The Ghosts of Mississippi (22 page)

“We call the defendant, Mr. Beckwith.”

Some people gasped. A man who had coughed continuously all day stopped coughing. The courtroom was silent as Beckwith’s fingers fluttered over his tie and pulled straight his suit coat. Then he strode to the witness stand.

Waller and Fox sat, stunned, for a moment. Then Fox hurried out to retrieve a large file from the D.A.’s office. Waller leaned forward, his massive bulldog head over the wooden table, watching closely as Beckwith was sworn in.

By now Waller knew he could lose this case, badly. The three alibi witnesses were hard to impeach. This was the break he was hoping for.

Beckwith carefully crossed his legs and shot his French cuffs and shifted around to face the jury as Hardy Lott began the questioning. Beckwith answered rapidly, with an odd military precision.

“How old are you?” Lott asked.

“Forty-three, suh!”

“You married?”

“Yes, suh!”

“Do you have any children?”

“One son.”

Beckwith beamed amiably at the jury, conjuring all his nervous salesman’s charm for this moment in the spotlight. He told them that he was a marine, that he “got the business” at Tarawa, and informed them that he was a gun lover and trader.

“I trade guns like I might trade dogs or stamps …” he said.

“Now, Mr. Beckwith, did you shoot Medgar Evers?”

“No, suh!”

“Were you in Jackson, Mississippi, when Medgar Evers was shot?”

“No, suh!”

Beckwith then denied speaking to the cabdrivers, ever going to the bus station in Jackson. He denied parking next to the grocery or going to Joe’s Drive In or even knowing where those places were.

He got the scar above his right eye, he explained, on Sunday afternoon before the murder. He was target shooting with a rifle and scope out on the police range in Greenwood, practicing in a prone position. “And I got my eye right up in that scope and I got it up a little too close and I squeezed that trigger and that heavy recoil came back and cut a hole, cut a gap in my head!” Beckwith said.

Lott asked him if he was a hunter. The man on trial for his life couldn’t help finding the humor in the moment. “I am the worst hunter in the world. I’ve had guns all my life and if I have ever killed anything besides time we haven’t been able to cook it at home!”

Waller stared at him from the distance of his table.

Beckwith clearly delighted in this gun talk. He boasted about the guns he kept and traded, how it was his habit to keep thirty or forty pistols in suitcases in the trunk of his car, ready to trade, and rifles and shotguns under the front seat, “so I can feel down there and see if they are there.”

Beckwith admitted having owned a few Enfield 30/06 rifles in his time. He admitted trading with Duck Goza for a scope. He also admitted trading with Thorn McIntyre for a .30/06, although he had taken only the barrel and bolt action; he had put his own wooden stock on it. Then he’d had a local gun dealer put Goza’s stock on the rifle. He had hoped, he said, to trade it to a deer hunter.

Hardy Lott picked up the jet-black rifle from the evidence table and walked toward his client. Again, the rifle’s dark, heavy presence seemed to suck the energy from the air around it. Every eye in the room followed it to Beckwith’s outstretched hands.

“I will hand you a rifle with a scope — State’s Exhibit 21 — and ask you to examine it.”

Beckwith ran his eyes over it with the attention of a connoisseur. Then he sited it over the heads of the jury, and peered into the empty breech. “There’s a little dust in it,” he grumped.

“Looking at it, do you see any difference between the rifle and scope you have just testified about that you had and that one?” Lott asked.

“There is much similarity between this weapon and the weapon — several weapons that I possess — much similarity between them.”

“Do you know whether or not that is the rifle and scope that you had that you have just testified about?”

“No, sir … I don’t know that it’s my rifle or one that 1 have ever had but it is similar to it.”

He said all of his rifles had slings on them, and this one didn’t. He narrated a story about his Enfield rifle, the one he had fired the Sunday before the murder, the one that cut his eye. He said he look it home that night to clean it thoroughly and wrap it up and put it in the bathroom closet “where nobody would be picking it up and fooling with it.”

