The Ghosts of Mississippi (34 page)

“He’s not here!” Thelma Beckwith shouted from behind the front door of her bungalow on Signal Mountain.

“Ma’am, we’ve got a warrant,” the deputy said. “Please open up.” Beckwith was in fact home on the afternoon of December 17, 1990. He was shaved and showered and had a fresh set of clothes ready. He knew they’d be coming for him. Finally Thelma let the officers inside.

“I’m ready to go, boys,” Beckwith told them. “I’m not guilty.”

He even joked as they led him away to the Hamilton County Jail. “You want to search my pockets to see if I’ve got a bomb?”

The old man’s mood had soured by the time he showed up in green jail togs for his hearing in Chattanooga the next day.

“How many Jews are among you?” Beckwith snapped as he peered at the mob of reporters. “I see one nigra man.”

Inside the courtroom Beckwith told the judge that the murder charge in Mississippi was “nonsense, poppycock and just something to… incite the lower forms of life to force and violence against the country club set.” Beckwith vowed that he would fight extradition to Mississippi “tooth, nail and claw.”

The judge released him on fifteen thousand dollars bail. He was hastily rearrested on a governor’s warrant and returned to his cinder block cell while he fought extradition.

Beckwith adjusted quickly to the jail routine. By now he knew how to do his time. He kept up his frantic correspondence with friends, donors, and journalists, writing twenty or more letters a day. He said he was a political prisoner.

He had a slick court-appointed lawyer named Russell Bean who fought off the extradition and tried to keep reporters away from his client. Beckwith never minded being interviewed, but he decided he would now put a price on it. Five thousand dollars, cash or check, in advance, no exceptions. In all the time he spent in jail, only a BBC documentary crew managed to interview him on tape. They wouldn’t say how they’d persuaded him to do it.

In that interview he denied the new allegations against him. He had not attended any NAACP meetings in Jackson, he said. He had never seen Medgar Evers.

“You ought to have enough sense not to ask such a damn fool question,” he told the interviewer. “I am not going to waste my time going to a nigger meeting. When I want to know something from a nigger, I tell the nigger to come to me!”

Beckwith denied bragging about the murder in front of Delmar Dennis at a Klan meeting in 1965. “Sounds like a fabrication to me,” he said. He started to say something else, then stopped himself, chuckling. “You see, the only time…” he paused. “I’ll just save that for the courts. Because you see, heh, heh, if Delmar’s still living, heh, heh, I’m goin’ drop one on him.”

“You’ll drop one on him?”

“Verbally…. He’ll know that he has fizzled around and blown the lamp out and he will have found himself in the dark!”

Dennis, who also was interviewed for the show, took that as a threat. By now he had written to DeLaughter to inform him that he would not testify at the trial, and he had informed the media of his decision. Privately he said it was a ploy to throw the assassins off his trail. The Klan had already left a calling card in his mailbox. Someone wanted him to know they knew where he lived.

Back in Mississippi DeLaughter and Crisco were taking advantage of the delay to strengthen the case against Beckwith. Among the many items still missing from the first trial was Evers’s original autopsy report. That was a big problem, almost as bad as not having the murder weapon. They needed a new autopsy, but that meant exhuming the long-buried body.

Myrlie Evers was horrified, and at first she refused to allow it. She couldn’t put herself or her family through it. But she changed her mind when her younger son. Van, offered to go to Washington in her place.

DeLaughter and Crisco flew to Washington to oversee the exhumation and autopsy. They met Van for the first time at the grave site. There wasn’t much time to talk. It was a warm, sunny morning, and the back-hoe was standing by. They all watched as its blade cut through the thick turf, uncovering a perfectly dry grave and a well-sealed casket. That was a good sign. But nobody knew what they might find inside. The casket was raised up and placed in a hearse. Van got in with the driver, and they set out for Albany, New York. DeLaughter and Crisco followed in another car.

DeLaughter had arranged for the autopsy to be performed by Dr. Michael Baden, New York State’s chief pathologist. Baden was probably the best-known and most respected forensic expert in the country. He specialized in old cases. He had reviewed the autopsy reports of both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., for the House assassinations investigation in the late 1970s. Baden would soon be heading to Russia to examine what were said to be the bones of Czar Nicholas II and his family to help solve one of the century’s great murder mysteries. DeLaughter wanted someone with Baden’s credentials to do this autopsy and testify at the trial. He wanted the historic weight of Baden’s resume. And Baden, who was a very expensive expert witness, had volunteered to do the work for free.

The somber little convoy arrived at the Albany medical center before dark. DeLaughter and Crisco finally had a chance to talk to Van. Like Myrlie, Van was warm and friendly and put them at ease.

