The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  The situation was the same when he came back to Wingfield High School in Jackson the next year. DeLaughter was an active and popular kid. He played varsity football even though he was too tall and skinny to do much more than get knocked around. He played basketball, joined a high school fraternity, and was sports editor of the yearbook. He was president of the honor society and the student council. He was even elected “Mr. Wingfield,” which got him a full-page picture in the Wing- spread. DeLaughter just couldn’t see the point of going to high school and joining all these things if you couldn’t have proms and pep rallies. So he decided to return fun to high school. Twenty years later he would still be bragging about organizing the first integrated senior prom in Wingfield’s history.

  Bobby went to college at Ole Miss and graduated from its law school. By then he had married Dixie. One day his father-in-law brought him around to Al Binder’s office and recommended him for a job. Binder put him to work on legal research. Binder would later say that he’d never met anyone as talented as DeLaughter when it came to finding the law.

  DeLaughter concentrated on personal injury cases. In one case involving a tractor accident he was able to find an angle nobody thought of that earned the firm a $700,000 fee. With another young and hungry lawyer named Bill Kirksey, DeLaughter helped Binder put together research for his most famous client, Wayne Williams, defendant in the Atlanta child murder case.

  In 1983 Kirksey and DeLaughter left the firm, amicably, to start their own practice. They were supposed to make their money on divorce and personal injury cases, but they ended up defending accused killers, rapists, and dope dealers. They won their cases but lost their shirts in the process.

  By 1987 DeLaughter had three kids and a troubled marriage. He wanted out of private practice. One afternoon during the Christmas season he stopped by the district attorney’s office on his way home. Ed Peters was the only one left in the office, so he invited DeLaughter to come in and talk. Peters remembers that DeLaughter said something about how tired he was of defending all those criminals; how it was driving him crazy.

  So Peters said, “Why don’t you come over and be on the other side?” DeLaughter accepted the offer, and Peters hired him.

  Bill Kirksey, who loves DeLaughter like a brother and feels as if he could just about read DeLaughter’s mind when they tried cases together, had no idea DeLaughter wanted to be a prosecutor.

  DeLaughter doesn’t brag much, but his self-confidence is formidable. At the same time he is an intensely private, introverted man. Even people like Kirksey who count him among their best friends will pause from time to time, stumped by one question or another about him, and admit that they really don’t know him that well.

  When DeLaughter chooses to reveal himself, it is like the sun coming from behind a cloud. Myrlie Evers, who instinctively understands the quiet in people, recognized this in DeLaughter when she first met him in Peters’s office. She liked him, and she saw past his reserve. Morris Dees liked him too. From then on her contacts were with DeLaughter instead of Peters. DeLaughter made a point of calling Evers in Los Angeles every week or so to fill her in on his progress with the case.

  DeLaughter had some long conferences with Bill Waller, who was in private practice in a building across from the courthouse. While DeLaughter was putting the facts of the case together, a sergeant in the police identification unit found an envelope of old negatives while cleaning out an old filing cabinet. They turned out to be the crime scene and evidence photos from the Medgar Evers murder case. DeLaughter had them printed up. Meanwhile the FBI turned over some records of the Evers case, including blow-by-blow accounts of both trials and the names of the witnesses. Beckwith’s fingerprint records were located in Washington. DeLaughter’s file was slowly growing.

  When something new turned up, DeLaughter would generally let Myrlie Evers know about it. When he saw that she was keeping the information to herself, he stopped worrying that she would leak material to the media, and he began sharing even more of the investigation with her. He felt he could call her at any time of the day or night; she insisted he wake her up if he needed a name or a source in the black community to develop new leads.

  Evers was astonished to find herself starting to trust this white man, whose job once symbolized every thing she hated about southern justice. She felt she had made a friend in DeLaughter. But for the first months of the investigation, they kept a professional formality between them. She still called him Mr. DeLaughter, and he called her Mrs. Evers. During one late-night phone call they used each other’s first names.

