ATLANTA — Edgar Ray Killen, a preacher and reputed Ku Klux Klan leader, was arrested Thursday in Mississippi on murder charges in the deaths 40 years ago of three young civil rights workers whose bullet-riddled bodies were found buried in an earthen dam.
The arrest came after a Neshoba County, Miss., grand jury heard testimony about the 1964 slayings of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, who were killed by a mob of local men the day after they arrived in the small town of Philadelphia, Miss.
The state never charged anyone with the killings.
All day, word of the grand jury proceedings leaked out across Philadelphia, a town of 7,300 that has struggled with the legacy of the killings. It is where the slayings occurred, where Killen lives and where the grand jury convened.
In New York, Goodman's 89-year-old mother said she believed Killen coordinated the killings. "I certainly hope that justice will be done," Carolyn Goodman said. "I knew all along that these men would be apprehended. I think they knew it too."
Killen, 80, has denied any role in the crime. He was tried on federal conspiracy charges in 1967, but the jury deadlocked on a vote of 11 to 1; the lone holdout later said she could not convict a preacher.
Officers from the Neshoba County Sheriff's Department arrested Killen without incident at his home on three counts of murder, a spokesman said. He is being held without bail.
The crime, which was dramatized in the film "Mississippi Burning," became one of the most infamous episodes of the civil rights era. Goodman, 20, Chaney, 21, and Schwerner, 24, freshly trained in voter registration techniques, drove into Philadelphia on June 20, 1964.
The next day, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price arrested them and took them to the county jail in Philadelphia. At 10 p.m., Price released the three men. Their station wagon was overtaken by a group of men on a rural road and all three were killed.
After the state refused to bring murder charges, the then-governor of Mississippi, Paul Johnson, asked federal investigators to look into the case. Ultimately, 18 men were tried on federal civil rights charges. Seven were convicted, serving sentences of three to 10 years.
Killen, who was 38 at the time of the killings, was described as the mob's ringleader in FBI documents released in 2000. James Jordan, an FBI informant, testified that Killen approached him at a restaurant in Meridian, Miss., saying "they had three civil rights workers in Philadelphia and that they needed their asses tore up," according to the FBI records.