He had spent the next day in the field with John Book, his instructor at Delta Liquid Plant Food, learning about crop fertilization. They drove all over the southern Delta in Book’s car. Beckwith’s Valiant, he testified, was parked, unlocked, in front of the office in Greenville all day. When he got home after dark, he noticed the rifle was gone. He hadn’t been able to find it in his car with his other guns or upstairs when he’d checked. He wasn’t sure whether the gun was missing from the car or the house.

By now Beckwith’s mouth was running away with him, and the judge had to remind him not to argue with himself and not to ask questions on the stand.

He said he lived in the house alone.

“What about your wife?”

“My wife and son, they . . . were in an apartment because the house was in such a fearful state of repairs, it wasn’t hardly fit to live in. . . .” “Were you and your wife separated at that time?”

“Only by geography. She was living in another part of town in a comfortable apartment, and I was living in that old house until we could make better arrangements.”

The old house was never locked, he said, unless they went away for a week or two.

Now the defense offered an explanation as to why Beckwith’s fingerprint should be on the scope. Was it Beckwith’s custom to handle shiny objects such as guns and scopes in gun shops? Yes. Including the objects in Duck’s Tackle Shop? That was correct.

Finally he was asked why he refused to speak to the FBI agents who came to talk to him before his arrest. Beckwith told the whole story, complete with dialogue on both sides.

“And they said, ‘We want to talk to you about a scope.’ And I said ‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I don’t have anything to say to you, don’t have any comment to make to you and you have my permission to leave.’ ”

He explained that he did this as a matter of routine, since the LeFlore County Bar Association had advised the citizens of Greenwood not to speak to FBI agents for any reason. There were articles about it in the
Commonwealth.

One such article was produced and entered into the record. It was the only piece of physical evidence the defense would offer.

Hardy Lott turned his witness over to the prosecution.

Bill Waller stood up slowly. The courtroom was very quiet. “Mr. Beckwith, I will ask you whether or not, sir, if you have been rather public in your pronouncement of your ideas on segregation and what forces should be used to maintain segregation?” Waller asked.

Beckwith answered snappily, “I have been very pronounced on my ideas in regard to racial segregation and constitutional government and state’s rights. Yes, sir, very pronounced. In fact I have written many articles to many newspapers and a lot of them have published the articles. And I don’t write under a pen name!”

Since Beckwith himself had opened this door, Waller fished a piece of newsprint from his files and read from a letter to the editor of the Jackson
Daily News,
April 16, 1957: ‘“I believe in segregation just like I believe in God. I shall oppose any person, place, or thing that opposes segregation.’ Did you write that?”

“I sure did write that. You are reading it just like it was written.” Waller continued, “ ‘I shall combat the evils of integration and shall bend every effort to rid the U.S.A. of the integrationists.’ Did you write that?”

“I sure did write that, suh.”

“Do you still feel that way?”

“As it is written, you read it.”

“Do you still feel that way?”

“Of course I feel that way, sir.”

“And you mean any force, when you say any force you mean . . .”

“Within
reason,
you understand,
reason,”
Beckwith said, pouring syrup over the vowels as he uttered them. “And moderation. I won’t say moderation. I say within reason, civilized reason. Reason within civilized and organized society.”

Waller kept reading. “ ‘And further, when I die I will be buried in a segregated cemetery. When you get to heaven you will find me in the part that has a sign saying — quote — “For White’s Only” and if I go to Hades I am going to raise hell all over Hades until I get to the white section.’ Did you say that?”

No answer.

“Anyway, Mr. Beckwith, that’s your letter and written by yourself and mailed to the editor?”

“Mr. Waller, I want you to understand and where there is humor intended I want you to laugh and smile and where it is serious I want you to be serious and so you have read the letter about like I intended for it to go to the press.”

If the jury, up to this point, had been wondering what might cause this quirky little salesman to shoot a man in the back from ambush, Waller intended to use this opportunity to provide the motive. With any luck he could hound Beckwith and make him crack on the stand. Already it was hard to shut him up. He was like a wind-up toy with a taut spring — he couldn’t seem to control his own mouth.

