Witness: Klan Chief Boasted of 1966 Killing

An elated Samuel H. Bowers boasted in 1966 that “my boys” in the Ku Klux Klan had carried out his orders to kill civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer, witnesses testified Thursday.

The testimony came at the onetime Klan chief’s trial on murder and arson charges as the prosecution and defense wrapped up their cases. Closing arguments are scheduled for today.

Defense lawyers called a series of witnesses in an attempt to undercut testimony that Bowers, now 73, ordered the firebombing and then bragged about it. He could get life in prison if convicted.

Dahmer, his lungs seared by the flames, died in his wife’s arms in 1966, hours after two carloads of Klansmen shot up and bombed their home. Prosecutors say Dahmer was killed for helping fellow blacks register to vote by letting them pay their poll tax at his grocery store.

Former Klansman and onetime FBI informant Robert Earl Wilson quoted Bowers as using a racial epithet and saying, while holding up a newspaper account of the attack: “Look at what my boys did to that Dahmer . . . for me.”

Cathy Lucy, a Klan leader’s widow, testified that she was present when Bowers made the comment. She described him as “smiling and jubilant.”

Deavours Nix, also charged in the firebombing, defended Bowers and characterized the Klan as a group that did charitable work.

The defense hoped to discredit the state’s star witnesses: former Klansmen Billy Roy Pitts and T. Webber Rogers. Pitts, a 54-year-old former furniture upholsterer, testified that he took part in the Dahmer raid and served nearly four years in federal prison. Rogers said he went on a “dry run” to the Dahmer home before the bombing.

Defense witnesses said Bowers had nothing to do with the attack.

This is the fifth time Bowers, the former imperial wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, has been tried in Dahmer’s death. Four previous juries, at least two of which were all-white, deadlocked during the 1960s.

Bowers did go to prison for six years for his part in one of the most notorious crimes of the era: the slayings of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss., in 1964.