After all tests were done and the results were in, Dr. Donoghue concluded that the body was that of Emmett Till and that Till was a victim of homicide, having died from a gunshot wound to the head. Before the exhumation started, a judge at the Cook County Circuit Court signed a court order stipulating that the body be returned to the family by June 6. On June 4, just three days after the process began, Emmett Till was reburied in a new casket during a private ceremony attended only by family members. Just days later, revelations about the discovery of bullet fragments hit the news. Press reports that DNA tests confirmed the body to be that of Emmett Till followed in August.52
These very public developments in the investigation satisfied the media, which allowed details that the FBI learned from witnesses to remain largely under wraps. Although Carolyn Donham had refused all requests for interviews about the Till case in the years after the murder, she agreed to speak with Killinger. Family members, with Donham’s permission, contacted Joyce Chiles and Hallie Gail Bridges at the district attorney’s office, who in turn set up an appointment for Donham at the federal office in Greenville. Killinger interviewed Donham for several hours, during which Donham became emotional. Donham was happy that investigators treated her kindly, and she said, with some relief, “I’m glad this is over with.”53
Carolyn Donham had, in fact, appeared relieved and anxious to talk. John Hailman, who stayed in direct contact with Killinger throughout the investigation, said that Donham genuinely appeared as though “the case was a dark cloud that had hung over her all through her life” and that this was a chance to lift a burden she had been carrying for half a century. Killinger and Donham spoke over the phone several times and met in person on at least a few occasions over the course of his investigation. During their in-person interviews, Killinger was wearing a wire, unbeknownst to Donham.54 She answered questions about the store incident and of the events surrounding the weekend of Emmett Till’s kidnapping.
As to her encounter with Emmett Till at the Bryant grocery on August 24, 1955, Donham stuck to her courtroom testimony that Till grabbed her. During the trial she said that Juanita Milam was in the apartment at the back of the store babysitting the four boys belonging to the Milams and Bryants. Donham told Killinger that when her customer began to act inappropriately, “I . . . screamed for [her] and screamed for [her] . . . as soon as he touched me I started screaming for [her].” The customer gave her the impression that he would be back. She said, as she had in 1955, that she went to get a gun out of the car Juanita was driving, but in her interview with Killinger, she clarified that she first looked for the weapon under the counter where it was normally kept.
Donham maintained that she was not the one who told Roy about the incident. “I didn’t say anything and one of the reasons I, I didn’t say, ever say anything more about it, was because I was afraid that, what I was worried about was he’s gonna go find and beat him up. . . . I told [Juanita] what had happened, [and] I asked her not to tell J. W., because I didn’t intend to tell Roy, because I was afraid of what they would do.” When Roy came back to town, she never brought up the subject, but Roy apparently found out from someone. “He waited a long time and he asked me didn’t I have something I wanted to tell him and I told him no.” Only after Roy became visibly angry did she tell her husband that a black customer grabbed her hand and held her by the waist.
Roy was so outraged over these revelations that when another black youth came into the store that night, Roy began questioning him. Donham recalled that incident. “I don’t know, Roy said something to ’em, and I remember telling him to leave him alone that, you know, that wasn’t him.”
