On the night of June 12th, 1963, Megar Evers pulled into the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi, carrying an armload of t-shirts that read, “Jim Crow must go.”
Hours earlier, President Kennedy had gone on national television to declare civil rights a moral crisis.
For the first time, it felt like the country might actually be changing.
Evers never made it to his front door.
A single bullet from a high-powered rifle struck him in the back from a honeysuckle thicket across the street.
He staggered toward the house collapsed and died less than an hour later.
He was 37 years old.
The man who killed him left behind a rifle with his own fingerprint on the scope.
He left behind a car that neighbors had seen parked nearby for days.
He left behind a trail of evidence so obvious that in any other state, in any other decade, the trial would have lasted a week.
But this was Mississippi in 1963.
By 1969, Byron Delabbeckwith had walked free, welcomed home as a hero in his hometown of Greenwood.
It took 31 years, a widow who never stopped fighting, a newspaper reporter who uncovered a state conspiracy, and a prosecutor willing to risk his career on a case the entire [music] system wanted to stay buried.
This is the story of how the longest cold case in civil rights history was finally solved.
And it starts long before the bullet.
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Now, to understand why Megar Evers was killed, you have to understand what he was doing in Mississippi.
And to understand that, you have to know where he came from.
Megar Wy Evers was born on July 2nd, 1925 in Decar, Mississippi, the third of four children.
His parents, James and Jesse Evers, were workingclass people who stressed two things above all else: education and financial independence.
In a state where black families were expected to stay quiet, stay poor, [music] and stay in their place, those values were quietly radical.
Decatur wasn’t a town that let you forget the rules.
When Megar was a boy, a family friend was lynched.
Afterward, the man’s bloody clothes were left hanging on a fence as a warning, not hidden, not removed.
Left there for the whole community to see for weeks until the fabric rotted away.
That image stayed with Evers for the rest of his life.
He walked roughly 12 miles each way to a segregated school.
He and his brother Charles grew up understanding exactly what Mississippi thought of them, and they grew up deciding quietly that Mississippi was wrong.
In 1943, at 18 years old, Evers was inducted into the United States Army.
He served in a segregated unit during World War II, fought across France during the Normandy campaign, and saw some of the worst combat the European theater had to offer.
Black soldiers fought in separate units, ate in separate mess halls, [music] and slept in separate barracks.
They were expected to risk the same death as everyone else, and then returned to a country that treated them as something less than citizens.
Evers was honorably discharged as a sergeant in 1945.
He had helped liberate a continent from fascism.
He came home to a state that would not let him drink from the same water fountain as a white man.
He later said it plainly.
We fought during the war for America and Mississippi was included.
Now, after the Germans and the Japanese hadn’t killed us, it looked as though the white Mississippians would.
Coming home made that contradiction impossible to ignore.
In 1946, Megar and Charles Evers along with several other black veterans decided to register to vote in Decar.
They were testing a simple proposition.
They had served their country.
They had bled for it.
Surely, they had earned the right to participate in its democracy.
They filled out the paperwork.
They followed every rule.
And on election day, they put on their best clothes and walked to the polls.
An armed white mob was waiting for them.
Not police, not election officials, armed civilians standing between the veterans and the ballot box.
The Evers brothers and their fellow veterans were turned away at gunpoint.
None of them voted that day.
And the message was clear.
Your military service means nothing here.
Your citizenship means nothing here.
Mississippi makes its own rules.
That moment did something to Megar Evers that the war had not.
It didn’t break him.
It focused him.
From that day forward, he knew exactly what he was going to spend his life fighting.
He enrolled at Alorn Agricultural and Mechanical College where he met a young woman named Merly Beasley.
She was 18 years old from Vixsburg and she saw in Megar someone whose ambition went far beyond what Mississippi would comfortably allow.
They married on Christmas Eve 1951.
He played football, studied business, and started planning a life that looked nothing like the one Mississippi had laid out for him.
After graduation, Evers applied to the University of Mississippi Law School.
His application was rejected because of his race.
That rejection in the wake of the 1954 Brown versus Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that declared school segregation unconstitutional brought him to the attention of the National NAACP.
In December 1954, Megar Evers became the first NAACP field secretary in the state of Mississippi.
He was 29 years old and he had just taken on the most dangerous job in the most dangerous state in the country for a black man with a mission.
His office was in Jackson, but his territory was the entire state.
He drove more than 42,000 m in his first 3 years alone, crisscrossing Mississippi to recruit NAACP members, organize voter registration drives, and investigate racial violence.
When 14-year-old Emmett Till was abducted and murdered in the Mississippi Delta in 1955, Evers was one of the people who tracked down witnesses and gathered evidence.
He helped organize economic boycott of white-owned businesses in Jackson.
