KKK leader dies in jail

EDGAR Ray Killen, a 1960s Ku Klux Klan leader who was convicted decades later for the slayings of three civil rights workers, has died in prison aged 92.

He was serving three consecutive 20-year terms for manslaughter.

He was convicted for being the ringleader in the 1964 ambush killings of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman.

They had been investigating the burning of a black church near Philadelphia, Mississippi. The deaths were dramatised in the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning.