The Most Evil Secret Societies in History (15 page)

Birmingham's law enforcement agencies at first attempted to blame black activists, but soon even they couldn't shy away from the fact that the KKK was involved. Yet, despite clear evidence pointing towards those responsible, at the time no one was charged with the killings. Eventually all four murders went on file, along with several hundred other unsolved crimes of the period. This did nothing to discourage KKK violence. During the summer of 1964 in St. Augustine, Florida, the black population, with the support of Martin Luther King (or ‘Martin Lucifer Coon,' as the Klan nicknamed him), embarked on ‘integrationist' marches along with their Jewish neighbors. The most militant of the hooded Klan knights were ready and waiting. The marchers refrained from using any sort of violence, but not so the white knights, who stoned and clubbed and threw acid at them. The clashes between the two groups lasted for weeks, the police seemingly powerless to intervene. The violence eventually died down, but other outbreaks of Klan activity sprung up elsewhere. One infamous incident involved Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn who, along with several other soldiers, was returning from a summer training camp at Fort Benning in Georgia. Colonel Penn was black, as were several of his companions. When their car, sporting a Washington number plate, was spotted by a group of Klansmen, they immediately jumped to the conclusion that the occupants were civil-rights supporters, with the result that Penn's vehicle was peppered with gunshots. Tragically, Colonel Penn died in the attack, but what followed was even more outrageous, for although the culprits were eventually arrested and put on trial, the all-white jury was loathe to convict. As the defendants' attorney put it, no ‘… Madison County jury [ever] converted an electric chair into a sacrificial chair on which the pure flesh of a member of the human race was sacrificed to the savage revengeful appetite of a raging mob.'
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A verdict of ‘not guilty' was returned, and much to the federal government's annoyance, if not embarrassment, the defendants went free.

If the Ku Klux Klan thought it was making any inroads into mainstream American life, however, nothing could have been further from the truth for, a little less than a hundred years after the Invisible Empire's birth, when it was formed primarily to stop black people gaining any foothold in mainstream America, the African-American population had begun to claim its rightful place in society. Educated, economically independent and making huge inroads into middle-class America, the country was more truly bi-racial than it had ever been in its entire history. Nonetheless, a great deal of work still had to be done if African Americans were ever to enjoy equality in their own country. Martin Luther King campaigned vigorously to bring down the racist barriers. Rallies were organized, as well as sit-ins and other means of peaceful protest, yet even then the Ku Klux Klan couldn't resist using violence to make its voice heard.

One victim of the Klan, Mrs. Viola Gregg Liuzzo, was shot dead while transporting demonstrators to and from a march in Lowndes County in 1965. The perpetrators were all brought to court; once again no conviction was secured.
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The only positive outcome of the whole sorry affair was that it did at least prompt the then President, Lyndon B. Johnson, to denounce the Klan publicly and declare a war against all that the Invisible Empire stood for.

Nevertheless, under United States law, it is impossible to forbid the existence of any type of organization, and it fell to individual counties to gauge the political temperature of the country and begin prosecuting Klan crimes. Slowly but surely, the tide began to turn. FBI agents infiltrated many Klan groups and with the evidence they were building up they began securing convictions against Klan members.

In 1965 a voting-rights law was passed, increasing the significance of black citizens and causing politicians to begin taking note of their non-white constituents. Towards the end of the 1960s, it seemed nothing could stem the increasing growth of black power, and several areas with black majorities voted in black mayors, councilors and sheriffs. In such an atmosphere, the decline of the Ku Klux Klan was inevitable.

So determined was the US government to stamp out the KKK that it sanctioned the FBI's ‘disrupt and neutralize' programme, otherwise known by the acronym COUNTERINTELPRO, which, by the early 1970s, led the FBI to claim that one in six Klan members were actually FBI informers.