He advised James Meredith during the 1962 campaign to integrate the University of Mississippi, a crisis that ended with federal troops on campus and riots that left two people dead.
By the spring of 1963, Evers was leading a full-scale civil rights campaign in Jackson, boycott of downtown stores, sitins at segregated lunch counters, the Woolworth sitin on May 28th, 1963.
Turned into one of the most violent confrontations of the entire movement when a white mob attacked demonstrators, dousing them with condiments and beating them while police stood by and watched.
Evers was the man organizing all of it.
And Mississippi noticed the people in charge of keeping the state segregated had a name for what Evers was doing.
They called it agitation.
But what Evers was doing was simpler than that.
He was asking Mississippi to follow its own laws.
He was asking black Mississippians to believe they had rights and then to act on that belief.
And in 1963, Mississippi, that was the most dangerous thing a person could do.
His name had appeared on a death list since 1955.
That is not a figure of speech.
White supremacist groups in Mississippi maintained actual lists of black leaders targeted for assassination and Megar Evers was near the top.
The threats came constantly by phone, by mail, sometimes delivered in person.
Strange cars followed Merly when she drove the children to school.
The police didn’t investigate the threats.
In some cases, police officers were the ones following her.
In late May 1963, just weeks before the murder, someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the family’s carport.
The fire could have spread to the house where the children were sleeping.
Merely put out the flames with a garden hose.
Days later, a car swerved at Megar in a parking lot, nearly running him down.
He reported it.
Nothing happened.
The Evers family lived under siege, and they organized their lives around that reality.
Megar and Merely slept with guns within reach and they had a drill rehearsed with their three children.
Daryl was nine.
Reena was eight.
Little James was only 3 years old.
If you hear gunshots, you drop to the floor.
You crawl to the bathroom.
You get into the cast iron bathtub.
The bathtub was heavy enough to stop a bullet.
That was the safest place in the house.
Think about that for a second.
A father in America in 1963 drilling his children on how to survive an assassination attempt inside their own home.
Not because of a random crime, not because of a bad neighborhood, because of the work he did, because he believed black people in Mississippi deserved to vote.
Evers knew what was coming.
He had told friends that he expected to be killed.
He had told Merly the same thing.
He once said, “I’m looking to be shot anytime I step out of my car.
If I die, it will be in a good cause.”
And in his final days, worn down by months of threats and violence and relentless organizing, he told merely something she would carry for the rest of her life.
“I’m so tired,” he said.
“I don’t think I can go on, but I can’t stop.”
He also told her, “I love my children and I love my wife with all my heart, and I would die.
Die gladly if that would make a better life for them.
That was the man Byron Debecwith chose to kill.
Not a soldier on a battlefield, not a criminal, a father, a husband, a veteran, a man who spent his days driving country roads so that other people could register to vote.
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Now, June 12th, 1963, that evening, something remarkable happened.
President John F.
Kennedy went on national television and delivered the most forceful civil rights address any sitting president had ever given.
He declared that America faced a moral crisis.
He called for sweeping civil rights legislation.
For the first time, the president of the United States spoke about racial equality not as a political problem, but as a moral imperative.
Megar Evers was not home to watch it.
[music] He was at an NAACP rally at a church in Jackson.
But his wife merely and their three children watched the speech from the living room.
The children were supposed to be in bed, but merely let them stay up.
It felt important.
[music] It felt like something was changing.
After the speech ended, the children kept waiting up.
They wanted to see their father when he got home.
Just after midnight, Evers pulled his 1962 Oldsmobile into the driveway.
He stepped out of the carrying the Jim Crow MustGo t-shirts from the rally.
He was alone.
From a honeysuckle thicket across the street, roughly 150 ft away, someone was watching through the scope of a 1917 Enfield rifle.
A single shot cracked through the warm Mississippi night.
The bullet struck Evers in the back, tore through his body, passed through the living room window, punched through an interior wall, ricocheted off the refrigerator, and came to rest on the [music] kitchen counter.
The children, who had been taught the drill, hit the floor.
Then they heard their father.
Merly ran to the front door and [music] opened it.
Megar Evers was lying face down in the driveway, dragging himself toward the doorstep, leaving a trail of blood across the concrete.
The children ran outside, screaming, “Daddy, get up.
Please, Daddy, get up.”
Neighbors rushed to help.
They loaded Evers into a station wagon and raced to the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
He was initially turned away because of his race.
He was eventually admitted, but it was too late.
Megar Evers was pronounced dead at 1:23 in the morning.
He was 37 years old.
On June 19th, 1963, he was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.
Thousands attended.
The NAACP postumously awarded him its highest honor.
The Spingarn Medal, the nation mourned, and Merely Evers, at 30 years old with three children, began a fight that would consume the next three decades of her life.
The question now was simple.
Who pulled the trigger?
