Convict in 1964 Civil-Rights Deaths Won’t Confess

BY JACK ELLIOTT JR.
Associated Press

PARCHMAN, Miss. — The man convicted of organizing the infamous 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers in Mississippi says he is still a segregationist and does not believe in the equality of the races. Yet he contends he bears no ill will toward blacks.

Now 89 years old, Edgar Ray Killen spoke to The Associated Press this month inside the Mississippi State Penitentiary, where he is serving a 60-year sentence. He was convicted of manslaughter in 2005 for the slayings of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were registering blacks to vote.

Witnesses testified that in 1964 Killen had rounded up carloads of Klansmen to intercept the three and helped arrange for a bulldozer to bury the bodies.

It was his first interview since his conviction.