Cold Case Files - Crimes of the KKK

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

Klan leader Sam Bowers goes on trial for ordering the murder of an African-American storeowner 32 years prior, and investigators reopen the unsolved case of an African-American truck driver who was forced to leap to his death from a bridge by Klan members.Apartments.com - To find whatever you’re searching for and more visit apartments.com the place to find a place.Marathon: Join Marathon Rewards today and start earning rewards on every gallon of gas. Marathon, where fun runs on full!Progressive: Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.Rosetta Stone: Cold Case Files listeners can get Rosetta Stone’s lifetime membership for 50% off when you go to RosettaStone.com/coldcaseSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This program contains subject matter that may be disturbing to some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. There are over 100,000 cold cases in America. Only 1% are ever solved. This is one of those rare stories. On the night of January 10th, 1996, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, headlights from trucks driven by members of the Ku Klux Klan illuminate a solitary farmhouse. Inside lives 58-year-old Vernon Damer, a black man and father of eight.

Inside the house with Vernon are his daughter Betty and his wife Ellie. This is Ellie. I heard the gunshots coming in. And a short time, they threw something in through the living room, and it just scuffed in flame. The flame was just roaring coming after us. And I was yelling to burn and get up, I believe they got it this time. As the clan sets Damer's house on fire, Vernon grabs his gun and begins shooting, hoping to provide cover while his family escapes the flames.

This is Vernon's daughter Betty. I was screaming and crying because I was in pain, but when I could look at my daddy and see that the skin was literally hanging off him like a sheet of paper, and he never complained. He never cried. He was just concerned that we stay out of the... the reflection of the light from the house so that if they did come back, they couldn't find us to trust. Vernon Damer's farmhouse is burned to the ground. The men in white sheets dissolve back into the night, and Damer himself is left barely alive,

with burns over more than 40% of his body. You tell me, don't cry. Everything is going to be all right. Vernon was dying then, and I didn't know it. Vernon Dahmer is taken to Forest County General Hospital. 13 hours later, he is pronounced dead. The Federal Bureau of Investigation sends 28 agents to Hattiesburg. Their mission is to find out who killed Vernon Damer.

FBI Special Agent Jim Ingram quickly develops a theory about who's responsible. He had had threats against his life because he used his small grocery store next to his home to register blacks to vote. So we knew the clan had been watching Vernon Damer. As agents sift through the rubble, they find evidence they hope might provide a break in the case. We found a gun. A gun had been dropped.

We knew a car had been shot up. We had enough evidence at the scene to assist us in our investigation. A charred 22 is dusted for fingerprints, but yields nothing. Nothing. FBI agents then began a hunt for the guns owner door to door through the Mississippi countryside and into the heart of the clan's secret society. By 1966, 10,000 men boast allegiance to the Mississippi clan. Many of them, however, draw the line at murder.

All of a sudden, the clan had turned into a murder's role, selecting individuals who they felt should be assassinated and removed from society. So other Klan members started to say, this is not for me. I could go to prison. I'm getting out. FBI agents find several Klan members who are willing to talk. From those conversations, the Bureau puts together a list of 14 men, all core Klansmen, all fought to have been at Vernon Damer's farm.

As agents begin to pour over the list of names, Vernon Damer's family, prepares for a funeral. Vernon Damer Jr. is the oldest of seven boys and a master sergeant on active duty with the U.S. Air Force. The day after his father's murder, he comes home to Mississippi. My dad had died. My little sister was still in the hospital. The home site had been destroyed along with the grocery store.

