Print

Mail

wiki links

Man long thought dead arrested for 1964 kidnappings

A white former sheriff's deputy was arrested on federal charges on Wednesday in one of the last major unsolved crimes of the US civil rights era -- the 1964 killings of two black men who were beaten and dumped alive into the Mississippi River.

Until recently, James Ford Seale was thought to be dead, and the investigation into the two deaths had long been abandoned.

The break in the 43-year-old case was largely the result of the dogged efforts of the older brother of one of the victims, who vowed to bring the killers to justice.

James Ford Seale, a 71-year-old member of the white supremacist group Ku Klux Klan (KKK) from the town of Roxie, Mississippi, was charged with kidnapping hitchhikers Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, both 19. He was expected to be arraigned yesterday in Jackson.

The victims' weighted, badly decomposed bodies were found by chance two months later in July 1964, during the search for three civil rights workers whose disappearance and deaths in Philadelphia, Mississippi, got far more attention from the media and the FBI.

A second man long suspected in the attack, church deacon and reputed KKK member Charles Marcus Edwards, now 72, was not charged. Sources close to the investigation, who did not wish to be named, said Edwards was cooperating with authorities. Prosecutors did not say why Seale was not charged with murder.

The arrest marked the latest attempt by prosecutors in the South to close the books on crimes from the civil rights era that went unpunished.

In recent years, authorities in the states of Mississippi and Alabama have won convictions in the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers, a civil rights leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing that killed four black girls and the 1964 Philadelphia, Mississippi, slayings.

"I've been crying. First time I've cried in about 50 years," Moore's 63-year-old brother, Thomas, said after the arrest. "It's not going to bring his life back. But some way or another, I think he would be satisfied."

Dee's sister, Thelma Collins, said through grateful sobs: "I never thought I would live to see it, no sir, I never did. I always prayed that justice would be done -- somehow, some way."

Both Seale and Edwards are suspected of kidnapping the two victims in a Klan crackdown prompted by rumors that black Muslims were planning an armed "insurrection" in rural Franklin County, Mississippi. Seale and Edwards were arrested at the time.

But, consumed by the search for the three missing civil rights workers, the FBI turned the case over to local authorities. And a justice of the peace promptly threw out all charges against Seale and Edwards.

In 2000, the Justice Department's civil rights unit reopened the case.

For years, Seale's family had told reporters that he had died. But in 2005, Thomas Moore and a Canadian documentary filmmaker, David Ridgen, found Seale, old and sick, living just a few kilometers down the road from where the kidnapping took places.

"If they hadn't brought it to my attention, I wouldn't have known to do anything," said US Attorney Dunn Lampton, chief federal prosecutor in Jackson.

Thomas Moore said he always carried a burden of guilt over his younger brother's death.
This story has been viewed 1429 times.