Grim Discovery in Mississippi

CIVIL RIGHTS

In 101DEG heat, FBI agents swarmed over an earthen dam on Olen Barrage's Old Jolly Farm, six miles southwest of Philadelphia, Miss. Through the scrub pines and bitterweed, they bulldozed a path to the dam, then brought up a lumbering dragline whose huge bucket shovel began chewing a V-shaped wedge out of the 25-ft.-high levee. Twenty feet down, the shovel uncovered the fully clothed, badly decomposed bodies of three young men, lying side by side in a pocket of red clay. They had been dumped there while the dam was still being built, and in the weeks afterward a local contractor had unknowingly piled earth higher and higher on their primitive graves.

The agents packed the bodies in ice, sealed them in black plastic bags marked Xl, X-2 and X3, and rushed them to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, 80 miles away. There a team of pathologists, using dental and fingerprint charts, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt what everybody had already suspected. These were the bodies of missing Civil Rights Work ers Michael Schwerner, 24, Andrew Goodman, 20, both white, and James Chancy, 21, a Negro.

"They're Just Hiding." Thus ended a six-week search that began after the three men disappeared on June 21, just one day after they had arrived in Mississippi. They had attended a week-long indoctrination course, sponsored by a civil rights coalition called the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. Schwerner, son of a Pelham, N.Y. wigmaker and a graduate of Cornell, had been working for the Congress of Racial Equality in Meridian, Miss., since January, had volunteered to go up to Oxford to instruct Northern students in voter-registration techniques. Chancy, a slender young man from Meridian, had accompanied him. Goodman was the son of a New York City building contractor and a student at Queens College. All were working with the 400 volunteers sent into Mississippi by COFO to help register Negroes.

The three had had time for just one night's sleep in Meridian when they decided to drive over to Longdale to inspect the ruins of a Negro church that had been burned down by segregationists. Returning to Meridian, they were picked up outside Philadelphia by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price for speeding. Price said later he had held them until 10:30 that steamy, moonlit night, then turned them loose.

The three young men never made it back to Meridian. Two days later, the burned wreck of their blue Ford station wagon was found twelve miles northeast of Philadelphia. While an army of FBI men and 400 sailors took up a painstaking ten-county search, many Mississippians preferred to believe that their disappearance was all a hoax. "They could be in Cuba," said Governor Paul Johnson airily. "They're just hiding and trying to cause a lot of bad publicity," pshawed Neshoba Sheriff L. A. Rainey.

Brutally Beaten. Though the FBI declined to admit it, the break apparently came after agents offered to pay $25,000 for inside information. And "somebody," as one bitter Philadelphian put it, "finally went and opened up." The informant, whoever it was, knew what he was talking about. The federal men had to dig only one hole to find the bodies. Schwerner and Goodman had each been shot through the heart with a single .38-caliber bullet. Chaney had three slugs in his body and, according to an unofficial autopsy, had been brutally beaten. "In my 25 years as a pathologist," said Dr. David Spain of New York after examining Chaney's body at his mother's request, "I have never witnessed bones so severely shattered."

Some Mississippians were shocked that the cold-blooded triple murder had not turned out to be a hoax after all. "I just didn't think we had people like that around," said a Jackson high school coach. Others seemed equally shocked that someone had violated the "code" by squealing to the FBI.

The federal agents pushed on in a grim effort to track down the killers, and President Johnson at week's end told a press conference that "substantive results can be expected in a very short time." Near the grave, FBI men sifted every inch of dirt, hunting for such evidence as cigarette butts and shirt buttons, and sent several 20-gallon cans containing scraps and other possible evidence to the Bureau's Washington laboratory for analysis.

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