The Ghosts of Mississippi (21 page)

Waller then called W. T. Lee, a telephone company executive, to testify that Medgar Evers had had an unlisted number and was not in the phone book of 1963. This would show that Beckwith would not have found his name and address in the phone booth at the bus station.

Lott attacked the whole scenario. He handed Lee the phone book and asked him to read the names and addresses of every Evers in the directory: “Dr. Carl Evers, 4325 Azalea Drive; David W. Evers Jr., 505 Witsell Road; James E. Evers, 344 Culley Drive; and Mrs. Mary L. Evers, 4233 Chennault Avenue.” There was no Evers on Poplar or Buena or Arbor Vista. Why, then, would Beckwith have mentioned those streets? This made the cab drivers seem less credible.

Dewitt Walcott, president of Delta Liquid Plant Food and Byron De La Beckwith’s employer, testified that Beckwith worked for him since February 1963. Walcott said that the white Valiant in Beckwith’s possession in June of 1963 belonged to the company. It had a broken speedometer, he said, so there were no records of its daily mileage, but Beckwith was allowed to take it home and use it for personal business.

All Waller wanted Walcott for was to establish that Beckwith drove a white Valiant. But as it turned out, Mr. Walcott was a bit of a time bomb for the prosecution.

Sanders used his cross-examination to discuss Beckwith’s work habits. He was, according to Walcott, hardworking. In fact the week of June 10 was extremely busy, as every customer needed soil and tissue tests. Walcott also slipped in a few other points. He had seen Beckwith with a rifle in his car on Monday morning, June 10, and he had seen a fresh, quarter-moon-shaped cut over Beckwith’s eye. Also, the doors and the trunk of the Valiant didn’t lock real well. In other words, it would have been easy to steal something out of the car. Like a rifle.

Bill Waller next called Leroy Pittman, who lived with his wife next to their small grocery store on Delta Drive, just south of Joe’s Drive In. Pittman and his wife both testified that early one evening the week before the shooting, probably that Thursday, they saw a stranger dressed in a business suit strolling around the field behind their property. Since those vacant lots were for sale, they assumed he was looking at real estate. He paid them no mind, but he was staring toward Guynes Street. They thought it was strange that the man was wearing dark glasses, and it was almost night.

The Pittmans had not been around on the night of the murder. They had left for a trip to the Gulf Coast on Sunday. Their son, Robert, told the court that he also saw a man get out of a white Valiant and walk around the vacant lots. He said that the man was wearing a hat, sunglasses, a dark suit, and white shoes.

Robert Pittman, who was seventeen, said that he had seen that white Valiant on other occasions. At about eleven o’clock on the Saturday night before the shooting, he saw a white Valiant backed into a secluded spot next to the grocery store, facing Delta Drive. He noticed a whip- type antenna lashed to the back bumper and a Shriners emblem dangling from the rearview mirror. Robert was certain that the car was a ’62 model.

He saw the car again the night of the murder. He and his friend Ronald Jones were minding the store. Just after 9 p.m. on Tuesday, June 11, Ronald and Robert closed the store and started throwing model airplanes out back. One plane landed on the roof of the store, and Robert climbed up to get it. That’s when they saw the white Valiant with the big antenna cruising by the place, real slow. They thought it was a police car.

The teenagers were asleep when they heard the first shot. They looked out toward Joe’s, saw nothing, and then heard the screaming. They ran in the direction of the screaming and found a hysterical Myrlie Evers in her front yard. She shouted something at them, like they were the ones who killed her husband, so they ran back home.

Jones testified that another shot was fired, maybe at them, while they were running home. Both boys were awakened by the police at four o’clock that morning, taken to the station for questioning, and then released.

The trial had everyone’s attention now. On Monday the gallery was standing room only. The Negro neighborhoods were tense, particularly the area around the Jackson State campus.

That night a twenty-year-old student named Mamie Ballard stepped out into the traffic that passed through the campus. A white motorist hit her, breaking her leg. The crowd of students who surrounded the accident soon broke into a wild, angry demonstration. Jackson police came in to chase them off and got a chance to roll out their new riot wagon: a baby-blue armor-plated troop carrier they called the “Thompson Tank.” Dogs were set on the students, and police fired buckshot at the crowd. At least three were hit.

