The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  The stress was showing on his family as well. Little Delay was snappish. He clumped down the hallways in his reptile-skin boots, toting a box of files, glowering and sometimes yelling at photographers to get out of his way. Thelma wandered about the courtroom until a friend led her back to her seat.

  The case was clearly not going well for Byron De La Beckwith. It had not turned into a forum for his twisted beliefs, a platform on which to anoint him as patron saint of the last Confederate holdouts. The case was instead shaping up to be what DeLaughter had said it would be: a murder trial.

  The day began with a calamitous setback for the defense. Coxwell had planned to call James Hobby, who had been a surprise witness at the second trial in April 1964. Hobby, who was a truck driver in Jackson at the time of the murder, was going to tell the jury that he drove a Valiant just like Beckwith’s and that he had been at Joe’s Drive In on the night of the murder.

  His story was even more detailed thirty years later and was in some ways inconsistent with newspaper accounts of his earlier testimony. According to the defense, he was now prepared to say that he’d had a big antenna on his Valiant because he was a CB radio buff. He also was going to say that he was a regular customer at Joe’s and that he had been there at closing time when a fight had erupted outside. He was going to say that he knew Barbara Holder and insist that he hadn’t seen her there. He also remembered hearing the sound of the rifle while he was leaving the restaurant.

  Hobby was a treasured witness for the defense. He was an oracle of reasonable doubt, someone who could smash every theory the prosecution had developed to tie Beckwith to the crime scene. There was only one problem: Coxwell had never notified the prosecutors — in writing — that he intended to call Hobby. In the heated arguments before the judge that morning, DeLaughter maintained that he had never heard Hobby’s name until after the trial had started. Coxwell insisted that he had told him, orally, that Hobby was a potential witness.

  Judge Hilburn had a serious dilemma here, with two prominent lawyers, friends, basically calling each other a liar in his court. He announced that he had to go with the strict interpretation of the law. Written notification was the rule. He denied the witness.

  By now Coxwell was trying the case for the appeal. He knew that he could turn the trial into a free-for-all, could drive a whole garbage truck of dirt into the courtroom and dump it in front of the jury. He could rake up the FBI reports and set up all the other scenarios and other suspects — the mystery man from Shreveport at the bus station, the three men in the hotel room with the rifle, the blue pickup with the rifle in the gun rack that had been noted hanging around at a demonstration and was seen at Joe’s Drive In the day of the murder. He could try all sorts of stunts, such as subpoenaing Beckwith’s Klan friend Gordon Lackey, who had been tall, young, and dark-haired at the time, and asking him what he had been doing the night of June 11. But any of those things would just open up opportunities for Peters to bring up other FBI reports about Beckwith’s political activities and suspicious associations. It would confuse the hell out of the jury, but it might end up putting his client in an even worse position, if that was possible.

  Instead Coxwell chose to stick with the script. He felt so strongly that any higher court would find a sackful of reasons to overturn a conviction that he played it safe.

  The next witness was Martha Jean O’Brien, a woman the defense could not locate. The missing witness had been a teenage carhop working at Joe’s the night of the murder.

  By now it was routine to have old testimony reenacted for the jury, and today a secretary read the part where O’Brien had said that she saw a man getting out of the Valiant who didn’t look at all like Beckwith. She described a good-looking man in his early twenties, taller than six two, with black hair and dark clothes.

  Bobby DeLaughter’s cross-examination, taken from the script, was perfunctory.

  At midmorning the moment everyone had been waiting for was at hand. Everybody knew that Beckwith needed to testify to explain certain things, such as how his rifle had ended up at the crime scene. He had to say that it had been stolen, and he was the only one who could do that.

  But something unexpected was happening. With the jury out of the room, Kitchens and Peters were arguing about something called “Rule 804.”

  Coxwell and Kitchens wanted Beckwith to testify all right, but they could not risk Peters’s cross-examination, or the probable outbursts from Beckwith. So they asked to invoke a rule to declare the defendant incapacitated. As Kitchens told the judge in the presence of his client, “Obviously Mr. Beckwith is here and alive, your honor. . . [but] in every sense of the Mississippi rules of evidence, Mr. Beckwith is unavailable to testify. We have spent hours talking to Mr. Beckwith, and he is less able to remember now than he was a couple of years ago.”

