Moore and Dee Murders
On May 2, 1964, Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee were picked up by KKK members while hitchhiking in Meadville, Mississippi. They were interrogated and tortured in a nearby forest, locked in a trunk, driven across state lines, chained to a Jeep motor and train rails and dropped alive into the Mississippi River.
Moore and Dee’s mangled torsos were discovered on July 12 and 13, 1964 amidst the frantic search for Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, the three civil rights workers who disappeared June 21 in the “Mississippi Burning” case. When it was discovered that the bodies were those of two black men and not those of the civil rights workers, two of whom were white, media interest evaporated and the press moved on. While the FBI investigated the case and arrested two suspects, they were soon released and the case dropped by local authorities, some of whom were complicit in the crime according to FBI and HUAC documents.
Read more about this topic: Mississippi Cold Case
Famous quotes containing the words moore and/or murders:
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—Marianne Moore (1887–1972)
“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)