Jackson, Miss. – Prosecutors in a revived civil rights-era case have dropped their attempt to get a TV interview with a now-dead Klansman admitted as evidence.
FBI informant Earnest Gilbert never testified about the 1964 killings of two black teenagers but was interviewed by ABC’s “20/20” before he died in 2004. Prosecutors had hoped to use the interview as evidence in the trial of reputed Klansman James Ford Seale.
In the tapes of the interview played Tuesday during a pretrial hearing, Gilbert said Seale and the other men involved in the slayings of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee were his “friends.”
“And did I rat on my friends? Yes, I did,” he said.
But after Jimmie Gilbert, the informant’s widow, testified that her husband was having mental problems by the time he gave the interview, U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton withdrew his request to admit it as evidence.
On May 2, 1964, the teens were abducted in the southwest Mississippi town of Roxie and beaten in the Homochitto National Forest before being weighted down and thrown into the Mississippi River to drown.
Seale, 71, was arrested in January and has pleaded not guilty to two counts of kidnapping and one count of conspiracy. Jury selection begins May 29.
