Word: liuzzo
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Dates: during 1965-1965
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...year before he was arrested for the nightrider slaying of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo near Selma last March, Alabama Klansman Collie Leroy Wilkins was riding around with a sawed-off shotgun in his car. Stopped by the cops in Hueytown, near Birmingham, Wilkins pleaded guilty to violating a 1934 federal law designed to curb gangsters, which requires registration of such weapons. After a not-too-inquiring probation officer reported that he had a blameless character and Birmingham Federal Judge Clarence Allgood himself decided that Collie's mother "is a real good woman...
Selma is not in that district. So after two Alabama juries had failed to convict Wilkins, 22, on murder charges, and a federal court had found him guilty of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of civil rights workers in the Liuzzo slaying,* Judge Allgood last week sentenced Wilkins to a year and a day in prison, his original term on the firearms charge...
...fellow Klansmen convicted with Wilkins in the civil rights case, Eugene Thomas, 42, and William Orville Eaton, 41, also face trial for murder in Mrs. Liuzzo's slaying. Thomas is under indictment as well for violating the federal firearms...
...prosecution's case was much stronger than in the Anniston trial. It was the already-familiar story told in damning detail by Gary Thomas Rowe, an FBI informant planted in the Ku Klux Klan, who testified that he rode with the killers when they gunned down Mrs. Liuzzo. Despite his first-hand testimony, juries in two state trials had failed to convict Collie LeRoy Wilkins, 22, on murder charges. The significant difference in federal court last week was that Wilkins and two fellow Klansmen, Eugene Thomas, 42, and William Orville Eaton, 41, were prosecuted under an 1870 federal statute...
Immediately after the conspiracy convictions in Alabama, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach telephoned the news to Lyndon Johnson at his Texas ranch. The President had taken a special interest in the case and had even announced on television the trio's arrest the day after Mrs. Liuzzo died. He warned the Ku Klux Klan then that he would bring it to heel. After talking to Katzenbach, Johnson said: "The whole nation can take heart from the fact that there are those in the South who believe in justice in racial matters and are determined not to stand for acts...