The Ghosts of Mississippi (19 page)

“No, that is not correct.”

“What is his name?”

“Darrell.” She spelled it out. “D-A-R-R-E-L-L K-E-N-Y-A-T-T-A Evers — E-V-E-R-S.”

“I see. He was named after Kenyatta . . .”

“Your Honor, we object to this! This is a deliberate attempt to poison the minds of the jury about some child’s name!”

“I sustain the objection,” the judge said.

Lott gave up. “No further questions.”

As Myrlie stood to leave the witness box, she felt somehow disappointed. She was just getting warmed up, and it was over. She had made it through without losing her temper or breaking down. Medgar would have been proud of her. It was the last she would see of the inside of the courtroom for the rest of the trial. Witnesses could not listen to testimony, and to the relief of the defense the grieving widow could not take a front-row seat for the jury to see. If Waller hadn’t called her, Lott might well have, just to keep her out of court.

The next witness was Houston Wells, the Everses’ next-door neighbor, who had fired his pistol to scare off the assassin. Wells owned a furniture company, and he was a good friend of Medgar Evers. Bill Waller wasn’t going to tiptoe around this witness. He was a good ol’ boy again.

“You are Houston Wells?”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“Where do you live, Houston?”

It was established that Wells was a neighbor and that he heard the shot that killed Evers, his daughter screamed, and some two minutes later he fired a .38 pistol in the air before running next door. He told the court that his brother James drove over to help, it took James about five minutes to get there, and that James fired a shotgun just as Medgar was being carried to the hospital.

“Well, I believe just as I was leaving another shot was fired.”

“You know who fired that shot?”

“My brother.”

“You all are not trigger happy are you, Houston?”

“No, we were aware it had to be somebody … in that area . . .”

Waller had one last question. He wanted the jury to hear just what Houston Wells found when he saw his friend lying, gasping in his own blood.

“Did you see the wife of Medgar Evers?”

“Yes, sir. . . . She was coming out the door and was screaming. . . . And the children were screaming. She was screaming and the children were screaming. She was just a wreck.”

“That’s all.”

The next witness was Joe Alford, a Jackson patrolman who arrived at the scene some three minutes after the call came in at 12:45 a.m. that there had been a shooting on Guynes Street. He escorted Wells’s car, with Evers inside, to the hospital.

Then came Dr. Forrest Bratley, a pathologist who performed the autopsy on Medgar Evers. He was called in at 2:15 a.m. He said the body was still warm. The cause of death: hemorrhage.

In a matter-of-fact voice Dr. Bratley described Evers’s wounds. There were two. The smaller wound, he said, was in the back, some ten inches below the right shoulder blade and about six inches to the right of his spine. It was oval in shape and measured fourteen by nine millimeters, a little smaller than a dime. From that entry point he had tracked the path of the bullet through Evers’s body. It was a grisly education in the damage one shot from a military weapon could inflict in the blink of an eye, tearing up lung tissue and arteries and shattering bones before it exited the chest in a jagged gash roughly the shape of a half-dollar coin.

The next witness was John Chamblee, a thirteen-year veteran of the Jackson police who had been a detective for eight of those years. He said he had investigated maybe twenty murders in the past decade. Jackson was a small, slow town back then. Chamblee was well-spoken but a little nervous. Bill Waller kept asking him to speak up and slow down as he described the crime scene in the early morning hours of June 12.

When he and his partner arrived at the scene at 12:54 a.m., they found Myrlie Evers standing in the carport with a neighbor. Then they saw the blood. It was “a tremendous amount of blood,” Chamblee said. “In fact it looked like somebody had butchered a hog at that point.”

The detective told the court that Myrlie Evers was nearly incoherent with shock. He described a crowd of about twenty-five people milling around on the lawn, but nobody had seen anything. So Detective Chamblee and his partner, Fred Sanders, started to look for physical evidence to piece together what had happened.

At this point the prosecution entered into evidence a stack of black-and-white photos of the crime scene and the surrounding neighborhood, some of them aerial shots.

After lunch Hardy Lott cross-examined Chamblee.

“Did you take in a boy, a young white man, that night for questioning about having shot Evers?” he asked.

