“Did you hear any car start up or leave or anything?”
“Not that I recall.”
Adcock took the stand next and corroborated Coley’s testimony. Like Coley, he heard the sound of someone running, but he never heard a car start up.
Detective O. M. Luke was born and raised in Neshoba County, not far from Medgar Evers’s hometown of Decatur. He had been a police officer in Jackson for just over thirteen years when he took the stand that day.
Luke described his search of the crime scene on the morning of June 12. He described the weedy field behind Joe’s Drive In where he found the Enfield rifle and scope carefully concealed in a clump of vines. The weapon, he said, had not been dropped, but had been carefully placed upright in the honeysuckle, more than a foot off the ground.
The rifle, he testified, was an Eddystone, serial number 1052682. The scope on it was a United Golden Hawk, six by thirty-two power, serial number 69431. Before the rifle was shipped off to the FBI lab in Washington, Luke had scratched his initials and the date into the barrel action.
Bill Waller held up the rifle, clearly heavy in his hands, and all attention in the courtroom focused on the long, black gunmetal of the barrel and the heavy wooden stock. As a mere prop the gun was an effective prosecution device. Its physical presence was mesmerizing. It looked mean and evil and deadly.
“Is this the gun — the exact gun — that you pulled out of the honeysuckle vine?” Waller asked.
“This is the gun, the same gun,” Luke replied.
And so, State’s exhibit number 21 was entered into evidence.
Delay Beckwith had a hard time sitting still under the best of circumstances. During the sometimes tedious examination of evidence, the crime scene photographs, and particularly the rifle, Beckwith trailed his lawyers around the room, peering over their shoulders, dogging them, keeping the focus of attention on himself.
During one break that day Beckwith and his attorneys holed up in an empty jury room. The door swung open for a moment, and a reporter caught a glimpse of Beckwith handling the rifle, aiming it across the table.
As Luke left the courtroom, Bill Waller arranged the papers at his table and got ready for the last witness of the day. “The State calls Thorn McIntyre.”
There was a tension in the courtroom as the young farmer stepped up to the bench.
In 1964 the rules for state trials in Mississippi were different than they are now. The exchange of evidence we know as discovery didn’t exist then. Both parties went to trial more or less blind. Neither side had to reveal anything except alibi witnesses. It was called “trial by ambush.” Innes Thornton McIntyre III was a surprise witness. He wore green sunglasses for the occasion.
McIntyre said that he had known Byron De La Beckwith since he had gotten out of the service in 1958. He told the court that he also knew Hardy Lott and Stanny Sanders. In fact they had been his personal attorneys “for a long time.”
Waller then asked him, “Did you in the year 1959 own a British or American Enfield, I’m not sure which it is called, but did you own an Enfield .30/06 rifle?”
“That’s correct,” McIntyre said. “I ordered the rifle from International Firearms, as I remember, in Connecticut.”
He had seen an ad in a magazine, and had ordered it COD for $29.50. He remembered that the invoice was from Quebec, Canada. He recalled picking it up at the Railway Express office in Greenwood. Waller gave him a Railway Express invoice dated February 2, 1959.
McIntyre had never seen this piece of paper before. It was a copy of the shipping company’s invoice, which the FBI had dug up in its investigation. McIntyre couldn’t find the original invoice he had received from Quebec. McIntyre told the court that the information on the shipping company’s invoice was similar to his recollection of when and how he had received the gun, but Waller was not allowed to enter the invoice into evidence.
The D A. then handed McIntyre exhibit number 21, the rifle found near the crime scene.
“How does that weapon compare to the one you owned?”
“The type of weapon is exactly the same. There is no doubt of that. The weapon was made at the Eddystone arsenal and this one is also as shown by the markings on this weapon here. The weapon I owned was made in the ninth month of the year 1918. Those are the only definite markings that I do remember but I do remember those definitely.”
“Does this gun in every way appear to be the gun that you owned?”
“When I traded my rifle, I kept the wooden stock. I couldn’t testify to that. I still have my stock in my possession.”
