The Ghosts of Mississippi (32 page)

It didn’t matter when Morris Dees, a man of considerable charm, assured Peters that his organization was prosecution-friendly and that he would help them out, making sure that the case was properly investigated and prosecuted. At least that’s how Peters interpreted the offer, and it didn’t set very well with him. Peters never blamed Myrlie Evers for what happened. He assumed she had been told bad things about him by his enemies. But the meeting with Evers and Dees started off chilly and got worse.

Peters never liked this case, just as he had said back in 1987, after an earlier move to reopen it. Peters told them that the case couldn’t be reopened, that they could never get around the speedy trial problems. It just wouldn’t stand up. The murder weapon was missing, along with all the other physical evidence and most of the court records. DeLaughter had located part of the old police report, which he carried into the meeting in a legal envelope. Peters pointed to the file: That was all they had to go on.

It seemed like so little to Evers, but she knew there was more. She had the transcript of the first trial, information she would keep to herself for the time being.

Evers informed Peters that she did not want to hear why the case could not be reopened. She wanted to hear how he was going to reopen it. Peters told her that they would keep trying to locate court documents and evidence to see if the case could be revived, but he didn’t offer her much hope. That’s how the meeting ended.

DeLaughter said very little. He just listened and watched. Afterward he and Peters talked. DeLaughter wanted to do some more research to see whether they could find a way around the speedy trial issue. As usual Peters told him that it was his bone and he could run with it.

Myrlie Evers impressed Bobby DeLaughter. She was smart and personable. DeLaughter sensed Evers was truly interested in reopening the case, but only if it could be successfully prosecuted. She didn’t seem to have a political agenda, just a desire for justice. He could relate to that. It made him want to find a way to do it.

DeLaughter felt personally offended that a state agency like the Sovereignty Commission would try to undermine a prosecution. But to him the case wasn’t about politics, or ghosts, or revenge. It was a coldblooded, back-shooting sniper ambush assassination, and there was no statute of limitation on murder.

The problem was, if the case was to be reopened, DeLaughter would need something different, and something solid. He could do a lot with evidence, but he couldn’t create it.

Bobby DeLaughter got his first taste of the law when his ninth-grade civics teacher took the class to watch an actual trial at the Hinds County Courthouse. It was a murder case, and the victim was a prominent lawyer named Millard Bush, whose wife, Peggy, had shot him in their daughter’s bedroom. She claimed it was an accident.

DeLaughter sat in the balcony of courtroom number three, entranced, while Bill Waller, who was in private practice then, defended the small blond widow. DeLaughter begged his parents to let him return all week to watch the rest of the trial. By the time the jury came back with a verdict — not guilty — DeLaughter had decided to become a prosecutor. Like a man who marries his high school sweetheart and never loves another, DeLaughter never considered doing anything with his life other than practice law.

His first afternoon at the Hinds County Courthouse provided DeLaughter with more than a career path. So many characters at the trial would play leading roles in his life, it was almost as if a tableau of his future was arranged in front of him.

The law partner of Millard Bush, the shooting victim, was Alvin Binder, who would be DeLaughter’s first boss and mentor. The defense attorney, Bill Waller, who had prosecuted Byron De La Beckwith in that very courtroom, would one day consult with DeLaughter on the most important case of his life. The presiding judge was Russel Moore, whose stepdaughter, Dixie Townsend, Bobby DeLaughter would marry. And Moore, as it turned out, held the key to a crucial piece of missing evidence in DeLaughter’s own prosecution of Beckwith.

While you might say DeLaughter was destined to inherit the Beckwith case, he was not, on the surface, the most likely candidate to drag Mississippi through its most turbulent civil rights trial of the modern era.

DeLaughter was born in Vicksburg in 1954. His mother, Billie, came from a big political family with roots in rural Issaquena County. Her uncle was Buddie Newman, Ross Barnett’s right-hand man in the state legislature. His father, Barney, was a commercial artist who worked for a newspaper. He moved the family to the capital when Bobby and his younger brother were little.

DeLaughter grew up in South Jackson’s white middle class. It was a world apart from the boycotts, demonstrations, and fairground stockades just a few miles north. Like most white boys his age, he was interested only in sports, school, family, and church, the parameters of his sheltered universe. He never heard the name Medgar Evers when he was growing up and would not hear it for many years.

DeLaughter’s first real encounter with the dramas of the civil rights movement came when his family moved to Natchez for a year. When he went home for the Christmas holidays in December of 1969, there were maybe two or three black students at his high school. When he returned to school in January, the teachers and students from black and white schools had been shuffled like a deck of cards. He now attended an integrated public school. He remembers it was strange because it was different. But the adults took it a lot harder than the kids. DeLaughter’s interests had expanded to include girls by then, but the parents and white school administrators, fearing riots, rapes, and whatever, threw a wet blanket over school activities. They would no longer allow proms, dances, or pep rallies where students could mingle socially.

