The Ghosts of Mississippi (18 page)

Detectives John Chamblee and Fred Sanders rode out to Greenville with a court seizure order to take possession of Beckwith’s company car at Delta Liquid Plant Food. Sanders was furious that the FBI had arrested Beckwith without including, or even notifying, the Jackson police. He felt that the police would have solved the case eventually. Now all he could do was to strengthen what evidence he had.

There was nothing inside the white 1962 Valiant that interested the detectives. They took photographs of the exterior, which had a long whip-type antenna attached to the bumper and a large, boxy trailer hitch.

The detectives also searched Beckwith’s crumbling old house on George Street in Greenwood. Yerger Moorehead met them at the door and showed them around.

Most of the rooms in the house were empty. Beckwith seemed to occupy one upstairs bedroom and a bare sitting room downstairs. In the bedroom the detectives found a box of newspaper clippings about integration, along with a folder of letters Beckwith had written on the subject and part of the manuscript for an anti-integration book that Beckwith was writing. They also found three guns in the bedroom: a Remington rifle and a double-barreled shotgun, both fully loaded, and a .25-caliber automatic pistol. There were several hundred rounds of ammunition, but nothing usable in a .30/06 rifle. There was, however, a booklet advertising Peters ammunition, and someone had circled the .30/30 and .30/06 specifications. They also found a letter from a Jackson psychiatrist named Dr. Roland E. Toms and a canceled check for the purchase of field glasses.

Detectives Luke and Turner brought in two young women who had been working at Joe’s Drive In on the night of the murder to look at another lineup. Neither could pick out Beckwith, although both identified his Valiant as the car they had seen in the lot that night. Martha Jean O’Brien, a seventeen-year-old carhop, repeated her observation that the man she had seen get out of the Valiant had been six foot two or taller and 160 to 165 pounds with a dark complexion, black curly hair, a black mustache covering his lip, and an erect posture. He had been wearing black pants and a black long-sleeved shirt. When the police later took a signed statement from O’Brien, this detailed description was not in it.

On Tuesday, July 2, two weeks after his arrest, Beckwith was formally indicted for murder by the grand jury. Medgar Evers would have turned thirty-eight that day.

It wasn’t long after John Chamblee and Fred Sanders had arrived in Greenwood and started asking questions about Delay Beckwith that they realized that the townspeople were closing ranks around one of their own. In one frustrated report Sanders referred to Greenwood archly as a “clannish” kind of town. People were generally cordial, even friendly, but they said nothing useful. One deputy sheriff told Sanders that no outsider would get the whole story from anyone.

The detectives heard about Beckwith’s well-known segregationist ardor, the “funny” straw hat he wore, and the pistol he toted to church. He was almost universally regarded as a “blowhard” and a “nut.”

During this initial visit Chamblee and Sanders met and interviewed Thorn McIntyre, who had already been visited by the FBI. In what must have been the best news they got all week, McIntyre told the Jackson detectives that he was willing to testify that he had traded the rifle to Delay. He also told them he wanted to keep things quiet, and he didn’t want any reward. That was a good thing because the reward was not going to be given to him or anyone else, since Beckwith technically had been located through routine police work in tracing the scope and fingerprint.

The rest of the investigation was standard fare. The detectives checked Beckwith’s company credit card record to see whether he had bought gas in Jackson. Meanwhile Luke and Turner checked motel records to see whether Beckwith had stayed in the city. They continued to interview potential witnesses, and they tracked down rumors that Beckwith had been seen hanging around Lynch Street before Evers had been shot.

The long, exhausting process of trying Beckwith began with a flurry of motions from both sides. Most interesting was one by the prosecution: Waller wanted Beckwith sent to the state mental hospital at Whitfield for a competency evaluation. Waller stated, magnanimously, that “it was something that should be done,” even though the defense never asked for an exam.

It was an unusual move in those days. Waller wanted to go fishing in Beckwith’s head. If Beckwith was found competent to stand trial, that diagnosis could be used against him should he later decide to plead insanity. If he was found to be mentally incompetent, he could be committed to a mental hospital, which would spare everyone the trouble of trying him. At least it got the issue of sanity out of the way.

Beckwith was indignant. The defense cried foul, and a three-hour hearing was held on the subject on July 18.

Yerger Moorehead testified for the prosecution. “I will say he is able to consult with attorneys and to prepare a defense,” Beckwith’s cousin and former guardian told the court. “But I don’t believe he is mentally capable of being guilty of a crime of violence. I’m not making that statement without a great deal of background to make it on.” Moorehead said that he had noticed a change in Delay’s mental state after he had come home from World War II.