My family was homeless. One by one, the other Damer sons also make their way home. each a member of the U.S. military, each sworn to protect the same right their father had died for, the right to live as a free man. He was seeking the opportunity. The right was there. He was seeking the opportunity to vote. But this opportunity was being denied by the hate muggles, better known as the White Knights of the Clu Klux Klan. Vernon Dahmer was murdered because he dared to register black people. people to vote. And although his family knows the name of Vernon's killer, they do not know his

face, nor do they hold any illusions about the quality of justice available to a black man in Mississippi in the 1960s. Looking at the history of Mississippi, I didn't have much hope. Black folks had been murdered by white folks and nothing never done about it. So as far as hope is concerned, I really didn't have a lot of hope. One year after the funeral, no arrests have been made. The FBI's best lead is a list of 14 men, all clan members, believed to be at Damer's Farm. The leader of the group is Mississippi's Imperial Wizard, Sam Bowers. Another man on the list is a clan foot soldier named Billy Roy Pitts.

On January the 10th, Billy Roy Pitts was one of those individuals who was, well, was assigned by Sam Bowers, head of the White Knights of the KKK, to assassinate Vernon Damer. Informants within the ranks of the clan link a 22-caliber gun found at the crime scene to Pitts. FBI agents believe it is the leverage they need to get Pitts talking. On April 4th, they put out the word to pick up Billy Roy for questioning. In Hattiesburg, rumor and fear run rampant.

Billy Roy Pitts has dropped out of sight. Many inside the Ku Klux Klan believe he is about to talk to the government, and the Klan wants to find him first. Meanwhile, Pitts struggles to find a place to hide. I went out in Texas a while, I went in New Orleans a while, and I ran that I couldn't go anymore. The FBI was looking for me. The Ku Klux Klan was looking for me.

The Laura Police Department was looking for me, which most of them was part of the clan. Everybody was looking for me. Everybody wanted me. I had nowhere to turn, no way to go. After six months on the run, Billy Roy is staying with his brother, a preacher living in Louisiana.

Late one night, Billy Roy and his brother talk. I sat down and I told my brother the whole story from A to Z. And I told him, I don't know what to do. So he advised me the best thing I could do. Let's go to the FBI. Tell them the whole thing. Pay whatever price I had to pay and get on my life. Pitts calls the FBI and sets up a meeting in exchange for an offer of immunity and protection from the clan.

Pitts lays out the blueprint for a clan attack. He begins by explaining a secret code for punishment. The clan calls them projects. Project number one was like harassing someone, burning a cross in front of their house. of the warning. And project number two was like taking someone out, beating them, whatever. Number three was burning of a building or burning their house or their church or whatever. And number four was annihilation, killing someone.

Pitts tells the FBI only one man in Mississippi carries the authority to order a number four. the Klan's Imperial Wizard, Sam Bowers. He wanted to make sure that Vernon Damer was taken care of. He wanted a number three and if all possible, a number four done on Vernon Damer. According to Pitts, his job was to provide cover as other Klansmen set Vernon Damer's home on fire with his entire family trapped inside. And one of the men made a remark on the way back to the car after it was all. all over, he heard him holler out.

He said, let them die. You know, that's what we came here for. Billy Roy Pitts provides the FBI with a blow-by-blow account of the damer attack, and most importantly, the names of the men underneath the white sheets. He named all the individuals involved in riding in the two cars. He names the individuals who was assigned to firebomb the grocery store, a vernon and damers, firebombed the house, who was to shoot and keep family members inside the house where they would be totally destroyed in a fire. So he laid out to the government everything

that we needed to know. As the FBI begins to arrest the men Pitts has named, a campaign of terror unfolds, beginning with threats against the state's star witness, a very frightened Billy Roy Pitts. ever right to be scared. In other words, Billy Roy Pitts was on their hit list when they found out that the FBI had been able to, quote, turn, unquote, Billy Roy Pitts. Then their assignment was to kill Billy Roy Pitts before he had a chance to testify. Pits is placed under heavy guard. Meanwhile, the threats escalate to include the prosecutor working the case, a young attorney named James Dukes. The people that were involved in this investigation were not intimidated by a bunch of hoodlums.