The next day Charles Evers stopped two hundred students from marching to the Hinds County Courthouse in protest. They were demanding that the city erect a traffic signal at the dangerous intersection.

“If you are such heroes that you want to die for a traffic light, then go ahead,” he told the crowd. “They will shoot you. They showed that last night.”

The students stayed on campus.

On Wednesday morning Bill Waller called Martha Jean O’Brien to the stand. The sixteen-year-old carhop had been working at Joe’s Drive In on the night of the murder. She was small and pretty, with shoulder-length brown hair. Her job was to go out to cars when they blinked their lights, take the customers’ orders, and bring them their food.

Sometime between 8:30 and 10 p.m. on June 11 she saw a dirty white Valiant pull into the parking lot. She later identified it as Beckwith’s car.

O’Brien said a man got out of the car without blinking the lights for service and walked to the rest room. She remembered he was very tall, dressed in dark clothes, and in his early twenties. His hair was dark and combed back, and he “walked straight.”

When Hardy Lott cross-examined the witness, he asked her how many statements she made to the police. She remembered signing two statements — one taken two days after the murder and another taken on June 24. Waller had referred only to the latter statement and could not produce the first. But Lott seemed to know what was in it.

Didn’t she say she noticed the man because he was exceptionally tall and good-looking and in his early twenties? She had. In fact, didn’t she pick a six-foot-four policeman out of a lineup as someone who was the same height? She had.

Barbara Ann Holder testified next. She was twenty-two and had recently stopped working at Joe’s after six years as a carhop. On the night of June 11, she said, she had been driving around and had stopped at Joe’s on an impulse. She saw Jean O’Brien, and while having a cup of coffee between 8:30 and 8:45, she saw a car pull in and park next to a pile of asphalt.

“I thought it was a police car,” she said.

Waller asked her to describe it.

“It was white, and it had a radio aerial on the back, and it was a Valiant, and it was dirty. It looked like it had been out on a dirt road or something.”

“Did you see the man in it?”

“Yes, sir. He got out of the car and went in the rest room. … I would say he was between five feet seven and five feet nine and a half, and he was slim, and he had on dark clothes. He walked straight, because most of those people out there don’t walk straight, but he walked erect and real straight.”

She said she left and came back again, around 11:30, and the car was still there.

The judge disallowed one statement she made. She said it was her “opinion” that the man in the lot was Beckwith, based on the pictures she saw in the papers.

Waller wrapped up testimony with a string of official witnesses. FBI agents Lee Prospere and Sam Allen described approaching Beckwith at his home on June 21, the day before his arrest. He refused to talk to them.

Waller called an FBI firearms expert, who testified that a scar over Beckwith’s eye and a gash in the tree bark at the sniper’s nest could have been caused simultaneously by the recoil of a rifle and scope.

The last witness was the pathologist Dr. Forrest Bratley, who had gotten a good look at Beckwith after his arrest. He described the vivid pink scar, which he determined was between ten and thirty days old and was consistent with the contours of a rifle scope. This was the image Waller wanted to leave with the jury as he rested his case.

In the end Waller and Fox felt they had put on the best possible case. Waller was proud of all the scientific evidence, and he felt that part had gone well. But despite all the circumstantial evidence, he knew the case wasn’t a strong one. He never could put the defendant at the scene beyond a reasonable doubt, never could put the gun in his hands at the moment the shot was fired.

Waller also was troubled by how well the defense was prepared for his witnesses. It wasn’t much of an ambush when the defense attorneys seemed to have an answer for everything Waller threw at them. Someone was feeding information to the defense team, but Waller could never be sure who was doing the leaking.

He was sure that he would need a break to win the case. He needed the other side to make a mistake, something that would give him an opening.

All Hardy Lott had to do was plant some reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury. He began with a young white woman who lived on Missouri Street, near Medgar and Myrlie Evers.

