Jackson, Miss. – A Colorado Springs man had to wait more than 40 years for charges in the racially motivated slaying of his brother, but, in the end, he helped make the arrest possible.
“I’ve been crying. First time I’ve cried in about 50 years,” said Thomas Moore, 63. “It’s not going to bring his life back, but some way or another, I think he would be satisfied.”
James Ford Seale, a 71-year- old reputed Ku Klux Klansman from the town of Roxie, was arrested and charged Wednesday with kidnapping hitchhikers Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, both 19.
Seale is a former sheriff’s deputy who was once thought to be dead. The arrest is expected to close one of the last major unsolved crimes of the civil rights era.
The break in the 43-year-old case was largely the result of Thomas Moore’s dogged efforts to bring the killers to justice.
For years, Seale’s family had told reporters that he had died, but in 2005, Thomas Moore and a Canadian documentary filmmaker, David Ridgen, found Seale, old and sick, living just a few miles down the road from where the kidnappings took place.
“If they hadn’t brought it to my attention, I wouldn’t have known to do anything,” said U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton, chief federal prosecutor in Jackson.
Thomas Moore said he always carried a burden of guilt over his younger brother’s death.
“I walked around with an amount of shame,” he said. “I didn’t know why, why it happened to us, that I wasn’t there to do something – to do something.”
A second man long suspected in the attack, church deacon and reputed KKK member Charles Marcus Edwards, now 72, was not charged.
Sources close to the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity said Edwards was cooperating with authorities.
Prosecutors did not say why Seale was not charged with murder.
The arrest marked the latest attempt by prosecutors in the South to close the books on crimes from the civil rights era that went unpunished. In recent years, authorities in Mississippi and Alabama have won convictions in the 1963 assassination of NAACP activist Medgar Evers; the 1963 Birmingham, Ala., church bombing that killed four black girls; and slayings in 1964 in Philadelphia, Miss.
Dee’s sister, Thelma Collins, told The Associated Press: “I never thought I would live to see it. No, sir, I never did. I always prayed that justice would be done – somehow, some way.”
Seale and Edwards are suspected of kidnapping the two victims in a Klan crackdown prompted by rumors that black Muslims were planning an armed “insurrection” in rural Franklin County. Seale and Edwards were arrested at the time.
But, consumed by the search for three missing civil rights workers, the FBI turned the case over to local authorities, and a justice of the peace promptly threw out all charges against Seale and Edwards.
In 2000, the Justice Department’s civil rights unit reopened the case.
On May 2, 1964, Charles Moore and Dee were hitchhiking near an ice cream stand in the town of Meadville when Seale pulled over and offered them a ride, a Klan informant told the FBI.
According to FBI interrogators, Edwards admitted that he and Seale took the two men into the woods for a whipping, but Edwards said both men were alive when he left them.
An informant told the FBI that Seale’s brother and another Klansman took the unconscious blacks to the river, lashed their bodies to a Jeep engine block and some old railroad tracks, and dumped them over the side of a boat. The other Klansmen and the informant have since died.
The victims’ weighted, decomposed bodies were found by chance two months later in July 1964, during the search for three civil rights workers whose disappearance and deaths in Philadelphia, Miss., got far more attention from the media and the FBI.
The Justice Department reopened the case after The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson uncovered documents indicating the beatings had occurred in the Homochitto National Forest, giving the FBI jurisdiction, but the case languished until Seale was located.
