In June 1966, three men knocked on Ben Chester White’s door and asked him to help find a lost dog.
They offered him $2 and a soda.
White was 67 years old.
He’d spent his entire life working the same piece of land near Nachez, Mississippi, where his grandparents had been enslaved.
He was a church deacon who could recite scripture by heart.
He had nothing to do with the civil rights movement.
He wasn’t registered to vote.
He’d never caused trouble a single day in his life.
That’s exactly why they chose him.
The men drove White into the Homacidito National Forest, pulled over on a bridge above Pretty Creek, and shot him at least 17 times.
His last words were a question to God.
The killers were clansmen.
And the reason they murdered an innocent old man had nothing to do with Ben Chester White himself.
It had everything to do with Martin Luther King Jr., One of those men confessed.
He told the FBI exactly what he did, and a Mississippi jury set him free.
Anyway, that was 1967.
By 2003, 37 years later, a second jury in a federal courtroom in Jackson, Mississippi, heard the same evidence, the same confession, and the same facts.
This time, the verdict was different.
This time, the word was guilty.
It took one journalist, one old television interview, and a single detail on a government land survey map to [music] bring a dead case back to life.
This is the story of Ben Chester White, the man who was killed as bait, and the map detail that beat a rigged aqu quiddle.
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The man they chose.
It was 1899 when Ben Chester White was born in the flat lands outside Natchez, Mississippi along the banks of the river that had defined the region’s wealth and its cruelty for centuries.
The land where White would spend his entire life sat on Liberty Road, [music] a stretch of farmland that had been worked by enslaved people for generations before the Civil War.
White’s own grandparents had been among them.
After emancipation, the family stayed.
They worked the same soil.
They lived in the same small world.
And when Ben Chester White grew old enough to work, he took over as caretaker of the property, maintaining it for the family that owned it.
That was his life.
Not remarkable by any outward measure, not dramatic, [music] not the kind of life anyone writes about in newspapers.
White was a quiet man, [music] hardworking, humble.
He kept to himself and he kept his head down.
And in Nachez, Mississippi [music] in the middle of the 20th century, a black man keeping his head down was sometimes the only strategy for staying alive.
But White wasn’t just a farm hand.
He was a deacon at his local Baptist church.
And even though he had only limited ability to read, he could recite long passages of scripture from memory.
People who knew him described a man of deep faith, the kind who carried his Bible with him, not because anyone was watching, but because it mattered to him.
He was respected in his community.
He was trusted.
He had two sons, Jesse, [music] who had moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Lewis, who would go on to serve in Vietnam.
His elderly mother, Clary Green, born around 1867, still lived nearby.
White’s world was small, and he seemed to prefer it that way.
And here is the detail that makes everything that comes next so much harder to stomach.
Ben Chester White had absolutely nothing to do with the civil rights movement.
[music] He was not a member of the NAACP.
He was not registered to vote.
He had never attended a protest, never marched, never signed a petition, never spoken publicly about segregation or equality or any of the battles that were tearing Mississippi apart in the 1960s.
He was by every measure a bystander, a man living his life on the margins, [music] invisible to the forces shaping the world around him.
That invisibility is exactly is exactly what got him killed.
The men who murdered Benchester White didn’t choose him because of what he’d done.
They chose him because of what he hadn’t done.
He was isolated.
He was quiet.
He had no allies with influence who would come looking for answers.
He was, in the coldest possible calculation, disposable, a means to an end.
Bait.
I mean, think about that for a second.
A man lived 67 years without bothering a soul.
And the thing that costs him his life is the fact that nobody would make noise when he disappeared.
[music] White’s name appears on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.
A curved black granite wall inscribed with the names of 40 martyrs who gave their lives during the movement.
Most of the names on that wall belong to leaders, organizers, activists, people who stood up and were struck down for it.
White is different.
He was struck down precisely because he did not stand up.
He never asked for a place on that wall.
The men who killed him put him there.
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And Ben Chester White spent enough years being invisible.
He doesn’t need to be invisible anymore.
Nachez, 1966.
A city at war.
To understand how three men could murder an innocent old man and walk free, you have to understand what Nachez, [music] Mississippi looked like in the middle of the 1960s.
Because this wasn’t a town where a racial murder was unthinkable.
This was a town where it was practically routine.
Nachez sits on the bluffs above the Mississippi River right at the Louisiana border, a city that had built its fortune on cotton and slavery and had never fully let go of either one.
By 1964, the Ku Klux Clan had established a strangle hold on the white population of Adams County.
On August 29th, 1964, [music] the United Clans of America held a public rally in Nachez, led by Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton, and launched their first local claim Adams County Civic and Betterment Association.
The White Knights of the Ku Klux Clan of Mississippi, the most violent clan faction in the state, were also active in the area under the leadership of Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, a man who would later be convicted of ordering the firebombing murder of NAACP leader Vernon Dmer.
But the most dangerous group in Nachez, wasn’t even the White Knights.
It was a cell operating inside the clan itself, the Silver Dollar group.
