ALABAMA 1963 Cold Case Solved After 39 Years — Four Girls Lost at Sunday School
Um, Sarah Collins Rudolph did survive the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, September 15th, 1963.
50 years ago, that killed her older sister, Addie Mae, who was 14 years old.
>> Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr.
, Bobby Frank Cherry, Robert Chambliss, and Herman Cash are the four clansmen the FBI named in 1965 over the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on Sunday, September 15th, 1963.
Blanton and Cherry were convicted in 2001 and 2002.
Chambliss in 1977, and Cash was never charged and died in 1994.
But that morning is still ahead of us.
It is Youth Day, and in the basement lounge, a 14-year-old girl named Addie Mae Collins is getting ready to sing.
Around her, friends are fixing their Sunday dresses and smoothing their sashes.
Upstairs, the congregation is finding its seats.
She loved to paint and draw.
She dreamed that one day her work would hang where people could see it.
At about 10:22 that morning, a single blast tore through the east side of the church.
Four girls lost their lives in that basement.
Addie Mae was 14.
Her little sister, Sarah, who was only 12, survived.
But she would never see out of one eye again.
The men responsible were not strangers.
Within 2 years, the FBI had put four names on a memo, and then the case simply stopped.
That is the paradox of this story.
The bureau did not lose the trail.
It had the names.
It had informants.
It had something even better than witnesses.
It had recordings.
And for decades, all of it stayed out of sight while the families of four girls waited and while the men on that memo grew old in their own homes.
Then, in the 1990s, someone went back to the files.
Not a new clue, not a new witness, just old evidence that had been sitting in the dark waiting for someone to listen.
Two trials followed, one in 2001 and one in 2002.
Nearly four decades after that Sunday morning, a jury finally heard the truth.
This is the story of Addie Mae Collins and of the long road from a church basement to a courtroom.
Every case on this channel went cold.
Every one of them was solved.
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Let’s go back to the morning and to the girl who never made it upstairs to sing.
Addie Mae Collins was born on April 18th, 1949 in Birmingham, Alabama.
By 1963, she was 14 years old.
Just 14.
She grew up alongside two sisters, 16-year-old Junie and 12-year-old Sarah.
Junie was 2 years older.
Sarah was 2 years younger and the three girls were inseparable.
Those who knew Addie Mae remembered a quiet girl with a gift for creating things.
She loved painting and drawing.
Whenever she had free time, she sat with pencil and paper practicing lines and experimenting with colors.
She had real patience for it.
In 1963 Birmingham, opportunities were limited, but she dreamed that one day her artwork would hang where people could see and appreciate it.
She was also remarkably hardworking.
At home, her mother spent hours sewing aprons and potholders by hand, stitching each piece from whatever fabric was available.
When the items were finished, Addie Mae took them out to sell them door-to-door.
Not from a store, and not at a market stand, because every dime mattered.
She carried the handmade goods through white neighborhoods across town, polite and steady on every porch.
It took real courage for a young black girl to do that.
In 1963 Birmingham, there were no phones in her pocket, and no way to call home if she ran into trouble.
She simply walked those streets on foot, earning whatever money she could to help her family get by.
A 14-year-old girl carrying that kind of responsibility with quiet dignity.
Stories like Addie Mae’s are the reason this channel exists.
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Then came the morning of Sunday, September 15th, 1963.
It seemed like the most ordinary Sunday of the year.
It wasn’t.
On the church calendar, this was Youth Day at 16th Street Baptist Church.
For the young people of the congregation, it was one of the most anticipated mornings of the year.
On Youth Day, the teenagers and children took charge of the service.
They served as ushers, >> We were excited that Sunday about church, primarily because it was Youth Day.
It was our day to sing, and to read, and to usher, and to do everything associated with the church.
But, >> handed out programs, and prepared to sing together in the choir.
It was a special morning to participate in front of the entire congregation.
Addie Mae, Junie, and Sarah walked to the church together, dressed in their Sunday best.
Outside, families gathered along the sidewalks and made their way into the large brick building.
