “He might not talk, but he’ll see us.”
I asked him what he meant. Lee laughed. “If I have to kick the door in, he’ll see us.”
Lee had suffered discrimination and racism throughout his life. His father and mother, the Rev. Robert E. Lee Jr. and Lavinia Lee, friends of Frank Morris, had managed to see all four of their boys grow to manhood on the same streets and roadways that were traversed by Deputy Frank DeLaughter. Like all black families in Ferriday, the Lees had lost several friends to suspicious deaths. Lee III had been a friend of Joseph Edwards, who rode Reverend Lee’s schoolbus in the years before he went missing on the Ferriday-Vidalia highway.
After the talk to students, Shelledy took us to lunch. Dean Jack Hamilton and Matt Barnidge, a graduate student who became the first LSU intern to work with me on the cold cases, joined us. Shelledy envisioned an ongoing cold-case project in which students would research, investigate, and write about the old murders. That summer, Ian Stanford, another LSU graduate student, joined Barnidge in courthouses from Concordia Parish to Amite County, Mississippi, tracking down records on SDG Klansmen. Barnidge also helped me investigate the Morville Lounge. The result was a series of Sentinel stories about the lounge’s connection to the Klan, the Carlos Marcello mob, and the Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Office.
After discussing my need for intern help and for FBI documents that could be obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Dean Hamilton said, “We’re going to help you.” Subsequent deans Ralph Izard and Jerry Ceppos have supported Shelledy’s growing cold-case program, which has included thirty-two team members. The Concordia Sentinel has by far been the major benefactor from the project.
During most fall and spring semesters since 2010, a team of LSU cold-case students has visited the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, to retrieve what at this writing has totaled more than 150,000 pages of FBI investigative documents involving more than three dozen cases. These were released following LSU’s Freedom of Information requests. In early 2015, those documents were released through LSU’s cold-case Web site. Now historians and journalists can view documents not seen since they were archived a half century ago.
On the Washington trips, the students have interviewed the ever-changing members of the FBI cold-case unit. In Ferriday, they have followed me across the foundation of Morris’s shop as I retraced his path the night of the fire. I have told them about his trail of bloody footprints, and I have seen in their eyes that the inhumanity of that long-ago night upsets them and compels them to help pursue the case. But the highlight of every student visit was a pilgrimage to see Reverend Lee, who died in 2015. When he was a strapping young man of ninety-three, I told him that when he reached one hundred, I was going to write a feature about him for the front page. He laughed and said he thought that was a fine idea.
On August 26, 2013, more than four hundred family and friends turned out for Lee’s one hundredth birthday. The Sentinel ran a front-page story.
“I love you all,” Lee told the group that gathered to celebrate him.9 He said the greatest accomplishment of his life was his family. Born a year after World War I began, he had watched the Klan carnage of the 1960s with faith that things would get better. Yet never once did he think he would live to see a black president. When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, he, like so many others, expressed joyfully the exact words fire-scarred Frank Morris expressed in shock from his hospital bed forty-four years earlier: “I just can’t believe it!”
WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO JOSEPH EDWARDS?
JOSEPH EDWARDS is the only civil rights–era murder victim on the FBI’s list whose body has yet to be found. Because of this, his sister, Julia Dobbins of Bridge City, Louisiana, has an emptiness that other cold-case victims’ families don’t have. She can’t give her brother a proper family burial.
Another person haunted by Edwards’s disappearance was Marge Baroni, a white activist from Natchez whose family was ostracized by the white community in the 1960s. In her uncompleted master’s thesis, housed at the University of Mississippi Libraries Archives and Special Collections, Baroni wondered how many murdered bodies rest unseen beneath the earth’s surface or have been swallowed for eternity by the Mississippi River: “There’s a refrain that goes through my mind from time to time. I never really lose it . . . It’s ‘What ever happened to Joseph Edwards?’”
A major circumstance of the case was Edwards’s reputation for flirting with white women. It was also rumored he pimped black women to white men at the Shamrock Motel, where he worked as a porter. Another rumor involved the drowning of a four-year-old white boy in the Shamrock pool. It was speculated, but never proven, that Edwards was having a sexual relationship with or pimping the boy’s mother. What’s most important is that, true or not, the Klan and the cops believed Edwards was involved with the woman.
