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Preacher Pleads Not Guilty in 1964 Slayings

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Times Staff Writer

Edgar Ray Killen wears bifocals now. His neck is loose and ropy, and he is bald except for a fuzz at the back of his skull. At 79, he is freckled with age, and leans in because he has trouble hearing.

On Friday, facing a Mississippi prosecutor, Killen pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder in one of the most notorious crimes of the civil rights era: the killing of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, three young voter-registration workers who were overtaken by a crowd of Klansmen on the night of June 21, 1964.

Killen, a Baptist preacher, is the only person ever to be charged with murder in their slayings. The news was greeted joyously by the victims’ families and civil rights leaders who had waited all summer 40 years ago for word of the three men.

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“It’s a good day, because there is in the making some semblance of justice,” said Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat and civil rights leader who knew the victims. “It may take time, but the forces of justice and the spirit of history will track you down.”

After years of rumors about a renewed prosecution, Killen’s arraignment took Philadelphia by surprise, and few citizens showed up at the courthouse. As Killen was led into the courtroom, his orange jail-issued uniform hanging loosely, camera shutters clicked furiously. His voice was almost inaudible until he was asked to plea to the charges. “Not guilty,” he answered three times in a ringing voice. After the hearing, Killen was led through a crowd of reporters to a squad car, where he shrank away from the windows.

As the family left, Killen’s brother, J.D., 63, hit a cameraman, knocking him to the ground. Just then, the courthouse emptied because of a bomb threat. The staff filed outside good-naturedly, some carrying desk calendars and stacks of correspondence.

By noon, the reporters had dispersed, and people in Philadelphia were left to contemplate the prospect that has been forestalled for four decades: a murder trial.

Killen was frailer and more ordinary than one activist expected.

“I expected it to be emotional. I didn’t expect to feel sorry for Mr. Killen,” said Susan Glisson, director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi. “He is accused of some really awful crimes. I guess I thought evil would emanate from him.”

The killing of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner, who were 20, 21 and 24, held the nation’s attention. They were not welcome in Philadelphia, where many believed they were Communist agents bent on infiltrating the South. Their disappearance -- one day after they drove in from a voter registration training camp -- became a daily news story. The then-governor, Paul Johnson, suggested archly that they had decamped to Cuba.

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Forty-four days later, using information from a local Klan informant, authorities found the three bodies buried in an earthen dam.

Killen is the only central figure in the crime who never served time in prison. He was among 18 men tried in 1967 on federal civil rights violations. Seven were convicted and served sentences of three to six years. In Killen’s case, the jury deadlocked 11 to 1; the holdout later said she could not convict a preacher.

But investigators suspected he was the mob’s organizer. One informant recalled Killen approaching him in a restaurant, saying “they had three civil rights workers in Philadelphia and that they needed their asses tore up,” according to the FBI records. Howard Ball, a former civil rights worker who wrote a book about the case, “Murder in Mississippi: United States v. Price and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” described the preacher as “the mastermind.”

“He got the gloves, he got the backhoe operator, he was able to work with [a local landowner] to get the site of the burial,” said Ball, 67, who now teaches political science at the University of Vermont. “If there is one person, it should be him.”

Outside the courtroom on Friday, Killen’s brother surveyed the reporters with disdain. Edgar, the oldest of eight siblings, “had a rough life -- the old country preacher riding in a ’49 Lincoln that don’t go over the road too well,” J.D. said.

He said Killen never preached segregation and never had any connection with the Ku Klux Klan. As a preacher, Killen has described a heaven where both black and white souls go, J.D. said.

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“He’s got more black friends than any other white man in Neshoba County,” J.D. said. “He is not the villain you’ve heard he is.”

A murder trial could take place as early as this summer, said Mark Duncan, the Neshoba County district attorney, who will prosecute the case alongside Jim Hood, Mississippi’s attorney general.

Duncan said the state would rely on evidence from the 1967 federal trial. He would not say whether new evidence had emerged.

At his arraignment, Killen was not represented by an attorney.

Killen was arrested Thursday night. As late as Friday morning, many people expected more than one man to be arraigned in the killings. Eight of the 18 men who were tried in 1967 are still alive, and at least one of them, Billy Wayne Posey, appeared before the grand jury on Thursday. Duncan said, however, only one indictment was handed down.

Charles Sallis, a professor at Millsaps College in Jackson who has chronicled the era, said he was shocked by the notion of prosecuting a single man for the killings.

“It was a mob action,” said Sallis, co-author of “Mississippi: Conflict and Change.” “One person could not do what happened.”

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One of the few curiosity-seekers to take a seat in the courtroom was Mark Howell, who grew up in Philadelphia and now lives in New York City. He came back out of a sense of history: The year the civil rights workers came to town, he was 12, and used to peek at them, with their sandals and facial hair, with admiration.

“My friends and I thought they were cool,” he said. “They looked like rock stars.”

William White, 74, a farmer in a baseball cap, looked sourly at a row of reporters. Every time this crime settles down, he said, someone comes in to stir it up again. “If they’d been minding their own business, this wouldn’t have happened,” he said of the civil rights workers.

His eyes welled with tears as he pulled out a photograph of his grandson, who was killed in Iraq. “My grandson was fighting for something,” he said. “What were they fighting for? Publicity.”

Younger people see it differently, said Canah Dunaway, 20, who was waiting on customers at a Christian bookstore.

“I mean,” she said, “murder is murder.”

Times staff reporter Elizabeth Mehren in Boston contributed to this report.

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