The situation was the same when he came back to Wingfield High School in Jackson the next year. DeLaughter was an active and popular kid. He played varsity football even though he was too tall and skinny to do much more than get knocked around. He played basketball, joined a high school fraternity, and was sports editor of the yearbook. He was president of the honor society and the student council. He was even elected “Mr. Wingfield,” which got him a full-page picture in the
Wing- spread.
DeLaughter just couldn’t see the point of going to high school and joining all these things if you couldn’t have proms and pep rallies. So he decided to return fun to high school. Twenty years later he would still be bragging about organizing the first integrated senior prom in Wingfield’s history.

Bobby went to college at Ole Miss and graduated from its law school. By then he had married Dixie. One day his father-in-law brought him around to Al Binder’s office and recommended him for a job. Binder put him to work on legal research. Binder would later say that he’d never met anyone as talented as DeLaughter when it came to finding the law.

DeLaughter concentrated on personal injury cases. In one case involving a tractor accident he was able to find an angle nobody thought of that earned the firm a $700,000 fee. With another young and hungry lawyer named Bill Kirksey, DeLaughter helped Binder put together research for his most famous client, Wayne Williams, defendant in the Atlanta child murder case.

In 1983 Kirksey and DeLaughter left the firm, amicably, to start their own practice. They were supposed to make their money on divorce and personal injury cases, but they ended up defending accused killers, rapists, and dope dealers. They won their cases but lost their shirts in the process.

By 1987 DeLaughter had three kids and a troubled marriage. He wanted out of private practice. One afternoon during the Christmas season he stopped by the district attorney’s office on his way home. Ed Peters was the only one left in the office, so he invited DeLaughter to come in and talk. Peters remembers that DeLaughter said something about how tired he was of defending all those criminals; how it was driving him crazy.

So Peters said, “Why don’t you come over and be on the other side?” DeLaughter accepted the offer, and Peters hired him.

Bill Kirksey, who loves DeLaughter like a brother and feels as if he could just about read DeLaughter’s mind when they tried cases together, had no idea DeLaughter wanted to be a prosecutor.

DeLaughter doesn’t brag much, but his self-confidence is formidable. At the same time he is an intensely private, introverted man. Even people like Kirksey who count him among their best friends will pause from time to time, stumped by one question or another about him, and admit that they really don’t know him that well.

When DeLaughter chooses to reveal himself, it is like the sun coming from behind a cloud. Myrlie Evers, who instinctively understands the quiet in people, recognized this in DeLaughter when she first met him in Peters’s office. She liked him, and she saw past his reserve. Morris Dees liked him too. From then on her contacts were with DeLaughter instead of Peters. DeLaughter made a point of calling Evers in Los Angeles every week or so to fill her in on his progress with the case.

DeLaughter had some long conferences with Bill Waller, who was in private practice in a building across from the courthouse. While DeLaughter was putting the facts of the case together, a sergeant in the police identification unit found an envelope of old negatives while cleaning out an old filing cabinet. They turned out to be the crime scene and evidence photos from the Medgar Evers murder case. DeLaughter had them printed up. Meanwhile the FBI turned over some records of the Evers case, including blow-by-blow accounts of both trials and the names of the witnesses. Beckwith’s fingerprint records were located in Washington. DeLaughter’s file was slowly growing.

When something new turned up, DeLaughter would generally let Myrlie Evers know about it. When he saw that she was keeping the information to herself, he stopped worrying that she would leak material to the media, and he began sharing even more of the investigation with her. He felt he could call her at any time of the day or night; she insisted he wake her up if he needed a name or a source in the black community to develop new leads.

Evers was astonished to find herself starting to trust this white man, whose job once symbolized every thing she hated about southern justice. She felt she had made a friend in DeLaughter. But for the first months of the investigation, they kept a professional formality between them. She still called him Mr. DeLaughter, and he called her Mrs. Evers. During one late-night phone call they used each other’s first names.

“Hello, Bobby,” she said.

“Hello, Myrlie.”

There was an uneasiness, she recalls, as if they had crossed an invisible line into the forbidden.

“Good night, Mrs. Evers,” he said when they were through talking.

Charlie Crisco always wondered whether some kind of fate had brought him to the Beckwith case. Why, for instance, should it fall in his lap the month he started work as an investigator at the Hinds County D.A.’s Office?

Crisco retired from the Jackson Police Department twenty years to the day after he joined the force on September 29, 1969. He had spent his first few years on the job riding around in a patrol car, then he got into investigations. He’d spent the last ten years of his police career in homicide.

