Return to a Haunting Murder

Buoyed by recent prosecutions in the South, authorities Monday announced a federal-state investigation into one of the civil rights era’s most heinous crimes: the slaying of Emmett Till, a black teenager killed for wolf-whistling at a white woman in a Mississippi hamlet.

The investigation, partnering FBI agents with Mississippi detectives, will seek to discover who was involved in the middle-of-the-night abduction and death of Till, 14, who had come from Chicago to visit relatives.

The new inquiry was sparked by persistent allegations that the wife of one of the admitted killers was the person who identified Till as having offended her. Ten others -- possibly including five African Americans -- may have had some role in the events that led to Till being beaten, shot and tossed into the Tallahatchie River.

He was killed on Aug. 28, 1955. When his mother ordered the lid on his casket kept open at his funeral, Till’s broken face brought home to America the horror of white-on-black atrocities in the Deep South.

“I think it’s great news. I’m quite happy -- at last,” said Till’s cousin Simeon Wright, a 61-year-old semi-retired pipe fitter from suburban Chicago. Wright had been sleeping in bed with Till when he was snatched away by two armed white men.

Roy Bryant and his half brother, J.W. Milam, were tried and acquitted of murder charges by an all-white jury. Although they later admitted killing Till, neither was held accountable. Both died of lung cancer, Milam in 1980 and Bryant in 1990.

In recent years, civil rights activists, filmmakers and others have gone to Money, Miss., looking for new clues in the slaying. On Monday, those efforts seemed to have paid off.

“We owe it to Emmett Till -- and we owe it to ourselves -- to see whether, after all these years, some additional measure of justice remains possible,” said R. Alexander Acosta, assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

Key pieces of evidence center on Bryant’s wife, Carolyn. Other individuals implicated in the slaying include local African Americans who may have helped clean blood out of the truck that carried the teen to the river.

The Rev. Wheeler Parker -- another of Till’s cousins who was asleep in the Mississippi home that night -- said his grandfather heard a woman in the truck identify Till as “the one who had whistled at her,” Parker said. Carolyn Bryant reportedly later divorced her husband and moved to Florida. She could not be reached for comment.

Parker also said that when he was serving in the Army in West Germany during the Vietnam War, he met a black woman who said her uncle had been “forced to participate” in Till’s killing. “She said her uncle later couldn’t deal with his shame,” Parker said. “She said he went crazy, lost his mind.”

And Stanley Nelson, who recently produced an award-winning documentary on the slaying, said he found people who remembered that a black man named Leroy “Too Tight” Collins had admitted cleaning the truck.

Collins and another local black man, Henry Lee Loggins, have denied having any role in the Till killing.

“Back then, you had a system in the South where Milam and Bryant wouldn’t even be responsible for cleaning up the blood they spilled,” Nelson said. “They ordered others to do it, and they did it.”

On Monday, Emmett’s two cousins recalled him as being a slightly overweight, “fun-loving prankster” who did not know how blacks were expected to behave around white people in the South. Till was raised in Chicago but was in Mississippi that summer to spend time with his extended family.

One August afternoon, the three cousins visited a store owned by Roy Bryant. Till went inside and bought some candy; when he joined his cousins outside, Bryant’s wife followed him.

“That’s when he gave a wolf whistle at her,” Wright said. “To this day, we don’t have the slightest idea why he did that.”

Wright and Parker said the three boys jumped in a car and drove off in a hurry, while an enraged Carolyn Bryant threatened to get a pistol and give chase. “We went flying, and the dust was flying, and a car was coming behind us,” Parker said. “So we jumped out and ran through a cotton field.”

Till begged them not to tell their grandfather, with whom they were staying, and they agreed. Three nights later, they said, they were awakened by two armed white men looking for Till.

Parker said they shined a flashlight on him first. “They said they were looking for a fat boy, and Emmett was kind of chunky, so then they went into one of the other bedrooms.”

There, Emmett was asleep in bed with Wright. “They made him get up and get dressed in his khakis, and they took him out to the truck and put him in and drove off,” Wright said.

After their acquittals, Milam and Bryant sold their story to a reporter, who sold it to Look magazine.

They admitted they had beaten Till, shot him in the head, weighted his body down with a large metal fan and barbed wire, and then hoisted him over the river bank.

“I hope now, in this new investigation, they bring his body up and see exactly how he died,” Parker said.

“His mother said she could see daylight through his head, and a bullet wound would not necessarily do that. I heard they drilled through his head while he was still alive. And with DNA and other new forensic tools, they might be able to clear up some of these mysteries.”

In recent years, convictions in some 1960s cases of slayings of blacks have raised hopes in other long-dormant civil rights cases.

One such case was the conviction of Bobby Frank Cherry for his role in a Birmingham, Ala., church bombing that killed four black girls more than 40 years ago.

Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, never gave up her quest for justice. When she died in early 2003, her supporters took up the cause.

Among them were Nelson and Alvyn Sykes, a lawyer and activist from Kansas City, Mo. In the Till case, Sykes said, he helped convince federal authorities that although they had no jurisdiction in the matter, they still could work alongside Mississippi officials in a joint inquiry to look for anyone else responsible.

“If you assign FBI agents and then turn the case over to the state and monitor the state’s prosecution, that would certainly work in the interest of justice,” he said.