41 Years later
On Jan. 7, 2005, four decades after the crime, Edgar Ray Killen, now 80, was charged with three counts of murder. He was accused of orchestrating the killings and assembling the mob that killed the three men. On June 21—the 41st anniversary of the murders—Killen was convicted on three counts of manslaughter, a lesser charge. He received the maximum sentence, 60 years in prison. The grand jury declined to call for the arrest of the seven other living members of the original group of 18 suspects arrested in 1967.
A major reason the case was reopened was a 1999 interview with Sam Bowers, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard convicted in 1967 of giving the order to have Michael Schwerner killed. Bowers remarked in the interview that took place more than 30 years after the crime, "I was quite delighted to be convicted and have the main instigator of the entire affair walk out of the courtroom a free man. Everybody, including the trial judge and the prosecutors and everybody else, knows that that happened." Bowers claims that Killen was a central figure in the murders and organized the KKK mob that carried them out. (Bowers is currently serving a life sentence for ordering a 1966 firebombing in Hattiesburg, Miss., that killed Vernon Dahmer, a Mississippi civil rights leader—another crime that took decades to successfully prosecute).
