The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  “That’s right.”

  “And we asked you specifically, did we not, if the name of Medgar Evers was mentioned, didn’t we?”

  “You did.”

  “You told us no, didn’t you, Mr. Speight?”

  “Yessir,” said Tommy Mayfield in someone else’s voice. “I don’t talk to two parties at the same time.”

  At that the sixty or so spectators broke out laughing, and the judge chuckled and so did the jury, and even Beckwith smiled, which is just what had happened thirty years earlier, in the same courtroom, when the same words were spoken.

  When the trial resumed on Monday, January 31, the black Enfield rifle was placed where DeLaughter had left it on Friday, leaning against the witness stand, always within the jury’s sight, occupying the northernmost corner of their peripheral vision, which included the stoic widow to the south and, dead center, the dozing or fidgeting figure of Byron De La Beckwith.

  Beckwith’s attention was forever on the gun when it was in his line of sight. Once, when the jury was out of the room, he walked over to Henry Brinston, the deputy court clerk in charge of the evidence vault. “Could my grandson look at the gun?” Beckwith asked politely. “He hasn’t seen it before.”

  Brinston could hardly believe what he was hearing: Beckwith wanted to see the gun? He said all right, go ahead. The little old man and his big, beefy namesake ambled across the room for a better look.

  Brinston watched them closely. He was astonished that this trial was happening at all. He had been a kid when Medgar Evers was alive, but he remembered him well. He grew up in Jackson, and he remembered marching on Capitol Street in the days of the movement, being thrown in the back of a hot, stinking garbage truck, and then penned up like an animal in the stockyards. Brinston wasn’t about to let himself believe that a Mississippi jury would convict a man like Beckwith. No matter what the members of the jury learned in this phenomenal trial, no matter what conclusion they reached with their hearts, their minds would tell at least some of them, I’ve got to go home to my neighborhood and my job and live for the rest of my life with this verdict. Brinston was sure it was going to be another hung jury. This was still Mississippi.

  “I like this kind of rifle,” Brinston heard Beckwith tell the boy. “It has less recoil.”

  Kitchens looked up and noticed what was going on. He hurried over to shoo them away from the murder weapon.

  There was more technical evidence Monday morning about Beckwith’s fingerprints and handwriting. Dr. Bratley returned to describe the livid bruise he’d noticed over Beckwith’s eye and how it was consistent with the shape and size of the Golden Hawk scope. Witnesses old and new walked the jury through the chain of evidence: the rifle, the cartridges, the mutilated bullet. By noon Bobby DeLaughter had tied Beckwith to the murder weapon. Now he needed to put Beckwith at the scene and give him a motive for the killing.

  DeLaughter started with Barbara Holder, the former carhop who had stopped by Joe’s Drive In thirty-one years earlier. She was fifty-two now and overweight, with short gray hair. She was wearing dark glasses and walked with a cane. Her voice was surprisingly deep. She told how she had been “hanging out” with her friend Martha Jean O’Brien, a waitress on duty that night. She said that they had been talking over by the carhop booth around 9 p.m. when a white Valiant had come from behind the building and backed up into a dark corner of the parking lot. The car was muddy, and it had a long antenna on it, like a patrol car. She sounded like she knew all about cars and how they looked.

  Holder explained that she had then left for a while but came back to Joe’s just before the drive-in closed at midnight. The car was still there. Then she noticed it moving, pulling right up to the men’s bathroom in the back, and a white man got out. She remembered he was five foot seven or five foot eight with dark hair, wearing dark clothes. Holder was shown a black-and-white picture of Beckwith’s Valiant, the way it looked in June of 1963, and she said it was the car she had seen that night.

  Coxwell stood up to ask a few questions in cross-examination. He tried to confuse Holder about where she had been standing and what she saw, and when. The more Coxwell tried to trip her up and challenge her memory, the more she dug in.

  “I can’t remember two weeks ago,” she told him. “But I remember 1963.”

