Edgar Ray Killen, former Ku Klux Klan leader convicted of three murders, dies in jail aged 92
The slayings shocked the nation, helped spur passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and were dramatised in the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning
Edgar Ray Killen, a 1960s Ku Klux Klan leader who was convicted decades later in the “Mississippi Burning” slayings of three civil rights workers, has died in prison at the age of 92, the state’s corrections department announced on Friday.
Killen was serving three consecutive 20-year terms for manslaughter when he died at 9pm on Thursday inside the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. An autopsy was pending, but no foul play was suspected, the statement said.
His conviction came 41 years to the day after James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, all in their 20s, were ambushed and killed by Klansmen.
The three Freedom Summer workers had been investigating the burning of a black church near Philadelphia, Mississippi. A deputy sheriff in Philadelphia had arrested them on a traffic charge, then released them after alerting a mob. Mississippi’s then-governor claimed their disappearance was a hoax, and segregationist Senator Jim Eastland told Lyndon Johnson it was a “publicity stunt” before their bodies were dug up.
The slayings shocked the nation, helped spur passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and were dramatised in the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning. The movie title came from the name of the FBI investigation.
His life spanned a period where members of the Ku Klux Klan were able to believe they had a right to take other people’s lives
Killen, a part-time preacher and timber mill operator, was 80 when a Neshoba County jury of nine white people and three black people convicted him of three counts of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, despite his assertions that he was innocent. Prosecutors said Killen masterminded the slayings, then went elsewhere so he would have an alibi.