An ‘Outrageous Crime’ in South Remains Unfinished Business : Civil rights: Killing of Bill Moore 28 years ago is unsolved and no one appears to be working on the case. His widow still hopes for justice.

The walnut tree that shaded the place where Bill Moore died became a landmark for civil rights pilgrims and for the curious. It stood at the spot where a bullet halted his one-man march against racial segregation.

The tree is gone now, cut down to discourage visitors, folks here say. But little else has changed since the white ex-Marine was murdered on that spring evening in 1963.

Moore’s widow, Mary Moore Birchard, still has the same prayer: “That before I died I’d know who did it. . . . They have got to bring justice.”

The investigator who found the rifle that FBI experts concluded killed Moore is still angry that the case was not pressed further.

And a man identified as a suspect at the time, but released when a grand jury took no action, still lives just up the road from the murder scene.

“I thought we had enough to carry him to court, or let him do some explaining,” said Roy McDowell, an Alabama Bureau of Investigation agent at the time and later Etowah County sheriff.

Authorities have reopened at least three other civil-rights era killings in the Deep South: those of NAACP leader Medgar Evers in Jackson, Miss., voting-rights activist Vernon Dahmer in Hattiesburg, Miss., and Oneal Moore, a black deputy sheriff in Varnado, La.

Meanwhile, amid civil rights groups’ calls for justice, many similar murder cases remain dormant.

“I wonder,” Bill Moore wrote a friend on April 22, the day before his death, “if anything happened to me whether anybody would know.”

The same question could apply to countless never-prosecuted killings in the segregated South, according to historians and groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which researched many cases in choosing those, including Moore, whose names are to be etched on a memorial to civil rights martyrs.

Some of the others:

* Herbert Lee, warned to stop helping blacks register to vote, was fatally shot at a cotton gin in Liberty, Miss., in September, 1961. The state legislator who pulled the trigger was cleared by a coroner’s jury, which cited the testimony, later recanted, of a black witness who said Lee had brandished a tire iron.

* Louis Allen, the black witness to Lee’s killing, regretted his testimony and told other voting-rights workers that he had been coerced into saying Lee had a weapon. He had promised that, with federal protection for his family, he would testify and “let the hide go with the hair.” He was ambushed in his driveway in 1964 and no one was ever charged with his murder.

* Henry Dee and Charles Eddie Moore died in May, 1964, after Ku Klux Klansmen in Meadville, Miss., accused them of plotting to start a black uprising, which turned out to be an unfounded rumor. A klansman signed a detailed confession to their abductions and beating deaths, but a justice of the peace dropped all charges--”without explanation and without presenting the evidence to a grand jury,” according to “Free at Last,” a civil rights history edited by Sara Bullard of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The bodies of Dee and Charles Moore were found during the search for murdered civil rights workers James Cheney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. Again, in that case, though federal prosecutors won civil rights violation convictions, no one has ever been charged with their murders.

There are two reasons to prosecute such killings, said Julian Bond, the civil rights leader and educator, who knew Louis Allen. “First, they’re regular, ordinary murders and they cry out for justice. Secondly, they’re political crimes.

“There’s no statute of limitations on murder,” he added, “and there’s no limit to the memories.”

The passage of 28 years has not dried the tears of Bill Moore’s widow. She wept recently as she talked with a reporter about the midnight call she got from Alabama, about the outrage President John F. Kennedy expressed the next day when he called it “an outrageous crime,” and about her own--and Moore’s--premonitions of his death.

Moore, a stepfather of three, was, by all accounts, a remarkable individual, “a pure heart,” as one admirer said: compassionate, gifted and certain that if he could just get people’s attention and reason with them, he could win them over to any of his many causes--from the danger of radioactivity to mental patients’ rights.

But this Don Quixote also chose to tilt the windmill called Jim Crow in his native South.

“He said if he could just change one person’s mind,” Birchard recalled. “He said: ‘Lives are being snuffed out and nothing’s being done about it.’ ”

Once determined, Bill Moore could not be stopped. He’d use a vacation from his job as a mailman in Baltimore, he announced to his wife, to conduct a one-man march from Chattanooga, Tenn., through Georgia and Alabama to Jackson, Miss. For armor he wore a large sign urging, “Equal Rights for All.”

On the third day of his march he got as far as this tiny, two-store village in a valley beneath the long bluff of Lookout Mountain. “Feet sore all over,” he noted in his log. Then, as dusk gathered, someone pulled alongside Moore on this lonely stretch of U.S. 11 and shot him in the head at close range.

Images of that evening haunt Roy McDowell, who was among the first on the murder scene and probably the last person to talk with Moore. Under orders from his state police superiors, he had stopped to interview the equal-rights marcher who had caused a stir in every little town he passed.

In the agent’s car, the two men talked for 45 minutes. McDowell warned Moore about the unpredictable reactions of local “Ku Kluxers and whatnot,” and suggested that he stay at a motel just ahead. He agreed to do so and McDowell left.

The agent had barely reached a nearby coffee shop when he got a call from the highway patrol: “That man you’ve been talking to up yonder,” the dispatcher said, “he’s laying down in the highway, asleep.”

McDowell left his coffee and raced back to the valley, where he found Moore sprawled on the edge of the pavement less than a mile from where they had talked.

“They just shot him down like a dog for, really, no reason at all,” he said. Picking up the spent .22-caliber brass that lay in the dust, McDowell began an investigation that involved local, state and FBI agents.

They retraced Moore’s route, interviewing people at every house and store. They combed his diary, which noted that someone in a black car had been “harassing him all the day, between here and Ft. Payne,” McDowell said. Within days, they searched a house near Ft. Payne and seized a .22-caliber rifle.

McDowell flew with the rifle, casings and other evidence to Washington, where FBI ballistics experts concluded that it was the gun that had killed Moore.

“The next day,” McDowell said, “we picked up the fellow who we got the gun from.”

Pending grand jury action, Floyd Simpson, a country storekeeper, was charged with the murder less than a week after it occurred. He told authorities that he had talked with Moore, just out of curiosity.

Simpson denied any involvement in the crime, as did others who were questioned. Contacted recently by the Associated Press, he would not talk about the case.

As rural Etowah County waited to see whether the grand jury would indict Simpson, “freedom marchers” tried to complete Moore’s trek and were arrested.

“Things were all in an uproar here,” McDowell recalled. “A lot of people didn’t believe in it, felt that anyone who’d take part in it ought to be shot. I guess that’s how some of them felt.”

In September, 1963, the grand jury deliberated more than four hours before deciding not to indict Simpson or anyone else.

“More investigative work must be done,” said the late Judge Virgil Pittman, who presided. “This case will not be allowed to die on the vine.”

He was wrong. McDowell, who later served as county sheriff, said there was no further investigation.

“To be honest with you, as much work as we did on it and as much sleep as we lost, we felt kind of let down by the grand jury,” he said. “We felt like that was the gun that did it.”

The case is not closed, according to current Dist. Atty. James Hedgspeth, who was in junior high school in 1963. But with 1,000 fresher crimes to prosecute and no new evidence in the Moore case, it might as well be.

If she can overcome a deep fear, Birchard, who lives in Pennsylvania, said she will travel to Etowah County to talk with officials.

Meanwhile, in her voice now, hope mixes with anger.

“I was so glad when I heard about the Medgar Evers case,” she said. “I thought, well, they’re not going to get away with this. I’m glad people are starting to talk. Maybe somebody’s going to start talking about Bill.

“You can’t just let it go.”