The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  On Monday the federal charges against Beckwith were “deferred” while state murder charges were filed. After a preliminary hearing on Tuesday the judge ordered Beckwith held without bail, pending an indictment from the grand jury. Hinds County district attorney Bill Waller said that he would ask for the death penalty.

  After Beckwith’s picture appeared in the newspapers, the Jackson police got several calls from people who thought they had seen him snooping around the Masonic Temple on June 7, the night Lena Horne and Dick Gregory had spoken. Lillian Louie, the NAACP office secretary, said that she had seen Beckwith at the meeting and a few days later, on June 11, had seen him in the office. But Louie could not pick him out from a photo lineup.

  The police identified two other white men who resembled Beckwith and had been seen at the Masonic Temple on June 7 and June 11. One was a strange man from Michigan who had been hanging around asking questions. The other was an undercover cop.

  They still couldn’t definitely place Beckwith in Evers’s vicinity.

  Bill Waller was thirty-seven years old and ambitious. He was a sixth- generation Mississippian from a big landowning family near Oxford, William Faulkner’s hometown.

  Bill Waller was not a tall man, but he was powerfully built, with a large head and a peculiar hairline. His straight dark hair came down low at his forehead and jutted sharply back at the temple. It emphasized his heavy, low-slung face, which was often set in an expression that explained, somehow, why the Waller family inevitably chose bulldogs as pets.

  Waller had followed a conventional career path that could lead to the Governor’s Mansion and beyond: Ole Miss law school, military service (he had been in army intelligence during the Korean War), a law practice in the capital city. In 1960 Waller was elected Hinds County D A. It was a part-time job, but he brought in his law partner, John Fox, to help him out. They kept their private practice going, which was perfectly legal at the time, while they prosecuted all the felonies in four counties.

  In the summer of 1963 Bill Waller was not exactly a household name in Mississippi. Before long, everyone who read the paper or watched the TV news knew him. But name recognition can sometimes backfire. Bill Waller and John Fox claim that it never entered their minds, but vigorously prosecuting a controversial race murder case, even against a man like Beckwith, was not going to win them friends among the Citizens’ Councils clique, which still had a powerful influence in Mississippi.

  To be honest, people were shocked that there had been an arrest in the Evers case. And so many white men had walked away from killing a Negro that nobody really thought that Beckwith would ever be tried, much less convicted. Charles Evers and Myrlie Evers made hopeful, cautious statements to the press. Aaron Henry was typically blunt: “I don’t think they will indict him.” He speculated that Beckwith would get off on “the lunacy angle” and might get a suspended sentence. Henry predicted large demonstrations in Jackson and across the country if that happened.

  Detectives John Chamblee and Fred Sanders rode out to Greenville with a court seizure order to take possession of Beckwith’s company car at Delta Liquid Plant Food. Sanders was furious that the FBI had arrested Beckwith without including, or even notifying, the Jackson police. He felt that the police would have solved the case eventually. Now all he could do was to strengthen what evidence he had.

  There was nothing inside the white 1962 Valiant that interested the detectives. They took photographs of the exterior, which had a long whip-type antenna attached to the bumper and a large, boxy trailer hitch.

  The detectives also searched Beckwith’s crumbling old house on George Street in Greenwood. Yerger Moorehead met them at the door and showed them around.

  Most of the rooms in the house were empty. Beckwith seemed to occupy one upstairs bedroom and a bare sitting room downstairs. In the bedroom the detectives found a box of newspaper clippings about integration, along with a folder of letters Beckwith had written on the subject and part of the manuscript for an anti-integration book that Beckwith was writing. They also found three guns in the bedroom: a Remington rifle and a double-barreled shotgun, both fully loaded, and a .25-caliber automatic pistol. There were several hundred rounds of ammunition, but nothing usable in a .30/06 rifle. There was, however, a booklet advertising Peters ammunition, and someone had circled the .30/30 and .30/06 specifications. They also found a letter from a Jackson psychiatrist named Dr. Roland E. Toms and a canceled check for the purchase of field glasses.