Willie Mae Patterson had been standing in her parents’ kitchen, by the refrigerator, when she heard a loud shot. She ran to the front door and looked through the glass at the house across Missouri Street and she saw “the guy,” Medgar Evers, fall in front of his doorway. Everything was still, and then about a minute later she saw three men in light clothes running in front of her house. She didn’t recognize them. After the men ran by, she heard two more shots.

When Waller cross-examined Patterson, he read her the statement she had made to police at 4:25 a.m. on June 12. It was very different. She said then that she had waited longer before looking out the window and that the “men” were just walking fast. It had all happened after the second shot was fired. She said that she also saw “three white boys standing next to the fence” across from her house. Waller wondered whether she could have seen young Ken Adcock and Betty Coley, who was wearing slacks, hurrying by.

Next was Lee Cockrell, recent owner of Joe’s Drive In, who wasn’t having much success getting people to call it “Lee’s Drive In.” On the night of the murder he pulled into his lot at about 11:30 p.m. He recognized several cars belonging to employees or regular customers. There was no Valiant.

The Drive In shut down at midnight, but the employees were still inside the building at 12:30, closing up. Cockrell said he didn’t hear any shots, since he was in front of the restaurant, by the cigar counter. But Eloise Cooper, the “colored girl” who worked as a cook, came running up from the kitchen, saying there had been “some shooting” going on outside. He “immediately” ran to the back door, the one facing east and the houses on Guynes Street, to see what was going on. He stayed maybe two, less than five, minutes. Did he hear or see a man running? He did not. Did he see or hear a car pull out of the gravel lot? He did not. He didn’t stay long, he said, because there were two customers up front who had been drinking all day and he was afraid they were about to start fighting.

Waller asked Lee Cockrell if he knew how long Eloise Cooper had waited before running back to tell him there had been a shooting. He didn’t know. Waller asked him if it was true that he had told police that he had no idea what had gone on that night because he was so distracted by the fighting drunks. In fact couldn’t a car have pulled out of the lot while he was so distracted that he didn’t even hear the shot before Eloise Cooper told him about the shooting?

Lee Cockrell didn’t think so, but by the time Waller was through with him, Lee Cockrell was not so convincing.

Doris Sumrall, a bookkeeper who worked part-time as a waitress at Joe’s, heard the shot. She testified next, saying that she was standing by the cash register at the carhop window when she heard gunfire — one shot, then two or three pistol shots, sounding far off. After the last shots Eloise Cooper came running up, saying, “Someone is shooting out here!” Doris Sumrall, who had a good view of the parking lot, neither saw nor heard a man running, and never saw a car pull out of the lot.

The next witness, Ansie Lee Haven, was another waitress at Joe’s who had put in a long day of work — she started at 5 a.m. — when she finally got off at 11 p.m., the night of the murder. As she walked through the parking lot to get her car, she noticed a blue Ford parked in a dark corner, and next to it a white or cream-colored Dodge with no aerial. When police showed her a picture of the Valiant, she was sure it was not the car she saw.

Then Bill Waller cross-examined her, holding her police statements in his hand. Didn’t she tell Officers Luke and Turner on the day after the shooting that the car she saw was either a Dodge or a Plymouth? And on June 24, didn’t she tell the detectives that she had seen a white Valiant that night, with a big aerial on the back? She denied this. She also denied the statement she made to police only a few weeks earlier, on January 7, saying that the car was either a Valiant or a Dodge.

Alpha Mae McCoy was the owner of Smith’s Bait Shop out on Delta Drive, next door to Pittman’s Grocery. She was reading in bed when she heard the gunshot. Alpha Mae said she had a good view of Joe’s parking lot in the minutes after the shooting, and that she didn’t see anybody running or any cars pulling out.

The next two witnesses were friends of Beckwith, Mary Branch and her son Bo, both from Sidon, a small town near Greenwood. Together they reconstructed an odd event on Sunday night, June 9. As they drove together to the bus station in Greenwood at ten o’clock that night, they both testified, they saw a man they didn’t know getting out of Beckwith’s white Valiant. After Bo ran into the station to find Beckwith, Delay came out and talked to the man, who had hurried over to a pickup. That was all that was said. Bo Branch testified that he saw a cut over Beckwith’s eye that night.

