August 6, 2026 • 54 mins
Byron de la Beckwith was tried for the same murder three times. In 1964, it just wasn't generally considered illegal for a white man to kill a black man in Mississippi.
Sources & Further Reading:
Massengill, Reed (2024). Portrait of a racist: Byron De La Beckwith and the Assassination of Medgar Evers. Univ. of Tennessee Press.
DeLaughter, Bobby (2001). Never Too Late: A Prosecutor’s Story of Justice in the Medgar Evers Case. Scribner.
Mitchell, Jerry (2020). Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era. Simon & Schuster.
Evers, Myrlie (1967). For Us, The Living. Doubleday & Company.
Tyson, Timothy (2017). The Blood of Emmett Till. Simon & Schuster
Vollers, Maryanne (1995). Ghosts of Mississippi. Little Brown & Company.
Martin, Ralph (1983). A Hero For Our Time. Bandwagon, Inc.
Baden, Michael (2006). Exhumation. in Spitz & Fisher's Medicolegal Investigation of Death.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
They offered him a seat in the rental car. The
prosecutor and his investigator had rented the sort of practical
sedan that government employees can expense for a work trip,
and they'd cleared out the entire back seat for the
young man who'd insisted on accompanying them. There was plenty
of room for him in the car, but he wanted
(00:27):
to ride with his father. That's why he was there,
wasn't it. He hadn't seen his father in twenty eight years,
almost exactly twenty eight years, as a matter of fact.
So on June third, nineteen ninety one, Van Evers climbed
into the back of the hearse idling beside his father's
(00:48):
empty grave in Arlington National Cemetery, and he lay there
on the floor next to his father's coffin for eight hours,
all the way to Albany. The next morning, before the
autopsy began, the little crowd of doctors and lawyers and
investigators stood in silence as Medgar Evers's youngest son reached
(01:11):
out and gently stroked his father's hair. Somehow, he looked
exactly as he had the day he was buried in
nineteen sixty three, and nearly three decades later, he was
still waiting for justice. Van Evers was three years old
(01:33):
on June twelfth, nineteen sixty three. He was asleep long
before midnight that night. I couldn't tell you whether it
was the sound of the assassin's rifle, the shattering glass
in the living room window, or his mother's screams that
woke him, but his older siblings, Reena and Daryl sprinted
into action. They did exactly what their daddy taught them
(01:55):
to do if they ever heard gunfire outside the family home.
Grabbed their baby brother and dragged him along as they
crawled across the carpet towards their parents' bathroom. They stayed low,
beneath the sight of anyone firing through a window, just
like they had in the drills their father had insisted on.
They tried to make it fun, make it a game,
(02:19):
but even as young as they were, they understood the stakes,
and he would have been proud of them that night.
They moved so fast, and they stayed so low, and
then got baby Van into the big iron bathtub. That's
where they'd be safe, their father told them, from gunshots
or flames, they'd be safe in the tub. And they
(02:43):
were supposed to stay in the tub until someone came
and got them. But Rina and Darryl, just eight and
nine years old that night, heard their mother screams from
the driveway and ran to her side. Marily Evers knew
what she would see when she switched on the light
in the car port, but she did it anyway. Her husband, Medgar,
had been shot in the back. He'd tried desperately to
(03:07):
crawl toward the door, toward his family to get home.
His keys were still in his hand, and somewhere in
the darkness across the street, his assassin ran, Daddy, please,
please get up, daddy. Eight year old Rena screamed as
(03:28):
the pool of her father's blood spread across the driveway.
Medgar Effers died that night, and thirty one years later,
as Rena walked out of a Hinz County courthouse, she
looked up to the sky and she spoke to her
father again. This time she whispered, Hi, Daddy, we did it.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Byron de la becku With and finally, at long last
been convicted of murder. I'm Molly Conger and this is weird, little.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Guys Byron Della Beckwith was tried for the murder of
(04:28):
Medgar Evers three times, not because there was ever any
confusion about who killed Medgar Evers, but because when he
was tried in nineteen sixty four, an all white jury
in Mississippi had never convicted a white man for killing
a black man, and they weren't about to start. We
(04:50):
left off last week in the morning of the murder
June eleventh, nineteen sixty three. When the sun rose on
June twelfth, Medgar Evers was dead, Jackson, Mississippi was a
tinder box, and Byron de la Beckwith went to work
like nothing had changed. Medgar Evers spent the last evening
(05:13):
of his life in meetings as the NAACP Field Secretary
for the State of Mississippi. He was working around the
clock in nineteen sixty three as the fight for civil
rights escalated that year. Despite a recent court injunction prohibiting
demonstrations in Jackson, hundreds of people marched for Medgar the
day he died. Early in the day, a group of
(05:35):
ministers conducting a quiet march of public mourning were arrested
for demonstrating without a permit. In that afternoon, nearly two
hundred demonstrators, mostly young people were arrested when their march
was met by an equally large contingent of local and
state police. One of the arrested demonstrators, John Salter, was
(05:57):
beaten so badly by police that he was taken into
custody unconscious. Salter, professor at Tugaloo College, would have still
been bruised from the last time he'd been beaten bloody.
Just two weeks earlier, he'd accompanied the two students who
staged to sit in at the Woolworth's lunch counter. Within
minutes of taking his seat at the counter next to
(06:17):
a young black woman, the professor was punched in the
face by someone in the crowd wearing brass knuckles. And
that night, less than twenty four hours after her husband
was assassinated in her front yard, Merly Ever spoke to
a crowd of hundreds at the Pearl Street African Methodist
Episcopal Church. Nothing can bring Medger back, she said, but
(06:43):
the cause can live on. At the Evers home, detectives
found the murder weapon by sunrise. He'd left it behind.
A detective who was about the same height as med Grever's,
stood next to the car where ever it had been
standing when he was shot. Another detective stood inside and
(07:05):
shown his flashlight at him through the bullet hole in
the living room window, allowing the beam of his flashlight
to mimic the trajectory of the bullet. When the officer
in the driveway stepped out of the light, the beam
traveled across the street and illuminated a brushy spot amidst
some trees. There in the honeysuckle thicket beneath the sweetgum
(07:26):
trees was a thirty six end peeled rifle with a
powerful scope mounted on top. Someone had snapped a small
tree branch at about eye level, leaving a little window
in the foliage, and there was a scrape on the
tree where the rifle had been steadied. It was a
sniper's nest. I doubt by Arondella. Beckwayth got much sleep
(07:50):
that night. It's about an hour and a half dry
from Jackson to the Greenwood, so he couldn't have been
home before two am, and according to his work log,
he was tracking miage for his first sales call of
the day by six forty five am. In the summer
of nineteen sixty three, Beckwith was living in the crumbling
old family mansion alone the uncle who'd raised him had died.
(08:14):
His wife had left him again, and this time she
took their son with her. He was all alone in
this big, filthy house. He'd never actually lived alone before,
had always been a maid or a wife. He almost
certainly didn't even know how to cook breakfast, but he
(08:37):
couldn't have even if he'd wanted to. The house was
falling apart. So he was out the door early that morning,
as he usually was, and he visited several cotton plantations
in the tiny town of Money, Mississippi, that day, but
he didn't make any sales. If you've heard of Money, Mississippi,
you're either from Mississippi or you know that the little
(09:00):
town where Emmett Till was visiting relatives when he was
lynched in nineteen fifty five. By the time Beckwith got
home that evening, the afternoon edition of the Greenwood Commonwealth
had bad news for him. The story had broken midday
that the Jackson police found a single perfect fingerprint on
(09:23):
the rifle scope, and then on June thirteenth, papers all
over the country ran a photo of the rifle. They
were hoping someone might recognize the gun or the Japanese
made rifle scope, noting that the site had been mounted
in a slightly unusual way, so the gunsmith who did
the work would probably remember the job. Miraculously, someone did
(09:46):
recognize the gun right away. On June thirteenth, Thorne McIntyre,
a farmer in Idabina, called the Jackson Police that very night.
He couldn't be completely sure, but the rifle he saw
in the paper looked an awful lot like when he'd
(10:08):
traded to a salesman from Greenwood a few years back.
Beckwith that was his name, A real segregation fanatic, he recalled,
very radical on this racial problem. He didn't want to
get mixed up in any of this, and he hoped
they could keep his name out of it. But he
made the call because he recognized the gun. Jackson Police
(10:33):
Captain Ralph Hargrove wrote the tip down, but he didn't
tell anyone. He didn't mention it to the FBI, although
they'd already stepped in to assist in processing the weapon
and the print. This is odd, I mean, the FBI
hadn't assumed jurisdiction. The case belonged to the Jackson Police,
(10:54):
so because he didn't have to tell them, but he
knew they had a fingerprint, and now he had a name,
So why wouldn't he tell them? I mean, it looks bad.
It looks really bad. The day after the murder, the
Jackson police get a tip from someone who remembers selling
(11:18):
the murder weapon. He gave you the guy's name, and
you didn't You didn't do anything with it at all.
I mean, why not tell the FBI right away so
they could compare the fingerprint. It would have been easy
to do because Beckwith's fingerprints would have been on file
from his time in the Marines. But I don't think
(11:41):
this particular piece actually screams cover up. I mean, there
will be parts of the story that do, but I don't.
I don't know that this does as bad as it
looks because Captain Hargrove, the detective who took the farmer's
tip about Beckwith, is the same detective who found the
fingerprint in the first place. He's the one who found, lifted,
(12:04):
and ultimately identified the print. So if he were trying
to help someone get away with murder, it would have
been much easier to just botch the job lifting the print, right,
just don't tell anyone you found the print or smudge
it this one, I think we can chalk up to
(12:26):
displain old dick measuring. The Jackson police wanted to solve
it their own way without the FBI taking any credit,
and the mistrust went both ways. While the Jackson Police
worked it their way, the FBI focused on the scope.
The Japanese manufactured rifle scope only had one US based importer.
(12:51):
Records from the United Binocular Company quickly narrowed the field.