  Detectives Luke and Turner brought in two young women who had been working at Joe’s Drive In on the night of the murder to look at another lineup. Neither could pick out Beckwith, although both identified his Valiant as the car they had seen in the lot that night. Martha Jean O’Brien, a seventeen-year-old carhop, repeated her observation that the man she had seen get out of the Valiant had been six foot two or taller and 160 to 165 pounds with a dark complexion, black curly hair, a black mustache covering his lip, and an erect posture. He had been wearing black pants and a black long-sleeved shirt. When the police later took a signed statement from O’Brien, this detailed description was not in it.

  On Tuesday, July 2, two weeks after his arrest, Beckwith was formally indicted for murder by the grand jury. Medgar Evers would have turned thirty-eight that day.

  It wasn’t long after John Chamblee and Fred Sanders had arrived in Greenwood and started asking questions about Delay Beckwith that they realized that the townspeople were closing ranks around one of their own. In one frustrated report Sanders referred to Greenwood archly as a “clannish” kind of town. People were generally cordial, even friendly, but they said nothing useful. One deputy sheriff told Sanders that no outsider would get the whole story from anyone.

  The detectives heard about Beckwith’s well-known segregationist ardor, the “funny” straw hat he wore, and the pistol he toted to church. He was almost universally regarded as a “blowhard” and a “nut.”

  During this initial visit Chamblee and Sanders met and interviewed Thorn McIntyre, who had already been visited by the FBI. In what must have been the best news they got all week, McIntyre told the Jackson detectives that he was willing to testify that he had traded the rifle to Delay. He also told them he wanted to keep things quiet, and he didn’t want any reward. That was a good thing because the reward was not going to be given to him or anyone else, since Beckwith technically had been located through routine police work in tracing the scope and fingerprint.

  The rest of the investigation was standard fare. The detectives checked Beckwith’s company credit card record to see whether he had bought gas in Jackson. Meanwhile Luke and Turner checked motel records to see whether Beckwith had stayed in the city. They continued to interview potential witnesses, and they tracked down rumors that Beckwith had been seen hanging around Lynch Street before Evers had been shot.

  The long, exhausting process of trying Beckwith began with a flurry of motions from both sides. Most interesting was one by the prosecution: Waller wanted Beckwith sent to the state mental hospital at Whitfield for a competency evaluation. Waller stated, magnanimously, that “it was something that should be done,” even though the defense never asked for an exam.

  It was an unusual move in those days. Waller wanted to go fishing in Beckwith’s head. If Beckwith was found competent to stand trial, that diagnosis could be used against him should he later decide to plead insanity. If he was found to be mentally incompetent, he could be committed to a mental hospital, which would spare everyone the trouble of trying him. At least it got the issue of sanity out of the way.

  Beckwith was indignant. The defense cried foul, and a three-hour hearing was held on the subject on July 18.

  Yerger Moorehead testified for the prosecution. “I will say he is able to consult with attorneys and to prepare a defense,” Beckwith’s cousin and former guardian told the court. “But I don’t believe he is mentally capable of being guilty of a crime of violence. I’m not making that statement without a great deal of background to
make it on.” Moorehead said that he had noticed a change in Delay’s mental state after he had come home from World War II.

  Waller also called Dr. Roland Toms, the Jackson psychiatrist to whom Beckwith had been referred by his family doctor in 1962. Toms had reached a diagnosis, but a defense objection stopped him from repeating what that diagnosis was. Toms also was prevented from answering whether Beckwith had been packing a pistol when he had come in for his appointment.

  Waller managed to squeeze Beckwith’s alarming divorce papers into the record, as well as the judgment from a peace bond hearing in July 1962, in which Beckwith had been found guilty of “threatening to kill his wife . . . and likely to carry out the threat.”

  Judge Leon Hendrick ordered Beckwith to Whitfield for a month-long psychiatric exam. A week later another judge overturned the ruling. While Waller appealed, Beckwith was sent to the Rankin County Jail, near the Whitfield hospital.