The defense later produced four more of Beckwith’s friends and coworkers who swore they saw a cut over Delay’s eye prior to June 11. One was Fred Conner, a college student who worked at the bus station. He said that he saw Beckwith that same Sunday night, and noticed a “fresh” cut over his eye.

Conner also saw Beckwith the night of the murder. They had dinner together at the Crystal Grill in Greenwood between six and seven in the evening. Fred said Beckwith seemed “normal, just as calm as he always was.”

The defense now brought out its own expert witnesses to dispute the state’s most solid physical evidence: the fingerprint on the Golden Hawk scope. First up was C. D. Brooks, a chemical engineer and former employee of the Alabama Stale Department of Toxicology and Criminal

Investigation. Brooks made the point that it is almost impossible to determine the chemical composition of a fingerprint — it depends on what the finger touched beforehand.

“Now, from your work in the field I will ask you whether or not it is possible to determine the length of time that any fingerprint has been in existence?” Lott asked Brooks.

“It can’t be done without knowing what the substance is.”

“In other words … there is no way to determine how old it is?” “No, sir.”

After lunch L. B. Baynard, a former investigator who was briefly director of the Bureau of Identification for the Louisiana State Police, also testified that there was no way to tell the age of a fingerprint.

Roy Jones, the defense’s first alibi witness, said he had known Beckwith by name for about three years and could recognize the man. Jones was a thirty-three-year-old small-time entrepreneur from Greenwood who had three kids, a neon-sign business, some real estate interests, and a well-known segregationist point of view. Like many with his beliefs, he had joined the Greenwood auxiliary police to boost the force in those troubled times of Negro agitation.

On the night of June 11, Roy Jones was just learning his new job, and he was eager for all the lessons he could get. After he checked off duty at 10 11 p.m. he stuck around the Greenwood Police Station to learn about arrest techniques like how to use a nightstick, how to lead a man around by his finger. He then drove to Short’s Cafe for a sandwich and a glass of milk, and he lingered there for about twenty-five minutes. That’s how he estimated, as he testified in court, that he saw Byron De La Beckwith around 11:45 near the Billups filling station in Greenwood the night Evers was killed in Jackson.

“When you left the cafe you were by yourself?” Lott asked.

“I was by myself.”

“What did you do then?”

“I proceeded to go home.”

“Now, when was it then that you saw Mr. Beckwith?”

“Just as quick as I got in the car and started turning to the left, he was sitting right there on the right, with his lights on, just like he was waiting for a car to pull out, I mean to go on by so he could pull out.”

“Did you get a good look at him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you positive that was him?”

“I know it was.”

Bill Waller pounced during his cross-examination. He had to demolish any alibi witnesses, or at least make them seem confused or biased. He began by asking why, if Jones had knowledge that Beckwith was in Greenwood the night of the murder, did he let him sit in jail for eight months before coming forward with his story. Jones said he didn’t know. “You didn’t see fit to notify
anyone?”
Waller asked incredulously. “That’s right, because I hadn’t been on the auxiliary police but for four or five months. I didn’t know which way to go.”

“In spite of the fact you have only known Mr. Beckwith for three years you are good friends of his in the sense that you want to help him out in the trial?”

“I don’t know what you mean by good friends.”

“Well, you had seen him enough to recognize his automobile at midnight with the headlights on . . .”

“Yes, sir.”

“. . . at a right angle to the street?”

“Yes, sir.”

“To see him in it and know he was driving?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Was that a dark night or was it moonlight?”

“It was a dark night.”

“Had it been raining?”

“No, sir.”

“You want to tell the jury it was a pitch black night?”

“That’s right. . .”

The jury may have remembered that other witnesses in the trial testified that it was a bright moonlit night.

Waller picked through the rest of Jones’s testimony. How could he see in the car when the headlights were shining at him? Was he sure he hadn’t seen Beckwith on the tenth? The ninth? Could he pinpoint any other time he saw Beckwith except at 11:45 on a black night with his lights on? He could not.

