Killinger remained focused, paid little attention to external commentary, and would not let political pressure or the rumor mill affect his probe. “That doesn’t dictate the way the FBI operates,” he explained in 2014.29 Yet there were important developments unfolding, which meant there was no denying the world would soon know more about the murder of Emmett Till. Information that leaked out indicated that Killinger and his team were making headway. For example, they had recently located old Department of Agriculture aerial photographs that honed in on the sites relevant to the case. This allowed investigators to see the land of the Till murder as it looked in 1955.30 To help further reconstruct the layout of the plantation in Drew, Mississippi, where Till had been beaten and presumably killed, Killinger took Willie Reed to the scene in April 2005. Reed identified the shed, which was still standing, and pointed out the former location of his grandfather’s home and the sharecrop house of Mandy Bradley. On May 18, the FBI conducted a thorough search of the shed, which included the laborious job of sifting through the dirt floor for fifty-year-old evidence and spraying luminol in an effort to locate traces of blood spatter. The passage of time alone had diminished the likelihood of finding anything incriminating, but chances were even slimmer because a few years earlier the current owner, local dentist Jeff Andrews, removed and discarded the original floorboards, where bloodstains would at one time have been plentiful. Investigators removed five items that appeared at first glance to be bone fragments, but tests concluded that three of them were animal bones while two were rocks.31
Discussions about exhuming Emmett Till’s body had been uncomfortable for the Till family, and they had been forced to deal with the issue at some level for over a year before the investigation even began. Then, in October 2004, Killinger traveled to Argo and met with Wheeler Parker, Crosby Smith Jr., and Simeon Wright, to prepare them for the fact that the body would need to be exhumed and autopsied. In response, Parker explained to the press that the family would support an exhumation if mandated by federal authorities, but they would not back a voluntary one. Because the defense in the 1955 murder trial had argued so vehemently that the body claimed and buried by Mamie Bradley could not have been that of her son, laying that theory to rest and determining the cause of death were essential to a complete investigation. At this point, Alvin Sykes was still hoping that the federal authorities would utilize Dr. Mehmet Yaşar İşcan, of Istanbul, Turkey, for the job, but they apparently never looked further into Sykes’s recommendation and had the Cook County coroner in mind and saw him as sufficient.32
On Wednesday, May 5, 2005, the news hit that Emmett Till’s body would be removed and examined. Sykes had been anticipating that day because of the answers he believed doing so would bring, and he summarized that nicely when speaking to a reporter. “The exhumation represents the first and last time for Emmett Till to speak for himself.” Many of those answers would come once investigators gathered DNA from the body and ran it against samples donated by living family members. Parker seemed more supportive once plans became official, realizing the procedure “would bring a lot of closure and that he [Emmett Till] would be positively identified. We need to get the whole thing closed.”33
Unfortunately, the views of Parker, Smith, and Wright were not representative of the entire family, however, and divisions soon arose and went public. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson even got in on the controversy and quickly arranged a news conference at his Rainbow/PUSH headquarters for Wednesday at noon, where he gathered family members opposed to the exhumation. His initial complaint was that the family had learned of the decision only through media reports, but he quickly began criticizing the entire process. “There is a feeling (among the family) that the FBI is grandstanding,” he said. However, Representative Bobby Rush, learning about the plans to exhume the body, immediately parted with Jackson and voiced his support for unearthing the murder victim. “The alternative to me is less desirable, and that is to forget about this case and seeking justice for Emmett Till. The alternative would be disrespectful of the wishes of Mamie-Till-Mobley.”34
Bertha Thomas, a cousin and president of the Emmett Till Foundation, stood beside Jackson and before the media and made it clear that she was adamantly opposed to disturbing the remains. “We are offended,” she said bluntly, citing religious concerns, but for her and those siding with her, an exhumation was also “a useless process at this stage. Why now?” Echoing Jackson, Thomas accused the FBI of simply “grandstanding” and called the entire undertaking “a waste of time.”35 With the media gathered around, Jackson upped his criticisms. “Is the FBI and the Department of Justice making a renewed commitment to racial justice and a national dialogue with civil rights organizations, or is it using Emmett Till as a trophy 50 years after a brutal act of terror?” Jackson even accused the FBI of “trying to prove a nut theory that this is not Emmett Till’s body. Rather than pursuing the terrorists, the FBI is searching for positive identification, which is the position that the Mississippi court took.” Bertha Thomas went so far as to suggest that the investigation be called off rather than exhume the body. “If I have to, I will fight this and I am more than prepared to fight . . . the FBI, the Department of Justice and anybody else that steps up to the plate.”36
Although Thomas maintained that her views were in line with most of the family, Simeon Wright insisted that his cousin was “speaking for herself.” Thomas’s stance was puzzling to Wright and undoubtedly to others. “Why would [the Emmett Till Foundation] want to keep Emmett’s memory alive at all if there’s something that might be done about the murder and it refuses to do it?” he asked. “That’s no different than the jury that let those two men go.” Thomas, however, countered that it was Wright who was in the minority. FBI spokeswoman Deborah Madden, weighing in from her office in Jackson, said that none of the relatives she had spoken with shared Thomas’s objections.37 Civil rights leader Al Sharpton also split with Jesse Jackson on this issue and threw his support behind the Justice Department. “I think that it is imperative that just as we fought for decades to track down the murderers of [other civil rights victims], that we track down the murderers of Emmett Till,” he said. “This cannot be done without completion of his death certificate and the exhumation of his remains.”38
A few weeks earlier in April, FBI director Robert S. Mueller appointed Jim Garrity to a new post in Washington, DC, and Garrity would vacate his position as Mississippi’s special agent in charge on Friday, June 3.39 He would not leave before weighing in on the hullabaloo surrounding Emmett Till’s exhumation, however, and his irritation over Jesse Jackson’s accusations led him to fire off a letter to the Chicago Tribune, which the paper published in part on May 22. Although the Tribune censored Garrity’s obvious references to Jackson, the Daily Southtown, published thirty miles south in Tinley Park, printed the letter in full. “The planned exhumation and medical examination of the body of Emmett Till has provoked controversy, misinformation and allegations of an ulterior motive on the part of the FBI that I cannot allow to go unaddressed,” he wrote. His response to his most vocal and prominent critic was sharp:
The men and women of the FBI are conducting a painstakingly thorough criminal investigation, not a historical exercise, and it is offensive to their professional reputation to hear the irresponsible statements of those who allege the FBI is grandstanding, posturing or viewing Emmett Till as a “trophy.” This investigation, as all FBI criminal investigations, is being conducted with the objective of identifying the facts and unwaveringly following them to their logical conclusion. The exhumation of a body is a delicate issue, and we are sensitive to the emotions that are naturally evoked as a result. However, it is the FBI’s absolute obligation to pursue justice wherever the facts may lead, even in the face of dissension. To do any less would be an abdication of our duty, and would doubtless result in accusations of a sloppy investigation or cover-up.
