3 Reopened Murder Cases Part of South’s ‘Unfinished Business’ : Civil rights: New probes of race-related murders are a step toward justice. But there are problems with 25-year-old evidence.

Some killings went unprosecuted altogether. In other cases, suspects were quickly freed. Black victims in the segregated South of 25 years ago were just in the wrong place and time to get justice, especially if they were killed for civil rights work.

Today, in a South transformed by that work, justice may be closer for some.

At least three race-related Deep South murders of the 1960s are being reopened by authorities, who face constitutional challenges and public disapproval to pursue the unfinished business of the civil rights era.

“There are individuals out there with dirty hands,” said Dennis Dahmer, who was 12 when he escaped his family’s burning house after the Ku Klux Klan bombing that killed his father. “You’re just as guilty today as you were in 1966.”

The reconsidered cases include:

* The 1963 ambush shooting of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers. White supremacist Byron de la Beckwith faces trial in Jackson, Miss., after his extradition earlier this month from Tennessee.

* The 1965 shooting of Oneal Moore, a black deputy who broke the color line in a Louisiana sheriff’s department. FBI agents say they are examining new evidence.

* The 1966 firebomb death of Vernon Dahmer of Hattiesburg, who urged blacks to register to vote. A prosecutor is considering the possibility of new charges.

Last month, authorities in Florida began examining new information concerning an even older case, the 1952 Christmas Eve bombing that killed civil rights activist Harry T. Moore and his wife, Harriet. Jamie McLaughlin of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement would provide no details of the taped statements of an unidentified woman who claimed to have new evidence.

“It’s unfinished business,” said Cleve McDowell, former Mississippi state field secretary of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, who is among a group of black activists organizing to pressure district attorneys and to revive interest in the many other never-prosecuted cases.

“The thrust generally is to try to open as many of those old cases as possible,” he said.

For some, justice in the long-dormant cases would finally close a bitter chapter in the South’s history, a period in which extremists, determined to stop reform of a social and legal system that subjugated blacks, used crude violence to intimidate or eliminate the reformers.

“I think the primary thing is catharsis,” said historian Robert Weisbrot. “The South has progressed,” said Weisbrot, author of “Freedom Bound,” a history of the civil rights movement. Whereas a quarter century ago the number of blacks murdered went uncounted, now it is difficult to keep count of the black elected officials in Southern states, he said.

“There’s a need to come to terms with the self-image of the South,” and retrials in the old cases could be part of that, Weisbrot said.

In some cases, a new trial would follow mistrials; twice before, de la Beckwith was freed by hung juries. In others, police at the time gathered evidence, even arrested a suspect, but no prosecution resulted. In some cases, there was not even a pretense of investigation.

“The legal system was in bed with the criminal elements,” said Louis Armstrong, a Jackson, Miss., City Council member who called for the reopening of the de la Beckwith case.

Now, however, as prosecutors press hard to bring the 70-year-old de la Beckwith to trial again on a murder charge, the delay itself could foil their efforts.

Having succeeded in their 10-month battle to extradite de la Beckwith from a jail in Chattanooga, Tenn., Mississippi authorities say their next hurdle could be the “speedy trial” requirement of the state constitution. While there is no statute of limitations for murder, legal experts wonder whether a delay of decades--with witnesses dying or forgetting, with evidence lost--has made fair trials impossible.

Asked the biggest challenge he will face if de la Beckwith gets to court, the lead prosecutor, Hinds County Assistant Dist. Atty. Bobby DeLaughter, said: “Getting a jury that will decide the case on the law and the evidence, instead of extraneous issues, such as the age of the defendant and the age of the case.”

DeLaughter has received letters and phone calls protesting the reopening of the old wound in a state that has made tremendous gains in getting blacks into the voting booth and into elected office.

“This is the kind of prosecution that you make as many enemies as friends,” he said.

On the other hand, he added, “This kind of case makes you decide whether or not the laws that we as prosecutors have taken an oath to uphold, whether we’re just going to pay them lip service.”

Just hours before Evers’ death, President John F. Kennedy, too, spoke of lip service in a nationally televised speech. “Are we to say to the world,” he asked, “that this is the land of the free, except for Negroes. . .? Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise.”

Evers’ wife, Myrlie, let their three children stay up to watch the speech and talk with their father about it when he got home from an NAACP meeting. But as his car door slammed, they heard a shot. A bullet from a hunting rifle struck him in the back, fatally wounding him. “Please, Daddy,” they wailed in vain as they ran out to him, “please get up!”

De la Beckwith has denied that he killed Evers. In a letter from jail--on stationery bearing his name and the inscription, “On the White Right Christian Side of Every Issue”--de la Beckwith declined an Associated Press request for an interview unless he was paid.

