The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  At first Beckwith was going to blow up the ADL headquarters downtown. He even walked up to Botnick’s office and tried to get in to see him. The ADL secretary told him that Botnick wasn’t in. Beckwith decided it would be easier to bomb Botnick’s house.

  L. E. Matthews was a prosperous electrician and expert bomb-maker. Together he and Beckwith plotted the attack. According to the informant, Beckwith boasted to Matthews that it had only taken four or five weeks to set up the Medgar Evers murder. Matthews criticized him for bungling the job by leaving his rifle at the scene. Beckwith apparently brushed that off and asked Matthews for money to set up the job. As usual Beckwith was broke.

  As the plans took shape, Clark reported regularly to the FBI and to Al Binder, who was apparently paying him for the information in an arrangement similar to the Tarrants operation. Binder later said it had cost his group ten thousand dollars to find out when the Botnick bombing was going to take place.

  Agent Thompson B. Webb, who was in charge of the operation, says he knew nothing of Binder’s alleged relationship with Clark. On September 18, 1973, Webb alerted the New Orleans FBI office, which in turn notified New Orleans police intelligence about the bomb plot. Sergeant Bernard Windstein, who was acting chief of the subversives unit, was briefed by an FBI agent. They knew Beckwith would be driving an Oldsmobile, tag number 42D4112 or 42D412. The FBI man added that the subject usually carried a loaded .45 automatic on his person and a .30-caliber carbine in his car. The agent told Windstein where Beckwith planned to enter the city and what route he would take. They just didn’t know when.

  It occurred to Windstein that this sort of tip was out of the ordinary. It’s pretty rare that a federal agency will turn over a bust to local police, especially if there’s some glory to be had. But there it was. He wasn’t about to question it.

  So Windstein chose John Evans, the biggest, toughest cop in intelligence, to be his partner. He put the special units on alert and prepared to intercept the bomber.

  On Wednesday morning, September 26, Byron De La Beckwith turned his Oldsmobile onto Highway 49 and headed down to Jackson. He got there just before noon. He went to the Mayflower Cafe, a modest old Greek seafood place in the downtown business district and one of the city’s most popular lunch spots. From there he made several phone calls. One was to Elmore Greaves, who wasn’t in. Then he called L. E. Matthews and Gordon Clark.

  Al Binder later told many people that he had been tipped off that Beckwith was going to be given the bomb at this meeting. He said he was watching from another booth in the restaurant when Clark and Matthews joined Beckwith for lunch. Binder said he was so nervous that sweat dripped into his plate of fish. He saw Matthews hand Beckwith a large paper bag. Beckwith got up and carried the bag to his car, which was parked out front, and drove off.

  This story has passed into local legend, but it seems unlikely that even dolts from the Ku Klux Klan would pass a large sensitive time bomb in a crowded restaurant frequented by cops and agents.

  According to FBI sources, Beckwith drove to Matthew’s house in Florence on the rural outskirts of Jackson. Matthews assembled the bomb in his shed and gave Beckwith a lesson in how to arm it after he arrived at his target. Clark, who was at the scene, called Webb as soon as he could get to a phone.

  At 5:30 p.m. the FBI contact called Windstein and told him that Beckwith was on his way. Bee Botnick and his family had been warned of the plot and had gone into hiding. Windstein was told that Beckwith would be carrying a powerful dynamite time bomb in a black wooden box measuring 8 by 9 by 22 inches. He was due in New Orleans between 11 p.m. and midnight, and he would be entering the city from Slidell, traveling west on 1-10, and taking the Twin Bridges across Lake Pontchartrain.

  Windstein briefed the intelligence officers, then alerted the Headquarters Tactical Unit, the bomb squad, the emergency medical services, and whoever else might be useful. By 10 p.m., they were all in place.

  It was decided that the bomber would be arrested right after he came off the bridge. But just in case Beckwith changed his route, snipers and other specialists were positioned around Botnick’s neighborhood to take him there.

  At 10:15 p.m. Dick Huth at intelligence headquarters radioed an update. The subject was driving a 1968 Oldsmobile 98, white over dark blue, with two antennas on the rear fender, one a whip type fastened down. The car had a different — probably stolen — set of Mississippi plates: 61D2390. The driver was alone.

  When Beckwith’s car was spotted crossing the Louisiana line, two unmarked units pulled up behind him and fell back, blocking both lanes of the highway and slowing traffic, so that by the time he hit the five-mile span across Lake Pontchartrain, he would be isolated. At the same time, traffic was diverted from the eastbound lanes.

  Windstein and Evans waited in a patrol car just beyond the bridges. The lights of New Orleans glowed softly to the west. It was a perfect spot. There were no houses, no commercial buildings. Just miles of lonely swamp and landfill that had been prepared for a development that was never built. Instead there were a series of turnarounds — “no-name exits,” they were called — leading to nowhere. The turnarounds were ideal for hiding squad cars.

