Devils Walking Read online

  I soon realized that Frank Morris’s story was much bigger than Ferriday. I also recognized there was not a moment to waste. In the 1960s, Klan murderers on the loose were a formidable enemy. Although the few aging suspects still around in 2007 did not seem as intimidating as they had been during their prime, some remained dangerous.

  Some well-meaning people tried to set me straight by insisting that justice for old Klansmen like James Ford Seale was no business for a newspaper reporter. They said that the matter should be left to God. I countered that before God gives judgment, we are morally forbidden from supporting killers, even through our silence or apathy. I reminded them of Proverbs 28:17: “A man who is laden with the guilt of human blood will be a fugitive until death; let no one support him.”

  The biggest foe of the FBI’s cold-case initiative by 2007 was not a violent racist bully in the prime of his life but an embittered, dying old man—a fugitive until death—chained to the sins of his past. He was still in reach, but his days were numbered. He was counted among the Klan devils who had walked the earth since Reconstruction. In Concordia Parish, Louisiana, and nearby Natchez, Mississippi, and environs, the most secretive Klan group ever known had arisen—the Silver Dollar Group—led by a psychopath who outwitted the FBI. This man and his murdering associates, some of whom wore badges, had devoured all in their path and escaped with a swagger into the darkness of the decades to follow.

  Fifty years later, with death offering the escape route for the fugitive murderer, time emerged as the new enemy of justice.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MANY PEOPLE helped me during the writing and research of this book and during the investigations into the long-ago murders.

  I am grateful to Lesley Hanna-Capdepon and Sam Hanna Jr. of the Concordia Sentinel for their support and commitment to justice for all, and to coworkers Tracey Bruce, Barbara Jackson, and Heather Kaplan Card for their assistance.

  I thank Julia Dobbins, Denise Jackson Ford, Keith Hodges, Wharlest Jackson Jr., Thomas Moore, and Deborah Jackson Sylvester for sharing stories of their loved ones and recalling the tragedies that forever altered their lives. Special thanks go to Rosa Williams, the granddaughter of Frank Morris. Her life exemplifies grace, faith, love, and dignity.

  Those who provided important contributions to my research and investigations include Chris Allen (FBI), Bill Atkins, Jim Barnett, Paul Benoist, Johnny Blunschi, Leland Boyd, Sonny Boyd, William Brown, Brad Burget, Tony Byrne, the late Woodie Davis, Antonne Duncan, the late Ted Gardner (FBI agent retired), Kirby King, Paul Lancaster (FBI agent retired), Norma Leake, the late Rev. Robert Lee Jr., the late Robert Lee III, Robert “Buck” Lewis, Johnny Loomis, Mary Manhein, Tron McCoy, David Opperman, Robin Person, the late John Pfeifer (FBI agent retired), Donna Robinson, Joe Sha­piro, J. L. Spinks, Father August Thompson, Carl Ray Thompson, former U.S. attorney Donald Washington, the late Billy Bob Williams (FBI agent retired), and David Whatley.

  I thank the Center for Investigative Reporting and the great journalists with whom it was my honor to work: John Fleming, Ben Greenberg, Peter Klein, Hank Klibanoff, Jerry Mitchell, Pete Nicks, David Paperny, David Ridgen, and Robert Rosenthal.

  I am grateful to the LSU Manship School of Mass Communications, including Jay Shelledy (for too many things to mention); LSU deans Jack Hamilton, Ralph Izard, and Jerry Ceppos, as well as Bob Mann and many others at the Manship School; and especially the Student Cold Case Team, including Matthew Albright, Matt Barnidge, S. Rene Barrow, Chelsea Brasted, Gordon Brillon, Ryan Buxton, Zachary Carline, Brett Christensen, Jake Clapp, Ward Collin, Sydni Dunn, Tessalon Felician, Andrea Gallo, Joshua Jackson, David LaPlante, Sarah Lawson, Minjie Li, Katie Macdonald, Justin McAcy, Olivia McClure, Willborn Nobles III, Briana Piche, Patrick Rideau, Paromita Saha, Matthew Schaeffer, Morgan Searles, Brian Sibille, Jay Stafford, Robert Stewart, Kevin Thibodeaux, Jennifer Vance, Ben Wallace, Drew White, Amy Whitehead, Marylee Williams, and Xerxes Wilson.