There were only two hundred dealers in the United States
selling Golden Hawk rifle scopes, and only a few dozen
had been sold anywhere in the Southeastern United States, and
only one of this particular site had been sold in
(13:12):
the state of Mississippi. Duck Goza of Duck's Tackle Shop
did not come forward on his own. He read the
description in the newspaper, just like Thorn McIntyre. But Thorn
McIntyre called in a hunch about a truthfully pretty generic rifle,
and I think Duck Goza had to have known he
(13:35):
was the only guy in Laflora County, Mississippi selling fancy
Japanese rifle scopes. I found some classified ads from this
time period showing that these sites were selling for the
equivalent of a couple hundred dollars in today's money. They
weren't cheap, but it took three increasingly hostile visits from
the FBI before Duck could remember that he'd traded the
(13:58):
only six power Goldenhawk rifles spe in the state of Mississippi.
His old buddy, Byron de la Beckwith had come in
on May twelfth, and he'd traded two forty five caliber
pistols and some loose shotgun shells for the scope. As
the FBI and the Jackson police pursued their separate investigations,
(14:19):
Merley Evers buried her husband, and Byron de la Beckwith
tried to convince his wife to come home. Merleyan Medgar
Evers already owned side by side funeral plots at Black
Cemetery in Jackson, but NAACP leaders urged her to consider
the possibility of burrying him at Arlington National Cemetery in
(14:41):
Virginia instead. He was eligible. He was a decorated World
War Two veteran. In her book For Us the Living,
Murley wrote, I realized how selfish I was being to
on his grave near our home. I had shared Medgar
with others all of our marriage and much as I
(15:04):
regretted it. I'd known for years that he did not
belong to me alone. Reluctantly, she agreed to let her
husband's body keep working for the movement even in death.
He wasn't just Marley's husband, and Charles's brother, and Rena,
Daryl and Van's father. He wasn't just Medgraffs. He was
(15:27):
a symbol, now a martyr, and burying him at Arlington
was a powerful reminder that he'd died fighting for a
better country, a task that proved more dangerous than actually
fighting for this country at war. After the funeral at Arlington,
a massive affair with celebrity guests and endless speeches, Merley
(15:49):
and her two older children were invited to a private
audience with President Kennedy and a tour of the White House.
In the Oval Office, President Kennedy took her hand and
held it silently for a few moments. Finally he said,
how are you. In a book published just a few
(16:09):
years later, Murley wrote, I wanted to say that I
was dead inside, that my life had been snatched from me,
that I wished he could do something about it. Personally,
I wanted to say that my husband had fought for
his country, and he came back home to find he
still was not free and had died for his belief
that all Americans were entitled to first class citizenship. I
(16:32):
wanted to say that I knew that nothing could be
done about it, but I just said, fine, thank you, mister.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
President.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Kennedy's secretary, Evelyn Lincoln told Rina and Darryl that the
President's chair has a special power if you sit in
it and make one wish, it can come true. I'm
sure she meant, well, children love make believe in an
office is a boring place for little children. But what
(17:01):
a terrible promise to make to children who've just lost
their father. So hours after seeing his father's coffin lowered
into the ground, nine year old Darryl Evers climbed up
into the President's chair in the Oval Office, and he
said he wished his father had not died in vain.
(17:23):
Back home in Mississippi, on the day of Medgar Ever's funeral,
Byron de la Beckwith paid a visit to his estranged wife.
She'd been admitted to the hospital earlier that week. A
local newspaper used to be a terribly nosy thing. I
found scattered mentions in the social pages over the years
about Missus Byron de la Beckwith being admitted to the
(17:44):
hospital pretty often, at least once a year for most
of the late fifties and early sixties. It rarely said
why a broken ankle once an unspecified operation for treatment.
I mean she was being badly abused at home and
her drinking was getting so severe that she sometimes needed
(18:07):
a few days in the hospital to get right again.
According to Read Massingill's book, this visit was for a
bladder in kidney infection. He brought her flowers and hoped
that would be enough to bring her home again.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
She left because she was afraid he would kill her.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
He didn't know the FBI was closing in on him,
But once the FBI squeezed Beckwith's name out of Duck
Goza as the man he traded the rifle scope to,
they were able to match the prinkloscope with Beckwith's military records,
and it was the FBI who made the arrest without
even trying to get cooperation from the local police, for
fear that someone on the fore sympathetic to Beckwith's cause
(19:03):
would tip him off. The last thing they needed was
a manhunt. But here we run into a problem we've
had before on this show. Murder isn't a federal crime.
I mean it can be in really specific circumstances. There
are certain things you can do that make it a
(19:24):
federal crime, like if you do it at the airport
or on a ship at sea, or during a bank robbery.
But generally the Feds aren't trying murder cases, and this
is a murder case, isn't it. The FBI wants very
badly to arrest Byron Della Beckwi, but you have to
(19:47):
charge someone with a crime to arrest them. On Saturday morning,
June twenty second, nineteen sixty three, ten days after Medgravers
was killed, the FEDS were desperate to come up with
something they could put in front of a judge. They
knew who killed Medgar Evers, but now they had to
(20:08):
decide what he might be guilty of. The assistant director
of the FBI tried to call the Assistant Attorney General,
but he was tied up in a meeting with Martin
Luther King, Junior. So the call was patched through to
the head of the DOJ Civil Rights Division. But the
matter was so pressing that the Assistant Attorney General was
pulled out of not only that meeting with MLK, but
(20:28):
someone interrupted a meeting he was having with the President
of the United States to get him back on the
phone again later to hammer out some of the details.
They were going to charge Beck with under Section two
forty one of time to eighteen conspiracy to violate civil rights.
It's not murder, but it's federal. The US attorney tasked
(20:53):
with writing the complaint thought it was weak. They called
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy at home morning to try
and get his help, and he said the same thing.
This isn't going to survive a courtroom. He can't charge
someone with conspiracy without co conspirators. First of all. They
(21:13):
went back and forth all morning, and eventually they had
to call j Edgar Hoover. That's actually kind of insane
to think about. I mean, look at the order of
operations here. They're pulling the assistant ag out of a
meeting with the actual president. They called the Attorney General
at home on a weekend morning. They lit up the
whole damn phone tree all up and down the f
(21:33):
behind the DOJ. Before anyone was willing to brave bothering
j Edgar Hoover on a Saturday. I had no idea
he had such incredible work life boundaries. I don't think
any of them ever said as much, not outright, but
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there doesn't seem to have ever been any actual intention
to prosecute this charge. They spent hours going back and
forth about what the charge should be and how the
complaint should be written, but they weren't going to prosecute this.
They knew it was thin when they wrote the complaint,
but it was enough for a judge to issue an
(22:14):
arrest warrant, and that's all they needed. Once Beckwith was
in custody, they turned him over to Jackson County. Jackson
County wasn't ready to file a murder case, but now
they don't really have a choice. The FEDS had just
made this big, high profile civil rights arrest. It's in
the news Byron de la Beckwith is the assassin, and
(22:37):
now he's in their custody and they have to do
something with him. I think what happened here is that
j Edgar Hoover needed a win, and this seems like
it was a really messy way to get one. This way,
the FBI gets credit for solving the case, but the
federal government isn't stuck with the burden of prosecuting it.
(23:01):
Arresting Beckwith gave the bureau something to point to. They
can say, see, see, look what we did. We care
about civil rights, We're looking out for civil rights activists.
We solved this one. We got the bad guy, we
put them in handcuffs. Look, there are photos to prove it.
The FBI had delivered Medgar Evers's assassin to the proper authorities,
(23:23):
whatever justice looked like after that, But that was out
of their hands. It's a state matter. What more do
you want from them? It might sound like I'm reading
a lot of emotion in some dry old FBI memos
with Hoover's initials in the corner, but there's a surprisingly
robust paper trail for j Edgar Hoover's fragile ego. When
(23:48):
the story of the arrest first hit the news, one
of Hoover's closest advisors circulated a memo noting that across
all outlets quote in all instances, we received full credit
for the arrest, and the FBI wasn't just waiting around
for reporters to get the story. Members of Hoover's inner
(24:08):
circle personally reached out to journalists, specifically at major black
publications to make sure they had the bureau's version of events.
Within hours of the arrest, Hoover received a memo but
a call made to the editor of The Afro American,
a long running black run newspaper in Baltimore, informing him
(24:29):
of Beckwith's arrest. According to the memo, the paper's editor
got emotional and said, thank God for the FBI quote.
I think this best typifies the reaction responsible Negro elements
throughout the country will have as a result of our
work in this matter. The memo continues at the bottom
(24:51):
of the page, Hoover wrote, a job well handled. If
you've ever looked through an old FBI file, well you
know they're like forty to eighty percent old newspaper clipping.
Sometimes it'll just be a handful of memos, but most
of the pages aren't. Just articles that have been physically
(25:13):
cut out of a newspaper, laid down on a piece
of plane paper and run through a xerox machine. It
was someone's job to cut out every article about whatever
the file was on, and if it was an issue
Hoover cared about, they all crossed his desk. He must
have been looking at a thousand articles a day, so
you know. In June of nineteen sixty three, he's reviewing
(25:38):
all of the clippings about Beck with the rest. One
of those stories had the headline Ever's brother Comma wife
praise FBI. At the bottom of this one, Hoover directed
his secretary to send a copy directly to Robert F. Kennedy.
He was pleased with himself, and when Hoover met with
(25:59):
meta Ker's brother, Charles Evers a year later in nineteen
sixty four, he scolded him for not being more grateful
that the FBI had solved the case. Getting credit for
this one mattered to him in a really profound way,
and he was genuinely perturbed that any black person anywhere
(26:21):
would have the goal to speak an unkind word about
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, after all he'd done for them.
