Word: murderes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Bowers was tried twice by the state in the 1960s for Dahmer's murder, but by votes of 11 to 1 and 10 to 2 to convict, juries failed to reach the unanimous verdict required to send him to jail. A federal trial also ended in deadlock. Prosecutors say they suspected witness tampering by the Klan but couldn't prove it. Bowers, now 73, is a free man living in Laurel, just 30 miles up the interstate from the Dahmer family...
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...
...located and arrested in February. Billy Roy Pitts, one of the Klansmen who attacked the Dahmer house, was convicted on federal conspiracy charges. He 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...
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...