Solved cold cases in Mississippi
7 documented cases.
Ben Chester White
Ben Chester White, a 67-year-old Black Baptist deacon who had worked all his life on a white family's farm outside Natchez, Mississippi, was killed on June 10, 1966, in the Homochitto National Forest in Adams County. Three men tied to the Ku Klux Klan, Claude Fuller, James Jones and Ernest Avants, had asked him to help find a lost dog. The Justice Department later said the plan was to lure Martin Luther King Jr. to the area by killing a Black man. Jones named all three in statements to state officers. Avants was acquitted at a state trial in December 1967, Jones's trial ended in a hung jury, and Fuller was never tried. Federal officials considered a civil rights charge in 1970 and did not bring one. In 1999 a national news program gave them a videotape of a recent interview with Avants, and they realized the killing had happened on federal land. Avants was indicted in June 2000 for aiding and abetting murder on federal property. Jones and Fuller were dead by then. In February 2003 a federal jury in Jackson convicted him, on Jones's 1966 testimony read aloud and on the account of an FBI agent to whom Avants had said in 1967 that he shot White. He was sentenced to life, and the Fifth Circuit affirmed in April 2004. Avants died in prison in 2004.
Charles Eddie Moore
Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, both 19, were hitchhiking at the edge of Meadville, Mississippi, on May 2, 1964, when Klansman James Ford Seale, posing as a federal revenue agent, drove them into the Homochitto National Forest. Klansmen beat them with bean poles while interrogating them about imaginary guns, then drove them, still alive, across the river into Louisiana, chained them to a Jeep engine block and railroad iron, and pushed them into the Mississippi from a boat. Their bodies surfaced in July 1964 during the search for the three civil rights workers of the Mississippi Burning case. Seale and a second Klansman were arrested that November and released; a justice of the peace dismissed the charges. Decades later the case was widely reported as closed because Seale was dead. In July 2005 Charles's older brother, working with a Canadian documentary filmmaker, found Seale alive near Meadville and took the evidence to U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton. Indicted for federal kidnapping in January 2007, Seale was convicted on June 14, 2007, on the testimony of the second Klansman, who was granted immunity, and sentenced to three life terms. He died in prison in 2011.
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner
On June 21, 1964, during Freedom Summer, three civil rights workers went to Neshoba County, Mississippi to look at a Black church outside Philadelphia that the Klan had burned the week before. James Chaney, 21, was a Black Mississippian from Meridian; Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, were white New Yorkers. Leaving the site, they were stopped for speeding and held for hours in the county jail. After their release, carloads of Klansmen intercepted them on an isolated road, beat them and shot them. Their bodies were found forty-four days later under an earthen dam. Mississippi never charged anyone with murder. In 1967 federal prosecutors tried eighteen men for conspiring to violate the victims' civil rights; seven were convicted and none served more than six years. The jury deadlocked eleven to one on Edgar Ray Killen, a sawmill operator, Baptist preacher and Klan organizer whom witnesses said had gathered the mob; the holdout would not convict a preacher. Decades later new witnesses surfaced, and on January 6, 2005, a Neshoba County grand jury indicted Killen, 79, for murder. On June 21, 2005, forty-one years to the day after the killings, a jury convicted him of three counts of manslaughter, and Judge Marcus Gordon gave him the maximum, sixty years. The Mississippi Supreme Court upheld the conviction in 2007; the state closed the wider investigation in 2016. Killen died at the state penitentiary at Parchman on January 11, 2018, a week short of his 93rd birthday.
Julia Critchfield
Julia Critchfield, a 36-year-old mother of four who loved karaoke, was found on January 22, 1978, at the bottom of a dirt pit below a cliff in Saucier, in Harrison County, Mississippi. An autopsy and a coroner's inquest showed she had been strangled by hand and died about two hours before she was thrown from the cliff. She had been at Chris's Lounge on Courthouse Road the night she died, but no suspect was found and the case went cold. A sheriff's investigator and a crime scene investigator took it up again a few years before 2018. In October 2018 the Texas Rangers told them that Samuel Little, a 78-year-old inmate, had given information linking him to a killing in Harrison County while being questioned about a Texas cold case. Little had been convicted in 2014 of three Los Angeles murders after a DNA match in those unrelated cases, and he was by then confessing to a Texas Ranger. On October 31, 2018, Harrison County investigators interviewed him at the Wise County Sheriff's Office in Decatur, Texas; the sheriff said he confessed, giving details only the killer would know, and he was charged with murder. Little eventually confessed to 93 killings between 1970 and 2005, of which the FBI had verified 50 by October 2019. He died in custody on December 30, 2020, aged 80. The sources reviewed report no trial in Mississippi.
Medgar Evers
Medgar Evers, 37, the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi, was shot in the back in the driveway of his Jackson home shortly after midnight on June 12, 1963, hours after President Kennedy's televised civil rights address. He had stepped out of his car carrying an armload of T-shirts; a sniper hidden in the honeysuckle of a vacant lot across the street fired a single rifle shot, and he died about fifteen minutes after reaching the hospital. Police found a .30-06 Enfield rifle in bushes near a drive-in lot, and an FBI examiner matched a fingerprint on its scope to Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and White Citizens' Council member from Greenwood, who was charged on June 21. Two trials in 1964 ended in hung juries of white men, and in 1969 the indictment was dismissed. In October 1989 The Clarion-Ledger reported that the state's secret Sovereignty Commission had helped Beckwith's defense screen prospective jurors; his widow called for a new prosecution the next day. Hinds County prosecutors rebuilt the case without the original file, found crime-scene negatives and witnesses who said Beckwith had bragged about the killing, and in December 1990 a grand jury re-indicted him. A jury of eight Black and four white Mississippians convicted him on February 5, 1994, in the courtroom where he had been tried thirty years earlier. He was sentenced to life, the conviction was affirmed in 1997, and he died in custody on January 21, 2001, aged 80.
Melinda Lou Barnhouse
In September 1989, the body of a young woman was found strangled and nude in the bushes at a rest area off the southbound side of Interstate 55 near mile marker 26 in Lincoln County, Mississippi. Investigators could not identify her; they estimated her age between 16 and 35 and buried her as Jane Doe in a pauper's plot at Rosehill Cemetery in Brookhaven. About a year later, Alfred Ray Case of Brookhaven was arrested, charged with manslaughter in her death, and convicted; he was sentenced to 20 years and, according to reporting, is not eligible for release until 2030. The victim, however, remained unidentified for more than three decades. In 2022 the Mississippi Office of the State Medical Examiner, the Lincoln County Sheriff's Office, and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation turned to forensic genetic genealogy, sending evidence to the Othram laboratory in The Woodlands, Texas. Othram used Forensic-Grade Genome Sequencing to build a genealogical profile and traced a family tree, and on May 10, 2023, through DNA testing of a close relative, the long-unidentified Jane Doe was positively identified as Melinda Lou Barnhouse, originally from Maryland.
Vernon Dahmer
Vernon Dahmer, 58, ran a farm, a sawmill and a grocery store north of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and led the local NAACP. After the 1965 Voting Rights Act he offered publicly to collect poll taxes for his neighbors, and to pay them for anyone who could not afford it. Early on January 10, 1966, two carloads of White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan attacked his house with gasoline and shotguns. He fired back from the doorway while his family escaped, and he died of his injuries. The FBI investigation led to charges against fourteen Klansmen: one pleaded guilty to arson and three were sentenced to life for murder. But the White Knights' Imperial Wizard, Sam Bowers, whom prosecutors said gave the order, was freed by hung juries in four trials. The case was reopened in the 1990s. After published reports in March 1998 that Bowers had admitted tampering with a 1968 jury, state prosecutors brought new indictments, arrested him on May 28, 1998, and put a former Klansman who had taken part in the attack on the stand. On August 21, 1998, a multiracial jury in Hattiesburg convicted Bowers of murder and arson after deliberating just over two hours. He was sentenced to life, always denied it, and died in the Parchman prison hospital on November 5, 2006, at age 82.