Ex-Miss. sheriff’s deputy charged in ’64 deaths

For a brother, a burden
Thomas Moore said he always carried a burden of guilt over his younger brother’s death.

“I walked around with an amount of shame,” the Colorado Springs, Colo., man said. “I didn’t know why, why it happened to us, that I wasn’t there to do something — to do SOMETHING.”

Former Gov. William Winter, who was co-chairman of President Clinton’s racial reconciliation initiative, said the latest arrest — though done by federal rather than state authorities — shows that Mississippi “now is obviously seeking to make up for lost time in bringing people to justice.”

“Mississippi is taking a look at those crimes that were committed in a different era when a different attitude prevailed,” said Winter, who was governor in the 1980s.

Anatomy of two murders
On May 2, 1964, Charles Moore and Dee were hitchhiking near an ice cream stand in the town of Meadville when Seale pulled over and offered them a ride, a Klan informant told the FBI. The Klan had heard rumors of Black Muslim gunrunning in the area, and Seale believed the two were involved, authorities said.

According to FBI interrogators, Edwards admitted that he and Seale took the two men into the woods for a whipping. But Edwards said both men were alive when he left them.

An informant told the FBI that Seale’s brother and another Klansman took the unconscious blacks to the river, lashed their bodies to a Jeep engine block and some old railroad tracks, and dumped them over the side of a boat. The other Klansmen and the informant have since died.

Federal authorities turned the Dee and Moore case over to local authorities. A short time later, a justice of the peace called an end to the inquiry without presenting evidence to a grand jury.

Feds focused on another case
Searchers were combing the woods and swamps for James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner when the remains of Dee and Moore were discovered near Tallulah, La. The bodies of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were found in an earthen dam in Mississippi a short time later. They were the victims in the more famous “Mississippi Burning” killings case.

According to FBI documents from the 1960s, authorities confronted Seale and told him they knew he and others killed the hitchhikers, and “the Lord above knows you did it.”

“Yes,” Seale was quoted as replying, “but I’m not going to admit it. You are going to have to prove it.”

The Justice Department reopened the case after The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson uncovered documents indicating that the beatings had occurred in the Homochitto National Forest, giving the FBI jurisdiction. But the case languished until Seale was located.

“I had other plans to confront him a long time ago — violently,” Thomas Moore said.

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