“I have a letter here dated January 26, 1963 [to the] National Rifle Association, Washington DC. ‘Gentlemen: For the next fifteen years we here in Mississippi are going to have to do a lot of shooting to protect our wives, children and ourselves from bad niggers.’ Did you write that?”
“I don’t know. Let me look at it and see. I probably did if you say so …”
If it was Waller’s intention to make Beckwith lose his temper on the stand, it was Beckwith’s intention to spar with Waller and goad his tormentor as best he could. When Waller showed him a picture of the white Valiant, Beckwith would only say that it “sure looked” like his car, until the judge prodded him to answer directly. It was the same thing with the rifle: “I couldn’t say that it is or that it is not my gun.”
There was no use in badgering the witness; it wasn’t getting him anywhere. So Waller dug back into his files and produced another letter to read to the jury. Beckwith had written it to the editor of Outdoor Life only a week or so earlier.
“Mr. Beckwith, let me read you this part of the letter, sir: ‘I have just finished an article on garfish hunting at night’ — which you underscored — ‘which is sure to be of interest to the reader along with several ideas I have on shooting at night in the summertime for varmints.’ Those are your words on January the 22nd.”
Beckwith eyed the prosecutor with disdain. “Do you know what a varmint is?”
“No, sir, I thought maybe you did.”
“I do.”
“What is it?”
“A varmint is game, disagreeable game, game that does no good, for instance, a crow or a hawk. Well, a hawk may do some good, but — well, you might even call a squirrel a varmint, but we don’t refer to squirrels as varmints, but down in the Natchez area you might call an armadillo a varmint…. It’s wildlife that contributes nothing to the welfare of other animals and it’s a, it’s a great sport to varmint hunt.” Waller ignored the contradiction in Beckwith’s earlier testimony, that he wasn’t a hunter. Instead he threw out some bait: “Are you talking about. . . would you say an integration leader is a varmint?”
Beckwith wouldn’t take it.
“Oh, that’s a human being,” he cooed. “But we’re talking about varmints. I’m talking about crows and things like that.”
Waller tried another tack. Of the 150 letters Beckwith had written from his jail cells since his arrest, had he once denied killing Medgar Evers?
“I don’t imagine I said much about killing Medgar Evers in all of them. . . . The only mention that I can imagine that I would put in a letter regarding this case is that I am not guilty of. . . any crime,” Beckwith replied.
“And you don’t believe that killing an integration leader is a crime, do you, Mr. Beckwith?”
“Oh, that’s a crime. But I say I believe I am guilty of no crime.”
“Yes, sir. Now in four months’ time and a hundred and fifty letters. I’ll ask you whether or not you have referred frequently to the fact that you are making sacrifices for the cause?”
“This is a cause, yes, sir.”
“All right. Now I’ll ask you further if you have not referred to the fact that you have written a book about the subject matter of which you are being tried now, you have given it a title, and you have offered it to publishers to print, is that not so?”
All in all Beckwith was on the stand for two hours and twenty minutes, with only one short break. For someone with Beckwith’s temperament he controlled himself reasonably well. But for some reason this line of questioning, about the book he was hoping to see published, touched something in him, and the jury got to see something in his eyes they hadn’t seen before.
“I have made mention of it many times as a book, but it is not a book. It is a compiling of literature and facts and background material.”
“What is the title of the book, Mr. Beckwith?”
“The title,” he snapped. “The book has ten titles . .
People who were there say they saw an odd glint in Beckwith’s eyes, and a change came over his face as the lawyers argued back and forth over whether the book should be mentioned in court. As Beckwith testified about the book, his choice of words seemed mild enough, but his demeanor projected, as one reporter put it, a man on the verge of hysteria.
“Mr. Beckwith, could I refresh your memory and give you one title to your book that you have used in your correspondence to various editors and people in reference to your book?” Waller asked.
“You certainly may, sir.”
“Is it, My Ass, Your Goat and the Republic?”
