By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS and ALLEN G. BREED, Associated Press Writers
See Related Video
JACKSON, Miss.- For four decades, Thomas Moore dreamed of exacting bloody revenge on the Ku Klux Klansman he believed had kidnapped his younger brother and another teen, beaten them and drowned them in the muddy Mississippi River.
His mother, though, told him to “wait and the Lord will take care of it.” So Thomas Moore held his anger and stubbornly prodded authorities to do more in the investigation of the killings of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee in 1964.
Moore’s burden of guilt that he wasn’t there to protect his brother lifted Wednesday when he learned that James Ford Seale, 71, a former sheriff’s deputy and reputed KKK member previously believed to be dead, was arrested on federal kidnapping charges.
“I’ve been crying,” Thomas Moore, 63, said when he learned of Seale’s arrest. “First time I’ve cried in about 50 years. ... I hope and I believe that Charles Moore and Henry Dee are beginning to smile.”
Federal prosecutors acknowledge the dogged efforts by Moore and Canadian documentary filmmaker David Ridgen led to the break in the case. The Rev. Joseph Lowery said the arrest is proof that justice delayed is not necessarily justice denied.
“I think truth crushed to the earth will rise again,” said Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “The arc of justice, sometimes it moves slowly _ but surely.”
Dee’s sister, Thelma Collins, told The Associated Press through grateful sobs: “I never thought I would live to see it, no sir, I never did. I always prayed that justice would be done _ somehow, some way.”
The victims’ weighted, badly decomposed bodies were found by chance two months after their abductions in July 1964, during the search for three civil rights workers whose disappearance and deaths in Philadelphia, Miss., got far more attention from the media and the FBI.
A second man long suspected in the attack, church deacon and reputed KKK member Charles Marcus Edwards, now 72, was not charged. Sources close to the investigation, who did not wish to be named, say Edwards was cooperating with authorities. Prosecutors did not say why Seale was not charged with murder.
The arrest marked the latest attempt by prosecutors in the South to close the books on crimes from the civil rights era that went unpunished. In recent years, authorities in Mississippi and Alabama have won convictions in the 1963 assassination of NAACP activist Medgar Evers; the 1963 Birmingham, Ala., church bombing that killed four black girls; and the 1964 Philadelphia, Miss., slayings.
“If a person allegedly engages in this kind of heinous murder, then they ought to pay,” said Mark Potok, who investigates hate groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “It’s a sad thing if justice arrives 40 or 50 years late, and it’s too bad if the alleged perpetrator is in very bad shape. But to not prosecute these cases would be like forgiving Auschwitz prison guards.
“I just don’t think you can let these case go. There’s too much at stake in terms of our national conscience. I also think that these cases are a way to say to the black South that even though it took a half century, your relatives in these cases are important.”
Seale and Edwards were arrested in November 1964 as part of a suspected Klan crackdown on rumored black Muslim gunrunning. The Klan believed blacks were planning an armed “insurrection” in rural Franklin County.
But, consumed by the search for the three missing civil rights workers, the FBI turned the case over to local authorities. And a justice of the peace promptly threw out all charges against Seale and Edwards.
In 2000, the Justice Department’s civil rights unit reopened the case.
For years, Seale’s family had told reporters that he had died. But in 2005, Thomas Moore and Ridgen, who works for the CBC in Toronto, found Seale, old and sick, living just a few miles down the road from where the kidnapping took places.
“If they hadn’t brought it to my attention, I wouldn’t have known to do anything,” said U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton, chief federal prosecutor in Jackson.
On May 2, 1964, Charles Moore and Dee, both 19, were hitchhiking near an ice cream stand in the town of Meadville when Seale pulled over and offered them a ride, a Klan informant told the FBI.
According to FBI interrogators, Edwards admitted that he and Seale took the two men into the woods for a whipping. But Edwards said both men were alive when he left them.
An informant told the FBI that Seale’s brother and another Klansman took the unconscious blacks to the river, lashed their bodies to a Jeep engine block and some old railroad tracks, and dumped them over the side of a boat. The other Klansmen and the informant have since died.
Searchers were combing the woods and swamps for James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner when the remains of Dee and Moore were discovered near Tallulah, La. The bodies of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were found in an earthen dam in Mississippi a short time later.
According to FBI documents from the 1960s, authorities confronted Seale and told him they knew he and others killed the hitchhikers, and “the Lord above knows you did it.”
“Yes,” Seale was quoted as replying, “but I’m not going to admit it. You are going to have to prove it.”
The U.S. Justice Department reopened the case after The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson uncovered documents indicating that the beatings had occurred in the Homochitto National Forest, giving the FBI jurisdiction. But the case languished until Seale was located.
Seale is expected to appear in court on Thursday. Thomas Moore said the case is far from over, but he is hopeful justice will be done.
“It’s been a long journey, and I don’t guess it could have happened any other way,” he said. “I’m hoping Charles Moore is saying I didn’t let him down.”
___
Allen G. Breed reported from Raleigh, N.C. Associated Press writer Lara Jakes Jordan in Washington also contributed to this story.