Edgar Ray Killen is not ready to concede he will die in prison.
Eleven years after being convicted of plotting the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, and almost three years after the U.S. Supreme Court presumably turned back his last avenue for appeal, the 91-year-old inmate says he sees a way out if he can get a court to hear his case.
His legal strategy for being set free? That is a secret, he says.
That caginess is typical of the man who calls himself “the most hated white man in Mississippi” — a distinction he seems to take pride in while claiming it has been unjustly acquired.
Killen recently agreed to an interview with the Commonwealth, only the second time he has talked with the press since being incarcerated following his 2005 conviction on three counts of manslaughter in the deaths of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney.
Those murders of two white New Yorkers and a black Mississippian sparked national outrage and a massive FBI investigation, dubbed “Mississippi Burning,” which also became the title of a 1988 movie loosely based on the case.
Killen talked for four hours with the Commonwealth in the visitation room at Unit 31 at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. Unit 31 is the medical unit at the prison, where Killen is confined in a wheelchair because of heart problems and severe injuries he suffered in a logging accident about three months prior to the 2005 state trial.
The interview, held Aug. 14, was conducted under less-than-ideal conditions. Due to prison regulations, no cameras or other recording devices were allowed, nor even writing materials. The room was noisy with other inmates and their visitors. A curious toddler, there to see another inmate, periodically interrupted.
Despite the distractions, Killen was animated and talkative. By the end of the interview, a nasty abscess oozed a trickle of blood down the back of his bald head. But otherwise — despite saying he had spent the previous couple of weeks “wrestling with the Grim Reaper” — Killen seemed in good spirits.
His hearing is not the best. He struggles at times with his memory or in finding just the right word to express himself. When that happens, he points to his head and blames it on a brain injury he says he suffered when the tree hit him. He acknowledges veering off in tangents but does not object to being reeled back in.
Killen is serving three consecutive 20-year sentences. His tentative release date, if he were to get parole, is Sept. 1, 2027 — when he would be 102 years old.
He continues to maintain, as he has through two trials and over the 52 years since the three men’s bodies were found buried in an earthen dam, that he is innocent.
“I will be exonerated someday, although I might not live to see it,” he said.
Though Killen denies having anything to do with the murders, he said he would have been a willing participant if he had learned prior to their deaths that “they were recruiting and coaching young black bucks to rape a white woman once a week.”
He said, “Had I known it ahead of time, I might have been the trigger man.”
Killen’s unsubstantiated claim that the murders constituted justifiable homicide is not new. According to “We Are Not Afraid,” a history of the case written by Seth Cagin and Philip Dray, Killen tried it out first during the 1967 federal trial in which a jury hung up on his guilt while convicting seven Klansmen of apprehending the three civil rights workers, shooting them and hiding their dead bodies. Killen claims he can prove his allegation if the U.S. Justice Department would turn over all of its files in the case to him.
Rita Schwerner Bender, when informed of Killen’s comment, said she did not want to dignify with a response his effort to malign her late husband.
“It’s just so offensive,” she said. “Giving any dignity to this is not useful.”
As to Killen’s professed innocence, Bender, an attorney in Seattle, was not moved.
“All I can say is that he’s not the first person convicted of a crime who has sung that song,” she said.
Chaney’s sister, Julia Chaney-Moss, is likewise not surprised that Killen remains defiant.
“His responses certainly are not anything new or that I would not have expected a person of his nature to say. It’s just that it saddens me to hear again this kind of thought processes that he has,” said Chaney-Moss, who was 17 at the time her brother was murdered and, after spending 45 years in human services work, is now retired in Willingboro, New Jersey.
She said, “I have long since forgiven Killen and his ilk in this situation and have prayed that each of them could have at this juncture an opportunity to rethink and would take it and do just that. But again, a life lived and choices have been made, and he is who he has always been, and so be it.”