The Silver Dollar group was founded in the spring of 1964 at the Shamrock Motel in Videlia, Louisiana, just across the river from Natchez.
Its leader was a man named Raleigh Jackson Glover, known as Red Glover, who worked at the Armstrong Tire and Rubber Plant in town.
Glover handpicked every member personally.
He gave each one a silver dollar, usually minted in the member’s birth year, as a token of loyalty.
Members were known to flip these coins during conversation, a quiet signal of who belonged and who didn’t.
The Silver Dollar group was described by investigators as a clan within a clan.
The most secretive and most violent cell operating anywhere in Mississippi.
And they were not just talking.
On August 27th, 1965, someone planted a bomb under the car of George Metaf, the president of the Natchas’s NAACP chapter.
The explosion nearly killed him.
Red Glover was the FBI’s chief suspect, though he was never charged.
The bombing set off a firestorm.
Charles Evers, the brother of the assassinated civil rights leader Megar Evers, came to Natchas to lead a boycott and protest campaign that lasted months.
By December of 1965, the city government caved.
The Natchas agreement conceded to nearly all of the NAACP’s demands.
Desgregation of public facilities, hiring of black police officers, paving of roads in black neighborhoods.
The clan was furious.
Every concession felt like a defeat.
The Deacons for Defense and Justice, an armed self-defense organization, had [music] formed to protect the black community during the boycott, and their presence enraged white supremacists who were used to operating without resistance.
For the first time, the men who had operated in darkness with total impunity were encountering organized push back, armed push back, and it drove them to escalation.
By early 1966, the violence in Natchez had reached a pitch that is hard to comprehend from a distance.
This was not a city where a single act of racial terror happened and shocked everyone.
This was a city where bombings, beatings, and threats were woven into the fabric of daily life for the black community.
The Silver Dollar group alone was suspected of involvement in multiple bombings, shootings, [music] and acts of arson.
Red Glover ran the cell with military discipline, and the FBI, despite having informants inside the organization, struggled to build cases that could survive a trial in front of a Mississippi jury.
The informants could provide intelligence.
They could describe the meetings, the plans, the targets.
What they could not do was guarantee that a white jury in Adams County would convict a white man for violence against a black citizen.
That guarantee simply did not exist.
This was the Natchez that Ben Chester White lived in.
A city where the black community was winning hard-fought battles and the clan was looking for ways to strike back.
The ground was soaked in gasoline.
The bombers and the gunmen were organized, motivated, and [music] protected by a justice system that had no interest in punishing white violence against black citizens.
And in the middle of all of this, a new opportunity arrived, not from Natchez itself, from a highway in central Mississippi where a lone black man had just been shot for daring to walk through the state without fear.
The March, the Plan, and the Biggest Prize.
On June 5th, 1966, a man named James Meredith set out alone on a walk from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi.
The distance was 220 mi.
Meredith, who four years earlier had become the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, was marching to encourage black voter registration and to prove that a black man could walk through Mississippi without being afraid.
The next day, near the town of Hernando, a white man named Aubrey James Norville stepped out of the roadside brush and shot Meredith with a shotgun.
Meredith survived, but the shooting galvanized the entire civil [music] rights movement.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Stokeley Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating [music] Committee, and Floyd McKisick of the Congress of Racial Equality all converged on Mississippi to continue the march.
It became known as the March Against Fear, and it drew national media from every corner of the country.
This was the march where Carmichael first used the phrase black power in a public rally.
A moment that would reshape the movement forever.
The march against fear would stretch until June 26th when it concluded in Jackson with a rally of some 15,000 people.
Along the way, it became the most significant civil rights march since Selma.
National television crews followed the marchers through Mississippi’s back roads and small towns.
Federal marshals provided protection.
The entire world was watching the state.
And for the clan, that attention was both a threat and an opportunity.
While the eyes of the nation were fixed on the march route winding through central Mississippi, the clansmen of Natchez saw their chance.
Claude Fuller was the man who saw it first.
Fuller was an ousted member of the White Knights, a drunk and a violent man who had been expelled from the organization but refused to stop operating.
He had formed his own splinter group, a small cell he called the Cottonmouth Moccasin Gang.
And Fuller had an idea.
If a black man were murdered near Natchez brutally and publicly enough to generate outrage, Martin Luther King Jr.
Would come.
He would come to the funeral or to the protest [music] march or to console the family.
And when he did, the clan would be waiting.
Fuller described King as the biggest prize of all.
To pull it off, Fuller recruited two men.
The first was Ernest Henry Avance.
Avance was a Korean War era Army veteran who had served in the National Guard and the Army Reserve through the mid 1950s and early 1960s.
He had been an early recruit to the clan and had built a reputation as one of the most dangerous men in the Nachez chapter.
In conversations with FBI agents, Avance had said that black churches should only be bombed when they were full of people inside.
He was not a man who dealt in half measures.
In 1964, he had been expelled from a local clan subdivision after he showed up to a Claver meeting in a Nachez neighborhood and shot the place up.
Reportedly furious about unpaid dues.
