Reputed Klansman Seale convicted for 1964 deaths

Emily Wagster Pettus

JACKSON, Miss. — After 43 years, Thomas Moore can tell his brother that his killer has been brought to justice.

“I’m going to go to that cemetery, that Mount Olive Cemetery,” he said. “I’m going to tell Charles Moore, ‘I told you that I’d see it to the end.’”

The end came last Thursday with the conviction of reputed Klansman James Ford Seale on federal charges of kidnapping and conspiracy in the 1964 deaths of Charles Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee. Seale faces life in prison when he is sentenced Aug. 24.

The 19-year-olds disappeared from Franklin County on May 2, 1964, and their bodies were found later in the Mississippi River.

Thomas Moore, 63, of Colorado Springs, Colo., was instrumental in getting authorities to take another look at the case. He has not lived in Mississippi since he entered the Army in 1964, weeks before his brother disappeared.

“I now feel that Mississippi is my home,” said Moore, a Vietnam veteran who spent 30 years in the military. “Mississippi, you came a long way and I’m so proud the jury spoke.”

Seale, 71, sat stone-faced in court as the verdict was read and showed no emotion as marshals led him away. Jurors reached the verdict after two hours of deliberations.

Several relatives of the victims dabbed tears from their eyes. Among them was Thelma Collins of Springfield, La., Dee’s older sister.

“I thank the Lord that we got justice,” she said outside the courthouse.

After the verdict, a half dozen of Seale’s relatives, including his wife, ran out of the courthouse to a waiting sport utility vehicle, bumping some reporters in the scramble.

“Obviously, we’re very disappointed in the jury’s verdict and we certainly plan to appeal,” public defender Kathy Nester said.

The prosecution’s star witness was Charles Marcus Edwards, a confessed Klansman. During closing arguments, prosecutors acknowledged they made “a deal with the devil” but said that offering immunity to Edwards to get his testimony against Seale was the only way to get justice.

Edwards testified that Dee and Moore were forced into the trunk of Seale’s Volkswagen and driven to a farm. They were later tied up and driven across the Mississippi River into Louisiana.

Edwards said Seale told him that heavy weights were attached to the two teenagers and they were then dumped alive into the river.

Seale was arrested on a state murder charge in 1964, but the charge was later dropped.

U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton told jurors that Klansmen abducted and beat Dee and Moore in an attempt to find out if blacks were bringing firearms into Franklin County.

The killings of Moore and Dee are among several decades-old civil rights cases reopened by federal investigators. In February, federal officials announced they were reopening investigations into about a dozen such cases.

Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman, was convicted last June of manslaughter in the killings of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964.

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

(Associated Press)