After his meeting with Charles Evers, Hoover sat down and
wrote a letter to the President to complain about it,
writing quote I specifically made the point that the FBI
had solved the murder of his brother at great cost
(26:42):
and sacrifice, Yet we never hesitated in our quest for
a solution. I added that despite this hard earned success,
a number of mister Evers followers, both before and after
the solution of the murder, have unjustly criticized the FBI.
I told him that such tactics are divisive and do
(27:03):
nothing to resolve the troublesome issues confronting the American people today. Truly,
any episode that takes place during the year that jay
Ed car Hoover was alive, he is the villain of
the episode. This man's crimes are countless. Keeping the Jackson
(27:23):
police in the dark so they could pull a pr
stunt to quell criticism of the bureau's record on civil
rights cases was a pretty dirty move. But regardless of
how they ended up there, they were probably right to
drop those federal charges. I mean, I don't think they
should have filed them in the first place if they
were just going to drop them because they knew they
(27:44):
wouldn't stick. But at least they dropped them because the
case they had in June of nineteen sixty three probably
would not have survived its first trip in front of
a judge if they had tried to bring a federal
civil rights conspiracy case, and that wouldn't have set a
great press for this kind of application of that particular statute,
(28:04):
which is one they would go on to use successfully
in some other civil rights cases. But again, don't give
Hoover any credit here, because he did not go out
of his way to get this case refiled when informants
started surfacing information that would have supported a conspiracy charge.
(28:25):
In July, a grand jury and Jackson indicted Beckwey on
the murder charge, and as soon as those state murder
charges were filed, the DOJ dropped their federal civil rights case.
There weren't going to be any federal charges. His home
was searched. They found a receipt for a purchase he'd
made for thirty six ammunition. There were a lot of
(28:47):
guns in the house, but none that could fire a
bullet of that caliber. He bought the ammunition the day
before he traded Goza for the scope, which would have
been four weeks before the murder and a week or
so after his wife left him. His car was impounded
as evidence, and at the jail a doctor made a
(29:08):
note of a semi circular injury above his right eye.
He toook that half moon bruise and kept following the
curve until it made a full circle would be just
about exactly the size and shape of the eyepiece on
the rifle scope. The Citizens Council of Greenwood quickly organized
(29:29):
a defense fund for Beckwith the Citizen's Council proper. The
organization itself never made an official statement on Beckwith's membership
in the group, but they didn't really have to. Everybody
knew him, and the flyers were printed on the same
printing press that churned out copies of Judge Braddy's Black
Monday pamphlet. The fund was chaired by the local bank president,
(29:53):
a prominent member of the citizens Council, and a city
commissioner allowed the fund to use his envelope addressing machine
to get the funds. Citations sent out quickly, and they
were sent out to the Citizens Council mailing list, along
with the membership lists of every other group. Beckwith had
added to his strange resume over the last decade, and
(30:13):
the money poured in. I mean money was no object.
Beckwith quickly retained a trio of attorneys party Lot, Stanny Sanders,
and Hugh Cunningham. Party Lot was the Greenwood City Attorney
and the former president of the Greenwood Citizens Council. Stanny Sanders,
(30:35):
also a Citizens Council member, was a former prosecutor. In
nineteen fifty five, he failed to convince a grand jury
to indict Roy Bryant and John Mylam for kidnapping Emmett Till.
The murder in that case was tried in a neighboring
county where the boy's body was found, but Brian and
(30:55):
Mylam abducted Emmett Till in Lafleor. Grand jury proceedings are sealed,
so I guess it's impossible to tell you for sure
how hard Stanny Sanders fought for that indictment, but he
didn't get it, and it's not hard to get an indictment.
He didn't even try to indict Carolyn Bryant, the woman
(31:18):
whose false allegation led to the brutal murder, and a
year later, in nineteen fifty six, Stannie Sanders was the
day who closed the case on George Lee's murder in Belzona.
That's when we talked about a few weeks ago. He
was a reverend who let his local NAACP chapter and
after refusing to bow to Citizens Council demands that he
(31:39):
stopped registering black voters, he was shot in the face.
The local sheriff declared his death to be a car accident,
but Medgar Ever's involvement in the case brought enough federal
scrutiny to force the county to pretend to investigate it
as a murder. They slow walked the investigation for a
(32:00):
year before Stanny Sanders closed the file, writing that there
just wasn't enough evidence to present this murder to a
grand jury, and according to one FBI memo, Sanders told
an FBI agent that even if there were enough evidence
to indict, they wouldn't do it anyway. Joe David Watson,
(32:20):
a local citizens Council member and one of the men
who almost certainly murdered George Lee, had recently been arrested
for firing a gun through the front window of a
black man's home, and in that case, Stanny Sanders declined
to even attempt to get an indictment. And the cases
of Emmett Till and George Lee are just the lynching
(32:42):
cases I happened to recognize his name in connection with
because I'd previously read about them specifically, Maybe there were
other lynchings of this man ignored as a DA in
Mississippi in the fifties. They'll have to use your imagination.
(33:13):
The third attorney Beckwe hired for his murder trial was
Hugh Cunningham. Cunningham ran a law firm with his longtime
law partner, Ross Barnett. Barnett obviously didn't have time for
private practice during his term as governor of Mississippi from
nineteen sixty to nineteen sixty four, but his term ended
just days before Beckworth's trial began. Obviously, Beckwith hoped that
(33:37):
meant Ross Barnett would join the team, but he never
officially entered an appearance in the case, although he did
attend almost every day of the trial. Imagine that this
man was the governor a few days ago, and now
he's making a big show of walking into the courtroom
(33:58):
every morning, strutting out to the defense table to chat
with his law partner, and clapping the defendant on the
back like he's an old pal. On the final day
of the trial, he made a big show of shaking
Beckwith's hand in front of the entire courtroom. It was
clear what sort of outcome the former governor was looking
for here. In the lead up to his first trial,
(34:22):
Beckwith lived like a king to the extent that you
can live like a king in a county jail. But
he was afforded every possible luxury. He received an endless
stream of visitors, like he was entertaining social callers in
the parlor at a plantation house. The defense fund was
racking up tens of thousands of dollars in donations, and
(34:44):
he assured his wife that when this was all over,
when he was finally acquitted, there would be more than
enough money left over for a lavish international vacation. They
deserved it, after all, they were not divorced. They had
divorced twice before, but they were not currently divorced at
(35:04):
this time. She'd moved out shortly before the murder and
gotten her own apartment, so they were sort of in limbo,
and when he visited her in the hospital a few
days before his arrest, he was trying to get her
to move home. I don't know if she would have,
but will never know because by the time she was
(35:24):
well enough to go home, he wasn't there. He was
in jail, so she kept her apartment. Those first few
months after the arrests were hard on Willie. She didn't
know what was true. She didn't know who to trust.
She was getting upsetting calls and letters from people who
(35:45):
loved her husband and people who hated him, And even worse,
her husband was sending her letters every day, Some of
them were as long as thirty pages. He was acting
like their reconciliation was a given, that of course she'd
take him back, of course she would support him. He
(36:07):
needed her right now, He needed someone to take care
of all these errands and tasks for him on the outside.
The stress of it was all too much, and she
was hospitalized again after a particularly severe binge drinking episode.
Shortly after his arrest, Beckweth was briefly confined in a
(36:27):
statemental hospital. He wasn't presenting an insanity defense. The state
was insisting that he should. Even the judge who granted
the motion admitted he'd never actually heard of a case
where the state was the one to raise the issue
over defense objections, but he agreed it could be helpful
(36:49):
to get a psychiatric evaluation. And again, this is one
of those points in this story where I'm not confident
I know what to make of this. Can't find anything
definitive that explains the prosecutor's thinking. Here, but if you
want to join me out here on this limb. It
kind of feels like the DA was hoping to avoid
(37:11):
having to try the case. I mean, the FBI forced
their hand with that big public arrest. They didn't have
a choice. They had to indict Byronila Beckwe for murder.
But if they actually tried the case, if they put
on a real case, there was a risk that he
would be convicted. The facts were pretty damning. But if
(37:36):
you have a court order that says he's insane, well
that resolves the situation without having to solve the problem.
Mississippi doesn't have a racism problem. This isn't a civil
rights issue, this isn't an indictment of our current political system.
It's just a crazy guy and we can all forget
about it. Freak accident couldn't be helped, nothing to do
(37:59):
with us. And as we discussed last week, there were
plenty of cases in the nineteen sixties where people with
what might be considered extreme political views were forcibly institutionalized
for them. Typically was people on the other end of
the spectrum, but the idea existed you could just park
(38:20):
him in a hospital and not have to address what
he did and why. But beck With and his attorneys
fought the commitment order tooth and nail. He was quickly released,
and ultimately the issue made it all the way to
the Mississippi Supreme Court, who ruled in his favor. After
(38:41):
the brief detour on the psych ward in the fall
of nineteen sixty three, he was locked up in the
Rankin County jail. And I think there those few months
in that jail cell, I think that's the only time
Byron de la beckwe With truly experienced happiness. The warden
would let him out for walks outside. The sheriff would
(39:03):
take him on field trips to town. The wives of
local businessmen brought him home cooked meals, and fanmail poured in,
more often than not with a little cash tucked inside.
He was a hero. He was finally the hero of
his own story. He could talk and talk and write
(39:24):
his letters, and his letters were published, and people listened
to his stories, and they came to see him, and
they gave him gifts, and they were proud of him.
He was a hero. He publicly maintained his innocence, of course,
but that didn't stop him from boasting about how nobly
he was suffering for the cause. In his jail cell,
(39:49):
he had a radio, television, a typewriter, some exercise equipment, candy, cigars,
and the endless admiration of racists all over Mississippi he
ever wanted, and, as read massing Gill notes in his book,
while Beckwith is publicly entering is not guilty plea, none
(40:10):
of his private correspondents actually insists on his innocence. In
letters that the author was able to review. He's not
openly admitting that he did it, but he's not saying
he didn't, which I don't know. I think that would
come up for me if I were in a jail
cell awaiting trial for something I didn't do. As the
(40:36):
trial date drew nearer, Beckwith was transferred to the Hines
County Jail and Jackson. In November of nineteen sixty three,
Willie had gotten out of the hospital again and she
was now living in the greenwoodlefloor hotel. She was too
afraid to go back to her apartment, and she had
no interest in living in the crumbling old Beckweth house.
