A Klansman involved in killing two black teenagers in Mississippi died Tuesday in prison.
James Ford Seale, 76, had been serving three life sentences at the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Ind. Prison officials did not release a cause of death.
In October, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of his conviction in connection with the abduction, beatings and killings of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee. The bodies of the 19-year-olds were found in the old Mississippi River.
Thomas Moore stands at the grave of his brother, Charles Eddie Moore, killed by Klansmen in 1964.
On May 2, 1964, Klansmen abducted Dee and Moore. They took them into the Homochitto National Forest as they interrogated the teens about rumors that black residents in the area were planning an armed uprising. Klansmen beat the teens, then tossed into the trunk of a car and driven more than an hour through Louisiana and Mississippi before being weighted down and thrown still alive into a Mississippi River backwater near Vicksburg, according to testimony.
Their mostly skeletal remains were found weeks later, identified by a wallet, a college dorm room key and other items.
In 2007, a U.S. District Court jury convicted Seale, and the judge gave him three life sentences.
Moore’s brother, Thomas, successfully pushed for the prosecution. Upon learning of Seale’s death Tuesday night, he remarked, ”Ain’t no rejoicing in it.”
He paused.
“I do offer my sympathies to the family.”
Sympathies to the family from a man whose brother was brutally beaten and killed by a mob of Klansmen.
Imagine that.