The coffin was opened the next morning. Since they had no idea whether the body would be dust and bones, or whatever, Van stayed outside the room. Crisco recorded the procedure with a camcorder as Baden pried open the box. Everyone in the room gasped. Evers’s body was perfectly preserved. His burial suit was still neat and dry; his face was only slightly altered from dehydration, as if he had been dusted with a thin coat of ashes. Medgar Evers looked as if he were sleeping, certainly not like someone who had been dead for almost thirty years.

Baden said he had never seen anything like it. Crisco remembered a feeling of awe in the room, as if they had stepped back from 1991 and were again at the wake in 1963. DeLaughter slipped out of the room and brought in Van. Then DeLaughter, Crisco, and Baden withdrew for a while to give Van a chance to be alone with his father.

Crisco, the homicide cop who had seen just about everything you need to see in this life, recalls that he was “moved” by the moment. It was emotional, almost spiritual.

After Van was finished, the autopsy team removed the clothing and opened up the body. Crisco took pictures as Baden prepared for X rays. No X rays had been taken back in 1963. Forensic science was a lot more sophisticated now. When the chest X rays were developed, Baden slapped them on a light screen, and everyone got the second surprise of the day. Although the part of the bullet that had passed through Evers’s body was still missing, the X ray showed that fragments of that bullet remained in his chest. Enough to present as evidence.

All the others, where are they now? The ones who didn’t have patience, they lost their minds, or disappeared. I saved part of myself, always held something in reserve. I didn’t give it all away while the others did. That’s why I’m still here.

— Charles Evers, 1991

Charles Evers was bankrupt and divorced, and the IRS was still chasing his tail, trying to collect back taxes. He had lost another race for mayor of Fayette, and he was living in an apartment behind the radio station, WMPR, just off the Tougaloo campus. His job was general manager of the nonprofit blues and gospel and talk station. He wasn’t allowed to own anything, at least not on paper, until the IRS and his many creditors were satisfied.

His office at WMPR was a shrine to his better days: There were pictures of Evers with every Republican president from Nixon to Bush. There were photos from his campaigns and pictures of him with Bobby Kennedy, famous pictures of Kennedy riding in an open convertible through an ocean of people, all of them reaching out to him and him reaching back. Evers’s dark, serious face is in the foreground, along with those of Rosie Grier and Jim Brown, Kennedy’s unofficial bodyguards. Evers was walking behind Kennedy the night he was killed in Los Angeles. After that Evers shut down his heart.

He kept mementos of everyone who had mattered to him. There was an Asian sculpture in one corner. He said it reminded him of the Philippines and Felicia, his one true love. There was a picture of James and Jessie Evers, seated in their clean parlor, and a publicity shot of B. B. King. If you asked, Evers would tell you that B.B. was his best friend. “But we’re not too close,” he’d say.

Above and behind him, dominating the room, was a large oil painting of Medgar Evers seated at his desk, looking over Charles’s shoulder. “I’ll never let anyone get close to me again,” he said.

By the fall of 1991, he had stopped talking about “the case.” Myrlie Evers, for one, had told him to keep out of it. But that wouldn’t be enough to quiet him if he wanted to speak. He seemed pained by the whole thing, too weary to hope for a conviction.

He was spending more and more time down in Jefferson County, because he was running for office again, this time for chancery clerk. Evers would tell you that he was campaigning out of a sense of obligation to “his people.” He was old and should be retiring, but “the people” had asked him to run and to fix the place up.

It was true that Jefferson County was having hard times. The two factories Evers had enticed to open there had closed and moved to Mexico. The roads were full of potholes. The swimming pool at the Medgar Evers Community Center in Fayette was cracked, with a foot of green slime festering on the bottom. The lawns were unmowed. The courthouse and jail had burned years ago and had not been rebuilt.

Skeptics said that Evers was running for chancery clerk because that was where the money was. He would be in charge of the county payrolls and get a percentage of every contract filed in his office. Some chancery clerks made more money than the governor. Others said that Evers just lived to run. He needed the action.

And so on a balmy autumn day in downtown Fayette, Evers kicked off his tenth campaign for office.

“Bro’ Willie!” Evers called.

“Okay,” a voice squawked on the CB radio.

“You be on the end, and I be on the front!”

“Ten four.”

“Okay. We gone,” Evers said.

It was about ten thirty in the morning. It would be eleven before the motorcade set off. Everyone had to get gassed up at Mazique’s, had to get posters, had to find each other. Evers drove his Ford van around the Fayette Plaza, home of the Dude Burger and Bill’s Discount Store, waiting for Willie, his security man, to check in again.

