Dennis saw his life as a continuous struggle. He felt underappreciated and overlooked for the risks he had taken in helping bring down the Klan in Mississippi. The FBI, he felt, had all but abandoned him. He tried to keep on preaching, tried different businesses, but none of them was successful. He kept hoping to make some money by selling his story, but that had never worked out. He ran a small press from his mountain home. He was trying to keep a low profile because whenever his neighbors found out about his past, they would shy away. Now this had happened, and he wasn’t too happy about it.
Still he didn’t shut the door on the possibility of testifying against Beckwith if the district attorney’s office ever made a strong enough case to bring the man to trial. He’d just have to wait and see.
It was a turning point. The investigation seemed to take off after Dennis appeared. Crisco tracked down Thorn McIntyre, who had traded the murder weapon to Beckwith. He found him in Montgomery, Alabama, leading a new life as a real estate developer. McIntyre said that he would be willing to testify again if it came to that.
Soon another witness came forward when she heard about the investigation. Her name was Peggy Morgan, a woman whose husband had been a friend of Beckwith’s in Greenwood. She said she needed to get something off her chest; it had been bothering her for years. Beckwith, she said, had bragged in her presence that he had killed Evers. It had happened while she and her husband had been giving Beckwith a ride up to Parchman prison sometime in the late sixties — she wasn’t sure of the year.
None of these developments was made public. This was a murder investigation, and DeLaughter was not about to tip his hand before he even had an indictment. It would have been tempting to blast his evidence all over the press to show how much work he was doing. But that would just blow the case.
The national media were getting interested by now. PrimeTime Live was the first to go public with a story that at least four witnesses were willing to testify that they had seen Beckwith at the New Jerusalem Church the night of Evers’s murder. In fact the old Jackson police reports in DeLaughter’s file showed that the rumors of Beckwith’s supposed appearances in Jackson had been checked out during the initial investigation. But he kept that information to himself.
DeLaughter was getting a crash course in modern media. The television people were asking him and Peters pointed questions, such as “The murder weapon is still missing?”
“That’s right,” Peters said during an on-camera interview, looking the correspondent directly in the eye with all his handsome sincerity.
DeLaughter sat there nodding. He figured it was too late to back out of the story now. Lying about the rifle, he thought, was the lesser of evils. He didn’t want Beckwith to get spooked and clam up, or maybe even leave the country.
The PrimeTime story aired on June 14, 1990. Five days later the Clarion Ledger ran the banner headline “Gun Used in Evers Slaying in D.A.’s Hands.”
The accompanying article, cowritten by Mitchell, charged that the prosecutor’s office had found the rifle “months” earlier. DeLaughter admitted he had the gun and tried to explain his dissembling as a strategic ploy. He said that he hadn’t wanted the “target of the investigation” to know that they had such a crucial piece of evidence. As it appeared in print, his explanation sounded feeble. What made it look worse was that the gun had been found in his late father-in-law’s closet. It was the kind of coincidence fiction writers would throw out of a novel because nobody would believe it.
To those who were inclined to distrust the district attorney’s office, the blundering lie reconfirmed their worst fears. Peters and DeLaughter were “hiding” evidence to avoid a new prosecution. It was the same old business from the same old boys.
By the next day black politicians, led by a city councilman named Louis Armstrong, were calling for a federal investigation of the “cover-up.” Myrlie Evers felt betrayed. It was one thing DeLaughter had not confided in her. She wondered what else she didn’t know.
“I am surprised, I am stunned, I am speechless,” she told the paper, then added icily, “I certainly hope that more ‘missing’ information will surface.”
The trust Evers and DeLaughter had built over the months was badly damaged. This was still Mississippi, Evers thought. No matter how much she liked this young man who seemed so sincere, she had to remember that this was still Mississippi.
