Post by WaTcHeR on Jan 24, 2007 17:02:02 GMT -5
Former Deputy James Ford Seale(L)
01.24.2007 - WASHINGTON - A former Mississippi sheriff's deputy was arrested Wednesday in the 1964 slayings of two black teenagers who were long believed to have been kidnapped and killed by the Ku Klux Klan.
The former deputy, James Ford Seale, of Roxie, Miss., was named in a federal indictment charging him in connection with the teens' disappearance and deaths while they were hitchhiking in a rural area of the state east of Natchez.
Until recently, Seale was thought to be dead, and the investigation into the two deaths had long been abandoned.
Seale was taken into custody by U.S. marshals Wednesday afternoon and was taken to Jackson, Miss. He is expected to be arraigned Thursday on kidnapping charges stemming from the May 1964 disappearances of Henry Dee and Charles Moore.
Two months after Dee and Moore disappeared, their bodies were pulled from the Mississippi River as part of an FBI-led search for three civil rights workers reported missing about 160 miles away near Philadelphia, Miss.
Federal authorities, who were focusing on the more famous "Mississippi Burning" killings, turned the Dee and Moore case over to local authorities. A short time later, a justice of the peace called an end to the inquiry without presenting evidence to a grand jury.
Moore's older brother, Thomas Moore, worked with Canadian film producer David Ridgen for two years piecing together what happened in 1964. The effort led them to a brief confrontation with Seale, a former sheriff's deputy who had been reported as deceased in several newspapers.
In 2000, the Justice Department's civil rights unit reopened the case.
Moore and Ridgen, along with Dunn Lampton, the U.S. attorney who has led the investigation in Mississippi, were traveling to Washington for a news conference as early as Thursday with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller.
news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070124/ap_on_re_us/murders_cold_case