KKK leader dies in prison

JACKSON, Miss. — Edgar Ray Killen, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who was convicted in the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” slayings of three civil rights workers, has died in prison at the age of 92, the state’s corrections department said Friday.

Killen was serving a 60-year prison sentence for manslaughter when he died Thursday night inside the Mississippi State Penitentiary. An autopsy was pending, but no foul play was suspected, the corrections statement said.

His conviction came 41 years to the day after James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, all in their 20s, were ambushed and killed by Klansmen. The three Freedom Summer workers had been investigating the burning of a black church near Philadelphia, Miss. The slayings shocked the nation, helped spur passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and were dramatized in the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning.”

Killen was 80 when a Neshoba County jury convicted him of three counts of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, despite his assertions that he was innocent of the killings. Killen was the only person ever to face state murder charges in the case.

Long a suspect in the 1964 slayings, Killen had made a livelihood from farming, operating his sawmill and preaching to a small congregation at Smyrna Baptist Church in Union, south of Philadelphia, Miss.

According to FBI files and court transcripts from a 1967 federal conspiracy trial, Killen did most of the planning in the ambush killings of the civil rights workers. According to testimony in the 2005 murder trial, Killen served as an organizer of the Klan in Neshoba County and helped set up a klavern, or local Klan group, in a nearby county.