  “Hello, Bobby,” she said.

  “Hello, Myrlie.”

  There was an uneasiness, she recalls, as if they had crossed an invisible line into the forbidden.

  “Good night, Mrs. Evers,” he said when they were through talking.

  Charlie Crisco always wondered whether some kind of fate had brought him to the Beckwith case. Why, for instance, should it fall in his lap the month he started work as an investigator at the Hinds County D.A.’s Office?

  Crisco retired from the Jackson Police Department twenty years to the day after he joined the force on September 29, 1969. He had spent his first few years on the job riding around in a patrol car, then he got into investigations. He’d spent the last ten years of his police career in homicide.

  Crisco was of average height, thin, almost wiry, with thick brown hair that brushed over his collar in back. He wore aviator glasses. You could tell Crisco was a cop because he looked at things longer than other people; he didn’t avert his gaze. When Crisco was feeling friendly, relaxed, his eyes were a warm brown. When he was suspicious or ticked off about something the eyes turned black right in front of you, like twin holes in space.

  Crisco took his job in homicide seriously. He liked the big cases and the moment of discovery, when everything fit into place and he knew he had a suspect nailed. During his last couple of years in homicide some cases had given him satisfaction. One was Greg Davis, Jackson’s serial killer. Crisco had set up a war room, with charts and psychiatric profiles. He ended up following a hunch that a recently captured burglar named Greg Davis might be the killer, and got him to confess. And there was Kenny Davis — no relation — who had killed an off-duty cop in a hold-up. That had also been a satisfying bust. Crisco had tracked him down through the murder weapon. Another long story.

  Every morning Crisco worked a crossword puzzle or two to get his mind going and because he enjoyed it. Solving the puzzle. That was the interesting part of the job. So he wasn’t unhappy when his first major assignment in the district attorney’s office was to help DeLaughter piece together a thirty-year-old murder case.

  Crisco had been fifteen years old in 1963 and going to high school in Jackson. He remembered the Beckwith case and being sorry somebody had gotten killed. But he also remembered when segregation was just something you grew up with. It was a way of life, and you never questioned it any more than you questioned going to school or to church.

  DeLaughter was that much younger. Since he knew almost nothing about Medgar Evers and the climate in which he had been killed, DeLaughter gave himself a history lesson. He read books. He interviewed old folks. He poured over yellowed press clippings from Beckwith’s trials. The more he learned about the case, the more it mesmerized him.

  DeLaughter thought that he knew the facts of Mississippi’s segregated past. He knew what he had learned in schoolbooks. Now he had to feel the facts, to crawl inside them as he absorbed the murder case. He came to know Medgar Evers and to understand his life, how hard it was to fight for something when everyone, even your friends, thought your cause was hopeless.

  What surprised DeLaughter was how high a price had been paid for so little. Evers and the NAACP hadn’t been asking for a separate nation or billions of dollars in restitution for the evils of slavery. All Evers had been asking for was the right to be treated like a man, to be called “mister,” to send his kids to a good school, to vote — things we take
for granted now. A good man could be killed for that thirty years ago.

  Meanwhile there were other cases to try in the D.A.’s office. DeLaughter and Crisco worked on the Beckwith file when they had time.

  At the end of February 1990 a few black leaders in Jackson called a press conference on the steps of the Hinds County Courthouse to protest the inaction of the D.A.’s office. Aaron Henry, who was still the leading voice of civil rights in Mississippi, still president of the state NAACP, and a state legislator, lent some weight to the protest. The old pro urged the prosecutors to keep on looking for evidence. “Whenever we don’t want to do something, we find reasons not to do it,” he said.

  DeLaughter insisted that he didn’t have enough evidence to go on. Not that he would make it public if he did. This was a criminal investigation, after all, not a campaign.

  The state attorney general’s office had helped come up with a strong legal argument to get around the speedy trial problem. DeLaughter had decided it was possible to bring Beckwith to trial again, but he wasn’t sure he could win it. The physical evidence was still missing. Most important, the rifle could not be found. He could try the case without the fatal bullet or the autopsy report, which also were missing. Theoretically he could even try it without the murder weapon, but there wouldn’t be much hope of success.

