The defense now brought out its own expert witnesses to dispute the state’s most solid physical evidence: the fingerprint on the Golden Hawk scope. First up was C. D. Brooks, a chemical engineer and former employee of the Alabama Stale Department of Toxicology and Criminal
Investigation. Brooks made the point that it is almost impossible to determine the chemical composition of a fingerprint — it depends on what the finger touched beforehand.
“Now, from your work in the field I will ask you whether or not it is possible to determine the length of time that any fingerprint has been in existence?” Lott asked Brooks.
“It can’t be done without knowing what the substance is.”
“In other words … there is no way to determine how old it is?” “No, sir.”
After lunch L. B. Baynard, a former investigator who was briefly director of the Bureau of Identification for the Louisiana State Police, also testified that there was no way to tell the age of a fingerprint.
Roy Jones, the defense’s first alibi witness, said he had known Beckwith by name for about three years and could recognize the man. Jones was a thirty-three-year-old small-time entrepreneur from Greenwood who had three kids, a neon-sign business, some real estate interests, and a well-known segregationist point of view. Like many with his beliefs, he had joined the Greenwood auxiliary police to boost the force in those troubled times of Negro agitation.
On the night of June 11, Roy Jones was just learning his new job, and he was eager for all the lessons he could get. After he checked off duty at 10 11 p.m. he stuck around the Greenwood Police Station to learn about arrest techniques like how to use a nightstick, how to lead a man around by his finger. He then drove to Short’s Cafe for a sandwich and a glass of milk, and he lingered there for about twenty-five minutes. That’s how he estimated, as he testified in court, that he saw Byron De La Beckwith around 11:45 near the Billups filling station in Greenwood the night Evers was killed in Jackson.
“When you left the cafe you were by yourself?” Lott asked.
“I was by myself.”
“What did you do then?”
“I proceeded to go home.”
“Now, when was it then that you saw Mr. Beckwith?”
“Just as quick as I got in the car and started turning to the left, he was sitting right there on the right, with his lights on, just like he was waiting for a car to pull out, I mean to go on by so he could pull out.”
“Did you get a good look at him?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you positive that was him?”
“I know it was.”
Bill Waller pounced during his cross-examination. He had to demolish any alibi witnesses, or at least make them seem confused or biased. He began by asking why, if Jones had knowledge that Beckwith was in Greenwood the night of the murder, did he let him sit in jail for eight months before coming forward with his story. Jones said he didn’t know. “You didn’t see fit to notify anyone?” Waller asked incredulously. “That’s right, because I hadn’t been on the auxiliary police but for four or five months. I didn’t know which way to go.”
“In spite of the fact you have only known Mr. Beckwith for three years you are good friends of his in the sense that you want to help him out in the trial?”
“I don’t know what you mean by good friends.”
“Well, you had seen him enough to recognize his automobile at midnight with the headlights on . . .”
“Yes, sir.”
“. . . at a right angle to the street?”
“Yes, sir.”
“To see him in it and know he was driving?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was that a dark night or was it moonlight?”
“It was a dark night.”
“Had it been raining?”
“No, sir.”
“You want to tell the jury it was a pitch black night?”
“That’s right. . .”
The jury may have remembered that other witnesses in the trial testified that it was a bright moonlit night.
Waller picked through the rest of Jones’s testimony. How could he see in the car when the headlights were shining at him? Was he sure he hadn’t seen Beckwith on the tenth? The ninth? Could he pinpoint any other time he saw Beckwith except at 11:45 on a black night with his lights on? He could not.
On redirect Lott established that there were floodlights shining around Billups service station, making it easy to identify Beckwith in his car as he waited to turn onto Highway 82. He also asked Jones whether he had told anyone about seeing Beckwith that night. He said he had told a Greenwood policeman, who told him to report it to Beckwith’s lawyer. So he called Hardy Lott.
