From Midnight to Guntown

by Hailman, John

  Dale Killinger plugged away, disproving the rumors that all sorts of shadowy white men had participated. Some of them did not even exist. He established that there was no Ku Klux Klan involvement. Especially tricky was the obvious involvement of certain black males who allegedly pointed out to Bryant and Milam the house of Preacher Moses Wright where Till was staying, as well as riding with the killers while they transported Till from place to place, helped dispose of Till’s clothing, and washed Till’s blood out of Milam’s truck after it was over. Most of them turned out to be deceased, and a couple had severe mental problems from age and the stress of living with those terrible memories.

  From our own office came my biggest surprise. One day, AUSA John Marshall Alexander came to my office, as he often did. I assumed he wanted to talk about a case we’d been working on together. John Marshall always had a dry sense of humor. A native of Cleveland, a graduate of Delta State, and the son of respected state senator William Alexander, John Marshall had a keen appreciation for the subtleties of reopening a case like Emmett Till. He started off slowly: “Well, John, I know you’ve got to be under a lot of pressure about this Till matter. I’m glad we’ve got Joyce Chiles as DA. She has a lot of credibility with blacks and whites alike.” I agreed. “And even if you can’t find anyone alive to prosecute, at least we can say we convicted Roy Bryant and sent him to the pen.”

  I didn’t understand. “Convicted Bryant? What are you talking about?” He chuckled. “Well, you assigned me the food stamp fraud cases back in the 1980s, and one of them was on Roy Bryant, who was buying food stamps at his store for fifty cents on the dollar.” I didn’t remember that. “We handled it just like any other case. Judge Keady gave him probation the first time.” “The first time?” I asked. “Yeah, then we caught him again. Judge Davidson gave him two years in the federal pen. That outstanding Department of Agriculture undercover agent Dave Thomas caught him cold on tape. But the press never picked up on who Bryant was.” I had my secretary pull the files and there he was, Roy Bryant, convicted, first in 1984 and again in 1988. He pled guilty both times. When sentenced, he asked Judge Davidson for extra time to report. Denied. He asked the judge to reconsider his sentence. Denied. He asked two more times for his sentence to be reduced. Denied. Denied. Bryant eventually died of cancer in 1994. That was our first surprise.

  The new investigation kept moving forward. In October 2004, we had a long conference call on our progress with the new head of the Civil Rights Division, Wan Kim, a gung-ho Korean American ex-soldier with degrees from Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago Law School. We discussed all our new facts, from where the body was thrown into the Tallahatchie (near Swan Lake, where Milam squirrel-hunted) to whether and why Carolyn Bryant had sworn that her sister-in-law, Juanita Milam, was present in the store in Money at the time of the incident that provoked the murder. Juanita swore she was not. We discussed most of all how cruelly ironic it would be to prosecute one or more of the elderly black men who, even if they were still alive, had helped Bryant and Milam only under severe duress. Everyone agreed the investigation was going well by staying out of the press, which might have caused witnesses and informants to clam up. My friend Charles Overby of the Freedom Forum and First Amendment Center would probably be appalled, but that’s how it was.

  The next time we discussed the case in detail with Washington was in August 2005. We met in the Main Justice Building, across the street from the FBI, in the very office occupied for many years by J. Edgar Hoover himself. Later it was the office of Mark Felt, the FBI agent who as “Deep Throat” had broken the Watergate story to the Washington Post. The agents regaled us with war stories about how Hoover had allowed only one chair in the office—his own—which forced visitors to stand at all times in his presence. It no doubt helped keep visits short.