Indeed, the investigation would be stalled without an autopsy. The decision to exhume th
e remains, Garrity assured his readers, “was not reached lightly, or in ignorance of the potential consequences.” Scientific testing would uncover details related to the manner of Till’s death and would be used to verify or debunk statements by others, such as defense attorneys or Sheriff H. C. Strider, who all theorized at the time of the trial that the body was not Emmett Till’s. Physical evidence such as bullet fragments might also be available for recovery, and the exhumation would allow the vital step of proving identity through DNA testing. In concluding his letter, Garrity charged that “reckless allegations that the FBI is trying to prove a ‘nut theory’ that the body is not that of Till’s are ignorant and ill-informed at best and, at worst, dishonest.” He promised that throughout the entire process, “Emmett Till’s remains will be treated with the utmost dignity and respect. At the conclusion of the pathological examinations, his body will be made available to the family so they may pay their respects in whatever manner they deem appropriate prior to reinterment.”40
As the controversy continued, other developments in the case were well received by all, and perhaps gave assurance to skeptics like Jackson that the FBI was carrying out a serious investigation after all. Mississippi officials never retained the transcript of the murder trial in their files, and the only copy known to have existed had been given to Hugh Stephen Whitaker in the early 1960s by J. J. Breland, one of the defense attorneys for Milam and Bryant. Unfortunately, Whitaker’s copy perished in a basement flood in the 1970s. The likelihood that a copy still existed somewhere could not be dismissed, and for a few, finding it became an obsession. Off and on, Florida State University professor Davis Houck, who held a deep interest in the Till case, made inquiries about the transcript but did not give the matter serious thought until 2005, when one of his graduate students, Mark Mulligan, took on the task of locating a copy for a class project. Mulligan made calls, followed leads, and spoke regularly with a son of one of the Till trial jurors who also became curious about the document. However, Mulligan’s efforts turned up nothing. On February 21, the Memphis Commercial Appeal ran a story about Houck and the hunt for the elusive record. The article got the attention of Killinger, who called Houck at his office to learn of any progress.41
Killinger did not tell Houck whether FBI investigators had already found the document, but his office had indeed located and logged in a copy five months earlier on September 13, 2004. It would prove to be one of the most significant discoveries of the investigation. Early on, when Killinger sent inquiries out to various law enforcement officers and prosecutors in an effort to obtain information from their files, the only response he received informed him that a man named Lee McGarrh, who lived near Biloxi, Mississippi, owned a copy of the transcript. Killinger was skeptical but drove all the way to the Gulf Coast to talk to McGarrh, but McGarrh was not home. Killinger then assigned someone else to look into it.42
Killinger later questioned the investigator who was to follow up and assumed the lead came up empty. Killinger was surprised to learn that not only did McGarrh really own the transcript, but he agreed to loan it to investigators. In fact, it had already been safely logged as evidence and placed in the designated room at the Oxford office. McGarrh had inherited the document from his father, Lee McGarrh Sr., a Glendora, Mississippi, service station owner who died in 2002. The elder McGarrh had served as a character witness for J. W. Milam during the 1955 murder trial. The document, which Robert Garrity described as a “copy of a copy of a copy,” was barely legible and missing one page, but investigators were still able to decipher it all and verify its authenticity by comparing it to direct quotes that Whitaker cited in his master’s thesis. Two clerks devoted long and grueling hours over several weeks transcribing the document in its entirety, retaining the original line breaks and pagination. On May 18, 2005, the New York Times broke the story of the find. The transcript would benefit investigators by resurrecting the testimony of dead witnesses while comparing the recollections of those still living with what they had said fifty years earlier.43
By Wednesday, June 1, the Till family united, and Bertha Thomas and any others who had opposed exhuming Emmett’s body ceased their efforts to stop it. Even Jesse Jackson affirmed his support and said simply that he was happy that the family was “speaking with one voice.” FBI agents were at the Burr Oak Cemetery by six o’clock that morning and covered the gravesite with a large white tent. A few hours later, Ollie Gordon, Crosby Smith Jr., and Simeon and Annie Wright, representing the family, arrived and held a brief ceremony. Following their short service, they watched silently for the next three hours as a backhoe slowly dug down and uncovered the concrete vault containing Emmett Till’s casket. The process was done as quietly as possible, and the media were not allowed past the gates during the exhumation. That same day, Frank Bochte of the Chicago FBI office reiterated the Bureau’s motive. “The first and foremost thing we’re trying to do is to put to rest any theories that the body inside there is not Emmett Till. We would like to settle that issue once and for all.” At around noon, the dirt-caked vault was loaded onto a flatbed truck and taken to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.44