  A trial is a piece of theater, and you have to have some props, particularly in the TV age. There wasn’t a juror out there who didn’t watch television, and few of them could say they hadn’t seen Perry Mason, Matlock, or some other fanciful courtroom drama. On television, the prosecutor always seems to have everything he or she could possibly need to try a case. Like fingerprints. Jurors don’t realize how rare it is to lift a clear fingerprint from a crime scene and especially from a gun. They had Beckwith’s fingerprint but still no gun. That fact could derail the case. DeLaughter had to find that Enfield rifle.

  Researching this case brought back a lot of memories, things DeLaughter hadn’t thought about at the time. One of those things went back fifteen years, to when he and Dixie were first married. They had been visiting her folks when DeLaughter found a rifle in Russel Moore’s bathroom closet. That wasn’t unusual. Moore, like a lot of men in Mississippi, kept guns all over the place. DeLaughter was interested in firearms, so he’d asked the judge about the bolt-action .30/06. All he remembered Moore telling him was that it was a weapon used back in an old civil rights murder. That was it.

  Moore had died a few years back. One night when DeLaughter got home from work, he called his mother-in-law and asked if she still had the gun. She did. He drove over that evening, and they fetched it down from a shelf in a different closet, where some of the judge’s things were stored. DeLaughter never expected it to be the murder weapon. It was just a nagging memory he had to check out.

  He pulled down the heavy black-barreled Enfield and held the serial number up to the light. He had written the missing murder weapon’s serial number on a scrap of paper from the office. The hair raised up on the back of his neck as he read off the numbers etched into the metal beneath the fat black telescopic site and compared them with his notes: 1052682. It was a match.

  The next day DeLaughter sat down in Cynthia Hewes’s office and told her the story. He was a religious man, and he did a lot of praying. But even he couldn’t believe that every time he needed something in this case, it would just show up. The photos, now the gun.

  Hewes looked hard at DeLaughter over the top of her spotless desk and said, “I think Mr. Beckwith is in big trouble.”

  DeLaughter got the next thing he needed later that spring when a colleague handed him a copy of Klandestine, an obscure book that told the story of Delmar Dennis and his years spying on the Klan for the FBI. The author was William H. McIlhany II, a writer, professional magician, and John Birch Society member who had met Dennis on the right-wing speaking circuit. On page 38 was a curious passage about a Klan meeting in the summer of 1965, near the old swinging bridge at Byram: “The accused killer of Jackson NAACP official Medgar Evers is reported to have fully admitted his guilt in that crime.” Dennis quoted Beckwith as saying, “Killing that nigger gave me no more inner discomfort than our wives endure when they give birth to our children.”

  This was exactly what Bobby needed. But he had a problem: where was Dennis? DeLaughter was thinking about where to start looking when the phone rang in his office.

  It was the reporter Jerry Mitchell, calling to bug him about the Beckwith case. Mitchell wanted to know if there was anything new. Why was it going so slowly? DeLaughter lost his temper and blurted out, “Well, I’ll tell you what. We’ll probably make some kind of headway if I can ever find a guy named Delmar Dennis.”

  There was a short pause on the other end of the line, and then Mitchell said pleasantly, “Why, I’ve got Delmar’s number.”

  It turned out that Mitchell had interviewed Dennis half a dozen times for the project the Clarion-Ledger had done on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner murders. He was living in Sevierville, Tennessee, in the Great Smoky Mountains.

  DeLaughter called Dennis, and the man told him yes, he had heard Beckwith talk about “killing that nigger,” and he knew he’d meant Evers. Dennis told him he had no interest in testifying, but if he wanted to come up and visit, that would be fine.