Later that same night, J. W. came around to the back of the store to the apartment door, picked up Roy, and left. “I was there all night by myself. Alone. With two boys,” said Donham to Killinger. After the men left and the two boys fell asleep, she became frightened. “I was just scared to death, sittin’ there, didn’t know what, and I think that was the first time I’d ever been alone at night there.”55
Before daylight, Donham recalled, she heard what sounded like a black person knocking at her door. She refused to answer, out of fear. Later that same morning Roy, Milam, and a man she called “Kimbrell,” or Elmer Kimbell, returned to the apartment. “I think they came back and I think that Kimbrell man was, was with, with ’em.” They took Emmett Till for Carolyn to identify. “I think it happened pretty much like he, like they said. I think they probably asked me who, if that was him.” Carolyn told them “no that’s not him.” Roy then told her that “he was gonna take him back.”56
Killinger does not say that he asked Donham if she accompanied the men to Wright’s home, but her insistence that they brought Till to her at the store to identify him would indicate that she claimed or implied that she stayed home. However, Killinger was left with the clear impression that Donham’s denial was not true.57
Donham told Killinger that after daylight she went down the road and used a phone to call her brother-in-law, Melvin Campbell, to learn Roy’s whereabouts. Campbell told her that Roy had been out all night playing poker but would return home later. After Roy was arrested that afternoon, Carolyn began staying with members of the Bryant family. While she was visiting at a store operated by Buddy Milam, one of her husband’s half-siblings, Roy’s twin brother, Raymond, came in. “I think it was the day the body was found, and I think he told me that and uh, I don’t know what I said to him, that Roy, Roy said he didn’t do anything to him or something and anyway, Raymond said Roy didn’t. It was Melvin.” When Carolyn asked why they arrested Roy if he did not kill the boy, Raymond told her that “I was not to tell anybody it was Melvin.”58
Carolyn Donham’s testimony implicating others who either knew about the murder, helped cover it up, or, with the Melvin Campbell allegation, actually fired the shot was a tremendous breakthrough considering she never told her story to anyone for the record before. Parts of her account were problematic, however, and notable discrepancies soon came to light. The first concerns Juanita Milam’s alleged presence at the apartment the night Emmett Till went into the store. When Killinger interviewed Juanita, she denied having been there that night. “I thought I was in Greenville,” she told him. She also believed that she “would not have been babysittin’ for her.” In fact, Juanita believed that Carolyn fabricated the entire story about Emmett Till accosting her. “The only way I can figure it is that she did not want to take care of the store. She thought this wild story would make Roy take care of the store instead of leavin’ her with the kids and the store.” Juanita may be confusing the Wednesday night incident with the kidnapping and murder that occurred on the following weekend. On September 2, 1955, she told defense attorneys Sidney Carlton and Harvey Henderson that “I went to Greenville about 1:30 P.M. on Saturday and got back home about 12 midnight and went to bed.”59
A second contradiction to Carolyn Donham’s story to Killinger would come from Donham herself. While the investigation was still in progress, Donham and her daughter-in-law, Marsha Bryant, began working together on Donham’s memoir. Perhaps prompted by the investigation, Donham reached the point where she wanted to tell her side of the story. Around this same time, she reached out to the historian Timothy B. Tyson and told it all to him. She said that she made up the tale about Emmett Till accosting her and did so at the urging of Bryant family members and defense attorneys.60 Indeed, defense notes written up by Sidney Carlton during an interview with Carolyn on September 2, 1955, quoted earlier, mention only that Till touched her hand, asked for a date, said good-bye, and whistled at her.61 The fabrications that he did anything else likely took days to concoct, but were clearly in place by Sunday, September 18, when Carlton began telling reporters that Emmett Till “mauled [Carolyn] and attempted a physical attack while making indecent proposals.”62
An unrelated yet nationally followed case should have caused Carolyn Donham some consternation. On January 6, 2005, seventy-nine-year-old Edgar Ray Killen was arrested
on three counts of murder for the June 1964 Freedom Summer slayings of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Killen had actually been charged, along with seventeen others, on federal civil rights violations in 1967 in the deaths of the three men. Although seven of them were convicted at the time, a hung jury in Killen’s case resulted in his release.
After Killen was charged with murder in January 2005, his trial began five months later, on June 13. On June 21, forty-one years to the day of the killings, he was convicted of manslaughter and two days later was given a twenty-year sentence for each count, for a total of sixty years. He would be eligible for parole after twenty, but the mandatory time virtually guaranteed that he would die behind bars, given his age.63 The Killen conviction, like that of Byron De La Beckwith eleven years earlier for the murder of Medgar Evers, was a reminder that revisiting cold cases was beginning to pay off.
Although Carolyn Donham had spoken to Dale Killinger willingly during his investigation, and to family members did not appear worried, she was in all probability feeling some angst about being a target of an FBI probe and had every reason to fear the worst.64 On August 7, 2005, two months after the Killen conviction, attorney Richard Barrett, a New Yorker who had moved to Mississippi, visited Donham’s son, Frank Bryant, at the Donham home in Greenville. Barrett, founder of the white supremacist organization called the Nationalist Movement, had run unsuccessfully for Congress in 1984. Two years earlier, he authored the book The Commission, which argued that the black race (or any nonwhite group) was void of any “creativity of its own.” Barrett sought out Bryant to offer “moral support,” and to encourage Donham “to go on the offense,” after seeing what he believed to be a tremendous outpouring of support for the seventy-one-year-old grandmother. Barrett described his meeting with Frank Bryant as “extremely cordial” and “upbeat.” Barrett emphasized that he was only consulting with Bryant as an “ordinary citizen,” but would happily get involved in the case should they ask him to.
Barrett discussed the meeting with Greenville’s WXVT television station, and did his best to paint Emmett Till as a sexual deviant. Fourteen-year-old Till, Barrett said, had “bragged” that he had raped a white woman and pointed out that Till’s father had been executed for raping and even murdering white women. Then, in a rant that sounded like something out of a 1950s segregationist playbook, Barrett insisted that if Donham were to be prosecuted, “the whole drive to invade and integrate Mississippi and to communize and destroy America” should be tried in a courtroom also. When reporters asked Barrett if he knew of any evidence that could lead to a prosecution, he said only that “the real issue is who will rule America, the minorities or the majority.” He called the investigation into Donham a “witch-hunt” that “has to be defeated by a fearsome political-defense, based upon love of freedom, reliance upon democracy and appeal to innate justice.” Frank Bryant made it clear to Barrett that he not only stood by his mother during this trying time but maintained his father’s innocence as well. Barrett described Frank Bryant, who asked the lawyer for a copy of The Commission, as “a man of backbone, defiance, vision and spirit.” Frank promised that both he and his mother would read the book.
Barrett believed firmly that Mississippi attorney general Jim Hood would seek an indictment, probably because Hood had tried the Killen case personally and showed great passion in seeking a conviction. Be that as it may, Barrett thought that “an early showing of support, bolstered by strong, patriotic public-opinion, for Carolyn Bryant could stave the vampires off.” Barrett demonstrated his support for Carolyn by applying biblical language. “As Paul said that he was not ashamed of the Gospel, I am not ashamed of Carolyn Bryant.” Frank Bryant seconded that statement wholeheartedly. Barrett had nothing good to say about state officials looking into the case and insisted that “there is a ghoulishness about the Till prosecutors, which needs to take flight before the light of reason and the righteousness of religion.”65 It is unknown if Barrett had any further contact with Frank Bryant or ever spoke directly with Carolyn. As fate would have it, five years later Barrett was stabbed to death and his body set on fire at his home in Pearl, Rankin County, by a twenty-two-year-old black man named Vincent McGee, whom Barrett had hired to do yard work. McGee pleaded guilty and was sentenced to seventy-five years in prison in 2011.66
Killinger and his team were able to learn details from other key players in the case even from beyond the grave. Not long before his death in 1980, J. W. Milam allegedly allowed a young (and, unbeknownst to him, black) woman to question him over the telephone on at least three different occasions. The interviewer, Bonnie Blue, provided Killinger with details of what Milam told her. Blue has since self-published a novelized account of the Till case called Emmett Till’s Secret Witness.67 Milam’s account, provided to Blue nearly twenty-five years after he first told his story to William Bradford Huie in Look magazine, differs substantially from that famous “confession.” It does, however, bolster the courtroom testimony of Willie Reed and Mandy Bradley. In his conversations with Blue, Milam confirmed the participation of three other white men besides Roy Bryant and himself—his brother Leslie Milam, brother-in-law Melvin Campbell, and a friend named Hubert Clark—all of whom were dead by 1974. He also verified the involvement of Levi “Too Tight” Collins and Henry Lee Loggins. Both of these former field hands were still living when Milam had his conversations with Blue.
According to Blue, Milam said that he and Melvin Campbell were together from late Saturday, August 27, until early the following morning. Roy Bryant had just returned to town on Saturday and was at home. That night, the three men met up and began drinking when the Wednesday night incident at the Bryant grocery came up in conversation.68 Milam and Bryant, along with either Collins or Loggins (Milam apparently could not remember which), borrowed Hubert Clark’s car, went to the Bryant store in Money, picked up Carolyn Bryant, and drove out to Mose Wright’s home, where they abducted Till.69 After that, they dropped off Carolyn at the store, then drove back to the place where they had been drinking. Milam, Bryant, Collins, Loggins, Clark, and Campbell were all together at this point. There they beat Emmett briefly and then put him into the back of Milam’s truck with the intention of taking him to a spot on the Mississippi River to scare him. After driving around at length, however, they failed to find it. Because it was now approaching daybreak, they drove to Leslie Milam’s farm in Drew.70
Leslie was upset that the truckload of men showed up at his farm unannounced because he had work to do that day. However, he remained present when they took Till into a shed and resumed beating him. During this violent episode, Till’s wallet fell out of his pants, and the men discovered that it contained a photo of a white woman. The men were further angered that Till disrespected them by failing to address them as “sir” and by insisting that he was as good as they were.71
Till was killed at the shed and stripped of his clothing. Collins and Loggins were told to clean the blood off the floor, which they did twice before spreading cotton seed to cover any remaining stains. The group then divided into two. Milam, Bryant, and Campbell took Till’s body away in Milam’s truck, stopped to pick up a gin fan, and then threw the body off a bridge and into the Tallahatchie River. Clark, Collins, and Loggins left in Leslie Milam’s car to bury Till’s clothing. For whatever reason, Till’s shoes were accidentally left in the car. After burying the clothes, Collins and Loggins walked home. After Roy was arrested later that day, the Bryant and Milam siblings met at the home of their mother, Eula, and decided that J. W. should turn himself in to authorities in order to keep an eye on Roy and prevent him from veering away from the story they had concocted.72
If accurate, Milam’s candid account is fascinating, but the stories do not end with him. Indeed, the most significant of all to corroborate his version of events as told to Bonnie Blue came from Milam’s best-known accomplice, his half-brother, Roy Bryant. Five years or so after Milam provided his account to
Blue, Bryant opened up to a friend who recorded him on audiotape. The source, whose name Killinger kept out of his published report, called Killinger’s office and told him of his 1985 encounter with Bryant. The source explained that he had gone to Roy Bryant and that Bryant agreed to ride along to the sites related to the kidnapping and murder. These included the store, the site of Mose Wright’s home, and the shed in Drew. Upon meeting the man, Killinger saw that he owned several personal photographs of other Bryant family members, an indication that they were well acquainted. This confidential source handed Killinger the audiotape and encouraged him to “use it as you see fit.”73
Bits and pieces of the conversation between Bryant and his friend confirmed important details and captured Bryant’s lack of remorse regarding the murder of Emmett Till. Like Milam, Bryant admitted that they had been drinking but insisted that “we wasn’t drunk . . . wasn’t nobody drunk.”
Bryant’s account of beating and killing Till was especially disturbing. “Well, we done whopped the son of a bitch, and I had backed out on killin’ the motherfucker,” he said. After beating the fourteen-year-old nearly to death, they thought about taking him to the hospital. However, Bryant explained (laughing) that “carryin’ him to the hospital wouldn’t have done him no good.” Instead, they “put his ass in the Tallahatchie River.” Bryant could not explain why they went to the plantation in Drew, other than they were “tryin’ to make our minds up.” He did confirm that Till was tortured and murdered inside of the shed. Bryant’s friend photographed the building in Bryant’s presence. Fifty-three-year-old Bryant did not name others who aided him and Milam in the kidnapping and murder, but boasted that “I’m the only one who’s living that knows. . . . That’s all that will ever be known.”74 Bryant would be long dead before that last statement would be proven wrong. Unbeknownst to Bryant, his half-brother Leslie Milam had privately confessed his involvement over a decade earlier.
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