“You say that’s the only title you have seen?”
“Well, other than Varmint Hunters.”
“Oh, that’s not a title to a book or to anything. That’s just a matter of expression.”
“That’s another subject, but I want to talk to you about your book now.”
“That is one of ten titles now,” said Beckwith. “My Ass, Your Goat, and the Republic.”
“Would you explain that to us?”
“It is thus explained, by the left-wing forces riding my donkey!” Beckwith sputtered. He was breathing hard now, his eyes blazing. “They intend to aggravate the public and continue on with their method of destroying state’s rights, constitutional government, and racial integrity!”
Stanny Sanders jumped in to stop it. “If the court please, we are not here to discuss philosophy,” he said.
Lott rose to object again to the questioning. Judge Hendrick said he would allow the witness to continue, but the spell was broken, and Beckwith gathered up his composure.
Waller tried getting at him from another angle. Based on his philosophy, and all that he had said in his letters about using force and about sacrifices, did it mean — yes or no — that he would do “whatever is necessary and use whatever force you deem best to stop integration?”
“No, sir. I am not going to go that far.”
“How far will you go?”
“To do whatever is morally, legally, and spiritually right to preserve the wholesome forces in this nation and in this republic. To do whatever I can in a small way with a pen. I am a writer.”
Another tack: “Do you hunt?”
“I wouldn’t admit to any such thing as that, sir.”
“Do you hunt?”
“Of course, I hunt moderately and haven’t done much hunting in many years. … I shoot at tin cans, snakes, and turtles, things along the side of the road.”
“You are accurate at two hundred feet with a .30/06 Enfield rifle with a six power scope, too, aren’t you?”
“I should do better than that. I ought to hit something at a range better than two hundred feet, sir.”
Waller then asked about Beckwith’s gun collection. He had boasted of having many guns. So why had the police, when they had searched his house, found only three guns — a rifle, a shotgun, and a .25 automatic pistol — but several hundred rounds of ammunition? Beckwith told the court that he had been selling off his gun collection before his arrest “to stay alive,” because he was running out of money.
If he was so strapped for cash, why had he traded an expensive handgun for a useless scope a month earlier? How could he justify going out to the rifle range and firing off rounds that cost thirty cents each? And when he fired off those rounds that Sunday, he had the rifle sighted real good and then he wiped it down real good? Beckwith said he had. And then he put it in his closet, where he kept his guns? Yes. So why, when the police searched his house twelve days after the shooting, were his guns “setting in your bedroom by the bed?”
“I always keep my guns around me.”
As hard as he tried, Waller never caught Beckwith in an obvious lie. There were no major breakthroughs except for one: Waller had shown the jury the face of a fanatic.
After five days of testimony both sides rested their cases.
On Thursday morning, February 6, the house was packed to hear the closing arguments. John Fox, looking eager and collegiate, aske
d the jury to recall Beckwith’s demeanor throughout the trial. “Has he in any act or utterance behaved like an innocent man? Does this man come and say, humbly: ‘I’m innocent’?” Fox asked.
“I have never before been so hypnotized by the testimony of a witness…. It became embarrassing for me to look at him. He sat upon his throne of glory and reveled in it…. He is a fanatic, pure and simple.” Fox asked the jurors to “take the conscience of Mississippi” with them to the jury room.
Bill Waller spent his time summarizing the case. The murder weapon belonged to Beckwith; the fingerprint on the scope was his. He had a cut over his eye that matched the contours of that scope. His white Valiant had been seen near Medgar Evers’s neighborhood in the days just before the shooting and in the parking lot of Joe’s Drive In on the night of the murder. Two witnesses said they saw Beckwith there that night. And the supposed alibi witnesses who could place Beckwith in Greenwood around the time of the murder hadn’t come forward until “the eleventh hour” of the trial, even though they could have testified at three preliminary hearings. The two Greenwood policemen could not be believed.
