JACKSON - He vowed he would take it to the grave with him. And he did.
The identity of "Mister X," the guy who told where the bodies of the three civil rights workers were buried in an earthen farm pond dam outside Philadelphia.
Several days ago word reached me that Joe Sullivan, the legendary FBI inspector who cracked the 1964 slayings of the three civil rights in Neshoba County, passed away in New York City. He was 85.
Sullivan, a hulking, square-jawed Irishman, was the only one who knew for certain who "Mister X" was, although many over the 36 years have speculated, or claimed, who he was.
Even though Joe and I had become good friends back then and periodically thereafter stayed in touch, Sullivan balked every time I asked him to tell me who tipped him off on the location of the three bodies. "I'm going to take that name with me when I die," Sullivan would always say with a chuckle.
For days, the FBI investigation of the June 21, 1964, disappearance of Michael Schwerner, James Cheney and Andrew Goodman had stalled while the case grew into a national and even international news story.
The break came on July 31 when "Mister X" met with Sullivan in a Philadelphia motel room and told him the civil rights workers were dead and where the bodies could be found.
"They (the bodies) were buried under 12 feet of earth," the informant told Sullivan. Who put them there Mister X wasn't saying, but he told Sullivan where the farm pond dam was located.
Sullivan, a widower, had been the FBI's crack trouble-shooter when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, under heavy pressure from President Johnson, dispatched Sullivan to take over the investigation into the disappearance of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi and command what later would become a small army of FBI agents.
Relentlessly, Sullivan pushed his charges to lean heavily on suspected members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the area around Philadelphia. Agents would show up at 5 a.m. on the doorstep of suspected Klansmen and pound on the front door, waking up the entire household.
"I'm with the FBI, and I have a few questions to ask you," agents would say. Slowly Sullivan and his team of agents began infiltrating the White Knights and piecing together scraps of information and breaking down at least two of the participants in the Klan plot that ended in the three murders.
By December 2, Sullivan had wrapped up a bundle of evidence and identified the lynchers and others closely connected with the slayings.
When the FBI evidence was offered to Gov. Paul Johnson Jr. for the state to prosecute, Johnson, knowing the unlikelihood of a conviction in Neshoba County, wisely asked the feds to proceed through the federal courts.
Twenty-one men, among them the two top law enforcement officers in Neshoba County, were arrested and later indicted under a post-Civil War felony crime law. Eight of the men, among them White Knights wizard Sam Bowers, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price and suspected triggerman Wayne Alton Roberts, were convicted and sent to federal prison up to seven years.
Although the convictions were a Mississippi milestone - the first time white men had been sent to prison in civil rights slayings - several of those not convicted have in recent years been made possible targets for the state reopening the case.
For Joe Sullivan, and his longtime Justice Department sidekick, Assistant Attorney General John Doar, the Neshoba convictions in October 1967 were a time for celebrating with a good dinner and lots of drinks after weeks and months of tedious, exhausting work.
They hove into LeFleur's, then Jackson's favorite restaurant and watering hole, gave me a call and invited me to join them. Doar, who in the six years he had battled to gain civil rights and justice for Mississippi blacks, until that night had never taken an alcoholic drink in Mississippi. To wash down LeFleur's great crabmeat LeFleur, John consumed a batch of booze that night.
Joe came back to Mississippi several more times in the next few years to help break the back of the Klan in Natchez, Laurel and Meridian, and even to lead the FBI investigation to find who assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
