Ex-KKK'er Exits Court On Stretcher

Onetime Klansman Edgar Ray Killen was taken to a hospital Thursday for treatment of high blood pressure, interrupting the opening day of testimony in his trial for the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers.

The 80-year-old part-time preacher was sitting up on a stretcher as he was loaded into an ambulance. The jury, which has just begun to hear testimony in the case, was told by Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon that they would remain in recess until later Thursday.

Defense attorney James McIntyre said Killen reported having a "smothering sensation" before the ambulance was summoned.

District Attorney Mark Duncan confirmed Killen's problem involved elevated blood pressure but said he had no additional details. Killen, who attends court in a wheelchair while he recovers from broken legs suffered in a woodcutting accident, has had a nurse assigned to him in the courtroom.

Killen was in court while the procedural matters were disposed of but left before the 45-minute testimony of Rita Schwerner Bender of Seattle, widow of Michael Schwerner. The white-haired, composed Bender led the jury through the events that sent her husband, along with James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, to Philadelphia and into the waiting arms of the Ku Klux Klan four decades ago.

Killen is charged with masterminding the deaths of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, who were beaten and shot to death in a case dramatized in the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning." Their bodies were found 44 days later, buried in an earthen dam.

The killings of the three young men, who were helping to register black voters during the "Freedom Summer" of 1964, galvanized the civil rights movement and helped win passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act that same year.

Attorney General Jim Hood said prosecutors intend to prove that Killen planned the murders and helped round up Klansmen to chase down and kill Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney when the three were released from the county jail. They had been detained after Chaney received a speeding ticket.

Bender said she had left Mississippi after working on voter registration but her husband had returned to the state on June 20, 1964, after learning a rural black Neshoba County church had been burned by nightriders. She said he felt voter registration work in that area had triggered the attack.

Bender said she learned a blue station wagon being used by the three men when they disappeared after visiting the burned church 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 courtroom, including about 60 spectators sprinkled among the media and law enforcement officers, was silent as she described her efforts to find her husband. A few wiped away tears.

Earlier Thursday, Gordon ruled that testimony from a 1967 federal trial could be used in Killen's trial.

Gordon ruled there was no legal prohibition blocking the introduction of testimony from the federal trial that resulted in seven white men being convicted of conspiring to violate the civil rights of victims. None serving more than six years.

Killen walked free after the federal jury could not agree on his verdict. One juror reportedly said she could not convict a preacher.

Killen is the first person ever indicted on state murder charges in the case.

The judge said the facts of the state murder case are similar to those in Killen's 1967 trial, where Killen's attorneys had cross-examined the witnesses.

Defense attorney Mitch Moran, during opening statements Wednesday, said Killen "was just a bystander in the same organization that a lot of other people were in at the same time in Neshoba County."

He added: "As repulsive as an organization like that might be, you can't find him guilty for the crime he's charged with."

Hood also said testimony will show that before authorities found the bodies, Killen told people where they had been buried.

Killen served as a kleagle, or organizer, of the Klan in Neshoba County and helped set up a klavern, or local Klan group, in a nearby county, Hood said. He also alleged that Killen led an April 1964 Klan meeting at which members discussed what to do to stop "Goatee" — as Schwerner was known because of his beard — and his voter registration activities.

Testimony will show that Killen, a part-time preacher, and other local preachers used the pulpit to encourage their church members to join the Klan, Hood said.

"They told them that God sanctions it," he said.

Killen's name has been associated with the slayings from the outset. FBI records and witnesses indicated he organized the carloads of men who followed Chaney, a black man from Mississippi, and Schwerner and Goodman, white men from New York, and stopped them in their station wagon.

Killen could get life in prison if convicted.