“Politics is never organized,” he explained to a passenger. “You just go ’round in circles.”

Finally they were off, crawling out of town at twenty-five miles an hour, the strictly enforced speed limit. Cars and pickups bobbed along the bumpy, potholed macadam like slow-moving barges on a choppy current.

The first stop was a country store in Harriston, a community just east of Fayette. Evers leaped from the van, a handful of flyers in his fist. He was the vision of an expert politician at work, of someone who had been on the campaign trail for thirty years.

He shook the first hand he saw, which belonged to a black man in farm clothes climbing from a pickup. “Please vote for me. I sure need your support,” Evers said heartily, pressing a flyer in the man’s hand.

“How you feeling?” Evers called to an old woman on her porch.

“Fine, fine, Mayor,” she replied. Although he hadn’t been mayor for years, that was how folks remembered him.

He moved quickly but stepped carefully down the paths to the small frame houses, looking for dogs. “Campaigning in the country is hard work,” he said. “A lot of walking, a lot of bad dogs.”

Dogs were Evers’s bane. They scared him, but everybody in the country had one.

Out behind the store he spotted a young white man and his small towheaded son fiddling with the hitch of a livestock trailer. Two brindled mutts lay in the shade of the trailer, watching Evers walk by.

“Don’t you bite me now,” Evers muttered to the dogs. “I appreciate your support now, you know I don’t want to kill no dogs. You just stay put.”

Killing a man’s dog would lose a vote, Evers reasoned. He didn’t want to mess with them. The dogs stood up warily as the candidate walked up to their owner, hand outstretched. The white farmer in the red cap seemed slightly stunned but took Evers’s hand. His smile was friendly if not warm.

“I sure could use your vote,” Evers said with all his considerable charm.

The county was 80 percent black, with just over six thousand registered voters. The whites tended to vote for Evers. He said he had been promised 95 percent of the white vote in this race. It was, ironically, the African-Americans he had to sell himself to.

Evers jumped back into the van and tore off down the two-lane highway, beeping his horn as he passed homes, driving fast to make time. The route was lined with fields of goldenrod, southern pine, oak, and sweetgum thick with road dust.

At a former filling station a group of young white men gathered around the back of a pickup. Since it was squirrel season, two of them wore camouflage fatigues. One held an empty quart of Jose Cuervo. There were rifles on the rack. Evers pulled over to talk to them. By now he had put some distance between himself and the rest of the motorcade. He had no backup.

Twenty years ago men like this would have been likely to take a shot at Evers. Now they recognized him and shook his hand.

Lou, a wiry little fellow with short blond hair and a ruddy face, told Evers that he thought he had been the best mayor Fayette ever had. He’d get Lou’s vote. The others nodded in agreement.

“People gonna elect me for one reason — I’ll make life better for them,” Evers said as he pulled away. “They don’t give a damn about Charles Evers.”

The two-way radio crackled with static. Bro’ Willie’s voice faded in and out. It seemed the motorcade was ready to roll into Red Lick. Evers drove faster now, weaving off the road and recovering as he fiddled with the radio. A little plastic Garfield ornament bounced on a string attached to the rearview mirror. The van was awash with empty soda cans, campaign flyers, and one copy of Evers’s eponymous autobiography, which had been published in 1971.

The book had been placed carefully on the dashboard, facedown. The whole back page of the dust jacket was a photograph not of the author, but of the author’s brother, Medgar, positioned to look out the windshield. Because of the angle of the window and the afternoon light, Medgar’s face was reflected in the glass. For the rest of the trip Medgar Evers hovered just ahead of Charles, a disembodied face with eyes turned to the driver, floating over the wide fields of Jefferson County.

On a September afternoon Myrlie Evers looked out her kitchen window and studied the colors of the high desert at her hideaway in Oregon. Green, yellow, lavender, tan. It was so different from the landscape she knew best, the muted shades of the Vicksburg bluffs and, later, the smoggy hills of southern California. This was a good, clean place to be.

She had retired, reluctantly, at age fifty-eight from her job on the Los Angeles Board of Public Works. She had injured her back when a chair collapsed. She could no longer sit at a desk all day and she was in almost constant pain. Now that she had left her job, her first priority, after her family, was the case against Beckwith.

The phone had been ringing all morning. Reporters wanted a comment on the latest news. Beckwith had lost his appeal in Tennessee. He was about to be extradited to Mississippi, but his lawyers had slapped down a writ of habeas corpus. Another delay. But it was close; DeLaughter almost had him. She felt like kicking something, she was so frustrated.

She was surprised at how emotional she could get after all these years. For a while life had seemed almost normal: marriage, a job, grandchildren.