No date is set in de la Beckwith’s retrial, and no new charges have been filed in the Oneal Moore and Vernon Dahmer cases.

FBI Agent Andrew Nash in New Orleans confirmed that the Moore case was reopened “based on some new leads that have developed.” Those leads are said to involve evidence of a klan role in the murder of Moore, who was gunned down in his patrol car after he and partner Creed Rogers became the first black sheriff’s deputies in Washington Parish, La.

Rogers, who lost an eye in the nighttime attack on a country road, said he hopes charges finally will be brought. He bristled when asked if the passage of 26 years made a new probe questionable.

“If someone has done that--killed one person and left another one handicapped all his life--wouldn’t you want to know who did it?” Rogers said. “I’d like to know who left me in the shape I’m in.”

Moore’s widow, a nurse who raised the couple’s four daughters, also hopes that the FBI will make a case. “One day they will, the good Lord willing,” said Maevella Moore Sam. “Something’s got to give.”

Among those questioned by agents in the new probe is a man arrested an hour after Moore’s shooting. He was driving a truck that matched the description of the assailant’s, down to the Confederate flag emblem on the front bumper. Inside was a gun that authorities said smelled of having been recently fired. Charges against the suspect were brought, then dropped.

Some think authorities have enough present-day crime to deal with, and should not be sidetracked with hard-to-make cases that go back 25 years.

“They got enough to get rid of this dope and everything. I think they ought to let this lie,” said J.C. Knippers, who as sheriff in Walthall County, Miss., helped arrest the suspect in the Moore case and reported the freshly fired smell of the man’s gun.

“If they couldn’t prove it back then, how can they now?”

In the Vernon Dahmer case in Hattiesburg, prosecutors did manage to prove it back then. They won convictions against four men indicted in the firebombing death, the first guilty verdicts ever in Mississippi state courts against klansmen in a black person’s killing. Three went to prison for murder, one for arson.

But the man described in testimony as the mastermind, klan leader Sam Bowers, was--like de la Beckwith--twice freed by hung juries. One time the vote was 11 to 1 to convict, according to James Dukes, district attorney at the time, who recalls chilling phone threats describing the interior layout of his house.

Bowers does not have a listed phone, and a message left at his business, requesting comment, was not returned. Bowers later served a prison term for federal convictions in the 1964 deaths of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Miss., a case fictionalized in the movie “Mississippi Burning.”

Dahmer’s widow, Ellie, and other family members say they want Bowers tried again.

“I think we’d find a different situation for him today,” Ellie Dahmer said. “I just don’t believe that Mississippi, as far as we’ve come along in race relations, would agree for him to walk around and be free when he has had a part in this.”

In the cold darkness of 2 a.m. on Jan. 10, 1966, two carloads of men attacked the Dahmer house with bullets and firebombs. Vaulting from bed, Ellie Dahmer rushed to save her children, Betty, 10, and Dennis, while her husband braved the front-door flames to return fire with guns kept always loaded because of threats.

“Betty was crying and didn’t think we were going to make it. And Vernon was hollering, ‘Get the children out while I try to hold them off,’ ” recalled Ellie Dahmer, who was burned along with her daughter.

Her husband, a cotton grower and grocery store owner who was widely respected but who made enemies with his active voter registration work, died the next day.

Twenty-five years later, the case falls to Glenn White, district attorney in Forrest County, who said his small staff--two assistants, one investigator and himself--will evaluate the case but can make no promises.

He lacks transcripts of the earlier trials, which he said would be crucial to mounting any new one. Some potential witnesses, he said, are dead. He, too, cites potential “speedy trial” challenges. “It’s a very tedious process.”

One Dahmer family member said filing the case would be politically thankless for White, but the prosecutor dismissed the notion: “I don’t think politics has anything to do with prosecution. . . . Any time you have someone who escapes paying the penalty, then I think the prosecutor has a duty to pursue that,” White said.

Dukes, the former prosecutor, said he thinks White will file new charges if it is legally and constitutionally possible.

But he raised a rhetorical question about reopening the many untried segregation-era cases.

“When are they going to retry Brutus for killing Caesar? How far back do you want to go? I don’t mean to make light of this. What I’m saying is, history is full of instances of injustice that you can’t rebirth and correct. You just have to learn from them.”

Learning is not enough for Ellie Dahmer.

A concrete slab is all that is left of the store where her husband accepted--and sometimes paid--blacks’ poll taxes, the first step toward voter registration back then. The store was torched the same night as the fatal attack on the Dahmers’ home.

Standing near the slab recently, Ellie Dahmer said the family has been learning the killing’s bitter lessons for 25 years. The family wants a new trial, even though she knows the hurt it will bring the family of anyone charged.

“Maybe it would be reopening old wounds for the other side,” Ellie Dahmer said. “But they’ve never been closed for us.”