He had been implicated in the 1965 beating death of Earl Hodes, a disillusioned former clansman.
And in February 1966, just 4 months before the murder, Avance had been called before the House Unamerican Activities Committee in Washington to answer questions about clan violence.
Like most of the clansmen subpoenaed, he refused to say a word.
The second recruit was James Lloyd Jones.
Jones was the driver.
[music] He was the least ideologically committed of the three.
A follower more than a believer.
The kind of man who went along because the alternative, saying no to men like Fuller and Avance, carried its own risks.
Jones owned the car they would use.
That made him necessary.
Between the three of them, Fuller was the schemer, Avance was the weapon, and Jones was the transport.
None of them had any personal connection to Benchester White.
None of them had ever been wronged by him.
They didn’t even know him.
They knew only that he fit the profile they needed.
Old, black, alone, uninvolved, the kind of man whose murder would register as a racial act without triggering the kind of immediate organized response [music] that might compromise the real target.
They chose Benchester White, the way you would choose a piece of equipment for a job.
Without emotion, without hesitation, without any consideration of the fact that he [music] was a human being with a family and a church and a life that had lasted 67 years on this earth.
If Fuller had stopped at that point, if the plan had fallen apart or someone had gotten cold feet, this would be a very different story.
Nobody stopped.
Nobody flinched.
The clock was already ticking on Benchester White’s life.
He just couldn’t hear it yet.
June 10th, 1966.
The bridge over Pretty Creek.
On the evening of Friday, June 10th, 1966, James Lloyd Jones drove to Claude Fuller’s house.
Ernest Avance arrived about 30 minutes later.
The three men got into Jones’s car.
They drove to Benchester White’s home on Liberty Road outside Nachez and knocked on [music] his door.
They told White they needed help finding a lost dog.
They offered him $2 and a bottle of soda for his trouble.
White agreed.
He walked out of his house, got into the backseat of the car, and Jones drove south into Adams County toward the Homachito National Forest.
The Homachito is a sprawling tract of federal land in southern Mississippi, thick with pine and hardwood, cut through by creeks and logging roads.
It’s the kind of place where sound doesn’t carry far.
The kind of place where nobody would hear anything.
Jones drove the car across a bridge that [music] spanned Pretty Creek.
On Fuller’s orders, he turned the car around and stopped on the bridge.
Fuller sat in the front passenger seat.
He was carrying an EM2 carbine, an automatic rifle.
Avant sat in the back behind the driver.
He had a shotgun.
Fuller got out first.
[music] He walked to the passenger side of the car and ordered White to get out.
When White didn’t move, Fuller opened fire.
The EM2 carbine fired in rapid bursts.
He shot White at least 15 times with the automatic rifle, the rounds tearing through the car and through the man sitting inside it.
Then Fuller turned to Avance.
Now you shoot him with the shotgun.
Avant stepped forward and fired once.
Ben Chester White’s last words spoken before the first shot were, “Oh Lord, what have I done to deserve this?”
The men threw White’s body off the bridge into Pretty Creek below.
Then they dealt with the car.
Jones’s vehicle was destroyed, [music] covered in blood and tissue from the shooting.
They drove it to a planter’s driveway in another part of the county and set it on fire.
Fuller instructed Jones to go to the police and report the car stolen.
The next day, June 11th, Jones walked into the police station and filed a stolen vehicle report.
But law enforcement had already found the burned car.
2 days after the murder, children found Ben Chester White’s body beneath the bridge over Pretty Creek [music] in the Homachito National Forest.
The bait had been set, but the trap failed completely.
The murder of Ben Chester White never [music] reached Martin Luther King Jr.
King was hundreds of miles away, marching through central Mississippi with the other civil rights [music] leaders.
He never came to Nachez.
He never spoke publicly about White’s death.
The grand assassination [music] scheme that Fuller had dreamed up, the plan to lure the biggest prize of all into range collapsed before it even started.
Benchester White was dead for nothing.
An old man’s life traded for a plan that didn’t even work.
A 67year-old church deacon shot 17 times in a national forest.
[music] His body dumped in a creek.
All so that three clansmen could try to lure a man who never came to a city he never visited for an assassination that never happened.
The cruelty of it isn’t just in the violence.
It’s in the pointlessness.
White’s death accomplished nothing for the men who killed him.
It didn’t advance their cause.
It didn’t generate the media firestorm they expected.
It didn’t draw Martin Luther King Jr.
Within a 100 miles of Natchez.
It simply erased a quiet man from the earth and left his family to grieve in a state that had no interest in giving them answers.
And for a while, that appeared to be the end of it.
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Stories like this only stay [music] buried if nobody tells them.
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It matters more than you think.
The confession and the courtroom that didn’t care.
3 days after the murder on June 13th, 1966, James Lloyd Jones broke down under questioning.
He confessed to his role in the killing.
He told investigators what had happened in the car, on the bridge, [music] and in the forest.
He named Claude Fuller and Ernest Avance as the other two men involved.
Jones described the [music] shooting in vivid, horrified detail.
He talked about the blood.
He talked about the sound.
His confession gave the Adams County District Attorney Lennox Foreman enough to file state murder charges against both Avants and Jones.
Fuller, despite being the ring leader and the man who fired the rifle, would never be formally charged.
The reason was simple and devastating.
Neither Avance nor Jones would agree to testify against Fuller in open court.
Without their testimony and with a white Mississippi jury almost certain to acquit a white man accused of killing a black man, the district attorney decided a prosecution against Fuller was feudal.
In December 1967, Ernest Devance went to trial for the murder of Ben Chester White in Adams County, Mississippi.
The courtroom [music] was packed with clansmen.
They filled the gallery rows, a silent wall of support for the defendant.
The jury was all white.
And if you’re wondering whether that’s even legal, so is everyone else.
Two of the 12 jurors were later identified as members of the Ku Klux Clan themselves.
This was the jury that would decide whether Ernest Avance was guilty of murder.
Avance’s defense was audacious.
His attorney didn’t deny that Avance had been present.
He didn’t deny that Avance had fired a shotgun at Benchester White.
Instead, the defense argued that by the time Avance pulled the trigger, White was already dead.
Fuller’s rifle had done the killing.
The defense [music] claimed Avance merely shot a corpse.
You can’t murder a dead man.
This was not a theory supported by the evidence.
This was a legal technicality designed for a jury that was already looking for a reason to acquit.
And Avance himself had already destroyed this defense in his own words.
On March 13th, 1967, [music] during an FBI interview about a completely separate racial killing, Avance had volunteered his confession without being asked.
He told the agents what he had done to Benchester White.
He said he blew the man’s head off with a shotgun.
The trial [music] was not a search for truth.
It was a performance.
The prosecution presented its evidence.
The defense offered its theory and the jury seated in a courtroom full of clansmen in a county where the clan controlled entire blocks of civic life returned the verdict that everyone in the room already knew was coming.
[music] The jury acquitted Ernest Avance not because the evidence was insufficient, not because the confession was ambiguous, [music] not because the shot a corpse defense was scientifically credible, because the system was built to protect men like him and to discard men like Ben Chester White.
In 1967, Mississippi, a white man’s confession to killing a black man was not evidence of [music] guilt.
It was a formality that the jury was free to ignore, and they did.
Jones’s trial ended in a hung jury, which given the circumstances, was almost more remarkable than the acquitt.
It meant that at least one juror in Jones’s case had actually considered the evidence and refused to go along.
But a hung jury is not a conviction.
It’s a deadlock.
And with no prospect of a successful retrial and no cooperating witnesses willing to testify against Fuller, the district attorney closed the case on all three defendants.
But there was one more chapter in the immediate aftermath.
In 1968, Benchester White’s son, Jesse, filed a civil lawsuit against the Ku Klux Clan as an organization.
A court awarded him $1 million in damages, a decision that was reportedly the first time the clan itself was held legally liable for the actions of its members.
It was a landmark ruling.
And the White family never collected a single scent.
The clan had no assets to seize, no bank accounts to freeze.
The judgment was symbolic.
Justice on paper and nothing [music] more.
The cold decades, the years after the aqu quiddle, were quiet.
Quiet in the way that a grave is quiet.
Ben Chester White was buried at Southwood Lodge Church Cemetery in Nachez.
His headstone marked the place where a man who had lived 67 years in near total obscurity would continue to be forgotten.
The case file was closed.
The district attorney’s office moved on.
The witnesses aged and scattered and one by one they died.
Ernest Avance lived as a free man.
He had confessed to a murder and walked out of a courtroom without consequence.
And for decades, that was the end of the story.
Claude Fuller, the ring leader, the man who fired the automatic rifle, was never tried.
[music] After the killing, Fuller was actually welcomed into the Silver Dollar group by Red Glover, who admired his willingness to act.
Fuller’s reward for orchestrating the murder of an innocent man was a promotion within the clan’s most violent inner circle.
The violence in Nachez did not stop with White’s death.
On February 27th, 1967, less than a year after White was killed, a car bomb detonated in the driveway of Warless [music] Jackson, Senior.
Jackson was the treasurer of the Natchas’s NAACP chapter.
He had just been promoted to a position at the Armstrong Tire and Rubber Plant that had previously been reserved for white workers.
The promotion cost him his life.
The bomb killed him instantly.
Red Glover was the primary suspect for the FBI.
Nobody was ever charged.
2 years after that, on April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr.
Was assassinated on the balcony of the Lraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
The man the Nachez clansmen had tried to lure to Mississippi with Benchester White’s blood was killed in a different city by a different gunman for reasons that had nothing to do with the failed plot of June 1966.
[music] King died in Memphis, just 200 m north of Natchez.
He never knew that two years earlier, a 67-year-old farmand had been murdered specifically to draw him into rifle range.
The plot had been so thoroughly unsuccessful, so completely irrelevant to the larger movement that it hadn’t even registered as a footnote in the history of King’s life.
