AP News, January 26th, 2007
As a deacon at Bunkley Baptist Church, Charles Marcus Edwards was responsible for opening up for Sunday school. And so on that sultry Mississippi morning, he and his wife were the first to arrive at the tiny brick chapel.
A minivan pulled into the gravel drive behind them. A black man got out of the van and approached, followed by a younger white man carrying a video camera. Betty Edwards gave them a friendly wave.
"Mr. Edwards," the black man said, extending a hand with a sealed manila envelope. "I have something for you, sir."
"What is this?" the 72-year-old deacon asked, bemused.
Inside were pages from an unfinished story.
The nine sheets, copied from a 42-year-old FBI file, told a tale of Ku Klux Klansmen and secret codes and terror. They told, in gruesome detail, of the kidnap, torture and slaying of two black men _ Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore.
Edwards limped quickly toward the church and climbed the three steps. At the top, he stopped and turned.
"What's your name, fella?" the elderly white man asked.
"My name is Moore," the stranger replied. "Thomas James Moore."
The reputed former Klansman moved to enter the sanctuary, then paused and turned again.
"I'm going to tell you, fella," he said, gesturing down at Moore with the church keys in one hand and his Bible clutched in the other. "I DID not kill your brother. I didn't have, I didn't have anything to do with that."
As Edwards disappeared inside the darkened church, his wife jiggled the door handle to make sure it was locked, then slammed it behind her. As the cameraman filmed, Moore walked back to the van, a satisfied grin on his face.
The old man hadn't confessed. But tucked under his arm, along with the black-covered Bible, was the manila envelope, with those chilling documents for the deacon to ponder.
The Sunday morning drama, which happened last year, would become a turning point in the quest for justice in the long-dormant Dee and Moore killings.
Just this week, another document was added in the case: a three-count federal indictment.
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For four decades, Thomas Moore had shouldered guilt and shame. Guilt that he was not there to protect his younger brother; shame that he didn't have the nerve to avenge Charles' death.
Over the years, the 63-year-old Army veteran had violent and bloody fantasies of confronting the men suspected of killing his brother. Then one day, someone offered to help him shoot the men _ not with a gun, but with a camera.
Canadian documentarian David Ridgen wasn't even born when Charles Moore and Henry Dee were murdered. He was working on another project when he stumbled across their story. The 38-year-old producer knew a good tale when he saw one, and Thomas Moore was the kind of character filmmakers dream of: The haunted older brother, a Vietnam veteran, literally born on the Fourth of July.
Moore had long ago given up hope for justice in his brother's killing. But when Ridgen asked for help telling the story, Moore agreed to return to the Mississippi pine swamps of his youth.
The worst that could come of it was Ridgen would get a good story. And perhaps, along the way, Moore could exorcise some of the demons that followed him since the time when black men risked their lives just by walking on public streets.
To be precise, since May 2, 1964.
On that morning, Henry Dee and Charles Moore were hitchhiking along U.S. 84 outside the Franklin County seat of Meadville. Dee was on his way to pick up his paycheck from a local lumberyard and had asked his old schoolmate to come along.
Charles and his older brother grew up in a three-room, tin-topped shack with no electricity or running water in the woods outside Meadville. Charles was not yet 2 when his father Charlie died, and Mazie Moore supported the family on $12 a month in welfare and whatever she could make cooking and washing for white folks.
After graduation in the fall of 1963, Charles had gone off to Alcorn A&M College. But that spring, he'd participated in a student demonstration and was expelled.
On that morning in early May, Dee and Moore, both 19, were walking past an ice cream stand on the highway when a Volkswagen pulled alongside them.
At the wheel was James Ford Seale, a 29-year-old truck driver and cropduster whose grandfather had been county sheriff. According to an affidavit from an FBI informant, this is what happened next:
Seale said he was a "Revenue agent hunting for bootleg whiskey stills," and asked the two if they had any information. Seale asked if they wanted a ride, and they got into the car.
Seale pulled out a walkie-talkie and told the occupants of a trailing pickup truck _ including his cousin, 31-year-old paper mill worker and fellow Army veteran Charles Marcus Edwards _ that he was bringing "two Negro boys" to talk with them.
In fact, the Ku Klux Klan had heard rumors that black Muslims were running guns in the area in preparation for an "insurrection." Ostensibly because he had been seen "peeping" at Edwards' young wife, Dee was targeted to receive a "whipping."
Charles Moore, it appears, was a victim of circumstance.
With the pickup in pursuit, Seale turned onto a forest road and, after traveling some distance, parked. When Dee and Moore got out, Seale emerged with a gun and "got the drop" on them.