She barely left the little hotel room, and she drank
(40:57):
herself to sleep every night, dreading her occasional visits to
see her husband in jail. The sheriff in Hines County
allowed conjugal visits, and Beckweth insisted on trying, despite his
impotence and her disinterest. Of course, he was completely confident
(41:17):
that he would be acquitted. Why shouldn't he be even
if he did do it, which he says he didn't.
But if he did, was it really that bad? Is
it really even illegal to kill a black person? Surely,
even if it's illegal, it's not wrong, right. He wasn't worried,
(41:40):
and his attorneys did almost no trial prep with him
before the January nineteen sixty four trial. There was no
discussion of what happens if they vote to convict, because
they would never no one ever had. When the trial
started at the end of January nineteen sixty four, District
(42:00):
Attorney William Waller asked prospective jurors, do you believe it's
a crime for a white man to kill a negro
in Mississippi. He had to ask this because the answer
might be no, and the question did manage to weed
out a handful of jurors, but there was no way
around an all white jury. There were only seven black
(42:23):
men in a jury pool of one hundred and nine.
Beckwith was confident. He was downright cocky. He laughed and
smiled with reporters. During testimony, he would turn in his
seat so the sketch artist could get a better look
at his face, grinned at the audience, and during recesses
he'd roam around and chat with his supporters. He wasn't bothered,
(42:48):
but the evidence was pretty strong the state put on
their case. The rifle was found at the scene. It
had been wiped clean of fingerprints, but whoever wiped it
down missed a spot under the scope, leaving a single
perfect match to Byron Dilla Beckwith. The jury heard from
the man who traded him the rifle and the man
(43:10):
who traded him the scope. The serial number on the
rifle at the crime scene matched sales records with the
guns manufacturer. Thorn McIntyre had been that gun's original owner,
and he says he traded it to Byron Della Beckwith.
Duck Goes's Tackle Shop had the only six ex Golden
Hawk scope for sale in all of Mississippi, and he
(43:31):
traded it to Byron Della Beckwith. Beckwith had been picked
out of a lineup by a cab driver who testified
that a few days before the murder, Beckwith approached him
outside of a bus station and asked if he knew
where Medgar Evers lived. A second cab driver corroborated that testimony,
saying he'd witnessed the exchange and recalled Beckworth, saying I
(43:54):
gotta find out where he lives. In a couple of days.
Captain Hargrove testified about lifting the fingerprint. An FBI analyst
testified about matching it to Beckwith. A young woman who
lived in the neighborhood testified that she'd been out for
a walk that night when she heard a gunshot and
then the sound of someone running away through that dense
brush right where the rifle was later found. Beckwith's boss
(44:17):
testified to the exact description of Beckwith's very recognizable company car.
A car hop from the drive in where multiple witnesses
saw a car matching the description of Beckwith's company car.
So the car backed into a spot at the edge
of the lot that evening and the man did not
flash his lights for service. A second car hop at
this establishment, just a few hundred yards from the ever's home,
(44:38):
said she remembered seeing that car in the lot past midnight.
A young man visiting a friend in the ever's neighborhood
the night of the murder said he saw that car
driving slowly down the street earlier in the evening. A
teenage boy testified to seeing that car parked in the
lot of a nearby store several days before the murder,
(44:58):
and every single one of the witnesses said the same thing.
They remembered the car because of its unusually long antenna.
His company car was equipped with a two way radio
for communicating with the office while he was out on
sales calls. It's the kind of radio cop carsad. The
(45:20):
people in this black neighborhood noticed this car because they
all thought they were being watched by an undercover cop.
In his defense, Beckwith presented an alibi. Two officers from
the Greenwood Police Department testified that they remembered seeing him
(45:42):
he was getting gas at a station in Greenwood around
one am. A volunteer policeman from Greenwood testified that he
saw Beckwith getting gas at that same service station in
Greenwood at eleven forty five pm. Both of these things
can't be true, but if either were true, he couldn't
(46:03):
have been an hour and a half away in Jackson
at midnight. So they're all trying to put forth an alibi,
but they conflict, and oddly none of these alibi witnesses
came forward before the trial. Detectives from Jackson had gone
to Greenwood during the investigation. They'd spoken to those two
(46:23):
cops specifically, but neither of them mentioned at the time
that Beckwick couldn't be guilty because they saw him that night.
I guess they just didn't remember they had an alibi
for their friend until he'd spent six months in jail.
This is the same Greenwood police department that would show
(46:45):
up at his home and arrest his wife after he
beat her on the stand. The officers couldn't actually remember
very much at all. I mean, they remembered the alibi part.
They remembered that crystal clear. They remembered everything about this
chance encounter they had with this man they said they
(47:05):
did not know very well at a gas station. They
remembered exactly what Byron de la Beckwith was doing at
the gas station at one five am on June twelfth,
nineteen sixty three. But they couldn't You couldn't remember anything
else about that day or any other day. When asked
if there was anyone else they saw that night, what
else did you do on June twelfth, nineteen sixty three,
(47:26):
they couldn't think of a single other person they saw
or any other place they went. They just remembered the
alibi part. They couldn't even name any other specific time
they'd ever run into Byron de la Beckwith. Surely, if
seeing him is so memorable, you would have additional specific
memories of seeing him around town. But the only clear
(47:48):
and specific memory they had was the exact moment that
Beckwith needed for an alibi, which is a remarkable coincidence,
because why would they remember it at all? Think about it.
If Beckwith had been arrested the very next morning, sure right,
you'd wake up, you'd see the news, and you'd say, wow,
that's crazy. I just saw him a few hours ago,
(48:10):
and that would be memorable. But he wasn't arrested until
ten days later. So on the night they allegedly saw
a guy they allegedly don't even know very well, they
happened to commit it to memory for no notable reason
at all. Apparently, the jury found that very convincing. Beckwith
(48:32):
also took the stand himself to swear the gun had
been stolen from his house before the murder, but the
window of time during which that could have occurred is
very small. A coworker testified that he'd come to work
on Monday, June tenth with that circular bruise already on
his eye, so he's admitting the injury is from the
(48:53):
rifle scope. He's not contesting that, yes, this bruise is
from the rifle scope hitting him in the face while
he was using the gun for target practice on Sunday
before the murder. He was just at the range, lawfully
using his gun. So his testimony is that sometime between
Sunday when he was using the gun of the range
(49:14):
and Tuesday when a murderer took it to Jackson, the
real killer must have come into his house and robbed him,
taking exactly one thing and nothing else. Despite the several
other guns that would have been in the immediate vicinity,
including guns that were more valuable, you could never predict
(49:37):
what a Jerry's gonna do. Maybe they really did find
a couple of cops hazy memory of seeing their buddy
getting gas on a random Tuesday night. More convincing than
a parade of witnesses who very specifically remembered seeing him
somewhere else, even more convincing than a murder weapon that
belonged to him and had his fingerprints on it. Or
(49:57):
maybe they didn't care, but they didn't acquit. The afternoon
came and went without a verdict. The judge kept them
past nine pm, just hoping they would finish up, but
they had to be sent to a hotel for the night,
and on February seventh, nineteen sixty four, the judge was
(50:19):
forced to declare a mistrial. The jury had argued and voted,
and argued and voted. They'd had twenty ballots in the
deliberation room. They were screaming at each other. They were
having to take breaks to take walks because they were
getting so angry. Because five jurors refused to back down,
they would not vote to acquit. Beckwith supporters quietly canceled
(50:42):
the party they'd already planned to celebrate the acquittal, and
Byron Della Beckwith went back to jail. But now it's
not fun. It wasn't a jailhouse vacation with a homecoming
party at the end. Now the possibility of capital punishment
felt very real. Sure it was seven to five in
(51:02):
favor of acquittal. Maybe they could do better, but maybe
they couldn't, and they could send him to the gas
chamber for this. His lawyers were frustrated with his antics.
No more letter writing, no more goofing off, no more
hamming it up with the reporters and goofing off in
the courtroom. You need to get serious about this. They
sent him the trial transcript and ordered him to memorize
(51:25):
his testimony because he's locked in now. He's going to
have to give identical answers at the next trial. The
steady stream of visitors slowed down. Cash stopped coming in
the mail. The businessman's wives weren't bringing him steak dinners anymore.
He didn't have a TV in his cell, and he
was starting to get paranoid. His attorneys were as surprised
(51:49):
as anyone at the mistrial. They put on. The case
that they had wasn't a great one, but there wasn't
any other defense to put on.
Speaker 1 (51:59):
That was his.
Speaker 2 (52:00):
It should have been enough. They weren't going to get
a better case, but maybe they could get better jurors
in between. Byron de la Beckwith's first murder trial in
January and his second murder trial in April. Two things changed.
(52:20):
The Ku Klux Klan officially returned to Mississippi, and the
Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission quietly joined Beckwith's defense team. In
April of nineteen sixty four, the jury deadlocked again, this
time with just four holdouts. Voting guilty. Klansmen roughing up
witnesses and intimidating spectators didn't change the outcome. Neither did
(52:44):
state sponsor jury tampering. He still couldn't get acquitted, but
he could go home. The DA didn't have the stomach
for a third trial. When Byron Dela Beckwith got home
to Greenwood and April of nineteen sixty four, there was
a huge banner hanging from a highway overpath on the
outskirts of town welcome home delay It read he was
(53:10):
a freeman. The government paid him a hefty twenty five
thousand dollars to buy his dilapidated old house so they
could use the land for a post office. He divorced
his wife for a third and final time, and he
threw himself full time into clan organizing. He had a
newly sung life. He was finally somebody he'd killed for
(53:34):
segregation and in the clan that earned him the respect
he'd always graved. It will be decades before the truth
came out about how many murders j Edgar Hoover was
willing to let go unpunished to keep his network of
criminal informants in the field, and just how badly the
(53:54):
state of Mississippi wanted to keep Medgar Ever's killer out
of prison. Weird Little Guys it's a production of Coolshoe
(54:16):
Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me,
Molly Hunger. Our executive producers are Sophie lec Treman and
Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented
Worry Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at
gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I
probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange
conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the
(54:39):
Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going
to make you one of my red Little Guys
Cool zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
They offered him a seat in the rental car. The
prosecutor and his investigator had rented the sort of practical
sedan that government employees can expense for a work trip,
and they'd cleared out the entire back seat for the
young man who'd insisted on accompanying them. There was plenty
of room for him in the car, but he wanted
(00:27):
to ride with his father. That's why he was there,
wasn't it. He hadn't seen his father in twenty eight years,
almost exactly twenty eight years, as a matter of fact.