Ben Chester White died for a plan that Martin Luther King Jr.
Never even heard about.
One by one, the people who knew what happened on that bridge over Pretty Creek disappeared.
Claude Fuller died.
James Lloyd Jones died.
[music] The clerk at the store where the men had stopped.
The officer who had taken the stolen car report, [music] the medical examiner who had examined White’s body, all of them died before any second reckoning could reach them.
Meanwhile, the broader reckoning with Mississippi’s civil rights era crimes was happening slowly, painfully, [music] and mostly not at all.
The files sat in drawers.
The families waited.
The FBI maintained its records, but took no action.
The Justice Department reviewed civil rights cases periodically, but rarely found the legal footing to bring new charges.
The conventional wisdom was that these cases were over.
The defendants had been tried or the witnesses were dead or the evidence was gone or the political will simply wasn’t there.
Mississippi had moved on or at least it wanted the world to believe it had.
For more than 30 years, the murder of Benchester White existed as a closed file in a county records office.
A resolved case, an acquitt, a matter that Mississippi had officially decided was finished.
Not everyone agreed.
And the version of moved on that Mississippi was selling didn’t hold up very well if you looked at it closely because a man had confessed to murder, walked free, and lived the rest of his life without consequence.
That wasn’t justice delayed.
That was justice denied.
And as long as Ernest Avance was alive and free, the case was not closed.
It was dormant.
There’s a difference.
The journalist who wouldn’t let go.
In 1989, a court reporter named Jerry Mitchell walked into a movie theater and watched a film called Mississippi Burning.
The movie told a fictionalized version of the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers, James Cheney, Andrew [music] Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Nshoba County, Mississippi.
Mitchell worked at the Jackson Clarion Ledger, one of Mississippi’s largest newspapers.
And as he sat in the theater watching actors portray clansmen and FBI agents and a justice system that had failed spectacularly, something clicked.
Mitchell started investigating civil rights cold cases, not as a side project, as a calling.
His first major breakthrough came in the early 1990s when he uncovered evidence that Mississippi’s State Sovereignty Commission, a taxpayer funded segregationist agency, had secretly screened potential jurors during the 1960s murder trials of Byron Debecwith, the man who assassinated EndoACP field secretary Megar Evers in 1963.
The Sovereignty Commission had helped identify which jurors would be sympathetic to Beckwith, effectively rigging the jury pools that produced two mistrials.
Mitchell’s reporting blew the case wide open.
In 1994, Beckwith was tried a third time and convicted.
He died in prison.
Mitchell didn’t stop there.
He understood something that the legal system had failed to grasp for decades.
These cases weren’t cold because the evidence was gone.
They were cold because nobody in power had wanted to pursue them.
The witnesses hadn’t all disappeared.
Some of them were still alive.
The documents hadn’t been destroyed.
They were sitting in filing cabinets in courouses and FBI field offices across the South.
The physical evidence, the autopsy reports, the ballistics analyses, the confessions, all of it still existed.
What had been missing wasn’t proof.
It was Will.
Over the next two decades, Mitchell’s investigations would help put four clansmen and a serial killer behind bars.
He wrote extensively about the murder of Ben Chester White, tracing the connections between Fuller, Avance, Jones, the Silver Dollar group, and the broader network of clan violence in Nachez.
He documented how the same small group of men in Adams County had been responsible for a chain of bombings, beatings, and murders that [music] stretched across years and left a trail of shattered families in its wake.
His reporting kept these cases alive when everyone else in Mississippi seemed content to let them stay dead.
Mitchell would later win a MacArthur Fellowship in 2009 for his work and go on to found the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting.
But the breakthrough in the White case didn’t come from a document or a confession or a witness coming forward.
It came from television.
In 1999, ABC’s News Magazine program 2020 aired a segment featuring journalist Connie Chung.
During the segment, they broadcast a recent interview with Ernest Avance.
The tape was sent to the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Mississippi.
Somebody at the DOJ watched the interview and then somebody at the DOJ did something that nobody had done in 33 years.
They pulled out a map.
Pay attention to this next detail because it explains everything.
The map detail that changed everything.
The bridge over Pretty Creek.
The spot where Claude Fuller and Ernest Avant stepped out of the car and shot Benchester White at least 17 times.
The place where an old man spoke his last words to God and had his body thrown into the water below.
That bridge sits inside the Homoto National Forest.
The Homoto National Forest is federal land.
It belongs to the United States government.
And under federal law, a murder committed on land under the territorial jurisdiction of the United States is a federal crime, prosecutable under federal statute, regardless of what any state court has already decided.
This was the detail that the killers never thought about.
In 1966, when Fuller chose this stretch of road as the kill site, he wasn’t thinking about jurisdiction.
He was thinking about isolation.
He picked the forest because it was remote, because there were no witnesses, because nobody would hear the gunshots.
The fact that the trees and the creek and the bridge belong to the federal government didn’t cross his mind.
But it [music] mattered.
It mattered more than any other single fact in this case.
Here’s why.
The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution protects Americans from being tried twice for the same offense.