Waller also called Dr. Roland Toms, the Jackson psychiatrist to whom Beckwith had been referred by his family doctor in 1962. Toms had reached a diagnosis, but a defense objection stopped him from repeating what that diagnosis was. Toms also was prevented from answering whether Beckwith had been packing a pistol when he had come in for his appointment.

Waller managed to squeeze Beckwith’s alarming divorce papers into the record, as well as the judgment from a peace bond hearing in July 1962, in which Beckwith had been found guilty of “threatening to kill his wife . . . and likely to carry out the threat.”

Judge Leon Hendrick ordered Beckwith to Whitfield for a month-long psychiatric exam. A week later another judge overturned the ruling. While Waller appealed, Beckwith was sent to the Rankin County Jail, near the Whitfield hospital.

Rankin County lies just across the Pearl River, east of Jackson. But crossing the bridge means entering a somewhat different, more primitive world. To this day some older black cabdrivers get a little nervous leaving the city limits to take a fare to the big airport in Rankin County late at night. It’s a reflex. In the past Negroes knew they had better not be caught on Old Brandon Road or Highway 80 after dark without a note from a white man saying they had business there. The county was the realm of bootleggers and tough redneck deputies. It was where, before 1968, in the days when the whole state was dry, the teenagers of South Jackson and the blue-haired ladies of Belhaven would drive out to pick up a bottle. It was the place where the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan had established a foothold in the early sixties and where towns like Florence and Brandon and Star are still shorthand for “Klanland” to some people who remember.

By all accounts Byron De La Beckwith was treated like visiting royalty at the Rankin County Jail, where he spent most of the rest of the year. Local housewives brought him special meals. He kept a TV set and part of his personal gun collection in his cell. He later bragged that the sheriff let him out from time to time to get his hair cut or go shopping. The sheriff just reminded him to be back by dark.

Beckwith had as many visitors as he wanted. Red Hydrick dropped by and gave him two hundred dollars for walking-around money. According to Bill Minor, a respected local reporter, Hydrick told Beckwith, “I’ve killed a hundred niggers and they haven’t never done anything to me yet. You don’t tell them anything.”

Another visitor was former General Edwin Walker, himself having escaped punishment for his role in the Ole Miss riots after a lunacy exam. Walker briskly answered a few reporters’ questions after his visit. He said that Byron De La Beckwith was a “fine Southern gentleman.” All he would say about the murder charge was that Medgar Evers had been “working against the good of the country.”

Bill Waller had to get a state supreme court order to pry Beckwith out of his open cell in Rankin County. Beckwith seemed peeved when the Hinds County sheriff took away his guns.

A television news crew recorded Beckwith’s transfer to Jackson on a cold December day. He wore a natty brown wool suit. His personal effects were at his feet on the pavement: an elegant umbrella, a portable typewriter, and a box labeled “Health Guardian Isometric Exerciser.” Beckwith sucked on a huge cigar as he strode into his new confinement. “Mighty glad to be here, sir,” he said to the jailer.

It was immediately clear to all those who knew them that Charles Evers was not at all like his brother. Where Medgar was smooth, Charles was rough. Where Medgar would choose to persuade, Charles would twist an arm.

The people in the movement who had worked so long with Medgar were wary at first, but hopeful. Nobody really knew Charles or what he would do. It didn’t take long for the SNCC kids and the CORE people to stay out of his way.

Dave Dennis liked Charles Evers’s roguish charm, his slick charisma. It was hard not to like him on a personal level, as long as you didn’t cross him. On the job he was unpredictable, mercurial, moody. But Charles’s main crime was not being Medgar.

One day that summer Dennis walked up the steps to the old NAACP office in the Masonic Temple to visit Charles and found the floors covered with red wall-to-wall carpeting. He thought,
This is a desecration.
That was his last visit to the office.

Everywhere Myrlie Evers turned in her house on Guynes Street, there was something to remind her of the night of the killing. There was the blood that would never quite wash off the carport; the dent in the refrigerator where a fingertip would fit, the stack of crisp white shirts still carefully folded in the closet, that she didn’t have the heart to give away.

The children were shattered. Van, the three-year-old, talked endlessly about the blood on the steps and about his father. He would answer the phone and the door with the same words: “Have you seen my Daddy?” He must have said it a hundred times a day. Reena kept her grief hidden, and Darrell retreated into deep silences. Sometimes he would just sit under the plum tree and stare out at nothing. He had trouble at school. He slept with a toy gun by his bed. And when his mother went away, as she often did, he was terrified that she would never come back.

