Reputed Klansman Pleads Innocent

Old passions die hard, even after 40 years.

In this rural Mississippi town, tempers flared as a decades-old case of three kidnapped and slain civil rights workers reopened and an arrested suspect, now 79 years old, was brought to court.

Stooped and frail looking, the former Ku Klux Klan leader appeared court to answer for one of the most heinous crimes of the civil rights era — the killing of three voter-registration workers beaten and shot in 1964.

Edgar Ray Killen, his head slightly tilted, repeated a strong "not guilty" three times Friday to three murder charges in a case that marks the latest effort by Mississippi to confront its bloodstained racist past as one of America's most fiercely segregationist states.

Killen, a part-time preacher who will turn 80 later this month, was arrested Thursday after being indicted by a grand jury. Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood and District Attorney Mark Duncan would not discuss what evidence they developed or exactly what role authorities believe Killen had in the killings, which galvanized public opinion in 1964 and were dramatized in the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning."

Although authorities say Killen's name has been associated with the case from the beginning, passions flared today, CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassmann reports. As

"To bring this back after 40 years is a nightmare," Billy Wayne Posey said. "To bring it back after 40 years is ridiculous."

And FBI records and witnesses from a 1960s federal trial in the case indicated that he organized the carloads of Klansmen who followed the civil rights workers out of town and waylaid them on the night of the killings.

James Chaney, a 21-year-old black Mississippian, and two white New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, were stopped by Klansmen, beaten and shot to death. Their bodies were found 44 days later, buried in an earthen dam.

Strassmann spoke with Goodman's mother, who said she couldn't foresee the day her son's death would be brought to justice.

"I didn't know if I was going to be here long enough to see it, but I thought my children would," said Dr. Carolyn Goodman.

"We've been investigating the case for several years now," Duncan said. "It just finally got to the point where we felt like we had done all that we can do. It was time to present whatever we had to the grand jury and let them make a decision on the case."

In 1967, the U.S. Justice Department tried Killen and 18 other men — many of them also reputed Klan members — on federal civil rights violations. Seven were convicted and sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to 10 years. The all-white jury deadlocked in the case against Killen, and he was freed.

Up until this week, the state of Mississippi never brought murder charges against anyone in the case. And Killen has long denied any role in the murders.

"For years nothing happened," said Jewel McDonald of Philadelphia, whose mother and brother were beaten by Klansmen the night of the murders. "It just saddens me to know it took 40 years to do this," said McDonald, who attended the arraignment and later cried.

Prosecutors said they do not plan on charging anyone else in the case; the state will not seek the death penalty.

"The speculation now has to be that someone who may have been involved has come forward to finger someone else, or a group of people," says CBS News Legal Analyst Andrew Cohen, noting that even if there is strong evidence, prosecuting a case after so many years can be difficult.

"Witnesses forget things, evidence tends to disappear, and there typically isn't a whole lot of political momentum after a certain number of years," says Cohen. "But we have certainly seen prosecutions and convictions in civil rights cases - Byron de la Beckwith for the killing of Medgar Evers, for example - the exceptions that prove the rule."

During the hearing, Killen, handcuffed and dressed in a loosely fitting orange jail jumpsuit, lowered his voice as he told Judge Marcus Gordon he could not afford an attorney. The judge said he would decide later whether he would appoint one for Killen.

A silent Killen was then led off to jail, where he will be held for another hearing Wednesday.

From her home in New York, Goodman's mother, Carolyn, said she "knew that in the end the right thing was going to happen." She added: "I'm not looking for revenge. I'm looking for justice."

Jerry G. Killen, who identified himself as the defendant's brother, called the indictment "pitiful." He said his brother never mentioned the 1964 slayings: "He won't talk about it. I don't know if he did it or not."

The charges mark a reopening of one of the most notorious cases of the civil rights movement.

Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were participating in Freedom Summer 1964, when hundreds of young people — mostly white college students from the North — came to the South to register blacks to vote and start educational programs.

On the day of the crime, they were arrested and accused of speeding while driving to investigate the ruins of a black church that had been firebombed. Then they were released. Authorities said Killen organized the ambush while the men were being held by police.

Carlton Wallace Miller, at the time a Meridian police officer, testified in the federal trial that the local Klan chapter wanted to beat Schwerner but were told by Killen "to leave him alone" and that "another unit was going to take care of him, that his elimination had been approved."

Miller testified that Killen told the group that the approval to kill Schwerner came from Sam Bowers, then the Klan's imperial wizard. Bowers was convicted in 1998 of murder in the 1966 firebombing death of Hattiesburg civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer and is serving a life sentence in federal prison.

Neighboring Alabama has also prosecuted some long-ago civil rights crimes in recent years. Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted in 2002 of killing four black girls in the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963 — the deadliest act of the civil rights era. A year earlier, Thomas Blanton was convicted in the bombing.