  The defense wanted Beckwith to testify through the transcripts of his first trial. Someone else would read for him.

  The atmosphere in the main courtroom was increasingly tense. An overflow crowd had to be seated in the balcony behind the press. Klansmen, skinheads, and Jackson State students sat in close proximity, with a chemical volatility in their mingling breath that you could feel through your skin.

  Cynthia Speetjens’s husband, Joe, had come to watch the show and had ended up seated between the two camps. As the lawyers churned through their arguments, with Peters saying why he felt Beckwith should testify live and not as a living ghost, and Coxwell claiming that his client couldn’t remember enough to defend himself, Joe experienced a strange bipolar commentary in stereo: The Klan youths muttered, “That’s a lie,” after every sentence Peters spoke. The old NAACP veterans on the other side whispered, “Praise Jesus.”

  Judge Hilburn offered what he felt was a compromise. He would not restrict Beckwith’s testimony to the transcript, but he would allow the witness to keep it in front of him and refer to it during his testimony.

  Peters and DeLaughter shifted in their chairs and straightened their papers expectantly. Then Merrida Coxwell rose from his seat. In that case, he said, Beckwith would not testify.

  “The defense rests.”

  At that three hundred or more hushed and excited spectators let out a choked yawp of disappointment — like the sound of air going out of a small balloon.

  Ed Peters threw his pen on the desk, then looked up for the judge to admonish him, though he never did. Peters had just been robbed of his finest performance. He had stayed in criminal law because he loved his time in the courtroom, like an actor loves the stage. But he was mostly a desk jockey now. This was a rare chance to do what he did best. He had two thick stacks of material in front of him. He was prepared to keep Beckwith on the stand for two days, to cut his alibis to ribbons, and to show the jury just what kind of a man this defendant was. He had videotapes of interviews Beckwith had given in recent years, where Beckwith had chuckled when he’d said he hadn’t “killed the nigger, but he sure is dead.” He planned to needle Beckwith until the man exploded in rage and showed the jury that his hatred was strong enough to lead him to murder.

  Now, Peters thought, Beckwith had shown what he was. He was a coward. For perhaps the first time in his long and unquiet life, Byron De La Beckwith had nothing to say.

  There were a few more orders of business before the end of the day. The prosecutors called former detective Fred Sanders as a rebuttal witness to dispute some things Holley had said. But the questioning was lackluster, the motions desultory. The air was heavy with frustration and a sense of anticlimax. DeLaughter walked around the courtroom as if his mustache weighed five pounds.

  As the afternoon wore on, Beckwith sat crumpled up inside his large, loud jacket. He looked defeated. Nobody had taken the stand to sing his praises at this trial. Nobody had even said he was a good salesman. He had been betrayed again and again by people he considered his own kind. His own nephew had written a book that said he was an impotent drunk and then had taken the stand to condemn him by reading his own words back to
him.

  The man who had boasted that he shot down “the mightiest nigger in Mississippi” had to sit still and listen while his attorneys told the court that he was infirm, suggested that he was senile. The man who lived for an audience skipped his last performance. There would be no curtain calls.

  It was all over by 2:30 that afternoon. Judge Hilburn scheduled closing arguments for Friday morning.

  Myrlie Evers was visibly upset. After enduring Beckwith’s taunts for so long, she wanted more than a guilty verdict. She wanted the whole horror show, with Beckwith howling and braying and Peters acting as her surrogate, the one who would slay the dragon for her and throw her the head.

  She met the TV cameras at the elevator doors that afternoon with gloomy, distracted eyes. “I would have enjoyed immensely hearing the accused assassin of my husband,” she said in a clipped, angry voice. “The fact that he didn’t take the stand means — a lot. It’s the first time in thirty years that he has not ranted and raved,” she said.

