The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  Next up was Kenneth Adcock, who had walked out of the courtroom the last time as a seventeen-year-old boy and reentered as a forty-seven-year-old man. He was tall and rangy and wore a bright orange shirt and blue pants.

  Adcock told the court how he had been walking with Betty Jean Coley on the night of June 11, 1963, and how just after midnight they heard a loud boom right behind them. There was a lady screaming and then the sound of someone running in the bushes.

  Coxwell had some questions for this witness. Had Adcock seen anyone running? He had not. Had he heard a car start up? No, he hadn’t.

  Betty Jean Coley was dead, but Bobby DeLaughter wanted her to testify from the grave. He asked that her testimony be read from the transcripts of the first trial in 1964.

  Naturally there was a legal skirmish over this issue. Coxwell and Kitchens argued that introducing old testimony was prejudicial to their client. It denied him due process, since the rules had changed in thirty years. They pointed out that Beckwith’s lawyers hadn’t had access to the police reports that were now provided under modern discovery rules. There was no way they could cross-examine the witness as effectively in 1964 as they could now.

  DeLaughter argued that the procedure had been allowed in earlier criminal cases in Mississippi. There was no reason to disallow it now.

  Judge Hilburn had apparently thought this one over already because he quickly denied the defense motion. Betty Jean Coley was permitted to testify through the voice of Mary Lynn Underwood, a bright, rosy-cheeked legal secretary in the D.A.’s office.

  Underwood read the part with such feeling that she might have been trying out for a community theater production of the Beckwith trial. Merrida Coxwell added to the illusion by cross-examining her, each reading their part from the decades-old transcript.

  When the state called retired detective John Chamblee to describe the crime scene, the defense had its first real opportunity to bring out the inconsistencies in the old police reports. Chamblee was tall and balding. He recounted his career for the court: a police officer for twenty-two years, then arson investigator for the state; he’d retired three years earlier.

  O. M. Luke was too weak to testify, and Fred Sanders was in bed with a slipped disk. DeLaughter needed Chamblee to set the scene for the investigation and to testify that a bullet had been recovered from the kitchen counter. Chamblee also had seized Beckwith’s car from a lot in Greenville after the arrest in 1963. He recalled seeing a Shriners emblem in the car.

  Jim Kitchens rose to cross-examine Chamblee. “Is it at all difficult for you to remember?” Kitchens asked the old detective.

  “I wish I could remember all of it,” he said

  “There’s more that you don’t remember than do?”

  “Yes.”

  Kitchens asked him if he remembered that he had worked in 1972 as a probation officer in the district where Kitchens had been D.A. Chamblee laughed and said that was right. He’d forgotten to mention it. Kitchens made the point that it was hard to remember what happened twenty years ago, let alone thirty.

  In his cross-examination Kitchens was able to make a number of points: Were there many suspects in the police reports? Yes. Have some of those written reports been lost? Yes again.

  As he went along, Kitchens was able to insert some of those maddening, confusing early leads, tips, and dead ends that make a case look weaker in court. Wasn’t there a bail bondsman in Jackson who’d had a gun just like this? Hadn’t three men been seen sitting in a local hotel room with a rifle? Hadn’t there been talk in town that the police had done this murder? Did the reports talk about a Shreveport man who had been a suspect?

  Chamblee’s memory wasn’t that clear, but there it all was in the stack of police reports in Kitchens’s hand.

  Did you get a report of three men running by the house on Guynes Street? Kitchens got Chamblee to say that there had been a crowd of twenty-five to thirty bystanders around the Evers home when the detectives arrived. The home had not yet been roped off as a crime scene, although some uniformed officers had been deployed around the house. The gun was found in a two-acre lot of overgrown weeds more than two hundred yards from the house. The bullet that was found in the house could never be positively matched to that gun.

  “Did it ever occur to you,” Kitchens asked, “that the person who killed Mr. Evers had not fired that rifle?”

  “No,” Chamblee replied, “When you find evidence of that nature you go with it until you find something else.”