The specter of the four young girls who were killed in the Birmingham bombing several years earlier, also began to catch up with the Klan. In Alabama there is no statute of limitation where murder is concerned, and a certain young lawyer by the name of William Baxley had forgotten neither the crime nor the fact that convictions could be sought at any time so long as there was enough evidence. On leaving law school Baxley set his sights on becoming Attorney General of Alabama, and by the time he was thirty, he had achieved his goal. In a position of authority, Baxley now began hounding the FBI for their files on the case and eventually, with the relevant documents in his possession, realized that the FBI had had, within weeks of the bombing, enough evidence to convict those men responsible. In September 1977, almost thirteen years after the crime was committed, one of the guilty men was brought to justice when an Alabama grand jury (made up of three black and nine white jurors) indicted and afterwards convicted Robert Edward Chambliss on four counts of first-degree murder.

Baxley promised to pursue everyone else who had been involved in the crime and bring them to justice, too. But perhaps the most poignant yet powerful sign that America was moving away from Ku Klux Klan-type politics was that in 1979, Birmingham, Alabama elected its first black mayor.

With Klan ranks thinning daily, and sheriffs and juries increasingly willing to arrest and convict anyone involved in Klan activities, membership of the Invisible Empire waned once again. Small pockets of resistance did still remain, people whose deeply entrenched beliefs were succinctly expressed by the female jockey Mary Bacon, who not only publicly declared her Klan membership but announced that:

We are not just a bunch of illiterate, southern, nigger killers. We are good white Christian people, hard-working people, people working for a white America […] When one of your wives or one of your sisters gets raped by a nigger maybe you'll get smart and join the Klan.
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Even with a brief renaissance (particularly in the Deep South) toward the end of the 1970s, the Klan struggled to achieve the kind of power it wielded in the 1920s. A young, college-educated man by the name of David Duke tried creating a new Klan image by appealing to America's growing middle class. Duke lectured at university campuses up and down the country, and appeared on television and radio shows, but to little avail. Indeed, the Klan seemed only to have become an organization that ultra-right-wing men and women could look back on with nostalgia. The Ku Klux Klan was part of American history, part of a long tradition that represented a yearning amongst some for white supremacy.

But there were some further hideous throwbacks to times gone by. In the town of Greensboro in North Carolina on November 3, 1979, a sizeable anti-Klan rally was gathering in Greensboro's black district when into their midst drove a nine-car cavalcade of Ku Klux Klan and American neo-Nazis. The demonstrators on the street began pounding on the cars, but what happened next was almost beyond belief. In front of TV cameras and numerous witnesses, several of the men inside the cars stepped out of their vehicles, brandished guns and began firing into the crowds. Four white men and one black woman were killed, and many, many more (including children) were badly injured. The incident drew national attention. President Carter ordered the FBI to investigate. Fourteen of the assailants were arrested and charged with the murders, but the Greensboro incident showed that, although America was becoming a more tolerant, interracial society, there were still deep pockets of bigotry and evil at large.

Today, almost twenty-six years later, nothing much has changed. When the Klan was founded back in 1865, its remit was first as a fraternal organization to fight against black emancipation. During its second flush under the authority of William J. Simmons its goal had changed little. The Klan was to be the savior of the downtrodden, working-class, white American. The society saw itself as defending what it believed were traditional American values: the Constitution, the Bible and racial separation. But perhaps what really bound and still binds the Klan together is something even more deep-seated. It is that original idea of fraternity, of a gathering together of like-minded people. Societies like the Klan have existed for many hundreds of years and the appeal of secret rituals, sacred ceremonies and a hierarchical structure clearly answers some unspoken, yet very real need.

The last word, however, must belong to the four teenage girls who died so tragically in the Birmingham Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, where a memorial plaque bearing pictures of the deceased reads, ‘May men learn to replace bitterness and violence with love and understanding.'

There is nothing so despicable as a secret society that is based upon religious prejudice and that will attempt to defeat a man because of his religious beliefs. Such a society is like a cockroach … it thrives in the dark. So do those who combine for such an end.