The answer came fast, too fast in a way for Mississippi to handle.
The morning after the murder, police found the Enfield rifle in the honeysuckle thicket.
It was a sporterized military rifle, the kind a former serviceman might customize.
Mounted on it was a telescopic sight, and on that site was a single, clear, unmistakable fingerprint.
The fingerprint was matched using military records.
It belonged to Byron Dela Beckwith, a 42-year-old fertilizer salesman from Greenwood, Mississippi.
Beckwith was born in 1920 in Kousa, California.
His father, the town postmaster, died when Byron was 5.
His mother died when he was 12.
Orphaned before he was a teenager, he was sent to live with his maternal uncle in Greenwood, Mississippi, deep in the Delta.
He grew up in a world that told him every single day that his whiteness made him superior and he believed it completely.
He enlisted in the Marine Corps in January 1942 and served as a machine gunner in the Pacific.
He fought at Guadal Canal.
He was wounded at the Battle of Terawa, one of the bloodiest engagements in Marine Corps history.
He was honorably discharged in 1945.
Like Megar Evers, Byron Dela Beckwith was a veteran who had fought for his country.
But where Evers came home and fought for equality, Beckwith came home and dedicated his life to making sure equality would never arrive.
After the war, Beckwith settled into life as a salesman in Greenwood, selling tobacco, then fertilizer.
Never particularly successful at any of it.
What he was successful at was hate.
The 1954 Brown versus Board of Education ruling was his radicalizing moment.
When the Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional, Beckwith didn’t see a legal ruling.
He saw an attack on everything he believed the South was supposed to be.
He joined the White Citizens Council in Greenwood immediately.
The Citizens Council was the respectable face of white supremacy in Mississippi.
Sometimes called the country club clan, its members were bankers, lawyers, politicians, and business owners who used economic pressure and political influence to maintain segregation.
Beckwith went further.
He became associated with the white knights of the Ku Klux Clan, the most violent clan faction in the south.
He wrote letters to newspapers defending segregation in terms that left nothing to interpretation.
He spoke openly about what he called absolute white supremacy under white Christian rule.
He told people that there were only three kinds of people in Mississippi.
Whites, colored, and trash.
And in his view, there was very little trash.
Beckwith wasn’t hiding in the shadows.
He was standing in the spotlight, and he liked it there.
He wanted people to know exactly who he was and what he stood for.
The evidence against him was overwhelming.
Beyond the fingerprint, investigators confirmed that Beckwith owned the Enfield rifle, though he claimed it had been stolen.
His white Plymouth Valiant had been spotted near the Evers home in the days leading up to the murder.
A Jackson cab driver told police that Beckwith had been asking for directions to Evers’s address, and Beckwith had no credible explanation for where he had been on the night of June 12th.
He was arrested on June 23rd, 1963, 11 days after the killing.
With that much physical evidence in a functioning justice system, the case should have been straightforward.
This was not a functioning justice system.
Not in Mississippi.
Not in 1963.
Beckwith went to trial twice in 1964.
Both times the outcome was decided before a single witness was called.
Here’s why.
In Mississippi, jury pools were drawn from voter registration roles.
Black citizens had been systematically excluded from voter registration since the state’s 1890 constitution, which meant the juries were all white, all male, drawn from communities where the white citizens council ran the civic life of the community and where killing a black civil rights leader wasn’t universally considered a crime.
The White Citizens Council paid for Beckwith’s defense.
They provided him with three of the best attorneys in the state free of charge.
And the defense had a secret ally that wouldn’t be revealed for another 25 years.
The prosecution presented strong evidence.
The fingerprint, the rifle, the car, the cab driver.
A solid circumstantial case built on physical evidence that pointed to one man and one man only.
Beckwith’s defense offered an alibi.
Two former police officers from Greenwood testified that they had seen Beckwith at a gas station in Greenwood, roughly 90 mi from Jackson on the night of the murder.
No other witnesses corroborated their account.
The first jury deliberated and deadlocked.
Mistrial.
The second jury months later did the same.
Another mistrial.
Beckwith walked out of the Hines County courthouse and his hometown of Greenwood gave him a hero’s welcome.
During the second trial, something happened in the courtroom that Merly Evers would never forget.
Former Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, the man who had personally tried to block James Meredith’s enrollment at Old Miss, walked into the courtroom and shook Beckwith’s hand.
Some accounts say it happened while Merly herself was on the witness stand.
The message was unmistakable.
The highest levels of Mississippi’s power structure stood with the accused killer.
In 1969, the charges were formally dropped.
Beckwith didn’t just go free, he thrived.
In 1967, he ran for Lieutenant Governor of Mississippi, campaigning on an openly white supremacist platform.
He lost.
But the fact that he ran it all tells you everything about what Mississippi tolerated.