Downstairs in the ladies lounge beneath the sanctuary, the girls gathered to finish getting ready.
Denise McNair was there.
She was 11 years old.
Carol Robertson and Cynthia Wesley were there, too.
Both 14 years old, chatting and fixing their hair before the mirror.
It was a room filled with light laughter, nervous excitement, and the rustle of Sunday dresses.
Someone needed help with the sash of her dress.
In the official records and recollections gathered years later, accounts differ on whose sash was being tied.
Junie remembered Addie Mae reaching out to tie the sash for little Denise McNair.
Sarah remembered her older sister tying the ribbon on her own dress.
Whichever memory was accurate, the meaning was the same.
A quiet act of kindness between children.
16-year-old Junie sat nearby on a sofa, holding her Bible in her hands.
She was older and ready for the service to start.
She listened to the chatter by the mirrors and watched the younger girls getting ready.
Then, as the hour approached for the service to begin, Junie stood up.
She carried her Bible toward the stairwell and walked upstairs into the main sanctuary, where the congregation was taking their seats.
That left Addie Mae, little Sarah, and their three friends alone in the basement lounge.
Five young girls.
They were adjusting their collars, smoothing their sashes, and waiting for the choir to be called.
Nobody in that basement had any reason to suspect what was sitting outside beneath the east steps.
It was the last ordinary minute in the basement.
16th Street Baptist Church was not an ordinary place of worship.
In 1963, the red brick building stood at the very center of the Birmingham Civil Rights Campaign.
It was large, it was visible, and everyone in the city knew where it was.
When organizers arrived to challenge segregation, this church was where they gathered.
Night after night, the sanctuary filled with local residents and civil rights leaders holding mass meetings and planning peaceful demonstrations.
The church was a house of faith, but it had also become a command post.
It was meant to be a safe harbor.
It wasn’t.
In May of 1963, that command post became the staging ground for a turning point in American history.
It was called the Children’s Crusade.
Hundreds of students made the choice to join the movement, walking away from their classrooms to gather inside the sanctuary.
Many were only children.
They knew their parents risked losing their livelihoods if they were arrested, so the young people took their place.
Wave after wave walked out through the double doors of the church and into the streets, marching in orderly lines.
City authorities met them with police dogs and high-pressure water hoses that knocked young marchers to the pavement.
Still, they kept moving forward.
Photographs and evening news broadcasts carried those scenes across the entire country.
Those images shifted the momentum of the civil rights campaign.
And every single march had started right on the steps of that church.
That visibility made the building an obvious target.
Birmingham had already earned a dark reputation for earlier bombings.
Over the years, many blasts had torn through black neighborhoods across the city, striking private homes, local businesses, and places of worship.
The threat was constant.
No neighborhood felt entirely secure.
Explosions went off in the middle of the night, destroying front porches and blowing out windows while families were asleep.
Families went to bed wondering if their walls would withstand the night.
And yet none of those earlier bombings had ever led to real consequences.
Not an arrest, not a trial, not a single conviction for the people responsible.
Those who carried out the attacks operated with complete confidence that no one would ever hold them accountable.
May turned into the long heat of summer.
Summer became September.
As a new school year began, tension in the city reached a boiling point.
Federal courts had ordered the desegregation of local public schools, and hostility spilled directly into the streets.
Protesters gathered outside school buildings, while angry rhetoric dominated radio broadcasts and morning papers.
The entire city was on edge.
The successful marches from that spring had pushed the movement forward, but they had also inflamed an intense resistance.
The battle lines were drawn, and resentment simmered behind closed doors.
It was only a matter of time before someone struck back.
By the middle of September, the congregation at 16th Street Baptist Church was looking ahead to Sunday.
It was an important date on the church calendar, a time dedicated to the youth of the community.
As darkness fell over Birmingham on that second weekend of the month, the neighborhood streets went quiet.
The person responsible was already in motion the Saturday night before.
Nobody knew what would be placed at the east steps.
Sunday morning arrived with the quiet routines of a church community.
