Word: klan
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...vivid memories of my experience in Laurel, Miss., in early 1966 [LAW, May 18]. I was an FBI special agent who had been sent to Laurel along with numerous other agents. We were involved in the investigation of the fire-bombing murder of Vernon Dahmer by the Ku Klux Klan. Klan leader Sam Bowers would often sit across the street from the Laurel FBI office in his souped-up 1940 black Ford. He usually was with another Klansman. They were "surveilling" us, the FBI. Bowers' Klan organization was known as the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi...
...served four years, but through circumstances that have never been fully explained, he was not sent back to Mississippi to serve his life sentence for murder. Pitts, who had been living in Denham Springs, La., has agreed to testify against Bowers one more time. Pitts has told of a Klan meeting at which Bowers ordered Dahmer killed. Pitts has also said Bowers assured him that "a jury would never convict a white man for killing a n___ in Mississippi...
Investigators have been tracking down everyone who was in on planning the murder, and prosecutors are threatening to bring charges against any who do not talk. And this time prosecutors expect to get a jury untainted by Klan influence. Three jurors from Bowers' 1968 trial said afterward that during deliberations, all the jurors agreed that he was guilty, yet one kept voting "not guilty" in the secret ballots that decide the verdict. But jurors today seem far less afraid to convict Klan defendants. According to documents quoted by the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, an informant recently told investigators that Bowers...
Samuel Holloway Bowers is a Klan leader right out of central casting. One of his grandfathers was a wealthy Louisiana planter; another was Eaton J. Bowers, a Mississippi Congressman from 1903 to 1911. But as Imperial Wizard of the Klan in Mississippi, Bowers compiled an unequaled record of murder and mayhem. Klan experts suspect him of orchestrating more than 300 bombings, assaults and arsons, plus nine murders. He served six years in prison for conspiracy in connection with the deaths of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, the civil rights workers whose killings were depicted in the movie Mississippi...
Neil McMillen, a history professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, believes that a Klan "die-hard" or two could still make it on the jury and produce another mistrial. But this time, notably, it is the Dahmers and their supporters who seem to have the most faith in the system. "I think the jury is going to work out just fine," says Fairley, the friend who warned Dahmer that registering blacks to vote could get him killed. "Things are a lot different now in Hattiesburg...