In 1973, he was arrested in Louisiana with a time bomb, a map, and loaded firearms in his car.
He was on his way to the home of AI Botnik, a regional director of the Anti-Defamation League.
Beckwith was convicted of that conspiracy and served nearly 3 years in prison.
And through all of it, from the mid 1960s onward, Byron Delabbeckwith bragged about killing Megar Evers.
Not quietly, not in code, openly.
At a 1965 clan rally, Beckwith told the assembled members that the killing didn’t bother him at all, that it caused him no more trouble than their wives had giving birth to their children.
He referred to Evers using a racial slur and called him a chicken stealing dog.
A clan member named Delmare Dennis, who was secretly working as an FBI informant, was in the room and heard [music] every word.
A woman named Maryanne Adams, met Beckwith in 1966 and was introduced to him as the man who killed Megar Evers.
His former tenant, Dan Prince, heard him brag about it as well, and a prison guard named Mark Riley would later testify that Beckwith had threatened him using the Evers killing as proof of what he was capable of.
Beckwith’s own mouth was building the case that would eventually destroy him.
He just didn’t know it yet.
This decision to brag seemed small at the time.
It wasn’t.
For 30 years, Merly Evers lived with a single unshakable conviction.
The man who killed her husband was going to be held accountable.
She didn’t know how.
She didn’t know when.
She just knew she wouldn’t stop until it happened.
And every time someone told her it was over, that the case was dead, that Mississippi had moved on, she said the same thing.
Not while I’m alive.
In 1964, she moved her three children from Jackson to Claremont, California.
The death threats hadn’t stopped after the trials, and she needed her children to grow up somewhere they could sleep through the night without practicing bathtub drills.
Daryl, Reena, and James had already seen more violence in their young lives than most people encounter in a lifetime.
Merly wanted them to know a world where their father’s name meant something beyond the way he died.
She enrolled at Pomona College, a prestigious liberal arts school in Southern California, and earned a degree in sociology in 1968.
She raised three children as a single mother.
She wrote a book about Megar’s life and work called For Us the Living.
She ran for Congress from California in 1970.
She lost that race, but the campaign gave her visibility, a public platform, and connection she would use for the next two decades.
Through all of it, she never let Mississippi forget what had happened in that driveway.
Every year, sometimes multiple times a year, she contacted Mississippi authorities and asked the same question.
When are you going to reopen the case?
And every year, she got the same answer.
There’s nothing new.
No new evidence, no new witnesses, [music] no reason to go back.
The state of Mississippi was betting that time would [music] do what the justice system had failed to do.
That merely would eventually give up.
That the case would fade from public memory.
That Beckwith would die a free man [music] and the whole ugly chapter would close itself.
They didn’t know Merly Evers.
She had also done something in 1964 that would turn out to be the most important single act of preservation in the entire case.
When it was feared that all transcripts from Beckwith’s original trials had been lost or destroyed through official neglect, Merly had kept a copy, a complete record of both trials.
She had it in her possession for decades, stored carefully, waiting, an entire trial record that the state of Mississippi could no longer find in its own files.
One woman had it in her home, and she never let it go.
In 1967, she wrote a line that became her public declaration of war on the cold case.
Somewhere in Mississippi lives the man who murdered my husband.
Nobody in Mississippi was listening.
Not yet.
But Merly was patient, and patience, it turned out, was her most effective weapon.
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By 1989, Beckwith had been a free man for a quarter century.
The Evers case was dead, filed away, forgotten by everyone except the family.
Then a 30-year-old reporter at the Jackson Clarion Ledger started pulling a thread that would unravel everything.
Jerry Mitchell was born in 1959, 4 years before Evers was killed.
He wasn’t a civil rights historian by training.
He was a newspaper reporter who had developed sources inside the state government.
And those sources pointed him toward a set of files that the state of Mississippi desperately wanted to stay sealed.
The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission.
If you’ve never heard of it, that’s by design.
The commission did its work in the dark, and Mississippi spent decades trying to keep its record sealed.
The Sovereignty Commission was created by the Mississippi legislature in March 1956, 2 years after the Brown versus Board ruling.
Its official purpose was to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi.
Its actual purpose was to preserve segregation by any means necessary using the full resources and authority of state government.
The commission [music] was taxpayer funded and chaired by the governor himself.
It operated as a domestic intelligence agency for the segregationist cause.
Its agents spied on civil rights workers across the state, tracking their movements, photographing their meetings, [music] recording their license plates.
It maintained dossas on tens of thousands of people, black and white, anyone who threatened the racial order.
It recruited black informants to infiltrate civil rights organizations from the inside and report back to the state.
And it funneled more than $193,000 of public money.
Mississippi taxpayer money directly to the White Citizens Council.
Megar Evers himself had publicly criticized that practice before his death.