  A few jurors chuckled. They all seemed better attired today — sports jackets for the men, nice dresses for the women — as if someone had brought them good clothes over the weekend. They seemed to be trying to dress more like the lawyers and big-city secretaries they saw every day now. They dressed as if they knew this was serious business, as serious as a church service or a funeral.

  Bobby kept up the pace. He was painting a picture for the jury of the world of Delta Drive and Guynes Street on a hot June night thirty-one years ago, and he brought back the people who had been in that world: the cops and carhops, cabdrivers and teenage lovers. Now he introduced two grown men who had been boys throwing a model airplane in the back lots along the strip when a white Valiant cruised by.

  Just as he’d testified in 1964, when he was sixteen, Ronald Jones, now forty-six and wearing a tight blue suit, told the court how he and his friend Robert Pittman had seen what they’d thought was a police car circling the neighborhood on the night of June 11, 1963.

  Ronald Mark Acy, who had worked in Pittman’s Grocery when he was sixteen, was paunchy now and his hair was receding. He remembered seeing that white car on Saturday night, June 8, 1963. It had been parked in the little alley next to the Pittmans’ house. When he had gotten closer to take a look, he’d noticed the long antenna and a Shriners emblem of a star and big sword hanging from the rearview mirror. He knew it was a Shriners symbol because his parents used to go dancing at the Shriners hall.

  Robert Pittman testified last. He wore a pink button-down shirt, and his voice was middle-aged deep now. He was so nervous Bobby had to slow him down, but he recalled the details. On June 11 he had seen a white Valiant with a ten-foot aerial on the side, and it was driving slowly up and down the highway. Pittman saw it parked in the alley, the same as Acy, and he noticed the “Masonic or some type of emblem” hanging off the mirror.

  Pittman then added something that he hadn’t said in 1964. He had seen that same Valiant in the parking lot of Joe’s Drive In that same night about 11 p.m. It had been just where Barbara Holder had said it was.

  When Coxwell cross-examined Pittman and asked him why he hadn’t said he’d seen the car in Joe’s lot during the first trial, Pittman said, “I don’t really believe anybody asked me about it at that trial.”

  Just as Bill Waller had done in the first trial, DeLaughter made a convincing case that a car just like Beckwith’s had been in Medgar Evers’s neighborhood the night he was killed and the weekend before that. But DeLaughter could use something that wasn’t available in Waller’s day: the modern technique of photo enlargement.

  DeLaughter showed the jury a photograph taken of Beckwith’s Valiant the week of his arrest. You could see the aerial and the trailer hitch, but the interior was dark and indistinct. DeLaughter called an FBI technician, who had blown up a portion of the photograph twenty times. In the enlargement the sword and crescent moon of a Shriners emblem was clearly visible, dangling from the rearview mirror.

  Reed Massengill’s book publicist had been telling reporters that the author would testify at Beckwith’s trial, so his appearance was not a complete surprise.

  But the defense objected to his testimony and the letters that DeLaughter planned to have him read into evidence. Kitchens argued that letters from 1955 and 1956 were too remote, too prejudicial. The judge rejected that argument but disallowed one letter that Beckwith had written to his first wife while they were married. Massengill was allowed to take the stand.

  Beckwith watched closely as Reed was sworn in. He stared at Massengill intently, as if trying to catch his eye. Massengill looked stranded and friendless. He was a tall, slender young man with carefully barbered brown hair and
round, perpetually startled-looking eyes. He was wearing a good gray suit. He nervously rubbed his hands together, but when he spoke, he seemed surprisingly self-assured, as if the voice did not go with the body.

  Massengill explained that Beckwith, his uncle, had approached him to write a book about Beckwith several years earlier. In the course of Massengill’s research he had been given a number of letters, documents, tapes, and the manuscript of an earlier book by Beckwith. He’d also been supplied with dozens of letters that Beckwith had written to his ex-wife, Mary Louise “Willie” Williams Beckwith, Massengill’s aunt. She was now dead. In one of those letters, from 1976, Beckwith had written that he was “heavily involved in Klan work,” the only time he was known to have admitted this.

