The untimely deaths of Birdia Keglar and Adeline Hamlet officially resulted from an "auto accident," even though no investigative reports exist - and most likely never existed.
Still, many serious questions remain among family members, close friends, and several others who say they witnessed what took place.
Looking back to the fall of 1965, however, offers important clues: this was a time when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) opened hearings lasting from October 19 through February 1966 in Washington, D.
C.
on the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, including Klansmen from Leflore County, where Keglar and Hamlet were killed.
Of all congressional committees, why had HUAC, known for its red-baiting and conservative nature, suddenly decided to investigate the Klan? Could this turnabout relate to Keglar's death? HUAC's sudden shift occurred shortly after the Alabama shooting of a white Michigan volunteer who was shuttling demonstrators from Montgomery back to Selma.
Viola Liuzzo, the mother of a five-year-old, was killed by a volley of bullets fired from a passing car.
President Johnson had taken an intense interest in the murder and within 24 hours of her death, with FBI Director J.
Edgar Hoover at his side, Johnson announced the arrest of four suspects, all members of the Ku Klux Klan.
At the time, Johnson praised the FBI for their efficient work and then urged Congress to mount a full-scale investigation of Klan activities; immediately HUAC accepted this task.
But Johnson did not explain that the crime was solved so quickly because one of the arrested Klansmen, Gary Rowe, was also a paid FBI informer.
Edwin E.
Willis, the House subcommittee chair, released a statement on November 9, 1965, outlining overall findings, once hearings had gone on for twelve days with testimony from 52 witnesses: There were "about a dozen different Klan organizations operating [at that time]" with "considerably greater" strength than was estimated.
Instead of a total Klan membership of 10,000, the committee now estimated "four to five times that number.
" According to the HUAC report, Klans were making "extensive use of innocent-sounding cover or front names - such as civic, improvement or rescue societies and hunting, fishing or sportsmen's clubs - to conceal the existence of their Klaverns and bank accounts.
" Further, "Klan members and officers speak about burning schools which integrate and setting off intense fires in automobiles and department stores.
" Secret Klan organizations known by such names as the Vigilantes or Black Knights, the Underground, and the White Band had been formed by Klan members for carrying out acts of violence and terrorism, according to HUAC's report.
Willis and his committee also learned of a "small minority of law enforcement officers who were Klan members," an important key in examining Keglar and Hamlet's deaths.
As the HUAC hearings turned to the specific testimony of Mississippi's Klansmen, three deaths of civil rights activists transpired in the first two weeks of January 1966.
The first killing received international coverage while the other two murders of Keglar and Hamlet barely made state news.
(Even today, numerous "old" Delta murders remain unexamined as the more heavily reported incidents, particularly in and near Jackson, are being given a second look by the media and law enforcement.
) Vernon Dahmer, 58, was fatally injured in a night riders firebomb attack on his Hattiesburg home the night of January 11, one day before Keglar's death, after leading a voter registration drive.
Dahmer's store and home were both destroyed because he had allowed blacks to pay in his store the $2 poll tax necessary for voting.
The past president of the Hattiesburg NAACP, Dahmer, died of shock from burns the next afternoon; his respiratory tract seared from inhaling so much fire and smoke.
Dahmer's wife and 10-year-old daughter were also burned; the child was hospitalized in fair condition.
Members of NAACP, SNCC and others attending a meeting in Edwards, in the outskirts of Jackson, quickly took off in the early morning hours for Hattiesburg after hearing the news.
But no one left for Charleston.
Three deaths in Leflore County In the early evening hours of January 12, 1966, as they returned home from a special meeting with Senator Robert F.
Kennedy in Jackson, the two civil rights activists from Tallahatchie County were killed and four other passengers injured, two seriously, after their car left the road near the small town of Sidon, south of Greenwood in Leflore County.
Birdia Keglar, 56, was found decapitated and both of Adeline Hamlet's arms had been "cleanly" severed from her body, confirm two Keglar family members, a close friend, and a Tallahatchie County minister.
Hamlett was 78-years-old when she was killed and mutilated.
Months earlier, both women were hanged in effigy by local Klansmen and warned not to participate in further voting rights activities.
Each had testified before a congressional hearing in support of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Keglar and the others were coming back home this time from a subcommittee meeting on discrimination and poverty in the Delta headed by Senator Robert F.
Kennedy.
Several times before, Klansmen had tried to force Grafton Gray off the road; Klansmen running blacks off the road was not an unusual event to take place in the Delta.
Stories abound of such incidents, Chism and others confirmed.
Gray's surviving second wife said that she was married after the accident "...
and he would not tell me anything about it, nothing at all.
I could tell that he was still afraid to talk.
He had told me about other times Klansmen tried to run him off the road, but he would say nothing about this accident.
It affected him greatly.
" Robert Keglar could not shake out details of his mother's death from Gray, the county sheriff or any public officials, as well.
A highway patrol officer threatened him to stay away from the accident site, he said, but Keglar sneaked out to Sidon to look around anyway and talked to people living near the site of the wreck.
Richard L.
Simpson, 27, of Massachusetts, a white SNCC volunteer who was reported as seriously injured, was not allowed any black visitors in the Greenwood hospital, Robert Keglar said.
"We tried to visit him to find out what happened, but the hospital did not treat black people and would not let us into the hospital.
"They were very rude and would not even tell us if he was okay.
I don't know what ever happened to him," Keglar said.
Simpson had worked on voting rights in Belzoni, a Delta town south of Tallahatchie County.
Chism believes that Simpson, "if he survived, was probably taken out of Mississippi and sent home as soon as possible.
That would have been the only way to keep him safe.
