The Ghosts of Mississippi (40 page)

Beckwith was keeping quiet in the courtroom, and under the watchful eyes of his attorneys he was no longer giving interviews. However, he was temperamentally unsuited to silence, and during breaks he was often overheard making comments to his lawyers or family members.

For instance, after the first group of mostly black prospective jurors took their seats, Beckwith was overheard in the hallway saying in a stage whisper like a buzz saw, “Why I thought I was looking up a stovepipe! All I could see was black!” Another time he announced, “I didn’t know whether I should smile at them or throw coconuts!”

DeLaughter and Peters did their best to steer clear of him, but sometimes the man cornered them in the corridor. Once Beckwith was carrying a copy of his paperback biography, and he walked up to DeLaughter and said, “You can buy this now for only eighteen dollars.” DeLaughter looked at him in astonishment as he added, “It’ll be twenty-two dollars after the trial!”

DeLaughter extracted himself and hurried down the hall.

On Friday afternoon Crisco crouched over his desk in Jackson like an army general preparing his battle plan. Papers and charts were stacked around him. He had neatly printed the name of every state witness and highlighted in green the ones who were from out of town and needed to be put up in hotels.

DeLaughter and Peters were keeping him up to date from Batesville while he put the final touches on the case. He had sent out subpoenas to thirty-seven state witnesses; seventeen of them had testified at the first trial. There were two new names to add to the witness list. Reed Massengill, a writer who happened to be Beckwith’s nephew by marriage, had just published a nasty biography of his uncle. Crisco had tracked him down and convinced him to fly down from Knoxville, Tennessee, to read some incriminating documents on the stand. And there was another former FBI agent whom Crisco had located through Massengill’s book who could back up Delmar Dennis’s story.

It put Crisco in a good mood. The only surprises he liked in a trial were his own.

Myrlie Evers came down with the flu and missed the first week of jury selection. By the weekend she felt well enough to travel to Batesville, but then her husband, Walter Williams, got sick, so she came alone.

Evers was relieved when Benny Bennett picked her up at the airport in nearby Memphis. She liked him, and he made her feel safe. But when she was shown her room at the Ramada, something close to panic welled up in her. Every room was on the ground floor, where a car could pull up to the door. Her room, like all the others, had a picture window looking out on the parking lot. Anyone who wanted to could just drive up, blast through that window, and be done before anyone, even Bennett, could react. A wave of fear passed through her. She could hardly sleep that night.

On Monday morning she took a seat, alone, in the back of the courtroom. Even though she was expected to testify, the judge had given her special permission to witness the trial. She had a yellow legal pad in her lap, and her hands were steady as she quietly took notes, but inside her heart was jumping. At the front of the room was the man she had pursued for thirty years. It was the first time she had seen him since 1964.

Beckwith was particularly agitated that morning. He could not seem to stay in his seat. He paced around and sat next to Thelma. Both of them craned their necks and peered myopically at the back of the room. If Beckwith could not see Evers, he seemed to sense her presence. She was like a force field, drawing the focus of the press and the sheriffs, pulling the center of attention away from Beckwith. Whenever she was around, Beckwith seemed gloomy and distracted.

When she finally met his gaze and looked into those cold gun-barrel eyes, she felt strangely liberated. She had done it. She had faced Medgar’s killer one more time, and now she could dismiss him from her mind. He was a nonperson, like a gnat she could casually brush away from her face. She shook off his stare and returned to her notes.

During a break Bennett saw Evers sitting by herself and walked over to talk with her. They chatted pleasantly, then Bennett told her something he had never mentioned before. “You know, Miz Evers, my daddy was one of the detectives who came to your house the morning your husband was shot.”

Evers looked at Bennett with wide-open eyes, then said in a hushed voice, almost apologetically, “Oh, Benny. Do you know that I must have hated your father?”

Bennett told her that was all right. “In your position, I would have felt the same way,” he said.

The jury was finally selected on Wednesday morning, January 26. Both defense and prosecution were allowed to strike twelve names from the panel and two from the list of alternates. Just about any reason would do. Kitchens removed a few potential jurors who had glared angrily at Beckwith and another one because she looked like Myrlie Evers. Peters rejected one elderly World War II veteran because he seemed like a “clone” of the defendant.

When it was over, Peters and DeLaughter were smiling. It was their jury to lose. The tally was eight blacks to four whites. The ages ranged from thirty to seventy, but only four black jurors were old enough to remember Evers’s murder. It was a working-class jury, a panel of Wal-Mart shoppers of all complexions. Half of them hadn’t finished high school. There were factory workers, truck drivers, a cook, a maid, a secretary, the white co-manager of a Wendy’s restaurant, and a black minister. When they went home to pack their bags for what was now expected to be a two-week trial, many of them didn’t own suitcases. When they disembarked from the bus that night at the hotel where they would be sequestered in Jackson, several jurors trundled their clothes into the elegant lobby of the Edison-Walthall Hotel in laundry baskets and plastic garbage bags.

To
convict Byron De La Beckwith, Bobby DeLaughter and Ed Peters had to resurrect Medgar Evers then kill him all over again. They had to make people care about Evers and show that his death mattered as much today as it did thirty years ago. They also had to transform Beckwith from the addled old gray-headed grandfather at the defense table into a fanatic racist and a black-hearted, cold-blooded killer. There was only one person who could do all these things for them.

“Call Myrlie Evers,” DeLaughter said.

The out-of-town jury was seated next to the judge’s bench. Some jurors craned their necks to watch Evers walk through the door. She wore a simple gray jacket over a black skirt. Her face was solemn and composed as she settled into the witness chair. It was an eerie moment: the same teak-paneled courtroom in Jackson; the same wooden pews filled with a smattering of friends, supporters, and college students; the same defendant with his arm draped over his chair, the dim light from the art deco chandeliers glinting vaguely off the gold watchband on his wrist.

Beckwith had yawned elaborately during DeLaughter’s opening statement earlier that morning. He sat quietly while Bobby outlined the case against him, promised the jury some new witnesses, and told them how for years Beckwith had gloated about beating the system. Now, finally, the state would be able to prove that the bullet that killed Medgar Evers was “aimed by prejudice, propelled by hatred and fired by a back-shooting coward,” and the coward was Byron De La Beckwith.

Beckwith watched with some interest as Merrida Coxwell made his brief opening remarks. The defense, said Coxwell, would prove that it was physically impossible for the defendant to have committed this crime. He was ninety miles away at the time of the murder.

Some of the spectators were surprised at Coxwell’s lackluster, narrow presentation. Where were the great conspiracy theories that had been hinted at for years? Where was the supposed FBI plot, the list of other suspects, the saber-rattling of previous hearings, invocations that this was a political trial and nothing more?

Dozens of reporters were covering the trial from the courtroom balcony, a place that had once been reserved for “colored” spectators. As much as the television stations and Court TV lawyers had pleaded and threatened lawsuits, Judge Hilburn refused to allow a video camera in the courtroom. As usual Mississippi was years behind the rest of the country in this practice, and Hilburn didn’t want to set any more precedents than necessary with this trial. Besides nobody in government wanted to inflame the masses. Every law enforcement officer in the area was on alert for the duration of the trial.

The reporters in the press gallery whispered and wrote notes to each other until Myrlie Evers entered the courtroom. Then everyone fell silent and stayed that way.

“State your name please,” Bobby DeLaughter said.

“My name is Myrlie Evers.”

She glanced over at the defense table just once, and she gave Beckwith a long, cool look. Then she turned her eyes away from him and focused on Bobby.

Her testimony began with who she was now. She was married to Walter Williams, and was a retired public works commissioner of the city of Los Angeles. She resided in Los Angeles and Oregon.

Then, slowly, Bobby walked her back into the past.

Yes, she had been married before, she said. Her first husband’s name was Medgar Wiley Evers, and they were wed on December 24, 1951. They had met “the first hour” of her first day at Alcorn College.

The jurors watched her carefully. Some of them leaned toward her, as if to hear better. But her voice was strong and mellifluous as she recalled the landmarks of her life with Medgar: his rejection from law school because of his race, his job as the first NAACP field secretary in Mississippi, his role in James Meredith’s enrollment at Ole Miss, his work to change the way things were in the state.

The defense objected when DeLaughter asked Mrs. Evers what her husband was “trying to change” in Mississippi. Kitchens was overruled.

“He wanted to integrate the schools,” she said. “To open swimming pools, use libraries, go to department stores, and to be called by name instead of just ‘boy’ or ‘girl.’ ”

A few of the younger members of the jury looked surprised. The older black folks nodded softly. That was what you could die for thirty years ago.

