The Ghosts of Mississippi (23 page)

“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, asked 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.

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 or 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.

For instance, the prosecution again called Herbert Speight, one of the cabdrivers who had identified Beckwith as the man who asked him for directions to Evers’s house days before the murder. At the second go-around Speight suddenly couldn’t be positive the man was Beckwith. He now said on the stand that he “couldn’t swear to it.”

“Have you been threatened in any way?” Waller asked him.

“Yes, sir.”

“Since you testified before, have you been assaulted?”

The defense successfully objected to this line of questioning. Later, during noon recess, Waller told reporters that Speight “got the hell beat out of him” and had received threats since his first testimony.

That afternoon Lee Swilley, the other cabbie, took the stand and more or less stuck to his story. In cross-examination Hardy Lott asked him whether he told a coworker that he wasn’t going to testify because he was not going to lie. He denied it. Lott asked him if he was mad because he wasn’t paid for his testimony. He denied that too. The defense later produced that coworker, Sam Warren, as a new witness. Warren swore that Swilley, who was working at the time at the state mental hospital, had told Warren that he wasn’t going to “tell ’nary ’nother lie.”

Another new twist in this second trial was the defense’s attempt to discredit a key witness who could place Beckwith near the crime scene on the night of the murder. Hardy Lott produced three witnesses to dispute Barbara Ann Holder’s testimony that she saw a white Valiant at Joe’s Drive In at 11:45 p.m. on June 11. John Turner, the owner of a redneck nightclub, the Club Kathryn, testified that Holder was definitely at his establishment, just up Delta Drive from Joe’s, at the time she said she was at the drive-in. He remembered the date, he said, because he was raided by the police and arrested that night for selling beer after hours. The raid was at 12:10 a.m. Turner said Barbara Holder was there and she had been there all night. Two of his employees backed up his story.

Martha Jean O’Brien, the young carhop, also testified that she couldn’t remember seeing Holder at Joe’s Drive In on the night of June 11.

If things were looking bad for Bill Waller after this testimony, they got worse when the defense called a surprise witness named James Hobby. He was a thirty-seven-year-old truck driver from Memphis, Tennessee, who had been living in Jackson in June 1963. Hobby testified that he owned a 1960 white Valiant and had been at Joe’s Drive In between 12:10 and 12:30 a.m. the morning of Medgar Evers’s murder. Hobby, who was the same height and build as Beckwith, said that he had gone to the rest room at Joe’s and then ordered a cup of coffee. He had been on his way to work, he said. He also said that he had been in the neighborhood in his Valiant that weekend, watching drag races.

To Waller’s relief Beckwith again took the stand on the eighth day of the trial. This time Beckwith chose a more casual look: a striped sports jacket and gray tie. He fidgeted in his chair and pulled at his face, but he calmly answered Hardy Lott’s questions, disputing each of the state’s witnesses in turn. For the first time he gave an account of what he was doing on the night of the murder. He said he had dinner at about 7:00 p.m. in Greenwood, and then he went home to his house on George Street. It was so hot he couldn’t get to sleep.

“I got up, put on my clothes and drove around some,” he said. “I thought I’d get a bottle of beer.”

Waller’s cross-examination went about the same as before. This time he felt that Beckwith did a better job for himself. Somebody obviously had told him to shut his mouth. He didn’t run on as much as the first time. Still there were moments.

Waller produced another letter that Beckwith had written during his first trial — even though he knew all his mail could be used against him. “We shall soon engage the enemy in mortal combat…. We will surely win… combat will always bring a few casualties,” the letter read. Waller asked Beckwith what he meant by “mortal combat.”

“What it means to you, it wouldn’t mean to me,” Beckwith snapped. Waller combed through Beckwith’s story about finding his Enfield missing right before Evers’s murder. “Did you or did you not report it missing?” he asked.

“I don’t have any recollection of reporting it or not reporting it.”

Waller hadn’t been able to make this point in the first trial.