“Lo and behold,” Waller said. “Their old buddy Beck was down there getting some gas, the same place he was an hour ago. I wonder if it wasn’t 2:30 a.m. and Mr. Beckwith had just rolled in from Jackson.”
Beckwith was far more subdued this morning and sat glumly at the defense table while Waller tried to send him to the gas chamber. The D.A. told the jury that Beckwith got “a real big kick out of being a martyr.” The murder of Medgar Evers, a human being, said Waller, “was the most cold-blooded killing I have ever heard about. He did not come to Jackson to get Medgar Evers. He came to kill evil, and get the number one man.”
Stanny Sanders and Hardy Lott hammered on the obvious weaknesses in the state’s case. “There’s not a single, solitary person who can identify Beckwith as the man who did it,” Lott said. It could not be proved that the bullet that killed Evers came from the weapon found at the scene. No one saw the shot fired. There was no way to prove how old a fingerprint was. And three men saw Beckwith in Greenwood at the time of the shooting.
That wasn’t all. The defense lawyers had some buttons to push, and they made sure they hit them all. “We believe that this jury is not going to render a verdict to satisfy the Attorney General of the United States,” Sanders said. Just invoking the image of Robert Kennedy was enough to make most white southerners bristle.
“If anybody had a motive, it seems to me it would be the people of Jackson,” Lott said. “The motive is non-existent. If you’re going to bring up everybody in Mississippi who believes in segregation, lots of us better leave. I might be guilty!”
It was something to think about. What Hardy Lott was saying here was that every white man in Mississippi had a reason to kill Medgar Evers. And, by inference, maybe he needed killing.
The judge sent the jury into deliberation after lunch on Thursday. To everyone’s surprise by 9:30 that night they still hadn’t reached a verdict. It had only taken an hour to acquit Emmett Till’s accused killers, and that wait was just for show. Folks were wondering what was taking so long in there.
On Friday morning, after eleven hours of deliberation and twenty ballots, the jury reported they were hopelessly deadlocked. Later some people would say that things got so hot in the jury room that fistfights nearly erupted. One told an Associated Press reporter that it was “hell in there.” The final vote was an even tie — six for acquittal and six for conviction.
Beckwith sat soberly as the bailiff polled the jurors. Then he kissed his wife and was led back to jail.
This was not what anyone had expected. Beckwith was so sure he’d be freed that he was writing letters during the trial saying he expected to “win with honor.” He was asking for donations to help pay off his lawyers.
The Evers family was equally shocked by the mistrial. Myrlie Evers had prepared a statement about the outcome, but she held on to it. “The fact that they could not agree signifies something,” she said.
Charles Evers wouldn’t comment until the second trial.
Outside the courthouse Waller spoke to the news crews. “We felt we put on a good case,” he said in his abrupt, north Mississippi accent. “The evidence amply justified a guilty verdict.” Folks couldn’t help but notice the eruption of canker sores on his lower lip. It had been a long couple of weeks.
Out in the blustery February day, in front of the cameras, Waller maintained the public attitude that the state would adopt for the next thirty years. “There has been nothing peculiar, unusual or different about this case,” he said, just like it was true.
What would he do now? “I plan to try another murder case Monday,” he replied.
18
The Second Trial
Torrential rains pounded Mississippi the weekend before Beckwith’s second trial. Three and a half inches fell in Jackson, ten inches in Meridian. Rivers jumped their banks, roads washed away, and people had to climb trees to be saved from high water and floodborne snakes. When jury selection began on Monday, April 6, 1964, the Pearl River was eleven feet above flood stage, and the temperature was eighty-two degrees and rising.
There weren’t as many reporters this time around, mainly the stalwarts from the wire services and the local papers and a few offbeat freelancers. There were other trials to cover that spring: Jack Ruby for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, Jimmy Hoffa on racketeering charges, the kidnappers of Frank Sinatra, Jr.
Byron De La Beckwith was becoming old news.
