In 1967, O. C. “Coonie” Poissot told the bureau he was with DeLaughter the night before the arson and that the deputy was furious with Morris over a confrontation about shoes. DeLaughter indicated that he was going to teach Morris a lesson for being uppity to a white man. The argument came after Morris told DeLaughter he would have to pay in advance for repairs in the future. E. D. Morace told the same basic story in 1967 but specified that the two had argued over cowboy boots.
Poissot was identified by the FBI as an ex-convict and hoodlum, addicted to speed and a Klansman capable of violent acts. Poissot had a tattoo of a star on one ear lobe and a half moon on the other. He told June Latiolais of Louisiana that these were Klan symbols. Latiolais told me that she and her husband had known Poissot for years and that he despised blacks. Two of Poissot’s daughters (by different mothers) described him as a man capable of great evil. One daughter, Jonene, grew to love him before his death in 1992, while the other, Shawnee, described her father as evil until his death. She also said he carried a silver dollar and once bragged about “killing a black man for the Klan.” These witnesses contacted me in 2010, and their stories inflamed my interest in Poissot because, by his own admission, he was the last person known to be with DeLaughter before the arson.
In June 2010, I called Bill Frasier, who had once been a deputy in Concordia Parish. Frasier was on a long list of current and former cops I wanted to ask about the Morris murder. In 1981, he had killed a black man he was transporting to the parish jail. Frasier claimed that en route the handcuffed suspect, arrested on a forgery warrant, pulled a knife and stabbed Frasier twice while he was driving. A struggle ensued, and Frasier said that in self-defense he drew his revolver and killed the suspect, shooting him six times. A Ferriday surgeon testified during a civil suit filed by the dead man’s widow that one of the knife wounds was six to eight inches deep. A grand jury, after a ten-day session, cleared Frasier. In a civil trial, the jury ruled that the suspect was unlawfully arrested but that Frasier used necessary force in self-defense and that the suspect unlawfully assaulted him.
I asked Frasier if he knew anything about the Frank Morris murder. “As a matter of fact, I do,” he said. Frasier said his ex-brother-in-law, Arthur Leonard Spencer of Rayville, Louisiana, had told him in the late 1960s that he had gone to Ferriday with another Klansman to burn down a shoe shop and was surprised when a black man came to the front. Spencer indicated that no one was supposed to be at the shop. Frasier said that Spencer’s partner in crime was Coonie Poissot.
Brenda Rhodes, Frasier’s sister and Spencer’s ex-wife, told me she had known Poissot for years, having first met him in the 1960s at her mother’s restaurant in a truck stop at Tallulah. Poissot, a trucker, was a customer. She had lost contact with him by the time she met and married Spencer. The two divorced, and the next time she saw Poissot was in Minden, Louisiana, in the early 1970s. After learning she had been married to Spencer, Poissot told her about the arson. Spencer’s son, William “Boo” Spencer, said he had heard his father talk about the shoe shop fire all of his life.
In June 2010, I went unannounced to see Spencer. With me were filmmaker David Paperny of Canada and cameraman Dan McKinney, both part of the Center for Investigative Reporting Civil Rights Cold Case Project. Also in our van was Tori Stilwell, the Concordia Sentinel’s intern. As we headed to Spencer’s, my cell phone rang. It was Rosa Williams, Morris’s granddaughter.
“I just had an urge to call you,” she said, “and let you know I’m praying for you.” I didn’t tell her until later where we were going.
As we drove to the end of a long lane through a cornfield to Spencer’s house in rural Richland Parish, his wife with her children pulled out of the driveway and stopped as our two vehicles came abreast. I had already decided I was going to begin a conversation with Spencer by asking him if he knew Coonie Poissot. When Poissot’s daughters called me, they said they were trying to fill in gaps in what they knew about his life and would be interested in contacting anyone who knew him. Mrs. Spencer, on her way to Wednesday night prayer meeting, said her husband would not be home for another hour, but she would call to let him know he had visitors. She wondered, “What do you want to talk to him about?” I said I wanted to talk to him about Coonie Poissot. She mouthed the word “Coonie” and said out loud she didn’t know him.
