By JOSH FOREMAN
Staff Reporter
Edgar Ray Killen explained when, how and where three civil rights workers were murdered the day after the crime occurred, a witness testified Friday in Killen’s murder trial.
The witness, former Klansman and Meridian police officer Mike Hatcher, said Killen visited him at the Meridian police station on June 22, 1964, and gave him the information.
“He then proceeded to tell me ‘we got rid of them civil rights workers. We won’t have no more trouble from Goatee,’” Hatcher said. “Goatee” was the nickname that the Klan had given murdered civil rights worker Michael Schwerner.
He said on the day after the killing, Killen told him the three victims were buried in a pond dam on Old Jolly Farm outside of town. Two workers at the site who had discovered some blood had to be “sworn in, or sworn to secrecy and threatened,” the 68-year-old Hatcher said.
Jurors also heard testimony from Carolyn Goodman, the mother of murdered civil rights worker Andrew Goodman, and a Mississippi Department of Corrections inmate who said he heard Killen boasting about the murders as a child.
In cross-examination of Hatcher, Mitch Moran, Killen’s defense attorney, asked him whether Killen had told him he planned or executed the murders. “I haven’t seen him give anybody orders but I’ve heard him talk about things,” Hatcher said. “He never said ‘I’, he said ‘we.’”
James McIntyre, Killen’s other attorney, said Hatcher’s testimony doesn’t connect his client with the murders.
Killen is accused of murdering civil rights workers James Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner in 1964.
The wheelchair-bound Killen’s face was expressionless throughout the day of testimony. He covered his mouth with his hand as Hatcher told the story of the day after the murders.
Hatcher, 68, said Killen also gave him a pistol and explained his alibi. Hatcher said Killen told him that he had been dropped off at a funeral home the night of the murders and had talked with people and signed the guest book.
Carolyn Goodman, 89, who was helped to the stand, said details about the time are hazy. She had trouble recalling who had called and told her the station wagon her son had been riding in had been found in a swamp; “I think it might have even been the President at that time,” she said.
She said she remembers strange details about her trip to Mississippi during the search for her missing son and his two friends. “I remember the red soil and I remembered that he was buried here,” she said.
Upon the prosecution’s request, she read aloud a postcard that she had received from her son after he arrived in Mississippi. “I have arrived safely in Meridian, Mississippi,” the postcard said. “The weather is fine. The people are wonderful. I wish you were here. All my love, Andy.”
Goodman was composed through most of her testimony, but held back tears when Attorney General Jim Hood asked her to identify a picture of her son that had been taken just before he left for Mississippi in 1964.
Goodman’s testimony was cut short when she became emotional, saying she might not be able to stand the stress of staying for the entire trial. Her son David Goodman, Andrew Goodman’s younger brother, helped her back to her seat at the front of the courtroom. Ben Chaney, brother of murdered civil rights worker James Chaney, hugged her when she got back to her seat and put his arm around her shoulders.
Afterwards, she said of her murdered son: “He didn’t come here to be a martyr, he came here to serve the people. And now I’m here in his stead.”
The MDOC inmate, Mike Winstead, who entered the courtroom wearing a bright yellow jumpsuit, said he overheard a conversation between his grandfather and Killen in 1967. “My granddad asked him if he had anything to do with those boys being killed,” Winstead said. “He told my grandfather ‘yes’ and he was proud of it.”
Winstead, then 10, said he was sitting on the front porch of his grandfather’s home when he heard the conversation.
“A statement like that would kind of stick out in a kid’s mind, don’t you think?” he told Moran during cross-examination.
Winstead is serving the 12th year of a 15-year sentence at a jail in Jefferson County for rape and sexual battery, he said.
Winstead, 48, said he did not receive money, a reduced sentence, or special treatment for his testimony. “I’m sittin’ in an isolated cell right now with nothing but me and the flies if you call that special treatment,” he said, drawing laughter from media and spectators in the courtroom.
Winstead said he has personal reasons for testifying. “The fact that I’ve got a son fighting in Iraq for the same thing these boys were killed for” is why he testified, he said. “Because I don’t believe what happened was right.”
Jurors also heard transcripts of testimony from James Jordan, who testified in the 1967 federal trial in which Killen received a mistrial after an 11-1 vote of guilty. Klansman-turned-FBI-informant Jordan, then 41, said Killen told him the night of the murders that the three civil rights workers were “locked up” and that he, Jordan and a gang of Klansmen from Meridian needed to hurry to Philadelphia because the workers needed “their rear end tore up.”
Jordan said Killen instructed the gang once they arrived in Philadelphia until he was dropped off at a funeral home. Jordan said he then accompanied the rest of the gang to the site of the murder and then to the dam where the bodies were buried.
Former FBI agent Jay Cochran also took the stand and told the story of searching for the missing workers in 1964, then finding their bodies buried 14 feet deep in an earthen dam.
Hatcher was the last witness to testify.
The former police officer, 24 at the time of the murders, said that he was initially invited to a “citizen’s meeting” in mid-June 1964. When he got to the meeting, he realized it was a Klan meeting. He was sworn in as a member by a white-hood-clad Killen that night, he said. Soon after the three civil rights workers disappeared, though he said he did not know they had been murdered until Killen told him the day after the crime.
“I didn’t know the Klan could do anything like that,” he said.
Hatcher contacted the FBI after the workers’ bodies were found. After that, he said, he decided to become “the best police officer Meridian would ever have,” taking every opportunity he could to attend law enforcement and training classes. After his testimony, his voice wavering, he said he believed he had become a professional police officer, and still was.