  Nobody knew what Beckwith would do, but they figured that he would stop for a patrol car and uniformed officers. That’s where the psychology came in. According to his FBI profile, the subject was a law-and-order type. He liked cops. He would think that it was an ordinary traffic stop and he could talk his way out of it. Windstein and Evans were wearing navy blue summer uniforms as they sat beside the loneliest stretch of highway in New Orleans, waiting to grab a man with a bomb.

  Windstein and Evans had nothing to do but sit and wait. They talked about their families. Evans was thirty-three and Windstein was thirty-seven. They had grown up in Catholic, working-class neighborhoods on opposite ends of Carrollton Street in New Orleans. Their fathers had both been firemen. They both liked country music. They had rarely worked together before this night.

  They went over what would happen if Beckwith didn’t stop when they tried to pull him over. They would have to give chase. There were cars lined up in every no-name exit along the way. They would ram him, if necessary, to keep him from getting to the city. It was a kamikaze move, and they knew it.

  “I just want to tell you that if that guy makes a move, either for his car or his gun, I’m gonna shoot him, Benny,” Evans said. “I just want to know now if you have a problem with that.”

  Windstein shook his head. He had no problem.

  The detectives saw the glint of headlights skimming across the lake.

  “There he is.”

  It was 12:02 a.m.

  The blue-and-white Olds whizzed by, not speeding, not too slow, just driving steady down the blank, empty highway. Evans pulled out behind it, followed the car for about a mile, and then flipped on the blue lights. Sure enough, Beckwith pulled right over. As soon as they stopped, the subject was out of the Olds and jogging toward the patrol car along the edge of the highway.

  Evans jumped out and stood behind the door with his shotgun pointed at a skinny little guy with rimless eyeglasses. “Stay where you are! Put your hands on the hood!” he shouted.

  Beckwith did what he was told. He was dressed in gray trousers and a yellow sports shirt that hung loose over his belt. He said nothing. While Evans covered him, Windstein came around and patted him down. When he reached Beckwith’s waist, he stopped and pulled up the shirt for Evans to see. There was a Colt .45 automatic, nickel steel, tucked into his pants behind his left hip.

  “What are you doing with a gun?” Windstein asked.

  “I always carry a .45,” Byron De La Beckwith answered amiably in his rich Mississippi drawl.

  Windstein checked it. Fully loaded.

  “You’re under arrest for carrying a concealed weapon,” Evans said.

  While Evans read Beckwith his rights, Windstein swept his flashlight beam over the Oldsmobile. He peered into the windows, careful not to touch the car
— or to breathe on it too hard. On the front seat he saw a photocopy of a map of New Orleans with a route marked in red. In the well of the passenger seat he saw a black clothing bag covering all but one corner of a black wooden box.

  A warm, damp breeze stirred the swamp grass. The back-up units and bomb squad hadn’t arrived yet. There was no one else around.

  It was a routine question, so Windstein asked it: “Have you ever been arrested before?”

  “Yessuh, I was arrested before,” Beckwith said mildly. “They say I killed a nigger in Mississippi.”

  Within a minute or two a marked unit pulled up, and Evans loaded his handcuffed prisoner into the backseat for the ride to central lockup. Windstein waited with the Oldsmobile.

  Beckwith was sweating in the backseat with the windows up, but he was calm, even chatty. Evans could hardly believe how friendly this guy was for someone who had just been jumped and handcuffed. Most guys would be screaming bloody murder. Beckwith made small talk.

  Evans later said Beckwith set the tone for the evening. He behaved liked a gentleman, so Evans and Dennis DeLatte, the other officer in the car, treated him like one. Evans wanted to relax him, draw him out, get him to talk. Instead Evans ended up telling Beckwith about his relatives in Mississippi and how he liked to hunt up there. Beckwith invited him to come up sometime; he would show Evans some good squirrel hunting.

  It went like that right through booking at central lockup. Beckwith said only one thing that night that could later be used against him, something the prosecution called a “spontaneous declaration.” He seemed to tell Evans and DeLatte that he didn’t hold a grudge over the arrest. “You have a job to do, and I have a job to do,” he said.

  Beckwith later claimed he was misunderstood. All he meant was they were all workingmen.

  When the men from the bomb squad got the black box in Beckwith’s car open, they found a very large bomb: six sticks of regular stump-blowing, construction-quality Hercules dynamite and one five-pound cartridge of Trojan seismograph dynamite, the kind oil companies use to find underground oil reservoirs. The police estimated that the bomb was big enough to blow up Botnick’s two-story house and take out both next-door neighbors for good measure. Who knows what would have gone up if the bomb had ruptured a gas line.

  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.