It was September 15th, 1963.
In the basement of 16th Street Baptist Church, the youth choir was preparing, smoothing their dresses, and getting ready for the service, while the congregation found its seats upstairs.
It was about 10:22 in the morning.
Inside the building, a telephone began to ring.
In 1963, there were no emergency broadcasts or warning sirens.
There was only a landline telephone on a wall.
Carolyn Maull, the acting Sunday school secretary, walked over and lifted the receiver.
A voice spoke from the other end.
The caller spoke only two words, “3 minutes”.
Then the connection went silent.
Not an explanation, not a demand, and not a chance to clear the building.
It seemed like a threat meant only to frighten.
It was not.
10:22 became 10:23.
Less than a minute had passed since the receiver was hung up.
Outside, beneath the east steps of the church, the countdown ended.
The person responsible had placed at least 15 sticks of dynamite under those steps, with some historical sources ranging to 19.
The blast hit at the east steps and tore into the basement lounge, where the girls were gathered.
Up in the sanctuary, the congregation felt it at once.
Panic filled the church as parents tried to find their children and reach the exits.
Four girls would not walk out.
Addie Mae Collins died after she was taken to Hillman Emergency Clinic.
Once out in the street, church members realized who was missing.
Down in the basement, the ladies lounge where the girls had been gathering was buried under tons of fallen brick, stone, and broken timber.
Men and women ran back into the ruins.
With no tools and no heavy equipment, they began digging through the rubble with their bare hands.
They were calling out names into the dark.
Four young girls lost their lives in that basement.
Addie Mae Collins was 14 years old.
Denise McNair was only 11.
Carole Robertson was 14 and Cynthia Wesley was 14 as well.
Four children who had come to church on Youth Day, each of them gone in a single moment.
Addie Mae Collins was carried out of the wreckage and rushed toward Hillman Emergency Clinic.
Drivers sped through the crowded streets desperate to reach help in time.
But there was nothing the doctors could do.
At Hillman Emergency Clinic, staff officially confirmed upon arrival that Addie Mae had not survived.
Her life had ended before she ever reached their doors.
Her younger sister Sarah was only 12 years old.
She had been standing in that same basement room just feet away when the wall collapsed around them.
Sarah survived the explosion, but she was gravely hurt.
When physicians examined her, they counted 21 pieces of glass embedded in her face.
The blast took the sight from one of her eyes.
The sisters were not the only ones carried to emergency rooms that morning.
Between 14 and 22 other people were hurt throughout the church.
Some had been struck by flying debris, while others suffered injuries as the crowd rushed down the stairways.
Across Birmingham, waiting rooms filled with families waiting for news of their loved ones.
A community was left trying to comprehend what had just taken place.
At the hospital, Sarah Collins lay in a bed with heavy bandages covering her eyes.
She was 12 years old, in pain, and unable to see the room around her.
She did not know that four young girls were gone.
All she knew was that she could not hear her sister’s voice.
From that hospital bed, Sarah kept asking for her sister.
Two days after the blast, the funerals began.
On Tuesday, September 17th, 1963, 14-year-old Carole Robertson was laid to rest.
Her family chose a private service at St.
John’s African Methodist Episcopal Church.
It was quiet.
In a city heavy with grief, her family gathered away from the crowds to say goodbye.
The next morning, Wednesday, September 18th, the grief filled the city.
A joint funeral service was held at 16th Avenue Baptist Church for Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, and Cynthia Wesley.
An estimated 3,300 mourners arrived from across the country.
They filled every pew in the sanctuary.
Hundreds more crowded the hallways and spilled onto the sidewalks outside, standing together in the September heat.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
stood before the congregation to deliver the eulogy.
He looked out over three small caskets resting at the front of the church.
His words were broadcast across the nation, reaching beyond the sanctuary to a country trying to understand the loss of four young girls.
He told the mourners, “This tragic day may cause the white side to come to terms with its conscience”.
Three days after the Sunday service she never got to attend, Addie Mae was laid to rest at Greenwood Cemetery.
