The Ghosts of Mississippi (36 page)

The next day Darrell attended the formal ceremonies dressed like a Nigerian oil tycoon. He wore gold-and-white robes, a tall hat, and dark shades. He had spent the morning with his Uncle Charlie. They just drove around Jackson. It was the first time they had ever really talked. Darrell wanted his uncle to know that he didn’t hate him, that they were family.

Charles sat in the front row for the afternoon ceremonies, wearing his blue seersucker jacket and looking proud of his nephew. When someone asked him if he was going to speak, he said, “Naw, naw,” as if that were the last thing he wanted to do. He sat there alone while the speeches were given and the names of Mississippi’s great civil rights heroes were recited as if in a litany: Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, Aaron Henry. Nobody mentioned his name. It was as if he had been erased from the books.

He didn’t care, he said. He was happy being chancery clerk of Jefferson County. Things were moving down there. He had contracts out to build a new jail and courthouse. And he had plans to bring jobs and tax revenues to the county: he wanted to start a big landfill out in the woods and charge out-of-state companies huge fees to dump there.

“We got nothing else to sell,” Charles said. “If Detroit is the Motor Capital of the World, we’re going to be known as the Garbage Capital.” If the landfill was a success, Charles hoped to expand the business to include toxic waste, maybe even nuclear waste. The government paid good money to take care of that.

When the unveiling ceremony was over and the television crews had left, a few people stayed behind to stare at the statue. It seemed so small, dwarfed by the wide green field. A car pulled up, and a couple got out, walked over to read the inscription, stood quietly, and then left. Medgar Evers looked, with his hand in his pocket and a serious expression on his tired face, as if he was in a deep, deep studying, gazing out over the hill in the direction of Capitol Street.

Here’s latest mailing — going out over Mississippi like shingles on your roof! Gee those niggers had a ball in L.A. As you know. I’m a native son of Calif. — but it will be hotter than that here in Jackson — you’ll call it chimneyville #2 — Remember your Confederate history. The damned Yankees did it 1 time. But this will be a Peters DeLaughter NAACP Jew Bum Out! Yep. Lot’s of real estate bargains when it cools off.

Ta Ta. De La IV.

A dozen officers guarded Judge Breland Hilburn’s small courtroom on the morning of August 3, 1992. A nervous police captain muttered into a walkie-talkie and hassled journalists who tried to bring briefcases past the sign-in desk. Inside two rows of polished wooden benches, like church pews, were loosely filled with reporters and assorted friends and relatives of the defendant.

Beckwith marched in wearing a dark navy suit, soft gray leather shoes, a white shirt with French cuffs, and gold cuff links. He sat at the defense table and seemed chipper, laughing and flirting with a female legal assistant until Merrida Coxwell finally turned to him and said sharply, “Mr Beckwith! Shhhh!” Beckwith pouted, and Coxwell went back to his papers.

The point of this hearing was for the defense to argue that the charges against Beckwith should be dismissed before he went to trial. When you hear editorial writers and man-on-the-street interviewees complain about all the crooks getting off on “technicalities,” these loopholes more often than not can be found in the U.S. Constitution. The technicalities that could free Beckwith were in the Bill of Rights, specifically the Sixth Amendment, which says the following:

Any reasonable person could see how trying a man for murder twenty-nine years after the fact might raise some doubts about the speediness of his trial. Then there was that other clause about a defendant’s having the right to confront witnesses — a problem here because so many of them were dead. If that wasn’t enough, there was also the Fifth Amendment to deal with, the one that guarantees “due process of law.” Dozens of court cases over the years had bolstered a defendant’s rights to due process and “fundamental fairness,” concepts that Coxwell and Jim Kitchens were arguing had been trampled by the prosecutors of their client.

The still-missing evidence, the lack of a transcript of the second trial, dead lawyers, and absent witnesses were just a few points of prejudice the defense planned to bring up. Worst was the problem that Beckwith couldn’t seem to remember enough about his first two trials to help defend himself.

Coxwell and Kitchens had tried to talk Beckwith into claiming diminished capacity to avoid the trial. They’d wanted to order a psychological profile of their client to use as evidence. Beckwith had been insulted. “What do you think I am, an idiot?” he had shouted.

There were times when Beckwith threatened to fire his attorneys. He and Kitchens couldn’t stand each other. But Coxwell usually could calm him down. Coxwell knew how to handle Beckwith’s tantrums, but nobody knew what Beckwith was likely to do next.

At 9:20 a.m. the bailiff said, “All rise,” and Judge Hilburn flapped through the door in his black robe. The state announced that it would call no witnesses. This seemed to surprise the defense lawyers, who conferred for a moment. Then Kitchens stood up and called Beckwith to the stand. Two dozen people gasped. This was not expected.

Beckwith seemed composed and alert when he took his seat to the left of the judge. He shot his French cuffs, arranged his hands on one knee, and offered the spectators his three-quarter profile.

Kitchens wore a boxy blue suit that looked slept in. His white hair was perfectly combed into a slight flip above his left brow, which he smoothed with his hand as he questioned the witness.

“Mr. Beckwith, have you ever been prosecuted on this same charge before?” Kitchens asked.

“I have, sir.”

“Can you tell the court how long ago that’s been?”

“It’s been quite a while ago, 1963 and ’4. In those years.”

As the questioning continued, Kitchens established that Beckwith couldn’t remember more than 50 percent of what had happened at his first trials, that two of his previous lawyers were dead, and that another of his lawyers, Hardy Lott, was eighty-three and unable to help out with the defense. Beckwith himself was now seventy-one and in bad shape.

“How would you describe your level of energy or stamina at this time, Mr. Beckwith?” Kitchens asked.

“Well, for about a year every morning when I get up I walk around my room, and I am exhausted and I have to go back to bed and sleep until … I have enough strength to do my reading, writing and arithmetic…. I just seem to be going down all the time.”

Beckwith was so clearly enjoying the chance to talk that Kitchens had trouble getting in his questions.

“Mr. Beckwith, how is your ability to concentrate at this time?”

“It’s diminished mightily.”

“Now, sir, I want you to compare these several infirmities that you have described —”

“May I interrupt you, sir?” Beckwith interrupted.

“No, you may not,” Kitchens answered curtly.

“I will hush,” said Beckwith, chastened.

It went on like this for some twenty minutes. Beckwith claimed he had dim memories of some of the old witnesses. Except for Delmar Dennis, he didn’t recognize any of the new witnesses, and he couldn’t recall making statements to any of them.

Kitchens handed over his witness.

Ed Peters looked like a hungry man stepping up to his meal. He didn’t waste any time.

“Did you know an individual named Cecil Sessums?” he asked.

Beckwith raised his chin and leveled a scornful stare at the district attorney.

“The name is familiar, and I do know a man named Cecil Sessums,” he said with almost comic haughtiness. “And I do not—”  he stopped himself, as if remembering instructions. “Go ahead. What’s the next question.”

Peters moved closer to Beckwith. “Go ahead, you can finish answering,” he said.

“You’ve got the floor. I’m listening.”

“How did you know Cecil Sessums?”

“I can’t recall, but I do know Cecil Sessums.”

“Did you go visit him in the penitentiary?”

At his seat behind the prosecutors’ desk, Charlie Crisco stiffened. He had been trying for months to pin down this information, and he hadn’t had much luck.

“I went to the penitentiary to visit some people,” Beckwith said. “And I would say that they were men that are accused of being to the far right, but I don’t know who or what persons or what day it was or anything about it.”

Peters let him ramble on and then asked, “If in fact you went to visit him with Peggy Morgan… would you say that you don’t remember that?”

“I don’t remember any Peggy Morgan. I remember a woman or a girl, a wife of a man, and that’s all I remember,” Beckwith replied.

Crisco let out his breath. He had been trying for months to verify that Beckwith had driven to Parchman with Morgan, one of the witnesses who said he had bragged about killing Medgar Evers.

“Don’t [you] recall going to see Cecil Sessums who had been convicted of a civil rights slaying?” Peters asked, moving closer still. Peters’s voice, which could be so soothing in private conversation, took on a wheedling, annoying cadence in the courtroom. It never took him long to rattle his witnesses.

“I just told you that I went to Parchman penitentiary in the company of some other people,” Beckwith snapped.

“And if —”

“That’s how blank my mind is, sir!”

Peters abruptly changed course.

“If I recall correctly what you told your attorney, you told him that this was quite an embarrassment for you to have been even charged with having killed Medgar Evers, is that correct?”

“You just going to have to go all over that again, please, sir!” Beckwith said coldly. “Make it — just talk slow and distinctly and loud and
look at me
when you talk to me and I will, I will answer your question.”

Peters repeated his question again and again, and Beckwith got angrier and angrier, until Coxwell objected. The judge ordered Peters to rephrase.

“You are saying that this was an embarrassment to you and your family,” Peters said. “I am asking you if it was a badge of honor to you, if it was something that you were proud of that you had been charged with that.”

“Well I don’t think it’s any badge of honor to be charged with murder…. I am very
enraged
over it.”

