Former Imperial Wizard names ringleader in 1964 Miss. murders

By Jerry Mitchell

One-time Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers acknowledged recently that a
reputed Klan leader carried out the 1964 plot to kill Michael
Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, documents show.

That person is Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen, Bowers confirmed to state
authorities in a May 7 interview in the Central Mississippi
Correctional Facility, where Bowers has been serving a life sentence
since 1998 for ordering the 1966 fatal firebombing of Vernon Dahmer Sr.

Killen is a prime target in the renewed federal-state investigation
into the killings of the three civil rights workers 40 years ago in
Neshoba County.

Testimony in a 1967 federal conspiracy trial identified Killen as the
Klan leader who got the order from Bowers to kill Schwerner. Testimony
also showed Killen coordinated the Klansmen's activities on the night
of June 21, 1964, when the trio were kidnapped and killed. The
all-white jury convicted Bowers, but deadlocked 11-1 in favor of
Killen's guilt when a lone holdout said she could never convict a
preacher.

The revelation comes as state and federal authorities are hoping to
bring the first-ever murder charges.

"It was probably one of the worst crimes committed in the state.
There's no question about that," said U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton of
Jackson, whose office is cooperating with Mississippi Attorney General
Jim Hood in the case. "I'm going to make sure we're part of the solution."

Goodman's mother, Carolyn, said Bowers' revelation shows the case
should be pursued — and likely will be. "I think the case is going to
be tried and that justice is going to be done," she said. "You wait
and see."

Killen could not be reached for comment, but he has repeatedly
insisted he didn't know Bowers and had nothing to do with the trio's
slayings, saying he spent that evening at a funeral home.

But when asked what should happen to their killers, he replied, "I'm
not going to say they were wrong. ... I don't believe in murder. I
believe in self-defense."

In the 1960s, Bowers headed the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in
Mississippi, the nation's most violent white supremacist group,
believed to be responsible for at least 10 killings as well as
countless acts of violence, including church bombings and beatings.

State authorities interviewed Bowers and others in the months leading
up to Hood's May 28 announcement he was asking for federal assistance
in the case.

Bowers' acknowledgment in his May 7 interview mirrors remarks he made
in a series of interviews in the early 1980s with the Mississippi
Department of Archives and History — interviews that remain sealed
until Bowers dies.

"I was quite delighted to be convicted and have the main instigator of
the entire affair walk out of the courtroom a free man," Bowers said
in those interviews, the contents of which were obtained by The
Clarion-Ledger. "Everybody — including the trial judge and the
prosecutors and everybody else — knows that that happened."

Although Bowers denied any role in the killings, he bragged in those
archives interviews that the case has gone unsolved and unprosecuted
by the state.

"Every stone in the Watergate conspiracy has been uncovered, exposed
to the light of day," he said. "Yet in the Philadelphia case and
dozens of other cases in Mississippi, very, very little is known, much
of what they think they know is inaccurate. The case has never really
been solved in the sense that Watergate has been solved. So, here is a
bunch of semiliterate rednecks in the state of Mississippi really
putting up a better show against imperial authority than Richard Nixon
and the Republican Party did in Watergate."

His bragging included admitting another crime, saying if authorities
"had wanted to put a charge on me they could have gotten me for
obstruction of justice," acknowledging that he did "everything I could
to frustrate the investigation."

He failed to specify, but in a number of other cases in the 1960s,
Klansmen succeeded in harassing, infiltrating or tampering with
jurors. FBI documents suggest that's what happened in 1968 when a jury
deadlocked 11-1 in favor of the guilt of Bowers, who avoided a
conviction then for Dahmer's killing.

In 1983 and 1984, Debra Spencer, an oral historian for the state
Department of Archives and History, conducted three separate
interviews with Bowers.

In those interviews, he referred to himself as "a criminal and a
lunatic," justifying lynchings and killings as means to preserve the
Southern way of life. "Citizens not only have a right but a duty to
preserve their culture," he said.

"By taking someone's life though?" Spencer asked.

Bowers responded without hesitating, "If that person wants to put his
life on the line in order to destroy that culture, yes."