The casket was removed from the vault, then opened, and workers carefully set aside the tight-fitting glass panel that had been placed over the body a half century earlier in order to protect it from the touch of curious onlookers. Witnesses included Dale Killinger and District Attorney Joyce Chiles, who flew in from her home in Itta Bena, Mississippi. Those present were met with the smell of chemicals used to preserve the body a half century earlier. The witnesses who gathered at the coroner’s office expected to gaze upon skeletal remains; instead, they were surprised to see a body that was in near pristine condition. Even the clothing was still intact. In addition to an obviously thorough job at embalming the body, preservation was no doubt aided by the glass top, which further protected the remains from outside elements. The vault had also sheltered the casket from the cemetery’s large water table. A close examination of both the glass and casket lid revealed a large collection of fingerprints left behind by many of the thousands of mourners who had filed past the body in September 1955. They looked as fresh as they did five decades earlier.45
The autopsy, conducted by Chief Medical Examiner Edmund R. Donoghue, began the morning of June 2 and was completed that afternoon. When the body was removed from the casket, examiners discovered newspaper underneath the head, along with a scattering of charcoal and straw that had apparently been placed inside to reduce the smell of the waterlogged corpse.46 Before the physical examination took place, the body was taken to the John H. Stronger Jr. Hospital of Cook County, where technicians performed a CT scan. This procedure revealed the presence of metallic fragments inside the cranium, a clear indication that the victim had been shot. The massive head wounds described by Mississippi law enforcement officers and Mamie Bradley back in 1955 were also documented, but the scan revealed that both wrists and the distal left femur had been fractured, facts never discovered before.47
Tests performed on the teeth of the victim were necessary to determine age and identity. Dental development confirmed that the deceased was around fourteen years old at the time of death. Photographs of Emmett Till taken during Christmas 1954 compared to pictures taken of the body exhumed from Burr Oak Cemetery revealed a small but identical gap in the teeth. “The dental examination concluded that based on a reasonable degree of dental certainty, the dental age, and proximal angle comparisons, are consistent with that of Emmett Louis Till,” noted Killinger’s summary of the tests. Despite Mamie Bradley’s many descriptions of the body as having had most of its teeth knocked out, the autopsy revealed that only one tooth was missing. It also dispelled rumors long afloat that the victim had been castrated. This myth received greater publicity from the reminiscences of John Crawford in Untold Story. Crawford said that Mose Wright made the castration claim after Wright identified Emmett Till at the river. Examiners photographed the body’s genitals to document that they were still inta
ct.48
DNA testing was done by taking a piece of muscle tissue from the body and a blood sample and two buccal swabs from Simeon Wright. Results showed that the mtDNA sequence obtained from both was the same. The mtDNA database, which represented 1,148 African Americans, showed only two instances of this same sequence. In addition to dental testing, an examination of bone development in the growth centers (or epiphyses) indicated that the deceased died at around fourteen years.49
Closer examination of the metal fragments found in the cranium showed them to be consistent with spent number 7 or 8 lead shot pellets. The investigation learned that the Remington Arms Company made both the M12 and M15 .45 caliber pistols in the years preceding Emmett Till’s death. They were manufactured for the army and both contained number 7 lead shot. A relative of J. W. Milam’s confirmed for the FBI that not only did Milam own such a firearm, he knew how to use it. “I can tell ya how good he was with that old pistol. I seen him shoot bumble bees out of the air with it.” On March 11, 2004, two months before the investigation began, Keith Beauchamp received an email from a woman who said she had “heard a rumor,” which she had not substantiated, “that the gun used by the man who killed Emmett was given to a man in Tallahatchie County,” who was then told to “do something with this!!” She said the man’s widow still possessed it and that it was a Colt .45 army edition and was kept in a leather holster. She named the woman who allegedly owned the gun and told Beauchamp that she lived in Tippo, Mississippi.50
Killinger followed up on that lead, which proved to be legitimate. On November 1, 2004, the woman in Tippo gave Killinger an Ithaca model .45 believed to have been owned by Milam. The serial number revealed that it had been manufactured in 1945. Milam served in the armed forces from 1941 until 1946. Killinger sent the gun to the FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, where firearms experts dismantled and examined it. However, they found no latent fingerprints that matched Milam’s or anyone else’s involved in the case. Still, this weapon was certainly the gun in question.51
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