  While the job of a prosecutor is to create a logical scenario for the commission of a crime, the role of the defense attorney is to create confusion. He has to show the jury that a crime didn’t necessarily happen a certain way, that there were all sorts of other characters lurking around and motives for the murder, and that the police didn’t do as thorough a job as they say they did. Confusion leads to doubt, and doubt wins an acquittal, or at least a hung jury.

  After nearly an hour of watching Jim Kitchens wave around sheets of paper and an old, not very spry detective rub his hands together trying to remember details from thirty years ago, the jury seemed adequately confused. How much doubt this created remained to be seen.

  On Friday morning, January 28, Myrlie Evers took her place in the front row of seats, near the door and directly in front of the jury box. Nan Evers, Charles’s ex-wife, sat by her side. The sheriff had assigned Myrlie two bodyguards, two veteran black officers, and they were always nearby.

  On the other side of the aisle was Beckwith’s entourage, an assortment of relatives and right-wing groupies. There was Thelma; Kim McGeoy; Little Delay and his teenage son, Delay VIII; a young man who published a hate sheet in northern Mississippi; and a smattering of curious old Kluckers.

  The space behind the bar was crowded with security men, state VIPs, and various observers from the D.A.’s office. Benny Bennett, stuffed into a suit and tie and snakeskin boots, sat within easy reach of Judge Hilburn. He glowered quietly at the spectator gallery while he slowly kneaded a ball of plastic putty in his very large hand. From time to time Cynthia Speetjens, or Linda Anderson, or whoever wasn’t in court at the moment would slip in the back door and sit with Bennett to watch the proceedings.

  There were motions to deal with before the jury came in. The prosecution was asking to remove Beverly Perkins, one of the alternate jurors, after a Clarion-Ledger article suggested that her husband might be in the Klan. When the reporter, Grace Simmons, called the woman’s husband and asked whether he was a Klansman, he seemed peeved.

  “Yeah, I knew I was accused of being one,” she quoted him as saying. “I ain’t going to tell you yes or no…. I don’t know whether you are black, white, yellow, green or purple. But it ain’t no different. A white man’s got the same right to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan as a colored man being a member of the NAACP.”

  This was alarming news to DeLaughter and Peters. They had always worried about getting a ringer on the jury. But they still didn’t have proof that the man was in the Klan. If he was, the juror could be disqualified for lying to the court because one of Peters’s questions to everyone had been, “Do you know anyone who is a member of the Klan?” What made things worse was that, unknown to any reporters, one of the elderly jurors had high blood pressure that was acting up. She was close to quitting the panel, and that would put the alternate in the jury box.

  Judge Hilburn decided to delay any decision on the issue while the matter was investigated. For now the woman could stay. (There was never any evidence that the Klan story was true or that the juror lied.)

  Doc Thaggard took retired detective O.M. Luke’s part on the stand. He read from the transcript in his deep Neshoba County monotone, sounding exactly like, well, a homicide detective. With Bobby DeLaughter playing Bill Waller, Doc answered the questions where Luke had described finding the rifle stuffed into the honeysuckle vines the morning after the murder.

  Later former captain Ralph Hargrove would appear as himself, now snowy-haired and walk
ing with a slight limp, but sharp and lucid. He described lifting the fingerprint from the scope and later matching it with the print of Beckwith’s right index finger. There was no talk this time about how “fresh” the print had seemed to Hargrove. Although Hargrove was an experienced and thorough investigator, in these days of DNA testing and computer reconstructions, the impressions of a local cop with a matchbook degree in fingerprint identification would not be too helpful to the state.

  Times had changed, and that was never any clearer than when Kitchens, in his cross-examination of Hargrove, made one mild attempt to discredit Medgar Evers. He asked Hargrove whether he had ever fingerprinted Evers, and Hargrove said yes, for disturbing the peace.

  You could actually hear the bodies stiffen in the courtroom, along with the outraged inhalation of breath. Kitchens quickly withdrew from this tactic, although he did attempt to explain, after the theatrical objections of Peters, that he was just trying to show that Beckwith had not been alone in his stance to uphold segregation, that others, even policemen, had felt the same way. It was Kitchens’s only attempt to blame the victim, and it backfired.