That’s the double jeopardy clause.
Avance had already been tried for murder in Mississippi State Court and acquitted.
Under normal circumstances, that acquitt would have been permanent.
You can’t bring a man back to trial for the same crime just because you didn’t like the verdict the first time.
But the double jeopardy clause has a critical exception.
It only applies within the same sovereign jurisdiction.
A state prosecution and a federal prosecution are brought by two different sovereigns, the state government and the federal government, and they operate under two different sets of laws.
A state acquitt does not prevent a federal [music] prosecution for the same underlying conduct as long as the federal charge is based on a different statute.
The state of Mississippi had charged Avance with murder under Mississippi state law.
The federal government could now charge him with murder under 18 USC section 1111, the federal murder statute because the crime occurred on federal land on the soil of the Homochito National Forest.
And there was one more critical fact.
Federal capital eligible murder has no statute of limitations.
It doesn’t matter if the crime happened 5 years ago or 50.
If the evidence is there, the prosecution can go forward.
Think about what this means in practical terms.
For 33 years, everyone involved in this case, the family, the FBI, the prosecutors, the journalists, assumed that the 1967 acquitt was the end of the road.
Double jeopardy.
Can’t try a man twice.
Case closed.
And legally within the state of Mississippi, that was correct.
The state had taken its shot and missed.
Or more accurately, the state had rigged the game and let the defendant walk.
Either way, the state was done.
But the federal government had never taken a shot at all.
No federal charges had ever been filed.
No federal jury had ever heard the evidence.
And because the murder happened to occur on a bridge in a national forest, the federal government had every legal right to file its own charges under its own laws in its own courts with its own jury pool.
The irony is staggering.
[music] The clansmen chose the Homo Cheito National Forest because it was isolated, remote, dark, the perfect place to kill a man without being seen.
They had no idea that the very remoteness that protected them in 1966 would become the legal mechanism that destroyed [music] them decades later.
In June of 2000, a federal grand jury in the Southern District of Mississippi returned an indictment against Ernest Henry Avance for aiding and abetting the premeditated murder of Benchester White on federal land.
Claude Fuller was dead.
James Lloyd Jones was dead.
Avance, now in his late 60s, was the only surviving perpetrator.
The case that Mississippi had closed 33 years earlier, was open again.
And this time, the courtroom would look very different.
No clansmen in the gallery, no rigged jury, no system built to protect the defendant and abandon the victim.
This was a federal court.
[music] The clock was already ticking on Avance’s freedom.
He just couldn’t hear it yet.
Before the case could reach trial, there was a fight over evidence.
The federal prosecutors wanted to introduce Avance’s 1967 confession to the FBI, the one where he said he blew White’s head off with a shotgun.
The district court initially excluded it.
The government appealed.
The case went to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which reversed the lower court’s ruling and allowed the confession into evidence.
The decision is recorded as United States versus Avants 278F3D510.
During the appeals process, Avant suffered a stroke.
His health deteriorated.
By the time the case was cleared for trial, he was 72 years old and confined to a wheelchair.
The question hanging over the proceedings was as much moral as legal.
Could a man this old, this frail, be held accountable for something he did when he was 34?
Did time erase guilt?
Did a wheelchair earn sympathy that a confession should not?
The federal prosecutors believed the answer was no.
Time does not erase guilt.
A wheelchair does not undo a murder.
And a man who confessed to blowing another man’s head off does not get to escape justice simply because he managed to outlive most of the witnesses.
The trial.
37 years later, in February 2003, the federal trial of Ernest Henry Avants began in Jackson, Mississippi before US District Judge William H.
Barber Jr.
The prosecution was led by Assistant US Attorney Jack Brooks Lacy Jr.
And [music] Department of Justice Civil Rights Division attorney Paige Fitzgerald.
The defense was handled by Thomas E.
Royals.
The courtroom in Jackson was a world away from the Adams County courthouse where Avance had been tried in 1967.
No clansmen filling the gallery, no silver dollars being flipped in the back rows, no winks and nods from a jury that had already made up its mind before the opening statements.
This was a federal proceeding in the state capital with a judge appointed for life and a jury drawn from a broader pool than tiny Adams County could provide.
But the challenge facing the prosecution was enormous and it had nothing to do with jury composition.
This was not a case with living witnesses who could take the stand and point at the defendant.
Nearly four decades had passed.
The passage of time had taken almost everyone.
James Lloyd Jones’s testimony, the driver, and the man whose confession had been the backbone of the original case was dead.
Claude Fuller, the ring leader, was dead.
The store clerk who had seen the men together before the murder, was dead.
The police officer, who had taken the stolen car report, was dead.
Dr.
Scanland, the medical examiner who had performed the autopsy on Ben Chester White, was dead.
The prosecution had to build their case from the grave.
Jones’s testimony from the 1966 preliminary hearing was read aloud to the jury.
His recorded statement to the prosecutor given on July 15th, 1966 was played in the courtroom.
Under the rules of evidence, testimony from an unavailable witness who was subject to cross-examination at the time can be admitted.
