Reputed Klansman Convicted in '64 Case

JACKSON, Miss. - A federal jury on Thursday convicted reputed Klansman James Ford Seale of kidnapping and conspiracy in the 1964 deaths of two black teenagers in southwest Mississippi.

Seale, 71, had pleaded not guilty to charges related to the deaths of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee. The 19-year-olds disappeared from Franklin County on May 2, 1964, and their bodies were found later in the Mississippi River.

Federal prosecutors indicted Seale in January almost 43 years after the slayings.

U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate set sentencing for Aug. 24 at 9 a.m. in Jackson. Seale could be sentenced to life in prison on the two counts of kidnapping and one count of conspiracy.

During closing arguments earlier Thursday, federal public defender Kathy Nester said Seale should be acquitted because the case was based on the word of "an admitted liar."

"This case all comes down to the word of one man - an admitted liar - a man out to save his own skin," Nester said. "A case based on his word is no case at all."

Nester was referring to Charles Marcus Edwards, an admitted Klansman, who testified that he participated in the crimes for which Seale is on trial.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Paige Fitzgerald told jurors Seale was incriminated by his own words.

"Let me tell you about one man's word. 'Yes. But I'm not going to admit it. You're going to have to prove it,'" Fitzgerald said, repeating a statement that a retired FBI agent testified he heard Seale make after being arrested on a state murder charge in 1964. That charge was later dropped.

"Those are the words of a guilty man," Fitzgerald said, turning to point at Seale in the courtroom. She also called Seale "defiant, arrogant and unrepentant."

The defense claimed that the prosecution failed to prove key elements needed for conviction and didn't establish that Seale had crossed state lines during the commission of the crimes, which was vital because that's what gave the federal government jurisdiction in the case.

Edwards was the star prosecution witness.

Edwards testified during the trial that he and Seale belonged to the same KKK chapter, or "klavern," that was led by Seale's late father.

Seale denied being in the Klan. And, Nester said, the government only brought the case as a symbol that Mississippi is trying to reconcile its racist past.

Prosecutors said Dee and Moore were hitchhiking, were stopped by Klansmen and taken to the Homochitto National Forest where they were beaten. They said Klansmen were trying to find out if blacks were bringing firearms into Franklin County.

Edwards testified that Dee and Moore were stuffed, alive, into the trunk of Seale's Volkswagen and driven to a farm owned by Seale's father.

There, they were tied up, put into the trunk of a vehicle owned by Klansman Ernest Parker and driven across the Mississippi River bridge into Louisiana. Turning northward, the teenagers were driven along a rural Louisiana road to a place called Parker's Landing on Davis Island on a Mississippi River backwater south of Vicksburg, prosecutors said.