And I don't mean to say that braggadociously, but this was our community. In January of 1968, Duke secures nine indictments for murder, one for each of the men Billy Roy Pitts identified as being at Damer's property that night. Clan leader Sam Bowers is also charged with murder, as well as conspiracy to commit arson. In 1968, in the Forest County Courthouse, seven members of the Ku Klux Klan are tried for Vernon Damer's murder. Four are eventually found guilty. The sense of justice, however, is incomplete. The man believed to have ordered the attack on Vernon Damer faces three separate trials. Each time the jury is hung and Imperial Wizard

Sam Bowers walks away a free man. Oh, I cried his time that we couldn't get a juror that would convict him. I know the prosecutors tried hard, but they picked the best people they thought would be on a juror, but they didn't have no way of knowing how they're going to vote either. Sam Bowers was a very shrewd individual. He knew he was above the others that he led. So he insulated himself where he felt that they could not. never reach him.

After the third trial, prosecutors decide it's time to move on, and the case against Sam Bowers goes cold. But the men who work the case don't forget Sam Bowers and the evil they believe he represents. Sam Bowers was the acknowledged leader, grand wizard, if you please, of the white knights of the Ku Klux Klan. You cut off the head of the snake,

you kill the snake. And that's what he was. He was the head of a snake. 26 years after Sam Bowers was first charged, cold case detectives take a final shot at taking down the head of the Ku Klux Klan. I feel like a lot of us have had that moment where we thought we knew a language

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The first blow was struck 90 miles north. of Hattiesburg in Jackson, Mississippi. 31 years after civil rights activist Medgar Evers was gunned down, white supremacist Byron DeLubeckwith is convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison. The case gains national media attention and offers a measure of hope for the family of Vernon Damer. When the Evers family was actually successful in getting a new trial, we really got in high gear, so to speak, about trying to get my daddy's case reopened. In 1996, Lindsay Carter is the district attorney for Hattiesburg.

He meets with the Damer family and agrees to take a fresh look at the case. A lot of the witnesses were deceased and the rest were unwilling to talk to you. And so we started to realize that if we put everything together, which we were slowly doing, trying to reconstruct all the evidence that was used at the original trial, that we may need somebody in addition that didn't testify at the first trial. Carter believes the best way to attack the clan is from within, to find a witness who was close to Sam Bowers during the 1960s and is willing to talk. In April of 1997, the strategy pays off.

After a series of anonymous phone calls, a man named Bob Stringer steps forward. In 1966, Stringer was a teenager and an errand boy for Sam Bowers. Stringer claims he overheard Bowers speaking at a clan meeting one night. Slammed his hand on the table and stands up kind of and says, you know, something's got to be done about the damon down south. He's caused problems. He said, just put a code four on him and said, then I'll shut him up. In the language of the clan, a code four translates to murder.

Stringer's story corroborates the one offered by Klansman Billy Roy Pitts 30 years earlier and provides the new piece of evidence prosecutors are looking for. On May 28th, they charge 73-year-old Sam Bowers with murder. It is the fourth time the clan leader will face charges relating to Damer's death, and the fourth time Billy Roy Pitts will be asked to testify against his old boss. I told them that I would do it for the dame or family, but only for the dame of family. I wouldn't do it for the attorney general office, the FBI and nobody else. And the only reason was for the dame or family only, because I felt that I owed the dame of family that much.

On August 17, 1998, Sam Bowers goes to trial. For those who live in Mississippi, Bauer's trial is as much about the state's racial history as it is about the clan leader himself. Forest County DA Bob Helfrick prosecutes the case. Klan was a very small minority that gave Mississippi and the whole south a bad name. It's like a sore that's festering

that you need to clean. At trial, Sam Bauer's attorney claims his client is innocent and that Billy Roy Pitts is casting the former clan leader in the convenient role of scapegoat. His attorney likened it to a persecution, saying we were persecuting Sam Bowers, that Bowers didn't have anything to do with it and that Pitts was a liar. And I find Pitts to be a very, very honest person.

