S28 E1: The Wrong Body | "Someone Knows Something"

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This is a CBC podcast.

It's July 2017, and I'm standing on a muddy embankment next to an old part of the Mississippi River that formed some time over the past few millennia.

What kind of swallows are those?

I think they might be bank swallows.

Really?

I'm here with my 17-year-old son, Owen, who's been to Mississippi with me many times over the years, but never to this spot.

We've just come from picking wildflowers up on the levee, the engineered anaconda hump of earth that protects the land along the river from flooding.

That's a nice one.

Where'd you get that one?

Over there.

Dead-end river bends like this are called oxbows and they form over time as rivers meander, their overwhelming force of flow and volume causing new paths and cutting off older ones.

The Mississippi River reaches as far north as the border with Canada, snaking from Minnesota all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.

Today, here, a place now called Parker's Landing, It's sunny with cicadas and the water's green and swampy and impenetrable.

There are some open boats with ancient outboards floating at makeshift docks or repurposed logs.

And there's a kind of private fishing community of muggy shacks on stilts nearby.

So, do you want to put those flowers down?

Okay.

All right, well, why don't we just put this?

It gets really muddy really fast.

You're not going to be able to walk too far.

So, we can put them right over here by the water's edge.

A couple drives over in a four-wheel ATV to see what we're up to, just as my son is placing his well-chosen bunch of flowers onto the mud.

We wave and they don't wave back, instead circling around to disappear back to the shacks once more.

Prop them up against this piece of wood, maybe.

Yeah, and I would take them out of the container you dropped them in.

My son has positioned the two beautiful orange trumpet flowers on top of his memorial bundle, the reason he wanted to come.

The first time I came here to this particular part of the river, the day was almost gone, the still, murky water in shadows.

Dread filled the air with no sense of beauty.

And the same feeling, dread, maybe even mixed with fear, has persisted over the dozen or so times I've been back, stumbling over these deeply cracked, derelict mudflats shimmering with insects and spiders, and that resonance that we give to crime scenes.

Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, two 19-year-old African Americans, saw this place at night back in 1964,

before they were brutally killed by the white knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

Their case was my first foray into investigating murder, and one whose aftermath continues to this day in public and intensely personal ways.

But I came here indirectly, blindly along a different path 13 years ago.

Most hours have 60 minutes.

This hour has seven days.

And in this hour, we'll report to you on The Pill, The Queen, The Hot Line, The World's Greatest Spy Master, and Summer in Mississippi.

In 2004, I was watching this documentary on 16 millimeter black and white film in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Toronto Archives.

It's called Summer in Mississippi, and it's about the civil rights movement's attempt over the summer of 1964 to register black voters in the American South and the June 21st murders of three civil rights workers by the Ku Klux Klan.

Three months before, the Mississippi Summer Project began.

It had one simple objective, educating the Negroes of Mississippi to vote.

In these three months, there have been four people shot, 52 beaten, 250 arrested, 13 churches destroyed, 40 bombings, and three civil rights workers slain.

The case of the three would become known as Myburn by its FBI name, or Mississippi Burning by everyone else.

The victims' names, James Cheney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, are widely known in the United States.

Books, movies, and high school curricula have memorialized their deaths into the star-spangled fabric of American history.

This is the Southern White Man's Fear, Equality for Negroes.

And this was the chief.

I was watching the film made for the CBC by one of TV's first news magazine and investigative programs called This Hour Has Seven Days as part of my research for a 2004 documentary that I would shoot and direct that was to look back at these famous Klan murders.

We'd be going back to Mississippi about 40 years after the three civil rights workers were killed.

and there was hope that a trial might finally happen and at least one of the several Klansmen responsible brought to justice.

There were no traces of blood or bullet holes, but those who knew Neshoba County knew that the young men would not be found alive.

This was the only clue.

A charred station wagon in a blackberry thicket at the edge of a swamp.

Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman had been killed by a particularly violent branch of the Ku Klux Klan known as the White Knights.

And as I watched, I discover theirs were not the only murders around that brutal time.

They didn't stir up more trouble, honey.

We was getting killed before those white kids came in here.

This is all hypocrisy making our like the whites stirred up trouble.

Actually, we can't even get protection from people that's supposed to protect us, like the law officials, highway patrolmen.

They just as quick to shoot us as anybody else.

You remember when they began to search for those missing three civil rights workers?

When they began to fish in Mississippi River, they found bodies so I think they just stopped fishing.

Those kids didn't start this trouble.

We was getting killed anyway.

Watching the documentary over an optical 16 millimeter fuzz of cicadas, there's shots of the U.S.

National Guard, Mississippi Police, volunteers, and FBI beating bushes, scouring swamps, choppers and boats, and search lines of uniformed men in fields.

And then a muffled silence descends on the film as cigar-smoking white men in shirt sleeves fish decomposing body parts out of the Mississippi River using sticks and their bare hands.

We see ribs and a femur, knotted loops of wire or twine, and a transparent body-size bag being emptied of fetid water.

This is the place close to where my son would lay his flowers more than 53 years later.

Then the lazy ever-present southern droning of insects is silenced by the penetrating voice of the late great CBC narrator John Draney.

It was the wrong body.

The finding of a Negro male was noted and forgotten.

The search was not for him.

The search was for two white youths and their Negro friend.

I stopped the film and wrote down five words: wrong body, Negro male, and simply forgotten.

This body was not one of the three civil rights workers.

So, who was it?

You are listening to Someone Knows Something from CBC Original Podcasts.

