Testimony states Killen ordered 1964 attacks

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. – A former Ku Klux Klansman accused in the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers ordered fellow Klansmen to attack the men and went to a funeral home to create an alibi for himself, according to testimony read in court Friday.

The 1967 testimony from James Jordan – a member of the Klan turned government witness who has since died – was read to the jury on the second day of 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen’s murder trial. Jordan testified that Killen, a Klan leader, told a group of Klansmen that the three men had been arrested and ordered them to “pick them up and tear their butts up.”

Killen showed the group where the men were jailed and where to wait to hunt them down once they were released, Jordan said. He said as carloads of Klansmen drove to intercept the three doomed men, they stopped to let Killen off at a funeral home.

“He said he had to go there because if anything happened, he would be the first one questioned,” Jordan said in the 1967 testimony.

Killen has said he was at a wake when James Chaney, a black Mississippian, and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, white New Yorkers, were killed. Killen later talked about the slayings to a police officer he had sworn in to the Klan a few months earlier, the ex-officer testified Friday.

Mike Hatcher said Killen gave him a gun to pass on to someone else.

“He proceeded to tell me, ‘We got rid of those civil rights workers. You won’t have no more trouble out of Goatee,’ ” said Hatcher, 68, referring to the name Klan members had for Schwerner.

Killen is on trial in the deaths of the three men, who were in the town to investigate the burning of a black church. They were stopped for speeding, jailed briefly and then released, after which they were ambushed by a gang of Klansmen. The men were beaten and shot to death, their bodies found 44 days later buried in an earthen dam.

Friday’s testimony was dominated by witnesses who have died. Prosecutors got permission to have their co-workers read transcripts of the earlier testimony.