Bowers trial lasts five days. Each day the Damer family attends, watching Justice play out from the first row of the courthouse balcony. Looking at this guy and how he had escaped. Justice for some 32 years, he walked the streets while my dad lay dead in the cemetery. I wanted him to go to prison. After three hours of deliberations, the jury gives Vernon Damer Jr. the verdict he seeks. Sam Bowers is found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison. As Bowers is led out of the courtroom, Billy Roy Pitts seeks out Vernon Damer's widow and asks for her forgiveness.

The damer family, they forgave me for what I've done. That was a relief. There's no way for me to describe the feeling that I had because I had battled for all these years with this on my conscience. I didn't know I could forgive Biller off of what he had done. But you know when a person asked for forgiveness and you can look straight in their eyes, you can never feel it.

It took a burden off my heart because He didn't have no more hate for me and I had for them. I stopped hating Billeroy that day. In January 2002, on the same land destroyed by hate in 1966, the Damer family walks their rebuilt homestead in what is now called the New South, a region struggling to come to terms with the lessons of its past, lessons carved out of bitter experience and handed down by the people who live them. The days of Sam Bowers had passed him by, and he had lived long enough for Mississippi to change on him, and it caught it.

And that very, very, very system that protected him for all those years now, was turning him over to the justice system for him to pay for his crime. 36 years after Vernon Dahmer sacrificed his life for the right to vote, his widow, Ellie Damer, serves as an election commissioner for Forest County, Mississippi. I certainly hope that if there are any young people who don't go to the polling vote, they will find strength in going to the polling vote. We paid such a high price to have the privilege to vote. Sam Bowers died in prison in 2006. At 3 o'clock in the afternoon on January 22nd, 1957, in Montgomery, Alabama,

24-year-old Willie Edwards ends his shift at the Wind Dixie Warehouse. He goes home to his pregnant wife and two young girls. An hour later, the boss at Wind Dixie calls. He wants Willie to cover a sick driver's night shift. Sarah Jean Salter is Willie's wife. He said, well, you know, we need the money. You're pregnant again. And so I would just like to go back so we have something extra.

So I said, okay. That night, Willie Edwards leaves his home and heads back for the second shift. The next morning, Sarah Jean hears a knock at the door. Expecting her husband, she instead finds two Montgomery police officers. They have found Edwards' truck. So they said, well, we found the keys in with the lights on when nobody hit it. But if he should happen to come in or give you a call, tell him to call Winnie Dixie. Two weeks later, there has been no word from Willie Edwards.

His neighbors believe they know who was responsible for Willie's disappearance. Anne Steiner and her sister Ruby lived across the street. I would immediately think White, Clan or not, because I knew that he was a truck driver and I knew he was going out into all areas. And so therefore, he would be exposed to a number of different kinds of people and that his greatest danger would come from them. Willie Edwards' father calls on the Montgomery Police for help in finding his son. I think they just brushed them off, and he worried about it so much.

He kept going just about like every week trying to find out what happened, but would nobody tell us nothing? We were afraid of police. We never thought that the police would do anything to protect us. We thought that the police were those persons who were supposed to keep us in our place. Three months after Willie Edwards was last seen alive, his wife gets the call she has been expecting. That was the most horrible day when they called, and we knew then that it was him because it had rained for so long. And my mother kept saying, if it keep raining, I don't know why she was like this.

If it keep raining, it would wash him up. And I saw Mom, you don't know what you're talking about. She said, yes, I do. We will find him soon. Sarah Jean's mother was right. Willie Edwards' body had washed ashore on the banks of the Alabama River, 30 miles downstream of Montgomery. The cause of death is officially listed as unknown. Unofficially, Sarah's mother has her own theory as to how Willie died.