  My thanks also to the Syracuse College of Law Cold Case Justice Initiative and its cofounders, Paula Johnson and Janis McDonald, who work tirelessly for justice and peace for many families, and to CCJI’s many volunteer law students.

  These Concordia Sentinel interns did outstanding work during their summers in Concordia Parish, Natchez, and southwest Mississippi: Kellie Gentry and Jared Lovett, University of Alabama; Tori Stilwell, University of North Carolina; and Matt Barnidge and Ian Stanford, LSU Manship School.

  Thanks to Teach for America, especially Zach Bell, Emily Coady, Taylor Pettit, Bryan Tomlinson, and Mark Young.

  I also thank LSU Press editor Rand Dotson and the entire LSU Press team, especially Catherine Kadair, as well as freelance copyeditor Julia Ridley Smith, who found a book in my cluttered manuscript.

  And, finally, I am grateful to Greg Iles for challenging white southerners to face the horrific racial injustices of our past and present with open minds and especially open hearts.

  DEVILS WALKING

  Locations of Silver Dollar Group murders. In the cases of Henry Dee and Charles Moore, locations are site of abduction; both were drowned in the old river at Davis Island in Warren County, Mississippi. (Map by Mary Lee Eggart)

  1

  WHY FRANK?

  AT MIDNIGHT on Thursday, December 10, 1964, Ferriday’s two youngest police officers parked the town’s lone patrol car, a brand-new white Pontiac, on the southeast corner of the town’s main intersection, where US 65 and US 84 converge. George Sewell, a twenty-three-year-old Concordia Parish native, had been on the force for a year. His partner, Mississippi-born Timothy Loftin, was a year older but had been a town cop for only two months. Dressed in their uniforms—white shirts and blue trousers—the two officers were restless this night, fifteen days before Christmas.1 Weeknight duty was busiest during the period from 10 p.m. until an hour or so after midnight, when the factories across the Mississippi River in nearby Natchez changed shifts. Many plant workers stopped at the bars in town or along the ten-mile strip of watering holes between Ferriday and Vidalia.

  A short time before midnight, twenty-three-year-old Kenneth Walsworth, a friend of the young, untrained officers, finished work at the Holsum Bread bakery in Natchez and cruised into Ferriday. As he often did, Walsworth parked beside the Pontiac and climbed into the backseat of the patrol car. Loftin was behind the wheel; Sewell was riding shotgun.2 As they talked on this damp, cloudy evening, the temperature dipped into the high forties. On the southwest corner of the crossroads was Cecil Beatty’s Gulf Station. There, almost every evening after supper, Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Office deputies, some of them Klansmen, leaned on the fenders of their patrol cars while talking and watching traffic. By dark, some of the deputies went home, while others stayed out most of the night drinking and playing poker.3

  On the northwest corner of the intersection, the lounge at the King Hotel closed for the night. Opened in January 1927, three decades after a railroad company founded the town, the hotel had suffered a disastrous opening year when the Great Flood of the Mississippi River submerged Ferriday and the lower floor of the three-story building. Once the damage was repaired, the King became a showpiece. But by 1964, after several changes in ownership, it had become infamous for prostitution and gambling. Pickups with cattle racks on the beds and gun racks in the cabs lined the dirt parking lot, and the place had become a favorite hangout for alcoholics, roughnecks, truck drivers, loggers, cowboys, factory workers, and the local unit of the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.4

  The Concordia Parish Original Knights unit was organized in 1962, and Mississippi’s first Original Knights chapter was born in 1963. In Louisiana and the Magnolia State, the United Klans of America, responsible for a series of bombings in McComb, Mississippi, during the summer of 1964, was gaining strength. The White Knights, spawned by the Original Knights but limited to Mississippi, killed three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, that same summer. This case drew national attention and resulted in the opening of an FBI field offic
e in Jackson, the first since World War II.5 Meanwhile, a secret, deadly Klan cell known as the Silver Dollar Group came to life in Vidalia, Concordia Parish’s county seat, located on the banks of the Mississippi River opposite Natchez.

  At the King Hotel, the manager, a Klan leader and recruiter, kept a lookout for potential members. (The nearby plants, where thousands of men worked side by side seven days a week, had also become major recruiting grounds.6) From the dirty, dark lounge, the Klan staged some of its late-night raids of violence and intimidation against blacks and civil rights workers. Klan allegiances and alliances came and went, but as the civil rights movement grew and ignited violent white opposition to racial integration, there would be scores of beatings and arsons and at least five murders in 1964 alone attributed to the Silver Dollar Group.7

  Shortly before 1 a.m. on December 10, two waitresses walked out of the King Hotel lounge, climbed into a dark green sedan, and headed for Vidalia. One of the young officers suggested following the girls to see what they were up to. It was not an uncommon thing for Sewell and Loftin to do, although the mayor and police chief forbade them from leaving the town limits in the patrol car for anything less than an emergency.8

  Four blocks along the main drag south of the King Hotel, the Pontiac cruised by the shoe shop on the east side of the street. Fifty-one-year-old Frank Morris was in bed in a back room, while his grandson and lone full-time employee slept in a shanty located within five feet of the rear of the shop.9 For almost thirty years, Morris had nurtured a loyal white and black clientele, a rare accomplishment for a black man in a southern town during the era.

  A block to the south, the cook at Haney’s Big House chatted with a customer, while a drunk slept it off on a bench. Though quiet on this particular night, the nightclub was often crowded and loud. Legendary in the region, and well known by African American singers who followed the Chitlin’ Circuit, Haney’s featured performers like B. B. King (before he was famous). Gamblers from as far away as Memphis played poker in a back room.10 As a child, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Ferriday-born rock ‘n’ roll legend, occasionally would sneak into the club and hide under a table until the owner, Will Haney, would find him and gently kick him out. Lewis loved the music, the dancing, and the atmosphere in a town known for its violence and craziness.11

  Attendants at service stations would remember nothing that stood out that December night.12 By the time the Pontiac passed the sawmill on the south end of town and turned east toward Vidalia, the sedan had raced out of sight. The officers traversed the strip from Ferriday and back a couple of times before giving up on finding the women.13 Rounding the curve at the lumberyard heading back into town, the officers spotted a red glow a few blocks up the street. In front of the shoe shop, chunks of cinder blocks and shards of glass littered the street. “Lord, this was no fire, this was an explosion,” Sewell thought as he took in the scene. The shop was fully engulfed by flames.14 As they drove past, the officers witnessed Frank Morris, now a human torch, emerge from the rear.15

  Loftin parked in a vacant car lot between the shop and the Billups Service Station, a half block up the street. Morris was naked and bleeding. Smoke floated from his head. Straps of his tee shirt and undershorts clung to his body. One officer removed the flaming straps; the other patted Morris’s head to put out the fire. Morris’s skin peeled and drifted to the ground. Walsworth thought Morris was praying as he mumbled, “Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord!” He complained of being cold. One of the officers steadied Morris, whose flesh felt hard and crusty. Morris was strangely calm, as though, Walsworth thought, he knew “he was in his last days.”16

  They led Morris to the backseat of the Pontiac. Sewell, Loftin, and Walsworth squeezed into the front. As they quizzed Morris, Loftin floored the accelerator and headed to the newly opened Concordia Parish Hospital a mile away. Morris said that after being awakened by breaking glass, he encountered two white men outside the front of his shop. One poured gasoline from a can. As Morris reached the front door, the other man pointed a single-barreled shotgun at Morris and threatened to blow off his head, commanding, “Get back in that shop, nigger!” Morris said there might have been a third man in a car outside in the alley on the north side of the shop.17

  At the hospital, one of the officers led Morris to the entrance of the emergency room, then raced back to the Pontiac to return to the crime scene. Morris made his way—alone—into the emergency room, where a nurse recognized him. He reeked of gasoline, his body a mass of charred flesh. “I’ve been burned,” he said. “Someone threw something in my shop and blowed it up.” He was inexplicably alert, following the nurse’s every direction. She noticed the skin of one of his index fingers was missing; the bone protruded.18 Dr. Charles Colvin admitted Morris at 1:45 a.m., thirty minutes after the fire was reported. He had suffered third-degree burns covering all but the soles of his feet and spent the next four days on his back inside Room 101.19

  Before dawn, FBI agent Paul Lancaster was awakened by a phone call from Louisiana division headquarters in New Orleans. He was the senior resident agent at the Alexandria office, fifty miles west of Ferriday. The caller instructed him to race to the hospital to interview a Negro man who was gravely injured in a fire. Lancaster routinely carried a portable IBM dictaphone in his bureau car so that while traveling he could dictate notes for the steno pool in New Orleans. When he arrived at the hospital, Ferriday police chief Bob Warren and fire chief Nolan Mouelle greeted Lancaster. The first glimpse of the injured man told Lancaster death would come soon, and he hoped that Frank Morris could identify his attackers by name. The agent realized that this was the first time in the history of civil rights–era murders that a victim had lived long enough to be able to name his attackers to law enforcement. He also knew that the Ferriday police were incapable of solving the arson and that the sheriff’s office, which considered the FBI the enemy, would never investigate or assist in the probe. If anything, deputies would obstruct it. They often notified Klansmen about bureau activities. One deputy in particular, the hulking Frank DeLaughter, who once said he thought no more of killing a man than a rabbit, was known to make harassing phone calls to the wives of FBI agents. But if Lancaster could record Morris’s voice naming his killers, prosecutors could use the recording as legal evidence in court.20

  Surprised that visitors walked in and out of Morris’s room at will, Lancaster left the hospital with one request for the attending physician: Get Morris to identify his attackers.21 Once the police and firemen left, a steady stream of visitors came by Morris’s room. The Rev. August Thompson, who pastored at the St. Charles Church for the Colored, was at the post office in Ferriday on Thursday morning when he learned about the tragedy. He rushed to the hospital, where the sight of his friend nearly made him faint.22 As Thompson greeted attendants in the room, Morris recognized the voice.

  “Father, is that you?”

  “Yes, Frank.”

  “Father, I’m cold!”

  Once alone with Morris, Thompson comforted the dying man. He stood beside the bed and prayed. When he asked what had happened, Morris didn’t respond. Church business required Thompson to go to New Orleans, and after a few minutes, he told Morris he had to leave.

  “You coming back, Father?”

  “Yes, Frank, I will be back.”23

  Another visitor was James White Sr., Morris’s best friend. Some people thought the two were brothers. Ten months earlier, Klansmen, convinced that White was a black Muslim hoarding weapons, had launched a plan to kidnap and beat him. Used to harassment, White was always prepared. As gunfire erupted in his yard, White aimed and fired his shotgun, hitting one of the fleeing Klansmen in the face. White imagined the many scenarios his friend might have faced hours earlier, but his efforts to find out who was responsible failed. Morris would only lament, “I just can’t believe it!”24

  The Rev. Robert Lee Jr. came by. His wife, Lavinia, had attended high school with Morris in Natchez. During the last years of his life, Morris hosted a Sunday morning gosp
el music show on the Ferriday radio station KFNV, and he often dedicated a special song to Lavinia, who had a son in Vietnam. She loved to hear the Consolers sing, “Waiting for My Child to Come Home.” Morris knew it gave spiritual strength to Lavinia and other mothers whose sons were in the jungles of Vietnam. He also knew the song had special meaning for black mothers, who prayed for their sons’ safe return from the streets of Ferriday or from the hands of wicked cops: “Lord my child is somewhere in some lonely jail; Lord, with no one there to post his bail.”25

  Alone in the room with his wife’s old schoolmate, Reverend Lee asked, “Frank, who did this to you?” Morris answered, “Two white friends.” He would say no more. Lee left Room 101 convinced that Morris knew his assailants. But were the words—“two white friends”—generic? Morris told many visitors he didn’t know he had a white enemy. Did his statement conceal that he knew who masterminded the arson but not the identities of the arsonists? Until his death at age one hundred in 2014, Pastor Lee was haunted by the evil attack. “I never want to see a sight like that again,” he said repeatedly of his dying friend.26

  Similarly unnerved by the sight, Ferriday’s mayor L. W. “Woodie” Davis, who had known Morris for years, pleaded for the names of the attackers. Before his death in 2011 at ninety-three, Davis said he had made a mistake by talking with Morris in the presence of police officers. He was convinced that had he gone in alone, Morris would have whispered names of his killers. “It’s one of the greatest regrets of my life,” Davis said.27