“You mean you took the stock off the barrel?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You traded a gun without a stock?”
“That’s correct.”
“Who did you trade guns with?”
Over a volley of objections from Hardy Lott, McIntyre was allowed to answer: “A man from Greenwood named De La Beckwith.”
“Do you see that man in the courtroom now?”
“I do.”
Thorn told the jury that he had once had a general conversation about guns with Beckwith on the street in Greenwood. Beckwith had driven twelve miles out to McIntyre’s house to trade with him. He told the jury that it was his opinion that the gun in evidence was the same gun he had traded to Beckwith. He said he had fired that gun two hundred or three hundred times and had turned over some empty cartridge cases to the FBI. He was sure they had come from this weapon.
Now Hardy Lott took the lectern. This might be the best witness the state was likely to come up with, and Lott knew he had to do his best to demolish him. But he did it gently.
What he had to make clear was that the rifle in evidence looked nothing like the one McIntyre had traded to Delay Beckwith. Lott led McIntyre through the details of the trade: the rusty Enfield barrel and action and the new Springfield for McIntyre’s good Eddystone-type Enfield.
“All right,” Lott said. “Now he kept the stock on his rifle?”
“He kept his stock and I kept mine.”
“Now the thing you traded him didn’t have any scope on it, did it?”
“No.”
“And it didn’t have any stock?”
“No…. That’s not my stock.”
Lott asked him how, without having seen the stock or scope before, he could identify the rifle in the newspaper. He said it was because the barrel had been made at the Eddystone arsenal in September 1918.
“Would it surprise you to learn that there were more than two million manufactured in that month?”
“No, it wouldn’t.”
The court recessed until 9 a.m., Saturday.
That night there was another murder in Mississippi. Somebody lured Louis Allen to his front gate and blew his head off with a shotgun.
Allen was a thirty-six-year-old logger with a wife and three children who lived in Liberty, Mississippi. To this day some folks around the little community on the Louisiana line say Allen was killed for a bad debt. Others know better. They say it was because Allen had witnessed the killing of Herbert Lee, an NAACP worker who was shot dead by a state representative, E. H. Hurst. Hurst claimed he killed Lee in self-defense, and at first Louis Allen backed him up. Then his conscience got him, and he talked to the press and to John Doar, who was prepared to prosecute. Allen had been warned to keep his mouth shut, but he still talked. Then someone killed him.
In this case, like so many others, there was no suspect, and no arrest. There would never be a trial.
On Saturday morning, with the jury fresh after a night’s sleep, Waller began to introduce the highly technical evidence he would need to tie the murder weapon first to Thorn McIntyre and then to Beckwith. He called Francis Finley, the Memphis-based FBI agent who had collected fifty-three empty cartridge cases from Thorn McIntyre’s farm on June 24. He called Richard Poppleton, an FBI ballistics expert, who worked in the FBI laboratory in Washington. Poppleton had test-fired the Enfield and then compared the microscopic markings on the test
casings with the shells retrieved from McIntyre. He testified that thirty of McIntyre’s casings had been fired by the rifle in evidence.
Poppleton’s most important job was to link the bullet that had killed Medgar Evers to that same rifle. He had first examined the six live rounds recovered from the chamber and found that they were factory-loaded Winchester .30/06 180-grain soft point bullets. They could be bought at any hardware store.
When Poppleton had received the bullet, the lead tip was squashed like a mushroom, and the sides of the copper jacket were folded back along the lower half of the base. Poppleton had to smooth back the sides — basically try to reconstruct the original contours of the bullet to examine it. Two fragments of the jacket had broken off when he unfolded it.
Poppleton could say for certain that the spent round that had killed Evers was the same type and manufacture as the bullets in the chamber of the Enfield. Then he ran into a problem.
The basis of ballistic comparison is the supposition that every gun has a signature: microscopic markings that are etched into a bullet as it passes through the barrel. No two barrels are exactly the same, and each leaves a distinctive “fingerprint” on the bullet jacket.