In 2010, Tori Stilwell, a nineteen-year-old journalism student at the University of North Carolina, worked as a cold-case intern for the Concordia Sentinel. Stilwell located Robin, the sister of the boy who drowned in the Shamrock pool. Robin had been at the motel the day her brother died. So financially desperate was the family in 1964 that her mother had to turn a trick prior to the funeral to earn enough money to buy shoes for her dead child to be burie
d in. Her surviving children were placed in foster care. Robin was never told where her brother was buried but yearned to know. Through Robin, we also learned that her mother was still living in another southern state.
Stilwell and I met Robin in Meadville, Mississippi, during the summer of 2010. We led Robin and her husband a few miles out of town to a rural Franklin County cemetery to show her the grave of her brother. Robin expressed her joy through tears. I told Robin that Joseph Edwards had a sister whose brother could not be buried until his body was found. In a way, Joseph Edwards had played a role in Robin finding her long-lost brother.
The second Shamrock incident, the one that triggered the attack on Edwards, involved the allegation that he forced a kiss on Iona Perry. The Justice Department cited seven suspects when it closed the case in 2013. They included SDG Klansmen Red Glover, Kenneth Norman Head, and Homer Thomas “Buck” Horton. Only one FBI informant had named the three as suspects: Ferriday mechanic and Klan leader E. D. Morace. An eyewitness had seen a white Oldsmobile, with a flashing red light on the dash and two whip antennae on the rear, pull Edwards’s Buick over on the Ferriday-Vidalia highway. Glover drove a white 1964 Oldsmobile, but it had no rear antennae. He did, however, as a member of the Vidalia Auxiliary Police Department, have access to a portable flashing red police light.
Suspect number four, Vidalia police chief Bud Spinks, drove the town’s patrol car, a rental, which was also a white 1964 Oldsmobile. But this car had a red beacon light mounted on the top, which would eliminate it as the car described by the witness. Although the witness thought he had seen a 1964 model, he was not interviewed by the bureau until three years after the incident, and he seemed uncertain.
In addition to Spinks, the Justice Department cited three other law enforcement suspects, including probation officer James Goss. Goss was the only suspect to have openly expressed a tangible motive to harm Edwards because of the alleged kiss. With his attorney present, Goss gave the bureau a signed statement in 1967 acknowledging he was furious with Edwards over the matter and initially wanted to attack him with his fists. He claimed repeatedly, however, that he did not kill Edwards.
I located Goss’s daughter, Kay, in October 2009, four months after her father’s death. I later met her in Ruston, Louisiana, and we drove a short distance north to the Vienna Cemetery to see her father’s fresh grave. She said her father had often claimed “those bastards”—deputies Frank DeLaughter and Bill Ogden, also suspects in Edwards’s disappearance—had tried to pin the murder on him.
In 1967, James Goss pointed out to agents that Ferriday jailer and police officer Junior Harp, a close friend of DeLaughter’s, also drove a late-model white Oldsmobile. In fact, Goss said he always suspected Harp had a hand in Edwards’s disappearance, although he offered no specific reason. Harp had taken DeLaughter’s job as Ferriday jailer when DeLaughter became a patrolman for the town, and the two were involved with deputies in the 1962 beating of two black men at the courthouse.
FBI records show that when Sheriff Noah Cross hired Harp in March 1965, Harp sold his personal car—a white 1962 Oldsmobile—to the sheriff’s office and drove it as his patrol car. The sheriff’s office was equipped with red flashing emergency lights for mounting on the dash. Even as a Ferriday jailer, Harp had easy access to those lights.
Two separate stories emerged about the night of the disappearance. One, that Edwards was pursued by the Oldsmobile from Vidalia to Ferriday, and two, that Ogden pursued Edwards from Ferriday to Vidalia. Both chases ended at the same place: the bowling alley.
On the night he vanished, Edwards told a witness he had a date with a white woman at the Shamrock at 11 p.m. This date was likely a setup. Once he left the motel after midnight, a plan was put into motion. The white car in pursuit from Vidalia and Ogden’s patrol car coming from Ferriday converged at the bowling alley. Ogden told a witness that Edwards jumped out of his car and ran up the levee, while DeLaughter chased Edwards on foot. Ogden took an entrance road just east of the bowling alley and drove up atop the levee.
This could have happened seconds before or after the witness drove by the white Olds parked in front of Edwards’s Buick. The witness said he passed the two cars but that seconds later the Olds, occupied by the four or five men he saw at the scene, passed him and raced out of sight. A short distance from the bowling alley on the north—or right side—of the Ferriday-Vidalia highway is Tuminello Road, which connects with Fisherman Drive, which intersects with the levee road at the mouth of Lake Concordia, a mile distant from Ogden’s location on the other end. If Edwards was running on the levee, the maneuvers by the two cars would have boxed him in. Ogden claimed Edwards got away. But did he?