She said, well, you know what happened there. I said, oh, Mom, don't say nothing like that. She said, you know, the Ku Klux Klanz probably took him off that truck. A year later, to no one's surprise, Willie Edward's death remains a mystery. The case goes cold and is largely forgotten. The state of Alabama, they just swept it under the rug because he was black and just said, forget about it. Fourteen years later, in January of 1971, the political landscape of Alabama begins to change. Bill Baxley is the newly elected Attorney General.

Within two weeks of taking office, he begins to reopen unsolved cases from the civil rights era. The first case Baxley reviews is the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, a tragedy that claimed the lives of four young girls in 1963. And in the course of that investigation, we were getting all kinds of tips that we were trying to follow up on and Leeds, and one of them was that the clan out of Montgomery had come up to Birmingham and perpetrated the church bombing. Baxley assigns two investigators to follow up on the Montgomery lead. They interview a possible suspect in the bombing, a former clansman by the name of Raymond Britt. He tells them that by the year of the church bombing, he was no longer a member of the clan.

He said, I got out of the clan years before that bombing. I got out of the clan. I got out of the when we made that Wind Dixie truck driver jump off the Tyler Goodwin Bridge. Investigators believed Britt is referring to Willie Edwards, who was pulled out of the Alabama River 14 years earlier. Baxley offers the former Klansman immunity if he provides the full story of what happened on the Tyler Goodwin Bridge. Britt's story begins with a rumor spread amongst the clan. He said that they had had a report that a black truck driver. for Wind Dixie had made either whistled or winked at or made a remark to a white female. And so they being the clan were going to take care of that situation.

Britt says he and three fellow clan members drove the country roads of Montgomery County one night, looking for a black Wind Dixie driver. Just after midnight, Willie Edwards pulled his truck over to fill out a logbook, and the four Klansmen drove up beside him. They got him out of the truck at gunpoint. They put him in their car and roughed him up, talked horrible to him, and drove him around. Britt names the three men who were with him that night. Sonny Kyle Livingston, Ray Alexander, and J.D. Jimmy York. Britt claims the men drove Willie Edwards to the Tyler Goodwin Bridge, 50 feet above the Alabama River.

In his sworn affidavit, Brit writes, The driver continued to plead and sob and say that he had not done anything. Livingston, pointing his gun at the driver, told him to hit the water. The driver climbed up on the railing on the bridge and jumped off. I remember he screamed on the way down to the water. Bill Baxley secures indictments naming Brits three accomplices and charging them with murder in the first degree. The case is then handed over to an Alabama judge with his own brand of Southern Justice.

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his family believes their day in court might have finally come to pass. Melinda Edwards is Willie's oldest child. It was just unbelievable that someone actually came forth. I mean, it was just something we could never imagine that someone actually said something about it after all that time. In March of 1976, Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley secures indictments for the three men Britt has named. He knows that gaining a conviction will be a

far more difficult task. I knew we had the right people, but I knew that conviction was going to be a major hurdle because, I mean, when it really boils down to it, you still only had Brits' testimony. I thought it was going to be a real uphill battle to bring these people to justice. The battle is lost even before it begins.

In pretrial motions, an Alabama judge dismisses the case. In his ruling, Judge Frank Embry writes, merely forcing a person to jump from a bridge does not naturally and probably leave to the death of such a person. Without a cause of death, the judge rules a trial for murder cannot proceed. The decision to dismiss is a devastating blow for the Edwards family. The system was not going to give me any

justice, and this judge had the same feeling that others had that because my father was black, his life was not worth anything. Three months after being charged, the suspects in Willie Edwards' murder walk out of the Montgomery County Courthouse, free men. Living proof in the minds of many that even in 1976, the quality of justice in Alabama still depended largely on the color of one's skin. By 1993, 17 years later, Sarah Jean lives in Buffalo and has remarried. Her children are grown and the hope that her first husband's killer would ever face trial has long since faded. In May of that year, however, Sarah finds a letter in her mailbox. It's from a woman named Diane Alexander.

