Widow And The Wizard

By Adam Cohen/Hattiesburg

Sitting now at her dining table, reaching back three decades, Ellie Dahmer can speak calmly of the night the Ku Klux Klan came to kill her husband. Two cars of white-hooded men burst out of the darkness on Jan. 10, 1966, firing guns and hurling flaming jugs of gasoline at her house in Hattiesburg, Miss. "It happened so fast," Ellie recalled, that she turned to her husband Vernon and said, "I believe they've got us this time." He held off the attackers with a shotgun while she led their children out the back. Everyone escaped, but Vernon was badly burned and died the next day.

The private pain of the Dahmer (pronounced DAY-mer) family was also a national tragedy. Vernon, a prosperous businessman, headed the Hattiesburg branch of the N.A.A.C.P., so the Klan targeted him with a "No. 3" and a "No. 4": shorthand for arson and murder. At his funeral, thousands of admirers poured into Shady Grove Baptist Church. President Johnson sent Ellie Dahmer a telegram mourning her husband and calling for a federal investigation.

This was not, however, a case where local lawmen winked and looked the other way. Forrest County, named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general and patron saint of the K.K.K., charged 14 Klansmen with murder and arson. Five were convicted or pleaded guilty and received life sentences. But not Sam Bowers, the Klan's Imperial Wizard for Mississippi, whom prosecutors accused of ordering and planning the murder--and whom Klan experts describe as the most dangerous man ever to don a white hood.

Bowers was tried twice by the state in the 1960s for Dahmer's murder, but by votes of 11 to 1 and 10 to 2 to convict, juries failed to reach the unanimous verdict required to send him to jail. A federal trial also ended in deadlock. Prosecutors say they suspected witness tampering by the Klan but couldn't prove it. Bowers, now 73, is a free man living in Laurel, just 30 miles up the interstate from the Dahmer family.

The Dahmers have worked and prayed for years that the case against Bowers might be reopened. Now, thanks to new evidence and a shift in the state's public attitudes and politics, prosecutors appear ready to do just that--perhaps in the next few weeks. "We're very close to a reprosecution," says Michael Moore, the Mississippi Attorney General. "We're very optimistic we can bring Sam Bowers to justice."

Vernon Dahmer stood out from his neighbors of both races. The son of a mulatto mother and a white father, he was light-skinned enough to eat at whites-only restaurants. But Dahmer chose to live as a black man. He inherited land and in time farmed 400 acres; he also ran a sawmill and grocery store. His success brought respect from some whites, including prominent businessmen, and resentment from others.

Dahmer didn't let hatred infect his generous spirit. When two college kids ran out of money and gas on the highway near his store, Ellie says, he gave them fuel from his pump and lent them $20. The boys, like many people he helped, were white.

What got Dahmer killed, though, was helping blacks register to vote at a time when that was perilous work. In 1960 fewer than 100 of Forrest County's 8,000 voting-age blacks were registered. Dahmer would drive neighbors to the courthouse and watch in frustration as the white registrar found reasons to turn them away. Eventually, Dahmer got the sheriff to sign out to him a poll-tax receipt book, and Dahmer announced over the radio that blacks could register at his grocery. "I said, 'I wouldn't do this if I were you,'" recalls J.C. Fairley, a friend and fellow N.A.A.C.P. activist. "'You're out there by yourself--they can easily get to you.'" And they did, the first day Dahmer went on the air.

After Dahmer was murdered, his widow was pleased at the speedy jailing of five of the killers. But she would not rest until Bowers was convicted. After repeated mistrials, the government seemed to lose its will. But by 1990, the landscape had shifted. Byron de la Beckwith was rearrested and eventually convicted for the 1963 murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Jackson. "We figured if the Evers case could go forward," Ellie says, "we had a good chance of getting ours back on track."

The family persuaded the district attorney to reopen the case in 1991. But he called it "a long shot." Over the decades, key witnesses had died and disappeared. Memories had faded. And prosecutors would have to persuade a jury to send an old man to jail for something that happened long ago.

Ellie Dahmer set out to improve the odds. She pressed the FBI to share previously undisclosed investigative files with local prosecutors. She talked Attorney General Moore into assigning three investigators and a trial prosecutor to help the local D.A. And then her persistence began to produce some lucky breaks.

Two informants approached the family with fresh information about the killing. Meanwhile, county voters elected a new D.A., Lindsey Carter, who was more committed to the case than his predecessor. Two months ago, the state released 132,000 pages of documents from its infamous Sovereignty Commission, a secretive organization that spied on civil rights activists, and prosecutors have been combing those records, in which Dahmer's name appears more than 80 times, for new leads. Last month a state court ordered the Mississippi archives to hand over a 200-page transcript of an oral history Bowers provided in the 1980s that could contain incriminating statements or leads.