After an hour, we came back. I knocked on the door, and Spencer came out wearing blue jeans and buttoning a denim long-sleeved shirt. He worked for a farm cooperative and drove trucks, tractors, and combines during the farming season. He was a big man, with dyed black hair. He sat on the porch swing, and I sat alone on the steps. I asked if Paperny and McKinney could film, he agreed, and a few minutes later they approached with their cameras.
He was clearly nervous but at the outset was adamant: “I don’t know that Coonie fellow. A name like that I’d remember.” His statement seemed incredible. Two of Spencer’s children by Brenda Rhodes said Poissot was like a grandfather to them. When I told Spencer that Poissot was dead, he seemed to relax, but I could tell his mind was churning. He acknowledged having been in the Rayville Klan and that the Klan had wrecking crews.
“We might do a job for Ferriday and Ferriday do a job for us,” Spencer said, but he insisted he had never heard of Frank Morris. He said he had attended ten to twelve Klan meetings and that while his uncle was a leader in the group, his father was passionately opposed to the Klan. Spencer said he was just a kid in December 1964, although he was one month shy of twenty-five. He grew increasingly suspicious and nervous. I attempted to give him my business card, and he read it but he wouldn’t touch it. “For all I know you could be the FBI,” he said. (Two days later, I wrote him a letter assuring him again that I wasn’t with the FBI.)
“I’ve been around,” he said. “I’m being straight up with you. I know it’s more to this than what you’re telling me. I’m not stupid.”
When we departed, I reached out to shake Spencer’s hand. He squeezed my hand so hard that I almost asked him to ease up. I believe he was warning me to be careful. The last thing he said to me before we left was, “That Coonie fellow. You say he’s dead?”
A couple of days later, Spencer visited his son, “Boo,” who had recently been released from prison. As Boo’s wife, Edith, fried the two men pork chops for a late breakfast, Spencer joined Boo at the kitchen table and announced that the FBI (referring to me and my associates) had paid him a visit a couple of days earlier.
“Son, they got me,” Spencer repeated. “They got me on that Frank Marcey [sic] fire. I’m the only one left.”
When Boo and Edith Spencer told me this story, I couldn’t figure out why they were using the last name of “Marcey.” Then Boo told me, “That’s the only name I ever heard. I figured when you first asked me about Frank Morris that you were talking about Frank Marcey.”
There was something familiar about that name. Later, I studied one of the composition notebooks I have been filling since 2007. In one, I found a 2010 interview with the late Morris White, who for years was the Concordia Parish director of homeland security. White’s father had been a businessman in Ferriday and knew Frank Morris well. In the interview, White had told me his father and other older businessmen always called Frank Morris by the nickname “Marcey.”
Boo Spencer could not have made that up. I put together a scenario that made sense to me: DeLaughter, with Poissot in his patrol car the night before the arson, told him he wanted Morris’s shop torched to teach the shoe repairman a lesson. Poissot was well connected with the Klans in Rayville and Tallulah and had told the FBI that he had joined SDG Klansmen for various wrecking crew projects in 1965, including one in Tallulah to burn down black activist Moses Williams’s tire shop. Like Morris, Williams was a black businessman with an integrated clientele. Poissot said Morace and Red Glover were part of that wrecking crew, but at the last minute the fire attempt was aborted. Actually, the shop was destroyed by fire, and once again, Poissot placed himself at the scene of a
crime. Bill Frasier and Brenda Rhodes also said that Poissot and Spencer had confided they committed the Tallulah arson. Moses Williams told me in 2010 that a five-gallon gas can had been found on the outside rear of his tire shop following the 1965 fire, just as in Ferriday a five-gallon gas can was found in the shoe shop rubble in 1964.
During the weeks ahead, I worked on the story. By the fall, I was ready to run with it. Bill Frasier said that he had told the FBI about Spencer in the summer of 2009, a year before he told me. If time was the new enemy, I wondered, what was the bureau waiting on? Initially, I had shared information with agents during the early months of the Sentinel’s probe. But I noticed that when I asked for information, there was always a reason the request could not be granted. Hank Klibanoff, CIR’s cold-case managing editor, reminded me firmly one day that it wasn’t my job to feed the results of my work to the bureau and that my readers were my priority.
