Cold Cases

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Jay Shelledy, professional-in-residence at the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication, has a framed copy of the typed, double-spaced letter (pictured to the left, click to enlarge) on the wall of his office in Hodges Hall. The letter, a copy of which Shelledy obtained from FBI files through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), is addressed to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, and dated April 10, 1965.

The letter is relevant to the work Shelledy is doing as part of the LSU Cold Case Project, which was launched in 2010 and focuses on unsolved civil-rights murders from the 1960s in Louisiana and south Mississippi. Two to five students per semester are selected from a list of volunteers from Shelledy’s field-experience class to work on the project alongside him. Morris’s death, referenced in the letter, is one of three that he and his students are currently investigating.

Frank Morris was the successful owner of a shoe-repair business in Ferriday, Louisiana, whose customers were both black and white. His shop was burned down on December 10, 1964. Sleeping in a small bedroom in the back of the store, Morris was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of breaking glass. At the front of the store, he was confronted by two white men, one of whom struck a match and threw it inside the building, which went up in flames. The men, one armed with a shotgun, blocked Morris from leaving the shop, which exploded. Morris escaped through the back door but had suffered burns over his entire body. He died four days later in the hospital. The FBI closed the case in 2013, but Shelledy and his team are searching for new information by interviewing people and researching documents.

Two other murder victims are on Shelledy’s radar now—Wharlest Jackson and O’Neal Moore.

Jackson had worked at the Armstrong Tire & Rubber plant in Natchez, Mississippi, for twelve years when he was promoted to supervisor, a “white man’s job.” On February 27, 1967, a month after his promotion, Jackson worked the day shift plus four hours of overtime. Around eight o’clock that night, he got into his pickup truck and headed home in a cold rain. Nearing his house, he put on his turn signal, triggering a massive explosion from a bomb planted below the truck frame beneath the driver’s seat.

The FBI investigation into Jackson’s murder generated ten thousand pages of documents that pointed to suspects; but nearly five decades later, the killers have escaped prosecution. Suspects included members of the murderous Ku Klux Klan offshoot, the Silver Dollar Group. Formed as the 1964 Civil Rights Act was being passed, the group believed the KKK was not aggressive enough against civil rights. Its members carried silver dollars minted in the year of their birth; several worked for local law-enforcement agencies.

Moore, a black deputy sheriff, was shot and killed near Bogalusa, Louisiana, on June 2, 1965. Three white men shot at Moore and his partner Creed Rogers in their patrol car, killing Moore and partially blinding Rogers. Police arrested Ernest Ray McElveen, a Bogalusa paper-mill worker from Mississippi. He was extradited to Louisiana but never prosecuted.

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In many cold cases, it’s too late for justice. On average, fifty years have passed, and many perpetrators and witnesses, even if identified, have died or are no longer lucid. But they have left descendants, some of whom may have second-hand information about the killings. If nothing else, Shelledy and his team hope to uncover the truth of what happened.

“The team’s primary focus is to bring closure to African American communities that have lingered for decades without fully knowing what federal agents learned about the deaths of their family members and friends,” said Shelledy. “Agents at the time did their best to solve these vicious killings but were thwarted by intimidated witnesses, Klan-sympathizing local lawmen, and white juries that refused to convict whites of murdering blacks.”

The re-investigation of these regional murders was precipitated in 2006 as part of a larger Department of Justice (DOJ) Cold Case Initiative, which spotlighted some 126 unsolved murders—men, women, and teens—mostly Klan related. The vast majority of the deaths occurred in the Deep South, nearly half in Mississippi and Louisiana. Extra impetus was added the next year by the passage of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2007, which provided official direction to the DOJ and the FBI to reopen these cases for investigation and possible prosecution and allowed for the appropriation of funds to do so. The act was named for a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago who was brutally murdered in 1955 while visiting relatives in Mississippi. The killers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were acquitted by an all-white jury. Months later, the men sold a story to Look magazine in which they confessed to the murder. (Under the constitutional provision against double jeopardy, they could not be tried again.)

**

Last February, the LSU project launched a searchable, interactive website detailing previously sealed investigative reports from the FBI in a dozen civil rights–era murders in Louisiana and south Mississippi. The originals had been stored in FBI files, in the National Archives, until requested by the project team under the FOIA. Now more than 150,000 pages of FBI findings, resulting articles, and photographs are available on the site along with letters from the DOJ to the victims’ next of kin that detail the results of the reopened investigations.

The site, designed by Minjie Li, a Ph.D. student in Mass Communication, lists the names of victims alphabetically and includes a map, created by Mass Comm senior Marylee Williams, showing where the murders took place. The website, which took eighteen months to create, was underwritten by grants from the national Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation and the Manship School Excellence Fund.

Williams, a native of Natchez, said it shocked her to study the details of the cases. “I read a lot of the next-of-kin letters [written by the DOJ to relatives of victims and delivered by FBI agents],” she said. Seeing the entire map of places all along the Mississippi River was kind of shocking. So many murders were happening in this one area. It was like a slap in the face.” Thousands of additional pages of FBI case files are pending release under FOIA requests. When released, they will be added to the digital database, said Shelledy.

**

Last month, during spring break, Shelledy, Williams, and Olivia McClure, a graduate student in Mass Comm, spent four days in Washington, D.C., meeting with officials from the FBI and the DOJ and using digital cameras to photograph documents. These documents, along with articles, photographs, and research, are provided by Shelledy’s students to Louisiana and Mississippi newspapers and TV stations weekly. Sometimes those stories result in new leads.

“Just after we opened an investigation into a murder in Chattanooga, a woman emailed us and said her grandfather had killed one of the people on the list. He had told her when she was ten years old,” said Shelledy. “In another case, a person called about a Natchez murder and said so-and-so was his grandfather. A lot of information comes from relatives.”
McClure said her work on the project “has made me want to do this type of journalism even more. It takes work and time, and you have to use your judgment.”

LSU’s Cold Case Project was inspired by the work of Stanley Nelson, editor of the Concordia Sentinel in Ferriday, who has worked to solve hate crimes in the Ferriday-Vidalia-Natchez area. His 2010 series of stories led to his being named a Pulitzer Prize finalist. The student team shares its files with Nelson, whose reports on the secretive Silver Dollar Group prompted the sons of a deceased Klan leader to tell him about life inside a Klan family and to ask forgiveness for any evil deeds their father may have committed.

Nelson, whose book on Klan violence, Devils a-Walkin’, will be published in 2016, said he is impressed with the youthful enthusiasm of the students, who are researching a time period they often know little about. “Not only are they unbelievably dedicated and focused, but they also appreciate the historical significance of these stories,” he said. “We’re writing the final chapter of this history.”

Nelson, who has given summer internships to some of the Manship students, said he lets them know how important the work is. “I tell them, ‘I guarantee you this work will be as meaningful as anything you ever do.’

“Imagine if you were a family member who never knew what had happened to your loved one. If you see a story acknowledging that your loved one was brutally murdered and listing suspects, that is a little bit of justice. It tells you somebody cares about you and your loved ones.

“We owe them this.”

Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net. For more information about the LSU Cold Case Project, go to lsucoldcaseproject.com.