Solved cold cases in Mississippi
2 documented cases.
Charles Eddie Moore
Charles Eddie Moore was a 19-year-old Black man who, along with his 19-year-old friend Henry Hezekiah Dee, was abducted on May 2, 1964, near Meadville in Franklin County, Mississippi, beaten in the Homochitto National Forest, and then drowned alive in the Mississippi River by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Moore, a college student who had been suspended from Alcorn A&M and returned home, and Dee were hitchhiking when James Ford Seale, a Klansman posing as a federal revenue agent investigating moonshine, lured them into his car. Klansmen took the two young men into the forest, tied them to a tree, and beat them with bean sticks while interrogating them under the false belief that Black residents were stockpiling weapons for an uprising. The barely conscious teenagers were then bound to a Jeep engine block and lengths of railroad rail with chains, driven across the state line through Louisiana to a remote landing on the Mississippi River, and thrown into the water while still alive. Their partial remains were found that summer during an unrelated search for three missing civil rights workers in the Mississippi Burning case. Seale and fellow Klansman Charles Marcus Edwards were arrested by the FBI in November 1964, but state charges were dropped in January 1965 and no one was prosecuted. The case stayed cold for more than forty years. It was solved not by forensic science but by Edwards himself: decades later, the co-conspirator was granted immunity and agreed to testify against Seale, providing the inside account that finally convicted him. On June 14, 2007, a federal jury found Seale guilty of two counts of kidnapping and one count of conspiracy. He was sentenced on August 24, 2007, to three life terms, and he died in federal prison in 2011.
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.