She told the jury about the last time she had seen Medgar, how he got into his car that morning and then came out again and hugged her “in a very special embrace” and told her to take care of herself. How he called from work that day.

Then Myrlie Evers told the jury what happened in the early morning hours of June 12, 1963. She told them the story she had repeated so often before, but her face showed them she was seeing it and hearing it all over again: the sound of the car motor, the slam of the door, the horrible rifle blast, her race to the front door, the sight of her husband lying in his own blood, the children screaming, “Daddy! Get up!” and her own screams.

DeLaughter pulled out a stack of black-and-white photographs and began showing them to her. There was her house on Guynes Street, this was Medgar’s car, here was the thick pool of blood on the carport. Bobby entered each photo into evidence and passed them to the jury. Then he did something that Myrlie Evers wasn’t expecting.

“Could you identify this please?” he asked as he handed her a snapshot-size color photograph.

Myrlie stared at the picture for a long moment, and for the first time her eyes filled with tears, and her voice cracked. “This is Medgar in his casket,” she said.

Over the futile objections of the defense DeLaughter was allowed to circulate the picture among the jurors. What was instantly clear to Myrlie, and quickly dawned on the twelve men and women in the jury box, was that the picture they were looking at had not been taken at Medgar’s funeral in 1963. It was a very recent picture of an exhumed body. The perfectly preserved features were those of a man who seemed to be sleeping.

The crime of Medgar Evers’s murder was no longer a distant political act from a long-ago era. The peculiar alchemy of the testimony was completed now. Medgar Evers had been brought to life, killed, and literally brought back from the dead in the course of one morning.

Beckwith, who at first seemed to be listening to the testimony, cradled his head in his hands and looked down, as if he had a headache or perhaps was falling asleep. All twelve jurors and both alternates sat with their arms crossed over their chests. Some of them looked at Beckwith like he was a bug.

Bobby DeLaughter spent the rest of the day enhancing the spell. The case against Beckwith would not only be recounted; it would be reenacted.

Houston Wells was much too feeble to testify at this trial. Bobby and Crisco had found another witness from the murder scene who could bring it to life. Willie Quinn was a very old man now. He seemed stunned and somewhat confused as he ambled to the stand in his Sunday suit. He couldn’t hear the questions and couldn’t recall most things about the night Medgar Evers was shot. But he remembered one thing well, and his voice was good and loud when he told it.

Quinn had been riding to the hospital in the back of Houston Wells’s station wagon when Evers had come awake and tried to sit up.

“Did he say anything, Mr. Quinn?”

“Yes, sir. He said, ‘Turn me loose!’ ”

Charlie Crisco testified that he had been present at the exhumation of Medgar Evers’s body in Arlington National Cemetery in June 1991. He’d accompanied the body to Albany, New York, where he had documented the autopsy. Pictures and X-rays had been taken, and lead fragments had been removed from the body in Crisco’s presence. They were entered into evidence.

The fragments were too small to be of much use, except as a psychological anchor for the jurors. They were real; they had a physical weight. This was not just a case made from paper and words and memories.

DeLaughter next called Dr. Michael Baden, who had performed the second autopsy of Evers’s body. DeLaughter lingered on Baden’s credentials as the director of forensic sciences for the New York State Police. Baden stated that he had reviewed the autopsies of both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., for the congressional investigations into their assassinations.

It didn’t hurt the prosecution one bit to link Evers’s name with Kennedy’s and King’s in front of a predominantly black jury. It telegraphed to every member of the jury that this was an important case indeed.

Baden was an articulate, animated witness. He spoke with a jackhammer New York accent that created a jarring counterpoint to DeLaughter’s slow drawl. He was a tall man with glasses and thinning gray hair that curled over his ears.

Like a patient teacher Baden set up his X-ray charts, took out his pointer, and explained to the jury how he knew the man he had examined was Medgar Evers. Here, he showed them, was the old football injury in his left ankle. And here was where a bullet had exploded through his chest, fracturing two ribs.

The slug, he said, had left a “starburst pattern” consistent in every way with a high-powered rifle, such as a .30/06. He’d removed lead fragments that had splintered off the bullet as it had passed through the chest.