  Dale Killinger had made lots of progress. We now knew that the state trial had been held in the wrong county. The point in the Tallahatchie River where the body was found was actually in Leflore County, not Tallahatchie. The white teenager who found it, somewhat eerily, still fishes there because it is such a good, deep fishing hole. The gin fan that had hung from Emmett Till’s neck was missing, but Dale had somehow retrieved Big Milam’s military .45 revolver. We also learned exactly how Till died: Milam shot him in the head from point-blank range using a pellet-filled shotgun shell rather than a bullet. Called by some an “emergency load,” these shells were issued in World War II to pilots flying over enemy territory to use in escaping capture by spraying their pursuers with steel pellets rather than single bullets. The modern equivalent is still around. Called “rat shot” it is used in barns and stockyards on the same theory. Shells are easy to find since a .410 shotgun shell will fit in a .45. We also learned for certain where the killing took place, in a barn on the old Shurden Plantation, which was managed back then by Leslie Milam, brother of J. W. “Big” Milam. According to believable witnesses, J. W. asked Leslie to participate, but he refused, saying they needed to “take that boy back where you got him.” Leslie Milam, like J. W. and Roy Bryant, was long since deceased.

  We met again in Washington in December 2005, this time for three days of detailed discussions of the evidence and all remaining factual and legal issues. Dale and his team had done a marvelously thorough job. Finally, in December 2006, our local team met in Joyce Chiles’s office at the courthouse in Greenwood. Assistant state attorney general Charlie Maris joined us. An experienced appellate prosecutor, Charlie knew state law better than anyone. He resolved for us most outstanding Mississippi law questions now that Dale had all the facts we were going to get. First of all, the best state charge we would have on Carolyn Bryant was that she aided the kidnapping by personally identifying Emmett Till as the one who wolf-whistled or did the talking at the store in Money. But that charge would not stick. In 1955, the Mississippi statute of limitations on kidnapping was an unbelievably short two years. Even worse, under Mississippi law in 1955 there was no felony-murder law, meaning that we could not even prosecute her for helping cause Till’s murder by aiding in the kidnapping that resulted in his death.

  The trial transcript itself even went against us on the kidnap and felony/murder points. It showed that Moses Wright did not say at trial that the voice out in the truck who identified Emmett Till was a woman’s voice, but just a “light” voice. Simeon Wright confirmed this in his fine recent book Simeon’s Story (Chicago, 2010), saying Medgar Evers, who was helping Mr. Wright prepare, told him not to say that the person in the truck was Carolyn Bryant, but only what he knew for sure. Mr. Wright thought it was her, but could not be totally positive even that the voice was that of a woman. And she was not on trial even though Leflore County sheriff George Smith had had a warrant issued for her arrest for kidnapping. For one reason or another the warrant was never served. Otherwise, the woman known in the national press as the “Crossroads Marilyn Monroe,” might have faced trial, but probably with the same result given the attitudes of the times. Today I wonder: If Moses Wright had testified that the voice was that of Carolyn Bryant, whom he knew from weekly visits to her store, I feel we would have prosecuted.

  On Wednesday, February 21, 2007, Joyce Chiles and Hallie Gail Bridges presented the new Till case to a Leflore County grand jury composed of thirteen black and seven white citizens of Leflore County. The state grand jury secrecy rule prevented discussion of it for six months, but after a long February 27 conference call between our team and FBI Director Bob Mueller and Civil Rights Division Chief Wan Kim, U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales announced the end of the Till case at a press conference that day. Mr. Gonzales first announced several indictments that had been returned in other cold cases, then noted briefly that “not every case can be resolved.”15 At that time all he could say was that the official public records of the Leflore County grand jury report showed no indictments for cases from 1955, and thereupon Gonzales quietly pronounced the end of our Emmett Till investigation.

  We were sorely disappointed. The cl
osure we’d hoped for did not come for the American public. The failure of the grand jury to indict was reported on the front page of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger but only on inner pages of the New York Times and USA Today.16 We were certainly not looking for publicity for what would be seen as our “loss,” but we wanted resolution. In another lengthy telephone conference call with Director Mueller and AAG Kim, they had strongly supported us in our insistence that the Till family be told first, before the public. Joyce Chiles and Dale Killinger flew to Chicago and personally explained the case to Emmett Till’s closest living relatives, including Simeon Wright and Wheeler Parker Jr., both of whom were at the store and in Moses Wright’s house when Till was kidnapped.

  In response to a FOIA request from the Associated Press, a 135-page summary of the twenty-eight-volume, 8,000+-page case report was released. Sadly, by the time the FOIA units finished deleting “sensitive” materials like names, “redacting it like crazy,” Dale’s outstanding report was a mere shadow of its robust former self but still has interesting details of many kinds.17 It may be found online in a somewhat longer 464-page summary at the FBI website, which does include at least a complete copy of the trial transcript.