W
ILLIAM
H
OWARD
T
AFT
, 27th US President, 1909-13

O
n October 4, 1994 in Morin Heights, a small ski resort near Montreal in Canada, the fire brigade was called out to a burning condominium, beside which they discovered the remains of two badly charred bodies. Initially investigators, who had run a quick check on the building's registered owners, thought the two bodies were most likely those of Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret. Di Mambro, it later transpired, was the leader of a secretive sect, known as the Order of the Solar Temple, while Luc Jouret was Di Mambro's right-hand man, a self-styled prophet whose main role was to recruit new members to the cult. But, as an autopsy later confirmed, neither body belonged to these two men; indeed one of the corpses was that of a woman. So perhaps investigators were looking at the bodies of the couple that were renting the condominium? This theory was also quickly dismissed when fire-fighters, having extinguished the flames inside the building, went in to investigate. On close inspection of the rooms, three further corpses were discovered hidden at the back of a wardrobe – those of a man, a woman and a child. But the grisly horror of the scene did not stop there, for all three bodies were found to be covered in blood. The corpses were those of the property's tenants: Tony Dutoit, Nicki Dutoit and their child, a baby boy called Christopher-Emmanuel. It was quickly established that, rather than dying from the fire, all three had been stabbed to death – Tony a total of fifty times in the back, Nicki several times in the back, chest and neck, and finally Christopher-Emmanuel (who was only three months old), six times in the chest with what appeared to have been a wooden stake. Police put their time of death at a minimum of four days prior to the outbreak of the fire, so it would seem that the murderer had stored their bodies before deciding to burn down the building. But what of the other two corpses? Who were they – the people who had murdered the Dutoits, or yet more victims of a multiple killer?

The police were baffled, although early on they did make one crucial discovery: that the Dutoits had been members of the Order of the Solar Temple. Police also learned of a rumor that the leader of the order, Joseph Di Mambro, had sent out assassins to murder the Dutoits' baby boy because he believed Christopher- Emmanuel to be the anti-Christ. Arrest warrants were issued for both Di Mambro and Luc Jouret but, unsurprisingly, the pair were nowhere to be found.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Switzerland, more fires were breaking out, fires which no one at first had cause to suspect might be connected to the murders in Canada.

At midnight on October 4, 1994, less than a day after the Morin Heights' deaths, Swiss fire-fighters were called to the home of an elderly farmer, Albert Giacobino, who lived near the tiny ski resort of Chiery. On entering the burning building, Giacobino's body was found slumped across the kitchen table with a plastic bag over his head. Investigators initially concluded that he had committed suicide, however, on closer inspection, it was discovered that Giacobino had been shot in the head. Police also discovered that the farmhouse and outlying buildings were peppered with incendiary devices. It all seemed very strange, but the Swiss authorities could not even guess at this point just how sinister these findings really were. One of the outlying buildings appeared to have been turned into a meeting room inside which belongings lay scattered about, although there was no sign of the owners of these items. Then one of the investigators, realizing that the building seemed much larger from the outside than it looked inside, started searching for a hidden door or panel. Suddenly all was revealed: an entire section of wall was found to slide back, on the other side of which lay a secret chamber decorated from floor to ceiling with scarlet furnishings. To the investigator's horror, in the middle of the floor lay eighteen corpses, arranged in a circle with their feet in the middle and their heads towards the outside. Many of the corpses were dressed in what appeared to be red, gold and black ceremonial capes, and some had plastic bags over their heads. A second secret room or chamber was then discovered in which lay another three corpses. There was a great deal of blood in both rooms, indicating that many of the victims had been shot. Forensic specialists estimated the time of death to have been on October 3, at around the same time as the Canadian murders had occurred, allowing for the time difference. Serge Thierren, one of the many investigators who attended the farmhouse massacre, described it thus: