Edgar Ray Killen, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who was convicted in the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, has died in prison at the age of 92. During the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, James Chaney, 21, a young black man from Meridian, Mississippi and Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, two Jewish men from New York, were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Killen, along with Cecil Price, then deputy sheriff of Neshoba County, was found to have assembled a group of armed men who conspired against, pursued, and killed the three civil rights workers. Samuel Bowers, who served as the Grand Wizard of the local White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and had ordered the murders to take place, acknowledged that Killen was “the main instigator.” Price and seventeen others were indicted with conspiring in a Ku Klux Klan plot to murder three young civil rights workers. The indictments were dismissed by District Court but the decision was later reversed on appeal and the charges reinstated. On October 21, 1967, Price was found guilty at trial and sentenced by Judge Cox to a six-year prison term. He served four and a half years at the Sandstone Federal Penitentiary in Minnesota. He was never charged with the murders of the three men. Killen’s trial, began in November of 1966 at the federal courthouse of Meridian, Mississippi before an all-white jury. The trial ended in a hung jury, with the jurors deadlocked 11–1 in favor of conviction. The prosecution decided not to retry Killen and he was released. Twenty years later the case was reopened and on January 6, 2005, Killen was arrested for three counts of murder and set free on bond. His case drew comparisons to that of Byron De La Beckwith, who was charged with the killing of Medgar Evers in 1963 and re-arrested in 1994. Beckwith was sentenced to life imprisonment for first-degree murder without the possibility of parole. On January 21, 2001, De La Beckwith died while being treated at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi. He was 80 years old. The trial began on June 13, 2005, with Killen attending in a wheelchair. He was found guilty of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, 41 years to the day after the crime. The jury, consisting of nine white jurors and three black jurors, rejected the charges of murder, but found him guilty of recruiting the mob that carried out the killings. He was sentenced on June 23, 2005, by Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon to the maximum sentence of 60 years in prison, 20 years for each count of manslaughter, to be served consecutively. Killen raised legal arguments throughout the appeals process and was actually let out of prison in 2005 on a $600,000 appeals bond. He claimed that he could no longer use his right hand and that he was permanently confined to his wheelchair. Gordon said he was convinced by the testimony that Killen was neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community. It was later proven, he was lying and his bond was revoked. Killen entered the Mississippi Department of Corrections system on June 27, 2005, to serve his sixty-year sentence where he died January 12, 2018. The slayings shocked the nation, helped spur passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and were dramatized in the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning.”
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