By DEBBIE BURT MYERS
Managing Editor
Among witnesses expected to testify for the prosecution in the trial of Edgar Ray Killen are three men convicted in 1967 in U. S. District Court in Meridian for conspiracy to deprive civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner of their constitutional rights.
Two others who were acquitted in the same trial also were expected to testify.
Other witnesses subpoenaed by the prosecution include a Mississippi Highway patrolman who was on duty the night of the murders and a Meridian police officer who testified in the 1967 trial.
Of the 18 men tried in federal court, seven were found guilty and eight were acquitted. The jury could not reach a verdict on three defendants, including Edgar Ray Killen. The jury voted 11-1 to convict Killen, but a woman juror voted for acquittal because she didn’t believe a preacher would do what Killen was accused of doing.
Scheduled to testify are Billy Wayne Posey, Jimmie Snowden and Jimmy Arledge, who served time in federal prisons; Olen Burrage and Pete Harris, who were acquitted; former Meridian Police Officer Joseph (Mike) Hatcher; and Harry Wiggs, a retired state highway patrolman of Philadelphia.
Sentenced to six years, Posey served his time in a U. S. penitentiary outside of Atlanta before being paroled.
He was manager of a Phillips 66 service station on Mississippi 21 at Williamsville in June 1964. He was also the nephew of Minnie Lee Posey Herring, who ran the county jail along with her husband when the civil rights workers were first arrested. It was Mrs. Herring who prepared what turned out to be the last meal eaten by the three civil rights workers.
She testified for the government in the 1967 trial.
A Meridian laundry truck driver in 1964, Snowden was sentenced to three years. He entered federal prison at Texarkana, Texas; was later transferred to a correctional facility at Lompoc, Calif. and finished serving his sentence at the Federal Youth Center at Ashland, Ky.
Arledge, a Meridian truck driver in 1964, also received a three-year sentence, serving his time at the same facilities as Snowden.
Burrage operated a trucking company in Neshoba County for several years before retiring and selling his company.
The bodies of the three civil rights workers were recovered on his property from a farm pond dam, five miles southwest of Philadelphia off Highway 21.
The pond was under construction at the time the bodies were found.
During the 1967 trial, Hatcher testified that he was a Klan member and had attended a meeting of the organization in Neshoba County.
According to the 1967 court transcripts, Hatcher testified that Killen told him “that the three had been taken care of and the bodies were buried south of Philadelphia beyond the fairgrounds in an earthen dam and they had burned the car.”
Wiggs later retired from the Highway Patrol and still resides in Philadelphia.
District Attorney Mark Duncan said earlier that the prosecution would rely heavily on testimony from Killen’s 1967 federal trial which ended with a hung jury. Many of the people who testified in that trial are now deceased.
Parts of the transcripts are expected to be read in court with someone playing the role of the person asking the questions and another the role of the witness.
One person reads the question and one person reads the answers, Duncan said, noting that he’s used old transcripts in court on other occasions.