  Rankin County lies just across the Pearl River, east of Jackson. But crossing the bridge means entering a somewhat different, more primitive world. To this day some older black cabdrivers get a little nervous leaving the city limits to take a fare to the big airport in Rankin County late at night. It’s a reflex. In the past Negroes knew they had better not be caught on Old Brandon Road or Highway 80 after dark without a note from a white man saying they had business there. The county was the realm of bootleggers and tough redneck deputies. It was where, before 1968, in the days when the whole state was dry, the teenagers of South Jackson and the blue-haired ladies of Belhaven would drive out to pick up a bottle. It was the place where the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan had established a foothold in the early sixties and where towns like Florence and Brandon and Star are still shorthand for “Klanland” to some people who remember.

  By all accounts Byron De La Beckwith was treated like visiting royalty at the Rankin County Jail, where he spent most of the rest of the year. Local housewives brought him special meals. He kept a TV set and part of his personal gun collection in his cell. He later bragged that the sheriff let him out from time to time to get his hair cut or go shopping. The sheriff just reminded him to be back by dark.

  Beckwith had as many visitors as he wanted. Red Hydrick dropped by and gave him two hundred dollars for walking-around money. According to Bill Minor, a respected local reporter, Hydrick told Beckwith, “I’ve killed a hundred niggers and they haven’t never done anything to me yet. You don’t tell them anything.”

  Another visitor was former General Edwin Walker, himself having escaped punishment for his role in the Ole Miss riots after a lunacy exam. Walker briskly answered a few reporters’ questions after his visit. He said that Byron De La Beckwith was a “fine Southern gentleman.” All he would say about the murder charge was that Medgar Evers had been “working against the good of the country.”

  Bill Waller had to get a state supreme court order to pry Beckwith out of his open cell in Rankin County. Beckwith seemed peeved when the Hinds County sheriff took away his guns.

  A television news crew recorded Beckwith’s transfer to Jackson on a cold December day. He wore a natty brown wool suit. His personal effects were at his feet on the pavement: an elegant umbrella, a portable typewriter, and a box labeled “Health Guardian Isometric Exerciser.” Beckwith sucked on a huge cigar as he strode into his new confinement. “Mighty glad to be here, sir,” he said to the jailer.

  It was immediately clear to all those who knew them that Charles Evers was not at all like his brother. Where Medgar was smooth, Charles was rough. Where Medgar would choose to persuade, Charles would twist an arm.

  The people in the movement who had worked so long with Medgar were wary at first, but hopeful. Nobody really knew Charles or what he would do. It didn’t take long for the SNCC kids and the CORE people to stay out of his way.

  Dave Dennis liked Charles Evers’s roguish charm, his slick charisma. It was hard not to like him on a personal level, as long as you didn’t cross him. On the job he was unpredictable, mercurial, moody. But Charles’s main crime was not being Medgar.

  One day that summer Dennis walked up the steps to the old NAACP office in the Masonic Temple to visit Charles and found the floors covered with red wall-to-wall carpeting. He thought, This is a desecration. That was his last visit to the office.

  Everywhere Myrlie Evers turned in her house on Guynes Street, there was something to remind her of the night of the killing. There was the blood that would never quite wash off the carport; the dent in the refrigerator where a fingertip would fit, the stack of crisp white shirts still carefully folded in the closet, that she didn’t have the heart to give away.

  The children were shattered. Van, the three-year-old, talked endlessly about the blood on the steps and about his father. He would answer the phone and the door with the same words: “Have you seen my Daddy?” He must have said it a hundred times a day. Reena kept her grief hidden, and Darrell retreated into deep silences. Sometimes he would just sit under the plum tree and stare out at nothing. He had trouble at school. He slept with a toy gun by his bed. And when his mother went away, as she often did, he was terrified that she would never come back.