In those days of trial by ambush, all Waller and Fox knew was that Hollis Cresswell and James Holley were alibi witnesses. They had no idea what they were going to say.
Cresswell was fifty years old and a lieutenant with the Greenwood police, where he had worked for the past fifteen years. Holley was his partner. Cresswell said that he had known Beckwith casually for some eight or ten years and he could recognize him easily, along with the white Valiant he drove.
On the night of June 11, Hollis Cresswell and his partner, James Holley, were on patrol, “mostly in the colored section of town, and part uptown.” Their shift ran from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Cresswell swore that he had seen Byron De La Beckwith at the Shell service station in Greenwood at 1:05 a.m., June 12. That was just over half an hour after the shooting, ninety miles to the south. There was no way Beckwith could have driven fast enough to get back to Greenwood by that time.
Lott asked the policeman where he had been right before he saw Beckwith. “We had just pulled into Billups service station, which is an adjoining station and which is just south of the Shell station and Mr. Holley had bought a package of cigarettes,” Cresswell replied.
“I see.”
“Then I pulled on out from under the station and had started up on the Main Street at the time we saw Mr. Beckwith.”
“All right. Now, how close was he to you?”
“Approximately seventy-five to a hundred feet, hardly that far,” Cresswell said. The station was all lit up; he could see clearly. “He was sitting — his car was sitting in the driveway of the Shell service station. At that time there was being some gas put in his car. Mr. Beckwith was standing beside of his car, on the left-hand side of his car, and his front door was open at that time.”
“Now what way have you got of fixing that time that you saw him in the Shell service station?”
“Well, the reason I remember what time it was, usually at night, when we are patrolling around, a lot of times we stop over at a little grocery store there on Main Street and eat something…. That’s Bracci Danton’s. And as we were sitting under the station where Mr. Holley bought the cigarettes, he asked me, said, ‘Are we going to eat anything tonight?’ I said, ‘Well we might as well, if we got time.’ He said, ‘What time is it?’ And I looked at my watch and 1 told him it was five minutes to one o’clock, I mean, after one o’clock, at that time. He said, ‘Well, we had better go on over before he closes up.’ ”
Cresswell said he had been listening to an all-night radio station from Nashville when he heard that Medgar Evers had been shot in Jackson. He said it had been about 4 a.m.
Bill Waller’s cross was short. All he wanted to know was whether or not Hollis Cresswell had come forward at any of Beckwith’s hearings or had spoken to the Jackson detectives to try to clear Beckwith with an alibi. Cresswell said that he had told only a few officers at the Greenwood Police Station and Beckwith’s lawyers, and that was all. Waller didn’t bother asking him why. He would let the jury decide for themselves.
Hardy Lott then called thirty-six-year-old James Holley to the stand. Like Cresswell he said he knew Beckwith by sight. His story about seeing Beckwith at the Shell station matched Cresswell’s exactly, except he reckoned that the distance between them was thirty or forty, instead of seventy, feet. He testifie
d that he had mentioned the sighting to several other cops and to Beckwith’s lawyers after they called. They advised him not to mention it to any investigators unless he was asked. None of them asked.
Waller performed another brusque cross-examination, hammering home the uncomfortable fact that Holley had held his tongue until the trial. He also questioned Holley’s specific memory of Beckwith. Could he say who else he saw that night and when?
“Who did you see at 1:10 on the morning of June the 11th?” asked Waller.
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Who did you see at 1:15?”
“I don’t recall seeing anyone.”
“Do you know of anybody you saw that whole night on that whole shift?”
“Not specifically, no, sir.”
“That’s all.”
Judge Hendrick excused the witness and then turned to the defense table. “Who do you want, Mr. Lott?” he asked.
“We call the defendant, Mr. Beckwith.”
Some people gasped. A man who had coughed continuously all day stopped coughing. The courtroom was silent as Beckwith’s fingers fluttered over his tie and pulled straight his suit coat. Then he strode to the witness stand.