She was 14 years old.
Her family stood beside the open ground, facing a reality no parent should ever have to face.
Her sister, Sarah, remained in a hospital bed, bandaged and unable to attend.
Only a quiet hillside and a grief that would not go away.
While the families grieved, the first arrests came quickly.
In late September and October of 1963, investigators took three men into custody, including Robert Chambliss, but the charges had nothing to do with what had happened at the church.
Not for the blast, not for the four young lives lost, not for the injuries left behind.
Instead, Chambliss and the two other men were convicted only of possessing dynamite without a permit.
The penalty was a $100 fine and a suspended sentence of 180 days.
Think about that for a second.
Four girls had died on Youth Day at Sunday school.
More than a dozen people were injured.
Yet the only legal consequence handed down was a minor fine for handling explosives without a permit.
The men walked free.
Federal authorities recognized that the local investigation had stalled before it had even begun.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a major inquiry under the case name BA Bomb.
Dozens of special agents arrived in Alabama.
They conducted hundreds of interviews, tracked sales of commercial explosives, and examined physical evidence from the scene.
But in 1963, physical evidence was not enough to secure a conviction.
They needed voices.
To break through the wall of silence, the Bureau turned to an informant named Mitchell Burns.
Burns began spending time with Blanton, driving through the streets of Birmingham.
Hidden inside the trunk of Burns’s car was a reel-to-reel tape recorder wired to capture their conversations without Blanton knowing.
Federal agents reportedly went even further, placing a hidden microphone inside Blanton’s apartment to listen to what was said behind closed doors.
The tapes began to pile up in FBI evidence lockers.
Reel after reel captured unguarded talk about meetings, planning, and explosives.
Mitchell Burns kept the recorder running through 1964 and into 1965, preserving hours of spoken audio that no courtroom had yet heard.
Federal agents had the suspects, they had the informants, and they had the recordings.
The case is about to turn.
Stay with me.
On May 13th, 1965, federal agents and local investigators formally put their findings on paper.
They named four men as responsible for what had happened at the 16th Street Baptist Church.
Robert Chambliss, Herman Cash, Bobby Frank Cherry, and Blanton.
The investigation had gathered witness statements, informant logs, and hours of magnetic tape.
Everything needed to seek indictments appeared to be in the files.
The proof was documented.
The suspects were identified.
The FBI had names and recordings by the spring of 1965.
Then a decision was made in Washington.
The decision came straight from the top.
In 1965, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J.
Edgar Hoover stepped in and blocked federal prosecution.
Agents in the field had gathered names, documented meetings, and secured undercover recordings.
The investigators believed they had enough to move forward.
But Hoover refused to let any of it go before a grand jury.
Just like that, the case ground to a halt.
Three years later, the bureau made that silence official.
In 1968, federal authorities closed the investigation without bringing a single charge.
The files were sealed and placed into government storage, hidden away from the public eye.
Not an arrest, not a trial, not a single answer for the families.
1965 became 1968.
1968 became 1971.
For years, the record sat untouched while the city tried to move on.
It seemed like the investigation was over for good.
It wasn’t.
Then, in 1971, Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley took action.
Baxley refused to let the case stay buried in the dark.
He reopened the state investigation and began pressing federal officials to share the evidence that agents had gathered years earlier.
Baxley knew the names on those early memos.
He wanted to bring the men responsible into a state courtroom.
Building that case took years of quiet, painstaking work.
State investigators tracked down old witnesses, re-examined original statements, and focused their efforts on Robert Chambliss.
On September 24th, 1977, an Alabama grand jury finally returned an indictment against him.
The trial opened in Birmingham on November 14th, 1977.
Four days later, on November 18th, the jury returned its verdict.
Robert Chambliss was found guilty in the death of 11-year-old Denise McNair.
The judge handed down a life sentence.
For the families who had waited 14 years, the verdict was a measure of justice, but it was only a partial answer.
Chambliss had not acted alone.
Others had helped plan the attack at the church steps.
