Former KKK Leader Is Convicted of Ordering Bombing

Former Ku Klux Klan leader Samuel H. Bowers was convicted Friday of ordering the 1966 firebombing that killed civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer, finally bringing to a close a case that saw four deadlocked juries in the years after the attack.

This time, the jurors took only two hours to find Bowers guilty of murder and arson in the slaying, which prosecutors said was ordered because Dahmer was helping fellow blacks register to vote.

“Oh, this is a happy moment for us,” Dahmer’s widow, Ellie Dahmer, said as Bowers, now 73, was led away in handcuffs to begin serving a mandatory life sentence. “It is a moment we have been waiting for [for] about 30 years.”

At least two of the trials during the 1960s had taken place in front of all-white juries.

The Forrest County Circuit Court jury this time consisted of six whites, five blacks and one Asian. During the 1960s, blacks were prevented from registering to vote in Mississippi and were thereby kept from serving on juries.

The former imperial wizard of the White Knights of the KKK showed no emotion as the verdict was read, but earlier he smiled while posing for pictures with members of his defense team.

Defense attorney Travis Buckley said he will appeal. Bowers could be eligible for parole after 10 years.

State Atty. Gen. Mike Moore, whose office had helped Forrest County prosecutors revive the long-dormant, 32-year-old case, said the verdict “makes me feel very good, makes me feel proud of my state, proud of the Dahmers, proud of the entire judicial system.”

Ellie Dahmer (pronounced DAY-mer) had pressed for years to get the case reopened and stepped up her efforts after the state in 1994 convicted white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith in the 1963 sniper slaying of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Access to long-sealed state records and old FBI files helped convince prosecutors that they could gain a conviction.

Ellie Dahmer and other family members hugged as the courtroom emptied.

“These tears that I am shedding, I am shedding for Vernon, because I know he is looking at us today,” she said.

Bowers, who ran a business that supplied pinball machines and other amusements, previously served six years in prison for his part in one of the most notorious crimes of the civil rights era, the 1964 deaths of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner near Philadelphia, Miss.

Before dawn on Jan. 10, 1966, two carloads of Klansmen arrived at Dahmer’s house, shot it up and tossed gasoline bombs through a window. Dahmer held the Klansmen at bay with a shotgun while his family fled. His lungs seared by heat and flames, he died in his wife’s arms 12 hours later.

Four Klansmen who participated in the raid were found guilty in the 1960s. The 1968 guilty verdict for one of them was believed to be the first Klan conviction in the killing of a black man in Mississippi.

The state’s witnesses, mostly former Klansmen turned FBI informants, said that Bowers ordered a “No. 4,” Klan code for assassination, and that he later bragged that “my boys” had carried out his instructions.

Bowers’ lawyers attacked the state’s witnesses as liars and said that he had been “sacrificed to the media” to further the attorney general’s political ambitions.

Two others charged in the case await trial.