The Klansmen bound the two friends and began whipping them with beanpoles. Seale asked them over and over who was behind all the "Negro trouble" in Franklin County.
One of the bleeding teens blurted out the name of a black preacher in Roxie, and passed out.
Shortly afterward, Seale's father, Clyde, got on the telephone and put out the distress call "Kiwu" _ code for "Klansmen, I want you" _ and the local apparatus of hate sprang into action.
The Klansmen loaded the unconscious pair into a car trunk, careful to line it with a tarp to catch the blood. Reaching the Mississippi River, they were surprised to find the two captives still breathing.
The white men dragged the pair into a boat and headed out into the relatively still waters of an oxbow lake formed by the river's shifting course. They decided not to shoot their captives; no one wanted the boat to be splattered with blood.
Instead, Moore was lashed to a Jeep engine block, Dee to some old railroad tracks and wheels, the informant said. One of the Klansmen asked Dee if he knew what would happen next, and Dee nodded.
The two friends went over the side, and the swirling, muddy water swallowed them alive.
___
Thomas Moore, who had been drafted into the Army, returned home for the funeral. Afterward, he asked his mother what she wanted him to do.
"I want you to stay in the Army," she told him. "Don't you do anything."
"Why?" he demanded.
She replied: "The Lord will take care of everything."
For a while, it seemed as if she was right.
In November, acting on information from a Klan insider, Mississippi state troopers arrested Seale and Edwards on murder charges.
In an interview with FBI agents, Edwards admitted that he and Seale had kidnapped and beaten the two black men. But Edwards said they were alive when he left them.
The informant told agents that Seale was worried his fingerprints might still be on the sticky side of the tape he'd used to cover the men's mouths and bind their wrists. The officers leaned heavily on the younger man.
"You didn't even give them a decent burial," agent Lenard Wolf told Seale. "We know you did it, you know you did it, the Lord above knows you did it."
"Yes," Seale replied, according to an FBI report, "but I'm not going to admit it. You are going to have to prove it."
But the FBI had its hands full with what would come to be known as the "Mississippi Burning" case _ the murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, civil rights workers who were killed while working in Neshoba County to register black voters.
The Dee-Moore prosecution was turned over to local authorities, who quietly dropped it without even presenting it to a grand jury.
Thomas Moore heeded his mother's advice and stayed in the service. But he began drinking. His anger stoked by Johnny Walker Red, Moore cooked up all kinds of "crazy plans."
It seemed to him that all of white Meadville was complicit in his brother's murder. He had visions of poisoning the water tank near city hall or going AWOL from Fort Hood with a truck full of munitions, tossing grenades into houses and spraying schools with gunfire.
One night, he found himself driving down Edwards' road, three loaded guns in the seat beside him. But he couldn't find the house, and turned back.
Over the years, Moore watched as case after cold case from the civil rights era was brought to trial, and old white men were sent to prison.
When broadcaster Connie Chung called in 1999 and asked to talk about his brother's slaying, he agreed. Seale refused to appear, but Edwards granted a rare interview _ and denied having anything to do with the killings. Instead, he talked to Chung about his religion.
"I've had a good job all my life, and I raised five kids," he said. "Had the American dream."
In 2000, The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., published documents indicating that the killings _ or at least the beatings _ might have occurred in the Homochitto National Forest. Claiming federal jurisdiction, the U.S. Department of Justice reopened the case.
Thomas Moore, by now retired from the Army and living in Colorado Springs, Colo., began to believe that his brother would finally get justice. But as 2000 faded to 2001, and the government turned its attention to more modern terrorists, that hope faded.
When a Canadian filmmaker began calling in late 2004, asking for an interview, Moore didn't even bother answering the phone. What was the point?
___
David Ridgen had been assigned by CBC Television to do a new documentary on the "Mississippi Burning" case. As part of his research, he had watched a 1964 CBC piece on the murders, and noticed footage of police fishing human bones out of the Mississippi River.
When officials determined that these were the bones of black men _ Goodman and Schwerner were white _ the press turned its attention elsewhere. But Ridgen couldn't shake the images of the discolored bones and decomposed clothes. He dug deeper.
These were the bones, he learned, of Henry Dee and Charles Moore, two young black men whose deaths had gone unavenged. And he learned that Moore had a brother.
But Thomas Moore wouldn't answer the phone. Finally, when Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year-old preacher, went to trial in the "Mississippi Burning" case in 2005, Ridgen wrote Moore a letter.
