By Paul Duggan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 16, 1999; Page A05

JASPER, Tex.—On a spectator's bench in the courtroom, the father tours his memories of better times, before his son became a white supremacist, and proud of it. He thinks of the boy before he turned wrong, before prison and the Nazi tattoos. He thinks of him years ago, when he was a child and they would hug, before the boy became the man he sees now: vilified, accused of one of the grisliest crimes of the post-civil rights era, the dragging death of a chained black man behind a pickup truck.

"That ain't the boy I knew," said the father, Ronald King.

John William King was the boy, now a man of 24. After three weeks of jury selection, testimony in King's trial begins today. It is the first of three death penalty trials arising from an incident last June 7 that repulsed the nation: the slaying of James Byrd Jr. in what appears to have been a backwoods lynching.

Byrd, 49, unemployed and living alone in a subsidized apartment, was walking home from a party at night when he allegedly was picked up and driven into the forest, beaten and, ultimately, dragged to his death. His slaying shamed this racially mixed city of 8,000 in the East Texas pine woods 120 miles north of Houston, and it shamed the father of the first man to go on trial charged with carrying it out.

"It hurts me deeply," the elder King wrote in an apology to the dead man's family, "that a boy I raised and considered to be the most loved boy I knew could find it in himself to take a life."

Journalists from all over have besieged Ronald King, 68, a widower retired from a plywood mill who comes to court in a wheelchair, carrying bottled oxygen to cope with his emphysema. He has turned nearly all the reporters away. But in November, he spoke with the Dallas Morning News about his son.

"The way he was raised, I don't see how he could have that kind of hate in him," the father said, according to the newspaper.

He said his son had grown up around black children, and that he, Ronald King, has good friends who are black. He said he has two black goddaughters. As for his son's elevated white consciousness, he said at first he found nothing disturbing about it. "He don't mind saying he's proud of his race," King said. "I never thought it was anything more than that."

Ronald King and his wife, who died eight years ago, were living in Mississippi when they adopted Bill King as an infant. They also had two daughters. They moved to Jasper before their son was old enough for school.

The city's police chief, among others, remembers him as "just a regular kid." But in May 1992, after his third and last year at Jasper High School, King was arrested for burglary and got probation. Then, a few months later, he was involved in a second burglary that set him on a path to prison.

The burglary, in the wee hours of Sept. 15, 1992, was at a Jasper vending machine company called Neal's. A kid who worked there hid inside until after closing, then unlocked the door for King and his pal Shawn Berry, also a 17-year-old Jasper High dropout. An owner of Neal's remembers that the three drank beer from a refrigerator and were about to walk out with a handful of pool cues when the police rolled up.

King and Berry did push-ups in a correctional boot camp for a few months before being released. But King kept running afoul of probation officials and was hauled back into court. A judge revoked the probation from his first burglary and gave him an eight-year prison term. On July 20, 1995, he landed in Texas's Beto I Unit, a 3,200-inmate penitentiary. He was 20 years old.

The prisoner he wound up sharing a cell with, Lawrence Brewer, was almost eight years older than King, and a harder case. His felony record, dating to 1987, included arrests for burglary, cocaine dealing and parole violations. By the time King got his first look at Beto I, Brewer was a penitentiary veteran.

Alliances founded on race are a fact of life in prison. And authorities said King and Brewer got involved with one such group at Beto I -- a small circle of inmates using the name of a North Carolina-based Ku Klux Klan faction, the Confederate Knights of America. By the time King was paroled on July 28, 1997, after two years in the tribal netherworld of a state penitentiary, there was no mistaking how he felt about the primacy of the white man.

Jasper, located near huge lakes, is not the sagebrush Texas of the West. It is the Texas of the South, part of the Big Pine Belt, stretching from here to Georgia. Timber and bass fishing fuel the economy. While visiting anglers fill rooms at the Ramada and the Best Western, 18-wheelers hauling just-cut loblolly pines from the uplands growl and belch along Highway 96, the city's commercial strip.

