Killen implicated in murder by his fellow Klansman

ACCUSED Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen was implicated in the killing of a civil rights worker in testimony from a now-deceased Klansman read in court yesterday.

Carlton Miller, who belonged to the Klan, testified in a 1967 federal conspiracy trial that Killen told Klan members that the white supremacist group had approved the murder of Michael Schwerner.

“Mr Killen told us to leave him alone, that another (Klan) unit was going to take care of him, that his elimination had been approved,” according to the transcript of Miller’s testimony read in court.

Mr Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney were helping Mississippi blacks register to vote during the 1964 Freedom Summer civil rights campaign. The three men, all in their 20s, were abducted and shot by a group of Klansmen on a remote road outside the eastern Mississippi town on June 21, 1964. Their bodies were found weeks later in an earthen dam.

Killen, now 80, is being tried by the state for the murders, which outraged much of the nation, energised the civil rights movement and were dramatised in the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning.

Now wheelchair-bound since breaking both of his legs in a logging accident in March, Killen was released from hospital after being taken there from the court on Thursday and treated for high blood pressure.

Miller’s statements, as well as other testimony from the 1967 conspiracy trial of Killen and more than a dozen other men accused of involvement in the killings, has been ruled admissible in the current trial.

Killen, an ordained Baptist minister who says he is innocent, was among a group of men tried in 1967 for violating the civil rights of Schwerner and Goodman, white New Yorkers, and Chaney, a black Mississippian.

Seven of Killen’s co-defendants were convicted and given prison sentences ranging from three to 10 years but his trial ended in a hung jury after a lone juror said she could never convict a preacher. Killen continued to live in the Philadelphia area after the 1967 trial, spending his time logging and preaching in local churches. Early this year, he was charged with the murders after Mississippi investigators reopened the case.

State prosecutors did not go after any of the original suspects in the 1960s, perhaps swayed by the realisation that no jury in Mississippi had at that time ever convicted whites for killing blacks.

The defence has urged the jury not to be moved by evidence that Killen was involved with white supremacists.