JACKSON - When Robert Garrity Jr. became Mississippi FBI director in June, the 27-year FBI veteran began investigating legendary cold case homicides.
The victims' names- Emmett Till, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman- were killed decades ago. No one was convicted of their murders. Despite the passage of time, their names still resonate in Mississippi and across the nation.
The U.S. Justice Department reopened investigation of Till's 1955 murder two months ago. Till was 14 when he was kidnapped, tortured and murdered after allegedly whistling at a white woman in a Delta store in the Delta town of Money.
The woman's husband and brother-in-law were acquitted by a jury. Both later confessed in a Life magazine profile. Both are dead.
"The crime preceded the 1964 Civil Rights Act so the FBI had no jurisdiction, never did anything in that case until now," Garrity said Thursday during a newsmaker interview with The Associated Press.
"Because murder is not a capital crime, the FBI can only get involved when local or state law enforcement asks us," he said. "Assistant district attorney Joyce Chiles asked us to help find anyone still alive who abetted Till's murder."
The FBI is racing the clock to question those now-elderly witnesses. Dead witnesses are not the sole hitch Garrity met. He was astonished to hear the original Till murder trial transcript had vanished.
"It was loaned to a doctoral student-I've never heard of something like that happening," Garrity said. No one can recall what happened to the transcript after the loaner.
The 1964 Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman murders, which inspired the movie "Mississippi Burning," pose different challenges. Schwerner, 24, and Goodman, 20, were white New Yorkers who volunteered for Freedom Summer a campaign to register black voters and teach literacy classes.
Chaney, a 21-year-old black Mississippi volunteer, helped Schwerner found a sewing class for rural women learning a trade. Goodman arrived in Mississippi on June 21 to help Chaney and Schwerner investigate a Ku Klux Klan church burning near the tiny town of Philadelphia. Goodman's first day in Mississippi was his last day of life.
The three were kidnapped driving from Philadelphia and shot dead. Their bodies were found 40 days later buried in an earthen dam. Seven men, including a deputy sheriff, were convicted of violating the slain activists' civil rights. Although witnesses linked the county sheriff, a fervent Ku Klux Klansmen, to the killings, he was acquitted. Mississippi never convicted anyone for their murders.
Garrity recalled that the FBI opened its first Mississippi statewide bureau to probe the disappearances.
The new Mississippi FBI chief has inherited a legacy of charged emotions and over 40,000 pages of investigative documents spawned by the 1964 murders.
"In 1999, we surrendered all our investigative files to Mississippi," Garrity said. Yet he is restricted from releasing identities of FBI informants to state investigators he must help. The FBI's investigative files contain intelligence provided by undercover informants.
Only separate administrative files state the informants' true names.
"State investigators want to know who these people are but we promised these informants we would not release their identities, not even if they're dead," Garrity said. He compared the FBI's need for confidentiality to the protection journalists extend to its sources, like renowned Deep Throat in articles that led to the downfall of President Nixon.
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