"In spirit, everyone belonged to the Klan. It didn't pay to push Neshobans. They weren't afraid," Joseph Sullivan, the FBI's lead detective, said at the time.
It took three years, but a prosecutor from Washington convicted seven men of violating the dead trio's civil rights. The jury hung on Killen, 11 to 1 to convict. The one juror said she couldn't bring herself to convict a preacher.
Mississippi never said a mumbling word about murder charges for nearly 40 years.
Then Jerry Mitchell, a reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, dug up a new statement from a Klan leader in prison that implicated Killen as the ringleader.
"Not guilty," Killen said at his arraignment earlier this year.
Now it is mid-June in Mississippi again, but 2005 this time, and Edgar Ray Killen, arrested in January on charges that he organized the killings, is going on trial on three counts of murder.
At the scene of the slayings, today there are only a couple of trees, a beer can, an empty pack of smokes and some broken glass. James Chaney's grave has been vandalized so often in the nearby town of Meridian that his family has had to support the tombstone with steel beams.
At the courthouse, potential jurors, white, black and Choctaw, have filed into a side room to talk to the judge about whether they could be sequestered for as long as two weeks. Could you hear this case for that long? Could you judge it fairly?
Day 1 drags into Day 2, Day 3 . . .
Up in front, Killen talks with one of his lawyers, Mitch Moran. Also, and elsewhere, talks to God, delivers words from same. Still says the deity wants black kept separate from white. Has said he wanted to shake the hand of Martin Luther King Jr.'s killer. Espouses theories that black men want to rape white women. Fond of toting shotguns. Fonder still of threatening to shoot reporters with them, particularly those who show up at his ranch-style house out in the county, way out from town. It's out there on the old Rock Cut road, less than two miles from the murder site, lost among the red clay and pine trees.
"I'm as much for separation as I ever was," he told Mitchell a few years ago.
"The state of Mississippi sat idly by for 40 years," one of his lawyers, Jim McIntyre, is telling reporters on the courthouse lawn, his suspenders tight, his face florid in the early morning heat. "He didn't go anywhere. He lives eight miles from the courthouse. Why they are prosecuting this case now is beyond me."