In season three, David Ridgen revisits his 2007 documentary, Mississippi Cold Case.

This is episode one,

The Wrong Body.

Now you talk about terror.

I think you talk about terror.

People have been terrorized.

Oh, my days.

All my days.

July 2004.

Heavy raindrops pelt down across the windshield during a southern summer heat wave.

Sorry, we had the rain.

That's

no control.

Stanley Dierman, a man in his early 70s, is sitting in the passenger seat and conducting me on a tour of the crime in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where the Myburn case happened.

A place of red earth and loblolly pine, black churches, white churches, and home-style cooking with lard.

Stanley takes me to the jail where civil rights workers Cheney, Schwerner, and Goodman were held, the back roads where they were pulled over by Klansmen and murdered, and the place where their bodies were buried before an FBI informant disclosed the location.

Well, after the murders occurred, the Klan

drove up this road here where a farm pond was being built,

and just over the hill around the curve there

was where they were buried for 44 days.

And they won't let you in there?

No.

They won't let anybody in there.

In fact, if

they feel so strongly about it, they'd charge us with trespassing, probably.

So

we better move on.

I don't really believe that there's been a single day that I haven't thought some way about this case.

It works on you.

For some reason, it's taken on a life of its own.

It was just about the most horrendous

case.

I always call it the high water mark of resistance to change that occurred.

There were a lot of atrocities all over the South in the 60s.

In the 1960s, Dierman was a reporter who covered the killings of the three civil rights workers.

And when he later took over as editor and publisher of the Neshoba Democrat, he began to question in editorials why justice had never been done.

Well, the only way to deal with this

case is to face it.

Dearman passed away at age 84 in the winter of 2017, and I think of how it must have been for him and all the others, white or black, whose opinions and actions strove against the prevailing terrors of the 1960s.

Dearman's work as a journalist helped form the backdrop to the eventual modern trial of Edgar Ray Killen.

Okay, if you want to see where Mr.

Killen lived.

Okay, so we're going to go to Mr.

Killen's spot here, the Reverend Mr.

Killen.

The ringleader of the murders, Edgar Ray Killen, or the preacher as he was known, escaped conviction back in the 1960s thanks to a hung jury based on a single holdout.

One juror who reportedly couldn't bring herself to find a preacher guilty of murder.

Maybe you can just tell us what we're doing here.

Tell us that we're where we are here.

Well,

we're coming up on the home of

Edgar Ray Killen, well known in this case.

That's like it right there.

He's the center of the whole thing.

He was the one who

made it possible.

Here we go right here where the murders occurred.

Mr.

Killen has to come by here every day when he goes to town to see

right where the murders occurred.

So he passes by all the time.

We're almost done for the day, but before finishing with Mr.

Dearman, I had just one more question for him.

A question I've taken to asking everyone I talked to in Neshoba County.

I'd brought along a copy of the CBC documentary from 1964, the one with the short clip about the wrong body.

I wanted to know if Dierman had ever heard of other victims apart from the three civil rights workers that had been found.

But we'll see this shot.

We'll have to go through it quick and find it.

Let's watch the sequence here.

It was the wrong body.

The finding of a Negro male was noted and forgotten.

The search was not for him.

The search was for two white youths and their Negro friend.

So what do you make of that?

Well,

that's not in this county.

I mean, that didn't happen in this county.

And

somebody there said something about when they were

looking in the Mississippi River.

That's probably where it occurred.

I remember they did find a body

or more than one body

around the Mississippi River, but that's, oh, six or eight counties away, 140, 150 miles.

Where that actually occurred there is, would be closer to 180 miles from here.

Mississippi had claimed them in silence, smothered their smiles in their forests.

Dearman was right.

More than one body had been discovered in that same section of the Mississippi River that summer.

And eventually, after reading books like Don Whitehead's Attack on Terror and some of Mississippi journalist Jerry Mitchell's work, I learned that the wrong body I saw in the 1964 CBC film had a name, Henry Hezekiah Dee, a 19-year-old African-American from Roxy, Mississippi, and that another 19-year-old, Charles Eddie Moore, a friend of Dee's, was found by local fisherman James Bowles in the same section of river the day before, on July 12th, 1964.

About 1230 a

man came in and said he and his wife had been fishing and passed this lobe

what was partially sticking out of the water and noticed this body lodged on it.

Police Chief James Rogan of Tallulah, Louisiana was interviewed by the press the day Charles Moore's partial remains were discovered.

We found this

bottle of parts the body upon this lobe which is sticking out of the water.

And what did you do then?

We brought it in and carried it to the funeral home and examined the

remains of it, found in the pocket,

several articles in the pocket.

Well what were these articles to you?

One of them was a boulevard gold watch, stretchable band,

two keys,

one penny.

What was the condition of the remains and how was it dressed, the clothing and so forth?

I had on a pair of looked like blue jeans, tennis shoes, belt with a buckle EM on it.

A belt buckle M, right.

Was there anything unusual about

the remains there that you noticed?

Oh, it was badly decomposed.

They had a string tied around it, wound around the ankles.

several times it tied them up with the feet together.

Well, did you talk to anybody in Mississippi on this?

I talked to

Gwynne Cole, Special Investigator, and the Chief Investigator, Mr.

Goward Trove.

The torso of Henry Hezekiah Dee was found the following day further downriver, but some of the rest of Charles Moore and Henry Dee would not be found by Navy divers for another three months.

When Henry Dee and Charles Moore disappeared on May 2, 1964, no National Guard was called in.

No extra detachments of FBI agents were sent.

The tragic fact wasn't noted in any newspaper.

Their disappearance and deaths would not immediately be inscribed into the American Historical Lexicon.

But when Moore and Dee's remains were found two months later in July during the frantic search for the three civil rights workers, it became impossible not to notice, at least for a short time.

Just a few days ago, they fished two bodies out of the river which they thought might have been the civil rights workers.

Here's Charles Evers.

He's the brother of the late NAACP leader Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in his driveway by white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith in late spring 1963.

And as soon as they found out that they were not the civil rights workers, it seemed as though that America felt that, oh, just another two Negroes were killed, so what?

I said this, and I've said it many times, as much as I regret what has happened over in Philadelphia, but had it not been for the two white boys involved, I'm sure there would have been just three more Negroes beaten, killed, or missing.

The federal government was also made immediately aware of the discovery of Dean Moore's bodies.

A search through the Texas-based archive of President Lyndon B.

Johnson turned up a discussion between Johnson and his Attorney General, Robert F.

Kennedy.

Here, Kennedy speaks first.

Uh uh the Mississippi thing, did you see where they got part of a body down here?

Yeah, evidently it's not uh

uh I just seen the papers and then I had some contact with it, but evidently it's not any of the three.

Oh, it's not.

Well, I I got the impression in the morning paper that it probably was.

Yeah, but they I had heard that they've at least eliminated two, and they think they've eliminated the third.

So, I think that

I think we should keep those families advised because I think it's awful tough on them.

They keep reading about this stuff in the paper.

President Johnson also discussed the discovery of Moor and D with FBI Director J.

Edgar Hoover.

Johnson speaks first.

Somebody told me television interrupted and said that they found another body They have just found it.

And it tentatively identified as one of the three.

No, that is not correct.

The first body, which has been, which we found

yesterday,

has been tentatively identified as a boy attending the Alcorn College.

That's a small Negro college down in Mississippi.

In contact with the college this morning, We learned that this boy whose body we found yesterday and which has tentatively been identified as Charles Edward Moore.

Now the second body has just been found

within the last hour, as a matter of fact, and only the lower part of it of the body was found.

The upper part was not.

Our agents are there trying to get some identification.

With the Moore boy, we were able to establish tentatively that he is the student at Hawkhorn because he had a key to room 47 V1 or VI.

And checking at the college, he did occupy such a room.

So that it has no connection with the three missing people that we are primarily looking for, but it looks as if we've got another case.

Does it have any connection with civil rights?

That's what we're looking into now.

The FBI would eventually determine that Dean Moore had been killed by the White Knights, the same Klan group that murdered Cheney, Schwerner, and Goodman, except two months earlier and in a far more brutal fashion.

In fact, it could be said that the killing of Dean Moore represented the first bloody salvo the Klan fired that spring of 1964, foreshadowing the coming war on the civil rights workers of so-called Freedom Summer just weeks later.

The white Mississippians' hatred of race mixing is based not only on the fear of miscegenation, but on the fear of a political revolution.

Negroes in that state constitute 42% of the population.

In some counties, Negroes outnumber whites.

Four out of every 10 Mississippians are Negro, yet only one in 80 is able to vote.

If the Negroes were to obtain equal voting rights, they could control Mississippi.

This is the southern white man's fear: equality for Negroes.

In August of 2004, I began searching for Dee and Moore's family members with the help of some CBC colleagues, sweeping southwest Mississippi with dozens and dozens of phone calls.

But nobody seemed to know Henry Dee or his family, and the one cousin we eventually turned up, who knew Charles Moore and knew that he had a still-living brother named Thomas, did not know Thomas's number or current whereabouts.

I don't know, I just think myself that I'm just a journalist, I'm just a reporter, but I'm pursuing the story.

To me, it's a good story.

We had interviewed journalist Jerry Mitchell in July 2004 2004 for our CBC documentary about the Mississippi burning case.

Jerry is based in Jackson, Mississippi, and writes for the Clarion Ledger newspaper.

He was instrumental in seeking and often spurring action on civil rights era cases, including my burn.

I view all these things, even though they're all kind of different cases, I kind of view them all as one story.

And what story is that?

Well, just

basically the story of injustice, a story of hate, these people who basically killed people just because of the color of their skin, just because they wanted black Americans to be able to vote, things like that.

It's just amazing.

I discovered that Jerry had also written about Dean Moore in 1999 and 2000.

So in August 2004, I contacted him again, and Mitchell gave me what he said was Thomas Moore's phone number.

It had a Colorado area code.

Many calls to that number later, with no answer, I thought the number might be wrong.

Throughout the winter and spring of 2005, I would continue to look for the families of Dee and Moore.

It had become a personal mission.

Then, almost 11 months after learning some of the details of Charles Moore's murder, I finally located Thomas, his brother.

retired and living quietly in Colorado Springs, about 100 kilometers south of Denver.

I sent him a couriered letter, and that letter, Thomas would tell me later, had sat on the mantle of his home for weeks while Thomas decided what to do with me.

Finally, after nearly a year, I received a message that I'd missed a phone call.

Oh, hi, Mr.

Moore.

It's Dave Regin calling from CBC in Toronto.

I'm sorry I wasn't here to take your call before.

That's okay.

Thomas agreed to send me some documents and newspaper clippings he'd collected about the case.

No matter how much time had passed, it was clear to me in these initial conversations that the murder of his brother Charles and Henry Dee, who had been a friend of Thomas's, had become central to who he was and how he defined himself.