  The NAACP stepped in to take care of the family. Gloster Current and Roy Wilkins made sure that Myrlie and the children had enough money to live on. They knew Medgar had died without insurance, so the NAACP board voted to keep her on the payroll as a consultant, earning Medgar’s salary of seventy-five hundred dollars a year. They voted to give her a twenty-thousand-dollar tax-free gift over four years. They set up a trust fund for the children to shelter donations. The NAACP took care of everything. All the association asked for in return was her cooperation and loyalty.

  Myrlie signed a document authorizing only the NAACP to use Medgar Evers’s name to raise funds. Every few days a packet of checks would arrive from New York for her to endorse, along with a list of thank-you notes for her to copy and sign. The NAACP staff wrote the text for her.

  Almost immediately Myrlie Evers was in demand on the speaking circuit. Shortly after Byron De La Beckwith was arrested for the murder, she made her first out-of-state appearance. She accepted for Medgar the NAACP’s highest honor, the Spingarn Medal, which was awarded posthumously at the annual convention in Chicago. After that she was on the road most weekends, giving speeches to NAACP branches.

  She remembers the time as one remembers an unpleasant dream — the kind in which you never catch the plane you are late for, never find your way to the train. She was disconnected and depressed, just walking through her life, which no longer had any meaning. Coming home to the house on Guynes Street was agony.

  Alarmed, Gloster Current and Roy Wilkins arranged for Myrlie and the children to see a psychiatrist in New York. They urged her to move away from Jackson.

  16

  Trial by Ambush

  The trial of Byron De La Beckwith began in Jackson on a raw, windy morning January 27, 1964. A small, curious crowd gathered on the steps of the huge limestone-and-granite courthouse on the corner of Pascagoula and Congress Streets. A vendor selling peanuts was disappointed by the turnout. It could have turned into a circus, but the NAACP deliberately kept a lid on demonstrations that might detract from the “dignity” and “fairness” of the trial.

  The Hinds County Courthouse had been built on a grand scale, with heavy, oversized bronzed-wood doors, a cool, vaulted marble foyer, high ceilings, lots of dark polished wood and oil paintings in the public rooms. Despite the grand trappings it was an all-purpose building: three floors of judges’ chambers, courtrooms, and witness rooms. The top two floors, accessed from a separate entrance, served as the Hinds County jail, where Beckwith was a prisoner. One wing of the fifth floor held the old gallows chamber, used frequently in the days when executions had been a local event. The state now dispatched its condemned inmates in the gas chamber at Parchman prison, deep in the Delta.

  Security was heavy on the second floor, at the entrance to courtroom number three. The bailiffs were expecting
big crowds and trouble. Each spectator and journalist had to sign in at the door, submit to being frisked, and receive a badge to enter. There were new rules for this trial: anyone could sit wherever he or she wished. There was no need for demonstrations. For the time being the courthouse was integrated by order of the judge.

  The wood-paneled chamber was the biggest the city had to offer, with seating for three hundred and a balcony. The judge’s bench towered over the assembly.

  Circuit court judge Leon Hendrick was sixty-nine years old, tall and slim, with pure white hair and spectacles. He was generally a soft-spoken man, but he could summon a big courtroom voice when he needed it. This was not the southern cracker of a judge the northern press was expecting to find. Hendrick was, reporters would point out, a “dignified” professional.

  At 8:30 a.m. the first batch of veniremen took their seats in the courtroom. There were two hundred names on the roster of potential jurors picked from the voting rolls of Hinds County. All were men. Women wouldn’t serve on state juries in Mississippi for another four years.

  Of the one hundred veniremen who sat in the courthouse, seven were Negroes. It was a little charade the courts had to go through, since there were no laws barring blacks from juries. They just never were chosen.

  Three Negroes were actually interviewed. Each was dismissed because of work conflicts or opposition to the death penalty, which was reason enough to dismiss a potential juror in a capital case. District Attorney Bill Waller simply skipped calling the others.

  Bill Waller kicked things off with a question for each man in the jury pool: “Do you think it’s a crime to kill a nigger in Mississippi?”