  As soon as he got off the phone, DeLaughter called Benny Bennett and Crisco and told them to get packed. While he was clearing off his desk, he started to wonder about something: Beckwith lived near Chattanooga, and that was only a couple of hours from Sevierville at most. Beckwith was running his mouth with every reporter who showed up at his door. Maybe he’d talk to DeLaughter too.

  The phone rang again. It was Mitchell.

  “So, I hear you’ve reached Delmar,” he said cheerily.

  Of course Mitchell wanted to do a story about this, but DeLaughter tried to convince him to hold off for a while. He hadn’t interviewed Dennis, and the man was nervous. He didn’t want to spook a potential witness or put Dennis’s life in danger. He did not tell the reporter that he wanted to visit Beckwith.

  When the conversation ended, DeLaughter had the impression that Mitchell was going to cooperate. So he placed a call to Signal Mountain.

  “Why Miz Thelma and I would be tickled to have you come on up here,” Beckwith said in his thick Delta drawl.

  DeLaughter couldn’t believe his luck. The man was trying to charm him. He was all syrup and smiles. DeLaughter told Beckwith he just wanted to clear some things up, hear Beckwith’s side of the story. DeLaughter was playing stupid.

  “Well, you know we’re getting a lot of pressure down here, you know, to at least look at the situation,” DeLaughter said. “You certainly don’t have to talk to me, or if you want a lawyer present. . .”

  Beckwith was trying to pick him for information too, but he had one condition. “Now you know I don’t allow nobody on my property except white Christian folks,” Beckwith said. “Now, you don’t sound like you’re anything but white . . .”

  “I am white.”

  “Are you Christian?”

  “Yeah, yeah I am.”

  “You know, I don’t allow no Jews up here!”

  “I know.”

  “Well, who else is coming?”

  “I’ll be bringing at least one investigator. They’re all white, and as far as I know they’re Christians.”

  DeLaughter ran home to pack. Just as he walked through the door, his wife, Dixie, handed him the phone.

  “Beckwith’s on the telephone,” she whispered.

  This time Beckwith’s attitude was belligerent. He was suddenly afraid that he would be kidnapped if an investigator came along with DeLaughter.

  “I don’t want anybody with arrest power up here,” he said.

  DeLaughter felt a sinking in his gut, but he tried to turn it around anyway.

  “We’re not going to be able to arrest you, Mr. Beckwith. We don’t have the authority,” he said. “Number one, i
f you were indicted, we’d have to go through the governor’s office and get an extradition order. We can’t just come up there and kidnap you.”

  It didn’t work. Beckwith called off the meeting. Before he hung up, he said, “I’m going to tell you something, you know. When you see old Delmar, you tell him that I’m very aware of what’s going on.”

  How could he have known about that? DeLaughter pondered for a moment. The only way he could have found out was if Mitchell had called him. That burned him. Here was a newspaper leading the charge to reprosecute Beckwith and accusing him of dragging his feet. Then Mitchell goes and blows the best break DeLaughter’s had.

  He was fuming when he saw the next day’s paper. It carried a picture of Dennis alongside the headline “Ex-FBI Informant Agrees to Cooperate.”

  It got worse. The wire services picked up the story, and by the time DeLaughter, Crisco, and Bennett pulled into Sevierville, the whole country knew that Dennis was talking to the prosecutors.

  Naturally Dennis was a bit jumpy. He insisted that they rendezvous in a crowded Cracker Barrel restaurant near Great Smoky Mountains National park. Then he got in his pickup, and they followed in their car as he led them deep into the woods, past perfectly good picnic benches and rest areas to a spot he had chosen to talk.

  Dennis told them how he had joined the White Knights and spied on them for the FBI. After his testimony in the Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner murders, his life had been in ruins. His wife had left him, and he had been threatened and harassed. Someone had put metal shavings in his car engine; someone had blasted a hole in his house with a shotgun. Eventually Dennis had left Mississippi and settled in Tennessee. He had been a speaker for the John Birch Society, even run for president on the anticommunist platform he still endorsed. He had remarried and had more children. One of his sons was named Andy, after Andrew Goodman.