Black’s Hanging Not Tied to Klan Incident, FBI Claims

The hanging death of a young black homosexual in Concord in November, 1985, was not related to the assault on two black men by men wearing Ku Klux Klan-type robes that same night, a recently-released FBI report concluded.

But the report, less than one-quarter of which was made public, failed to dispel continuing charges by local civil rights activists that the death was not a suicide, as Concord police concluded, but a murder motivated by his race and homosexuality.

The body of Timothy Lee, 23, was found hanging from a fig tree along with a suicide note near the Bay Area Rapid Transit station in Concord, a largely white suburb east of San Francisco. Police called the death a suicide and cited testimony from Lee’s roommate that Lee had been depressed in previous weeks.

Lee’s family denied that he had been depressed, and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People provided the FBI with testimony from a handwriting analyst who claimed the suicide note was not written by Lee.

The same night, two black men in a Concord bar were stabbed by two whites wearing Klan-type robes, and some have suggested a link between the two incidents.

The hanging and subsequent allegations focused public attention on race relations in Concord, with a number of black and Asian residents approaching the NAACP with complaints of racial harassment.

“I had been hoping for information that was conclusive that Timothy Lee’s death was due to other parties, known or unknown,” said Thordie Ashley, head of an NAACP committee on racial intolerance, who requested the FBI report through the Freedom of Information Act. “We’ll just continue to try to get information from any source we can.”

Ashley said she still believes Lee was murdered.

The FBI opened its Lee investigation in January, 1986, at the request of the NAACP, FBI spokesman John Holford said.

The investigation, which lasted six months, included interviews with friends of Lee and examination of Concord police records about the case. But the names of those people interviewed and the substance of the interviews were all deleted from the parts of the report released to the NAACP.

The FBI did not conduct its own analysis of the suicide note because it had already been examined by a state specialist in documents, the report said.

The part of the report made public largely concerned the Concord police case involving two men in Klan-type robes who were arrested the night of Lee’s death on charges of assaulting the blacks in a bar. The two men were already in the custody of Concord police at the time Lee’s death was estimated by the county coroner to have occurred, the report said.

Ashley, head of an NAACP task force on racial intolerance set up shortly after the Lee death, said she believes the FBI’s investigation was “very thorough” but that the report was disappointing. Only 35 pages of the original 141 in the report were released.

“The report was so censored that the only thing you could read on some pages was ‘Timothy Lee, deceased,’ ” said Ashley. “It’s so censored that it’s not informational.”

The missing material was deleted under Freedom of Information guidelines allowing for excision of information from confidential sources, FBI spokesman Holford said.