AP News, June 6th, 2007
A retired Navy diver testifying Wednesday in the trial of a reputed Klansman recalled finding a human skull and rib in a Mississippi River backwater while searching for remains of two black teenagers in 1964.
James Bladh testified that his crew also found railroad rails, a metal chain and other objects in the murky water near Vicksburg, six months after Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore were abducted, beaten and dumped into the river to drown.
Federal prosecutors allege James Ford Seale and other Ku Klux Klansmen kidnapped the two, stuffed them in a trunk, drove them 70 miles to the river, tied them to iron weights, railroad rails and a Jeep engine block and threw them in the water, still alive.
Seale, 71, has pleaded not guilty to kidnapping and conspiracy charges in the attacks Dee and Moore on May 2, 1964. He also has denied involvement with the Klan.
Bladh, now 81, testified that his team spent five days searching the waters off Davis Island _ a place where historical markers say Confederate president Jefferson Davis once owned a plantation.
Two law officers and a funeral home worker from Louisiana testified earlier this week that they fished the badly decomposed corpses of Dee and Moore from the waters off Davis Island in July 1964. The Navy dive team was brought in to search for other body parts and objects.
In the courtroom Wednesday, prosecutors showed jurors and spectators a black-and-white photograph of the skull, which Bladh said "was almost a polished black." He said he assumed the skull had turned that color because of the mud.
He testified that divers turned over the remains and the other objects to law officers working on the investigation, who told the Navy team to drive immediately back to Florida and "'Don't stop any place.'"
Bladh said he interpreted that as meaning the divers might be threatened if they were to stop.
Seale was arrested in January in the latest of more than a dozen Jim Crow-era cases to be revived across the South since the early 1990s.