Crisco was of average height, thin, almost wiry, with thick brown hair that brushed over his collar in back. He wore aviator glasses. You could tell Crisco was a cop because he looked at things longer than other people; he didn’t avert his gaze. When Crisco was feeling friendly, relaxed, his eyes were a warm brown. When he was suspicious or ticked off about something the eyes turned black right in front of you, like twin holes in space.

Crisco took his job in homicide seriously. He liked the big cases and the moment of discovery, when everything fit into place and he knew he had a suspect nailed. During his last couple of years in homicide some cases had given him satisfaction. One was Greg Davis, Jackson’s serial killer. Crisco had set up a war room, with charts and psychiatric profiles. He ended up following a hunch that a recently captured burglar named Greg Davis might be the killer, and got him to confess. And there was Kenny Davis — no relation — who had killed an off-duty cop in a hold-up. That had also been a satisfying bust. Crisco had tracked him down through the murder weapon. Another long story.

Every morning Crisco worked a crossword puzzle or two to get his mind going and because he enjoyed it. Solving the puzzle. That was the interesting part of the job. So he wasn’t unhappy when his first major assignment in the district attorney’s office was to help DeLaughter piece together a thirty-year-old murder case.

Crisco had been fifteen years old in 1963 and going to high school in Jackson. He remembered the Beckwith case and being sorry somebody had gotten killed. But he also remembered when segregation was just something you grew up with. It was a way of life, and you never questioned it any more than you questioned going to school or to church.

DeLaughter was that much younger. Since he knew almost nothing about Medgar Evers and the climate in which he had been killed, DeLaughter gave himself a history lesson. He read books. He interviewed old folks. He poured over yellowed press clippings from Beckwith’s trials. The more he learned about the case, the more it mesmerized him.

DeLaughter thought that he knew the facts of Mississippi’s segregated past. He knew what he had learned in schoolbooks. Now he had to feel the facts, to crawl inside them as he absorbed the murder case. He came to know Medgar Evers and to understand his life, how hard it was to fight for something when everyone, even your friends, thought your cause was hopeless.

What surprised DeLaughter was how high a price had been paid for so little. Evers and the NAACP hadn’t been asking for a separate nation or billions of dollars in restitution for the evils of slavery. All Evers had been asking for was the right to be treated like a man, to be called “mister,” to send his kids to a good school, to vote — things we take for granted now. A good man could be killed for that thirty years ago.

Meanwhile there were other cases to try in the D.A.’s office. DeLaughter and Crisco worked on the Beckwith file when they had time.

At the end of February 1990 a few black leaders in Jackson called a press conference on the steps of the Hinds County Courthouse to protest the inaction of the D.A.’s office. Aaron Henry, who was still the leading voice of civil rights in Mississippi, still president of the state NAACP, and a state legislator, lent some weight to the protest. The old pro urged the prosecutors to keep on looking for evidence. “Whenever we don’t want to do something, we find reasons not to do it,” he said.

DeLaughter insisted that he didn’t have enough evidence to go on. Not that he would make it public if he did. This was a criminal investigation, after all, not a campaign.

The state attorney general’s office had helped come up with a strong legal argument to get around the speedy trial problem. DeLaughter had decided it was possible to bring Beckwith to trial again, but he wasn’t sure he could win it. The physical evidence was still missing. Most important, the rifle could not be found. He could try the case without the fatal bullet or the autopsy report, which also were missing. Theoretically he could even try it without the murder weapon, but there wouldn’t be much hope of success.

A trial is a piece of theater, and you have to have some props, particularly in the TV age. There wasn’t a juror out there who didn’t watch television, and few of them could say they hadn’t seen
Perry Mason, Matlock,
or some other fanciful courtroom drama. On television, the prosecutor always seems to have everything he or she could possibly need to try a case. Like fingerprints. Jurors don’t realize how rare it is to lift a clear fingerprint from a crime scene and especially from a gun. They had Beckwith’s fingerprint but still no gun. That fact could derail the case. DeLaughter had to find that Enfield rifle.

Researching this case brought back a lot of memories, things DeLaughter hadn’t thought about at the time. One of those things went back fifteen years, to when he and Dixie were first married. They had been visiting her folks when DeLaughter found a rifle in Russel Moore’s bathroom closet. That wasn’t unusual. Moore, like a lot of men in Mississippi, kept guns all over the place. DeLaughter was interested in firearms, so he’d asked the judge about the bolt-action .30/06. All he remembered Moore telling him was that it was a weapon used back in an old civil rights murder. That was it.

Moore had died a few years back. One night when DeLaughter got home from work, he called his mother-in-law and asked if she still had the gun. She did. He drove over that evening, and they fetched it down from a shelf in a different closet, where some of the judge’s things were stored. DeLaughter never expected it to be the murder weapon. It was just a nagging memory he had to check out.