Ex-deputy arrested in 1964 race case

By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS and LARA JAKES JORDAN,
Associated Press Writers
Wed Jan 24, 6:24 PM ET

A white former sheriff's deputy who was once thought
to be dead was arrested on federal charges Wednesday
in one of the last major unsolved crimes of the civil
rights era — the 1964 killings of two black men who
were beaten and dumped alive into the Mississippi
River.

The break in the 43-year-old case was largely the
result of the dogged efforts of the older brother of
one of the victims, who vowed to bring the killers to
justice.

James Ford Seale, a 71-year-old reputed Ku Klux
Klansman from the town of Roxie, was charged with
kidnapping hitchhikers Charles Eddie Moore and Henry
Hezekiah Dee, both 19.

The victims' weighted, badly decomposed bodies were
found by chance two months later in July 1964, during
the search for three civil rights workers whose
disappearance and deaths in Philadelphia, Miss., got
far more attention from the media and the FBI.

Seale is expected to be arraigned on Thursday in
Jackson.

A second man long suspected in the attack, church
deacon and reputed KKK member Charles Marcus Edwards,
now 72, was not charged. Sources close to the
investigation, who did not wish to be named, say
Edwards was cooperating with authorities. Prosecutors
did not say why Seale was not charged with murder.

The arrest marked the latest attempt by prosecutors in
the South to close the books on crimes from the civil
rights era that went unpunished. In recent years,
authorities in Mississippi and Alabama have won
convictions in the 1963 assassination of NAACP
activist Medgar Evers; the 1963 Birmingham, Ala.,
church bombing that killed four black girls; and the
1964 Philadelphia, Miss., slayings.

"I've been crying. First time I've cried in about 50
years," Moore's 63-year-old brother, Thomas, said
after the arrest. "It's not going to bring his life
back. But some way or another, I think he would be
satisfied."

Dee's sister, Thelma Collins, told The Associated
Press through grateful sobs: "I never thought I would
live to see it, no sir, I never did. I always prayed
that justice would be done — somehow, some way."

Seale and Edwards are suspected of kidnapping the two
victims in a Klan crackdown prompted by rumors that
black Muslims were planning an armed "insurrection" in
rural Franklin County. Seale and Edwards were arrested
at the time.

But, consumed by the search for the three missing
civil rights workers, the FBI turned the case over to
local authorities. And a justice of the peace promptly
threw out all charges against Seale and Edwards.

In 2000, the Justice Department's civil rights unit
reopened the case.

For years, Seale's family had told reporters that he
had died. But in 2005, Thomas Moore and a Canadian
documentary filmmaker, David Ridgen, found Seale, old
and sick, living just a few miles down the road from
where the kidnapping took places.

"If they hadn't brought it to my attention, I wouldn't
have known to do anything," said U.S. Attorney Dunn
Lampton, chief federal prosecutor in Jackson.

Thomas Moore said he always carried a burden of guilt
over his younger brother's death.

"I walked around with an amount of shame," the
Colorado Springs, Colo., man said. "I didn't know why,
why it happened to us, that I wasn't there to do
something — to do SOMETHING."

Former Gov. William Winter, who was co-chairman of
President Clinton's racial reconciliation initiative,
said the latest arrest — though done by federal rather
than state authorities — shows that Mississippi "now
is obviously seeking to make up for lost time in
bringing people to justice."

"Mississippi is taking a look at those crimes that
were committed in a different era when a different
attitude prevailed," said Winter, who governor in the
1980s.

On May 2, 1964, Charles Moore and Dee were hitchhiking
near an ice cream stand in the town of Meadville when
Seale pulled over and offered them a ride, a Klan
informant told the FBI. The Klan had heard rumors of
black Muslim gunrunning in the area, and Seale
believed the two were involved, authorities said.
According to FBI interrogators, Edwards admitted that
he and Seale took the two men into the woods for a
whipping. But Edwards said both men were alive when he
left them.

An informant told the FBI that Seale's brother and
another Klansman took the unconscious blacks to the
river, lashed their bodies to a Jeep engine block and
some old railroad tracks, and dumped them over the
side of a boat. The other Klansmen and the informant
have since died.

Searchers were combing the woods and swamps for James
Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner when the
remains of Dee and Moore were discovered near
Tallulah, La. The bodies of Chaney, Goodman and
Schwerner were found in an earthen dam in Mississippi
a short time later.

According to FBI documents from the 1960s, authorities
confronted Seale and told him they knew he and others
killed the hitchhikers, and "the Lord above knows you
did it."

"Yes," Seale was quoted as replying, "but I'm not
going to admit it. You are going to have to prove it."

The U.S. Justice Department reopened the case after
The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson uncovered documents
indicating that the beatings had occurred in the
Homochitto National Forest, giving the FBI
jurisdiction. But the case languished until Seale was
located.

"I had other plans to confront him a long time ago —
violently," Thomas Moore said.

___

Associated Press writer Allen G. Breed in Raleigh,
N.C., contributed to this story.

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