Murder in Mississippi

THREE YOUNG CIVIL RIGHTS WORKERS
were killed in 1964 in eastern Mississippi in a case made famous by the 1988 film Mississippi Burning. Forty-one years later to the day, former Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of manslaughter in those 1964 slayings. TIME has followed this case since the men disappeared; below is some of the coverage:

They were two young white men and a Negro youth, all civil rights workers, missing in the murky, snake-infested swamps of eastern Mississippi, where the charred shell of their Ford station wagon was found.
From The Grim Roster
Jul. 3, 1964

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.
From Grim Discovery in Mississippi
Aug. 14, 1964

Holstered pistols and blackjacks humped against their hips and red mud clung to their boots as Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price got out of their squad car and walked into the Philadelphia, Miss., courthouse one chill morning last week.
From A Crime Called Conspiracy
Dec. 11, 1964

Among her papers, Queens (N.Y.) College Literature Professor Mary Doyle Curran found a poem written last spring by Andrew Goodman, 20, just before he left for Mississippi, where he and two other civil rights workers were murdered a few weeks later.
From People
Jan. 8, 1965

Mississippi's standards of justice still leave something to be desired. More than a dozen Negroes and civil rights workers have either been murdered or died mysteriously there in the past three years without a single conviction by state courts and, in many cases, without even indictments.
From Act of Savagery
Mar. 10, 1967

Every morning the boys from Bill Gordon's barbershop in Meridian, Miss., staked out a big Confederate flag. Across the street, U.S. District Judge W. Harold Cox and a jury of white Mississippians were hearing charges against 18 of their neighbors named as plotters in the grisly 1964 murders of Civil Rights Workers Michael Schwerner, 24, Andrew Goodman, 20, and James Chaney, 21.
From Reckoning in Meridian
Oct. 27, 1967

Though eight members of the Ku Klux Klan served prison sentences on federal charges of conspiring to deny the civil rights of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, no state charges were ever filed against the killers of the three civil rights workers, who were slain near Philadelphia, Miss., during the Freedom Summer of 1964.
From Living Down the Past
Jul. 3, 1989

The case shocked much of the country and later inspired the 1988 Gene Hackman film Mississippi Burning. Yet neither Killen, called the 'Preacher' by locals, nor other Klansmen ever faced state murder charges. And most, including Killen, beat federal civil rights--violation charges in a 1967 trial in which one member of the all-white jury insisted she could never convict a man of God like the Preacher.
From Long Wait for Justice
By Tim Padgett
Jan. 17, 2005