A few blocks west of the highway, the city square is a place out of time, from the slower America of soda fountains and five-and-dimes. Rows of storefronts line four quiet avenues, all facing the beige stucco courthouse, which has stood on a swath of green at the center of the square since 1889.

Bill King, who is being held at the county jail, is escorted into the courthouse by deputies each morning, past a news photographer posted inside the entrance. He seems used to having his picture taken. Lately he has even smiled, once hiding his boyish face behind a folder of legal papers, then peeking out in jest.

"Actually, there is a great deal I'd like to say to the vast majority of hypercritical residents that populate Jasper," he told the weekly Jasper NewsBoy in a recent letter. King said he is "a victim of a judicial conspiracy as well as the District Attorney's personal animosity for a non-Christian ex-convict . . . adorned with skin art mildly offensive to his and Jasperites' religious beliefs."

By "non-Christian," he was referring to his worship of Odin, a god of Norse mythology who presides in Valhalla, the great hall to which all brave warriors ascend after perishing in battle. Most white supremacists come across Odin. King learned all about him in Beto I and had his prison file amended, listing his church affiliation as "Odinism."

Before that he had been a Baptist.

As for the skin art, a prison official who has seen photos of the tattoos said they include a silhouette of a black man lynched from a cross, a menacing woodpecker in Klan garb, the lightning-bolt SS of the Nazi Schutzstaffel, and the words "Aryan Pride." There also is a crest with a Confederate flag and a burning cross.

At the courthouse, no one sees the tattoos on his arms. King wears long-sleeve shirts. His dark hair covers the satanic pentagram behind his left ear. He said too much has been made of the tattoos, that officials want to "ensure a credulous case against . . . me, therefore gaining recognition as contributors to the National Honor of a solution to America's racial problems," according to a seven-page statement he gave to the Morning News in November, titled "Logical Reasoning."

Those and other remarks were among the reasons his lead attorney, C. Haden "Sonny" Cribbs, tried to quit the case, complaining in a court motion that King "refuses to follow counsel's advice." King tried to fire the lawyer, telling the court that Cribbs "is in disagreement of my innocence" and "intends to do no more for my defense than try to ensure that I do not receive the death sentence." The two are still together, though. And as jury selection wrapped up last week, King sat patiently at the heavy oak defense table, listening to the judge and lawyers, all of them white, who will help determine his fate.

Sometimes Kylie Greeney, the mother of King's infant son, shows up in the spectator gallery. Last year, before the slaying, they were sharing a one-bedroom apartment at a low-rent complex opposite the Jasper Wal-Mart. King was not long out of prison and working odd jobs; Greeney was 18 and pregnant. The apartment manager remembers the couple fought often and loudly. Eventually, Greeney moved out.

It was around the time of her departure last spring, authorities said, that Lawrence Brewer, King's old cellmate, drifted into town. He had been paroled on Sept. 5, 1997, a little over a month after King. Brewer took up residence in the apartment. Authorities said King's pal Shawn Berry also moved in. Berry's record had been fairly clean since the Neal's burglary in 1992. He had a steady job at the Jasper Twin Cinema.

Soon, a rogues' gallery of friends started tramping in and out of the little apartment at all hours, the manager said. After a slew of complaints from tenants, she filed eviction papers against King. And that was where his life stood on June 7 last year. With no regular job, his girlfriend gone and his landlady kicking him out, about all he had left was his Aryan pride.

A motorist came upon James Byrd Jr.'s decapitated remains that Sunday morning, just before 9. The corpse was a heap by the side of Huff Creek Road, a ribbon of backwoods pavement east of the city. What few houses there are on Huff Creek belong mostly to black families. The body had been dumped at the gate of an old black cemetery, across from a clapboard chapel.

A blood trail led west on Huff Creek. After a mile, at a bend, Sheriff Billy Rowles's men saw the dead man's head and right arm in a roadside ditch, by the jagged edge of a concrete culvert. They walked a mile and a half more on Huff Creek until the blood trail turned into the woods. It led along a rutted, narrow logging path. They followed the path and found the dead man's sneakers, his torn shirt, his dentures. They found his wallet and photo ID. Then, about three miles from where they had begun, they came to a clearing.