  Among the stunned people milling in the wide courtroom hallway was at least one woman who saw Beckwith’s silence as a victory. Rosa Mitchell, a seventy-three-year-old NAACP veteran, was telling anyone who would listen that she was happy she hadn’t had to listen to Beckwith this time around. She had sat through his first two trials, she said. “Now he can’t be carrying on like a cobra, spitting out poison at our children. This poison and hate will end here, with this old man. It ends here, today.”

  It had been a peculiar, spooky case from the beginning, and it was not over yet. Early Thursday evening the phone rang in Kitchens’s office. It was a woman who said she was Martha Jean O’Brien. She had heard on the news that somebody had read her testimony. She wondered why he hadn’t contacted her, since she had been in touch with the prosecution. “I talked to Bobby DeLaughter the night before the trial started,” she said.

  “You’re kidding me,” the dumbfounded lawyer said. He’d had a private detective searching for her for months.

  She told him her name was different now and she was afraid to come forward and testify in person. She wouldn’t leave her number with him, but she said she had visited Charlie Crisco in his office. She repeated her story to Kitchens about how she had not been able to identify Beckwith, and she couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. She had seen a much younger man at Joe’s thirty-one years ago.

  “Ma’am,” Kitchens sputtered, “in the unlikely event that we would be able to reopen our case and put you on the stand tomorrow, would you be available?”

  “I’m — I’m scared to do it,” she said. Couldn’t she just give a deposition?

  Kitchens told her, regrettably, no. She ended the call without leaving her number.

  Darrell and his sister Reena Evers-Everett flew into Jackson on Thursday night. Nobody expected the trial to be over so quickly. Darrell thought he could wait at least another week.

  Darrell came to give support to his mother, but he also was there for himself. He wanted to see Beckwith, and he wanted Beckwith to see him. Darrell was forty, slightly older than his father was when he died. Medgar Evers’s eldest child was taller, built slimmer than his father, but he had his father’s face and his eyes. Later he would tell people that he wanted the assassin to see his face, his father’s face, because all he had seen before was his back.

  On Friday morning, February 4, Darrell took a seat on one side of his mother, and Reena sat on the other side. Darrell searched for Beckwith’s eyes across the room. Beckwith glanced at him, recognized him, and met his stare. Their eyes were locked for ten, thirty, forty-five seconds. What Darrell saw in Beckwith’s eyes surprised him. There was hate, of course, and plenty of attitude: the eyes said, I’m right; I’m angry; I’m powerful. But there was something else. Darrell thought it was fear, not of him or of black people, but of Beckwith’s own beliefs, like they were choking him. Beckwith looked away first, and Darrell was satisfied.

  Darrell wanted this man to pay for his crime. But this case wasn’t a crusade for him as it was for his mother. He believed in karma, and he knew that Beckwith would be taken care of in the cosmic balance; he would get what was coming to him in this world or another.

  On that spiritual level Darrell was cool. On another, more corporeal frequency he wanted like hell to see Beckwith convicted.

  The first order of business was yet another call from the defense for a mistrial or for reopening their case. Coxwell and Kitchens accused DeLaughter of withholding information from them because he had never told them he knew the whereabouts of Martha Jean O’Brien. They wanted to subpoena her to testify.

  Bobby argued that it wasn’t his job to run down witnesses for them and that the prosecution had named O’Brien on their witness list as well. Besides, she had moved, and he didn’t have a new number for her. Judge Hilburn apparently accepted this excuse, because the motion to reopen was denied.

  There was also the question of Judge Hilburn’s bizarre instructions to the jury Thursday afternoon. He had told them to pack their bags, that they should expect to go home Friday night.

  Hilburn quickly rescinded that advice, but the defense team objected. It was as if the judge was telling the jury not to waste their time deliberating. The longer they were out, the better it was for the defense. Hilburn noted the defense motion and called the jury back in to hear closing arguments.

  Bobby DeLaughter was up first. He had never been known for his rousing oratory, but to those familiar with his courtroom manner he was practically on fire that day.