So on June third, nineteen ninety one, Van Evers climbed
into the back of the hearse idling beside his father's
(00:48):
empty grave in Arlington National Cemetery, and he lay there
on the floor next to his father's coffin for eight hours,
all the way to Albany. The next morning, before the
autopsy began, the little crowd of doctors and lawyers and
investigators stood in silence as Medgar Evers's youngest son reached
(01:11):
out and gently stroked his father's hair. Somehow, he looked
exactly as he had the day he was buried in
nineteen sixty three, and nearly three decades later, he was
still waiting for justice. Van Evers was three years old
(01:33):
on June twelfth, nineteen sixty three. He was asleep long
before midnight that night. I couldn't tell you whether it
was the sound of the assassin's rifle, the shattering glass
in the living room window, or his mother's screams that
woke him, but his older siblings, Reena and Daryl sprinted
into action. They did exactly what their daddy taught them
(01:55):
to do if they ever heard gunfire outside the family home.
Grabbed their baby brother and dragged him along as they
crawled across the carpet towards their parents' bathroom. They stayed low,
beneath the sight of anyone firing through a window, just
like they had in the drills their father had insisted on.
They tried to make it fun, make it a game,
(02:19):
but even as young as they were, they understood the stakes,
and he would have been proud of them that night.
They moved so fast, and they stayed so low, and
then got baby Van into the big iron bathtub. That's
where they'd be safe, their father told them, from gunshots
or flames, they'd be safe in the tub. And they
(02:43):
were supposed to stay in the tub until someone came
and got them. But Rina and Darryl, just eight and
nine years old that night, heard their mother screams from
the driveway and ran to her side. Marily Evers knew
what she would see when she switched on the light
in the car port, but she did it anyway. Her husband, Medgar,
had been shot in the back. He'd tried desperately to
(03:07):
crawl toward the door, toward his family to get home.
His keys were still in his hand, and somewhere in
the darkness across the street, his assassin ran, Daddy, please,
please get up, daddy. Eight year old Rena screamed as
(03:28):
the pool of her father's blood spread across the driveway.
Medgar Effers died that night, and thirty one years later,
as Rena walked out of a Hinz County courthouse, she
looked up to the sky and she spoke to her
father again. This time she whispered, Hi, Daddy, we did it.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Byron de la becku With and finally, at long last
been convicted of murder. I'm Molly Conger and this is weird, little.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Guys Byron Della Beckwith was tried for the murder of
(04:28):
Medgar Evers three times, not because there was ever any
confusion about who killed Medgar Evers, but because when he
was tried in nineteen sixty four, an all white jury
in Mississippi had never convicted a white man for killing
a black man, and they weren't about to start. We
(04:50):
left off last week in the morning of the murder
June eleventh, nineteen sixty three. When the sun rose on
June twelfth, Medgar Evers was dead, Jackson, Mississippi was a
tinder box, and Byron de la Beckwith went to work
like nothing had changed. Medgar Evers spent the last evening
(05:13):
of his life in meetings as the NAACP Field Secretary
for the State of Mississippi. He was working around the
clock in nineteen sixty three as the fight for civil
rights escalated that year. Despite a recent court injunction prohibiting
demonstrations in Jackson, hundreds of people marched for Medgar the
day he died. Early in the day, a group of
(05:35):
ministers conducting a quiet march of public mourning were arrested
for demonstrating without a permit. In that afternoon, nearly two
hundred demonstrators, mostly young people were arrested when their march
was met by an equally large contingent of local and
state police. One of the arrested demonstrators, John Salter, was
(05:57):
beaten so badly by police that he was taken into
custody unconscious. Salter, professor at Tugaloo College, would have still
been bruised from the last time he'd been beaten bloody.
Just two weeks earlier, he'd accompanied the two students who
staged to sit in at the Woolworth's lunch counter. Within
minutes of taking his seat at the counter next to
(06:17):
a young black woman, the professor was punched in the
face by someone in the crowd wearing brass knuckles. And
that night, less than twenty four hours after her husband
was assassinated in her front yard, Merly Ever spoke to
a crowd of hundreds at the Pearl Street African Methodist
Episcopal Church. Nothing can bring Medger back, she said, but
(06:43):
the cause can live on. At the Evers home, detectives
found the murder weapon by sunrise. He'd left it behind.
A detective who was about the same height as med Grever's,
stood next to the car where ever it had been
standing when he was shot. Another detective stood inside and
(07:05):
shown his flashlight at him through the bullet hole in
the living room window, allowing the beam of his flashlight
to mimic the trajectory of the bullet. When the officer
in the driveway stepped out of the light, the beam
traveled across the street and illuminated a brushy spot amidst
some trees. There in the honeysuckle thicket beneath the sweetgum
(07:26):
trees was a thirty six end peeled rifle with a
powerful scope mounted on top. Someone had snapped a small
tree branch at about eye level, leaving a little window
in the foliage, and there was a scrape on the
tree where the rifle had been steadied. It was a
sniper's nest. I doubt by Arondella. Beckwayth got much sleep
(07:50):
that night. It's about an hour and a half dry
from Jackson to the Greenwood, so he couldn't have been
home before two am, and according to his work log,
he was tracking miage for his first sales call of
the day by six forty five am. In the summer
of nineteen sixty three, Beckwith was living in the crumbling
old family mansion alone the uncle who'd raised him had died.
(08:14):
His wife had left him again, and this time she
took their son with her. He was all alone in
this big, filthy house. He'd never actually lived alone before,
had always been a maid or a wife. He almost
certainly didn't even know how to cook breakfast, but he
(08:37):
couldn't have even if he'd wanted to. The house was
falling apart. So he was out the door early that morning,
as he usually was, and he visited several cotton plantations
in the tiny town of Money, Mississippi, that day, but
he didn't make any sales. If you've heard of Money, Mississippi,
you're either from Mississippi or you know that the little
(09:00):
town where Emmett Till was visiting relatives when he was
lynched in nineteen fifty five. By the time Beckwith got
home that evening, the afternoon edition of the Greenwood Commonwealth
had bad news for him. The story had broken midday
that the Jackson police found a single perfect fingerprint on
(09:23):
the rifle scope, and then on June thirteenth, papers all
over the country ran a photo of the rifle. They
were hoping someone might recognize the gun or the Japanese
made rifle scope, noting that the site had been mounted
in a slightly unusual way, so the gunsmith who did
the work would probably remember the job. Miraculously, someone did
(09:46):
recognize the gun right away. On June thirteenth, Thorne McIntyre,
a farmer in Idabina, called the Jackson Police that very night.
He couldn't be completely sure, but the rifle he saw
in the paper looked an awful lot like when he'd
(10:08):
traded to a salesman from Greenwood a few years back.
Beckwith that was his name, A real segregation fanatic, he recalled,
very radical on this racial problem. He didn't want to
get mixed up in any of this, and he hoped
they could keep his name out of it. But he
made the call because he recognized the gun. Jackson Police
(10:33):
Captain Ralph Hargrove wrote the tip down, but he didn't
tell anyone. He didn't mention it to the FBI, although
they'd already stepped in to assist in processing the weapon
and the print. This is odd, I mean, the FBI
hadn't assumed jurisdiction. The case belonged to the Jackson Police,
(10:54):
so because he didn't have to tell them, but he
knew they had a fingerprint, and now he had a name,
So why wouldn't he tell them? I mean, it looks bad.
It looks really bad. The day after the murder, the
Jackson police get a tip from someone who remembers selling
(11:18):
the murder weapon. He gave you the guy's name, and
you didn't You didn't do anything with it at all.
I mean, why not tell the FBI right away so
they could compare the fingerprint. It would have been easy
to do because Beckwith's fingerprints would have been on file
from his time in the Marines. But I don't think
(11:41):
this particular piece actually screams cover up. I mean, there
will be parts of the story that do, but I don't.
I don't know that this does as bad as it
looks because Captain Hargrove, the detective who took the farmer's
tip about Beckwith, is the same detective who found the
fingerprint in the first place. He's the one who found, lifted,
(12:04):
and ultimately identified the print. So if he were trying
to help someone get away with murder, it would have
been much easier to just botch the job lifting the print, right,
just don't tell anyone you found the print or smudge
it this one, I think we can chalk up to
(12:26):
displain old dick measuring. The Jackson police wanted to solve
it their own way without the FBI taking any credit,
and the mistrust went both ways. While the Jackson Police
worked it their way, the FBI focused on the scope.
The Japanese manufactured rifle scope only had one US based importer.
(12:51):
Records from the United Binocular Company quickly narrowed the field.
There were only two hundred dealers in the United States
selling Golden Hawk rifle scopes, and only a few dozen
had been sold anywhere in the Southeastern United States, and
only one of this particular site had been sold in
(13:12):
the state of Mississippi. Duck Goza of Duck's Tackle Shop
did not come forward on his own. He read the
description in the newspaper, just like Thorn McIntyre. But Thorn
McIntyre called in a hunch about a truthfully pretty generic rifle,
and I think Duck Goza had to have known he
(13:35):
was the only guy in Laflora County, Mississippi selling fancy
Japanese rifle scopes. I found some classified ads from this
time period showing that these sites were selling for the
equivalent of a couple hundred dollars in today's money. They
weren't cheap, but it took three increasingly hostile visits from
the FBI before Duck could remember that he'd traded the
(13:58):
only six power Goldenhawk rifles spe in the state of Mississippi.