  It was midmorning when a slender, well-dressed man with trim brown hair and a neat mustache took the stand.

  “State your name please,” Bobby DeLaughter said.

  “Thorn McIntyre.”

  Beckwith stared intently at his old accuser, but McIntyre barely gave him a glance.

  Of all the free-flowing hatreds and resentments swirling around this case, probably more invective was flung in the direction of McIntyre than at any other party. If anyone talked to Beckwith’s friends in Greenwood, and even some who were not his friends, he or she was likely to hear what a low-down dirty deed McIntyre had done selling out another white man for the reward money, and how the good people of Greenwood had shunned young Thorn and driven him out of Mississippi. Almost none of this was true. Since the reward had never been paid, McIntyre never collected a dime. He hadn’t been hounded out of town. He stayed on in Greenwood until 1972, until a car wreck, a divorce, and a new business strategy had pointed him in the direction of Alabama, and he started a new life there.

  Now he was fifty-six years old and a successful real estate developer in Montgomery. If he was unhappy about having to go through another trial, he kept it to himself.

  He sat stoically in the witness box and repeated his story while a number of white people who wished him ill glared at him from the spectator pews.

  McIntyre said that he had traded the barrel and action of an Enfield rifle to Beckwith back in 1960.

  DeLaughter picked up the rifle from under the defense table and walked it over to McIntyre. Was this the gun? Thorn had a good look and pronounced it almost identical to the one he had once owned. DeLaughter took the weapon back and held it up in front of the jury.

  Beckwith was hyperalert. Throughout the trial, whenever the word “gun” was mentioned, Beckwith’s head would shoot up like a napping dog hearing the word “bone.” He leaned forward for a better look at the long-missing rifle.

  The dull black gun metal of the long barrel and scope and the burnished mahogany stock seemed to suck all the light out of that corner of the room. The rifle radiated menace, just as it had thirty years ago. Bobby offered it to the first juror, who held it for a second and then passed it on, as if it were burning his hands. The second juror, a thirty-year-old unemployed black man named Frank Boyce, wouldn’t even touch the gun. It was passed over him to the next man in the row. Most of the jurors looked as if they knew how to handle a rifle, and they examined it curiously. A seventy-year-old black minister named Elvage Fondren spent several minutes scrutinizing the weapon, running his hand over the smooth stock, holding the barrel to the light to read the serial number himself.

  In cross-examination Kitchens asked McIntyre to look at the rifle. Weren’t the serial numbers etched into a thin metal plate attached to the barrel below the scope? McIntyre said they were. Since Enfield parts are interchangeable, could those serial numbers on the receiver plate have come from a different rifle? Thorn said he supposed so.

  When McIntyre stepped down from the stand, the rifle was still in plain view, resting heavily and upright against the dark wooden witness stand directly in front of the jury.

  The fifth floor of the courthouse was humming like a hive during the two-hour lunch break that day. Sheriffs deputies stood guard by the elevator to eject unwelcome visitors. The long table in the conference room was laid out with plates of hamburgers and cold cuts and slices of homemade layer cake for the dozens of witnesses, law officers, and inconvenienced A.D.A.s.

  Bobby DeLaughter wolfed down a sandwich then wandered back to Cynthia’s office. He looked tired and pale, like a man who was fighting a bad cold and wasn’t getting any sleep. All week long faxes, letters, and phone calls had been coming in to the D.A.’s office, most of them directed at him, some of them cursing him for persecuting an old man, some of them accusing him of wasting the taxpayer’s money to advance his career.

  Most alarming was a letter from a ranking legislator who had a direct effect on the prosecutor’s budget. He let them know what a big mistake they were making in pursuing this prosecution and that there would be no safety net under them when they fell. The legislator told Peters not to bother replying to the letter; he didn’t want to hear from him.

