Ex-Klansman on trial for 1964 killings leaves court on stretcher

ONE-TIME Klansman Edgar Ray Killen was removed from court on a stretcher and treated for high blood pressure yesterday on the opening day of testimony.

He is on trial for the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers.

The court went into recess to await Killen’s return, but not before courtroom observers wept as the widow of one of the slain men described her reaction when her husband’s car was found, burned and abandoned, in the Mississippi countryside.

Killen, 80, was in court yesterday morning as the judge dealt with procedural matters. But he was taken out of the room after he reported feeling a “smothering sensation,” defence attorney James McIntyre said.

Testimony continued for about 45 minutes as Killen was examined elsewhere in the courthouse. But when an ambulance was summoned to take Killen to hospital, Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon stopped the trial and told jurors court would remain in recess until later.

Killen came to court in a wheelchair and has been attended by a nurse because of his health. He broke both his legs in a wood-cutting accident several months ago and has other ailments.

He was sitting up on the stretcher as he was loaded into the ambulance.

Killen is charged with killing James Chaney, a black man from Mississippi, and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, white men from New York, all of whom were beaten and shot to death in a case dramatised in the 1988 film Mississippi Burning. Their bodies were found 44 days later, buried in an earthen dam.

Yesterday morning, Schwerner’s widow Rita Schwerner Bender led the jury through the events that sent her husband into the waiting arms of the Ku Klux Klan four decades ago.

The white-haired, composed Bender said she left Mississippi after working to register black voters, but that her husband returned to the state on June 20, 1964, after learning that a rural black Neshoba County church had been burned. She said he believed voter registration work in that area had triggered the attack.

Bender described her reaction when she learned that a blue station wagon the three men had been using when they disappeared had been found, burned and abandoned.

“I think it hit me for the first time that they were dead, that there was really no realistic possibility that they were alive,” she said.

The killings of the three young men during the “Freedom Summer” of 1964 galvanised the civil rights movement and helped win passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act that same year.

Killen was tried along with several others in 1967 on federal charges of violating the victims’ civil rights. The all-white jury deadlocked in Killen’s case, but seven others were convicted.