Waller and Fox sat, stunned, for a moment. Then Fox hurried out to retrieve a large file from the D.A.’s office. Waller leaned forward, his massive bulldog head over the wooden table, watching closely as Beckwith was sworn in.
By now Waller knew he could lose this case, badly. The three alibi witnesses were hard to impeach. This was the break he was hoping for.
Beckwith carefully crossed his legs and shot his French cuffs and shifted around to face the jury as Hardy Lott began the questioning. Beckwith answered rapidly, with an odd military precision.
“How old are you?” Lott asked.
“Forty-three, suh!”
“You married?”
“Yes, suh!”
“Do you have any children?”
“One son.”
Beckwith beamed amiably at the jury, conjuring all his nervous salesman’s charm for this moment in the spotlight. He told them that he was a marine, that he “got the business” at Tarawa, and informed them that he was a gun lover and trader.
“I trade guns like I might trade dogs or stamps …” he said.
“Now, Mr. Beckwith, did you shoot Medgar Evers?”
“No, suh!”
“Were you in Jackson, Mississippi, when Medgar Evers was shot?”
“No, suh!”
Beckwith then denied speaking to the cabdrivers, ever going to the bus station in Jackson. He denied parking next to the grocery or going to Joe’s Drive In or even knowing where those places were.
He got the scar above his right eye, he explained, on Sunday afternoon before the murder. He was target shooting with a rifle and scope out on the police range in Greenwood, practicing in a prone position. “And I got my eye right up in that scope and I got it up a little too close and I squeezed that trigger and that heavy recoil came back and cut a hole, cut a gap in my head!” Beckwith said.
Lott asked him if he was a hunter. The man on trial for his life couldn’t help finding the humor in the moment. “I am the worst hunter in the world. I’ve had guns all my life and if I have ever killed anything besides time we haven’t been able to cook it at home!”
Waller stared at him from the distance of his table.
Beckwith clearly delighted in this gun talk. He boasted about the guns he kept and traded, how it was his habit to keep thirty or forty pistols in suitcases in the trunk of his car, ready to trade, and rifles and shotguns under the front seat, “so I can feel down there and see if they are there.”
Beckwith admitted having owned a few Enfield 30/06 rifles in his time. He admitted trading with Duck Goza for a scope. He also admitted trading with Thorn McIntyre for a .30/06, although he had taken only the barrel and bolt action; he had put his own wooden stock on it. Then he’d had a local gun dealer put Goza’s stock on the rifle. He had hoped, he said, to trade it to a deer hunter.
Hardy Lott picked up the jet-black rifle from the evidence table and walked toward his client. Again, the rifle’s dark, heavy presence seemed to suck the energy from the air around it. Every eye in the room followed it to Beckwith’s outstretched hands.
“I will hand you a rifle with a scope — State’s Exhibit 21 — and ask you to examine it.”
Beckwith ran his eyes over it with the attention of a connoisseur. Then he sited it over the heads of the jury, and peered into the empty breech. “There’s a little dust in it,” he grumped.
“Looking at it, do you see any difference between the rifle and scope you have just testified about that you had and that one?” Lott asked.
“There is much similarity between this weapon and the weapon — several weapons that I possess — much similarity between them.”
“Do you know whether or not that is the rifle and scope that you had that you have just testified about?”
“No, sir … I don’t know that it’s my rifle or one that 1 have ever had but it is similar to it.”
He said all of his rifles had slings on them, and this one didn’t. He narrated a story about his Enfield rifle, the one he had fired the Sunday before the murder, the one that cut his eye. He said he look it home that night to clean it thoroughly and wrap it up and put it in the bathroom closet “where nobody would be picking it up and fooling with it.”
He had spent the next day in the field with John Book, his instructor at Delta Liquid Plant Food, learning about crop fertilization. They drove all over the southern Delta in Book’s car. Beckwith’s Valiant, he testified, was parked, unlocked, in front of the office in Greenville all day. When he got home after dark, he noticed the rifle was gone. He hadn’t been able to find it in his car with his other guns or upstairs when he’d checked. He wasn’t sure whether the gun was missing from the car or the house.
