The Ghosts of Mississippi (33 page)

He pulled down the heavy black-barreled Enfield and held the serial number up to the light. He had written the missing murder weapon’s serial number on a scrap of paper from the office. The hair raised up on the back of his neck as he read off the numbers etched into the metal beneath the fat black telescopic site and compared them with his notes: 1052682. It was a match.

The next day DeLaughter sat down in Cynthia Hewes’s office and told her the story. He was a religious man, and he did a lot of praying. But even he couldn’t believe that every time he needed something in this case, it would just show up. The photos, now the gun.

Hewes looked hard at DeLaughter over the top of her spotless desk and said, “I think Mr. Beckwith is in big trouble.”

DeLaughter got the next thing he needed later that spring when a colleague handed him a copy of
Klandestine,
an obscure book that told the story of Delmar Dennis and his years spying on the Klan for the FBI. The author was William H. McIlhany II, a writer, professional magician, and John Birch Society member who had met Dennis on the right-wing speaking circuit. On page 38 was a curious passage about a Klan meeting in the summer of 1965, near the old swinging bridge at Byram: “The accused killer of Jackson NAACP official Medgar Evers is reported to have fully admitted his guilt in that crime.” Dennis quoted Beckwith as saying, “Killing that nigger gave me no more inner discomfort than our wives endure when they give birth to our children.”

This was exactly what Bobby needed. But he had a problem: where was Dennis? DeLaughter was thinking about where to start looking when the phone rang in his office.

It was the reporter Jerry Mitchell, calling to bug him about the Beckwith case. Mitchell wanted to know if there was anything new. Why was it going so slowly? DeLaughter lost his temper and blurted out, “Well, I’ll tell you what. We’ll probably make some kind of headway if I can ever find a guy named Delmar Dennis.”

There was a short pause on the other end of the line, and then Mitchell said pleasantly, “Why, I’ve got Delmar’s number.”

It turned out that Mitchell had interviewed Dennis half a dozen times for the project the
Clarion-Ledger
had done on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner murders. He was living in Sevierville, Tennessee, in the Great Smoky Mountains.

DeLaughter called Dennis, and the man told him yes, he had heard Beckwith talk about “killing that nigger,” and he knew he’d meant Evers. Dennis told him he had no interest in testifying, but if he wanted to come up and visit, that would be fine.

As soon as he got off the phone, DeLaughter called Benny Bennett and Crisco and told them to get packed. While he was clearing off his desk, he started to wonder about something: Beckwith lived near Chattanooga, and that was only a couple of hours from Sevierville at most. Beckwith was running his mouth with every reporter who showed up at his door. Maybe he’d talk to DeLaughter too.

The phone rang again. It was Mitchell.

“So, I hear you’ve reached Delmar,” he said cheerily.

Of course Mitchell wanted to do a story about this, but DeLaughter tried to convince him to hold off for a while. He hadn’t interviewed Dennis, and the man was nervous. He didn’t want to spook a potential witness or put Dennis’s life in danger. He did not tell the reporter that he wanted to visit Beckwith.

When the conversation ended, DeLaughter had the impression that Mitchell was going to cooperate. So he placed a call to Signal Mountain.

“Why Miz Thelma and I would be tickled to have you come on up here,” Beckwith said in his thick Delta drawl.

DeLaughter couldn’t believe his luck. The man was trying to charm him. He was all syrup and smiles. DeLaughter told Beckwith he just wanted to clear some things up, hear Beckwith’s side of the story. DeLaughter was playing stupid.

“Well, you know we’re getting a lot of pressure down here, you know, to at least look at the situation,” DeLaughter said. “You certainly don’t have to talk to me, or if you want a lawyer present. . .”

Beckwith was trying to pick him for information too, but he had one condition. “Now you know I don’t allow nobody on my property except white Christian folks,” Beckwith said. “Now, you don’t sound like you’re anything but white . . .”

“I am white.”

“Are you Christian?”

“Yeah, yeah I am.”

“You know, I don’t allow no Jews up here!”

“I know.”

“Well, who else is coming?”