The commission operated until 1973 and was formally abolished in 1977.
By then, it had assembled roughly 146,000 pages of surveillance files containing more than 87,000 names.
Those files were sealed by order of the state legislature.
They were supposed to stay sealed for 50 years.
The state of Mississippi wanted its own citizens to forget that their government had spent two decades running a spy operation against the civil rights movement.
Jerry Mitchell had other plans.
Through sources he had cultivated inside state government, he gained access to information from those sealed [music] files.
And among the thousands of pages of surveillance reports and intelligence memos, he found something that changed the entire complexion of the Megar Evers case.
During Beckwith’s 1964 trials, while the Hines County District Attorney was publicly prosecuting the case, Sadium Norris, the Sovereignty Commission, a different arm of that same state government, was secretly working with Beckwith’s defense team.
Commission investigators had used state resources to [music] screen the prospective jury pool during the voir dyer process.
They identified which potential jurors would be sympathetic to a white supremacist defendant accused of murdering a black civil rights leader and they fed that intelligence directly to Beckwith’s defense attorneys.
The implications were staggering.
The state of Mississippi had been prosecuting and sabotaging its own murder case at the same time.
One hand was trying Beck with for murder.
The other hand was making sure the jury would never convict him.
Those two hung juries in 1964 weren’t failures of evidence.
They weren’t even [music] failures of justice in the traditional sense.
They were engineered outcomes.
The state had rigged its own trial.
Mitchell’s story ran on October 1st, 1989 in the Clarion Ledger.
The impact was immediate.
The day after it was published, Merely Evers went public and called for the case to be reopened.
She had been waiting for exactly this kind of opening for 25 years.
Suddenly, the cold case that everyone thought was dead had a pulse, and the narrative had completely shifted.
This was no longer a story about weak evidence or reasonable doubt.
This was a story about a state conspiracy to let a murderer walk free.
The evidence had never been the problem.
The system had been the problem.
And now the systems corruption was documented in its own files.
In the Hines County District Attorney’s Office, a young assistant prosecutor named Bobby Dauder read Jerry Mitchell’s story and felt something shift inside him.
Dofer was born in 1954.
He was 9 years old when Megar Evers was killed.
He would later say that he had never even heard the name Megar Evers until after he finished law school.
The case wasn’t part of his world.
[music] Not then.
But when his boss, District Attorney Ed Peters, asked him to look into the jury tampering allegations from the Sovereignty Commission files.
Gelder started reading and the deeper he went, the more the case consumed him.
He later described the murder as a flatout cold-blooded sniper assassination from ambush.
And he couldn’t understand how a killer with that much evidence against him had walked free.
Mississippi has no statute of limitations on murder.
Legally, Beckwith could still be tried.
The question was whether a case this old could be rebuilt from scratch.
The obstacles were staggering.
And no, that is an exaggeration.
What Delau faced would have made most prosecutors walk away on day one.
The original district attorney’s case file was missing, gone.
Nobody could account for where it went.
There was no official trial transcript on record anywhere in the Mississippi court system.
The physical evidence, including the bullet that had killed Evers, had not [music] been properly retained.
The forensic trail that should have supported a murder prosecution had essentially been erased by 30 years of institutional neglect.
Whether that neglect was accidental or deliberate, the effect was the same.
A murder case with no file, no transcript, no physical evidence, and no autopsy report.
Delauer was starting from less than zero.
He was trying to prosecute a 30-year-old murder with no case file and no evidence locker.
In most jurisdictions, that would have been the end of the conversation.
But Delau kept going, and the first breakthrough came from the person who had been keeping the flame alive longer than anyone else, Merly Evers herself.
The trial transcript she had preserved for decades, the one she had guarded through three decades of moves and a cross-country relocation, became the foundation of the new case.
Without that transcript, there would have been no record of what witnesses had testified to in 1964, no way to reconstruct the prosecution’s original arguments, [music] and no baseline for the new case to build on.
The entire reinvestigation rested on pages that one woman had refused to throw away.
The second breakthrough was the rifle.
The 1917 Enfield that had killed Megar Evers, the one with Beckwith’s [music] fingerprint on the scope, had disappeared from the evidence locker years earlier.
Delauer tracked it through a chain of custody that would sound absurd if it weren’t true.
The rifle had been taken home as a souvenir by the judge who had presided over one of the 1964 trials.
From there, it passed through several hands and ended up in the possession of a judge named Russell Moore, who happened to be Dau’s father-in-law.
Moore had been using the Enfield rifle to prop open a closet door.
Dau checked the serial number against the original records.
It matched.
The murder weapon had been sitting in a family member’s closet, holding open a door [music] for years.
In June 1991, Megar Evers’s body was exumed from Arlington National Cemetery for a new autopsy.