Waller had been making an effort to stay out of Beckwith’s reach. He didn’t want to be ambushed with any cigars. But as Waller closed in to show Beckwith a picture of the car the state said was used by the killer, Beckwith patted him on the shoulder. Waller jumped back as if he had been stuck with a cattle prod. Beckwith grinned, saying, “I’ll say anything you want me to about that car, Mr. Waller.”

Hardy Lott and his team had a more direct closing argument this time: the theme was that Beckwith had been framed. He was the victim of a plot to make it look like he had killed Evers. Someone must have planted that gun in the bushes. And besides how could you hear the testimony of three fine alibi witnesses and not have a reasonable doubt?

The jury began deliberation just after noon on April 15. More than two hundred spectators remained in the courtroom, waiting. Beckwith sat with his lawyers, chatting softly.

Again the jury had four choices: innocent, guilty as charged, guilty as charged with life sentence as punishment, guilty as charged but with no agreement on punishment.

By midday of the seventeenth, they reported they were deadlocked. Judge Hendrick declared another mistrial. This time the vote was eight to four in favor of acquittal.

Bill Waller could have asked for a third trial date. The law would allow it, but another trial seemed pointless. Waller felt he had presented the best case he could. He had made the most of the evidence he had, but he apparently needed more to get a conviction. So when Judge Hendrick set bond for Beckwith at ten thousand dollars, the D.A. did not object.

Beckwith would remain on bond until the judge ordered a new trial or until the court voided his indictment. That could take months, even years.

When Byron De La Beckwith made bail that afternoon, he was not technically a free man. He was still an accused killer, and he could be hauled back into court at any time.

Beckwith slipped out the back of the courthouse sprawled on the backseat of Sheriff Fred Pickett’s car while the huddle of newsmen waited out front. An hour later, when Beckwith’s small police convoy coasted out of the hills and down into the Delta along Highway 49, Beckwith spotted a sign that read “Welcome Home DeLa.” Another homemade banner hung from an overpass just south of Greenwood with the same slogan. Some people waved Confederate flags as he passed. At a brief meeting with reporters at the LeFlore County Courthouse that afternoon, a joyful Beckwith remarked that the sight of the signs “brought tears to my eyes.” He had been in jail for ten months.

That night Delay and his wife, Willie, ate a steak dinner, on the house, at the Hotel LeFlore, where Beckwith’s supporters had been lodging his family during Beckwith’s imprisonment.

Hardy Lott had told the press that Beckwith would not be making any statements, but that was of course not the case. The next day he discussed his plans with a UPI reporter.

“I’m not bitter against anyone,” he said. “The Beckwith family does not hold bitterness. We have been inconvenienced and aggravated but we have only been hurt financially.”

Willie added, “This thing has about wiped us out.”

The couple discussed their relationship.

“I’m as happy today as the day I married Delay,” Willie cooed. Beckwith said they were even happier than that, because “all the pleasant moments we have had have been multiplied by this incident in our lives.” (They divorced again, for the third and last time, the next year.) Meanwhile Delay was eager to get back to work, to get back to “normal.” He was going to take a couple of weeks on the Gulf Coast to do some fishing and relax.

His fertilizer job was waiting for him. He was given a new company station wagon. The little Beckwith family moved into a mobile home at the Rebel Court Trailer Park in Greenwood.

Beckwith’s friend and admirer Gordon Lackey lived just across the street. Lackey was very tall and skinny, with Elvis-black hair and eyes the color of pond water. He was in his late twenties, married, and he worked in his parents’ cafe when he wasn’t fixing and selling motorcycles or flying crop dusters over the cotton fields. Lackey used to keep a chimpanzee in the cafe, with a sign around the ape’s neck saying, “I am a man.” That was Lackey’s sense of humor. According to government reports and most other sources (except Lackey himself, who always denied it), his other job was as a kleagle, or recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan. In fact Lackey, who had been in and out of college over the years, was said to have written the White Knights’ constitution.