I'll tell you what is,

even as we speak, 40 chunkier than past, every single time

that I go through this,

I get back down where I used to be.

You know, it's still hard to,

you know, from all the reports that we got from Charles Moore, it was just from the waist down.

So it brings back no different

feelings that I don't.

That I don't live through and made it through.

But, you know, it's hard to revisit that stuff.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

And by the way,

the newspaper that I've said, you got Charles Marcus' picture right on the front.

He's turned up in a cemetery or something.

Really?

Charles Marcus Edwards was a member of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and one of the men who was implicated for his involvement in the brutal murder of Dean Moore.

The White Knights were known to be the most violent Klan group in the United States at the time and had formed in January 1964 as a large splinter group of Mississippi Klansmen from what was then known as the original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

I asked Thomas how old Charles Edwards would be now.

And he's about seven there.

He should be about 74 right now.

Okay, so 74.

He's still

got a few years left.

He got 20 years, he's been in jail.

That's what I'll say.

Thomas had sent me a nine-page FBI document that he had received from Jerry Mitchell several years earlier that laid out what the FBI investigation had determined happened to Dean Moore that day.

The report was detailed and damning.

But if even part of it was true, why all these years later had there never been any convictions in the case?

The documents produced more questions than answers.

Check it out, read it.

Anything else I can do for you, give me a call, leave me a floor's mail, and I'll get back with you.

I hope you a lot of love.

And I got up to it.

Yeah, yeah, no, I'm not finished.

uh i'm not finished talking to you either uh you know by a long shot but i'll look at the stuff and i'll give you a call back and i want to work with you on this so i'll have any video anytime okay thanks a lot bye dude talk to you again bye-bye

I was originally asked to cover the trial of Edgar Ray Killen, the preacher who helped organize the Myburn murders as a follow-up to the film we'd shot in Mississippi the summer before in July 2004.

But the story of Thomas Moore and the D.

Moore case had a deeper pull

and once Thomas agreed in principle to move forward I set about pitching the story to anyone who would listen at CBC.

Finally, I was given the go-ahead for a short piece of 10 minutes duration that would paint a picture of a victim's family member finally being able to look back at the case after 40 years.

Not a fan of flying since I experienced two near-crash landings in the Canadian Arctic, I loaded up a rental van and drove to Colorado at the end of June 2005.

Thomas lives in a split-level home with double garage in the suburbs of Colorado Springs.

The nearby Fort Carson was the last place he was stationed before his retirement from the military.

A scene of clean, cool air with blue sky and Cheyenne Mountain towering in the distance.

It's a little bit different than Mississippi, I guess.

Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Mississippi, you don't see nothing but

bush this time of year.

Yeah.

I do feel safe here from everything, you know, I mean.

absolutely.

And I would not feel safe in Mississippi.

Thomas spent 30 years in the military and retired as an E-9 Command Sergeant Major, the highest rank that a non-commissioned officer can achieve.

He leads me into the house through his garage.

Inside, it's like a well-organized war memorial.

The walls neatly arranged with framed photos of Thomas in uniform, military citations, medals, promotions, and more.

He gives me the full tour.

This is the Viercon flag that

when we

won the battle we had, we collected stuff off of the enemy after they was killed.

Thomas is about as all-American as you might imagine the phrase implies, a former football quarterback, Vietnam War vet, actually born on the 4th of July 1943 in Meadville, Mississippi.

This is the Bronze Star Medal.

The Garage Tour continues.

It was awarded to me in Vietnam for the operation from

December 1965 to December 1966.

I was a recon platoon squad leader.

So we were constantly in contact or looking for the enemy during that time.

So I stayed out in the field as long as 90 days at one time without coming in.

So this was kind of given to me because I was successful in what I did as far as leading ambush patrols, capturing or killing the enemy.

As I got talking to Thomas, it became clear that his involvement in the Vietnam War was a kind of source of pride for him.

But it was also a source of consternation couched in the recognition that while serving his country, it did not always serve him.

My brother was murdered in Mississippi and it was total denial and nobody wanted to step forward and do anything.

And, you know,

that bothers me.

Many of the Klansmen who were involved in the murders of Dean Moore had actually been in the military, some in active service in Korea or World War II, others in between those active periods.

And some of the tactics and skills the Klan used at the time against black and white citizens were acquired through their military training.

Methods of organizing and hierarchy, communication and secrecy, and more simply, bomb-making and unequivocal violence.

But these Klansmen had finished their military service by the 60s, and Thomas was just starting his.

They were around here bragging about the American dream and

raising a family and all that.

Well, you know,

I was separated from my family, mom,

and

they walk around free,

living on the freedom that I'm fighting for.

The American Dream is what we fought for.

It took me 30 years to get the American Dream, a home, and all that kind of stuff.

Of course, Charles Moore got killed, and they denied him of that right.

In March 2017, Police in Ketchiken, Alaska, got a worried call.

And I haven't heard something of you, so I'm getting raised.

It was about a beloved surgeon, one of just two in town, named Eric Garcia.

When police officers arrived to check on the doctor, they found him dead on a couch.

Is it a suicide?

Is it a murder?

What is it?

From ABC Audio and 2020, Cold-Blooded Mystery in Alaska is out now.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Can you see that pretty good?

Thomas begins showing me photos he's saved over the years.

Pictures of himself and army fatigues, shirt off, dog tags, the beaches and jungle of Vietnam.

