James Ford Seale
(June 25, 1935 – August 2, 2011)
was a
Ku Klux Klan member charged by the
U.S. Justice Department on January 24, 2007, and subsequently convicted on June 14, 2007, for the May 1964 kidnapping of
Henry Hezekiah Dee and
Charles Eddie Moore, two African-American young men in
Meadville, Mississippi.
[1] At the time of his arrest, Seale worked at a lumber plant in
Roxie, Mississippi. He also worked as a
crop duster and was a police officer in
Louisiana briefly in the 1970s.
[2]
Seale was convicted on June 14, 2007, by a federal jury on one count
of conspiracy to kidnap two persons, and two counts of kidnapping where
the victims were not released unharmed.
[3]
He was sentenced on August 24, 2007, to three life terms for his part
in the 1964 murders of the two Mississippi teens. In 2008, Seale's
kidnapping conviction was overturned by a panel of the
United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, before being reinstated by that court sitting
en banc the following year. He was incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in
Terre Haute, Indiana, where he died in 2011.
[4]
Background
Southern Mississippi was an active area of the
civil rights
movement in the 1960s. Many working class whites feared greater job
competition from blacks if integration changed the society and tensions
were high over desegregation of schools. The Natchez area became a
center of Ku Klux Klan and other segregationist activity, with violence
directed against black churches, often used as the center of community
organizing, and black activists.
Double murder in 1964
John Ford Seale abducted the two young African-American men,
Henry Hezekiah Dee and
Charles Eddie Moore, each 19, as they were hitchhiking near Roxie on May 2, 1964. Moore had been a student at
Alcorn State College.
[5] According to
F.B.I. records, Seale thought the two might be
civil rights activists, especially as Dee had just returned from
Chicago. He ordered them into his car by telling them he was a federal revenue agent, investigating moonshine stills.
[5]
He drove them into the
Homochitto National Forest between Meadville and Natchez, having called Charles Marcus Edwards to have him and other Klansmen follow. As Seale held a
sawed-off shotgun
on the pair, the other men tied the young men to a tree and severely
beat them with long, skinny sticks (called "bean sticks" because they're
often used to "stalk" beans in gardens). According to the January 2007
indictment, the Klansmen took the pair, who were reportedly still alive,
to a nearby farm where Seale duct-taped their mouths and hands. The
Klansmen wrapped the bloody pair in a plastic tarp, put them into the
trunk of another Klansman's red Ford (the deceased Ernest Parker,
according to FBI records), and drove almost 100 miles to the
Ole River near
Tallulah, Louisiana. They had to drive through Louisiana to get there, but the backwater is located in
Warren County, Mississippi.
At the river, the Klansmen took the pair away from shore in a boat, where they tied them to an old
Jeep
engine block and sections of railroad track rails with chains before
dumping them in the water to drown. Reportedly still alive when put in
the river, the young men were killed in Mississippi.
[6]
According to a Klan informant, Seale said later that he would have shot
them first, but didn't want to get blood all over the boat.
The bodies of the pair were found about two months later by
US Navy divers who were working on the investigation associated with the disappearance in June of three civil rights workers:
James Earl Chaney,
Andrew Goodman and
Michael Schwerner from
Meridian, Mississippi.
[5]
The FBI made an investigation of the Dee-Moore murders (they had more
than 100 agents around Natchez, trying to reduce violence), and
presented their findings to local District Attorney Lenox Forman. FBI
agents and Mississippi Highway Patrol officers arrested Seale, then 29,
and fellow Klansman
Charles Marcus Edwards,
31, on November 6, 1964. According to FBI informants, both men
confessed to the crime. They were released on November 11, after family
members posted $5,000 bond each.
[5]
On January 11, 1965, the District Attorney
Lenox Forman filed a “motion to dismiss affidavits” with
Justice of the Peace Willie Bedford,
who signed the motion the same day. The motions state: “… that in the
interest of justice and in order to fully develop the facts in this
case, the affidavits against James Seale and Charles Edwards should be
dismissed by this Court without prejudice to the Defendants or to the
State of Mississippi at this time in order that the investigation may be
continued and completed for presentation to a Grand Jury at some later
date.” Forman said he dismissed the case because it had been prejudiced
toward the defendants, who "put out the story" in Meadville that, after
their arrest, they had been "brutally mistreated," as reported in 2005
in an investigation by Donna Ladd of the
Jackson Free Press.
[5]
1966 Congressional hearing
On January 14, 1966, Seale was called to appear in Washington before a subcommittee of the
House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was investigating Klan activities. Seale was there with nine other alleged Klansmen from the violent
White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,
including his father, Clyde Seale, and Charles Marcus Edwards, his
alleged accomplice in the Dee-Moore murders. The Klansmen repeatedly
pleaded the
Fifth Amendment,
while the chief investigator Donald T. Appell and House members placed
into the record what they believed the men had done, including
kidnapping and murdering Dee and Moore in 1964. According to the hearing
transcript, Appell introduced testimony of Alton Alford, a Meadville
man, who said that Seale beat him with his shotgun. Appell asked Seale
if he was involved in the 1965 death of a Klansman named Earl Hodges,
who had fallen out with Seale’s father. Appell accused Seale and Edwards
of claiming "false arrest" by Mississippi highway patrolmen to help
them escape criminal charges.