The NAACP stepped in to take care of the family. Gloster Current and Roy Wilkins made sure that Myrlie and the children had enough money to live on. They knew Medgar had died without insurance, so the NAACP board voted to keep her on the payroll as a consultant, earning Medgar’s salary of seventy-five hundred dollars a year. They voted to give her a twenty-thousand-dollar tax-free gift over four years. They set up a trust fund for the children to shelter donations. The NAACP took care of everything. All the association asked for in return was her cooperation and loyalty.

Myrlie signed a document authorizing only the NAACP to use Medgar Evers’s name to raise funds. Every few days a packet of checks would arrive from New York for her to endorse, along with a list of thank-you notes for her to copy and sign. The NAACP staff wrote the text for her.

Almost immediately Myrlie Evers was in demand on the speaking circuit. Shortly after Byron De La Beckwith was arrested for the murder, she made her first out-of-state appearance. She accepted for Medgar the NAACP’s highest honor, the Spingarn Medal, which was awarded posthumously at the annual convention in Chicago. After that she was on the road most weekends, giving speeches to NAACP branches.

She remembers the time as one remembers an unpleasant dream — the kind in which you never catch the plane you are late for, never find your way to the train. She was disconnected and depressed, just walking through her life, which no longer had any meaning. Coming home to the house on Guynes Street was agony.

Alarmed, Gloster Current and Roy Wilkins arranged for Myrlie and the children to see a psychiatrist in New York. They urged her to move away from Jackson.

The trial of Byron De La Beckwith began in Jackson on a raw, windy morning January 27, 1964. A small, curious crowd gathered on the steps of the huge limestone-and-granite courthouse on the corner of Pascagoula and Congress Streets. A vendor selling peanuts was disappointed by the turnout. It could have turned into a circus, but the NAACP deliberately kept a lid on demonstrations that might detract from the “dignity” and “fairness” of the trial.

The Hinds County Courthouse had been built on a grand scale, with heavy, oversized bronzed-wood doors, a cool, vaulted marble foyer, high ceilings, lots of dark polished wood and oil paintings in the public rooms. Despite the grand trappings it was an all-purpose building: three floors of judges’ chambers, courtrooms, and witness rooms. The top two floors, accessed from a separate entrance, served as the Hinds County jail, where Beckwith was a prisoner. One wing of the fifth floor held the old gallows chamber, used frequently in the days when executions had been a local event. The state now dispatched its condemned inmates in the gas chamber at Parchman prison, deep in the Delta.

Security was heavy on the second floor, at the entrance to courtroom number three. The bailiffs were expecting big crowds and trouble. Each spectator and journalist had to sign in at the door, submit to being frisked, and receive a badge to enter. There were new rules for this trial: anyone could sit wherever he or she wished. There was no need for demonstrations. For the time being the courthouse was integrated by order of the judge.

The wood-paneled chamber was the biggest the city had to offer, with seating for three hundred and a balcony. The judge’s bench towered over the assembly.

Circuit court judge Leon Hendrick was sixty-nine years old, tall and slim, with pure white hair and spectacles. He was generally a soft-spoken man, but he could summon a big courtroom voice when he needed it. This was not the southern cracker of a judge the northern press was expecting to find. Hendrick was, reporters would point out, a “dignified” professional.

At 8:30 a.m. the first batch of veniremen took their seats in the courtroom. There were two hundred names on the roster of potential jurors picked from the voting rolls of Hinds County. All were men. Women wouldn’t serve on state juries in Mississippi for another four years.

Of the one hundred veniremen who sat in the courthouse, seven were Negroes. It was a little charade the courts had to go through, since there were no laws barring blacks from juries. They just never were chosen.

Three Negroes were actually interviewed. Each was dismissed because of work conflicts or opposition to the death penalty, which was reason enough to dismiss a potential juror in a capital case. District Attorney Bill Waller simply skipped calling the others.

Bill Waller kicked things off with a question for each man in the jury pool: “Do you think it’s a crime to kill a nigger in Mississippi?”

Black spectators, including Aaron Henry, shifted angrily in their seats. So it was going to be like this after all. Another kangaroo court, a whitewash, a quick acquittal. Another Emmett Till.

But Waller had a strategy going. He assumed certain things: that white men of goodwill would have a hard time sympathizing with the victim; that they might find Beckwith sympathetic — particularly if he didn’t testify, and Waller had no way of knowing whether he would; that they were segregationists. But just as he did, they could set all those things aside and follow the law. His questions were designed to put himself squarely in their corner, lead them through the facts, and show them that they could do the right thing together.