Perhaps most important, the chief witness against Bowers in his earlier trials, who disappeared in 1971, was located and arrested in February. Billy Roy Pitts, one of the Klansmen who attacked the Dahmer house, was convicted on federal conspiracy charges. He served four years, but through circumstances that have never been fully explained, he was not sent back to Mississippi to serve his life sentence for murder. Pitts, who had been living in Denham Springs, La., has agreed to testify against Bowers one more time. Pitts has told of a Klan meeting at which Bowers ordered Dahmer killed. Pitts has also said Bowers assured him that "a jury would never convict a white man for killing a n___ in Mississippi."

Investigators have been tracking down everyone who was in on planning the murder, and prosecutors are threatening to bring charges against any who do not talk. And this time prosecutors expect to get a jury untainted by Klan influence. Three jurors from Bowers' 1968 trial said afterward that during deliberations, all the jurors agreed that he was guilty, yet one kept voting "not guilty" in the secret ballots that decide the verdict. But jurors today seem far less afraid to convict Klan defendants. According to documents quoted by the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, an informant recently told investigators that Bowers has said he is worried about losing this time "because he didn't have the contacts he once had, that a lot of them had died."

Samuel Holloway Bowers is a Klan leader right out of central casting. One of his grandfathers was a wealthy Louisiana planter; another was Eaton J. Bowers, a Mississippi Congressman from 1903 to 1911. But as Imperial Wizard of the Klan in Mississippi, Bowers compiled an unequaled record of murder and mayhem. Klan experts suspect him of orchestrating more than 300 bombings, assaults and arsons, plus nine murders. He served six years in prison for conspiracy in connection with the deaths of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, the civil rights workers whose killings were depicted in the movie Mississippi Burning.

Bowers has lived for years in a black neighborhood on the poor side of the railroad tracks in Laurel. He runs a pinball and vending-machine company called Sambo Amusement. He loves NASCAR racing and cars in general and drives two classic baby-blue Ford Falcons. He attends the mainstream Hillcrest Baptist Church, where he has taught Sunday school. He gives generously to the poor, including a family who recently asked the church for children's clothing. "What you see on the news and what you see in the church are totally different," says former Hillcrest pastor Max Parker. But Bowers has shown no sign of renouncing racist violence. He describes proponents of racial integration as heretics and said in a 1994 interview, "When a priest sees a heretic, he can do only one thing: he eliminates him."

As the case has heated up, Bowers has drawn fresh attention from journalists--and has not taken gracefully to it. One CBS-TV reporter says Bowers took a swing at him when he tried to ask him a question. And Bowers tried to ram a TIME photographer with his car. Bowers has declined to comment publicly about the prospect of a retrial, and he did not return telephone calls asking about the Dahmer case or his clashes with journalists.

Lawrence Arrington, the lawyer who defended Bowers in the previous Dahmer trials, hopes to do so again. He is 81 and lives in a Hattiesburg retirement home, but the former Forrest County D.A. is confident that he could make all the difference. "If I'm in the case, there's a 2-to-1 chance of winning," he says. "Without me, it's about even."

Arrington's strategy would be to discredit Pitts, as he did in the earlier trials. He would bring up the money federal agents paid Pitts back then and would pronounce the government's main witness "bought and sold." And Arrington would revive old allegations that the FBI let Pitts cavort with a mysterious blond while he was in custody. "I got pictures of her in a car with Billy Roy," Arrington boasts. It was these doubts about the government's star witness, he says, not jury tampering, that hung the previous Bowers juries. He thinks they could work again.

Still, Arrington worries that prosecutors will persuade several Klansmen to testify against Bowers. He fears the changes in state politics that, he says, are driving Moore and Lindsey to work so hard to convict Bowers. "Since the blacks are voting now, that has given them a boost," Arrington says. "I was district attorney before they could vote."

Neil McMillen, a history professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, believes that a Klan "die-hard" or two could still make it on the jury and produce another mistrial. But this time, notably, it is the Dahmers and their supporters who seem to have the most faith in the system. "I think the jury is going to work out just fine," says Fairley, the friend who warned Dahmer that registering blacks to vote could get him killed. "Things are a lot different now in Hattiesburg."

One thing that is different, as Arrington indicated, is black voter registration--a gateway to jury service. Up from fewer than 100 in 1960, black voters today number more than 18,000 in Forrest County--about 30% of the total. The attacks by Bowers and other Klansmen on civil rights workers only served to accelerate their efforts to win full participation for blacks in public life. In that sense, whatever happens in court to Sam Bowers, he and his kind have already lost the great struggle of their lives. Vernon Dahmer won.