[5]
Two authors published books on the case: Don Whitehead wrote
Attack on Terror: The FBI Against the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, (1990), which included some of the FBI’s 1960s-era findings on the Dee-Moore murders.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson, in
Betrayed: The Presidential Failure to Protect Black Lives,
(1996), also wrote about the Dee-Moore case, naming Seale and another
suspect as responsible. He called for federal officials to indict the
men on kidnapping charges. Hutchinson pointed out that because the crime
occurred in a national forest, the federal government has jurisdiction.
[7]
Reopening of the case in 2005
In 1998 Thomas Moore, the older brother of Charles and a retired 30-year
Army
veteran, began to work on the case. Then living in Colorado, he wrote
to the District Attorney Ronnie Harper "asking him to look into his
brother's murder. He agreed." Various media journalists began to look at
the story again, including
Newsday,
20-20 and
Jerry Mitchell of
The Clarion-Ledger
(Jackson, Mississippi). On January 14, 2000, Mitchell reported that the
murders occurred on federal land. This spurred the FBI to take another
look but some of their resources got diverted to the revival of the 1964
Neshoba County investigation of
Edgar Ray Killen.
[5]
Contacted by the filmmaker
David Ridgen of the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Thomas Moore returned to Mississippi on July 7, 2005, to begin shooting the documentary
Mississippi Cold Case,
about the events of his brother's murder. Together they began a search
for justice in the case. They were also going to be working with the
journalist
Donna Ladd and photographer Kate Medley from the
Jackson Free Press, an alternative newsweekly in
Jackson, Mississippi.
On July 8 the two men interviewed the District Attorney Ronnie
Harper, who told them that James Ford Seale was alive, although his
family members had reported him dead to the media a few years before.
[5][8]
The pair confirmed this fact when Kenny Byrd, a resident of Roxie,
pointed them toward Seale's trailer. The same morning, Moore and Ridgen
met with Ladd and Medley. During this trip, the former Klansman James
Kenneth Greer told Ladd and Medley that Seale was living in
Roxie, Mississippi next to his brother.
[9]
The discovery of Seale helped to revive interest in the case; Moore and Ridgen visited the
U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton, who pledged to re-open the case.
[10] Two weeks after the trip, Ladd published the first of several articles in the
Jackson Free Press about the investigation and the discovery that Seale was alive.
[5]
Moved by the response of people he talked to, that July Thomas Moore
formed the "Dee Moore Coalition for Justice in Franklin County."
[11]
Moore and Ridgen returned to Mississippi every few months to continue filming, making nine trips in total for
Mississippi Cold Case; each time they visited Dunn Lampton, where Moore presented more of the data they had found. The
Jackson Free Press continued its investigation as well, and has published a package of all of its stories on the case
[12]
to keep local interest high. At the end of July 2005, the paper
published Thomas Moore's response to an editorial that appeared in the
Franklin Advocate,
the weekly in Meadville, in which the editor said the case should not
be re-opened. (Editor Mary Lou Webb did not publish Moore's response.)
[11]
Indictment, trial and conviction in 2007
The indictment affidavit filed January 24, 2007, in U.S. District
Court in Jackson, charged Seale with two counts of kidnapping and one
count of conspiracy. The “introductory allegations” begin: “The White
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKKK) operated in the Southern District of
Mississippi and elsewhere, and was a secret organization of adult white
males who, among other things, targeted for violence African Americans
they believed were involved in civil rights activity in order to
intimidate and retaliate against such individuals.” The document says
that Seale and other Klan members suspected Dee of being involved with
civil rights activity. Moore was included because he was a friend of Dee.
[13]
Seale was arraigned and denied bond because he was considered a
flight risk: he owned no property, was a pilot, and lived in a motor
home. He and his wife had already left Roxie for a brief time after the
reporting team's initial July 2005 visits, according to Roxie residents.
Primary testimony was from fellow Klansman
Charles Marcus Edwards. After being confronted by Thomas Moore and David Ridgen during filming of a scene in
Mississippi Cold Case, state and federal officials gave him
immunity from prosecution to tell the full story of what happened.
Seale was convicted of
kidnapping
and conspiracy on June 14, 2007, by a federal jury. On August 24, 2007,
Seale was sentenced to serve three life terms for his crimes.
[14][15]
The Judge Wingate said that he took into account Seale’s advanced age
and poor health, but added, “Then I had to take a look at the crime
itself, the horror, the ghastliness of it.” Seale was imprisoned for a
year at a medical facility.
[16] The conviction was overturned by the
5th US Circuit Court of Appeals
on September 9, 2008. The court ruled that the lower court had failed
to recognize the statute of limitations for kidnapping had expired. At
the time of the kidnapping, kidnapping was a capital crime under federal
law; capital crimes have no statute of limitations. However, Congress
and the Supreme Court made kidnapping a non-capital crime, with a
statute of limitations, in the 1970's. The lower court did not apply the
newer statute of limitations, while the appeals court did.
[17] The prosecutors asked the appeals court to reconsider the ruling,
[18] and the court agreed to do so
en banc.
On June 5, 2009, the en banc panel of 5th Circuit judges ruled in an
evenly divided decision on the matter, thus upholding the district
court's decision. Seale's three convictions and sentences were
re-instated. On motion of defense counsel, the 5th Circuit asked the
US Supreme Court to review the case. On November 2, 2009, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, letting the lower rulings stand.
[17]
Death
Seale died in August 2011 at the age of 76 in a
federal prison.
[19][20]
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