His old buddy, Byron de la Beckwith had come in
on May twelfth, and he'd traded two forty five caliber
pistols and some loose shotgun shells for the scope. As
the FBI and the Jackson police pursued their separate investigations,
(14:19):
Merley Evers buried her husband, and Byron de la Beckwith
tried to convince his wife to come home. Merleyan Medgar
Evers already owned side by side funeral plots at Black
Cemetery in Jackson, but NAACP leaders urged her to consider
the possibility of burrying him at Arlington National Cemetery in
(14:41):
Virginia instead. He was eligible. He was a decorated World
War Two veteran. In her book For Us the Living,
Murley wrote, I realized how selfish I was being to
on his grave near our home. I had shared Medgar
with others all of our marriage and much as I
(15:04):
regretted it. I'd known for years that he did not
belong to me alone. Reluctantly, she agreed to let her
husband's body keep working for the movement even in death.
He wasn't just Marley's husband, and Charles's brother, and Rena,
Daryl and Van's father. He wasn't just Medgraffs. He was
(15:27):
a symbol, now a martyr, and burying him at Arlington
was a powerful reminder that he'd died fighting for a
better country, a task that proved more dangerous than actually
fighting for this country at war. After the funeral at Arlington,
a massive affair with celebrity guests and endless speeches, Merley
(15:49):
and her two older children were invited to a private
audience with President Kennedy and a tour of the White House.
In the Oval Office, President Kennedy took her hand and
held it silently for a few moments. Finally he said,
how are you. In a book published just a few
(16:09):
years later, Murley wrote, I wanted to say that I
was dead inside, that my life had been snatched from me,
that I wished he could do something about it. Personally,
I wanted to say that my husband had fought for
his country, and he came back home to find he
still was not free and had died for his belief
that all Americans were entitled to first class citizenship. I
(16:32):
wanted to say that I knew that nothing could be
done about it, but I just said, fine, thank you, mister.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
President.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Kennedy's secretary, Evelyn Lincoln told Rina and Darryl that the
President's chair has a special power if you sit in
it and make one wish, it can come true. I'm
sure she meant, well, children love make believe in an
office is a boring place for little children. But what
(17:01):
a terrible promise to make to children who've just lost
their father. So hours after seeing his father's coffin lowered
into the ground, nine year old Darryl Evers climbed up
into the President's chair in the Oval Office, and he
said he wished his father had not died in vain.
(17:23):
Back home in Mississippi, on the day of Medgar Ever's funeral,
Byron de la Beckwith paid a visit to his estranged wife.
She'd been admitted to the hospital earlier that week. A
local newspaper used to be a terribly nosy thing. I
found scattered mentions in the social pages over the years
about Missus Byron de la Beckwith being admitted to the
(17:44):
hospital pretty often, at least once a year for most
of the late fifties and early sixties. It rarely said
why a broken ankle once an unspecified operation for treatment.
I mean she was being badly abused at home and
her drinking was getting so severe that she sometimes needed
(18:07):
a few days in the hospital to get right again.
According to Read Massingill's book, this visit was for a
bladder in kidney infection. He brought her flowers and hoped
that would be enough to bring her home again.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
She left because she was afraid he would kill her.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
He didn't know the FBI was closing in on him,
But once the FBI squeezed Beckwith's name out of Duck
Goza as the man he traded the rifle scope to,
they were able to match the prinkloscope with Beckwith's military records,
and it was the FBI who made the arrest without
even trying to get cooperation from the local police, for
fear that someone on the fore sympathetic to Beckwith's cause
(19:03):
would tip him off. The last thing they needed was
a manhunt. But here we run into a problem we've
had before on this show. Murder isn't a federal crime.
I mean it can be in really specific circumstances. There
are certain things you can do that make it a
(19:24):
federal crime, like if you do it at the airport
or on a ship at sea, or during a bank robbery.
But generally the Feds aren't trying murder cases, and this
is a murder case, isn't it. The FBI wants very
badly to arrest Byron Della Beckwi, but you have to
(19:47):
charge someone with a crime to arrest them. On Saturday morning,
June twenty second, nineteen sixty three, ten days after Medgravers
was killed, the FEDS were desperate to come up with
something they could put in front of a judge. They
knew who killed Medgar Evers, but now they had to
(20:08):
decide what he might be guilty of. The assistant director
of the FBI tried to call the Assistant Attorney General,
but he was tied up in a meeting with Martin
Luther King, Junior. So the call was patched through to
the head of the DOJ Civil Rights Division. But the
matter was so pressing that the Assistant Attorney General was
pulled out of not only that meeting with MLK, but
(20:28):
someone interrupted a meeting he was having with the President
of the United States to get him back on the
phone again later to hammer out some of the details.
They were going to charge Beck with under Section two
forty one of time to eighteen conspiracy to violate civil rights.
It's not murder, but it's federal. The US attorney tasked
(20:53):
with writing the complaint thought it was weak. They called
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy at home morning to try
and get his help, and he said the same thing.
This isn't going to survive a courtroom. He can't charge
someone with conspiracy without co conspirators. First of all. They
(21:13):
went back and forth all morning, and eventually they had
to call j Edgar Hoover. That's actually kind of insane
to think about. I mean, look at the order of
operations here. They're pulling the assistant ag out of a
meeting with the actual president. They called the Attorney General
at home on a weekend morning. They lit up the
whole damn phone tree all up and down the f
(21:33):
behind the DOJ. Before anyone was willing to brave bothering
j Edgar Hoover on a Saturday. I had no idea
he had such incredible work life boundaries. I don't think
any of them ever said as much, not outright, but
(21:54):
there doesn't seem to have ever been any actual intention
to prosecute this charge. They spent hours going back and
forth about what the charge should be and how the
complaint should be written, but they weren't going to prosecute this.
They knew it was thin when they wrote the complaint,
but it was enough for a judge to issue an
(22:14):
arrest warrant, and that's all they needed. Once Beckwith was
in custody, they turned him over to Jackson County. Jackson
County wasn't ready to file a murder case, but now
they don't really have a choice. The FEDS had just
made this big, high profile civil rights arrest. It's in
the news Byron de la Beckwith is the assassin, and
(22:37):
now he's in their custody and they have to do
something with him. I think what happened here is that
j Edgar Hoover needed a win, and this seems like
it was a really messy way to get one. This way,
the FBI gets credit for solving the case, but the
federal government isn't stuck with the burden of prosecuting it.
(23:01):
Arresting Beckwith gave the bureau something to point to. They
can say, see, see, look what we did. We care
about civil rights, We're looking out for civil rights activists.
We solved this one. We got the bad guy, we
put them in handcuffs. Look, there are photos to prove it.
The FBI had delivered Medgar Evers's assassin to the proper authorities,
(23:23):
whatever justice looked like after that, But that was out
of their hands. It's a state matter. What more do
you want from them? It might sound like I'm reading
a lot of emotion in some dry old FBI memos
with Hoover's initials in the corner, but there's a surprisingly
robust paper trail for j Edgar Hoover's fragile ego. When
(23:48):
the story of the arrest first hit the news, one
of Hoover's closest advisors circulated a memo noting that across
all outlets quote in all instances, we received full credit
for the arrest, and the FBI wasn't just waiting around
for reporters to get the story. Members of Hoover's inner
(24:08):
circle personally reached out to journalists, specifically at major black
publications to make sure they had the bureau's version of events.
Within hours of the arrest, Hoover received a memo but
a call made to the editor of The Afro American,
a long running black run newspaper in Baltimore, informing him
(24:29):
of Beckwith's arrest. According to the memo, the paper's editor
got emotional and said, thank God for the FBI quote.
I think this best typifies the reaction responsible Negro elements
throughout the country will have as a result of our
work in this matter. The memo continues at the bottom
(24:51):
of the page, Hoover wrote, a job well handled. If
you've ever looked through an old FBI file, well you
know they're like forty to eighty percent old newspaper clipping.
Sometimes it'll just be a handful of memos, but most
of the pages aren't. Just articles that have been physically
(25:13):
cut out of a newspaper, laid down on a piece
of plane paper and run through a xerox machine. It
was someone's job to cut out every article about whatever
the file was on, and if it was an issue
Hoover cared about, they all crossed his desk. He must
have been looking at a thousand articles a day, so
you know. In June of nineteen sixty three, he's reviewing
(25:38):
all of the clippings about Beck with the rest. One
of those stories had the headline Ever's brother Comma wife
praise FBI. At the bottom of this one, Hoover directed
his secretary to send a copy directly to Robert F. Kennedy.
He was pleased with himself, and when Hoover met with
(25:59):
meta Ker's brother, Charles Evers a year later in nineteen
sixty four, he scolded him for not being more grateful
that the FBI had solved the case. Getting credit for
this one mattered to him in a really profound way,
and he was genuinely perturbed that any black person anywhere
(26:21):
would have the goal to speak an unkind word about
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, after all he'd done for them.
After his meeting with Charles Evers, Hoover sat down and
wrote a letter to the President to complain about it,
writing quote I specifically made the point that the FBI
had solved the murder of his brother at great cost
(26:42):
and sacrifice, Yet we never hesitated in our quest for
a solution. I added that despite this hard earned success,
a number of mister Evers followers, both before and after
the solution of the murder, have unjustly criticized the FBI.
