FEDS CHARGE EX-DEPUTY IN 1964 SLAYINGS

[JumpinJack AJ]

Feds Charge Ex-Deputy in 1964 Slayings

By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS and LARA JAKES JORDAN

AP

WASHINGTON (Jan. 25) - A former Mississippi sheriff's deputy was arrested Wednesday in the 1964 slayings of two black teenagers who were long believed to have been kidnapped and killed by the Ku Klux Klan.

The former deputy, James Ford Seale, of Roxie, Miss., was named in a federal indictment charging him in connection with the teens' disappearance and deaths while they were hitchhiking in a rural area of the state east of Natchez.

Until recently, Seale was thought to be dead, and the investigation into the two deaths had long been abandoned.

Seale was taken into custody Wednesday afternoon and was taken to Jackson, Miss. He is expected to be arraigned Thursday on kidnapping charges stemming from the May 1964 disappearances of Henry Dee and Charles Moore.

Two months after Dee and Moore disappeared, their bodies were pulled from the Mississippi River as part of an FBI-led search for three civil rights workers reported missing about 160 miles away near Philadelphia, Miss.

Federal authorities, who were focusing on the more famous "Mississippi Burning" killings, turned the Dee and Moore case over to local authorities. A short time later, a justice of the peace called an end to the inquiry without presenting evidence to a grand jury.

Moore's older brother, Thomas Moore, worked with Canadian film producer David Ridgen for two years piecing together what happened in 1964. The effort led them to a brief confrontation with Seale, a former sheriff's deputy who had been reported as deceased in several newspapers.

In 2000, the Justice Department's civil rights unit reopened the case, the most recent in a string of civil rights-era killings that have been revived by state and federal authorities in the South.

Moore and Ridgen, along with Dunn Lampton, the U.S. attorney who has led the investigation in Mississippi, were traveling to Washington for a news conference as early as Thursday with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller.

Reached by cell phone on his way to the capital, a crying Thomas Moore said: "It's been a long journey, and I don't guess it could have happened any other way."

"I hope and I believe that Charles Moore and Henry Dee are beginning to smile," Thomas Moore said. "I'm hoping Charles Moore is saying I didn't let him down."

Seale and another man, Charles Marcus Edwards, were first arrested in the case in November 1964, four months after the bodies were found. At the time, Seale was asked if he knew why he had been arrested. The FBI said he responded: "Yes, but I'm not going to admit it. You are going to have to prove it."

Both men were reputed members of the Ku Klux Klan, which at the time was cracking down on a rumored gunrunning operation by black Muslims in rural Franklin County., Miss.

On May 2, 1964, according to federal documents, Seale offered the two black hitchhikers a ride, then drove them to a wooded area where he and others whipped them with bean poles. An informant later told the FBI that the Klansmen took the unconscious men to the river, lashed their bodies to a Jeep engine block and old railroad rails and dumped them, still breathing, into the muddy water.

Edwards initially told federal investigators the two black men were alive when he left them and he had nothing to do with any murders, according to FBI documents. He later denied making the statement.

Edwards was not expected to face any new charges, although authorities did not immediately say why.

The case is the latest long-dormat civil rights-era killing to be reopened decades after the crimes were committed. The others include:

-A 1994 conviction in Mississippi of Byron de la Beckwith for the 1963 sniper killing of NAACP leader Medgar Evers.

-Bobby Frank Cherry, convicted in 2002 in Alabama of killing four black girls in the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963. In 2001, Thomas Blanton was convicted in the church bombing.

-Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year-old former Klansman, convicted of manslaughter in June 2005 in the deaths of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the three civil rights workers who were killed near Philadelphia in 1964.

Associated Press writer Allen G. Breed in Raleigh, N.C., contributed to this story.

[3cookies]

...and justice has been served. Thanx 4 posting this AJ...

~ Cookie