  Beckwith was on red alert for this testimony. He leaned forward eagerly and held up his hearing aid in Massengill’s direction. But once his nephew started reading his letters, Beckwith testily pulled out his earpiece and tossed it on the table.

  Another letter Massengill read to the court had been written by his uncle to the Jackson Daily News in 1957. “Believe it or not,” he wrote, “the NAACP, under the direction of its leaders, is doing a first-class job of getting itself in a position to be exterminated!”

  When it came time for cross-examination, Kitchens took a sarcastic tone with Massengill. Wasn’t Reed writing about his uncle for money? Massengill allowed that he got paid to write. And his uncle never told him he killed Medgar Evers? He did not.

  Kitchens tried to paint Beckwith as a harmless, loudmouthed eccentric. Wasn’t he a talkative person? And someone who read the Bible a lot? And wasn’t it true he drank only water he got in Georgia and carried with him to Tennessee? Reed agreed that Beckwith did all these things and that he had hired another author to write his earlier manuscript for him, that those weren’t his words, although they were his thoughts.

  Kitchens moved for a mistrial based on this secondhand testimony. His motion was denied.

  Mary Ann Adams was a hefty, no-nonsense woman of fifty-one, a bookkeeper who carried her boxy tan handbag like a weapon. In 1966 she was twenty-four years old and working for the Holmes County Cooperative. She was having lunch with a friend in a small town near Greenwood one September day when her friend noticed a group of men at another table.

  “That’s Byron De La Beckwith,” the friend told her, and he went over to talk to Beckwith.

  After a while the friend brought Beckwith back to the table to meet Adams. He introduced Beckwith as “Byron De La Beckwith, the man who shot Medgar Evers.” Beckwith reached his hand out to her.

  “I refused to shake his hand,” she told the court. “I wouldn’t shake the hand of a murderer.” She said Beckwith got “extremely agitated” and told her that he hadn’t killed a man “but a damn chicken-stealing dog — and you know what you have to do when a dog has tasted blood.”

  Adams had never told anyone, she said, because she’d been under the impression that Beckwith could not be tried again. She came forward when she read that the Hinds County D.A.’s office had reopened the case.

  Under cross-examination Adams admitted that she had changed her story somewhat. At first she didn’t mention the remark about the “chicken-stealing dog” to the district attorney. She said she didn’t trust him. “I called him later to tell him the whole truth,” she said.

  Next up was Dan Prince, a skinny, bearded middle-aged man who wore a light blue suit and dark blue tie. Prince was an alcoholic and an ex-con who had rented an apartment from Delay and Thelma on Signal Mountain back in 1986. Once, in a casual conversation, Beckwith had told Prince that he had been tried twice in Mississippi “for killing that nigger.” According to Prince he’d said, “I had a job to do and I did it and I didn’t suffer any more than your wife if she was going to have a baby.”

  Buddy Coxwell lit into this witness. He brought up Prince’s alcoholism, the fact that he had sometimes been drunk when he’d lived on the Beckwiths’ property, and that he was unhappy with the Beckwiths because they had evicted him.

  “I had a drinking problem,” Prince allowed, “but that’s not why they evicted me.” They had evicted him after police had come on the property to arrest him for vandalism, a charge later dropped. But Coxwell didn’t want to get into that.

  Coxwell pointed out that Prince hadn’t gone to the police with his story but instead had gone to the local newspaper and gotten himself on the front page.

  “Do you deny asking the paper for money?” Coxwell asked.

  “I do,” said Prince, who twisted around in his chair as he answered.

  Prince might not have been Bobby DeLaughter’s strongest witness, but his story fit in with the others, and it kept the momentum going.

  On Tuesday morning DeLaughter was still playing the same theme when he called Elluard “Dick” Davis to the stand. Davis was a sixty-year-old small-press publisher from central Florida. During the late sixties and into the seventies he was in the construction business in Winter Haven, but his main job was as a paid FBI informant who had infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan.

  In October 1969 Beckwith was a traveling boat salesman. He was introduced to Davis by a mutual acquaintance, and they met once for supper at a Lum’s restaurant. The conversation was not just about boats.

