Feds close book on ‘horrific’ slay of Black teen Emmett Till

The Justice Department on Monday closed the case of the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, the Black teenager from Chicago who was abducted and tortured after being accused by a white Mississippi woman of making advances on her when he was 14.

Officials from the Justice Department and FBI reportedly met privately with Emmett’s family in Chicago on Monday to inform them they had insufficient new information to prosecute the case. The report from federal officials included a letter that summarized Emmett’s killing as “one of the most horrific examples of the violence routinely inflicted upon Black residents.”

The Rev. Wheeler Parker, Emmett’s cousin who was with the teenager the night he was killed, said at a press conference that he won’t forget Monday’s visit, in which federal investigators offered a summary of their findings, according to ABC News. He was 16 at the time of his cousin’s death.

“Officially, the Emmett Till case has been closed after 66 years,” Parker said. “For 66 years we have suffered pain for his loss, and I suffered tremendously because of the way that they painted him.”

Emmett’s badly beaten body was found in a river three days after he was last seen by relatives. He had also been wrapped in barbed wire, weighed down and shot.

Emmett (photo) was killed after Carolyn Bryant Donham, a 21-year-old shopkeeper, told her husband she’d been whistled at and harassed by the boy. Witness accounts of the incident varied. An all-white jury acquitted Donham’s then-husband,

Roy Bryant, and another white man who’d been charged with killing Emmett.

Months later, those men, who have since died, told a magazine writer that they’d murdered the teen. They could not be tried again due to double jeopardy laws.

The case was reopened after author Timothy Tyson claimed in his 2017 book “The Blood of Emmett Till” that Donham, then 87, confided to him that statements she’d made to federal agents regarding her run-in with Emmett hadn’t been conveyed accurately. She was said to have claimed the teen told her he’d been with “white women before” and grabbed her hand while visiting the market she operated with her husband.

“That part’s not true,” Donham allegedly told Tyson.

But according to a CNN report, Donham told investigators she never recanted her testimony and authorities could not prove otherwise. No recording of Donham’s alleged confession to Tyson was made.

Emmett’s horrific death became a defining moment in the civil rights movement, due in part to his mother’s decision to hold an open-casket funeral so the world could see the violence visited upon her son. Photos of the child’s mutilated corpse drew shock and outrage. Tyson told PBS in 2020 that Donham told him details of the events that sealed Emmett’s fate had become foggy over the years, but that “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”

Another investigation into Emmett’s case was closed in 2007 after three years. His body was exhumed for an autopsy during that process, which also uncovered lost court transcripts. A grand jury declined to indict anyone.