The Ghosts of Mississippi (27 page)

It was a sophisticated bomb, as the police bomb expert Glenn Keller would later testify, built by someone who knew what he was doing. A Westclox alarm clock — ticking and set for 4:30 a.m., with a mercury switch on the back — was attached to blinking flashlight bulbs and an Eveready battery. A blasting cap had been inserted in the dynamite. All that would be needed was a few twists of wire to complete the circuit and fully arm the bomb. Keller disabled it and carted it away in the bomb pot.

Windstein had a look in the car. He placed into evidence the photocopied map marked with a route to Bee Botnick’s neighborhood.

The car itself was cluttered with Beckwith’s possessions, like a capsule of the narrow concerns of his life. In the front seat, along with the bomb, were a steel hatchet, brown work gloves, a King James Bible, four seven-round clips for a .45 pistol, a six-inch Buck knife, and a first aid kit.

The backseat contained, among many other things, a .30-caliber M-1 carbine; a thirty-round clip for it, fully loaded; ammunition for the rifle; a Polaroid Swinger camera; enough clothes for a week, including five sets of Jockey shorts, black and brown shoes, and a few foreign coins from Guatemala and Holland.

The trunk, once they got it open, offered up a small arsenal of various ammo and gun parts, including the barrel of a .50-caliber machine gun and the barrel and action of a Royal Enfield rifle. There was also a box of blue-and-white antique china, packets of letters and photos describing the antiques, letters from the wife of Jefferson Davis to Beckwith’s grandmother, an umbrella, a black wooden walking stick, several boxes of personal items such as little lapel pins (one in the shape of a gun), Massey-Ferguson sales materials, a silver dollar, and twenty-three copies of a book titled
None Dare Call It Conspiracy
by Gary Allen.

Although the car was equipped with a tape player, the detailed police report did not mention any box of eight-track tapes.

Beckwith was held in lockup overnight, then taken to the parish jail to wait for arraignment. Word had gotten around that the man accused of killing Medgar Evers had been arrested with a time bomb. Beckwith was met by reporters and managed to answer a few questions.

He told them that he had been coming to New Orleans to sell some antique china. When he was asked about the dynamite bomb, he replied, “I’ll just say a lot of dynamite is used in the Delta to blow up stumps.” The Associated Press reported the quote, adding that “he would not say if he planned to blow up any stumps in New Orleans.”

Somebody asked if he was a member of the KKK.

“I’ve been accused of it,” he said softly. Then he snapped, “Thank you for your interest.”

Beckwith was finally charged in both federal and state courts. Some leading citizens in Greenwood vouched for his eligibility for bail, including the mayor, a former sheriff, and a justice of the peace named Curtis Underwood. A Greenwood businessman named Z. A. Prewitt put up his $36,000 bond. Beckwith told the Greenwood Commonwealth that another rich planter had flown him back from New Orleans in his private plane, since his Oldsmobile had been impounded.

Now Beckwith had a more direct answer to give about the bomb in his car: he had no idea who could have put it there. “I was astounded to find out about it,” he said. He praised his jailers in Louisiana, and even the inmates, who were “very courteous with few exceptions.” Ever the gentlemanly guest, he even complimented the prison food as “very good, ample, wholesome and well-prepared.” He was still, he said, trying to sell his china.

Within weeks a fund-raising letter was circulating among the usual Christian patriots. “This is Urgent!” it began. Beckwith begged that money “in any amount” be sent to his son’s address in West Point, Mississippi. They were after him again. “Because of who I am, I have the right type of enemies.” They were in “high places.” He was the victim of “a plot to Abolish Beckwith.”

In every way Beckwith was back where he felt he belonged. He was once again the center of attention.

Beckwith was tried in federal court in New Orleans in late January 1974. The charges were straightforward: possessing an unregistered handgun and an unregistered bomb. For the first time in his life Beckwith was up before an integrated jury, including three women, a black man, and a black alternate. His court-appointed attorney, Wayne Mancuso, was an Italian Catholic.

There had been a number of pretrial skirmishes. The most dangerous to the government’s case had been the defense motion to suppress evidence found in the arrest and search, which would effectively end the case. Where was their probable cause to stop Beckwith and search him and his car?

