The Ghosts of Mississippi (31 page)

There were a lot of indiscretions. The peccadilloes of elected officials offered a limitless supply of entertainment in the capital. They were open secrets, fuel for conversation among people who loved to talk. People whispered about the prominent politician who was supposedly shot by his wife during an argument over his mistress. Or the former governor who allegedly solicited male prostitutes on Farish Street. (The prostitute who snitched on him reportedly said, “I didn’t know he was the governor! I thought he was just another legislator.”)

Peters’s office concentrated on violent felonies and avoided political prosecutions, leaving that to the state attorney general and U.S. Justice Department. His office was staffed with talented prosecutors who won their cases and made do with few resources. This conviction record helped win him elections, but it had not quieted his enemies. In the Byzantine world of Mississippi politics and rampant rumor, Peters had figured into just about every conspiracy theory of corruption and influence peddling making the rounds.

Depending on who was talking, Peters was either a power-hungry government stooge or a dope-smoking racketeer who sold protection to Mafia-types and who used the Jackson Police Department and the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize his critics. This was the view — usually whispered and sometimes printed — of some of Peters’s political rivals as well as a cabal of activist black leaders. It is interesting to note that the local klansmen and their sympathizers were equally certain that Peters was controlled by international communist banker Jews and their pawns, the FBI. They were particularly unhappy about Peters’s prosecution of a bunch of partying brownshirts who got into a shooting match with a black gunman during a racist picnic in Jackson one summer.

As with all conspiracy theories, there were enough factual elements to keep the rumors alive: the little grains of truth in the oyster of paranoia.

There had been attempts to convict Ed Peters of one thing or another over the past two decades. Back in the seventies he had been investigated by the state attorney general’s office for allegedly taking payoffs to protect a prostitution ring. Jack Anderson, the syndicated columnist, made it a national story. Peters was cleared. He had been reprimanded by the state bar for negligence for his role in a securities-fraud scandal when he was in private practice. But Ed Peters has never been found guilty of any crime, which must be a record in the state, where fifty-seven county supervisors were recently indicted on corruption charges in an FBI sting, and a federal district court judge was impeached and sent to jail for perjury.

Since what Peters’s office did best was to prosecute violent criminals and send them to prison or to the gas chamber, the D.A. was popular among law-and-order voters. This record also made him a target for anti-death penalty activists. And that is where Peters got in his worst trouble with the black community.

On May 27, 1987, a headline in the
Clarion-Ledger
read, “Hinds DA Says Race Is Factor in Jury Selection.” The article was about a federal court hearing in the case of Leo Edwards, a black man sentenced to death for murdering a clerk in a Jackson convenience-store hold-up. His lawyers argued that Edwards deserved a new trial because his rights had been violated when, in 1981, he was convicted by an all-white jury. Ed Peters had used his peremptory, or automatic, strikes to keep blacks off the Edwards jury. In fact, a study by an American University professor showed that Peters’s office used peremptory strikes to exclude 80 percent of potential black jurors in capital murder cases.

Peters was asked, under oath, why this happened, and the D.A. admitted that he favors whites over blacks for death penalty juries. The reason, he said quite candidly, was that blacks are less likely to vote for executions. As a group, Peters said, blacks have “been discriminated against, they’ve been subjected to much crueler treatment at the hands of law enforcement [and are] more likely to be against the system.”

All criminal lawyers know about this theory, and many would agree it is true. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, has ruled that you can’t strike jurors based on racial stereotypes. Peters’s admission caused a minor uproar in Jackson. It did not go over well with black leaders, many of whom were looking for a way to get rid of him anyway. There was talk that there might be an African-American challenger for Peters’s job in the next election.

The grumbling, in fact, was still going on when the
Clarion-Ledger
articles on the Beckwith jury appeared in October 1989, and the Jackson City Council voted to urge the district attorney to reopen the Evers murder case.

In the fall of 1989 there were eight assistant D.A.s working under Ed Peters and three full-time investigators. No matter how long they knew him, everyone called the D.A. “Mr. Peters” in public, the way a diplomatic staff might say “Mr. Ambassador.” An outsider would pick up right away their fierce loyalty to and respect for Peters, who was himself a spectral figure in the office. He would dart in and out at appropriate times, either to advise someone on a case or, if it was a big capital murder trial, to help out in court. His style was to give all of his A.D.A.s as much freedom to make decisions as possible. But if they screwed up, Peters would be right on them. John Davidson, a young Texan and the newest member of the staff, remembers the first time a jury of his came back with an acquittal. Peters passed Davidson in the hall and without looking at him muttered, “Loser,” and kept on walking.

There were two black lawyers on Peters’s staff, Linda Anderson and Glenda Haynes, who specialized in trying robberies and abuse cases. The most serious violent felonies were handled by Cynthia Hewes and Bobby DeLaughter, Peters’s first assistants.

Hewes was the daughter of a judge, a Tri Delt, an Ole Miss Law School graduate, a Junior Leaguer, and an utterly lethal prosecutor. On court days she wore trim suits and short skirts and tied her chestnut hair in a French twist. Her laugh carried from one end of the office to the other. The cops all loved her. In fact few people in town had anything but good things to say about her, even the defense lawyers she regularly beat up in court.

Her office door was plastered with clippings and cartoons that reflected her unusual view of the world.
The Far Side
comics and funny tabloid headlines (“Woman Sets Husband on Fire for Eating Chocolate Bunny!”) were posted right next to a prized memento: the execution order for Greg Davis, a serial killer who had preyed on old ladies.

DeLaughter stood over six feet tall, but he looked shorter, probably because he walked fast and with his head down, as if weaving through a field of unseen linebackers. DeLaughter, pronounced “dee-lawter,” had piercing dark eyes and heavy black eyebrows that almost met at the bridge of his nose. His hair was straight and of medium length. The only really remarkable feature about him was the thick, dark mustache that completely covered his upper lip. He projected the earnestness of a kid who had decided to become a prosecutor in the ninth grade and had carried a briefcase ever since.

DeLaughter’s office was right next to Hewes’s and was as sloppy and dark as hers was neat. In one corner an ancient, dried-up fish tank was a museum of mold species. An old, rusted Browning shotgun rested against another wall, the souvenir of a diving expedition in the Pearl River. Diving for evidence was one of DeLaughter’s few hobbies. His main hobby, he would tell you, was the law.

So it only made sense that a headline about jury tampering in the
Clarion-Ledger
would get his attention. He read about how the Sovereignty Commission had helped pick the jury in Byron De La Beckwith’s second murder trial. He showed the article to Peters, who shrugged and muttered something about looking into it. Then he showed it to Doc Thaggard, one of the investigators. They started talking about it in a casual way.

That’s how Thaggard remembers it all started for him, just as a curiosity. He and DeLaughter wondered how many people were still living among those who had sat on the Beckwith juries and how long it would take to find them. Thaggard was real good at finding people. It was a specialty of his, something he had been known for since he was a police detective. The other thing he was known for was his … calm. As in, one morning he called Hewes to tell her he was going to be late.

“How come, Doc?” she asked.

“Well,” he said mildly. “Last night our house burned down.”

That was Thaggard. He used that sort of patience to search for missing persons. He figured chasing down the members of a thirty-year-old jury might be a challenge.

The clerk’s office came up with a list of people who had served on the two Beckwith juries. Just names. No addresses. So Thaggard started by opening up the Jackson phone book.

By the end of October the reopening of the Evers murder case had become a political cause. The Jackson City Council had voted to urge Peters to reopen the case, and there was pressure from the County Board of Supervisors and the NAACP. On Halloween Peters announced that he was calling together a grand jury to investigate the charges of jury tampering in the second Beckwith trial.

Thaggard and DeLaughter did the investigating. Naturally Thaggard found the Beckwith jurors, dead and alive. Some still lived in Jackson, or their widows did. Others he had to track down all over the South.

Thaggard interviewed each living juror, asking them if they’d had direct contact with a Sovereignty Commission investigator, or anyone else connected with the case. Not one had. Some knew that someone had been asking friends and associates about them, but that was all.

