Suicide Mazey and the Year of the Long Hot Summer

Suicide sees an opportunity, a sight-seeing flight over the flatwoods, a startling find, and Suicide secures his place in local folklore.

Nineteen sixty-four was the year of the Long, Hot Summer. The Democrats were in the process of totally botching the Viet Nam War, and public opinion was beginning to turn against it, which would lead to massive protest a few years later – but not quite yet. The Civil Rights cauldron, bubbling for years, finally boiled over. Protests and riots tore through the cities of the Northeast, Midwest and Pacific coast. Night after night, looters smashed store windows and made off with merchandise, turned over cars and set entire blocks of major American cities ablaze.  Scores of people were killed.  The talking heads on the nightly news gave the events perfunctory mention, and then turned their spotlight on the South.

In Laurel, Mississippi, a massive Klan rally had attracted a crowd of about 18 people, but the real news was from the Meridian, Mississippi area where three Civil Rights workers on a voter registration effort were missing.  Their burnt-out car was discovered, but the three men were nowhere to be found.  Forget that Newark, NJ was burning and scores of people were dead.

An army of federal agents from the FBI, CIA, ATF, NCSI, NPS, Federal Marshal Service, Secret Service and US Department of Agriculture flooded into the state and they, along with hundreds of sailors from Meridian Naval Air Station, beat the bushes looking for the bodies or, at least, a clue.  They literally beat the bushes:  They formed lines abreast and, armed with sticks, walked through the woods, parting the underbrush – each person searching for his 15 minutes of glory.

And Suicide saw an opportunity.

He reported to the local sheriff that, while on an, uh, sight-seeing -- yes that was it, sight-seeing -- flight over the flatwoods, he had spied, in the yard of an abandoned house, what appeared to be a – gasp, pause – grave! He led the sheriff to the site.  Sure enough, there was a mound of freshly turned earth about eight feet long and three feet wide. The sheriff cordoned the area with crime-scene tape, posted a guard and radioed the federal authorities.

INTERMISSION

Now that I have built tension to a fever pitch, we will pause for an intermission.

During the intermission, I will regale you with a joke that was making the rounds about the time of these happenings.  Now, this is the kind of joke 13-year old boys eagerly repeated, a past-time I greatly enjoyed.  But now that I am a Baptist, and no longer use strong language, I will “dash-out” the offensive words, as writers did back when the world was sane.  Now-a-days, they just let ‘er rip, strewing their writings with language that, even today, normal people would never use in polite conversation, and if my mother had heard me using, would have whipped me with a forsythia switch, cut from the shrub that grew under my bedroom window. (How I hated that bush!)

Hers it goes:

The first day of school, the fifth grade students filed into their classroom and saw this message written on the chalk board:  “The teacher is a b----!  The teacher calmly erased it and got on with the lesson. The same thing happened, day after day, until Friday arrived and the teacher had had enough.

“Class,” she announced, I am tired of this nasty message being written on the chalk board every day.  I am going to give the guilty person one chance to make amends without getting into trouble. If he doesn’t and I find out who it is – and I will – I will take him to the principal! (My note:  Being taken to the principal was the ultimate punishment, for he was eager to use the paddle that hung on the wall behind his desk, and the offence would be entered on your PERMANENT RECORD and your life would be ruined.  You could never be admitted to college or get a decent job.  You would spend your adulthood digging ditches or selling snowballs from a booth in a traveling carnival.)

Continuing the story: The teachers said, “Everyone, including myself, will close his eyes and put his head on his desk and the guilty person will come to the front of the room and erase this filthy message and write an apology.  He will then return to his desk.  We will all look up, read his apology, not know who it is, and this episode will be forgotten. (Note:  I refuse to use the plural pronoun “their” for a singular person.  I was taught in elementary school to use the “royal he” when referring to a person of unstated gender, and I continue to do so.  I am old-school and not politically correct.)

Everyone did as the teacher instructed, and the class heard a chair being moved back, footsteps, proceeding down the aisle, the scuff of an eraser on the board and the scratch of chalk writing out an apology (they assumed); then the sound of footsteps returning up the aisle, a chair being pulled back from a desk and the “plunk” of someone taking his seat.