Yet, Chambliss refused to speak a single word about the men who had stood with him.
He carried that silence all the way to the grave.
On October 29th, 1985, Robert Chambliss died in prison at the age of 81.
He had spent eight years behind bars without ever naming an accomplice.
With his death, it seemed as though the chance for full accountability had slipped away.
More years passed.
The calendar turned through the rest of the 1980s and into the 1990s.
The families of Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley were still waiting for someone to answer for the loss of their daughters.
Then came another quiet ending.
On February 7th, 1994, Herman Cash died at the age of 75.
Cash had never been indicted.
He had never been placed in handcuffs, and he had never faced a jury in a courtroom.
He died a free man, having never answered for that Sunday morning.
More than 30 years had passed since the blast at the 16th Street Baptist Church.
Four young girls had lost their lives, and only one person had ever been convicted.
Two of the men the Federal Bureau of Investigation had named back in 1965 were still walking free.
Those two men were living ordinary, quiet lives.
Decades had drifted by, and they had every reason to believe no one would ever come for them.
The evidence against them seemed safely forgotten.
The audio recordings an informant had gathered in 1964 were still out of sight, locked inside federal archives where no one was listening.
Three of the four named men were gone or silent, and somewhere inside a federal building something from 1964 was still sitting in storage.
Before we go on, a quick word.
If this story is holding you, there is another channel video I think you should see.
It is the case of Sister Margaret Ann Paul in Ohio in 1980, solved after 26 years.
Like this one, it is about a truth that waited a very long time.
Finish this one first, then watch that one.
It’s linked on screen and in the description.
Now, back to Birmingham, where the silence was about to break.
In 1995, after more than 30 years of silence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation quietly reopened the case.
There had been no press conference, no announcement, just a quiet decision in Birmingham to pull the files back into the light.
The men responsible were still walking free, living ordinary lives while the families of four young girls waited for answers.
For decades, the case had been treated as closed.
In the late 1960s, federal officials had sealed the records, locking away hundreds of interviews and memos behind vault doors.
A state prosecution in 1977 had convicted one man, but three others walked away untouched.
One of them had passed away in 1994 without ever facing a courtroom.
That left two.
When investigators unsealed the evidence in 1995, they were not looking at an empty archive.
They were facing an avalanche of paper.
Roughly 9,000 pieces of evidence had been kept under federal seal, sitting untouched for three decades.
Cardboard boxes held yellowing interview transcripts, carbon copies of memos, and scene photographs from 1963.
Agents began working through the material page by page.
It was slow work, not modern forensics, not fresh footprints.
They were searching for what earlier officials had chosen to set aside.
Then came a discovery that changed everything.
Deep inside federal storage, sitting in an unmarked box among the archived files, agents found a collection of old reel-to-reel magnetic tapes.
According to reports, an agent named Bill Fleming discovered the recordings while sorting through the forgotten materials.
The tape stated back to 1964.
Decades earlier, the Bureau had run a surveillance operation under the code name Batbomb.
An informant named Mitchell Burns had agreed to help, reportedly carrying a hidden recorder in a car.
Other recordings were reportedly gathered using a hidden microphone placed near an apartment.
For over 30 years, those reels had gathered dust.
When the federal case closed in 1968, the tapes were packed away.
Magnetic tape is fragile.
Over time, the backing degrades, the plastic grows brittle, and static begins to swallow the sound.
No one had listened to them in decades.
Possessing old tape meant nothing if the sound was unintelligible.
In a courtroom, defense attorneys would challenge every word.
The audio was buried beneath engine noise, road vibration, and tape hiss.
The recorded voices were faint and muffled.
The recordings were transferred to an audio laboratory for specialized restoration.
Sound [clears throat] technicians worked section by section using modern filtering technology to strip away the low rumblings and isolate human speech.
It took immense patience.
One pass reduced the rumble of the car.
Another lifted the spoken frequencies out of the background haze.
As the audio was cleaned, the words began to emerge.
The voices captured in 1964 sounded clear and unmistakable.
The conversations were unfiltered.
The men had talked casually, unaware their words were being preserved on magnetic tape.
The proof needed to hold the person responsible had not been destroyed.
It had not vanished into thin air.
It had been sitting on a shelf in a government building, preserved on magnetic tape while decades slipped by outside.
Finding the tapes was a major breakthrough, but prosecutors still needed more.
Audio recordings alone could be challenged on technical grounds, and juries in Alabama would need living witnesses to tie the evidence together.
Not a guess, not a theory.
They needed people who had been there.
Then, a crack appeared in the wall of silence.
Family members of one suspect came forward to talk to authorities.
Willadean Brogdon, the ex-wife of Bobby Frank Cherry, agreed to sit down with investigators.
She had been married to him around the time of the church bombing.
For decades, she had carried what he told her in private.
When agents approached her during the reinvestigation, she agreed to cooperate.
She told investigators that he had spoken directly to her about being involved in what happened at the church.
Her cooperation changed the case.
Investigators now had a bridge between the old files and the surviving suspects.
They had documentation from the original inquiry, restored audio from secret surveillance, and a direct witness willing to take the stand under oath.
In the spring of 2000, prosecutors presented their evidence to a grand jury in Jefferson County.
Men who believed the past had been buried forever were suddenly facing the weight of a renewed prosecution.
On May 16th, 2000, the grand jury reached its decision.
Indictments were officially returned against two men, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry.
Each was charged with four counts in the loss of Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley.
37 years after the morning of the blast, formal charges had finally arrived.
The defense teams prepared for battle, arguing that the delay had made a fair trial impossible and that old recordings should never be heard by a jury.
But the prosecutors were ready.
The first trial would open in April 2001 and the jury would hear something it was never meant to.
On the morning of April 24th, 2001, the courtroom in Birmingham opened its doors.
37 years had passed.
An aging man sat quietly at the defense table.
He had lived freely for decades, convinced that time was on his side.
United States Attorney Doug Jones stood before the jury to lead the prosecution.
The defense argued that the case was simply too old.
Witnesses had passed away.
Memories had faded.
On paper, it sounded like a convincing argument.
It was not.
The prosecution had something that time could not change.
Deep inside federal evidence storage, investigators had retrieved old reel-to-reel tapes from 1964.
For decades, those magnetic spools had sat in the dark while four families waited for answers.
Technicians had cleaned the audio and filtered out the background hiss.
Now prosecutors wheeled a player into the middle of the courtroom.
Then they pressed play.
The courtroom went entirely quiet.
Through the speakers came the defendant’s own recorded voice from 37 years earlier.
He sounded calm, unhurried, and unaware that anyone was listening.
On the tape, he spoke about secret meetings and the planning needed to carry out an attack.
There was no hesitation in his tone.
Not a rumor.
Not an echo from an old interview.
Not a second-hand story from someone cutting a deal.
It was his own voice, captured on tape while the crime was still fresh.
To make the recordings matter, the jury needed to understand where they came from.
The prosecution called Mitchell Burns to the witness stand.
Decades earlier, Burns had agreed to work as an FBI informant.
He had spent hours driving around Birmingham with the defendant, letting a tape recorder run hidden in his car trunk.
A microphone had also reportedly been placed in an apartment.
Decades had passed, but Burns testified about those conversations and the recordings he had helped make in 1964.
The defense pushed back hard.
They argued that the tapes were muffled, that words were missing, and that an old conversation could not prove what took place at the church.
But the tape was hard to explain away.
In his closing argument, Doug Jones looked at the jurors and reminded them of the long passage of time.
He told them that it is never too late for the truth to be told.
The man at the defense table was Thomas Edwin Blanton, Jr.
Back on May 13th, 1965, federal investigators had put his name on an internal memo alongside three others.
One of those men had been convicted in 1977.
Another had died years later without ever facing a judge.
That left only two men from the original memo, Thomas Edwin Blanton, Jr.
and Bobby Frank Cherry.