Even U.S. secretary of labor Thomas Perez, who in 2011 was the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told me in an interview that when his department conducted investigations, “oftentimes, information flow is a one-way street. We ask people for information, we ask people to do things and we are not in a position to explain why we ask certain things. I certainly appreciate the fact that can be frustrating from the perspective of people like yourself and other interested parties, but we are concerned about pursuing the case and that is really the sole motivator for us as we have an active investigation and I can’t get any more specific.”13
THE TV NEWS PROGRAM 60 Minutes showed an interest in jointly working on the Spencer story. The Sentinel, the CIR Cold Case managing team, and 60 Minutes held several phone conferences to discuss the case. Associate producer Sumi Aggarwal of the news program came to Ferriday and interviewed Boo Spencer, Brenda Rhodes, and Bill Frasier. Beginning with associate producer Sam Hornblower in 2007, 60 Minutes had investigated the Morris murder on and off and provided me with several hundred pages of FBI documents.
In October, a 60 Minutes producer with our blessings told the FBI that we knew about Spencer. Cynthia Deitle, the head of the FBI’s cold-case unit, over a series of phone calls and e-mails, asked the Sentinel to hold the story indefinitely, maintaining that it would jeopardize the case. By then, 60 Minutes had decided it would instead pursue its investigation into the 1964 murder of Louis Allen in Liberty, Mississippi, seventy miles east of Ferriday.
One of the Sentinel family owners, Sam Hanna Jr., told Deitle that the newspaper intended to run the Spencer story unless the FBI provided a specific reason why publicizing the story would jeopardize the case. Deitle said she couldn’t be specific. When Hanna said the story would run, he got a call from Justice Department lawyer Roy Austin, who asked that we hold the story until the end of December to give the FBI time to complete some interviews. For almost a year and a half, the bureau had known about Spencer but had not talked to him, nor did they know I had.
The Spencer story ran on January 11, 2011. It was a nerve-racking day. Ridgen followed me with his camera rolling, and Paperny and McKinney went to Rayville and filmed a KNOE-TV (CBS affiliate in Monroe) reporter going to Spencer’s workplace to interview him. Joe Shapiro with National Public Radio was at the Sentinel office covering the story. Shapiro and I would later work together on the 1965 killing of Fayette, Mississippi, shoeshine man Johnny Queen. Together we would interview more than fifty local witnesses and would be shocked to learn that the FBI had interviewed fewer than five.
BBC Radio was in town for the Morris story. The Associated Press, the New York Times, CNN, and other media outlets gave coverage. In the days ahead, Jim Rainey of the Los Angeles Times, Mallary Tenore of Poynter, and many others would write lengthy stories on the case.
A month after the story ran, the Concordia Parish grand jury convened to investigate the Morris and Joseph Edwards cases. A $10,000 reward had been offered by the FBI for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Morris’s killers. To my knowledge, this was the largest reward offered in any cold case following the FBI’s 2007 announcement of its initiative. It was also the only case since that time that resulted in a grand jury. Concordia Parish district attorney Brad Burget named Justice Department lawyer Patricia Sumner as an assistant district attorney so she could oversee a state grand jury. Burget named one of his assistants, David Opperman, to help with the case, but the Justice Department didn’t share much with the DA’s office.
On the day the grand jury convened, February 8, 2011, E. L. McDaniel died. He had been a key informant in the Morris case. (I had called McDaniel, who had suffered a stroke, more than once in the preceding years. He said he couldn’t remember his Klan days.) Father August Thompson called to say he had been subpoenaed to testify. A brother of an SDG Klansman called to ask me if the matter concerned the Frank Morris case. I told him it did. The calls kept coming, even from grand jurors.
A total of three separate grand jury panels—each serving an average of six months—listened to testimony for more than a year, but nothing happened. In May 2013, Leonard Spencer died at the age of seventy-three. I believe the Justice Department did Concordia Parish a disservice by not having a grand jury summary report published even if the jurors drew no conclusions.
Janis McDonald and Paula Johnson of the Syracuse University College of Law Cold Case Justice Initiative said Congress should hold oversight hearings to investigate why the Justice Department had failed to fully implement the mandates of the Emmett Till Act.