The original autopsy report had gone missing along with everything else.
When pathologist Michael Baden examined the remains, he found them remarkably well preserved and was able to thoroughly document the wound track and the trajectory of the bullet.
With the transcript, the rifle, and the forensic evidence reassembled, Delau turned to the element that would become the heart of the new case, the witnesses.
Over months of investigation, Dauder and his team tracked down six people who were willing to testify under oath that Byron Debeekwith had bragged to them about killing Megar Evers.
Maryanne Adams, Dan Prince, clan informants Delmare Dennis and Dick Davis, Peggy Morgan, and a former prison guard named Mark Riley, who would become the prosecution’s most dramatic witness.
In December 1990, a Hines County grand jury reindicted Byron Dela Beckwith for the murder of Megar Evers.
Beckwith, now in his early 70s and living in Signal Mountain, Tennessee, fought back with everything he had, and he had a legitimate legal argument, at least on paper.
He battled extradition for nearly 10 months, arguing that Tennessee had no obligation to send him back to Mississippi to face charges that had been dropped decades earlier.
When he was finally returned to Mississippi, his defense team launched a barrage of motions designed to kill the case before it ever reached a courtroom.
They argued that a retrial after 30 years violated his constitutional right to a speedy trial.
They argued it violated his due process rights since witnesses had died, memories had faded, and evidence had been lost.
They argued double jeopardy, saying the state had already tried him twice and that trying him again amounted to legal harassment.
And they had a point about the difficulty of mounting a defense three decades after the crime.
Key witnesses for both sides were dead.
Physical evidence had degraded or disappeared.
The Mississippi of 1994 bore almost no resemblance to the Mississippi of 1964.
But the double jeopardy argument, which was the strongest card in Beckwith’s hand, had a fatal weakness.
Double jeopardy protects a defendant from being tried again after an acquitt.
Beckwith had never been acquitted.
Both 1964 trials had ended in mistrials because the jury’s deadlocked.
He had never been found not guilty.
The case had simply been abandoned by prosecutors who chose not to try again.
That was a critical legal distinction and it meant the door had never actually been closed.
The case went to the Mississippi Supreme Court which issued a deeply divided ruling in late 1992 allowing the retrial to proceed.
The justices acknowledged the extraordinary delay but concluded that the state’s own role in undermining the original prosecution, the Sovereignty Commission’s jury tampering weighed against Beckwith’s claim that the delay was unfair.
The state didn’t get to sabotage its own case and then argue that too much time had passed.
Everything Delotter had fought for came down to this.
He had spent four years rebuilding a case from nothing.
Enduring skepticism from colleagues who thought it was a waste of time and resources.
The personal cost was enormous.
The years lauder spent consumed by the Evers case strained his first marriage to the breaking point and it ended.
He had staked his career, his reputation, and his personal life on a 30-year-old murder case that many people in the Mississippi legal establishment thought was unwininnable and some thought shouldn’t be tried at all.
It was January 1994 in the Hines County Courthouse in Jackson, Mississippi.
31 years after a bullet tore through Medgar Evers’s back, the case of Mississippi versus Byron Daba Beckwith was going to trial for the third time.
Bobby Delau had spent nearly four years fighting to reach this moment.
Merly Evers had spent 30.
Jury selection began in late January with the jury pool drawn from Polola County in the town of Batesville.
This time the selection process was different from anything the Evers case had seen before.
For the first time in the case’s history, the jury would actually represent the full population of Mississippi.
The final panel was composed of eight black jurors and four white jurors, seven women and five men.
Some of them had been children themselves in 1963.
Some of them had parents and grandparents who had lived through everything Megar Evers had fought for and everything he had fought against.
For the first time in three trials, Beckwith would face a jury that looked like the state he lived in.
Testimony began on January 27.
Merly Evers was the prosecution’s first witness.
She walked into that courtroom and did something she had done twice before in 1964, something she had relived every day for 31 years.
She described the night of June 12th, 1963.
The Kennedy speech on television, the children begging to stay up past bedtime, the sound of the car pulling into the driveway, the crack of the rifle, opening the front door, finding Megar face down in his own blood, dragging himself toward the house.
The children running past her, screaming for their father to get up.
31 years later and she had not forgotten a single detail.
Her testimony was devastating because it was not rehearsed pain.
It was lived pain, the kind that doesn’t fade.
The prosecution’s strategy was methodical.
Daughter reassembled the physical evidence, presenting the Enfield rifle and the fingerprinted scope to the jury.
For witnesses who had testified in 1964 but had since died.
Stand-in readers delivered their words from Merly’s preserved transcript.
The prosecution also introduced an enhanced photograph of Beckwith’s white Plymouth Valiant showing a Masonic Lodge emblem on the car that matched descriptions from witnesses who had seen the vehicle near the Evers home.
