Suspect Says He Didn't Kill Civil Rights Workers
Edgar Ray Killen, the reputed Ku Klux Klansman accused of killing three civil rights workers in 1964, said in a television interview Wednesday that he will be exonerated because he was attending a funeral at the time of the slayings. Killen also told Jackson's WLBT-TV that all he knew of the case at the time was what he had heard from media reports. "I am accused of murdering someone that I didn't even know existed until the news media broke that they were missing," said Killen, 80. "I wasn't even in the location, and they'll learn that." Killen, a part-time preacher, was indicted last month on state murder charges in the killings of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, who had been helping register blacks to vote. The men's bodies were buried in an earthen dam. In the WLBT interview, Killen said some people were making millions of dollars off the revived state investigation into the killings. "This is not a legal battle, this is a political battle," he said. Nineteen men, including Killen, were previously indicted on federal charges in the case. His case ended in a hung jury, but seven others were convicted in 1967 of violating the victims' civil rights. None served more than six years.
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