What the defense wanted to know was who tipped off the police to the time bomb. How could the informant know the exact dimensions of the bomb unless he or she constructed it? And if the informant had made the bomb, then he or she was a coconspirator and not subject to special protection. In the end the court ruled that the search had been proper, and the informant’s identity was kept secret.

The delicate matter of the informant hamstrung the prosecution. The government couldn’t get directly into the motive for the crime without producing him. But the FBI was not willing to sacrifice the informant’s identity — and, possibly, his life — for a conviction.

This didn’t prevent the prosecution from trying to paint a picture of the larger crime for the jury. For instance, Bee Botnick’s secretary, Lorraine Treigle, testified that Beckwith had come to the ADL office on Gravier Street on September 14, 1973, asking about her boss. Botnick himself took the stand to corroborate her account. But the judge threw out their testimony. It wasn’t relevant to the charges.

The defense strategy was to convince the jury that a bomb was planted in Beckwith’s car either to frame him or to kill him. Beckwith took the stand to offer his version of events that day in September. He had decided, he said, to take a few days off and head to New Orleans to try to sell off his family’s antique china. He said there was a black wooden box filled with music tapes in his car when he left Greenwood. He said he stopped in Jackson to visit friends and business acquaintances, leaving his car parked and unguarded.

Shortly before dark he left Jackson for New Orleans — a three- or four-hour drive to the south. Feeling tired, Beckwith pulled off the road for “a nice long snooze.” Then he continued on to New Orleans.

The next thing he knew, he was under arrest for some reason. He collected guns, and he carried a loaded pistol for self-protection. He had a permit to carry it, he said. Beckwith said he never saw the map of New Orleans on the front seat of his car. He had no knowledge of a time bomb. He read in the paper that a bomb was found in his car.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Dennis Weber was sarcastic in his cross- examination. “You have no idea who put that device in your car?” he asked incredulously.

“No sir,” Beckwith said. “I’m just as curious as you are, and believe me, I’m going to find out.”

The jury went out at 1:40 on a Friday afternoon. They stayed out all evening. By noon on Saturday they had reached a unanimous verdict: not guilty on all counts.

Reporters who interviewed the jurors later learned that what bothered them most was that they felt they weren’t getting the whole story. They wanted to know why Beckwith had a bomb in his car. Where did he get it? They were a cautious group, and if they couldn’t get all the facts, they weren’t taking a chance on a conviction. They wouldn’t even convict him on the handgun charge.

The U.S. attorney was dumbfounded. The judge seemed livid.

“You were arrested under most suspicious circumstances,” the judge lectured Beckwith. “You have literally walked through the valley of the shadow of death.”

Beckwith delighted in his victory. He immediately announced his intention to run for office again in Mississippi. Maybe try for Congress this time. There was just the little matter of the Louisiana state charges against him that were still pending.

That fall New Orleans elected Harry Connick, Sr., as its new district attorney. Connick brought in his law partner, Bill Wessel, as his first assistant. Wessel was a reform-minded lawyer. He had worked on civil rights cases in Mississippi. He wanted to send out a message that the new D.A. wasn’t going to conduct business as usual. He searched through the stacks of pending cases from the departing Jim Garrison’s docket and found the one he was looking for.

Louisiana has strange laws, a melange of British common law and Napoleonic Code from the state’s origins as a French colony. Although the laws have been changing, back in the 1970s a person could be tried by a five-member jury for certain misdemeanors. Beckwith, who was still charged only with illegally transporting dynamite into Louisiana without a permit, qualified for the small jury.

Beckwith was put on trial in May 1975. This time, despite the loud protests of the defense, the jury consisted of five black women.

The second trial was much like the first one. The prosecution was allowed to use crucial testimony from the federal trial, including the hearing to suppress evidence obtained in the search of Beckwith’s car. It was, all in all, not a favorable situation for the defense.

Again Beckwith took the stand. He narrated his version of events on the day before his arrest in September 1973. It was a now-familiar performance. Beckwith argued with his own lawyer, he interrupted and asked questions, and he sparred with the prosecutor on cross-examination, leading the judge to admonish him again and again. He offered to sell his china to Wessel or anyone in the gallery who might be interested. He seemed to be enjoying himself thoroughly.