Then came the witnesses who turned Beckwith’s own arrogance into the prosecution’s deadliest weapon.
One by one, six people took the stand and told the jury what Byron Debeckwith had said to them in his own words.
Over three decades of bragging, Maryanne Adams testified that when she was introduced to Beckwith in 1966, the introduction was explicit.
This is the man who killed Megar Evers.
She said Beckwith didn’t deny it, didn’t deflect, didn’t change the subject.
He owned it.
He was proud of it.
Dan Prince, Beckwith’s former tenant, told the jury that Beckwith had spoken about the murder casually, as though it were a chore he had completed.
He had been tried twice, Beckwith told him, and it hadn’t bothered him any more than having a baby would bother a woman.
He spoke about killing a man the way someone else might talk about fixing a fence.
Delmare Dennis, the former clan member who had been secretly working as an FBI informant, described a 1965 clan rally where Beckwith addressed the room.
Beckwith told the assembled members that killing Evers hadn’t caused him any trouble at all.
He used a racial slur to describe his victim and called him a chicken stealing dog.
He was performing for an audience and an informant was taking notes.
Dick Davis, another former clan informant, corroborated the pattern.
Beckwith spoke about the killing openly in clan circles, treating it as a credential, proof that he was a man of action in a movement full of talkers.
The prosecution saved its strongest witness for last.
Mark Riley, the former prison guard, testified that Beckwith had directly invoked the Evers murder as a personal threat against him.
Beckwith told Riley that if he could get rid of someone like Megar Evers, he could certainly handle someone like Riley.
It wasn’t a casual boast.
It was a threat delivered by a man who wanted Riley to understand exactly who he was dealing with.
Riley’s testimony landed like a hammer in a silent courtroom.
It was the final witness the jury heard before deliberations began.
[snorts] The defense, led by attorneys who were now trying to overcome not only the original evidence, but 30 years of their client’s own admissions, offered the same alibi from 1964.
Former police officers from Greenwood testified that they had seen Beckwith at a gas station in Greenwood, 90 mi from Jackson on the night of the murder.
The same story 30 years later, from the same witnesses nobody knew had come forward to support it.
Beckwith himself did not take the stand.
Given the number of people he had bragged to over the decades, his attorneys likely decided that putting him in front of a jury would do more harm than good.
Then Bobby Delau stood before the jury and delivered the closing argument he had been building toward for 4 years.
He asked the 12 jurors a question that carried the weight of 31 years.
Is it ever too late to do the right thing?
For the sake of justice and the hope of us as a civilized society, I sincerely hope and pray that it’s not.
The jury was sent to deliberate.
What followed was agonizing.
The 12 jurors debated for roughly 7 to 8 hours across 2 days.
At one point, the vote stood at 8 to 4, and the spectre of another hung jury loomed over the courtroom.
The jury was sequestered overnight.
Inside the jury room, the foreman, a 70-year-old minister named Reverend Elvage Fondrin, led the group in a prayer session.
Not for a specific verdict, for clarity, for the courage to do what was right, whatever that looked like.
On February 5th, 1994, the jury returned to the courtroom.
The foreman read the verdict.
Guilty.
Unanimous.
12 jurors, one voice.
Guilty of murder.
The courtroom erupted.
Merely Evers wept.
When she was able to speak to reporters afterward, she said five words that carried three decades of grief and determination.
All I want to say is, “Yay, Medgar.
Yay.”
And then she said something else, something quieter and more personal that she had been waiting 31 years to say.
Medgar, I’ve gone the last mile of the way.
Judge L.
Brilland Hillburn sentenced Byron Debecwith to life in prison.
He was 73 years old.
District Attorney Ed Peters summarized the result in a single sentence.
A bragging murderer has been convicted.
Beckwith, defiant to the end, showed no remorse.
He was escorted out of the courtroom and into the prison system.
He would never leave.
The appeals began almost immediately.
Beckwith’s attorneys argued that the 31-year delay between the crime and the conviction had denied him a fair trial.
The Mississippi Supreme Court disagreed.
In 1997, it upheld the conviction, ruling that the extraordinary circumstances of the case, including the state’s own role in undermining the original prosecution, justified the long delay.
The United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Byron Debecwith died on January 21st, 2001 at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson.
He was 80 years old.
He died in custody, having spent the last 7 years of his life in prison for a crime he had committed 38 years earlier and bragged about for most of the time in between.
For Merly Evers, the conviction was not an ending.
It was a transformation.
After the verdict, she told reporters something that revealed what the fight had cost her.
She said, “I don’t have to say accused assassin anymore.
I can say convicted assassin.”
For 31 years, she had been unable to call her husband’s killer what he was in official terms.
Every time she spoke publicly, every time she wrote about the case, she had to use the word accused.