Andy Hopkins, who had checked out the jurors for Beckwith’s defense team, was dead. So Thaggard and DeLaughter drove out to Forest, Mississippi, to talk to Erle Johnston, who had been the director of the Sovereignty Commission at the time.

Johnston was an unusual character. After he left the commission in 1968, he went into publishing and local politics. He had always considered himself a moderate in the segregation wars. He felt he had served his state well. Now retired he spent his time reaching out to his former enemies. He kept up a lively correspondence with John Salter, who had written an endorsement for Johnston’s new book about the Sovereignty Commission called
Mississippi’s Defiant Years
. Johnston also was friendly with Charles Evers and Aurelia Young. He had even been named cochair of the Committee on Preservation of Civil Rights Papers at Tougaloo, a college he had once tried to destroy for its student activism.

When Thaggard and DeLaughter visited Johnston at his pine-shaded house, he told them that he remembered giving Hopkins permission to help Beckwith’s defense. He didn’t see anything wrong with it since there had never been any personal contact with the jurors.

“It wasn’t ethical,” Johnston admitted. “But it wasn’t illegal.”

They agreed, and so did the grand jury. The eighteen-member panel concurred that there was no evidence of criminal jury tampering. The grand jury did, however, recommend that the district attorney look for another way to reopen the Evers case.

Meanwhile Myrlie Evers decided that it was time to fly to Jackson to find out what was going on. Benny Bennett got the assignment to pick her up at the airport and bring her to the district attorney’s office. Bennett was a Jackson police detective assigned to the district attorney’s office as an investigator. Because he was six-foot-two and 240 pounds and had special skills — he was an expert marksman, and a connoisseur of defensive arts — Bennett usually pulled special escort duty.

He had spent time in police intelligence, some of it semiundercover as a “Klan sympathizer” and later as a leather-jacketed, Harley-riding wanna-be Bandito (Mississippi’s version of a Hell’s Angel). Frankly Bennett looked the part. And now that he was cleaned up and shorn and squeezed into a sports jacket, he still wore a silver skull ring and carried a rattlesnake-head key chain to remind him of the old days.

Bennett was thirty-nine years old, the son of a Jackson detective who, in fact, had worked on the Beckwith investigation almost thirty years earlier. He had some old-fashioned attitudes about police work, and he was not what you would call a liberal. But if he decided to be your friend, he was your friend for life.

All Bennett knew about Myrlie Evers was that she was the widow who wanted the old murder case reopened. He wondered whether she wouldn’t be hostile, an in-your-face Angela Davis type, so he prepared himself for that. He was pleasantly surprised when she greeted him with a warm smile and a handshake. She was a good-looking woman, well dressed and friendly, and she put him at ease. Like most cops, Bennett made fast judgments about people. He liked Myrlie Evers right off.

“Miz Evers,” which is what he called her from the moment they met, and would never call her anything else, had a good sense of humor, which was another big plus. At the time, Bennett was learning to use a new weapon — a butterfly knife that flipped open like a switchblade. After he had escorted Evers to the D.A.’s office, he was walking around the hallway, snapping it open and shut, trying to get the hang of it. He rounded a corner and almost walked into Miz Evers. She just laughed and said, “Well, I knew things had gotten rough in Jackson, but I didn’t realize it had gotten
this
bad.” That really cracked him up. She had a lot of class.

Unfortunately, Evers’s first encounter with Peters was not as pleasant. She didn’t want to go into this meeting alone. She wanted advice and she wanted a witness, so she had asked her friend Morris Dees to meet her in Jackson. Dees was the cofounder and head of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama. He had made a big name for himself by suing Nazi and Klan hate groups and bankrupting them out of business. He had a memoir about to be published, and Corbin Bernsen was going to play him in a television movie.

Peters had no idea who Dees was, but Peters took an instant dislike to him. Dees reminded Peters of the bleeding-heart “death squad” lawyers who harassed him and his office just about every time they tried a capital murder case. The Southern Poverty Law Center sounded like one of those outfits.