On August 7, 2009, I received an e-mail from a woman in Texas. “I think I may know some information that may be useful to you,” she wrote. I called her. The woman had recently read the Concordia Sentinel’s account of Ogden’s story about his pursuit of Edwards. She had previously worked at a nursing home in Ferriday where Ogden resided until his death in 2004. The woman said Ogden, like other patients, suffered from dementia and hallucinations. She described an apparition that had long haunted Ogden. Attendants rushed to his room on many occasions as he cried for help. He would point to the corner of the room: “Don’t you see that little nigger boy? He’s got blood on him. He’s after me. I ran over him with my car.”10
Naturally, the story jolted me. I immediately recalled a 1967 FBI document in which SDG Klansman Jack Seale, by then an informant, recalled Louisiana Klansmen discussing a story that Edwards was taken to the levee “possibly to whip him, and they over did it.” Seale said he heard the perpetrators “rolled him [Edwards] down the levee, thinking he was dead or buried him in the levee.” Had Ogden hit Edwards with the patrol car and sent him rolling down the levee?
For years, I couldn’t advance the story. But by 2013, I had learned that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Farm Service Agency kept on file aerial photographs relating to its various farm programs. The thought that a photograph would have been taken in July 1964 of Edwards’s car parked by the bowling alley intrigued me. The possibility was slim, but it wouldn’t be my first dead end. I was disappointed to find that there were no July 1964 photos available but excited that aerial shots had been compiled on October 7, 1964. I spent a couple of hours sifting through large (two feet, two inches square) pictures stacked in no specific order until I came across an aerial photo of the bowling alley. Two FSA workers were in the room, and one eyed the photo with me. “Looks like they’re building up the berm over here,” he said, pointing to the mouth of Lake Concordia in the top center of the photo, where on the west side of the levee tons of dirt were being added to build up the levee berm, part of a larger project. Just to the north on the east side of the levee was a huge excavation pit with big equipment loading and hauling dirt to the berm. I thought about two things: first, that three weeks before Edwards went missing the White Knights in Neshoba County, Mississippi, had shot the three civil rights workers and buried their bodies in an earthen dam; and second, what Seale had claimed the Louisiana Klansmen had said of Edwards: “Buried him in the levee.”
FBI agent John Pfeifer, whose investigations sent DeLaughter and Cross to jail for racketeering in the 1970s, believed that if Ogden had run over Edwards, the deputies would not have taken the injured man to the hospital. They would have finished him off and disposed of the body as quickly as possible before daylight. Quick disposal by water seems unlikely because of the darkness.11
At this writing, new information is being investigated on the possible location of Edwards’s body. Discovering his body would enable his sister to give him a proper burial, and the remains might also offer forensic details about his death. Many questions remain. Did the killers leave behind a piece of evidence at the burial site? During a 1965 SDG wrecking crew project in Natchez—the vandalism of a black man’s car in search of weapons—a Klansman left his initialed cigarette lighter at the crime scene but retrieved it in the nick
of time. Perhaps somebody made a similar mistake during the Edwards killing.
WHO KILLED FRANK MORRIS?
FOR YEARS I have studied a photograph of Frank Morris and his employees standing in front of his shoe shop. Morris appears confident, his arms folded over his apron and his visor pulled down on his forehead just above his eyebrows. I wondered and wondered: Who would want this man dead?
In 1964, the FBI probe pointed at Frank DeLaughter and other police officers, but there was no evidence to support the suspicions. In 1967, E. L. McDaniel, DeLaughter’s friend and fellow Klansman, pointed the FBI in the direction of four SDG Klansmen. These men were reportedly upset with Morris for allegedly flirting with white women and for permitting interracial sexual liaisons between white women and black men in the back of his shoe shop. For years, I asked people about those allegations, but never once did I find anyone who confirmed them. In 2011, an eighty-three-year-old white woman who didn’t identify herself called to tell me she had read many of the stories in the Concordia Sentinel about Klan allegations against Morris.
“I was one of the women that carried my shoes, my husband’s shoes, and those of our boys to Frank Morris’s shoe shop,” she said. “I went there often. I never went inside. I drove in front of the shop and he brought candy for my boys and took my order. He was a nice, respectful man. He never flirted with me, and I wasn’t a bad-looking woman. He never flirted with the other women I knew.”12
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