Poppleton was clearly proud of his skill in ballistics. He spoke lovingly, endlessly, of riflings and grains and land-and-groove impressions. But for all his expertise and precision he could not do the one thing Waller needed: he could not put that bullet back in the rifle.
The FBI man testified that the bullet that killed Medgar Evers was so mutilated that there were not enough identifiable markings to associate it with any particular gun. He could tell it had been fired from an Enfield, and he had found “some similarities” with other bullets test-fired from the rifle in evidence, but not enough to justify a scientific match.
It was a blow for the prosecution, and with it the first breeze of reasonable doubt wafted through the courtroom. Waller was able to get Poppleton to say that there was nothing about the bullet to suggest it had not been fired from the rifle, but Hardy Lott was ready to pounce.
In cross-examination Lott got Poppleton to admit that it was “remotely possible” that the spent round could have been fired from a different type of rifle fitted with an Enfield barrel. He had him testify that two million of this type of American Enfields had been manufactured during World War I and later sold as surplus. These rifles were now scattered around the country in the hands of private gun owners.
“And this spent bullet, Exhibit 18, in your firm opinion, could have been fired from any one of those rifles?” Lott asked.
“That’s correct.”
During breaks in the testimony Beckwith made a point of hounding Waller. Once he slipped a cigar into the astounded prosecutor’s breast pocket. Waller numbly handed it back. The little fellow was always trying to put his hands on his adversary, and Waller had to stay alert to keep out of reach. Beckwith sometimes managed to pat Waller on the back as he left the courtroom. Waller ignored him as best he could.
Beckwith just couldn’t keep still. He once walked over to the jury box and started to chat with the jurors before the bailiff herded him back to his seat.
After lunch John Fox took over the examinations. He called to the stand John W. Goza, known to folks around the Delta as “Duck” and proprietor of Duck’s Tackle Shop on Highway 8 East in Grenada, Mississippi. Duck did not seem happy to be in court. He said he knew Delay Beckwith well; the salesman would come by the shop every month or so to trade guns.
Goza told the court that Beckwith had telephoned him at his shop on May 12, 1963, to tell him that he was coming over to do some trading. Beckwith was calling from Greenwood, and he wanted to know how late Duck would be open that night. Goza told him eight o’clock.
Beckwith drove the thirty miles to Grenada that night. Duck traded Beckwith five dollars’ worth of .22 cartridges for an inoperable .22 rifle. There were other trades as well.
“I traded a nice .45 automatic for a lesser grade automatic, and I got four or five clips to boot. And then I — I wanted to go home. He said he had another trade to make, and I traded him a six-power scope, telescopic sight.”
“And what did you trade with him for the six-power scope?” Fox asked.
“A .45 automatic. … I was trying to run him out. I wanted to go home. He said, ‘I’ve got one more trade to make,’ said, ‘What will you give me for this .45 automatic?’ And I wanted to go home. I just noticed this scope laying there in the showcase, and I told him I’d trade him even.”
“Did you run him out of your shop?”
“I wanted to go home.”
Fox produced an invoice from United Binocular Company showing that Goza had received one Golden Hawk six-power scope on September 12, 1962. Goza testified that it had been the only one of its kind in his shop. It was the scope he had traded to Beckwith.
Stanny Sanders took the cross. He got Goza to say that Beckwith was just like any other gun trader who came into the shop — that he would come in and handle things, pick them up. Goza also agreed that when he had traded the scope, there hadn’t been anything unusual or secret about the deal.
The Court adjourned early that afternoon.
The trial of Byron De La Beckwith resumed Monday morning, February 3. The state was still making its case.
Ralph Hargrove was called to the stand to describe the fingerprint he had found on the Golden Hawk scope. This was crucial testimony for Waller, the very cornerstone of his case against Beckwith.
Hargrove, the captain in charge of the Identification Division, described his training. He had been on the force for twenty-three of his forty-three years. He described himself as a graduate of the Institute of Applied Science in Chicago.
