Word: dahmer
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...Dahmer didn't let hatred infect his generous spirit. When two college kids ran out of money and gas on the highway near his store, Ellie says, he gave them fuel from his pump and lent them $20. The boys, like many people he helped, were white...
...What got Dahmer killed, though, was helping blacks register to vote at a time when that was perilous work. In 1960 fewer than 100 of Forrest County's 8,000 voting-age blacks were registered. Dahmer would drive neighbors to the courthouse and watch in frustration as the white registrar found reasons to turn them away. Eventually, Dahmer got the sheriff to sign out to him a poll-tax receipt book, and Dahmer announced over the radio that blacks could register at his grocery. "I said, 'I wouldn't do this if I were you,'" recalls J.C. Fairley, a friend...
...After Dahmer was murdered, his widow was pleased at the speedy jailing of five of the killers. But she would not rest until Bowers was convicted. After repeated mistrials, the government seemed to lose its will. But by 1990, the landscape had shifted. Byron de la Beckwith was rearrested and eventually convicted for the 1963 murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Jackson. "We figured if the Evers case could go forward," Ellie says, "we had a good chance of getting ours back on track...
...Ellie Dahmer set out to improve the odds. She pressed the FBI to share previously undisclosed investigative files with local prosecutors. She talked Attorney General Moore into assigning three investigators and a trial prosecutor to help the local D.A. And then her persistence began to produce some lucky breaks...
...Lindsey Carter, who was more committed to the case than his predecessor. Two months ago, the state released 132,000 pages of documents from its infamous Sovereignty Commission, a secretive organization that spied on civil rights activists, and prosecutors have been combing those records, in which Dahmer's name appears more than 80 times, for new leads. Last month a state court ordered the Mississippi archives to hand over a 200-page transcript of an oral history Bowers provided in the 1980s that could contain incriminating statements or leads...