He asked practical questions: Had they contributed to Beckwith’s defense fund? Would rendering an unpopular verdict affect their relationship with their customers?

And he dug deeper, putting himself inside the skin of his potential jurors, seeing how it fit. “The deceased worked in a way obnoxious and emotionally repulsive to you as a businessman and me as a lawyer — can you put this out of your mind and judge this case like any other case?” he asked.

Ed King sat in the balcony and watched with growing disgust. It seemed to him that Medgar was on trial, not Beckwith. He would refer to this proceeding as “Medgar’s trial” for the rest of his days.

Meanwhile Waller kept on hammering on his theme: “I’m a little upset myself right now with all these nigras in the courtroom — does that bother you?”

The strategy seemed to pay off. When Waller put the big question — Is it a crime to kill a nigger? — to one venireman, the man sat quiet.

“What did he say?” asked Judge Hendrick.

“Nothing, Judge,” said Bill Waller. “He’s trying to make up his mind.” The man was sent home.

This went on for four days, both sides picking through the minds of the jurors, looking for an advantage. Of the first twelve men to come up, the prosecution dismissed eleven.

The normally stoic judge took to fidgeting with a ring on his finger. The three defense attorneys cradled their chins in their hands as they scrutinized each juror.

Beckwith seemed thoroughly at ease. Wearing a dark blue suit with a red tie-and-sock combination, he lounged in his chair at the defense table. Spectators noted that he looked more like a prince awaiting coronation than an innocent chump on trial for his life. He casually draped one arm across his chair and the other on the defense table, chin raised and black wire-frame glasses balanced on his nose. During breaks he smoked a cigar while he chatted with his guards.

He was elated by the appearance — apparently a surprise — of his long-estranged wife, Willie. She was a big woman with dark hair and an unpleasant expression on her face. She wore a modest knit suit, two big strands of faux pearls, and pale gloves. In later appearances she sometimes wore a little fur stole over her shoulders.

The first time Beckwith saw her in court, he rushed over and kissed her. She sat behind him throughout the trial.

There were other regulars as well. Reverend R. L. T. Smith sat in the same front-row seat every day. Judge Russel Moore, the Citizens’ Councils stalwart who had once conspired to arrest Medgar Evers and Roy Wilkins, was a constant fixture in the spectator pews.

Jury selection wore on into night sessions. Finally both sides agreed on twelve jurors and one alternate who represented a cross section of white Jackson. Among them were two electricians, two business executives, an engineer, a plumber, a bakery manager, and assorted salesmen.

Opening statements were heard on Friday, January 31. This time the courtroom was packed with spectators, and a line curled around the hallway with the overflow crowd.

John Fox sat with Bill Waller at the prosecution table. Like Waller he was an old-family Mississippian. He could trace his roots through seven generations, back to a Revolutionary War veteran who had migrated from South Carolina. The family still owned a farm outside Jackson that had belonged to the Indians before the first Fox ancestor bought the land and planted crops. But while Fox could out-Mississippi any witness he interviewed, he was nobody’s redneck. He was raised in Oxford, where his father was a professor and registrar at the University of Mississippi Law School. Fox went straight through Ole Miss, undergraduate and law school. After a stint in the army he went into practice with his friend Bill Waller in 1958. Now in his thirties, Fox still looked like a college boy, or maybe a member of the Kingston Trio, in his white shirt and thin tie and crew cut, which made his perfectly round ears stick out like apricot halves.

Beckwith’s troika of lawyers — Hardy Lott, his partner Stanny Sanders, and Hugh Cunningham — were older, more established attorneys. Physically they were almost interchangeable: fleshy-faced white men in advanced middle age with similar cases of male-pattern baldness.

Ross Barnett, who by law could not succeed himself, had turned over the governorship to Paul Johnson earlier that month. He had resumed an active partnership in Cunningham’s law firm, and he made frequent appearances at the defense table. Barnett developed a habit of wandering into the courtroom almost every morning of the trial. More than once the former governor shook Beckwith’s hand and clapped him on the back in full view of the jurors.

The bailiff called the court to order, and Waller began to lay out his case for the jury. “Our witnesses will show in ten ways that Byron De La Beckwith is guilty of this crime,” he said.

The first state witness was B. D. Harrell, the officer who had taken the call about a shooting on Guynes Street.

The next witness was Myrlie Evers.

Myrlie chose a royal blue dress and black gloves for her court appearance. As the bailiff led her to the stand, Myrlie’s eyes flicked over the courtroom, looking for Beckwith. She had dreaded this moment and wondered how she would react when she saw him. When she took her seat and her eyes came to rest on him, she felt nothing at all. She was utterly composed.