I told him that such tactics are divisive and do
(27:03):
nothing to resolve the troublesome issues confronting the American people today. Truly,
any episode that takes place during the year that jay
Ed car Hoover was alive, he is the villain of
the episode. This man's crimes are countless. Keeping the Jackson
(27:23):
police in the dark so they could pull a pr
stunt to quell criticism of the bureau's record on civil
rights cases was a pretty dirty move. But regardless of
how they ended up there, they were probably right to
drop those federal charges. I mean, I don't think they
should have filed them in the first place if they
were just going to drop them because they knew they
(27:44):
wouldn't stick. But at least they dropped them because the
case they had in June of nineteen sixty three probably
would not have survived its first trip in front of
a judge if they had tried to bring a federal
civil rights conspiracy case, and that wouldn't have set a
great press for this kind of application of that particular statute,
(28:04):
which is one they would go on to use successfully
in some other civil rights cases. But again, don't give
Hoover any credit here, because he did not go out
of his way to get this case refiled when informants
started surfacing information that would have supported a conspiracy charge.
(28:25):
In July, a grand jury and Jackson indicted Beckwey on
the murder charge, and as soon as those state murder
charges were filed, the DOJ dropped their federal civil rights case.
There weren't going to be any federal charges. His home
was searched. They found a receipt for a purchase he'd
made for thirty six ammunition. There were a lot of
(28:47):
guns in the house, but none that could fire a
bullet of that caliber. He bought the ammunition the day
before he traded Goza for the scope, which would have
been four weeks before the murder and a week or
so after his wife left him. His car was impounded
as evidence, and at the jail a doctor made a
(29:08):
note of a semi circular injury above his right eye.
He toook that half moon bruise and kept following the
curve until it made a full circle would be just
about exactly the size and shape of the eyepiece on
the rifle scope. The Citizens Council of Greenwood quickly organized
(29:29):
a defense fund for Beckwith the Citizen's Council proper. The
organization itself never made an official statement on Beckwith's membership
in the group, but they didn't really have to. Everybody
knew him, and the flyers were printed on the same
printing press that churned out copies of Judge Braddy's Black
Monday pamphlet. The fund was chaired by the local bank president,
(29:53):
a prominent member of the citizens Council, and a city
commissioner allowed the fund to use his envelope addressing machine
to get the funds. Citations sent out quickly, and they
were sent out to the Citizens Council mailing list, along
with the membership lists of every other group. Beckwith had
added to his strange resume over the last decade, and
(30:13):
the money poured in. I mean money was no object.
Beckwith quickly retained a trio of attorneys party Lot, Stanny Sanders,
and Hugh Cunningham. Party Lot was the Greenwood City Attorney
and the former president of the Greenwood Citizens Council. Stanny Sanders,
(30:35):
also a Citizens Council member, was a former prosecutor. In
nineteen fifty five, he failed to convince a grand jury
to indict Roy Bryant and John Mylam for kidnapping Emmett Till.
The murder in that case was tried in a neighboring
county where the boy's body was found, but Brian and
(30:55):
Mylam abducted Emmett Till in Lafleor. Grand jury proceedings are sealed,
so I guess it's impossible to tell you for sure
how hard Stanny Sanders fought for that indictment, but he
didn't get it, and it's not hard to get an indictment.
He didn't even try to indict Carolyn Bryant, the woman
(31:18):
whose false allegation led to the brutal murder, and a
year later, in nineteen fifty six, Stannie Sanders was the
day who closed the case on George Lee's murder in Belzona.
That's when we talked about a few weeks ago. He
was a reverend who let his local NAACP chapter and
after refusing to bow to Citizens Council demands that he
(31:39):
stopped registering black voters, he was shot in the face.
The local sheriff declared his death to be a car accident,
but Medgar Ever's involvement in the case brought enough federal
scrutiny to force the county to pretend to investigate it
as a murder. They slow walked the investigation for a
(32:00):
year before Stanny Sanders closed the file, writing that there
just wasn't enough evidence to present this murder to a
grand jury, and according to one FBI memo, Sanders told
an FBI agent that even if there were enough evidence
to indict, they wouldn't do it anyway. Joe David Watson,
(32:20):
a local citizens Council member and one of the men
who almost certainly murdered George Lee, had recently been arrested
for firing a gun through the front window of a
black man's home, and in that case, Stanny Sanders declined
to even attempt to get an indictment. And the cases
of Emmett Till and George Lee are just the lynching
(32:42):
cases I happened to recognize his name in connection with
because I'd previously read about them specifically, Maybe there were
other lynchings of this man ignored as a DA in
Mississippi in the fifties. They'll have to use your imagination.
(33:13):
The third attorney Beckwe hired for his murder trial was
Hugh Cunningham. Cunningham ran a law firm with his longtime
law partner, Ross Barnett. Barnett obviously didn't have time for
private practice during his term as governor of Mississippi from
nineteen sixty to nineteen sixty four, but his term ended
just days before Beckworth's trial began. Obviously, Beckwith hoped that
(33:37):
meant Ross Barnett would join the team, but he never
officially entered an appearance in the case, although he did
attend almost every day of the trial. Imagine that this
man was the governor a few days ago, and now
he's making a big show of walking into the courtroom
(33:58):
every morning, strutting out to the defense table to chat
with his law partner, and clapping the defendant on the
back like he's an old pal. On the final day
of the trial, he made a big show of shaking
Beckwith's hand in front of the entire courtroom. It was
clear what sort of outcome the former governor was looking
for here. In the lead up to his first trial,
(34:22):
Beckwith lived like a king to the extent that you
can live like a king in a county jail. But
he was afforded every possible luxury. He received an endless
stream of visitors, like he was entertaining social callers in
the parlor at a plantation house. The defense fund was
racking up tens of thousands of dollars in donations, and
(34:44):
he assured his wife that when this was all over,
when he was finally acquitted, there would be more than
enough money left over for a lavish international vacation. They
deserved it, after all, they were not divorced. They had
divorced twice before, but they were not currently divorced at
(35:04):
this time. She'd moved out shortly before the murder and
gotten her own apartment, so they were sort of in limbo,
and when he visited her in the hospital a few
days before his arrest, he was trying to get her
to move home. I don't know if she would have,
but will never know because by the time she was
(35:24):
well enough to go home, he wasn't there. He was
in jail, so she kept her apartment. Those first few
months after the arrests were hard on Willie. She didn't
know what was true. She didn't know who to trust.
She was getting upsetting calls and letters from people who
(35:45):
loved her husband and people who hated him, And even worse,
her husband was sending her letters every day, Some of
them were as long as thirty pages. He was acting
like their reconciliation was a given, that of course she'd
take him back, of course she would support him. He
(36:07):
needed her right now, He needed someone to take care
of all these errands and tasks for him on the outside.
The stress of it was all too much, and she
was hospitalized again after a particularly severe binge drinking episode.
Shortly after his arrest, Beckweth was briefly confined in a
(36:27):
statemental hospital. He wasn't presenting an insanity defense. The state
was insisting that he should. Even the judge who granted
the motion admitted he'd never actually heard of a case
where the state was the one to raise the issue
over defense objections, but he agreed it could be helpful
(36:49):
to get a psychiatric evaluation. And again, this is one
of those points in this story where I'm not confident
I know what to make of this. Can't find anything
definitive that explains the prosecutor's thinking. Here, but if you
want to join me out here on this limb. It
kind of feels like the DA was hoping to avoid
(37:11):
having to try the case. I mean, the FBI forced
their hand with that big public arrest. They didn't have
a choice. They had to indict Byronila Beckwe for murder.
But if they actually tried the case, if they put
on a real case, there was a risk that he
would be convicted. The facts were pretty damning. But if
(37:36):
you have a court order that says he's insane, well
that resolves the situation without having to solve the problem.
Mississippi doesn't have a racism problem. This isn't a civil
rights issue, this isn't an indictment of our current political system.
It's just a crazy guy and we can all forget
about it. Freak accident couldn't be helped, nothing to do
(37:59):
with us. And as we discussed last week, there were
plenty of cases in the nineteen sixties where people with
what might be considered extreme political views were forcibly institutionalized
for them. Typically was people on the other end of
the spectrum, but the idea existed you could just park
(38:20):
him in a hospital and not have to address what
he did and why. But beck With and his attorneys
fought the commitment order tooth and nail. He was quickly released,
and ultimately the issue made it all the way to
the Mississippi Supreme Court, who ruled in his favor. After
(38:41):
the brief detour on the psych ward in the fall
of nineteen sixty three, he was locked up in the
Rankin County jail. And I think there those few months
in that jail cell, I think that's the only time
Byron de la beckwe With truly experienced happiness. The warden
would let him out for walks outside. The sheriff would
(39:03):
take him on field trips to town. The wives of
local businessmen brought him home cooked meals, and fanmail poured in,
more often than not with a little cash tucked inside.
He was a hero. He was finally the hero of
his own story. He could talk and talk and write
(39:24):
his letters, and his letters were published, and people listened
to his stories, and they came to see him, and
they gave him gifts, and they were proud of him.
He was a hero. He publicly maintained his innocence, of course,
but that didn't stop him from boasting about how nobly
he was suffering for the cause. In his jail cell,
(39:49):
he had a radio, television, a typewriter, some exercise equipment, candy, cigars,
and the endless admiration of racists all over Mississippi he
ever wanted, and, as read massing Gill notes in his book,
while Beckwith is publicly entering is not guilty plea, none
(40:10):
of his private correspondents actually insists on his innocence. In
letters that the author was able to review. He's not
openly admitting that he did it, but he's not saying
he didn't, which I don't know. I think that would
come up for me if I were in a jail
cell awaiting trial for something I didn't do. As the
(40:36):
trial date drew nearer, Beckwith was transferred to the Hines
County Jail and Jackson. In November of nineteen sixty three,
Willie had gotten out of the hospital again and she
was now living in the greenwoodlefloor hotel. She was too
afraid to go back to her apartment, and she had
no interest in living in the crumbling old Beckweth house.
She barely left the little hotel room, and she drank
(40:57):
herself to sleep every night, dreading her occasional visits to
see her husband in jail. The sheriff in Hines County
allowed conjugal visits, and Beckweth insisted on trying, despite his
impotence and her disinterest. Of course, he was completely confident
(41:17):
that he would be acquitted. Why shouldn't he be even
if he did do it, which he says he didn't.