“There is no excuse for the delay by the Justice Department in bringing Spencer before a jury of his peers,” they told the Sentinel in a statement. “They have known for four years about evidence brought forward of his admissions to family members that he participated in the arson and cruel death of Mr. Morris. A jury should be the ones to decide on the credibility of the evidence. Now he is dead. This sluggish type of investigation by federal law enforcement is emblematic of their approach to many of the cases of unsolved civil rights killings.”14
In its letter of closure on the Morris case, the Justice Department mentioned that two witnesses had failed a polygraph test. Rhodes and Frasier called me in the fall of 2011 to tell me they had voluntarily taken polygraphs and were told they had failed. That the Justice Department mentioned two witnesses failed a polygraph in its closure letter infuriated me. The informants it had relied on from 1964 to 1967 were not given polygraphs, and few would have passed. In fact, the bureau had caught one of its top informants, E. D. Morace, in a lie. A Natchez man, beaten by the SDG in 1966 for speaking out against the Klan, pointed to a photograph of Morace as one of the men who had beaten him. Morace told the bureau it was mistaken identity.
In 2013, Dan Berry and Campbell Robertson of the New York Times came to Ferriday. They co-wrote with Robbie Brown the paper’s lead front-page story on March 13: “When Cold Cases Stay Cold.” LSU’s Jay Shelledy provided the reporters with background and a photograph of Wharlest Jackson’s bombed-out pickup.
“This part of the South is haunted by unanswered questions,” the reporters wrote. “F.B.I. agents soon swarmed the area, infiltrating the Silver Dollar Group and forcing an end to its campaign of terror, though without any arrests. The children of Mr. Jackson do not expect the cold-case initiative to change the cold absence of resolution and have come to see the government’s initiative as worse than nothing.”
SILVER DOLLAR GROUP leader Red Glover died of a brain tumor in 1984 at the age of sixty-two. In August 2009, his stepson James Watts asked me during an interview why Glover hadn’t been arrested if he had killed Wharlest Jackson in 1967. I couldn’t answer the question. Most investigators familiar with the Jackson case believe Glover acted alone in the murder. I share that opinion.
Glover may have given silver dollars to fifty-two men, but only fifteen comprised his inner core and were murder suspects. These SDG Klansmen linked to murders included seven mill workers, two farmers, two deputies, two mechanics, two truck drivers, and one
self-employed sanitation worker. Many served in the military, some in World War II. I link the SDG to eight murders. Their methods included arson (Frank Morris), a beating (Earl Hodges), a bombing (Wharlest Jackson), two shootings (Clifton Walker and Ben Chester White), and two drownings (Henry Dee and Charles Moore) that followed beatings. White, Dee, and Moore were picked up by their killers during daylight hours. White was killed at dusk; Walker, Dee, and Moore after dark. Joseph Edwards was stopped by the flashing light of a police car in the middle of the night. He did one thing the others couldn’t—he ran in an attempt to escape. Where he ended up is still a mystery.
Much is written about Sam Bowers and the White Knights because they killed men who became civil rights martyrs. Everybody knows what Bowers did. He and other White Knights got caught and went to jail. Not the SDG. These devils walked away from their crimes free men, with the exception of James Ford Seale, who was convicted after living a full life and died four years after imprisonment.
Jerry Beatty of Ferriday, whose father operated the Gulf station at the main intersection in town where deputies hung out in the 1960s, said that when he was a child DeLaughter and Ogden, over coffee with Beatty’s father, laughed about the Morris arson. Jerry Beatty said he heard the two confess their involvement.15
There was once a time when Frank DeLaughter would enter a bar in Concordia Parish and patrons would part like the Red Sea, but he died impoverished at the age of sixty-nine in 1996. He had often expressed fear of meeting his Maker, haunted by the things he had done. A Baptist preacher baptized him a few years before his death. Ex-cops have told me that DeLaughter slept with the windows of his house covered to keep ghosts from peeping in. It was said that even when he blocked his ears with his hands, he could still hear his victims scream.16
Ogden died in a nursing home in Ferriday in 2004 at age ninety. One preacher said he tried for years to bring Ogden into the light of God but feared the elderly former deputy was beyond redemption.17
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