At this point DeLaughter tried to introduce several photographs from Baden’s autopsy. Kitchens objected, and the judge removed all but three of the least gory photos to be shown to the jury. Some of them gasped as they examined the pictures.

Baden testified that Evers’s corpse was the “most pristine” body he had ever seen in his many years of experience. “The body was as if it had been embalmed the day before,” he said with some awe.

There was not much the defense could do to tear down such an obviously qualified witness. Kitchens made a stab at it anyway. He got Baden to admit that the rest of the fatal bullet was missing from evidence, that the lead fragments were not identifiable with any specific caliber bullet, and that bullets from other weapons, such as .357 Magnum pistols, can travel at the same velocity as those from a high-powered rifle.

The only point the defense lawyer managed to score off the famous pathologist was when Kitchens tried to trip him up about his knowledge of guns. He asked him whether a .38 was “like the guns the officers carry in this courtroom.” Baden shrugged amiably and said he didn’t know much about guns; he just knew what bullets did to bodies.

If Beckwith enjoyed Kitchens’s sarcastic treatment of the city-boy Yankee who didn’t know a .38 from a .45, he didn’t show it. The defendant looked for all the world to be sound asleep.

The rest of the afternoon was devoted to the eerie encore performances of some of the witnesses of 1964.

Dr. Forrest Bratley, the pathologist who had conducted Evers’s first autopsy, took the stand. The white-haired, bespectacled old doctor, who had retired in 1978 after fifty years of practice, repeated his findings that Evers had died of massive blood loss caused by a bullet wound in his right chest. He identified a black-and-white picture of the body showing the bloody exit wound, which was passed to the jury.

Next up was Kenneth Adcock, who had walked out of the courtroom the last time as a seventeen-year-old boy and reentered as a forty-seven-year-old man. He was tall and rangy and wore a bright orange shirt and blue pants.

Adcock told the court how he had been walking with Betty Jean Coley on the night of June 11, 1963, and how just after midnight they heard a loud boom right behind them. There was a lady screaming and then the sound of someone running in the bushes.

Coxwell had some questions for this witness. Had Adcock seen anyone running? He had not. Had he heard a car start up? No, he hadn’t.

Betty Jean Coley was dead, but Bobby DeLaughter wanted her to testify from the grave. He asked that her testimony be read from the transcripts of the first trial in 1964.

Naturally there was a legal skirmish over this issue. Coxwell and Kitchens argued that introducing old testimony was prejudicial to their client. It denied him due process, since the rules had changed in thirty years. They pointed out that Beckwith’s lawyers hadn’t had access to the police reports that were now provided under modern discovery rules. There was no way they could cross-examine the witness as effectively in 1964 as they could now.

DeLaughter argued that the procedure had been allowed in earlier criminal cases in Mississippi. There was no reason to disallow it now.

Judge Hilburn had apparently thought this one over already because he quickly denied the defense motion. Betty Jean Coley was permitted to testify through the voice of Mary Lynn Underwood, a bright, rosy-cheeked legal secretary in the D.A.’s office.

Underwood read the part with such feeling that she might have been trying out for a community theater production of the Beckwith trial. Merrida Coxwell added to the illusion by cross-examining her, each reading their part from the decades-old transcript.

When the state called retired detective John Chamblee to describe the crime scene, the defense had its first real opportunity to bring out the inconsistencies in the old police reports. Chamblee was tall and balding. He recounted his career for the court: a police officer for twenty-two years, then arson investigator for the state; he’d retired three years earlier.

O. M. Luke was too weak to testify, and Fred Sanders was in bed with a slipped disk. DeLaughter needed Chamblee to set the scene for the investigation and to testify that a bullet had been recovered from the kitchen counter. Chamblee also had seized Beckwith’s car from a lot in Greenville after the arrest in 1963. He recalled seeing a Shriners emblem in the car.

Jim Kitchens rose to cross-examine Chamblee. “Is it at all difficult for you to remember?” Kitchens asked the old detective.

“I wish I could remember all of it,” he said

“There’s more that you don’t remember than do?”

“Yes.”

Kitchens asked him if he remembered that he had worked in 1972 as a probation officer in the district where Kitchens had been D.A. Chamblee laughed and said that was right. He’d forgotten to mention it. Kitchens made the point that it was hard to remember what happened twenty years ago, let alone thirty.