AP News, January 25th, 2007
It was 1964, during a search of the eastern Louisiana swamps for three civil rights workers, when authorities turned up the weighted, badly decomposed remains of two black hitchhikers.
Two white suspects were arrested, but the FBI _ consumed by the civil rights workers' case _ turned the case over to local authorities. A justice of the peace promptly threw out all charges.
On Wednesday, seven years after the Justice Department reopened the case, one of the suspects was arrested on federal charges of kidnapping Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, both 19.
James Ford Seale, a 71-year-old reputed Ku Klux Klansman and former sheriff's deputy previously believed to be dead, was brought to the federal courthouse in Jackson on Thursday. He was charged with two counts of kidnapping and one count of conspiracy to commit kidnapping, according to a copy of the indictment that was released by the Justice Department.
Prosecutors did not say why Seale was not charged with murder.
The second suspect, church deacon and reputed KKK member Charles Marcus Edwards, now 72, was not charged. Sources close to the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity said Edwards was cooperating with authorities.
The break in the 43-year-old case was largely the result of the dogged efforts of Moore's older brother.
"I've been crying. First time I've cried in about 50 years," Thomas Moore, 63, of Colorado Springs, Colo., said after the arrest. "It's not going to bring his life back. But some way or another, I think he would be satisfied."
Dee's sister, Thelma Collins, said 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 arrest marks 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 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 of the three civil rights workers _ the case that led to the discovery of Moore's and Dee's bodies.
Seale and Edwards are suspected of kidnapping the pair in a Klan crackdown prompted by rumors that black Muslims were planning an armed "insurrection" in rural Franklin County.
For years, Seale's family told reporters that he had died. But in 2005, Thomas Moore and a Canadian documentary filmmaker, David Ridgen, found Seale living a few miles from where the kidnapping took place.
On May 2, 1964, Charles Moore and Dee were hitchhiking near an ice cream stand in Meadville when Seale pulled over and offered them a ride, a Klan informant told the FBI.
According to FBI interrogators, Edwards admitted he and Seale took the two into the woods for a whipping. 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 men to the river, lashed their bodies to an engine block and some old railroad tracks, and dumped them from a boat. The other Klansmen and the informant have since died.
The remains of Dee and Moore were discovered two months later near Tallulah, La., during the search for James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. Those three bodies were found in Mississippi a short time later.
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Lara Jakes Jordan reported from Washington. AP National Writer Allen G. Breed in Raleigh, N.C., also contributed to this report.