When Hargrove dusted the rifle, he said, he found a number of smears on parts of the weapon, vestiges of fingerprints and palm prints, typical of the surface of a gun. In his opinion the weapon had not been wiped down after it was last handled.
Hargrove found only one clear, identifiable print. He said that latent print “practically jumped up” when he spread the powder over the right front section of the scope. Charts and diagrams and photos were produced on an easel for the jury to examine. Hargrove droned on about what a fingerprint is, how it is made.
Then Waller asked, “. . . do you have an opinion as to the age of that fingerprint, based upon all circumstances?”
Lott objected. He was overruled, and Hargrove was allowed to answer.
“A latent fingerprint will last according to its surroundings. It — the life of a print cannot be pinpointed, although a print will last, as I said, according to the things that come in contact with it. … I believe that the print is not over twelve hours old.”
Hargrove then compared Beckwith’s fingerprint card, taken at the time of his arrest, with the latent print lifted from the scope, and said he found a match with Beckwith’s right index finger. He marked fourteen points of comparison; he said he could have marked more.
The prosecution set up a slide projector to show the two prints side by side. Hargrove compared them, ridge by ridge, whorl by whorl, bifurcation by bifurcation, through the fourteen comparison points. He also pointed out a small scar visible in both prints. He said that the identification was “positive.”
Hardy Lott needed to destroy this testimony in a bad way. So he began chipping away at Hargrove’s expertise. He mocked Hargrove’s “degree” from the formidable-sounding Institute of Applied Science in Chicago. It was a correspondence course, the kind advertised on matchbooks and in detective magazines. Lott read from a magazine advertisement for the school: “Blue Book of Crime free! Given to men who want to get into crime detection — fingerprint identification — train at home — spare time . . . learn fingerprint identification — crime investigation — police photography — other subjects vital to qualifying for good-paying, secure, interesting jobs.”
Then Lott referred the captain to the slide projection of the two prints. The print taken in ink at the jail included t
he whole terminal joint of the right index finger and part of the second joint. Lott made much of the fact that the latent print taken from the rifle was of a smaller section of the fingertip, roughly between one-third and one-quarter the size of the jailhouse print. He referred to it from then on as a “fraction” of a print, while Hargrove insisted that it was a “large, plain impression” with more than enough information to make a comparison. It was simply narrower, showing only the natural contours of a fingertip as it would touch an object without rolling from one side to another.
Lott tried to inject skepticism into the minds of the jury — there were bits missing, smudges. And Lott tried to discredit Hargrove’s evaluation of the age of the print. He got Hargrove to admit that fingerprints can last indefinitely — months, even years — under certain circumstances.
Lott then asked whether Hargrove knew for a fact how long the rifle had lain in the honeysuckle, whether it had been in a case just before that or been wrapped in cellophane — something that would preserve a fingerprint just like new. Hargrove said he didn’t know.
Lott asked Hargrove if the dew that had collected on the hot, humid night of the murder might have destroyed the latent fingerprint. Hargrove countered that the dew was light, and he took that into consideration when he aged the print. But Lott had planted his seed: couldn’t the weapon have been placed there in the hours after the murder?
After lunch George Edward Goodreau, an FBI fingerprint examiner, took the stand to tie the prints to Beckwith’s Marine records. As with Hargrove, Hardy Lott tried to inject doubt that a man could be identified with only part of one fingerprint.
After hours of droning technical testimony, Waller decided to pick up the pace with something more dramatic. He called Herbert Richard Speight, the first of two cabdrivers who had said they saw Beckwith in Jackson the weekend before the murder.
Speight testified that he was sitting in his White Top cab outside the Trailways bus station around 4 p.m. on the Saturday before the murder, when Byron De La Beckwith had walked up and asked him “if I knew Negro Medgar Evers, N-double A-C-P leader.” Speight said he didn’t, so Beckwith walked back into the bus station, went into a phone booth, and came out with a map.
The Ghosts of Mississippi Page 20