  “We discussed his arrest and his trials,” Davis said. “He never admitted to me that he was guilty. He never denied it, which I thought was a little strange.”

  The defense lawyers objected. Davis was allowed to continue.

  Davis said Beckwith had told him that “selective killings” were necessary to the right-wing cause. “He said he never asked someone else to do something he would not do himself,” Davis testified.

  Peggy Morgan, the witness who rode with Beckwith to Parchman penitentiary was up next. She wore a pink suit and pink stiletto heels and had frosted blond hair. Her thin face seemed pinched beneath large dark glasses. She spoke haltingly, like a woman who knew the consequences of talking too loud.

  She told the court that she had lived in Greenwood with her now-estranged husband, Lloyd, back in the sixties. One afternoon she and Lloyd had driven up to Parchman to visit Lloyd’s brother in prison. They’d offered a ride to Beckwith. (The judge would not let her say that Beckwith was going to see Cecil Sessums, who was doing time for the murder of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer.)

  Morgan sat between her husband and Beckwith in the cab of the pickup. During the eighty-mile drive Beckwith made conversation.

  “He started talking about some bombings,” she recalled. “He said that he had killed Medgar Evers, a nigger, and he wasn’t scared to kill again.”

  Kitchens challenged her credibility in his cross-examination. He used his smoothest voice to try to grind her into confetti on the stand. She was a vulnerable target. She couldn’t remember exactly when the conversation with Beckwith had taken place, not even the year it had happened. Kitchens dragged out her troubled family history, things she had told him during their pretrial interview. She had accused her father of abusing her, and he had later been murdered. Her mother had frozen to death. She’d suffered from an anxiety disorder for which she was treated with medication.

  Peggy Morgan meekly conceded all these things. Kitchens’s treatment of her only made her seem more sympathetic and more honest.

  DeLaughter gently took over in redirect. “Tell the jury whether any other traumatic thing happened before,” he said.

  “He [Beckwith] told me that this better not never get out,” she said.

  “What effect did this have on you?”

  “It made me fear not to say anything.”

  She said that she had contacted the D.A.’s office after she heard the case had been reopened because “there was evidence that should be brought forward.” She had no interest in becoming a witness at this trial.

  She was encouraged to tell the jury that she was still married to Lloyd Morgan, but he was now a drifter and she didn’t know where he was. He had contacted her recently, th
ough, after he’d found out she had talked to the D.A.’s office.

  “He said I better not come here and testify,” she said in a soft, calm voice. “I would wind up dead.”

  Later, after the court broke for lunch, the press ambushed Peggy Morgan in the hallway. She gave in to their questions and talked for the TV cameras. She had something she wanted to say. “I want Myrlie Evers to know that I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t come forward sooner.”

  After so much emotional testimony the long-awaited appearance of Delmar Dennis was somehow anticlimactic. Dennis surprised Crisco by showing up for court in a casual white pullover and slacks instead of a business suit. He wore his wire-rimmed glasses and a full beard.

  His appearance in court lent a historical perspective to the case, to tying it to another one of Mississippi’s notorious crimes; the Neshoba County murders of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner.

  Dennis briefly told the story of his days in the White Knights, how he had been a titan responsible for ten Mississippi counties and had reported everything to the FBI. For his trouble, he said, he got one hundred dollars per week expense money. In his flat, nasal drawl Dennis told the jury about the meeting near the swinging bridge back in August 1965, when he had heard Beckwith talk about murder. “He was admonishing the Klan to kill the enemy, from the top on down,” Dennis said.

  Dennis had been telling reporters that for years. Then he came to the part about Evers. Dennis reported that Beckwith had said, “Killing that nigger did me no more physical harm than your wives have to have when they’re having a baby for you.”

  A dozen heads shot up in the press section, and DeLaughter paused to look at Dennis for a moment. What happened to the part about “inner discomfort”? Was this quote, one that Dennis had repeated in exactly the same way again and again to anyone who’d asked him, only a paraphrase of what Beckwith had supposedly said? The jury, of course, wouldn’t know that. This new quote did, however, sound just like what Beckwith had said to Prince.