Ridgen expressed his outrage that the Dee-Moore case wasn't pursued because "your brother was not the `correct' murder victim." The Killen trial was proof that there was still a chance someone could be prosecuted for his brother's slaying.
"Now is the time to project your brother's story onto the international scene," he argued. "Justice for one case, means there should be justice in all cases _ no matter the colour of the victim's skin."
Phoning Ridgen, Moore was guarded at first. But as Ridgen talked about his proposal, the old soldier gradually loosened up.
Three days after that call, on June 21, 2005, Killen was convicted of three counts of manslaughter. Later that day, Ridgen gave Moore a call.
Moore was ready to go to Mississippi.
___
Ridgen and Moore didn't really know what they were after when they crossed the Mississippi line in July 2005. According to the newspapers, Seale had died a couple of years earlier. Edwards was still living just outside Meadville, but he'd rebuffed all efforts to break through his wall of silence.
The most they could hope for was maybe a better understanding of what had happened to Charles Moore and Henry Dee.
Then they saw a ghost.
They'd mentioned their project to a local, and how it was too bad James Seale had passed away. The man told them Seale was very much alive and gave them directions to his house.
The next day, Moore was standing on Highway 33 and staring at the man identified as the driver who, 41 years before, had offered a ride to Charles Moore and Henry Dee.
"I'm the brother of Charles Eddie Moore," he shouted as the white-haired man hobbled off to a motor home and shut the door. "Why don't you come out and be a man?"
Elated by their discovery, they went to Jackson for a meeting with U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton. Lampton, who had been an officer in the same Army unit as Moore, promised his old sergeant-major he'd "take a real careful look at this for you."
Over the next year, Ridgen amassed more than 1,600 pages on the case. Each time he and Moore contacted Lampton, it appeared they were one step ahead of the investigators.
Officials said they were having trouble locating living witnesses, but Ridgen had managed to track down people mentioned in the files _ even some who authorities believed were dead or senile. Moore passed some of that information along, and still nothing happened.
Finally, the pair decided it was time to confront Edwards.
___
In 1965, the FBI informant reported that Edwards was apparently suffering from a "bad case of conscience." According to documents uncovered by Ridgen, Seale's father had threatened Edwards and his family if they talked to authorities.
Hoping that Edwards' conscience was still bothering him, Ridgen decided to visit his home. But as soon as he mentioned the case, Edwards ordered him off the property.
When Ridgen returned to the van, he found Moore curled up on the floorboards, nearly paralyzed with anxiety. Ridgen realized just how difficult it was, even for this battle-hardened veteran, to face his past.
But Moore knew that if there was any hope of moving Edwards, he would have to be the one to confront him. They agreed to challenge him again, and this time they would do it "in front of his God."
When Ridgen and Moore arrived at Bunkley Baptist last July 9, the black man's palms were sweating and his heart pounding.
For an hour and a half that morning, they drove back and forth past the church, waiting for Edwards to arrive. They were about to give up when a white sedan pulled into the driveway.
Edwards was gray-haired and bespectacled now, with a bit of a paunch. But he was still recognizable as the dead-eyed man from the crinkled 1964 black-and-white police mugshot.
As Moore walked toward this stooped old man, all the fear left him.
Edwards tried to shove the envelope back into Moore's hands, but the black man refused.
"The FBI dropped all this case, and you know that," Edwards sputtered, his voice rising. "They dropped the case 'cause there wasn't any evidence."
Moore told Edwards that he did not believe he'd taken part in the killings. For a moment, it appeared Edwards was at a loss.
Then, as if he'd found a reserve of courage, he shouted, "You all get off this church ground and quit stirring up trouble here on the church!"
The church door slammed shut.
___
Shortly after the confrontation, Edwards began cooperating with authorities, people with intimate knowledge of the investigation told The Associated Press, requesting anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the case. In September, Thomas Moore got a summons to appear at the federal courthouse in Jackson and testify before a grand jury.
On Wednesday, FBI agents in Mississippi arrested James Ford Seale on two counts of kidnapping and one of conspiracy to commit kidnapping. He pleaded not guilty Thursday.
The Klansman once challenged authorities to "have at me," and they finally picked up that gauntlet.
Authorities declined to discuss Edwards' involvement in detail, but he has not been charged.
Lampton has acknowledged that the case would not have come this far were it not for Moore and Ridgen. Moore says he would never have done it without Ridgen.
"I wanted to do something but I didn't know where to go," he says. "The only thing that I had thought about in the past was ... an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
When Moore heard of the arrest, he wept for the first time in decades.
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Allen G. Breed is based in Raleigh, N.C.