Chamblee told him that he and other officers “took several people in for questioning and collaboration [sic] of what had happened out there. But as far as a suspect, we didn’t take anybody in as a suspect, purely as a witness in the material.”

Chamblee was asked whether he had heard Myrlie Evers accuse someone at the scene of shooting her husband. He had not.

Fred Sanders also testified that afternoon. Waller handed the thirty-two-year-old detective a glass bottle containing fragments of a .30- caliber lead-tipped bullet. Sanders identified it as the bullet he had found on Medgar Evers’s kitchen counter. It was in pieces now because it had been dissected and tested by the FBI laboratory. It was, he said, over the strenuous objection of Hardy Lott, the same bullet that had killed Medgar Evers.

Next up was Betty Coley, the woman who had been walking with Kenneth Adcock along Missouri Street when the shot was fired. She remembered how beautiful the moon had been that night. Bill Waller let her tell her story:

“We were walking, as has been pointed out, toward my home. Just walking slowly, talking and we were very startled when we heard the sound of the bullet because we were positive that the shot had been fired at us. Kenneth grabbed me. We stood there for a second and Kenneth said, ‘The best thing we can do is just to walk on slowly like we’ve been walking and act as if nothing had happened.’ And that’s what we did. We walked on to the house.”

Right after the shot was fired, Coley heard the sound of someone running. From what she could tell, the person had been heading in the direction of Joe’s Drive In.

After a short break Hardy Lott took the witness.

“You, of course, couldn’t tell, for example, whether that was a man or a woman running,” Lott said.

“No, sir.”

“Just somebody running in that field. And you naturally stayed there, or didn’t you, for a while, you and the young man, after that running over in there and you didn’t see anything.”

“Not very long. But we were there. We didn’t walk away immediately.”

“Did you hear any car start up or leave or anything?”

“Not that I recall.”

Adcock took the stand next and corroborated Coley’s testimony. Like Coley, he heard the sound of someone running, but he never heard a car start up.

Detective O. M. Luke was born and raised in Neshoba County, not far from Medgar Evers’s hometown of Decatur. He had been a police officer in Jackson for just over thirteen years when he took the stand that day.

Luke described his search of the crime scene on the morning of June 12. He described the weedy field behind Joe’s Drive In where he found the Enfield rifle and scope carefully concealed in a clump of vines. The weapon, he said, had not been dropped, but had been carefully placed upright in the honeysuckle, more than a foot off the ground.

The rifle, he testified, was an Eddystone, serial number 1052682. The scope on it was a United Golden Hawk, six by thirty-two power, serial number 69431. Before the rifle was shipped off to the FBI lab in Washington, Luke had scratched his initials and the date into the barrel action.

Bill Waller held up the rifle, clearly heavy in his hands, and all attention in the courtroom focused on the long, black gunmetal of the barrel and the heavy wooden stock. As a mere prop the gun was an effective prosecution device. Its physical presence was mesmerizing. It looked mean and evil and deadly.

“Is this the gun — the exact gun — that you pulled out of the honeysuckle vine?” Waller asked.

“This is the gun, the same gun,” Luke replied.

And so, State’s exhibit number 21 was entered into evidence.

Delay Beckwith had a hard time sitting still under the best of circumstances. During the sometimes tedious examination of evidence, the crime scene photographs, and particularly the rifle, Beckwith trailed his lawyers around the room, peering over their shoulders, dogging them, keeping the focus of attention on himself.

During one break that day Beckwith and his attorneys holed up in an empty jury room. The door swung open for a moment, and a reporter caught a glimpse of Beckwith handling the rifle, aiming it across the table.

As Luke left the courtroom, Bill Waller arranged the papers at his table and got ready for the last witness of the day. “The State calls Thorn McIntyre.”

There was a tension in the courtroom as the young farmer stepped up to the bench.

In 1964 the rules for state trials in Mississippi were different than they are now. The exchange of evidence we know as discovery didn’t exist then. Both parties went to trial more or less blind. Neither side had to reveal anything except alibi witnesses. It was called “trial by ambush.” Innes Thornton McIntyre III was a surprise witness. He wore green sunglasses for the occasion.

