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Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: Edgar Ray Killen, Convicted in ’64 Killings of Rights Workers, Dies at 92 Edgar Ray Killen, Convicted in ’64 Killings of Rights Workers, Dies at 92 By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN JAN. 12, 2018 Edgar Ray Killen, in a wheelchair, outside the Neshoba County Courthouse in Philadelphia, Miss., in August 2005. Edgar Ray Killen, the former Klansman who was sentenced to a 60-year prison term in 2005 for arranging the murders of three young civil rights workers outside Philadelphia, Miss., in 1964 during the Freedom Summer drive to register Southern black voters, died on Thursday night in prison in Parchman, Miss. He was 92. The Mississippi corrections department said he was pronounced dead at the hospital at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at 9 p.m. No cause was given, but the department said he had been treated for congestive heart failure and hypertension. Mr. Killen was convicted of state manslaughter charges 41 years to the day after James Earl Chaney, 21, a black man from Meridian, Miss., and two white New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, disappeared in a death trap set by a local deputy sheriff and a gang of his fellow Ku Klux Klansmen. He was prosecuted in one of the South’s major “atonement” trials, in which the Mississippi authorities revisited civil rights-era atrocities. He was convicted of a crime that galvanized the civil rights movement, stamped the town of Philadelphia as an outpost of terror and inspired the 1988 Hollywood movie “Mississippi Burning,” directed by Alan Parker. Mr. Killen was a founding member of the Klan in the Philadelphia area and its chief recruiter, according to the F.B.I. He had been among 18 men tried in 1967 on federal charges of conspiring to violate the civil rights of Mr. Chaney, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Schwerner. Photo Mr. Killen in 1964. They were shot to death on the night of June 21, 1964. After an extensive search led by the F.B.I., their bodies were found on a farm nearby six weeks later, buried nearby under an earthen dam. The federal charges against Mr. Killen, a sawmill operator and part-time preacher at small churches near his lifelong home in Union, Miss., were dismissed after a lone member of the all-white jury at the 1967 trial, in Meridian, held out for acquittal. She said she did not believe a man of God could have participated in such a crime. Afterward, Mr. Killen, known to friends as Preacher Killen, continued to live with his wife, Betty Jo, at their modest ranch home near his 20-acre farm and sawmill. He resumed his preaching and displayed a tablet with the Ten Commandments on his lawn. But in 1975 he was charged with making a telephone call threatening to kill a private investigator who had been hired by a man to follow the man’s wife. The man believed she was having an affair with Mr. Killen. Mr. Killen was sentenced to five months in prison in the case, which was prosecuted by Marcus D. Gordon, the Neshoba County district attorney at the time and later the judge who presided over the murder trial. Mr. Killen was indicted by a Neshoba County grand jury on murder charges in January 2005. Two months later, free on bail, he broke both his legs when a tree at his farm fell on him. He sat in a wheelchair during his state trial in Philadelphia while recovering from his injuries, a gaunt figure sometimes breathing through tubes attached to an oxygen tank. The murder prosecution, brought by the Mississippi state attorney general, Jim Hood, and the county district attorney, Mark Duncan, was based largely on the transcripts of testimony at the federal trial. Mr. Killen was said to have recruited the mob that killed the civil rights workers, although he was not at the scene of their murders, having gone to a funeral home to attend two wakes. In testimony, fellow Klansman said he had gone to the funeral home to create an alibi for his whereabouts when the murders occurred. Poster Comment: I was sitting in a bar in Chicago and this Irishman opened his jacket. He had a pistol stuck in the waistband of his pants. I told him, "You better go put that in your car. Gun powder and alcohol don't mix." A few minutes later I was talking with this guy named Arthur Pope. There was a KABOOM. I look and the Irishman goes out the back door. I was first one up and I open washroom door. There were no bodies. He was playing with his pistol and blew a hole in the baseboard of the outside wall. He could have just as easily blown a hole in the other wall and killed someone. ;) Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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