“I’ll be bringing at least one investigator. They’re all white, and as far as I know they’re Christians.”

DeLaughter ran home to pack. Just as he walked through the door, his wife, Dixie, handed him the phone.

“Beckwith’s on the telephone,” she whispered.

This time Beckwith’s attitude was belligerent. He was suddenly afraid that he would be kidnapped if an investigator came along with DeLaughter.

“I don’t want anybody with arrest power up here,” he said.

DeLaughter felt a sinking in his gut, but he tried to turn it around anyway.

“We’re not going to be able to arrest you, Mr. Beckwith. We don’t have the authority,” he said. “Number one, if you were indicted, we’d have to go through the governor’s office and get an extradition order. We can’t just come up there and kidnap you.”

It didn’t work. Beckwith called off the meeting. Before he hung up, he said, “I’m going to tell you something, you know. When you see old Delmar, you tell him that I’m very aware of what’s going on.”

How could he have known about that? DeLaughter pondered for a moment. The only way he could have found out was if Mitchell had called him. That burned him. Here was a newspaper leading the charge to reprosecute Beckwith and accusing him of dragging his feet. Then Mitchell goes and blows the best break DeLaughter’s had.

He was fuming when he saw the next day’s paper. It carried a picture of Dennis alongside the headline “Ex-FBI Informant Agrees to Cooperate.”

It got worse. The wire services picked up the story, and by the time DeLaughter, Crisco, and Bennett pulled into Sevierville, the whole country knew that Dennis was talking to the prosecutors.

Naturally Dennis was a bit jumpy. He insisted that they rendezvous in a crowded Cracker Barrel restaurant near Great Smoky Mountains National park. Then he got in his pickup, and they followed in their car as he led them deep into the woods, past perfectly good picnic benches and rest areas to a spot he had chosen to talk.

Dennis told them how he had joined the White Knights and spied on them for the FBI. After his testimony in the Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner murders, his life had been in ruins. His wife had left him, and he had been threatened and harassed. Someone had put metal shavings in his car engine; someone had blasted a hole in his house with a shotgun. Eventually Dennis had left Mississippi and settled in Tennessee. He had been a speaker for the John Birch Society, even run for president on the anticommunist platform he still endorsed. He had remarried and had more children. One of his sons was named Andy, after Andrew Goodman.

Dennis saw his life as a continuous struggle. He felt underappreciated and overlooked for the risks he had taken in helping bring down the Klan in Mississippi. The FBI, he felt, had all but abandoned him. He tried to keep on preaching, tried different businesses, but none of them was successful. He kept hoping to make some money by selling his story, but that had never worked out. He ran a small press from his mountain home. He was trying to keep a low profile because whenever his neighbors found out about his past, they would shy away. Now this had happened, and he wasn’t too happy about it.

Still he didn’t shut the door on the possibility of testifying against Beckwith if the district attorney’s office ever made a strong enough case to bring the man to trial. He’d just have to wait and see.

It was a turning point. The investigation seemed to take off after Dennis appeared. Crisco tracked down Thorn McIntyre, who had traded the murder weapon to Beckwith. He found him in Montgomery, Alabama, leading a new life as a real estate developer. McIntyre said that he would be willing to testify again if it came to that.

Soon another witness came forward when she heard about the investigation. Her name was Peggy Morgan, a woman whose husband had been a friend of Beckwith’s in Greenwood. She said she needed to get something off her chest; it had been bothering her for years. Beckwith, she said, had bragged in her presence that he had killed Evers. It had happened while she and her husband had been giving Beckwith a ride up to Parchman prison sometime in the late sixties — she wasn’t sure of the year.

None of these developments was made public. This was a murder investigation, and DeLaughter was not about to tip his hand before he even had an indictment. It would have been tempting to blast his evidence all over the press to show how much work he was doing. But that would just blow the case.

The national media were getting interested by now.
PrimeTime Live
was the first to go public with a story that at least four witnesses were willing to testify that they had seen Beckwith at the New Jerusalem Church the night of Evers’s murder. In fact the old Jackson police reports in DeLaughter’s file showed that the rumors of Beckwith’s supposed appearances in Jackson had been checked out during the initial investigation. But he kept that information to himself.

DeLaughter was getting a crash course in modern media. The television people were asking him and Peters pointed questions, such as “The murder weapon is still missing?”

“That’s right,” Peters said during an on-camera interview, looking the correspondent directly in the eye with all his handsome sincerity.

DeLaughter sat there nodding. He figured it was too late to back out of the story now. Lying about the rifle, he thought, was the lesser of evils. He didn’t want Beckwith to get spooked and clam up, or maybe even leave the country.

The
PrimeTime
story aired on June 14, 1990. Five days later the
Clarion Ledger
ran the banner headline “Gun Used in Evers Slaying in D.A.’s Hands.”

The accompanying article, cowritten by Mitchell, charged that the prosecutor’s office had found the rifle “months” earlier. DeLaughter admitted he had the gun and tried to explain his dissembling as a strategic ploy. He said that he hadn’t wanted the “target of the investigation” to know that they had such a crucial piece of evidence. As it appeared in print, his explanation sounded feeble. What made it look worse was that the gun had been found in his late father-in-law’s closet. It was the kind of coincidence fiction writers would throw out of a novel because nobody would believe it.

To those who were inclined to distrust the district attorney’s office, the blundering lie reconfirmed their worst fears. Peters and DeLaughter were “hiding” evidence to avoid a new prosecution. It was the same old business from the same old boys.

By the next day black politicians, led by a city councilman named Louis Armstrong, were calling for a federal investigation of the “cover-up.” Myrlie Evers felt betrayed. It was one thing DeLaughter had not confided in her. She wondered what else she didn’t know.

“I am surprised, I am stunned, I am speechless,” she told the paper, then added icily, “I certainly hope that more ‘missing’ information will surface.”

The trust Evers and DeLaughter had built over the months was badly damaged. This was still Mississippi, Evers thought. No matter how much she liked this young man who seemed so sincere, she had to remember that this was still Mississippi.

There was a federal probe and a lot of hollering in the community. Bennie Thompson, a rising black politician who represented Evers’s old neighborhood on the Board of Supervisors called the concealment of the evidence a “crisis of confidence.” Charles Evers weighed in with a defense of the prosecution. “I’m sick and tired of these politicians politicizing off my brother’s name,” he said. He said he was confident that Beckwith would be indicted. By the end of July the Justice Department investigation was over; they could find no evidence of a cover-up.

Myrlie Evers extracted a promise from the district attorney’s office that there would be no more surprises, no more “missing” evidence that suddenly reappeared without her knowledge. She had no choice but to cooperate with these prosecutors. They were all she had, and she was willing to deal with the Devil himself to get this case to court.

In mid-October, Evers made the final gesture of trust. She walked up the steps of the Hinds County Courthouse and handed over the single most important element in the reprosecution of Beckwith: the original transcripts of the first trial, which she had kept locked in a safe deposit box for two and a half decades. After a short hearing circuit court judge Breland Hilburn ruled them to be authentic, which meant that, under Mississippi law, they could be used in a future trial. All that stood in the way of an indictment was the grand jury.

By now the prosecution had an impressive stack of evidence: the transcript, a big chunk of the police report, the crime scene and some autopsy photos, the murder weapon, the fingerprint files, a surprising number of living witnesses from the first trials, and some new witnesses, including Delmar Dennis, Peggy Morgan, and Mary Ann Adams, another woman who had come forward with a story of Beckwith’s bragging about the murder.

Another grand jury was convened that December. DeLaughter and Peters made the unusual decision to present part of the defense case as well as the prosecution. They wanted the panel to have as much information as possible before they made the decision whether to indict. In a way it was a dry run for an actual trial.

The grand jury summoned James Holley and Hollis Cresswell, the two surviving alibi witnesses who said they had seen Beckwith in Greenwood the night of the murder. They also presented Myrlie Evers, who told her story with such dignity and sorrow that, according to one grand jury member, “there wasn’t a dry eye in the room.”

That afternoon Byron De La Beckwith was again indicted for the murder of Medgar Evers.