“And you were enraged over —”

“And I am still mad about it, and I will remain mad about it. I am indignant about it.”

“You were enraged over —”

“And I will not look with kindness upon those that attack me and, and those that are supporting me” — Beckwith was staring hard at the prosecutor — “….all of this heinous, scandalous, ridiculous charge!”

Peters kept baiting Beckwith, and the old man kept swallowing it. Beckwith even argued while his lawyers voiced their objections. At one point Kitchens had to yell, “Be quiet, Mr. Beckwith!” to stifle his client.

The cross-examination went on for the rest of the morning, until Judge Hilburn called a recess for lunch.

Bobby DeLaughter and Crisco walked off the elevator and onto the fifth floor like football buddies who had won the big game. “I couldn’t
believe
they put him on the stand!” DeLaughter kept saying. “I smiled at him the whole time.”

They had ordered sandwiches for lunch, and they sat at the little table by receptionist-secretary Jeanie Stewart’s desk and reviewed the morning, play by play. They chuckled over Beckwith’s admission that he had been to visit Parchman with “the wife of someone.”

“I spent so much time trying to nail that down, putting him at that jail,” Crisco said. “And he gives it to us!”

What Beckwith revealed on the stand that day set up the prosecution for the day his case would come to trial. Assuming there would ever be a trial.

Beckwith seemed more in control of himself when he resumed his testimony after lunch. Peters kept trying to shake him. At one point the two men nearly ripped an exhibit — the photocopy of an old letter — in a childish tug-of-war right in front of the judge. Beckwith kept addressing Peters as if he were a buck private in boot camp: “Look at me when you talk to me!” he would say.

By the end of the day Beckwith had proved to his lawyers that he was a very risky witness to put on the stand.

In spite of Beckwith’s petulant performance observers felt that the defense team had made a strong case of prejudice against their client in their legal arguments. At the same time the defense had quietly scored a tangible victory in another state. Coxwell had filed an appeal to vacate Beckwith’s Louisiana dynamite-transport conviction. Since his release from prison, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that five-member juries were unconstitutional in such cases. Based on that ruling a Louisiana judge retroactively set aside Beckwith’s guilty verdict. He now had no criminal record, and the bomb incident could not be brought up at his murder trial. If there was one.

It was only eight-thirty in the morning, and the August heat was already building in the concrete sidewalks along Tombigbee Street as DeLaughter ducked into the back of the courthouse. He was taking big strides, walking much too fast for someone who had grown up in Mississippi and ought to know better. He was dressed in one of his dark gray murder-trial suits, with shiny black brogues to match his overstuffed briefcase.

He punched the elevator button in the cool courthouse basement.

Crisco was already working in his roomy corner office. The case files for the week were neatly stacked on his desk. Crisco was hunched over the Selectric, pecking at the keys with his two crooked forefingers, typing up another sheaf of subpoenas.

Crisco was already prepared for the murder case DeLaughter was suddenly scheduled to try that morning. When DeLaughter walked through the door, Crisco handed him the fact sheet and the witness list.

“Just tell me — when did the murder happen and where?” DeLaughter asked his investigator. He hadn’t had time to get ready for the case.

Crisco pointed to his sheet, and DeLaughter was scribbling the details down on a legal pad when Jeanie Stewart came quietly to the door.

“Bobby, there are reporters and a news crew waiting for you. They want to talk to you,” she said.

Crisco looked at DeLaughter’s face — is there something else I need to know? — but DeLaughter was still concentrating on copying the fact sheet as he said, “Okay, tell ’em I’ll be right out.”

Both men knew that Judge Hilburn was going to make his decision on the Beckwith case today. It was the unspoken tension behind every move anybody made. You could feel it in the way Jeanie tiptoed around, her southern-breeze voice even breathier than usual; the way Bobby tightened up when he was worried, closed up his face so even his mother wouldn’t know what he was thinking. Beckwith seemed to follow him today like a dark shadow.

Crisco leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his stomach. He was going to have to see a doctor about this pain in his gut.

When Crisco was working homicide, he used to carry a pack of Rolaids in his pants pocket wherever he went. Always had a roll. He used to eat them by the handful. He ate his last Rolaid the day he took this job nearly two years ago. Not that working in the D.A.’s office didn’t have its own brand of stress. There were literally hundreds of violent felonies to try every court term and only two judges and two prosecutors to handle them. Doc Thaggard had suffered from ulcers for years. Cynthia Hewes had them. DeLaughter seemed to be the only one in the office with an iron stomach. He would joke that all he ever got was a bad attitude. Give him time. Crisco could feel the twinges of a return performance of his own bad stomach.