Mississippi Cold Case - Documentary

Documentary

In June and July 2004, while preparing to shoot another documentary in Mississippi, Ridgen stumbled across a sequence that troubled him in an old 16 mm film produced in Mississippi by the CBC in 1964. The sequence showed a body being taken from a river, but it was the narration over these images that stood out:

It was the wrong body. The finding of a negro male was noted and forgotten. The search was not for him. The search was for two white youths and their negro friend.

The film Ridgen was viewing in the CBC archive was called "Summer in Mississippi", and it was about the murders of Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, the three civil rights workers killed by Klansmen in a case that would become known by its FBI codename, "Mississippi Burning". Ridgen immediately wondered why the body was "forgotten" and how it was determined that this person was "the wrong body". Looking into the story more, Ridgen discovered the identity of the body as that of nineteen-year-old African American Charles Eddie Moore, a youth according to articles Ridgen read in the Clarion Ledger newspaper from 1999/2000, Don Whitehead's "Attack on Terror", and the Southern Poverty Law Center's online memorial, killed by the Klan while hitchhiking with his friend and fellow victim Henry Hezekiah Dee on May 2, 1964.

Forty-one years after the murders, just weeks before Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen was found guilty of manslaughter in the murders of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, David Ridgen convinced Thomas Moore to return to Mississippi to seek justice for his brother and Henry Dee. Filmmaker Ridgen and the CBC organized and funded the entire production. Ridgen has documented Moore on trips spanning over 26 months. A short version of the documentary (34 min.,) premiered on February 11, 2007 on CBC. A one hour version aired on MSNBC on June 9, 2007. A full feature length version of the film has been completed.