The outcome was rather different this time around. It took the jury thirty-five minutes to find him guilty. He was given the maximum sentence of five years in prison. Beckwith was allowed to remain free on bond while his lawyers filed an appeal.

A few years earlier Beckwith had bought a dilapidated old house deep in the woods of Holmes County, near a hamlet called Cruger just south of Greenwood. He returned there to await his appeal. The old Melton place, as it was called, had no heat or electricity or running water. The roof leaked when it rained, and a family of skunks resided in the foundation. In good weather Beckwith slept outside or under a mosquito net on the veranda. What it had was privacy and good hunting for his son. Beckwith took up reading as his main hobby, and by most accounts his fanatic philosophies grew more and more elaborate.

Sometimes FBI agents would hazard a trip down the rutted dirt road to drop in on Beckwith, if only to remind him that they were still watching. Mostly he kept to himself. The press was not welcome.

A reporter and photographer from the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
managed an audience with Beckwith before he began serving his sentence.  They found him at Ricks Motors tractor dealership, where he Beckwith was working. While the photographer, Jim Miller, snapped away in the fluorescent office light, Beckwith quietly terrorized the writer. He was describing how he could tell the differences between a black man and a Chinese man by cutting off their heads, boiling them down to the bone, and comparing the skulls side by side.

“You can do the same thing with a white man’s skull,” Miller remembered him saying. “But I wouldn’t want to cut the head off a white man, unless he made me real mad.”

According to Miller the shaken reporter tossed his notebook in the trash as they left the building. The story never ran.

Beckwith kept busy while he waited out his appeal. In the spring of 1977 he traveled to Washington, D.C., to stay with Pauline Mackey, a friend from the ultra-right wing Liberty Lobby organization. He was trying to sell some sort of oil filters to the Pentagon through the office of his hero and distant relative, Senator James O. Eastland.

While he was there, Beckwith’s appeal was denied. But since he was out of the state, he missed his appointment to report to prison.

Late one night in May a dozen or so armed officers appeared at Mackey’s house and rousted Beckwith from his bed. Among them was Ben Windstein, who carried a fugitive warrant from the state of Louisiana.

Beckwith spent the next three years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. He served his time in a solitary cell, often just off death row, where guards could keep him away from the general population. It was well known that the man who was supposed to have shot Medgar Evers was a prisoner at Angola. He would not have lasted long in the yard. So he took his meals in his cell, and he exercised in the corridor while the guards watched.

Beckwith was by then an experienced prisoner. He made the best of a bad situation. He was allowed a radio, reading matter, and limitless access to the commissary. To fight the drabness of prison life he managed to customize his jail togs: he cut the sleeves and sewed them with mattress buttons to give himself French cuffs. He continued his regimen of compulsive reading and letter writing.

One of his correspondents was the new, self-proclaimed leader of the Identity Movement. Richard Butler was a disciple of Wesley Swift, whose tapes had proved so inspirational to the Klan and who had died in 1970. Butler would soon establish a white separatist compound near Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to be headquarters for his own group, the Aryan Nations.

Beckwith wrote Butler a long letter in March 1978, which was promptly printed in Butler’s newspaper,
The Tribal Chronicle
, organ of the Identity Movement. Beckwith’s reason for writing was to complain loudly that he had been booted out of the Masons for being a convicted felon. He wanted fellow travelers to answer a question for him: was Jesus Christ a Mason? It seemed to be an important point to him in his appeal to the lodge.

Never one to pass up the chance to talk about himself, Beckwith provided some background about his life and his legal troubles. “In 1963 I was accused of murdering Mississippi’s mightiest NAACP nigger Leader named Medgar Evers…. I got two hung juries,” he wrote. “In 1973 I was accused of coming to New Orleans, La., to put a bomb in the lap of a top Jew of the ADL or B’nai B’rith. In 1974 I was tried and found totally innocent…. In 1975 I was retried before an all nigger jury made up of 5 nigger women and in 5 minutes I was a convict!”