Even with newspaper scoops and the memories of living witnesses, the legal and emotional obstacles in these cases are profound. Almost all suspects have lived for decades in the same town in which they are accused of committing murder -- sometimes emboldened by years of escaping justice, at other times quietly disappearing into the day-to-day life of the community and forming generational allegiances.
Killen and several of the men who prosecutors suspect of helping him kill the three civil rights workers were embedded in the fabric of this town of 7,300 northeast of Jackson, the capital. The grandson of Fenton DeWeese -- a Philadelphia attorney who pushed for the case to be reopened for decades -- played soccer the night that Killen was arrested against the grandson of Cecil Price, a former sheriff's deputy who investigators have long believed used his badge and his position to trap the rights workers.
Civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, left, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman disappeared near Philadelphioa, Miss., on June 21, 1964. They were aducted, killed and buried in an earthen dam in rural Neshoa County. Their cases were recently reopened.
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Neshoba County District Attorney Mark Duncan, who investigated the case along with the state attorney general's office, grew up in this town. Not a word was uttered about the murders in his high school history class, Duncan said, but he felt the stigma anyway. Now, he attends the same Methodist church as Price's son and, until last week's arrest, occasionally ran into Killen.
"I've had to deal personally with the effects of this case," he said.
Killen himself poked into the work of his pursuers. A few years back, DeWeese returned home after escorting a photojournalist to Rock Cut Road, where investigators believe a mob pulled Chaney, a 21-year-old black man, and Schwerner, 24, and Goodman, 20, who were white, from their cars. The phone rang. It was Killen.
"He was trying to find out what was going on," DeWeese said.
Prosecutors will be aided by a voluminous FBI file and well-preserved transcripts from the federal trial in 1967 of 18 men, including Killen, on charges that they conspired to violate the men's rights.
Testimony from Killen's trial -- a lone holdout juror said she voted to acquit him because she couldn't convict a preacher -- describes him as a "kleagle," or local Klan organizer. At one point, Killen was admonished by the judge for passing a note instructing his attorney to ask a witness whether civil rights activists sought "to get young negro males to sign a pledge to rape a white woman once a week."
"You can build on that," said G. Douglas Jones, a former U.S. attorney in Birmingham who prosecuted Cherry and Blanton. "Without that, it would be very, very difficult to just resurrect these cases."
Such luxuries do not exist in many cases. The Till case, which has been the subject of two documentaries, was reopened last spring. His confessed killers, half-brothers J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, bragged about committing the murder after being acquitted, but they are dead -- as is Till's mother, Mamie, who had pushed for another investigation. Their deaths leave modern-day prosecutors with the huge challenge of finding possible conspirators. Some activists in Mississippi are doubtful that the case will ever return to the courts, but they have not given up.
"A lot of times the evidence is right there, and people in the community even know who the perpetrators are," said Stanley Nelson, who produced the documentary "The Murder of Emmett Till." "The [Philadelphia] case that's just been reopened proves that it's not too late to reopen these cases. It's just another example of what can happen."
In Philadelphia, the 41-year wait for Killen's reckoning will likely end in a trial later this year. There was a bomb threat at the courthouse shortly after Killen's arraignment and his brother, Don, punched a photographer. On the courthouse lawn, there is an empty slab, where a statue of a Confederate soldier gazing north blew down in a storm. Some would like to see it restored, others want it gone. On the country road where Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were taken to their ignoble burial ground in a dirt dam, a red mud lane disappears around a bend. Alongside it, old cars go to rust and a faded house displays a big flag in its window -- the Confederate flag.
Staff writer Christopher Lee and researcher Madonna Lebling in Washington contributed to this report.