On redirect Lott established that there were floodlights shining around Billups service station, making it easy to identify Beckwith in his car as he waited to turn onto Highway 82. He also asked Jones whether he had told anyone about seeing Beckwith that night. He said he had told a Greenwood policeman, who told him to report it to Beckwith’s lawyer. So he called Hardy Lott.

In those days of trial by ambush, all Waller and Fox knew was that Hollis Cresswell and James Holley were alibi witnesses. They had no idea what they were going to say.

Cresswell was fifty years old and a lieutenant with the Greenwood police, where he had worked for the past fifteen years. Holley was his partner. Cresswell said that he had known Beckwith casually for some eight or ten years and he could recognize him easily, along with the white Valiant he drove.

On the night of June 11, Hollis Cresswell and his partner, James Holley, were on patrol, “mostly in the colored section of town, and part uptown.” Their shift ran from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Cresswell swore that he had seen Byron De La Beckwith at the Shell service station in Greenwood at 1:05 a.m., June 12. That was just over half an hour after the shooting, ninety miles to the south. There was no way Beckwith could have driven fast enough to get back to Greenwood by that time.

Lott asked the policeman where he had been right before he saw Beckwith. “We had just pulled into Billups service station, which is an adjoining station and which is just south of the Shell station and Mr. Holley had bought a package of cigarettes,” Cresswell replied.

“I see.”

“Then I pulled on out from under the station and had started up on the Main Street at the time we saw Mr. Beckwith.”

“All right. Now, how close was he to you?”

“Approximately seventy-five to a hundred feet, hardly that far,” Cresswell said. The station was all lit up; he could see clearly. “He was sitting — his car was sitting in the driveway of the Shell service station. At that time there was being some gas put in his car. Mr. Beckwith was standing beside of his car, on the left-hand side of his car, and his front door was open at that time.”

“Now what way have you got of fixing that time that you saw him in the Shell service station?”

“Well, the reason I remember what time it was, usually at night, when we are patrolling around, a lot of times we stop over at a little grocery store there on Main Street and eat something…. That’s Bracci Danton’s. And as we were sitting under the station where Mr. Holley bought the cigarettes, he asked me, said, ‘Are we going to eat anything tonight?’ I said, ‘Well we might as well, if we got time.’ He said, ‘What time is it?’ And I looked at my watch and 1 told him it was five minutes to one o’clock, I mean, after one o’clock, at that time. He said, ‘Well, we had better go on over before he closes up.’ ”

Cresswell said he had been listening to an all-night radio station from Nashville when he heard that Medgar Evers had been shot in Jackson. He said it had been about 4 a.m.

Bill Waller’s cross was short. All he wanted to know was whether or not Hollis Cresswell had come forward at any of Beckwith’s hearings or had spoken to the Jackson detectives to try to clear Beckwith with an alibi. Cresswell said that he had told only a few officers at the Greenwood Police Station and Beckwith’s lawyers, and that was all. Waller didn’t bother asking him why. He would let the jury decide for themselves.

Hardy Lott then called thirty-six-year-old James Holley to the stand. Like Cresswell he said he knew Beckwith by sight. His story about seeing Beckwith at the Shell station matched Cresswell’s exactly, except he reckoned that the distance between them was thirty or forty, instead of seventy, feet. He testified that he had mentioned the sighting to several other cops and to Beckwith’s lawyers after they called. They advised him not to mention it to any investigators unless he was asked. None of them asked.

Waller performed another brusque cross-examination, hammering home the uncomfortable fact that Holley had held his tongue until the trial. He also questioned Holley’s specific memory of Beckwith. Could he say who else he saw that night and when?

“Who did you see at 1:10 on the morning of June the 11th?” asked Waller.

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Who did you see at 1:15?”

“I don’t recall seeing anyone.”

“Do you know of anybody you saw that whole night on that whole shift?”

“Not specifically, no, sir.”

“That’s all.”

Judge Hendrick excused the witness and then turned to the defense table. “Who do you want, Mr. Lott?” he asked.