Charles Moore and Henry Dee, two black 19-year-olds hitchhiking in Franklin County, Miss., on May 2, 1964, were abducted, beaten, strapped to an engine block and thrown in the Mississippi River.
Moore’s brother, 62-year-old retired Army Sgt. Thomas Moore of Colorado Springs, wants justice.
Moore has enlisted the help of a U.S. attorney who has agreed to reopen the case and two U.S. senators who are proposing a $5 million federal cold-case office to solve racial murders of the era.
“This is my mission in life,” said Moore, who has examined 1,200 pages of FBI reports on the case. “There’s not a day that goes by I don’t work on this.”
U.S. Sens. Jim Talent, R-Mo., and Chris Dodd, D-Conn., said this week they will sponsor the Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, inspired by cases such as the Moore-Dee murders and other unsolved crimes.
Meanwhile, Moore and the Mississippi Religious Leadership Conference have established a reward fund for information in the murders.
FBI agents found body parts from Moore and Dee in July 1964 while looking for three civil rights workers – Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner – whose bodies were found in an earthen dam.
Former Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen, 80, was sentenced in June to 60 years in prison for those slayings. A $100,000 reward was established in that case by the Mississippi conference.
Charles Edwards, then a 31-year-old paper mill worker, and his cousin, James Ford Seale, a 29-year-old truck driver, were arrested in the Moore-Dee slayings but never tried.
Edwards told investigators he and Seale picked up the boys, beat them with bean poles and left them alive, according to FBI documents. He later denied making the statement.
Edwards and Seale did not return phone calls from The Denver Post.
Seale was reported in newspapers to have died in 2001. But in July, Moore found Seale lounging outside his home in Franklin County, Miss.
Moore went to U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton in the Southern District of Mississippi and convinced him to reopen the case.
“At first I told Thomas we didn’t have much to go on, but when I read the file I thought there might be enough evidence to have a trial,” Lampton said. “I told him I would either prosecute or tell him why I couldn’t.”
Some of the witnesses and investigators in the 42-year-old case have died, Lampton said. Others no longer may be lucid.
“Thomas is coming here next month and I’m going to take him with me to see some people so he can see for himself,” Lampton said. “He deserves some answers. I’m going to try to get those for him. ”
A state-federal task force has been formed to re-examine the evidence, Lampton said.
“We want the murderers and their accomplices who are still living to know there’s an entire section of the Department of Justice that is going after them,” Sen. Talent said. “We need to unearth the truth and do justice because there cannot be healing without the truth.”
“I’ve had nightmares my whole life,” Moore said. “There’s been a lot of imagining of what could have happened, and now I know from the FBI reports it was even worse than I imagined. Charles Moore was still alive when they put him in the Mississippi River.”
“This is closure for me,” Moore said. “I have a picture of him, and it looks like he’s frowning. Now when I look at this picture I see a smile on his face, and he’s saying, ‘Thank you brother.”‘
Staff writer Dave Curtin can be reached at 303-820-1276 or dcurtin@denverpost.com.