“I have a letter here dated January 26, 1963 [to the] National Rifle Association, Washington DC. ‘Gentlemen: For the next fifteen years we here in Mississippi are going to have to do a lot of shooting to protect our wives, children and ourselves from bad niggers.’ Did you write that?”

“I don’t know. Let me look at it and see. I probably did if you say so …”

If it was Waller’s intention to make Beckwith lose his temper on the stand, it was Beckwith’s intention to spar with Waller and goad his tormentor as best he could. When Waller showed him a picture of the white Valiant, Beckwith would only say that it “sure looked” like his car, until the judge prodded him to answer directly. It was the same thing with the rifle: “I couldn’t say that it is or that it is not my gun.”

There was no use in badgering the witness; it wasn’t getting him anywhere. So Waller dug back into his files and produced another letter to read to the jury. Beckwith had written it to the editor of
Outdoor Life
only a week or so earlier.

“Mr. Beckwith, let me read you this part of the letter, sir: ‘I have just finished an article on garfish hunting at
night’
— which you underscored — ‘which is sure to be of interest to the reader along with several ideas I have on shooting at night in the summertime for varmints.’ Those are your words on January the 22nd.”

Beckwith eyed the prosecutor with disdain. “Do you know what a varmint is?”

“No, sir, I thought maybe you did.”

“I do.”

“What is it?”

“A varmint is game, disagreeable game, game that does no good, for instance, a crow or a hawk. Well, a hawk may do some good, but — well, you might even call a squirrel a varmint, but we don’t refer to squirrels as varmints, but down in the Natchez area you might call an armadillo a varmint…. It’s wildlife that contributes nothing to the welfare of other animals and it’s a, it’s a great sport to varmint hunt.” Waller ignored the contradiction in Beckwith’s earlier testimony, that he wasn’t a hunter. Instead he threw out some bait: “Are you talking about. . . would you say an integration leader is a varmint?”

Beckwith wouldn’t take it.

“Oh, that’s a human being,” he cooed. “But we’re talking about varmints. I’m talking about crows and things like that.”

Waller tried another tack. Of the 150 letters Beckwith had written from his jail cells since his arrest, had he once denied killing Medgar Evers?

“I don’t imagine I said much about killing Medgar Evers in all of them. . . . The only mention that I can imagine that I would put in a letter regarding this case is that I am not guilty of. . . any crime,” Beckwith replied.

“And you don’t believe that killing an integration leader is a crime, do you, Mr. Beckwith?”

“Oh, that’s a crime. But I say I believe I am guilty of no crime.”

“Yes, sir. Now in four months’ time and a hundred and fifty letters. I’ll ask you whether or not you have referred frequently to the fact that you are making sacrifices for the cause?”

“This is a cause, yes, sir.”

“All right. Now I’ll ask you further if you have not referred to the fact that you have written a book about the subject matter of which you are being tried now, you have given it a title, and you have offered it to publishers to print, is that not so?”

All in all Beckwith was on the stand for two hours and twenty minutes, with only one short break. For someone with Beckwith’s temperament he controlled himself reasonably well. But for some reason this line of questioning, about the book he was hoping to see published, touched something in him, and the jury got to see something in his eyes they hadn’t seen before.

“I have made mention of it many times as a book, but it is not a book. It is a compiling of literature and facts and background material.”

“What is the title of the book, Mr. Beckwith?”

“The title,” he snapped. “The book has ten titles . .

People who were there say they saw an odd glint in Beckwith’s eyes, and a change came over his face as the lawyers argued back and forth over whether the book should be mentioned in court. As Beckwith testified about the book, his choice of words seemed mild enough, but his demeanor projected, as one reporter put it, a man on the verge of hysteria.

“Mr. Beckwith, could I refresh your memory and give you one title to your book that you have used in your correspondence to various editors and people in reference to your book?” Waller asked.

“You certainly may, sir.”

“Is it,
My Ass, Your Goat and the Republic?”

“You say that’s the only title you have seen?”

“Well, other than
Varmint Hunters.”

“Oh, that’s not a title to a book or to anything. That’s just a matter of expression.”

“That’s another subject, but I want to talk to you about your book now.”