By now Beckwith’s mouth was running away with him, and the judge had to remind him not to argue with himself and not to ask questions on the stand.
He said he lived in the house alone.
“What about your wife?”
“My wife and son, they . . . were in an apartment because the house was in such a fearful state of repairs, it wasn’t hardly fit to live in. . . .” “Were you and your wife separated at that time?”
“Only by geography. She was living in another part of town in a comfortable apartment, and I was living in that old house until we could make better arrangements.”
The old house was never locked, he said, unless they went away for a week or two.
Now the defense offered an explanation as to why Beckwith’s fingerprint should be on the scope. Was it Beckwith’s custom to handle shiny objects such as guns and scopes in gun shops? Yes. Including the objects in Duck’s Tackle Shop? That was correct.
Finally he was asked why he refused to speak to the FBI agents who came to talk to him before his arrest. Beckwith told the whole story, complete with dialogue on both sides.
“And they said, ‘We want to talk to you about a scope.’ And I said ‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I don’t have anything to say to you, don’t have any comment to make to you and you have my permission to leave.’ ”
He explained that he did this as a matter of routine, since the LeFlore County Bar Association had advised the citizens of Greenwood not to speak to FBI agents for any reason. There were articles about it in the Commonwealth.
One such article was produced and entered into the record. It was the only piece of physical evidence the defense would offer.
Hardy Lott turned his witness over to the prosecution.
Bill Waller stood up slowly. The courtroom was very quiet. “Mr. Beckwith, I will ask you whether or not, sir, if you have been rather public in your pronouncement of your ideas on segregation and what forces should be used to maintain segregation?” Waller asked.
Beckwith answered snappily, “I have been very pronounced on my ideas in regard to racial segregat
ion and constitutional government and state’s rights. Yes, sir, very pronounced. In fact I have written many articles to many newspapers and a lot of them have published the articles. And I don’t write under a pen name!”
Since Beckwith himself had opened this door, Waller fished a piece of newsprint from his files and read from a letter to the editor of the Jackson Daily News, April 16, 1957: ‘“I believe in segregation just like I believe in God. I shall oppose any person, place, or thing that opposes segregation.’ Did you write that?”
“I sure did write that. You are reading it just like it was written.” Waller continued, “ ‘I shall combat the evils of integration and shall bend every effort to rid the U.S.A. of the integrationists.’ Did you write that?”
“I sure did write that, suh.”
“Do you still feel that way?”
“As it is written, you read it.”
“Do you still feel that way?”
“Of course I feel that way, sir.”
“And you mean any force, when you say any force you mean . . .”
“Within reason, you understand, reason,” Beckwith said, pouring syrup over the vowels as he uttered them. “And moderation. I won’t say moderation. I say within reason, civilized reason. Reason within civilized and organized society.”
Waller kept reading. “ ‘And further, when I die I will be buried in a segregated cemetery. When you get to heaven you will find me in the part that has a sign saying — quote — “For White’s Only” and if I go to Hades I am going to raise hell all over Hades until I get to the white section.’ Did you say that?”
No answer.
“Anyway, Mr. Beckwith, that’s your letter and written by yourself and mailed to the editor?”
“Mr. Waller, I want you to understand and where there is humor intended I want you to laugh and smile and where it is serious I want you to be serious and so you have read the letter about like I intended for it to go to the press.”
If the jury, up to this point, had been wondering what might cause this quirky little salesman to shoot a man in the back from ambush, Waller intended to use this opportunity to provide the motive. With any luck he could hound Beckwith and make him crack on the stand. Already it was hard to shut him up. He was like a wind-up toy with a taut spring — he couldn’t seem to control his own mouth.
The Ghosts of Mississippi Page 22