Show me that one and tell me if what's the history of that picture.

One of the photos catches my eye.

It's black and white of Thomas with a friend standing at attention in cap and uniform.

This picture here was taken at Fort Port Louisiana

on May the 17th.

1964.

When this picture was taken, I had been in basic training from the 8th of April to May the 17th, so I had not been informed that Charles Moore, my brother, and Henry Dee, was even missing.

Sometime between

the 8th of April and the 29th of April, I received a letter from Charles Moore

stating that he was out of Alcorn College, which is the college that he was attending.

And he would tell me when I came home why.

So when basic training was over with

and I went back home proud to be an American soldier wearing my uniform

that is when I found out that he had been missing since May the 2nd

and for two weeks that's all I knew

that

nobody seemed to know where he was at.

Nobody would talk to me.

It was so many rumors

that Charles Moore and Henry Dee had ran away and went to Louisiana looking for a job.

Even the sheriff of Franklin County supposedly

told my mother that he had gone down in Louisiana and physically seen those two young men, Charles Moore and his friend Henry Dee,

which in fact he had not.

So for two weeks that I was home on leave,

I was frustrated.

I was angry.

Nobody talked to me.

Nobody would tell me anything.

Everybody was quiet.

Once his two-week leave was over, Thomas left Mississippi and was stationed in Fort Hood, Texas.

On July 12th, 1964, Charles Moore's body was discovered.

It came over the news that we were watching TV that they had found two bodies in the Mississippi River.

Later I was informed later that day or that night,

I was informed by my commander

that they had identified one of the bodies

as that of Charles A.

DeMoore.

I immediately flew out of Foolhood, Texas the next day to join my family members in Mississippi

and prepare for the funeral of Charles Eddie Moore.

And that's when

my life changed

forever.

My main concern was not about me.

It was concerned about the effect

it was going to have on my mother.

Thomas was two and a half years old and Charles was only one when their father died.

Thomas's father had come to Franklin County in the early 30s to look for work.

He was also named Charles, but people called him Charlie.

He became a lumberman and employed men to cut trees and fashion them into rail ties.

Thomas never really knew his father, but when he died, his mother, Maisie Moore, was forced to sell all the lumber equipment and pay all the outstanding bills, leaving the family with nothing.

Maisie had largely raised her two boys on on her own.

You're the lady that had raised two young men

without a father

on the welfare,

working in the community in the white lady's kitchen

home,

getting us through high school.

We was on welfare $12 a month.

My concern was how would the death of Charles Moore and the way he died, a senseless death,

how that's going to affect her?

December

1965, I was told to go to Vietnam.

And I went.

It wasn't no concern about Charles Moore.

I mean, I had dreams, I had nightmares about his death, and it was a concern that how he died, but my focus at that point was on me surviving.

and coming back home.

Incidentally, my mother

didn't even know where I was going.

She didn't know I was going to war.

I didn't tell her that.

Of course she found out, but she didn't hear from me proud of going.

So I served my country, did the best I could,

motivated, did my job, and I came back.

Do you think you would ever return to Mississippi to retire?

All of my life, young life, I dreamed of going back to Mississippi.

I like to farm.

I like to raise my own vegetables.

I can do that.

I know how to do that.

Being in a close, being from a close family, Charles Moore, my brother,

mom, and I mean, you know,

we was three people that

loved each other,

cared about each other.

You never thought about not

spending your life with these people.

What mama did was in vain, to try to raise two

well-thought-of-young men.

That was in vain.

So I couldn't, I couldn't grasp, couldn't even think about going back

because I would have a problem.

I would have a problem with blacks, and I would have a problem with white.

There's no doubt about it.

There's no way that even now I could go back

and live a bit simple.

There's one more thing Thomas wants to show me in his garage.

One of the most important

things here is this bicep

that,

oh man,

mom bought.

From a hook on the ceiling, Thomas pulls down a heavy steel-framed faded red bicycle from the 1950s.

Mom bought this bicycle, 1958.

First bicycle we ever had.

We used to ride it all the time.

I'd go to Meava, bring back groceries and stuff.

So this

This was his bike

Most of the time I would do the pedaling and and and he was sitting back here

Couple times he'll ride on the hambar

one time we were riding and

Going down to the house I would lose the control.

I told him you better jump and

He jumped and I feel about the same time.

We went into a briar patch over there.

Yeah, that was kind of funny.

This probably was the first experience we had of being really, really happy together.

And we used to use this bike when we were younger,

14, 15.

And we rode for about two years, perhaps, and then we put it away.

We started hitchhiking.

That's how we used to go from point A to point B,

hitchhiking rides.

and ultimately that led to him to his death because he was he was hitchhiking the morning he was picked up

inside the house thomas goes upstairs and comes down with a cracked leather briefcase that cannot close so full of papers they're spilling out the sides

These are some of the papers, articles that I've collected since the murder of Charles Moore back in 1964.

This is

one of the accused, Charles Marcus Edwards.

He's still alive in Mississippi.

The other perpetrators, as it turns out, there were seven in total, were all reportedly dead.

This included James Ford Seal, the other man, along with Edwards, who had been arrested for the crime in November 1964.

But Edwards and Seale were almost immediately released on $5,000 bail, and nobody else had ever been charged.

Edwards was still alive, but it was difficult to figure out when exactly Seal may have died.

LA Times Richard Serrano reported in 2002 that Seale died the previous year.

Jerry Mitchell told me in August 2004 that Seale was dead.