Jones was dead.
His words were not.
Dr.
Scanland’s autopsy findings were read into the record by a different doctor, establishing the nature and extent of White’s injuries.
And then the prosecution brought their most devastating witness.
FBI special agent Cornblum took the stand and testified about his 1967 interview with Avance.
He told the jury that during an interview about a completely separate racial murder, Avance had volunteered his confession without prompting.
He said he shot Ben Chester White.
He said he blew the man’s head off with a shotgun.
But the prosecution didn’t stop there.
They had anticipated the defense strategy.
The same shot a corpse argument that had worked in 1967.
This time they were ready.
Forensic pathologist Dr.
Steven Hayne took the stand and testified about the wounds inflicted on Ben Chester White.
He examined the evidence from the autopsy and re and reached a conclusion that directly contradicted the defense.
The massive head wound that killed White, Hayne testified, was consistent with a shotgun blast fired at close range, not with a rifle round from Fuller’s M2 carbine.
The fatal wound came from the shotgun, Avance’s weapon.
This was the testimony that destroyed the shot a corpse defense.
In 1967, Avance had claimed that Fuller’s rifle had already killed White before the shotgun was fired.
In 2003, the forensic evidence showed the opposite.
The shotgun blast was the killing blow.
Avance didn’t shoot a dead man.
He killed a living one.
The weight of that testimony in the courtroom was enormous.
For 37 years, the shot a corpse defense had been the shield that protected Ernest Avance.
It was the story that the 1967 jury had accepted, the technicality that let a confessed killer walk free.
And now, in a federal courtroom in 2003, a forensic pathologist was standing in the witness box and systematically dismantling it with medical evidence.
The defense called a single witness.
A pathologist named Dr.
Galvvis, who offered an alternative interpretation of the wounds and attempted to resurrect the theory that White was already dead when the shotgun was fired.
The prosecution challenged his conclusions.
The jury listened to both sides.
They weighed the forensic testimony against each other.
And they weighed all of it against the fact that Ernest Avance himself had told an FBI agent without being asked that he blew Benchester White’s head off with a shotgun.
Those were not the words of a man who thought he was shooting a corpse.
The trial lasted 3 days.
3 days to present evidence that had accumulated over 37 years.
Three days to tell the story of a man who was killed as bait, acquitted by a rigged jury, and forgotten by a system that should have protected him.
The jury deliberated for less than 3 hours.
Guilty.
The word came back on February 28th, 2003.
Guilty.
Ernest Henry Avance, 72 years old, sat in his wheelchair in a federal courtroom in Jackson, Mississippi, and heard a jury deliver the verdict that a different jury in a different courtroom in a different century had refused to give.
37 years.
That’s how long it took.
37 years between the night on the bridge over Pretty Creek and the moment a jury finally said that what happened there was murder and that the man who pulled the trigger was guilty of it.
The statements from the prosecutors and officials reflected the weight of the moment.
Assistant Attorney General for civil rights Ralph FB Boyd Jr.
Called the verdict a tremendous victory that brought a measure of justice to the senseless death of Benchester White.
He said that acts of violence motivated by hatred and bigotry would [music] not be tolerated whether they occurred in 1966 or today.
US Attorney Dun Lamp said that justice was delayed but not denied and that the jury’s verdict spoke well for the racial progress that had occurred in Mississippi since the original trial.
He credited the FBI with never giving up on the case.
Because of Avance’s failing health, sentencing was held at a federal medical facility in the Northern District of Texas [music] where he had been transferred for medical care.
Judge William Barber traveled to the facility to deliver the sentence, life imprisonment.
At the sentencing hearing, Judge Barber addressed Avance directly.
The judge told the convicted man that justice in this country can and sometimes has to wait, that times have changed since 1966.
And then he said something that carried the full weight of everything this case represented.
He expressed his hope that when Ernest Avance’s generation is finally dead, most of the hatred will have died with it.
Avance appealed the conviction.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals heard the case and on April 19th, 2004 affirmed the verdict.
The court rejected Avance’s arguments about pre-indictment delay, about the admission of decades old testimony from dead witnesses, and about the constitutionality of being sentenced outside the district where he was convicted.
The decision is recorded as United States versus Avance 367F3D433.
There is something worth noting about the timeline.
Avance was convicted in February 2003.
His appeal was denied in April 2004 and he died in June 2004.
[music] He spent the last year and a half of his life in federal custody, a convicted murderer, confined to a medical facility, his health deteriorating, his freedom gone.
Some people will say that’s not enough.
That a year and a half in prison for the murder of a man who has been dead for nearly four decades is not justice.
And they would have a point.
No sentence could give back the 37 years that Ben Chester White’s family spent waiting.
No verdict could undo the damage of the 1967 acquitt [music] or restore the faith that was destroyed when two clansmen sat on the jury that set their father’s killer free.
But a guilty verdict is not nothing.
It is in fact the only thing the legal system can offer in a case like this.