  This crime, he said, was an act of savagery, “the kind of murder every human being should be sickened by.” He made sure he pointed his finger at the defendant, like the wrath of God was descending on him. “When he thought he had beaten the system, he couldn’t keep his own mouth shut with people he thought would be impressed. His own venom has come back to poison him.” DeLaughter said.

  Beckwith, he said, had “danced to the music for thirty years. Isn’t it time he paid the piper?” The murder had left “a gaping wound” on society. “Where justice is never fulfilled, that wound will never be cleansed. … Is it ever too late to do the right thing? I sincerely hope and pray that it’s not.”

  Coxwell and Kitchens made their statements next. Coxwell reminded the jury of the alibi witnesses — the defendant hadn’t been in Jackson and couldn’t have killed Evers.

  Kitchens played on a different, loftier theme. First he asked the jury to regard the defendant in the context of his era. “Just about every white person in this state was for segregation and I’m not here to say it’s right,” he said.

  He invoked the names of Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson, pointing out that Jefferson had been a slaveholder and Lincoln had not been committed to black suffrage. Their views would not be accepted today, any more than Beckwith’s views on race were.

  “You’re not here to decide whether you like Mr. Beckwith,” he told the jury. “Or whether you want to take him home, or whether you’d like to join his organization…. Judge this case on the evidence,” he pleaded. “Forget it’s Byron De La Beckwith. Forget you don’t like him. Judge the case on the evidence because if the system doesn’t work for everybody, it doesn’t work for anybody.”

  Ed Peters was up last. Myrlie Evers was not disappointed. He slew the dragon and threw her Beckwith’s head.

  “By this defendant’s own words shall he be judged,” Peters began. He called Beckwith a “back-shooting, sneaking coward.” He pointed a finger at the defense lawyers. “No wonder they don’t want you to think about the defendant!”

  Peters went on like this for half an hour, acting out the parts of the defense witnesses, mocking them, chewing them up so that Kitchens had to object to the theatrics. Peters told the jury what he thought about the alibi witnesses: “You know the way the cops felt back then… that’s why they’d come down here and lie!”

  He reminded the jury of the courage of the witnesses who had come forward at great personal risk to say that Beckwith had bragged t
o them. “Don’t let him walk out of here and say ‘I’ve got twelve more! They can’t convict me!’ ”

  “All we’re asking you people to do is to give the Evers family some justice,” Peters said, looking each juror in the eye. “Just justice after thirty years.”

  After that the jurors went to the back room to begin their deliberations. There wasn’t a thing in the world for Myrlie Evers to do but wait, and pray.

  Most times a Mississippi jury will be out for two to three hours if there is going to be a conviction. Few people overintellectualize their decisions in this part of the world. The judicial process reflects the society here, which is one of moral certitude. There is right and wrong, good and bad, heaven and hell, and Mississippians usually have no trouble telling the difference. So when 3:30 went by, and then 4:00, and then 4:30, the folks waiting it out on the fifth floor started getting nervous.

  The most likely outcome, right from the start, had always been a hung jury. But the defense had been so hapless and the prosecution such a juggernaut of righteousness that everyone was feeling a conviction in the air. Besides there were eight black jurors in there. Still all it would take was one juror who didn’t want to face the music back at the Pepsi-Cola plant or the feed store, one who would hold out and hang it up one more time.

  A heavy storm hit in late afternoon, and the chandeliers in the courtroom hallways flickered a few times, then held steady. Thunder rumbled through the city and shook the heavy glass doors. It was Gothic weather, perfect for the occasion.

  By six o’clock the bailiffs were whispering that they heard shouts coming from the jury room. That was not a good sign at all.

  Up in the D.A.’s office, Myrlie Evers sat making small talk with Linda Anderson, Glenda Haynes, and Cynthia Speetjens in Anderson’s office. Darrell and Reena chatted with the other lawyers. Darrell hadn’t spent any time with the prosecutors before. He hadn’t even met Ed Peters. But as soon as he saw them at work, he felt they were like family. It was another thing he hadn’t expected, feeling this close to a bunch of Mississippi prosecutors.