  In 2010 the new Meek School of Journalism at Ole Miss, led by new Journalism Dean Will Norton, completed its own project on the case, bringing principals like Wheeler Parker and Simeon Wright to the university and to the crime scenes in the case. Funds are now being raised for various Till memorials in the Delta, including the remains of the ruined Bryant store in Money. The Moses Wright home, a nice four-bedroom house with screened porch which was occupied by whites both before and after the Wrights lived there, has since unfortunately been totally destroyed by a tornado, perhaps fittingly not unlike the storm that swept away the system of segregation that Emmett Till helped destroy by refusing, even on pain of death, to admit to Milam and Bryant that he was inferior to them because of his race.

  What We Learned That Made the Case Worth Reopening

  We learned new insights into the players. From old file pictures, Carolyn Bryant was indeed as beautiful as they said back then and had won two beauty contests, (not easy in Mississippi), before dropping out of school to marry Roy Bryant. We were reminded of the propensity of Mississippians to give colorful names to their towns, such as Money, Swan Lake, Sidon, Quito, Inverness, Pentecost, Sunnyside, and Schlater (pronounced “slaughter”). Other towns in the circle of the Till case are now known, thankfully, for their more distinguished former residents, such as Morgan Freeman of Charleston, B.B. King of Indianola, and Archie Manning from Drew.

  We also learned, to our surprise, that in 1955 the first reaction to the killing of Emmett Till by whites across the state was outrage. Governor Hugh White and the state’s leading newspapers strongly denounced it, and even the white segregationist Citizens Council, a far more powerful force in the state than the Klan ever was, said it was “deplorable,” facts Dale Killinger turned up in his investigation and which I recall reading but which are no longer available to me. With the always-correct benefit of hindsight, some can now call those reactions mere paternalism, but to me they were both human and humane.

  Even more surprising to me was that Leflore County sheriff George Smith immediately arrested Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam and obtained confessions from both men to the kidnapping of Emmett Till, even though they denied killing him. Sheriff Smith also obtained an arrest warrant for Carolyn Bryant for aiding Milam and Bryant by identifying Emmett Till as “The one who did the talking at Money.” Somewhere in the vast FBI files that I read weekly for months at a special office in Oxford dedicated to the Till case is a picture of Bryant and Milam chained to a tree in front of a courthouse. Given the mood of whites at the time, it is possible they might have been convicted, at least of kidnapping, if the case had been tried in Leflore County instead of Tallahatchie.

  In my forty years of traveling the three hours from Oxford to Greenville for court, my favorite route was always down old Mississippi Highway 35. If you cross the high railroad bridge at Batesville and take a hard left on 35, it takes you straight through Tallahatchie County, where the wooded bluffs of Appalachia on the left meet the flat and treeless Delta on the right as far as the eye can see. That unique part of the Delta is strangely like one of California’s central valleys. The population of the hills to the left is mostly white; the Delta flatlands on the right are overwhelmingly black. The jury for Emmett Till’s killers was chosen, purposely, from the “hill people,” as Faulkner called them. Leflore County would have been different; it is virtually all Delta. The FBI report notes that every juror received a personal visit before trial by at least one member of the White Citizens Council. Jury tampering was and still is an active part of our culture, as I can attest from personal experience.

  According to people who were there, the change of heart—or rather, the loss of heart by the majority of white people—came with national media attention. The Brown school desegregation decision had come the previous year in 1954. White Mississippians, always highly sensitive to pressure from people they still saw as Yankees who had plundered their lands and forests for nearly a century after the Civil War, hated outside interference. Led by the worst among us, within a month white sentiment in the Till murder changed from demanding punishment for Bryant and Milam as “white trash peckerwoods” who embarrassed the state to circling the wagons against “outside agitators.” Rather than Sheriff Smith and other whites like William Faulkner who wanted to punish the cowardly killers of a fourteen-year-old visitor, the focus shifted to hostility to out-of-state civil rights leaders and in-state NAACP leaders like Medgar Evers, who played a crucial role in the trial by producing witnesses like Willie “Chicken” Reed, the eighteen-year-old who testified at trial he saw J. W. Milam at the barn where Till was murdered. Writer Willie Morris feelingly recounted that whole matter in his excellent but little-known book The Ghosts of Medgar Evers.