But if he did, was it really that bad? Is
it really even illegal to kill a black person? Surely,
even if it's illegal, it's not wrong, right. He wasn't worried,
(41:40):
and his attorneys did almost no trial prep with him
before the January nineteen sixty four trial. There was no
discussion of what happens if they vote to convict, because
they would never no one ever had. When the trial
started at the end of January nineteen sixty four, District
(42:00):
Attorney William Waller asked prospective jurors, do you believe it's
a crime for a white man to kill a negro
in Mississippi. He had to ask this because the answer
might be no, and the question did manage to weed
out a handful of jurors, but there was no way
around an all white jury. There were only seven black
(42:23):
men in a jury pool of one hundred and nine.
Beckwith was confident. He was downright cocky. He laughed and
smiled with reporters. During testimony, he would turn in his
seat so the sketch artist could get a better look
at his face, grinned at the audience, and during recesses
he'd roam around and chat with his supporters. He wasn't bothered,
(42:48):
but the evidence was pretty strong the state put on
their case. The rifle was found at the scene. It
had been wiped clean of fingerprints, but whoever wiped it
down missed a spot under the scope, leaving a single
perfect match to Byron Dilla Beckwith. The jury heard from
the man who traded him the rifle and the man
(43:10):
who traded him the scope. The serial number on the
rifle at the crime scene matched sales records with the
guns manufacturer. Thorn McIntyre had been that gun's original owner,
and he says he traded it to Byron Della Beckwith.
Duck Goes's Tackle Shop had the only six ex Golden
Hawk scope for sale in all of Mississippi, and he
(43:31):
traded it to Byron Della Beckwith. Beckwith had been picked
out of a lineup by a cab driver who testified
that a few days before the murder, Beckwith approached him
outside of a bus station and asked if he knew
where Medgar Evers lived. A second cab driver corroborated that testimony,
saying he'd witnessed the exchange and recalled Beckworth, saying I
(43:54):
gotta find out where he lives. In a couple of days.
Captain Hargrove testified about lifting the fingerprint. An FBI analyst
testified about matching it to Beckwith. A young woman who
lived in the neighborhood testified that she'd been out for
a walk that night when she heard a gunshot and
then the sound of someone running away through that dense
brush right where the rifle was later found. Beckwith's boss
(44:17):
testified to the exact description of Beckwith's very recognizable company car.
A car hop from the drive in where multiple witnesses
saw a car matching the description of Beckwith's company car.
So the car backed into a spot at the edge
of the lot that evening and the man did not
flash his lights for service. A second car hop at
this establishment, just a few hundred yards from the ever's home,
(44:38):
said she remembered seeing that car in the lot past midnight.
A young man visiting a friend in the ever's neighborhood
the night of the murder said he saw that car
driving slowly down the street earlier in the evening. A
teenage boy testified to seeing that car parked in the
lot of a nearby store several days before the murder,
(44:58):
and every single one of the witnesses said the same thing.
They remembered the car because of its unusually long antenna.
His company car was equipped with a two way radio
for communicating with the office while he was out on
sales calls. It's the kind of radio cop carsad. The
(45:20):
people in this black neighborhood noticed this car because they
all thought they were being watched by an undercover cop.
In his defense, Beckwith presented an alibi. Two officers from
the Greenwood Police Department testified that they remembered seeing him
(45:42):
he was getting gas at a station in Greenwood around
one am. A volunteer policeman from Greenwood testified that he
saw Beckwith getting gas at that same service station in
Greenwood at eleven forty five pm. Both of these things
can't be true, but if either were true, he couldn't
(46:03):
have been an hour and a half away in Jackson
at midnight. So they're all trying to put forth an alibi,
but they conflict, and oddly none of these alibi witnesses
came forward before the trial. Detectives from Jackson had gone
to Greenwood during the investigation. They'd spoken to those two
(46:23):
cops specifically, but neither of them mentioned at the time
that Beckwick couldn't be guilty because they saw him that night.
I guess they just didn't remember they had an alibi
for their friend until he'd spent six months in jail.
This is the same Greenwood police department that would show
(46:45):
up at his home and arrest his wife after he
beat her on the stand. The officers couldn't actually remember
very much at all. I mean, they remembered the alibi part.
They remembered that crystal clear. They remembered everything about this
chance encounter they had with this man they said they
(47:05):
did not know very well at a gas station. They
remembered exactly what Byron de la Beckwith was doing at
the gas station at one five am on June twelfth,
nineteen sixty three. But they couldn't You couldn't remember anything
else about that day or any other day. When asked
if there was anyone else they saw that night, what
else did you do on June twelfth, nineteen sixty three,
(47:26):
they couldn't think of a single other person they saw
or any other place they went. They just remembered the
alibi part. They couldn't even name any other specific time
they'd ever run into Byron de la Beckwith. Surely, if
seeing him is so memorable, you would have additional specific
memories of seeing him around town. But the only clear
(47:48):
and specific memory they had was the exact moment that
Beckwith needed for an alibi, which is a remarkable coincidence,
because why would they remember it at all? Think about it.
If Beckwith had been arrested the very next morning, sure right,
you'd wake up, you'd see the news, and you'd say, wow,
that's crazy. I just saw him a few hours ago,
(48:10):
and that would be memorable. But he wasn't arrested until
ten days later. So on the night they allegedly saw
a guy they allegedly don't even know very well, they
happened to commit it to memory for no notable reason
at all. Apparently, the jury found that very convincing. Beckwith
(48:32):
also took the stand himself to swear the gun had
been stolen from his house before the murder, but the
window of time during which that could have occurred is
very small. A coworker testified that he'd come to work
on Monday, June tenth with that circular bruise already on
his eye, so he's admitting the injury is from the
(48:53):
rifle scope. He's not contesting that, yes, this bruise is
from the rifle scope hitting him in the face while
he was using the gun for target practice on Sunday
before the murder. He was just at the range, lawfully
using his gun. So his testimony is that sometime between
Sunday when he was using the gun of the range
(49:14):
and Tuesday when a murderer took it to Jackson, the
real killer must have come into his house and robbed him,
taking exactly one thing and nothing else. Despite the several
other guns that would have been in the immediate vicinity,
including guns that were more valuable, you could never predict
(49:37):
what a Jerry's gonna do. Maybe they really did find
a couple of cops hazy memory of seeing their buddy
getting gas on a random Tuesday night. More convincing than
a parade of witnesses who very specifically remembered seeing him
somewhere else, even more convincing than a murder weapon that
belonged to him and had his fingerprints on it. Or
(49:57):
maybe they didn't care, but they didn't acquit. The afternoon
came and went without a verdict. The judge kept them
past nine pm, just hoping they would finish up, but
they had to be sent to a hotel for the night,
and on February seventh, nineteen sixty four, the judge was
(50:19):
forced to declare a mistrial. The jury had argued and voted,
and argued and voted. They'd had twenty ballots in the
deliberation room. They were screaming at each other. They were
having to take breaks to take walks because they were
getting so angry. Because five jurors refused to back down,
they would not vote to acquit. Beckwith supporters quietly canceled
(50:42):
the party they'd already planned to celebrate the acquittal, and
Byron Della Beckwith went back to jail. But now it's
not fun. It wasn't a jailhouse vacation with a homecoming
party at the end. Now the possibility of capital punishment
felt very real. Sure it was seven to five in
(51:02):
favor of acquittal. Maybe they could do better, but maybe
they couldn't, and they could send him to the gas
chamber for this. His lawyers were frustrated with his antics.
No more letter writing, no more goofing off, no more
hamming it up with the reporters and goofing off in
the courtroom. You need to get serious about this. They
sent him the trial transcript and ordered him to memorize
(51:25):
his testimony because he's locked in now. He's going to
have to give identical answers at the next trial. The
steady stream of visitors slowed down. Cash stopped coming in
the mail. The businessman's wives weren't bringing him steak dinners anymore.
He didn't have a TV in his cell, and he
was starting to get paranoid. His attorneys were as surprised
(51:49):
as anyone at the mistrial. They put on. The case
that they had wasn't a great one, but there wasn't
any other defense to put on.
Speaker 1 (51:59):
That was his.
Speaker 2 (52:00):
It should have been enough. They weren't going to get
a better case, but maybe they could get better jurors
in between. Byron de la Beckwith's first murder trial in
January and his second murder trial in April. Two things changed.
(52:20):
The Ku Klux Klan officially returned to Mississippi, and the
Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission quietly joined Beckwith's defense team. In
April of nineteen sixty four, the jury deadlocked again, this
time with just four holdouts. Voting guilty. Klansmen roughing up
witnesses and intimidating spectators didn't change the outcome. Neither did
(52:44):
state sponsor jury tampering. He still couldn't get acquitted, but
he could go home. The DA didn't have the stomach
for a third trial. When Byron Dela Beckwith got home
to Greenwood and April of nineteen sixty four, there was
a huge banner hanging from a highway overpath on the
outskirts of town welcome home delay It read he was
(53:10):
a freeman. The government paid him a hefty twenty five
thousand dollars to buy his dilapidated old house so they
could use the land for a post office. He divorced
his wife for a third and final time, and he
threw himself full time into clan organizing. He had a
newly sung life. He was finally somebody he'd killed for
(53:34):
segregation and in the clan that earned him the respect
he'd always graved. It will be decades before the truth
came out about how many murders j Edgar Hoover was
willing to let go unpunished to keep his network of
criminal informants in the field, and just how badly the
(53:54):
state of Mississippi wanted to keep Medgar Ever's killer out
of prison. Weird Little Guys it's a production of Coolshoe
(54:16):
Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me,
Molly Hunger. Our executive producers are Sophie lec Treman and
Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented
Worry Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at
gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I
probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange
conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the
(54:39):
Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going
to make you one of my red Little Guys
Host
Molly Conger
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