Both men had been indicted together the year before, but a dispute over mental competency had delayed Cherry’s trial, separating their cases.
Blanton was left to face the courtroom and the evidence alone.
For 36 years after his name first appeared in federal files, he had lived an ordinary life in Birmingham.
Now, the past had caught up to him.
The jury was sent out to to 37 years of waiting came down to 12 people in a closed room.
They did not take long.
The jury deliberated about 2 and 1/2 hours.
On May 1st, 2001, the courtroom fell silent once more as the jury returned with its decision.
The jury found him guilty on the most serious charge, four counts.
The judge handed down a life sentence, ensuring he would spend the remainder of his days in prison.
Decades of waiting.
Decades of silence.
Now, one name from that old memo had finally been answered for in court.
A verdict after 37 years, but one man was still left.
That man was Bobby Frank Cherry.
He had been indicted alongside Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr.
in May of 2000, but when the first trial began, Cherry was not in the courtroom.
His defense had raised questions about his mental competency, claiming he was not capable of understanding the proceedings or assisting in his defense.
It looked like a legal dispute that might keep him from ever facing a jury.
It wasn’t.
The dispute dragged on through hearings and evaluations.
2000 became 2001, and 2001 became 2002.
Doctors examined him, judges reviewed the reports, and the arguments continued for an entire year.
In the end, the court ruled that Cherry was competent to stand trial.
On May 6th, 2002, the proceedings finally began in Birmingham.
38 years and 8 months had passed since that Sunday morning at the 16th Street Baptist Church.
Robert Chambliss had died in prison in 1985, and Herman Cash had died in 1994 without ever being charged.
Nearly four decades of ordinary life, of work and daily routine while four young girls never had the chance to grow up.
Now, the last living suspect named by investigators in 1965 sat at the defense table, an aging man watching a jury take its place.
The prosecution faced a different task than it had a year earlier.
There were no secret recordings of Cherry speaking inside a car the way there had been with Blanton.
Instead, the case relied on people who remembered what he had told them across the decades.
They had listened to him speak when he believed the past was buried and the law would never reach him.
Among those witnesses was someone who had known him better than almost anyone else in that room.
Her name was Willadean Brogdon.
She was Cherry’s ex-wife and she took the witness stand to tell the jury what she had carried for decades.
Brogdon testified that Cherry had spoken to her directly about what happened at the church and told her he was involved.
Not an accident.
Not an empty boast.
And not something she could ever forget.
The defense tried to break her account.
Lawyers questioned her memory, challenged her motives, and argued that the passage of time made her testimony unreliable.
It did not work.
Other witnesses took the stand to describe what Cherry had told them over the years, reinforcing the weight of his own admissions.
Nothing shook the core of what the jurors heard.
The closing arguments ended and the case was placed into the hands of the jury.
On May 22nd, 2002, the jurors returned to the courtroom with their decision.
Bobby Frank Cherry was found guilty on four counts, held responsible for the lives taken at the church.
The judge sentenced him to life in prison.
Justice had finally spoken.
Cherry was taken into custody to begin serving his sentence.
He did not live for decades in a cell the way he had lived in freedom.
On November 18th, 2004, Bobby Frank Cherry died in Kilby Correctional Facility at the age of 74.
He had served only 2 and 1/2 years of his life term.
His time had run out.
Thomas Edwin Blanton, Jr.
remained in prison far longer following his conviction in 2001.
He stayed in custody year after year while the city of Birmingham grew and moved forward without him.
On June 26th, 2020, Blanton died in prison.
Neither man ever walked free again.
Both of them finished their lives behind bars.
The courtroom battles were over.
The legal delays, the disputed hearings, and the decades of silence had finally come to an end.
The families had waited through 38 years to see the men named so long ago held accountable.
Two verdicts nearly four decades apart from the Sunday morning.
The verdicts had finally come, but they could not undo the damage.
In that church basement, Sarah Collins Rudolph had survived the blast.
She survived.
She was only 12 years old that morning, and she lost the sight in one eye.