  Upon closer examination both Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam come off a bit differently. Roy Bryant had a twin brother named Ray. Naming twins Roy and Ray gives outsiders some image of their backgrounds. Roy Bryant was a veteran U.S. Army paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne, serving from 1950 until honorably discharged in 1953. He stood 6’ tall and weighed 190 pounds. To Mississippians, who send a larger percentage of their citizens to military careers than any other state, military service is an important factor, and John William “Big” Milam had an outstanding career. Standing 6’, 2” and weighing 220 pounds, Milam not only fought combat missions in World War II from 1941 to 1945 but received both a Purple Heart and a battlefield commission to lieutenant, signs of some trust and respect. He was a racist and a bully, but his military record gives a little different perspective on his propensity for violence.

  To those who followed the reopened Till case, the most important part of the investigation was our decision to have Emmett Till’s body exhumed. At the 1955 trial the entire defense (other than prejudice, intimidation, and jury tampering) was that the body discovered in the Tallahatchie was not that of Emmett Till. No autopsy was ever performed. The face was too decomposed from being in the river several days at the mercy of fish and turtles for even his own mother to recognize him. Till was first identified by Moses Wright only by the silver ring inscribed “L.T.” (for Louis Till) which Emmett Till had lent to Simeon Wright to wear. The ring disappeared after the trial and we never found it, but it clearly appears in pictures from the trial. The gin fan has also disappeared.

  The findings of the recent autopsy begin at page ninety-nine of the FBI report and are necessarily gruesome. Other than the damaged face, however, the body was remarkably well preserved. Emmett Till was definitely not castrated or sexually mutilated as rumored. His left leg and both wrists were fractured, the latter possibly during physical abuse, but possibly from being thrown off a Tallahatchie bridge. Given the seventy-pound gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire, it is surprising the body managed to float nine miles downstream, a testament to the p
ower of the river currents in that area. The autopsy, performed fifty years after the death, revealed numerous head wounds inflicted prior to death. The brain was missing. Most surprising of all was the presence of several small lead fragments inside the skull. They proved to be #7.5 chilled lead shot made for use in a shell fired from the Remington .45 caliber pistol of J. W. Milam. Eyewitnesses said they’d often seen Milam shoot it and that he would “shoot bumblebees out of the air with it,” meaning he probably used shotgun-type shells in the .45 on a regular basis, it being extremely difficult to hit a flying bumblebee with a single bullet.

  Comparison of dental records confirmed the body buried in Emmett Till’s grave was indeed that of Emmett Till. Mouth swabs of mitochondrial DNA from his cousin Simeon Wright correlated to that of intact muscle fiber taken from Emmett Till’s exhumed body, but only to a “42% upper bound.” We wanted more conclusive DNA proof, but there was only one way to obtain it and that meant major embarrassment to the surviving Till family members. The best DNA could only be obtained from the male line, and this would have involved exhuming the body of his father Louis Till, and when we began our investigation no one knew where his body was buried.

  Mamie Till Mobley had already revealed in her memoir the shocking fact that Louis Till, Emmett’s father, was one of a handful of U.S. GIs executed for serious crimes against civilians committed in World War II. Louis Till was convicted by court martial near the end of the war of raping two Italian women and murdering a third. Through his military contacts, Dale Killinger, himself a decorated paratrooper and sniper (and cancer survivor) who’d fought in the U.S. invasion of the island of Granada, persuaded the army to find Till’s body, which was located in an army cemetery outside Paris. After consulting with the family, we decided not to have Louis Till’s body exhumed until after the grand jury met. If they indicted anyone, we would no doubt have obtained a more conclusive DNA result for use at trial. In the end, the exhumation proved unnecessary and we avoided further embarrassment to the Till family.