McIntyre said that he had known Byron De La Beckwith since he had gotten out of the service in 1958. He told the court that he also knew Hardy Lott and Stanny Sanders. In fact they had been his personal attorneys “for a long time.”

Waller then asked him, “Did you in the year 1959 own a British or American Enfield, I’m not sure which it is called, but did you own an Enfield .30/06 rifle?”

“That’s correct,” McIntyre said. “I ordered the rifle from International Firearms, as I remember, in Connecticut.”

He had seen an ad in a magazine, and had ordered it COD for $29.50. He remembered that the invoice was from Quebec, Canada. He recalled picking it up at the Railway Express office in Greenwood. Waller gave him a Railway Express invoice dated February 2, 1959.

McIntyre had never seen this piece of paper before. It was a copy of the shipping company’s invoice, which the FBI had dug up in its investigation. McIntyre couldn’t find the original invoice he had received from Quebec. McIntyre told the court that the information on the shipping company’s invoice was similar to his recollection of when and how he had received the gun, but Waller was not allowed to enter the invoice into evidence.

The D A. then handed McIntyre exhibit number 21, the rifle found near the crime scene.

“How does that weapon compare to the one you owned?”

“The type of weapon is exactly the same. There is no doubt of that. The weapon was made at the Eddystone arsenal and this one is also as shown by the markings on this weapon here. The weapon I owned was made in the ninth month of the year 1918. Those are the only definite markings that I do remember but I do remember those definitely.”

“Does this gun in every way appear to be the gun that you owned?”

“When I traded my rifle, I kept the wooden stock. I couldn’t testify to that. I still have my stock in my possession.”

“You mean you took the stock off the barrel?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You traded a gun without a stock?”

“That’s correct.”

“Who did you trade guns with?”

Over a volley of objections from Hardy Lott, McIntyre was allowed to answer: “A man from Greenwood named De La Beckwith.”

“Do you see that man in the courtroom now?”

“I do.”

Thorn told the jury that he had once had a general conversation about guns with Beckwith on the street in Greenwood. Beckwith had driven twelve miles out to McIntyre’s house to trade with him. He told the jury that it was his opinion that the gun in evidence was the same gun he had traded to Beckwith. He said he had fired that gun two hundred or three hundred times and had turned over some empty cartridge cases to the FBI. He was sure they had come from this weapon.

Now Hardy Lott took the lectern. This might be the best witness the state was likely to come up with, and Lott knew he had to do his best to demolish him. But he did it gently.

What he had to make clear was that the rifle in evidence looked nothing like the one McIntyre had traded to Delay Beckwith. Lott led McIntyre through the details of the trade: the rusty Enfield barrel and action and the new Springfield for McIntyre’s good Eddystone-type Enfield.

“All right,” Lott said. “Now he kept the stock on his rifle?”

“He kept his stock and I kept mine.”

“Now the thing you traded him didn’t have any scope on it, did it?”

“No.”

“And it didn’t have any stock?”

“No…. That’s not my stock.”

Lott asked him how, without having seen the stock or scope before, he could identify the rifle in the newspaper. He said it was because the barrel had been made at the Eddystone arsenal in September 1918.

“Would it surprise you to learn that there were more than two million manufactured in that month?”

“No, it wouldn’t.”

The court recessed until 9 a.m., Saturday.

That night there was another murder in Mississippi. Somebody lured Louis Allen to his front gate and blew his head off with a shotgun.

Allen was a thirty-six-year-old logger with a wife and three children who lived in Liberty, Mississippi. To this day some folks around the little community on the Louisiana line say Allen was killed for a bad debt. Others know better. They say it was because Allen had witnessed the killing of Herbert Lee, an NAACP worker who was shot dead by a state representative, E. H. Hurst. Hurst claimed he killed Lee in self-defense, and at first Louis Allen backed him up. Then his conscience got him, and he talked to the press and to John Doar, who was prepared to prosecute. Allen had been warned to keep his mouth shut, but he still talked. Then someone killed him.

In this case, like so many others, there was no suspect, and no arrest. There would never be a trial.