Her husband, Walter Williams, was with her, and that kept her together. He never complained when she was distracted by the case.

But now the old fears were back, along with the anxiety of hope. At least something was happening with the case. But she was riding an emotional roller coaster, and it was ruining her health. The bad back was worse now. Her stomach was acting up again.

Sometimes all she wanted to do was disappear. But then she would hear Medgar’s voice. Not literally, she would tell you with a laugh. She wasn’t crazy. She would feel him, though. He was saying, “Speak, girl! Speak your mind. You can do this thing.”

On Thursday, October 3, 1991, a federal judge in Tennessee cleared the way for Beckwith’s extradition. Tim Metheny and Sammy Magee from the Hinds County Sheriff’s Department were standing by in Chattanooga when the ruling came down. They dressed Beckwith in his pinstriped suit, cuffed him, and whisked him into a waiting car before his lawyer could file yet another appeal.

Thelma Beckwith got to the courthouse too late to say good-bye. It was hard to tell who was angrier, Beckwith or his wife. Thelma shouted at the gathered media, “He may die anytime! I hope you all are happy.” She told anyone she could corner that she knew the true identity of the man who had killed Medgar Evers: it was Lee Harvey Oswald.

Beckwith was fuming as he sat in the backseat of the sedan. He told Metheny and Magee that they’d never make it out of Tennessee. There would be roadblocks. “They” would never let him go. The deputies knew the old man was just blustering. Still they didn’t relax until they’d left Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama behind and crossed the state line into Mississippi.

By the time they pulled up to the Hinds County Detention Center, a small herd of cameramen and reporters were waiting. Beckwith’s eyes flashed angrily behind his glasses as the reporters shouted questions.

“Did you kill Medgar Evers?”

Beckwith wheeled and glared into the television cameras.

“Did
you
kill Medgar Evers?” he snarled, mocking the question. “I didn’t kill him, did you?” He raised a gnarled, handcuffed hand and pointed a finger at one red-bearded reporter.

“Are you a Jew?” he hissed before the deputies hustled him away.

The next morning Beckwith was arraigned before circuit court judge Breland Hilburn. Jackson didn’t have a public defender at the time, so two experienced local defense attorneys were appointed to represent Beckwith. He was confined to a private cell in the hospital unit of the jail while his court-appointed attorneys, Jim Kitchens and Merrida Coxwell, drew up a motion for bond.

Beckwith probably couldn’t have found better lawyers in Mississippi if he’d had a sack of money to spend. Kitchens had been district attorney for the counties south of Jackson in the seventies. He was a seasoned, white-haired, country-style lawyer, the defense counterpart of Ed Peters.

Coxwell, whose friends called him Buddy, was one of Jackson’s rising young stars. He was a junior partner at an old, established downtown law firm. Coxwell was something of an oddity in Jackson, a city so conservative that a woman who didn’t wear stockings in August or a businessman with a beard was considered eccentric. Coxwell was thirty-five years old and he wore his sandy hair trimmed on top and long in the back. He bombed around town in a not-yet-vintage Mercedes with Jimi Hendrix or James Brown blasting on the speakers. Coxwell was divorced, living out in singles paradise in a condo on the reservoir. He didn’t eat meat. He was good-looking and painfully thin, with high cheekbones that made his features seem both fragile and tough.

Before Beckwith he was best known for taking on the most difficult death penalty cases, usually for indigent black defendants who ended up costing him a fortune in lost billable hours. But he did it out of a sense of obligation, because he was good at it, and because he flat out believed that everyone was entitled to the best defense. Even, his friends noted, a raving seventy-year-old racist who couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

Coxwell took his job seriously, and he fought to win. Up until now, he and DeLaughter had been fairly good friends. Even though they were so often on opposite sides of the table in court, they could usually put that aside and see each other at parties and hang out together. Not now. This case was a war. After the arraignment, Coxwell walked up to DeLaughter and shook his hand. “I’ll see you when this is over,” he said.

The skirmishes began at Beckwith’s bond hearing a month later. First DeLaughter laid the foundation of his case. Beckwith looked like Scrooge, forced to confront the ghosts of his Christmases past, as DeLaughter called witness after witness from the defendant’s earlier trials. Ralph Hargrove, the old crime lab chief, identified the physical evidence: the fingerprint cards, the crime scene photos, and the Enfield rifle. Ben Windstein was called out of retirement in New Orleans to tell the judge how he’d had to fly to Washington, D.C., to arrest Beckwith as a fugitive after his Louisiana bomb conviction. And DeLaughter called an agent from the FBI’s domestic terrorism division to talk about the hate groups to which Beckwith had been linked, including a new, shadowy outfit called the Phineas Priests.