A formal, public, on there declaration that what happened on that bridge over Pretty Creek was murder, that the man who did it was a murderer, and that the state of Mississippi’s decision to let him walk free in 1967 was wrong.
Ernest Henry Avance died in federal prison on June 14th, 2004.
He was 72 years old.
He died a convicted murderer, which is the one thing that for 37 years it seemed like he would never be.
Redemption.
The legacy of Benchester White.
The conviction of Ernest Avance was not just a verdict.
It was a door.
The federal prosecution of a civil rights era murder on the basis of jurisdiction using a map and a land survey to circumvent an unjust acquitt.
Avance’s case was the first successful federal murder conviction connected to a killing from the civil rights movement.
And it proved that the law could reach backward through decades of silence, through dead witnesses, and destroyed evidence and closed files, and still find a way to hold someone accountable.
That precedent mattered.
In the years that followed, a string of long, dormant civil rights cold cases were reopened and brought to trial.
In 2001 and 2002, Thomas Blandon and Bobby Frank Cherry were convicted for the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
The attack that killed four young girls and became one of the defining atrocities of the civil rights era.
On June 21st, 2005, exactly 41 years to the day after the original crime, a Mississippi jury convicted Edgar Ray Kllinan of manslaughter for the 1964 murders of James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.
The Mississippi burning case that had haunted the state for four decades.
In 2007, another federal prosecution in Mississippi convicted James Ford Seal for the 1964 kidnapping and murders of Henry Hezekiah D.
And Charles Eddie Moore, two young black men whose bodies were found in the same Homoto National Forest, where Benchester White had been killed.
The forest that had been a killing ground for the clan became decades later the jurisdictional key that put their members in prison.
Each of these cases owed something to the Avance prosecution.
Not because the legal theories were identical.
They weren’t.
Each case had its own facts, its own challenges, its own jurisdictional puzzles.
But the Avance verdict proved that these prosecutions were possible.
It proved that a jury in Mississippi [music] in the 21st century would convict a white man for the murder of a black victim during the civil rights era.
It proved that dead witnesses and destroyed evidence and decades of elapsed time were obstacles, not walls.
And it gave prosecutors, families, and journalists the evidence they needed to argue that reopening these cases was not a symbolic gesture.
It was a viable path to actual convictions.
This momentum, this slow and painful reckoning with crimes that had been allowed to fester for generations culminated in the passage of the EMTT till unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act signed into law by President George W.
Bush Bush in October 2008.
The act directed the Department of Justice and the FBY to jointly investigate racially motivated homicides committed during the civil rights era, defined as no later than December 31st, 1979.
It authorized appropriations of up to $10 million per year to fund the investigations.
It was reauthorized in December 2016.
As of early 2024, more than 138 cold cases have been reopened under the act.
Ben Chester White’s name is inscribed on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, alongside the names of 40 martyrs who gave their lives in the struggle for equality.
The memorial was dedicated in 1989.
White is among the honored dead, not because he marched or organized or led, but because he was killed by men who saw his life as a tool and his death as a means to a larger end.
His inclusion on that wall is a recognition that the victims of racial terror were not only the leaders and the activists.
They were also the quiet men, the farm hands and the deacons, the people who never made a speech or carried a sign.
The people who were chosen to die precisely because no one would come looking for them.
Jesse White, Benchester White’s son, spent decades fighting for some form of accountability.
The milliondoll judgment he won against the clan in 1968 was a legal landmark, the first time the organization was held liable for the actions of its members, and it was also an empty one.
No money was ever collected.
The real payment came 35 years later in a federal courtroom in Jackson when a jury delivered the word that Jesse White and his family had been waiting their entire lives to hear.
The story of Ben Chester White is in the end a story about what happens when justice refuses to die.
[music] The clansmen who killed him counted on silence.
They counted on a rigged courtroom and an indifferent system and the slow erosion of memory.
They counted on the idea that if enough time passed, the crime would simply cease to exist.
They were wrong.
It took a journalist who wouldn’t stop digging.
It took a television interview that should never have been given.
It took a prosecutor who looked at a map and realized that a bridge in a national forest sat on federal land.
And it took a jury 37 years removed from the crime who listened to the evidence, including the defendant’s own words about what he had done, and decided in less than 3 hours, that Ernest Avance was guilty of murder.
Three men knocked on Benchester White’s door on a Friday evening in June 1966 and asked him to help find a lost dog.
They offered him $2 and a soda.
He said yes.
He walked out of his house and got into their car and he never came home.
For 37 years, that was where the story ended.
A body beneath a bridge, an aqu quiddle, a closed file.
It’s not where it ends anymore.
The story ends here.
In a courtroom with a verdict, with the word guilty spoken aloud 37 years after a man who deserved to hear it was silenced on a bridge in the Mississippi woods.
Justice arrived late.
It arrived imperfect.
It arrived after the defendant was in a wheelchair and most of the witnesses were underground.
But it arrived.
And in a case like this one, in a state like Mississippi, in the long and painful history of civil rights, cold cases that everyone assumed would stay cold forever.
That is not a small thing.
That is everything.
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