On February 5th, 1994, that word finally changed.
She also delivered a quiet warning to anyone who might think that time would protect a killer.
Always look over their shoulder, she said, because there may be someone like me and my family who will push to see the justice is done and never give up.
In 1995, Merly became the first woman to serve as chairperson of the national NAACP, winning the position by a single vote in a contentious election.
The organization was deep in debt and reeling from internal scandal.
Over the next 3 years, she restored its finances, rebuilt its credibility and pulled it back from the brink of collapse.
She stepped down in 1998, having done for the NAACP, what she had done for her husband’s case.
She refused to let something she believed in die.
She founded the Megar Evers Institute to carry on her husband’s civil rights work.
She remarried, becoming Merely Evers Williams, and continued speaking and writing about civil rights for decades.
And on January 21st, 2013, 50 years after Megar’s death and exactly 12 years after Beckwith died in his prison cell, Merly Evers Williams stood on the steps of the United States capital and delivered the invocation at President Barack Obama’s second inauguration.
She was the first woman and the first lay person ever to do so.
The girl from Vixsburg, Mississippi, who had crawled through her husband’s blood in a driveway, was now opening the ceremony for the nation’s first black president.
The Evers Home in Jackson, the house where a father was shot in his driveway while his children waited inside, was designated a national historic landmark and became a national monument in 2020.
Visitors can walk the same driveway.
They can see where the honeysuckle thicket once stood.
The house looks ordinary from the outside.
Most houses where history happened do.
The Beckwith conviction did something even larger than bring justice to one family.
It proved that civil rights cold cases could be successfully prosecuted decades after the crime.
It established a template.
It showed other prosecutors, other reporters, other families that the passage of time did not have to mean the passage of accountability.
And it opened the floodgates.
Jerry Mitchell, the reporter whose Sovereignty Commission investigation had cracked the Evers case open, kept going.
Over the following years, his investigative work contributed to the convictions of four more clansmen for civil rights era murders.
Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights, was convicted in 1998 for ordering the 1966 firebombing murder of NAACP leader Vernon Dmer in Hattisburg, Mississippi.
Thomas Blandon and Bobby Frank Cherry were convicted in 2001 and 2002 for the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
The bombing that killed four young girls and became one of the defining atrocities of the civil rights era.
And in 2005, Edgar Ray Kllinan was convicted of manslaughter for orchestrating the 1964 murders of James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights workers whose disappearance in Nshoba County, Mississippi, became known as the Mississippi Burning Case.
Mitchell would later receive a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grant, with a $500,000 award in recognition of his decades of investigative work.
Every single one of those convictions traced a line back to the Evers case, back to Jerry Mitchell’s first story about the Sovereignty Commission, back to merely Evers calling for the case to be reopened the next day, the first domino.
Congress eventually passed the EMTT Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act.
Creating a formal federal framework for identifying, investigating, and prosecuting cold cases from the civil rights era.
Dozens of cases were re-examined.
The legislation itself was a direct consequence of the momentum that the Evers conviction had started.
Bobby Deau became a national figure.
He was portrayed by Alec Baldwin in the 1996 film about the case.
He wrote a memoir.
He was appointed to the bench first as a county judge, then as a circuit judge.
He seemed destined for a legacy defined entirely by the Evers case.
Then came the fall.
In 2008, Delau was suspended from the bench and later indicted on federal charges in a corruption scandal tied to disgraced trial lawyer Richard Dicky Scrugs.
In 2009, he pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice for lying to the FBE about communications with his former boss, Ed Peters.
[music] He was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison and lost his law license.
The hero of the Evers case ended his career in a prison cell of his own.
Charles Evers, Megar’s brother, publicly stood by him.
“What can we do but fight for a man who fought for us?”
He said.
It’s a complicated footnote to an otherwise extraordinary story of justice.
Delotter’s later crimes don’t erase what he accomplished in the Evers case.
And his fall doesn’t diminish the verdict.
The evidence was real.
The witnesses were real.
The fingerprint on the scope was real.
Beckwith’s own bragging was real.
The conviction stands on its own.
On the night of June 12th, 1963, Megar Evers stepped out of his carrying t-shirts that read, “Jim Crow must go.”
He never made it inside.
His children found him in the driveway.
He once said, “You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea.”
Mississippi killed the man.
It took 31 years, but the idea won.
Megar Evers is buried at Arlington National Cemetery in a place of honor among the soldiers who fought for the country he loved and tried to change.
His grave faces Washington DC, the city where decades after his death, [music] the laws he fought for became the law of the land.
The case went cold for 31 years.
A widow kept the file.
A reporter found the secret.
A prosecutor picked up the thread and on February 5th, 1994, 12 jurors said what should have been said in 1964.
Guilty.
This is Cold Case Redemption.
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