And Seale's son, James Jr., told Associated Press reporter Alan Breed that his dad had died six or seven months ago, and that would have been around March of 2005.

So, Thomas's focus, our focus, was to be on Charles Marcus Edwards.

This is the picture of Charles Marcus Edwards.

He is the one, one of the two that was arrested

and

turned loose because they said they didn't have enough evidence.

This is the

last and only picture

that I have left of Charles Eden Moore, my brother.

This picture here

was taken

in 1963

and that is one of

the only picture that I know of that we took together.

The picture shows Thomas and his brother Charles, aged 19 and 18, both smartly dressed, leaning up against a white car.

Thomas is square-jawed, muscled, and serious.

Charles is not as stocky, smiling easily into the camera with a sense of openness about him.

Later, I'd meet Thomas' son Jeffrey, who's a dead ringer for his uncle Charles.

When I look at these pictures, I see Charles Moore as a great young man, wanting to be something,

had great ambitions.

I'm a guy,

treated people fair, respected people.

So, this is a beautiful picture of us as teenagers.

I mean, two great football players.

I was a quarterback, he was a center.

We played on a great team.

So,

it's a beautiful remembrance of him.

We don't have any pictures of Henry Dee.

As far as I know, no one had a picture of Henry Dee,

Charles Moore friend.

And then Thomas finds what he's been looking for.

This is a

FBI document

dated

January 12, 1965.

This is nine pages that I have

of approximately a thousand page investigative report of the brutal murder of Charles Moore and Henry Dee.

Thomas pulls out a summary FBI report that is largely based on the findings of a confidential informant, a person numbered as JN30 by the FBI.

There's names of Klansmen, details of what happened to Dean Moore, information about a search by Navy divers, and about subsequent investigations carried out by both the FBI and the local state police known as the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol or MHSP.

According to documents, this is what happened on May 2nd, 1964.

Around midday, Charles Moore and Henry Dee began hitchhiking near the ice cream shop in the small town of Meadville, Mississippi.

Right here in the in the FBI report,

the only one known for sure

that we're in on the actual picking up of these two Negro boys

were Clyde Seal,

James Seal,

and Charles Edwards.

Clyde Seale was 63 in 1964 and the senior leader, or in Klan language, the exalted cyclops of the Franklin County White Knights Group or Clavern as it was known.

And Clyde was the father of James Ford Seal.

On the day my brother was killed, he was hitchhiking with the friend Henry Hesakard Dee outside an ice cream store in Meadville, Mississippi.

Klansman picked him up off the highway.

The FBI heard from their informant that James Ford Seale picked Dean Moore up in his white Volkswagen Beetle, claiming to be a revenue agent hunting for bootleggers.

He then drove them deep into the Homachitta National Forest, a national park that surrounds Meadville.

My brother Charles and his friend Henry

were then whooped and tortured in a nearby national forest.

The informant indicated that both Seale and Edwards participated in the restraining and whipping of Dean Moore, but James Seale was also interrogating them.

There had been a rumor circulating amongst Klansmen that a black movement was underway to smuggle guns guns into the area to stage a so-called Muslim uprising.

Dee and Moore had nothing to do with such movements, but eventually, in an attempt to end their torture, the name of a Reverend from Roxy, Mississippi was cried out.

The Reverend Clyde Briggs, one of them said, might be storing guns in the basement of his church.

While Briggs was well known in the area to be a fiery speaker, no guns were ever found in the church, and using the Reverend's name didn't stop the torture.

They were driven, blooded, and bound in a car trunk to the Mississippi River.

They were chained to an old Jeep motor and dumped into the Mississippi River.

On the Charles Moore lower half was ever found.

Henry's body was headless.

They identified my brother Charles Moore by the belt book I had given him for his birthday with the letter M written on it.

My brother Charles Moore and his friend Henry Dee were killed because they were black.

According to the document, once the bodies of Moore and Dee were found, Charles Edwards, a 31-year-old worker at a large Natchez paper mill, became nervous.

Clyde Seale, the Clavern leader, felt that Edwards was talking too much and threatened him by saying that he didn't think the Klan had enough money to raise his kids and support his wife.

Child Marcus Edward

is still alive in Meadville, Mississippi.

And I hope to meet him.

At the time, even with the amount of detail evident in this nine-page summary, the District Attorney of Franklin County, Lennox Foreman, did not feel that sufficient evidence existed to take the case forward to a grand jury.

In the United States, the grand jury is a precursor to trial, and at the end of them, indictments are usually handed up.

From the end of the nine-page FBI report, quote, Investigator Gwynne Cole summarized to Mr.

Foreman orally the result of certain phases of the investigation to date.

He was also informed of the admissions made by subjects James Seale and Charles Edwards following their arrests on November 6, 1964.

So, despite ample evidence, an FBI informant and admissions made by Seale and Edwards to the Highway Patrol following their arrest, the state still wasn't interested in pressing charges.

Something wasn't adding up.

This investigator Gwynne Cole, who's quoted here, would be someone worth talking to, but first I'd have to find out if he was still alive.

Thomas and I head upstairs to a guest room that now serves as storage.

There's something else that he wants to show me.

This is a 3030 Winchester.

A medium-sized lever-action hunting rifle, and

it's in pretty good shape.

I bought this since 1968.

The reason I bought it was to go and

get revenge for the murder of Charles Moore and Henry D.

I used to ride the road to Mississippi.

I kept my revolver right on the seat.

32.

And I just hope I see five or six of them in the road trying to block me.

I'm going to take three of them out with me.