The matted grass and upturned dirt suggested a struggle. Among other items on the ground, they found cigarette butts, a Zippo-style lighter, a can of black spray paint and a set of small wrenches in a case. On the case, in cursive, was the name "Berry." On the lighter were crude inscriptions: "PoSSum," with the SS like lightning bolts, and three K's formed into a triangle.

At 9 that night, after news of Byrd's death had spread, a local man, Steve Scott, showed up at the sheriff's office. Scott said he was driving home that morning and saw Byrd walking on Jasper's Martin Luther King Drive. Minutes later, he said, he saw Byrd again on Martin Luther King, this time riding in the bed of a pickup. He said it was between 2:30 a.m. and 2:45 a.m. He said the truck was gray or black. He said there were two or three white men in the cab.

The truck description and the name on the wrench case led deputies to Shawn Berry, owner of a primer-gray '82 Ford pickup. They pulled him over as he was leaving the Twin Cinema parking lot that night and brought him to the sheriff's office. And there, in a little room, he retched up the story that stunned America.

Berry said he, Bill King and Lawrence Brewer were cruising and drinking beer when they saw a black guy on foot near Martin Luther King and Highway 96. Berry did not know his name, but had seen him around. He said he slowed the truck and offered him a lift. The guy got in the back.

Berry said King, spewing racial slurs, lashed out at him for giving a ride to a black man. Berry said he drove for a while, winding up at a gas station-grocery on a rural two-lane highway east of Jasper. He said King took the wheel and they continued east. Where Byrd thought he was going is unclear. Berry said they got off the highway at a farm road and followed it to Huff Creek. He said King then turned left onto a logging road and maneuvered the truck to a clearing in the woods.

They all got out, Berry said. He said King and Brewer punched and stomped the black guy, and that Brewer sprayed black paint on the guy's face. Berry said he wanted no part of the attack and ran away, though only a short distance. He said King and Brewer came back along the path in the truck minutes later and told him to get in. He said King was driving. Berry said he thought the black guy was unconscious in the clearing. He said he asked King, "Are you going to leave him out there?"

He said King replied, "We're starting 'The Turner Diaries' early," referring to a doomsday race-war novel popular with white supremacists.

The truck turned onto Huff Creek and sped up. Berry said Brewer glanced out the back window and remarked, "That [expletive] is bouncing all over the place." Berry said only then did he realize his friends had bound the man's ankles with a tow chain and were dragging him. Berry said he asked King to stop the truck and let him out. He said King refused and told him, "You're just as guilty as we are. Besides, the same thing could happen to a [racial slur] lover."

At some point the man's head came off, Berry said. A mile after that, Berry said, King unchained the body.

Later, Berry said, they went back to the apartment and slept.

It figured that Berry, the least hardened of the three, would be the one to give up his friends. His statement, at once self-incriminating and self-serving, was typical for a homicide case. Although authorities contend King instigated the attack, they said a wealth of evidence gathered since June indicates the three men participated equally. No trial dates have been set for Brewer and Berry.

As for the cigarette lighter, investigators showed it to Kylie Greeney. She told them "Possum" had been King's nickname in prison.

King said he lost the lighter before the slaying. He said he must have dropped it in Berry's truck. He said it must have fallen out while Berry, by himself, was killing Byrd. He said the cigarette butts, allegedly linked to King and Brewer through saliva DNA, also must have fallen out of the pickup.

In his "Logical Reasoning" statement, King said Berry dropped him and Brewer at the apartment that night and went off with Byrd to do a drug deal involving steroids -- a claim scoffed at by investigators. King said it could not be more obvious: Given Berry's "irate temper" and history of "abusive behavior and steroid use," the drug deal must have gone sour, in a big way.

As King put it, Berry had "a conclusive verifiable motive for murder that could be substantiated in an objective way, thus alleviating an unsubstantiated subjective motive of racial hate and supremacy."

In conclusion: "I, John W. King, remain White and Proud."