  It made Bobby laugh when people accused him and Ed Peters of scoring political points by trying Beckwith. If anything, the trial was making dogmeat out of his political future, such as it was. Bobby flopped down in the chair across from Cynthia’s desk.

  She looked at him with a wry smile. “It’s gonna be a tidal wave,” she said.

  “You think so?” Bobby said with a sigh. “I have no idea how it’s going. I’ve been too busy to watch the jury.”

  “Tidal wave,” she said again, and Bobby seemed happier.

  Other news that day also made him happy, even hopeful. It was something that might turn out to be another of those out-of-the-blue miracles that this case had been built on.

  The trial had been getting a decent amount of attention from the national news media. It might not have been as exciting as the story of Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding, two Olympic skating rivals who were dominating the news these days, but the opening of the trial had put the Beckwith case near the top of every CNN news cycle.

  The spot was still running every half hour on Friday morning when a communications manager in Chicago named Mark Reiley came down with the flu and called in sick. There was nothing for him to do but lie on the couch and flip on the tube. When he saw the familiar face on the TV screen, he thought about it for a while, then called information and got the number for the D.A.’s office in Jackson, Mississippi.

  Jeanie Stewart took the call from Mark Reiley. The phone had been ringing off the hook for weeks now with cranks and complainers and Yankee reporters demanding all kinds of things she wasn’t about to write down on those pink message slips that were spilling all over her desk. But there was something about Reiley’s voice that told her she had better take this one seriously, copy down the number in Chicago carefully, and see that Crisco got the message right away. It wasn’t every day, after all, that someone called saying they had new evidence.

  Bobby was still talking to Cynthia just after noon when Ed Peters and Charlie Crisco poked their heads in the doorway. DeLaughter stood up to join them.

  “Well, should we fly this guy down from Chicago?” Peters asked, smiling. “Or do you think he’s hallucinating?”

  Friday afternoon was cold and gloomy, the perfect setting for the testimony of ghosts.

  John Davidson felt strange when he sat in the witness box and read the words of the long-dead Duck Goza. Davidson was a handsome young Texan, the newest addition to the D.A.’s office, and, like all trial lawyers, he enjoyed any opportunity to be in court. But this felt eerie, not quite right.

  Davidson read Goza’s version of how he had traded Beckwith a Golden Hawk scope one evening in
May 1963 and that the scope was the one attached to the Enfield rifle in evidence.

  The whole afternoon was taken up with a parade of “dead” witnesses, who were called back mainly to establish the chain of custody of the long-ago evidence. Davidson read the testimony of Francis Finley, the late FBI agent who had carried the rifle and bullet to Washington for testing. Crisco read the part of Sam Virden, another agent who had handled the evidence.

  Then Tommy Mayfield took the stand.

  Mayfield also was an A.D.A. His job was prosecuting narcotics cases, but his avocation was clearly the stage. He was an accomplished blue-grass bassist, and he would sometimes gig around Jackson with some friends. He was known around the office as a storyteller and a mimic and a collector of obscure facts and figures. This was his moment.

  Tommy started off reading the testimony of J. R. Gilfoy, the late Hinds County sheriff and a man Mayfield had known personally. Tommy captured the flinty accent just right.

  Then came his reading of Herbert Speight, the cabdriver who had testified that Beckwith had asked him where he could find the house of Medgar Evers. Mayfield found the right accent for the country boy turned cabbie. He seemed not so much to be reading Speight’s words as to be channeling him.

  Mayfield led the jury through the scene at the Trailways station in Jackson and on through the lineup in which Speight had picked out Beckwith. But Tommy’s finest moments came when Merrida Coxwell read Stanny Sanders’s cross-examination of Speight. The defense attorney had grilled the petulant cabbie about how his story had changed since the defense team had interviewed him in his rooming house.

  “We asked you, wondered why you had been subpoenaed, didn’t we?” asked Coxwell, being Sanders.

  “You sure did,” snapped Mayfield being Speight.

  “And you said you didn’t know, you guessed it was because you had seen this man that you believed or identified to be Mr. Beckwith about a week before Evers was shot?”