There was a federal probe and a lot of hollering in the community. Bennie Thompson, a rising black politician who represented Evers’s old neighborhood on the Board of Supervisors called the concealment of the evidence a “crisis of confidence.” Charles Evers weighed in with a defense of the prosecution. “I’m sick and tired of these politicians politicizing off my brother’s name,” he said. He said he was confident that Beckwith would be indicted. By the end of July the Justice Department investigation was over; they could find no evidence of a cover-up.
Myrlie Evers extracted a promise from the district attorney’s office that there would be no more surprises, no more “missing” evidence that suddenly reappeared without her knowledge. She had no choice but to cooperate with these prosecutors. They were all she had, and she was willing to deal with the Devil himself to get this case to court.
In mid-October, Evers made the final gesture of trust. She walked up the steps of the Hinds County Courthouse and handed over the single most important element in the reprosecution of Beckwith: the original transcripts of the first trial, which she had kept locked in a safe deposit box for two and a half decades. After a short hearing circuit court judge Breland Hilburn ruled them to be authentic, which meant that, under Mississippi law, they could be used in a future trial. All that stood in the way of an indictment was the grand jury.
By now the prosecution had an impressive stack of evidence: the transcript, a big chunk of the police report, the crime scene and some autopsy photos, the murder weapon, the fingerprint files, a surprising number of living witnesses from the first trials, and some new witnesses, including Delmar Dennis, Peggy Morgan, and Mary Ann Adams, another woman who had come forward with a story of Beckwith’s bragging about the murder.
Another grand jury was convened that December. DeLaughter and Peters made the unusual decision to present part of the defense case as well as the prosecution. They wanted the panel to have as much information as possible before they made the decision whether to indict. In a way it was a dry run for an actual trial.
The grand jury summoned James Holley and Hollis Cresswell, the two surviving alibi witnesses who said they had seen Beckwith in Greenwood the night of the murder. They also presented Myrlie Evers, who told her story with such dignity and sorrow that, according to one grand jury member, “there wasn’t a dry eye in the room.”
That afternoon Byron De La Beckwith was again indicted for the murder of Medgar Evers.
“He’s not here!” Thelma Beckwith shouted from behind the front door of her bungalow on Signal Mountain.
“Ma’am, we’ve got a warrant,” the deputy said. “Please open up.” Beckwith was in fact home on the afternoon of December 17, 1990. He was shaved and showered and had a fresh set of clothes ready. He knew they’d be coming for him. Finally Thelma let the officers inside.
“I’m ready to go, boys,” Beckwith told them. “I’m not guilty.”
He even joked as they led him away to the Hamilton County Jail. “You want to search my pockets to see if I’ve got a bomb?”
The old man’s mood had soured by the time he showed up in green jail togs for his hearing in Chattanooga the next day.
“How many Jews are among you?” Beckwith snapped as he peered at the mob of reporters. “I see one nigra man.”
Inside the courtroom Beckwith told the judge that the murder charge in Mississippi was “nonsense, poppycock and just something to… incite the lower forms of life to force and violence against the country club set.” Beckwith vowed that he would fight extradition to Mississippi “tooth, nail and claw.”
The judge rel
eased him on fifteen thousand dollars bail. He was hastily rearrested on a governor’s warrant and returned to his cinder block cell while he fought extradition.
Beckwith adjusted quickly to the jail routine. By now he knew how to do his time. He kept up his frantic correspondence with friends, donors, and journalists, writing twenty or more letters a day. He said he was a political prisoner.
He had a slick court-appointed lawyer named Russell Bean who fought off the extradition and tried to keep reporters away from his client. Beckwith never minded being interviewed, but he decided he would now put a price on it. Five thousand dollars, cash or check, in advance, no exceptions. In all the time he spent in jail, only a BBC documentary crew managed to interview him on tape. They wouldn’t say how they’d persuaded him to do it.
In that interview he denied the new allegations against him. He had not attended any NAACP meetings in Jackson, he said. He had never seen Medgar Evers.
“You ought to have enough sense not to ask such a damn fool question,” he told the interviewer. “I am not going to waste my time going to a nigger meeting. When I want to know something from a nigger, I tell the nigger to come to me!”
Beckwith denied bragging about the murder in front of Delmar Dennis at a Klan meeting in 1965. “Sounds like a fabrication to me,” he said. He started to say something else, then stopped himself, chuckling. “You see, the only time…” he paused. “I’ll just save that for the courts. Because you see, heh, heh, if Delmar’s still living, heh, heh, I’m goin’ drop one on him.”
“You’ll drop one on him?”
“Verbally…. He’ll know that he has fizzled around and blown the lamp out and he will have found himself in the dark!”
Dennis, who also was interviewed for the show, took that as a threat. By now he had written to DeLaughter to inform him that he would not testify at the trial, and he had informed the media of his decision. Privately he said it was a ploy to throw the assassins off his trail. The Klan had already left a calling card in his mailbox. Someone wanted him to know they knew where he lived.
Back in Mississippi DeLaughter and Crisco were taking advantage of the delay to strengthen the case against Beckwith. Among the many items still missing from the first trial was Evers’s original autopsy report. That was a big problem, almost as bad as not having the murder weapon. They needed a new autopsy, but that meant exhuming the long-buried body.
Myrlie Evers was horrified, and at first she refused to allow it. She couldn’t put herself or her family through it. But she changed her mind when her younger son. Van, offered to go to Washington in her place.
DeLaughter and Crisco flew to Washington to oversee the exhumation and autopsy. They met Van for the first time at the grave site. There wasn’t much time to talk. It was a warm, sunny morning, and the back-hoe was standing by. They all watched as its blade cut through the thick turf, uncovering a perfectly dry grave and a well-sealed casket. That was a good sign. But nobody knew what they might find inside. The casket was raised up and placed in a hearse. Van got in with the driver, and they set out for Albany, New York. DeLaughter and Crisco followed in another car.
DeLaughter had arranged for the autopsy to be performed by Dr. Michael Baden, New York State’s chief pathologist. Baden was probably the best-known and most respected forensic expert in the country. He specialized in old cases. He had reviewed the autopsy reports of both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., for the House assassinations investigation in the late 1970s. Baden would soon be heading to Russia to examine what were said to be the bones of Czar Nicholas II and his family to help solve one of the century’s great murder mysteries. DeLaughter wanted someone with Baden’s credentials to do this autopsy and testify at the trial. He wanted the historic weight of Baden’s resume. And Baden, who was a very expensive expert witness, had volunteered to do the work for free.
The somber little convoy arrived at the Albany medical center before dark. DeLaughter and Crisco finally had a chance to talk to Van. Like Myrlie, Van was warm and friendly and put them at ease.
The coffin was opened the next morning. Since they had no idea whether the body would be dust and bones, or whatever, Van stayed outside the room. Crisco recorded the procedure with a camcorder as Baden pried open the box. Everyone in the room gasped. Evers’s body was perfectly preserved. His burial suit was still neat and dry; his face was only slightly altered from dehydration, as if he had been dusted with a thin coat of ashes. Medgar Evers looked as if he were sleeping, certainly not like someone who had been dead for almost thirty years.
Baden said he had never seen anything like it. Crisco remembered a feeling of awe in the room, as if they had stepped back from 1991 and were again at the wake in 1963. DeLaughter slipped out of the room and brought in Van. Then DeLaughter, Crisco, and Baden withdrew for a while to give Van a chance to be alone with his father.
Crisco, the homicide cop who had seen just about everything you need to see in this life, recalls that he was “moved” by the moment. It was emotional, almost spiritual.
After Van was finished, the autopsy team removed the clothing and opened up the body. Crisco took pictures as Baden prepared for X rays. No X rays had been taken back in 1963. Forensic science was a lot more sophisticated now. When the chest X rays were developed, Baden slapped them on a light screen, and everyone got the second surprise of the day. Although the part of the bullet that had passed through Evers’s body was still missing, the X ray showed that fragments of that bullet remained in his chest. Enough to present as evidence.
24
The Statue
All the others, where are they now? The ones who didn’t have patience, they lost their minds, or disappeared. I saved part of myself, always held something in reserve. I didn’t give it all away while the others did. That’s why I’m still here.
— Charles Evers, 1991
Charles Evers was bankrupt and divorced, and the IRS was still chasing his tail, trying to collect back taxes. He had lost another race for mayor of Fayette, and he was living in an apartment behind the radio station, WMPR, just off the Tougaloo campus. His job was general manager of the nonprofit blues and gospel and talk station. He wasn’t allowed to own anything, at least not on paper, until the IRS and his many creditors were satisfied.
His office at WMPR was a shrine to his better days: There were pictures of Evers with every Republican president from Nixon to Bush. There were photos from his campaigns and pictures of him with Bobby Kennedy, famous pictures of Kennedy riding in an open convertible through an ocean of people, all of them reaching out to him and him reaching back. Evers’s dark, serious face is in the foreground, along with those of Rosie Grier and Jim Brown, Kennedy’s unofficial bodyguards. Evers was walking behind Kennedy the night he was killed in Los Angeles. After that Evers shut down his heart.
He kept mementos of everyone who had mattered to him. There was an Asian sculpture in one corner. He said it reminded him of the Philippines and Felicia, his one true love. There was a picture of James and Jessie Evers, seated in their clean parlor, and a publicity shot of B. B. King. If you asked, Evers would tell you that B.B. was his best friend. “But we’re not too close,” he’d say.
Above and behind him, dominating the room, was a large oil painting of Medgar Evers seated at his desk, looking over Charles’s shoulder. “I’ll never let anyone get close to me again,” he said.
By the fall of 1991, he had stopped talking about “the case.” Myrlie Evers, for one, had told him to keep out of it. But that wouldn’t be enough to quiet him if he wanted to speak. He seemed pained by the whole thing, too weary to hope for a conviction.
He was spending more and more time down in Jefferson County, because he was running for office again, this time for chancery clerk. Evers would tell you that he was campaigning out of a sense of obligation to “his people.” He was old and should be retiring, but “the people” had asked him to run and to fix the place up.
It was true that Jefferson County was h
aving hard times. The two factories Evers had enticed to open there had closed and moved to Mexico. The roads were full of potholes. The swimming pool at the Medgar Evers Community Center in Fayette was cracked, with a foot of green slime festering on the bottom. The lawns were unmowed. The courthouse and jail had burned years ago and had not been rebuilt.
Skeptics said that Evers was running for chancery clerk because that was where the money was. He would be in charge of the county payrolls and get a percentage of every contract filed in his office. Some chancery clerks made more money than the governor. Others said that Evers just lived to run. He needed the action.
And so on a balmy autumn day in downtown Fayette, Evers kicked off his tenth campaign for office.
“Bro’ Willie!” Evers called.
“Okay,” a voice squawked on the CB radio.
“You be on the end, and I be on the front!”
“Ten four.”
“Okay. We gone,” Evers said.
It was about ten thirty in the morning. It would be eleven before the motorcade set off. Everyone had to get gassed up at Mazique’s, had to get posters, had to find each other. Evers drove his Ford van around the Fayette Plaza, home of the Dude Burger and Bill’s Discount Store, waiting for Willie, his security man, to check in again.
“Politics is never organized,” he explained to a passenger. “You just go ’round in circles.”
Finally they were off, crawling out of town at twenty-five miles an hour, the strictly enforced speed limit. Cars and pickups bobbed along the bumpy, potholed macadam like slow-moving barges on a choppy current.
The Ghosts of Mississippi Page 33