Byron De La Beckwith sat at the defense table, watching impassively. From time to time he squirmed in his chair to scan the crowd of spectators for familiar faces. Sometimes he scrawled furiously on a yellow legal pad.

Bill Waller began his questioning by asking her name.

“Mrs. Medgar Evers,” she said.

“Your first name, please?”

“Myrlie — M-Y-R-L-I-E.”

Waller was walking a minefield here. He needed her testimony. She had to describe the crime scene, how she had heard the shot and found her husband in the pool of blood. With luck the jury would sympathize with the well-dressed, well-spoken widow. But the whole thing could backfire if Myrlie balked at being called by her first name, which every white person in the courthouse knew was the way you were supposed to address a Negro.

The prosecutor and the widow had argued over the issue of courtroom decorum for months. Myrlie refused to address anyone as sir, not even the judge. And she assured Waller that she would not answer any questions in which she was addressed as “Myrlie” instead of “Mrs. Evers.”

Waller could just see it blowing up in his face. He was going to play along, but what about Hardy Lott? What if he called her Myrlie and she refused to answer? Would the court haul her off for contempt? And even if that didn’t happen, what would the jury think of such an uppity attitude? The whole case could be wrecked over a piece of foolishness.

Waller proceeded with caution. He solved his own problem by not using her name at all when prefacing his questions. Evers calmly answered questions about her husband: when they were married, where he went to school. Then Waller led her to the day of the murder.

She testified that she had spoken to her husband on the phone three times that day, the last time around 5:30 p.m. In a clear, strong voice she described how the children had heard the car pull into the driveway, and then the shot.

“After that there was complete silence,” she said.

“What did you do?”

“The moment I heard the blast I ran to the door. … I turned on the light and opened the door at the same time and I saw my husband where he had fallen.” She described the keys in his hand, the blood on the ground.

“I believe that’s all,” said Waller.

The prosecutor sat down, and Hardy Lott walked to the lectern. “After you heard this loud blast,” he asked, “did you hear any more shots?”

“I heard another shot after I had gotten to my husband.”

Bill Waller relaxed. Lott was going along; he wouldn’t use her name at all. Maybe Lott wanted her testimony in cross-examination more than he needed to alienate the jury against her by provoking a scene. It could be his only chance to bring up Medgar Evers’s career as an integrationist and to establish other motives for the killing.

Myrlie didn’t remember hearing any shots after the second blast. Then Lott asked her whether she had accused anyone at the scene of killing her husband. She said she had not.

“You didn’t say to anyone, ‘You shot my husband’?” he asked.

“No, I did not.”

Lott was trying to bring out what some witnesses had heard on the night of the murder, when Myrlie was hysterical and shouting at a group of white boys who came to gawk at the crime scene. She yelled some things she could no longer remember.

Lott wanted to show the jury that there could be more than one suspect in Medgar Evers’s murder.

The lawyer asked Myrlie whether her husband had received death threats, and she said that he had. She then testified that Medgar Evers was the NAACP field secretary and that he was active in the integration movement.

“Was he — he was the first person as a matter of fact who attempted integration of the University of Mississippi.”

Myrlie opened her mouth to answer yes. It was something she was proud of. But Waller wasn’t going to allow Hardy Lott to get into this if he could help it.

“Your Honor,” he barked. “We don’t see that this has any bearing on this!”

“I sustain the objection to that,” the judge said.

Lott tried a different approach.

“Now, at the time your husband was shot he had filed and had pending in Jackson a suit to integrate the white public schools of this city .. . ?”

Waller jumped up again.

“Your Honor, we can’t see that this is material on cross-examination of this woman. She is a housewife. She wasn’t in the movement. It has nothing to do with this slaying at the time, in the middle of the night at his home.”

This time Judge Hendrick allowed the question.

Lott resumed: “My question was, if it wasn’t a fact that at the time your husband was killed he had pending a lawsuit filed by him on behalf of his children to integrate the white schools of Jackson, Mississippi?”

“My husband was not the only plaintiff. There were other plaintiffs in the case.”

“But he was a plaintiff in it?”

“He was one of the plaintiffs.”

“You were another?”

“That’s correct.”

“It was brought on behalf of all the colored children in Jackson to integrate the schools here?”

“We were not the only plaintiffs.”

“There were others. Is that suit still pending?”

“To my knowledge, it is.”

“Now I believe one of your children who you stated was present that night is Thomas Kenyatta Evers?”