I used to, oh man, I used to ride the rule down there just,

you know, not hoping to see him, just say, if I do, though.

This isn't the last time that Thomas would tell me about his detailed plans for revenge against those who'd killed his brother.

But every single time it comes up in conversation, Thomas is quick to credit his mother, Maisie, for convincing him not to follow through with these plans.

After the funeral in July, I asked her, I said, what do you want me to do?

I said, if you leave Mississippi

and go to New Orleans with your sister,

I will make some things right.

Now, I told her, I'll probably go down.

I'll probably get killed and all that, but I will make some things right.

I will go eye for an eye, two for a two.

She looked looked at me and she said, son, don't do that.

She said, the men or the people that had

something to do with Charles Eddie Moore's death

will be brought to justice by the great maker.

So it was a frustrated time that I make a promise that I wouldn't do anything about it.

And I did not.

She finally passed away in 1977.

But it was tough.

It was kind of like I sold Charles A.

Le Moore out

because in high school I was there.

In football, you know,

I was the one running the interference for him around right in or left hand.

I was always there too.

But this time,

I couldn't do anything.

Over the years,

age, wise, wisdom,

I

decided to lay this down

and seek justice.

That's what I intend to do.

That's what the quest that we're on right now to go around to Mississippi and

let people know and seek some answer from them to help us get this case brought to justice.

10-minute documentary or not, we plan to go back down to Mississippi to track down and speak to everyone and anyone who might know something about the case.

I think there is a small possibility that

we could run into trouble.

I don't think so.

I don't think they can mobilize

that quick.

But there's always a chance that somebody can...

Can inform them that we're on the way, you know what I'm saying?

And they kind of be waiting for it because the crew club claim they don't do do nothing by itself.

They coward,

they uneducated,

you know.

They ain't gonna do anything unless they got a crowd.

In the year since I'd last visited Neshoba County in 2004 to look at the Myburn case, much had happened.

The state had moved forward with its case against preacher Edgar Ray Killen.

The leader or grand wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Sam Bowers, had once been heard to say that Killen was the main instigator behind the murders of the civil rights workers Cheney, Schwerner, and Goodman.

On January 6, 2005, Killen was arrested and charged with three counts of murder.

And on June 21st, 2005, 41 years to the day after the murders were committed, a new set of jurors had reached a verdict.

In Count 1, Kuwait Jury found the defendant, Edgar Wright Wright-Killen, as to Camp 1, guilty of manslaughter.

Thomas and I watched as afterwards family members of the victims spoke to the media.

And just like four decades before, the wrong bodies still haunted the Mississippi burning case.

As my mother stated when she was on the stand.

James Cheney's brother, Ben Cheney.

The FBI called her and described the bodies of two other black males that they found

young men in the rivers and the lakes in Mississippi.

And I think that the state of Mississippi should be held accountable to make sure they identify who these people were and bring some closure to their families.

Right, right, right.

Totally agree.

The result of Killen's trial may bode well for our coming trip to Mississippi.

But getting Killen's conviction had been a long, long stretch of nearly impassable road to get there.

As it turned out, the prosecution was successful on three charges of manslaughter.

That is, a lesser charge than murder, and one without forethought or malice connected to it.

But manslaughter stuck with Killen, and the conviction happened after 41 years.

Killen was sentenced to 60 years in prison.

I hope that I have the chance to meet Charles Marcus Edward.

I just want to to ask him a couple of questions.

Why?

What was he at when the founding father created the Declaration of Independence?

All men are created equal.

It didn't say because of color.

All men are created equal.

That's what they said.

I wonder if he learned that in school.

Did his family teach him that or what?

The thing that I did in my life,

military, rose to the highest rank

possible.

and getting two college degrees.

I don't consider that great at all.

I don't consider nothing about

my life as great

because what Charles Moore showed me

in his young life that he would have been better than me.

How's that?

There's no doubt that he would have been a PhD.

retired some university, probably still principal some university.

Superintendent,

Dr.

Charles E.

Moore, that would have been nice.

Because he had that ambition, he had that desire.

I just want to have a good time.

No doubt about it.

I look at this guy, man.

I look at this guy, Charles Marcus.

Every day of my life, I look at his picture, I look at Charles Moore's picture, and I ask the same question.

Why?

Why?

and I want him to explain that

I hope he can gain enough strength to to to to to utter those answers to me and just have heart it's nothing gonna happen I'm not gonna I'm not gonna seek revenge on him I want to see him in jail that's what I want to see

just I want to see him spend the rest of his life

Worrying about how he would have been had he not did that.

I want his family members to go visit him.

That's what I want.

And I want Mississippi to do something about it.

Hello?

Yes.

Hey, how you doing, Jerry?

As we're loading up the van, getting ready to leave, Jerry Mitchell, the reporter from Jackson, Mississippi, Mississippi, calls.

Mitchell wants to get a statement from Thomas about a story he's writing about other civil rights era cold cases.

We'd also been in contact with him to speak about our plans for the investigation.

What I'm going to try to do is bring back 1964 in the minds of people.

The black and the white, you know what did you hear because I was I'm sure they hear something I didn't know that I've never heard before right right so this is gonna be a great opportunity for us to do that and go

now you're gonna meet with

Ronnie

I think his last name the Daniel yeah Ronnie Harper we have a I have a point with him Friday at 10 o'clock, I believe.

So I'm fired up.

We getting ready, loading up water, because I know it's hot down in Mississippi.

Yeah, it is.

