Former deputy arrested in 1964 racial killings

JACKSON, Miss. – A white former sheriff’s deputy who was once thought to be dead was arrested on federal charges Wednesday in one of the last major unsolved crimes of the civil rights era – the 1964 killings of two black men who were beaten and dumped alive into the Mississippi River.

The break in the 43-year-old case was largely the result of the dogged efforts of the older brother of one of the victims, who vowed to bring the killers to justice.

James Ford Seale, a 71-year-old reputed Ku Klux Klansman from the town of Roxie, was charged with kidnapping hitchhikers Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, both 19.

The victims’ weighted, badly decomposed bodies were found by chance two months later in July 1964 during the search for three civil rights workers whose disappearance and deaths in Philadelphia, Miss., got far more attention from the media and the FBI.

Seale is expected to be arraigned today in Jackson.

A second man long suspected in the attack, church deacon and reputed KKK member Charles Marcus Edwards, now 72, was not charged. Sources close to the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity said Edwards was cooperating with authorities. Prosecutors did not say why Seale was not charged with murder.

The arrest marked the latest attempt by prosecutors in the South to close the books on crimes from the civil rights era that went unpunished. In recent years, authorities in Mississippi and Alabama have won convictions in the 1963 assassination of NAACP activist Medgar Evers; the 1963 Birmingham, Ala., church bombing that killed four black girls; and the 1964 Philadelphia, Miss., slayings.

“I’ve been crying. First time I’ve cried in about 50 years,” Moore’s 63-year-old brother, Thomas, said after the arrest. “It’s not going to bring his life back. But some way or another, I think he would be satisfied.”

Dee’s sister, Thelma Collins, said: “I never thought I would live to see it – no sir, I never did. I always prayed that justice would be done – somehow, some way.”

Seale and Edwards are suspected of kidnapping the two victims in a Klan crackdown prompted by rumors that black Muslims were planning an armed “insurrection” in rural Franklin County. Seale and Edwards were arrested at the time.

But, consumed by the search for the three missing civil rights workers, the FBI turned the case over to local authorities. And a justice of the peace promptly threw out all charges against Seale and Edwards.

In 2000, the Justice Department’s civil rights unit reopened the case.

For years, Seale’s family had told reporters that he had died. But in 2005, Thomas Moore and a Canadian documentary filmmaker, David Ridgen, found Seale, old and sick, living just a few miles down the road from where the kidnapping took places.

“If they hadn’t brought it to my attention, I wouldn’t have known to do anything,” said U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton, chief federal prosecutor in Jackson.

Former Gov. William Winter, who was co-chairman of President Clinton’s racial reconciliation initiative, said the latest arrest – though done by federal rather than state authorities – shows that Mississippi “now is obviously seeking to make up for lost time in bringing people to justice.”

“Mississippi is taking a look at those crimes that were committed in a different era when a different attitude prevailed,” said Winter, who was governor in the 1980s.

The U.S. Justice Department reopened the case after the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson uncovered documents indicating that the beatings of the teens had occurred in the Homochitto National Forest, giving the FBI jurisdiction. But the case languished until Seale was located.

Bobby Hunt, 55, a lifelong resident of Roxie and a cousin of one of the slain men, Henry Dee, said people have talked less about the murders over the years, but the victims have not been forgotten.

Hunt said Seale’s arrest made him feel “a little better.”

“It took all those years, but they finally got justice.”