" Grafton Gray, Birdia Keglar's cousin who was the driver, was also injured seriously and taken to the Mound Bayou hospital, said Gwen Dailey, Grafton Gray's great-niece.
Gray suffered emotionally afterwards and "was never the same," she said.
Dailey could tell that her father was suspicious of what happened to his brother and to the others who were injured or killed: "My great-uncle was already a quiet man.
He received under-handed threats while in the hospital to keep quiet about 'what happened,' my father learned.
"Employees and visitors would come into his room and tell him to 'be careful,' but not in a caring way.
When he came home, the threats continued.
"He would go out into the fields by his house and stand, gazing away.
He rarely talked.
Even my own father became far more cautious with his own children, and he watched Uncle Grafton like a hawk.
Mr.
Brewer was injured too, and he was never the same.
His reaction was the same as my great-uncle.
" Three months later in April, Birdia Keglar's son, James Eddie "Sonny Boy" Keglar, died unconscious in a suspicious fire in his home.
James had been trying to learn what happened to his mother, said Alma Chism of Memphis, James's daughter and Birdia Keglar's granddaughter.
"My father, James Keglar, was hit on the head before the fire was started," said Chism.
"I know his death was not an accident.
" Nearly forty years later, she joined with relatives and friends to aid in piecing together this story as they continued trying to learn what happened the night as Keglar and others were returning home.
"I know that Sonny Boy was trying to get answers and had even gone to Washington, D.
C.
about my grandmother's murder.
But I never knew who he talked to in Washington.
It might have been someone in the Justice Department.
"I just don't know.
We all knew they had been murdered.
Nothing indicated to us that Birdia's death, and Adeline's death, were due to an auto accident.
" James Keglar, 38, was typically a quiet person, both Chism and his brother Robert Keglar said.
"My grandmother's death really changed James.
He became very angry and outspoken, and he wanted to know who did this to his mother.
"He had just come home from the military service and stayed in Charleston while I worked on this from Memphis, where I lived with my family," Mrs.
Chism said.
When Chism attended her grandmother's funeral in Charleston, she also visited the site of the car wreck to gather information.
"I talked to some people who lived in Sidon and learned the other car came straight at them, crossing over the line.
"The other driver was not hurt.
It was obvious to me - and to the witnesses - they had been run off the road.
" "James was a lot like my dad," Keglar said of his brother who had left the military and returned home upon his mother's death.
"He would drink too much.
But he never committed any crimes.
" The weekend of James Keglar's death, James had called his brother from jail after being arrested for car theft - "something he would never do," Robert Keglar said.
"I could tell that he was scared.
" James asked Robert to call the FBI in Clarksdale, "...
and I did, but no investigators came to see him," Robert Keglar said.
"James got out of jail and went straight on to a house party.
Early that Sunday morning at about 6 a.
m.
, the police came to my house and said that James was dead.
"They would not tell me what happened to him.
Later, I was told by others that 'a hired killer' had murdered him.
I know that he had been hit on the head and a fire was started that burned down his house.
He died in the fire.
" BIRDIA KEGLAR WAS anticipating the Jackson meeting that was supposed to be kept a secret, according to Gwen Daily, Keglar's great niece.
"Senator Robert Kennedy's committee was coming to Jackson to meet with a small group of people who had met with him before.
They were not to tell anyone about this meeting, but Birdia, I'm afraid, may have let it slip out.
"She was excited about the meeting and would come over to our house with different suits and dresses on, asking which she should wear.
The fact of the meeting and the route they took somehow got out and the Klan knew where to find them.
Birdia had passed some notes about times and routes to people she thought she could trust.
" The Tallahatchie and Leflore county sheriff's departments and the state highway patrol could not provide reports or further information when asked about this accident in 2004.
Leflore county deputies, responding to a Freedom of Information Act or FOIA request refused to look for records, stating "they don't exist.
" A spokesperson for the state's department of safety maintained - "It's been too long ago for any records to exist now.
" He did ask a clerk to search, but nothing was reported found.
Brown Lee Bruce, Jr.
, the reported driver of the second car, was not injured, Chism learned during her investigations.
"I'm sure his family could put on all kinds of pressure to keep anything from happening to him.
" (Bruce died in 2003.
A relative claimed he suffered traumatic brain injuries from the 1966 accident, but Hamlett's granddaughter said that several relatives spoke to Bruce in the hospital, trying to learn more about what took place.
"He was rude and unwilling to help.
But he knew exactly what we were talking about," she said.
) REV.
EDWIN KING, an active civil rights leader from Tougaloo College of Jackson was in Hattiesburg when Keglar and Hamlett were killed, having attended a SNCC meeting in Edwards the day before.
King left for Hattiesburg upon hearing about Vernon Dahmer's incident.
He remembers hearing much later of Keglar's car accident, but no further information was given.
"We all assumed it was a car accident," he said years later.
No one from outside of the Delta came to Keglar's funeral that Lucy Boyd could recall.
"This really hurt.
We needed them in the worst way.
"This was the 'Free State of Tallahatchie' and it was a terribly frightening place to be.
None of us, even Birdia's son, could dig around, and find out what really happened without taking a risk we would be killed.
We could have used some outside help.
" "We were not allowed to see the car - a 1965 Plymouth Fury II - and we were too afraid to push the matter.
No one ever returned the brief case that held all of Birdia's records.
Somehow, it disappeared along with the car.
"The rumor was that deputies or patrolmen pulled the car away.
" Boyd said she remembered hearing - "and I don't remember where this came from - that a patrolman had shined a flashlight in the faces of their victims when they were inside the car, and said 'These are the sons of bitches we're looking for.
'"