Feds Charge Ex-Deputy in 1964 Slayings of two black men who were beaten and dumped alive into the Mississippi

Feds Charge Ex-Deputy in 1964 Slayings
By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS and LARA JAKES JORDAN
AP

WASHINGTON (Jan. 24) - A white former sheriff's deputy who was once thought to
be dead was arrested on federal charges Wednesday in one of the last major
unsolved crimes of the civil rights era - the 1964 killings of two black men who
were beaten and dumped alive into the Mississippi River

The break in the 43-year-old case was largely the result of the dogged efforts
of the older brother of one of the victims, who vowed to bring the killers to
justice.

James Ford Seale, a 71-year-old reputed Ku Klux Klansman from the town of Roxie,
was charged with kidnapping hitchhikers Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah
Dee, both 19.

The victims' weighted, badly decomposed bodies were found by chance two months
later in July 1964, during the search for three civil rights workers whose
disappearance and deaths in Philadelphia, Miss., got far more attention from the
media and the FBI.

Seale is expected to be arraigned Thursday in Jackson.

A second man long suspected in the attack, church deacon and reputed KKK member
Charles Marcus Edwards, now 72, was not charged. Sources close to the
investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity said Edwards was cooperating
with authorities. Prosecutors did not say why Seale was not charged with murder.



The arrest marked the latest attempt by prosecutors in the South to close the
books on crimes from the civil rights era that went unpunished. In recent years,
authorities in Mississippi and Alabama have won convictions in the 1963
assassination of NAACP activist Medgar Evers; the 1963 Birmingham, Ala., church
bombing that killed four black girls; and the 1964 Philadelphia, Miss.,
slayings.

"I've been crying. First time I've cried in about 50 years," Moore's 63-year-old
brother, Thomas, said after the arrest. "It's not going to bring his life back.
But some way or another, I think he would be satisfied."

Dee's sister, Thelma Collins, told The Associated Press through grateful sobs:
"I never thought I would live to see it, no sir, I never did. I always prayed
that justice would be done - somehow, some way."

Seale and Edwards are suspected of kidnapping the two victims in a Klan
crackdown prompted by rumors that black Muslims were planning an armed
"insurrection" in rural Franklin County. Seale and Edwards were arrested at the
time.

But, consumed by the search for the three missing civil rights workers, the FBI
turned the case over to local authorities. And a justice of the peace promptly
threw out all charges against Seale and Edwards.

In 2000, the Justice Department's civil rights unit reopened the case.

For years, Seale's family had told reporters that he had died. But in 2005,
Thomas Moore and a Canadian documentary filmmaker, David Ridgen, found Seale,
old and sick, living just a few miles down the road from where the kidnapping
took places.

"If they hadn't brought it to my attention, I wouldn't have known to do
anything," said U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton, chief federal prosecutor in Jackson.


Thomas Moore said he always carried a burden of guilt over his younger brother's
death.

"I walked around with an amount of shame," the Colorado Springs, Colo., man
said. "I didn't know why, why it happened to us, that I wasn't there to do
something - to do SOMETHING."

Former Gov. William Winter, who was co-chairman of President Clinton's racial
reconciliation initiative, said the latest arrest - though done by federal
rather than state authorities - shows that Mississippi "now is obviously seeking
to make up for lost time in bringing people to justice."

"Mississippi is taking a look at those crimes that were committed in a different
era when a different attitude prevailed," said Winter, who was governor in the
1980s.

On May 2, 1964, Charles Moore and Dee were hitchhiking near an ice cream stand
in the town of Meadville when Seale pulled over and offered them a ride, a Klan
informant told the FBI. The Klan had heard rumors of black Muslim gunrunning in
the area, and Seale believed the two were involved, authorities said.

According to FBI interrogators, Edwards admitted that he and Seale took the two
men into the woods for a whipping. But Edwards said both men were alive when he
left them.

An informant told the FBI that Seale's brother and another Klansman took the
unconscious blacks to the river, lashed their bodies to a Jeep engine block and
some old railroad tracks, and dumped them over the side of a boat. The other
Klansmen and the informant have since died.

Searchers were combing the woods and swamps for James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and
Michael Schwerner when the remains of Dee and Moore were discovered near
Tallulah, La. The bodies of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were found in an
earthen dam in Mississippi a short time later.

According to FBI documents from the 1960s, authorities confronted Seale and told
him they knew he and others killed the hitchhikers, and "the Lord above knows
you did it."

"Yes," Seale was quoted as replying, "but I'm not going to admit it. You are
going to have to prove it."

The U.S. Justice Department reopened the case after The Clarion-Ledger of
Jackson uncovered documents indicating that the beatings had occurred in the
Homochitto National Forest, giving the FBI jurisdiction. But the case languished
until Seale was located.

"I had other plans to confront him a long time ago - violently," Thomas Moore
said.

Seale lived in Roxie, which was once a thriving farm community in southwest
Mississippi. It is now dotted with decaying homes, and the only buildings still
in use are a small antique store, a bank and a post office.

Bobby Hunt, 55, a lifelong resident of Roxie and a cousin of one of the slain
men, Henry Dee, said people have talked less about the murders over the years,
but the victims have not been forgotten.

"Henry was a nice person. He would help people," Hunt said.

He said Seale's arrest made him feel "a little better."

"It took all those years but they finally got justice."

Associated Press writer Allen G. Breed in Raleigh, N.C., contributed to this
story.