Once again jury selection dragged on for days and bored most of the spectators right out of the courtroom. That process was, however, of crucial interest to the attorneys present. Some believe a case is won or lost by the time the jury is seated.
This jury selection didn’t seem unusual to Fox and Waller, but in fact there was something very different about it. A jury pool of three hundred men was assembled. The prosecution accepted its first twelve jurors, and the defense could challenge or accept them. One of the potential jurors was Durward L. Hopkins, and Stanny Sanders wondered whether he was related to Andy Hopkins, the Sovereignty Commission investigator. So Sanders called him. Hopkins wasn’t sure whether he was a cousin or not, but he offered to check. That same day the investigator told Sanders that Durward was indeed a distant cousin; moreover he would make a “fair, impartial juror.”
Anyone knows that lawyers don’t really want jurors to be fair and impartial. They want jurors to be predisposed to favor their client’s position — if they can get away with it. A defense attorney wants a juror who can empathize with his or her client, who hates putting anyone in prison, who is skeptical of the police. Prosecutors want to pick the coldest, most merciless jurors, people with a rigid respect for authority and the ability to make hard decisions. Certain types of people, it is thought, are predisposed to vote certain ways. A Roman Catholic, for instance, isn’t as likely to sentence someone to death as, say, a Baptist, although lawyers are supposed to swear up and down that this never affects their choices. It’s a little charade they all play.
The best way to find out how a juror might vote is to question him in court and investigate his background. The latter takes time and money. Lucky for Beckwith the Sovereignty Commission offered its services for free.
Years later this obscure episode would make banner headlines in Jackson. Erle Johnston, who in 1964 was director of the Sovereignty Commission, would say that what happened might have been unethical but not illegal (which turned out to be true). One state agency had simply volunteered to subvert the efforts of another state agency, the district attorney’s office.
Andy Hopkins offered to investigate the rest of the potential jurors, Erle Johnston gave his approval, and by the end of the day the defense team had an interesting list on its desk. In the short time he had to work, Hopkins didn’t learn all that much. Mostly just addresses and employment — things anyone could get from the city directory. In some cases he made some phone calls o
r visits to learn more. For instance, Hopkins reported that John T. Hester was “an analyst for the State Hi-Way Department and formerly lived in Jones County. He has a good reputation with people that work with him, would probably be a fair and impartial juror.” Hester got on the jury.
Another man on the list was Joseph S. Harris, noted to be “president of J. H. Harris, Inc…. He is a contractor and believed to be Jewish.” Beckwith’s lawyers struck him from the jury.
By midnight Wednesday a twelve-man jury had been selected. They appeared to be solid citizens, businessmen and executives, more educated than those in the first trial. Seven had college degrees, and two were actually Yankee born. There was a bookkeeper, a food broker, an IRS employee — guys who might be Lions Club tail-twisters or have country club memberships. All were Protestants, and, of course, all were white.
Once the testimony started, the crowds came back to the courthouse. John Herbers, who dropped in to cover the case for the New York Times, noted that the Ku Klux Klan seemed to be making its presence felt at the trial. He wrote that about seventy-five “tough-looking” men from Greenwood, some “linked with the Klan,” showed up in court and stared intently at Ralph Hargrove as he testified.
Herbers also noted that the Klan, which had been quiet in Mississippi for many years, seemed to be undergoing a revival. There had been cross burnings in southern Mississippi and the Greenwood area. And literature was being passed out by a new organization, something that called itself the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. On Thursday night, four days after the trial began, ten crosses were burned in and around Jackson.
Bill Waller and John Fox both remember the second trial as smoother, shorter, and more efficient than the first. Each side knew better what the other had in its hand and what the judge would allow into evidence. But the trials were not carbon copies of each other. Although apparently nobody ordered transcripts of the second trial and the stenographer’s notes were later lost, newspapers of the time reported some interesting new testimony.
The Ghosts of Mississippi Page 23