In eager anticipation, everyone looked up, to see this written on the board:  F---you, all you b--------s, the Phantom strikes again!

End of joke.  We now return to our story.

Federal authorities flocked to the alleged crime scene, and, with the sweet perfume of promotions in their nostrils, called their bosses, and so it went up the line until the assistant director, visualizing his own directorship, did the only logical thing.  He called the press. Now an army of reporters, each with visions of Pulitzers dancing through his head, descended on the abandoned farm-house deep in the wilds of the Kemper County flatwoods.

Then an agent made a startling discovery.   There, among a pile of fallen chimney bricks, he spied a misshapen gray object.  He picked it up and, on closer examination, determined it to be – OH MY GOSH – a deformed .45 caliber bullet!  It must have hit a brick.  This had to be it – the break they had been looking for:  a spent .45 bullet by a grave in the middle of nowhere.  Oh, blessed promotion!

“Get to it, boys,” he ordered the grave-digger hired for the occasion. And they did – eagerly, as the dirt flew and cameramen pulled out their light meters, adjusted their f-stops and focused in on the scene. Now, in these pre-digital days, everything had to be physically done – film developed in a darkroom, news stories typed on an actual typewriter, and both physically delivered to the studio for editing and transmission to an eager audience.  The boys in the darkroom carefully measured out their chemicals, and the currier warmed up his airplane engine at Key Field in Meridian.

Tension hung as heavy as the humidity on this languid Mississippi summer afternoon. It was something the world would not experience again until Geraldo opened Al Capone’s long-forgotten, but newly discovered, safe on national TV!

The hole got deeper and deeper and silence reigned as everyone waited in eager, yet reverent, anticipation, until the grave digger hit undisturbed clay and one announced, “That’s it, boss, ain’t nothin’ here.” A collective disappointed sigh escaped from the assembled lungs, and hopes and dreams of promotions, bonuses and Pulitzer Prizes evaporated like the morning midst – until the grave digger said, “Look, there’s somethin’ in that last shovelful, and reached down and retrieved a red object – a Prince Albert Tobacco can – and handed it to the agent in charge.

This must be it, a clue! Nobody would dig such a hole to bury a tobacco can without a reason, he thought, as he opened the can with trembling hands and reporters put pens to yellow pads and camera-men zoomed in.  As he opened the can, and – what was that strange smell?  Tobacco was to be expected, but there was a medicinal, kind of minty, scent, with an undertone of – what? Coca-Cola?

He looked inside, and there it was:  a folded piece of paper.  Oh, my gosh, this had to be it!  Someone was afraid to talk, and this was his way of leaving a clue.  He eagerly unfolded it, as the cameramen focused – oh, so carefully – for the close-up of a lifetime, and read to the hushed and anticipating crowd: “F--- all you b-------.  The Phantom strikes again!”

There was no joy in Mudville, for Mighty Casey had struck out. The “Hindenburg” had crashed and burned – right here in front of their eyes.  “Oh, the humanity, the humanity!”

Federal agents never discovered the identity of the prankster, but residents no longer brushed Suicide aside with a “Get off the sidewalk, Johnny, you are in the way.” Now it was, with a tip of the hat, “Come right on by, Mr. Mazey.  How are you this fine morning?”

Epilogue

The case was finally solved with a snitch with a guilty conscience directed agents to a pond dam in Neshoba County, where the three bodies were unearthed. The FBI arrested 18 men in October of 1964, but state prosecutors refused to try the case, claiming lack of evidence.  In 1967, seven men were convicted on federal conspiracy charges and given sentences of three to ten years, but none served more than six.  No one was tried on the charge of murder. On Jan 7, 2005, four decades after the crime, Edgar Ray Killen, then 80, was charged with three counts of murder.  He was convicted of three counts of manslaughter, a lesser charge.  He received the maximum sentence of 60 years in prison.  The grand jury declined to call for the arrest of the seven other living members of the original group of 18 suspects arrested in 1967.