And we're coming in there.

We're going to come on in there.

Terrific.

Yeah.

Real car when we get in there and get set up.

Yeah, man.

We're going to get some more catfish.

That's right.

Yeah, we're going to show David how the Sutton can do that.

He's a Yankee, you know.

We're going to show him how the Sutton can do that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

We'll definitely go

get together.

All right, then.

Thanks.

Good talking to you.

I'm glad you called.

Thank you, Mr.

Moore.

Okay, then.

We'll talk to you later.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

I think we're both feeling energetic and optimistic that we're going to make progress on the case.

But the call from Jerry Mitchell reminds me of something else.

Many journalists, some of them legendary, had tried to investigate this case in the past.

First, Tony Moreau of Newsday, who interviewed several people in the southwest Mississippi area in 1973-74 for a story about the Klan.

He spoke to people who may have known about the Dee and Moore murders and even remembers interviewing James Seale at the end of a driveway.

Seale was wearing a policeman's uniform and kept his hand on his revolver throughout the interview, Moreau says.

Seal was at one point acting as a sheriff's deputy, according to reports.

But Moreau never wrote the story.

Then, many years later, Mississippi native and Newsday writer Stephanie Saul took a crack at it.

She spoke to many people, including Charles Marcus Edwards, in an extensive, first-time, in-depth interview, where he denied any involvement in the killing of Dean Moore.

Then, the case was reprobed in 1999-2000 through the efforts of Jerry Mitchell and Connie Chung's ABC television news magazine 2020, working with a team led by Canadian producer Harry Phillips.

Don Simonton, a Mississippi academic, assisted with the investigation and pointed out that the killing of Dean Moore had possibly occurred on federal land, the Homachito National Forest, thus potentially triggering federal jurisdiction.

Mitchell had obtained FBI files on the D.

Moore case and, like Tony Moreau before him, had also spoken to James Seal.

The identity of a D.

Moore case Klan informant was discovered, but incredibly, state and federal officials at the time decided not to proceed, and the case was officially closed again by the U.S.

Department of Justice Civil Rights Division in June 2003.

Okay, that's enough.

A large part of me was worried that I'd be just another on this list, a Canadian filmmaker getting Thomas's hopes up, only to leave him disappointed.

What happens if nothing happens though?

What happens if we go on the strip and we don't turn up anything?

Nothing happens.

It's just, that's the worst case.

What happens?

I'm convinced we're going to turn up something because we're going to keep digging.

We just got to find the right

person, the right rock to turn over.

At some point, the evidence is there, there's no doubt about that.

And there's somebody in Mississippi, Franklin County, Meadville, Roxy, or Natchez that knows something about this case.

So I'm convinced of that.

However,

you know, if

that be our

misfortune that we can't can't find something, then

hopefully something will still come out of it.

Somebody will call us later on and say, hey, I couldn't talk then, but I got some information now.

So it's a, I don't see this as being a

false thing we've done.

I think it's very positive.

If this kind of work

had been done 10 years ago, five years ago,

three years ago, before James Seal died, he'd have been in jail.

I'm convinced of that.

You know, I'm convinced of that.

So

it's taking us 40 years, but

I like to look at it as 40 years of

wisdom,

knowledge, technology that we have now that we did not have back then.

So it's all

the man said, it's all good.

It's all good.

It's all good.

I'll see you, Runi.

Wish Wish a lot of luck and

success.

Thomas says goodbye to his wife, Mei Lee, and we hit the road.

We need success, shall we?

Okay.

Y'all take care.

Where do you think if I'm going?

You think it's a great idea, right?

It's going to be pretty tough if we can't even get your wife to talk to us about it.

Yeah, we'll get somebody down there.

Thanks for your kindness.

Okay, you.

I don't guess you're going to take this.

Back to packing.

She's going to take this.

She's hugging that in there.

I hope we got everything.

Yep.

All my keys upstairs.

Well,

we are on the road to Mississippi.

We're going to go down through

New Mexico,

Oklahoma,

Texas,

Louisiana,

and then Mississippi.

It's going to be an exciting trip.

I'll be back here and looking at the Shine Mountain in about two weeks.

Feeling great that we have accomplished something

and bringing

the murders of Charles Eden Or, my brother, and Henry D to justice.

I will feel good about that.

I'm sure that.

Okay, you got everything?

I got everything.

Okay, let's go.

I'm ready.

We head off down Highway 25 toward New Mexico.

It should take us less than 20 hours to get to our destination, Mississippi.

A mission, a clan murder, a long shot together.

You have been listening to episode one,

The Wrong Body.

Visit cbc.ca slash SKS to watch the 1964 documentary, Summer in Mississippi, and other videos associated with the case.

And subscribe to SKS on your favorite podcast app.

Someone knows something is hosted, written, and produced by David Ridgen.

The series is also produced by Chris Oak, Steph Kampf, Amal Dudlich, Eunice Kim, and executive producer, Arif Nurani, and mixed by Cecil Fernandez.

Our theme song is Terrorized by Willie King.

Now you talk about terror.

I think you talk about terror.

People have been terrorized

all my days

all my days

Hello?

Hey.

Yeah?

Yeah, look here.

I gotta ask you to do something for me.

David received a call from the FBI in Washington, D.C.

I said, David received a call from this FBI agent in Washington.

Yeah.

And he's telling David that that will never

an FBI investigation.

I got nine pages proof that the FBI did investigate.

So I want you to go and get those copies

and facts to the FBI.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/slash podcasts.