The return address is Montgomery, Alabama. Well, when I opened the letter and I read it and it said that her husband had confessed, I was saying, really? I don't believe it. Diane Alexander is the common-law wife of Henry Alexander, one of the three men named by Raymond Britt as Willie Edwards killers. In the letter, Diane claims that on his deathbed, her husband confessed to the murder and wanted his wife to seek out Willie Edwards family. And that changed everything for me

from that point on. I became a fighting demon after that. And I went around the world and back to try and do everything I can to see if I can still get those people that are still alive brought to justice. Melinda Edwards writes to the Montgomery County District Attorney Ellen Brooks. She asks that her father's case once again be reopened and his body exhumed. This is Ellen Brooks. And she'd been talking to an expert who had advised her, as she related to us, that if we were able to exhume the body, it might be possible now to prove the cause of death. And would we assist her in that? Obviously, she wanted to bring the people responsible. to justice. So the first issue was, could we determine a cause of death?

Forty years after he was interred, Willie Edwards' remains are exhumed from the New Pleasant Valley Cemetery. State medical examiner Dr. Jim Loredson and a team of forensic experts spend the next three days examining the body. So we have a man who is found in the river, who had no reason to be in the river, and whose autopsy is essentially negative, and for the forensic pathologist taking together all of these facts, those are indications of a person who has drowned. Dr. Lourdeson officially changes Willie Edwards' cause of death from unknown to drowning.

Still in question is the manner of his death. How did Edwards find his way to the bottom of the Alabama River? In reaching that conclusion, Lourdeson considers all the facts and applies a small dose of common sense. Given the information that I knew about Willie Edwards concerning his kidnapping, where the truck was found,

where he was found, and which bridge he jumped from, given all of that information, it was my opinion that Willie Edwards' death was a homicide. Armed with the medical examiner's new findings, prosecutors prepared to go before a grand jury, seeking indictments for a clan murder more than 40 years cold. In February of 1999, a grand jury convenes to hear the evidence

that may finally bring Willie Edwards' killers to justice. We were going to be in front of the grand jury ourselves. We were going to talk to them, tell them their sign of the story. I thought this is going to work. We presented six live witnesses, statements of a number of other witnesses, and summaries of the investigation. We had some 36 or so physical documents, exhibits, photographs. Ellen Brooks case begins with the medical examiner's findings that Willie Edwards did not

accidentally fall into the Alabama River, but he was in fact murdered. The district attorney then shares the contents of Diane Alexander's letter, including her husband Henry's deathbed confession. The letter is followed by the sworn statement of Raymond. Britt, the former Klansman who admits he was on the bridge the night Willie Edwards was killed. Two of the other participants Brit named Henry Alexander and James York are dead. The third is Sonny Kyle Livingston, named by Britt in his 1976 sworn statement as the man who put a gun to Edward's head and forced him to jump to his death.

By the time the grand jury convenes, Britt himself has recanted his statement and claims that Livingston was not involved at all. On February 16th, the grand jury decides that a murder was committed by the Ku Klux Klan, but refuses to issue any indictments. Our grand jury did issue a written report to the effect that they had completed their investigation and were not able to return any indictments at that time. For a second time, the Edwards family sought to hold the Ku Klux Klan accountable for their father's murder. for the second time they failed.

It is not the result, however, but the willingness to fight that resonates. I think my dad would be proud of me to say, my daughter did everything that she could to try to find those men who were responsible for my death to bring them to justice. I will keep trying until I can't anymore until the last person is dead. And then I'm done. Although justice may have been denied in the case of Willie Edwards, there has at least been some

recognition of his sacrifice. In 1989, the Civil Rights Memorial was dedicated in Montgomery, Alabama. Willie Edwards' name can be found there, along with that of Vernon Damer, and 38 other men and women who gave up their lives in the struggle for an enduring freedom. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light, and I had to be I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live.

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