Doctors removed 21 pieces of glass from her face.
The physical injuries stayed with her for the rest of her life.
She carried the pain, and she carried the loss of the sister who never walked out beside her.
For decades, Sarah lived with the silence of that morning.
While investigators worked and prosecutors prepared for trial, the men responsible lived in freedom.
Sarah lived with the cost.
Over the years, the nation attempted to offer recognition.
On May 24th, 2013, a bill was signed awarding the four girls the Congressional Gold Medal.
It was the highest civilian honor Congress could bestow, a national tribute, an acknowledgement nearly 50 years after that Sunday morning of four young girls who had only gone to church to sing.
Their names were carved into history in other places, too.
In Montgomery, Alabama, the names of Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia [clears throat] Wesley were engraved on the Civil Rights Memorial.
Water flowed over the stone.
Visitors came from across the country to read each name and remember what happened.
Yet, stone could never replace what was lost.
Then came a discovery that brought a different kind of heartbreak.
Addie Mae had been buried at Greenwood Cemetery 3 days after the bombing.
In 1998, workers digging in front of her headstone reportedly found the plot empty.
Not a vault, not a casket, nothing.
Where her remains actually lie was reported as an open question.
Decades had passed, and no one could explain what had happened to the plot where her family believed she rested.
More than five decades after the blast, the state itself spoke.
In 2020, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey reportedly offered a formal apology to Sarah Collins Rudolph.
It was long overdue, an acknowledgement of the state’s failures coming 57 years after that September morning.
Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr.
and Bobby Frank Cherry had both been convicted, both spent the rest of their lives behind bars.
Justice had finally caught up with the men named on that 1965 memo nearly four decades after the crime.
Yet, the honors, the memorials, and the official apologies could not change the past.
They could not locate the sister Sarah lost.
Even now, the mystery of that empty plot lingers.
A question the verdicts could not answer.
The cost of that delay cannot be measured in court records alone.
On May 13th, 1965, the Federal Bureau of Investigation formally named the men responsible for the bombing.
The names were on paper.
The evidence was there.
Yet Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr.
was not convicted until May 1st, 2001.
That was 36 years later.
Bobby Frank Cherry was not convicted until May 22nd, 2002.
That was 37 years.
1965 became 1975.
1975 became 1995.
Decades passed between the names on that memo and the moment a jury held those men accountable.
Decades of waiting for families who carried their grief while the suspects lived freely in their own neighborhoods.
Justice did not arrive on its own.
It took people who refused to let the truth stay buried in the dark.
It began with Bill Baxley.
In 1971, he reopened the investigation when others had moved on.
In 1995, federal agents returned to the case, unsealing thousands of documents and restoring old reel-to-reel tapes that had sat forgotten in storage.
It took Doug Jones.
As United States Attorney, he brought the case to court and made sure the jury heard those recordings.
As Jones told the courtroom, “It is never too late for the truth to be told”.
And it took the witnesses who spoke, people who took the stand and finally broke decades of silence to tell what they knew.
Before the courtrooms, before the long road to justice, there was only a quiet morning in Birmingham.
Sunday, September 15th, 1963.
Youth Day.
Down in the basement lounge of the 16th Street Baptist Church, four girls were getting ready for the service, fixing their Sunday dresses and smoothing their sashes.
Upstairs, the congregation was finding its seats.
Among them was Addie Mae Collins.
She was 14 years old.
She loved to paint and draw, dreaming that one day her work would hang where people could see it.
She walked door to door selling aprons and potholders her mother had sewn.
She was getting ready to sing, with her whole life ahead of her.
She was never just a name on a memo, not a cold case file, never just a number on an old docket.
She was a daughter and a sister whose life was taken in an instant.
The verdicts brought answers after nearly four decades of delay, but justice is about more than the men who were convicted.
It is about making sure she is remembered as a person, and not simply as a headline from 1963.
Her name was Addie Mae Collins.
This is Crime Watch Investigations.
Thank you for watching, and stay with us for the stories that refuse to stay buried.
