JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – They are among the signature horrors of the civil rights era.
A Black mother of 10 gunned down by a carful of White men amid racial unrest in Jacksonville in 1964. Two Black Louisiana deputies hunted like prey a year later by Klan members furious the force had crossed the color line. A Black man who so enraged the local sheriff by venturing into the “White section” of the Mississippi jail in 1958 that the sheriff beat him to death with a blackjack.
In each case, justice was whitewashed.
Just one of the four men targeting the Florida mother was prosecuted, and a jury reduced his conviction. The state dropped charges against the accused hunter of deputies. An all-White jury took less than 30 minutes to acquit the Mississippi sheriff.
Decades later, all three cases have been investigated anew under a federal push to right the nation’s civil rights era wrongs. The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, enacted in 2008 and funded with $200 million since, empowers the FBI and Justice Department to reopen cold cases and pursue new federal charges.
Yet the fresh investigations in Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi netted no new charges.
That is not unique, a Bloomberg Law review found. Since the Till Act went into effect, the Justice Department has closed investigations in more than 120 cases. None brought new federal charges, though the DOJ did secure two convictions not long before the Till Act.
In each case, federal officials detailed the hurdles to prosecution. Witnesses and suspects had died. Evidence was lost. Weak civil rights era laws could not be overcome.
The records of those closed cases show that the FBI and DOJ knocked on long-closed doors, conducted thousands of interviews and chased mountains of aged case files. The lack of prosecution, those records reveal, is a testament to the difficulty in resurrecting cases from an era in which racially motivated killings were sometimes, quite literally, swept under the rug.
In an interview with Bloomberg Law, Ron Reed, the FBI’s Civil Rights Unit chief, acknowledged the challenges to bringing new charges. Reed said the bureau aggressively chases every lead.
“When there is a viable case, you best believe we’ll do anything we can to bring the subject to justice and closure to the families,” Reed said. “And it doesn’t matter how long ago it happened.”
A Killing in Jacksonville
Few murders received as much scrutiny as the killing of Johnnie Mae Chappell, 35, on March 23, 1964, in Jacksonville.
In all, eight separate investigations—six by local authorities and state attorneys, and two by the feds—peeled back every layer of events on the evening she was killed.
That March, Jacksonville’s Black residents were protesting being barred from Whites-only hotels and restaurants. As they did, the city’s streets erupted in racial violence. Police arrested 140 people amid the disturbances, all of them Black.
Chappell, a mother of 10 who worked as a midwife, was not involved in the demonstrations. As violence smoldered elsewhere, she walked to a local food mart to get ice cream for her children. After returning home, she realized she lost her billfold, so began retracing her steps with two neighbors.
As she did, four men—J.W. Rich, Elmer Kato, Wayne Chessman and James Davis—were heading their way. Earlier that night, they had been drinking beer at a restaurant before driving around the city.
Suddenly Rich, then 21, blurted out: “Let’s get a n___.”
They drove to a Black neighborhood and saw three figures—Chappell and her neighbors—walking along New Kings Road. Rich pointed his gun out the window and fired. Chappell fell to the pavement, dead of a gunshot wound to the abdomen.
Her youngest son, Shelton Chappell, was 4 months old.
“We feel this pain like it happened today, not yesterday, but today,” he told Bloomberg Law. “It haunts me every day.”
After the shooting, the men drove to the restaurant owner’s house to dispose of the gun.
While some detectives pressed to root out the truth, the chief detective told colleagues not to “rock this boat.” Then he hid a police report under the floor mat in his office, Justice records show. Later, colleagues unearthed it.
In the end, only Rich was prosecuted for murder. His lawyer was a Florida senator. The state attorney dismissed charges against the other three men, and the restaurant owner was never charged. When Rich went to trial, the all-White jury downgraded his charge to manslaughter. He went to prison for three years.
Paula Johnson, a professor of law at Syracuse University and director of its Cold Case Justice Initiative, said what happened in the Chappell case was typical of the times. Johnson has explored the case at length, along with other unresolved killings.
“There wasn’t a real commitment to solving the cases,” Johnson said in an interview.
“That’s why we’re still talking about racially motivated killings of the civil rights era, because they didn’t get the full treatment they should have gotten,” she said. “As each year and each decade goes by, that becomes more and more difficult.”
Eight Investigations, No Charges
The state of Florida launched six separate investigations into the Chappell murder between 1964 and 2012. Federal authorities examined Chappell’s death in 2002 and again in 2008, and formally closed the file in 2014.
During each investigation, the other three passengers riding with Rich were still alive. But none of the new inquiries led to charges against the men, who all died in recent years. The restaurant owner is also dead.
Among the roadblocks to prosecution: The state of Florida destroyed the trial transcripts from the Rich case in 1996-97, making it daunting for authorities to reconstruct evidence. Though the gun was found, it later disappeared from evidence. The other three men were said to have been granted immunity in 1964, but those agreements were lost.
The statute of limitations precluded federal authorities from bringing other civil rights charges against the men, and speedy trial rules were yet another roadblock.
Lee Cody, a retired Jacksonville detective, worked on the case at the start. He pursued it aggressively until he was removed from the investigation. For decades he has pushed for justice for Chappell and her family.
“This woman was gunned down only because her skin was Black,” Cody said in an interview. “This is not a cold case. This is a case of simple obstruction of justice at the time.”
The family brought a lawsuit, but it failed to gain traction.
“It was a case that just cried out for justice,” said Robert F. Spohrer, the family’s attorney.
“It was incredibly frustrating for the family to realize their mother had been shot and killed in cold blood and the suspects had been in custody, and yet there was really no justice that occurred.”
Chilling Reminder
The murder’s consequences rippled.
After their mother died, the 10 children were under the care of their father, who worked as a cement finisher by day and a gas attendant at night, his son said. Authorities then moved the children to juvenile shelters, breaking up the family for years.
Shelton Chappell, 60, said he didn’t reconnect with all his siblings until he was in his early 30s. His mother’s murder “ripped everything from us,” he said.
“I owe my mother so much, I owe her my life,” Chappell said.
For some, recent racially motivated killings in the city have stirred chilling memories. In August, a young White man killed three Black residents. Even before the shootings, the man had pulled into the parking lot of a historically Black university and began putting on tactical gear. When a campus officer approached, he sped off.
For Syracuse’s Johnson, the case is starkly reminiscent of the killing 59 years earlier, when White men targeted their victim based on race.
“It simply raised the hair on my neck,” Johnson said. “My thoughts immediately went to Mrs. Chappell. This is why Johnnie Mae Chappell’s name needs to be remembered.”
The current culture of racial violence in the US shows that the cold cases “are not relics of the past,” Johnson said, and are a vivid reminder of why killings like Chappell’s should continue to be investigated.
Targeting Black Deputies
In Varnado, Louisiana in 1965, racial tensions brewed just as they had in Jacksonville. Against that backdrop a year earlier, David Creed Rogers and Oneal Moore had become the first two Black deputies in Washington Parish.
Their hiring enraged the KKK. At the time, Washington Parish boasted the highest per capita KKK membership in the US, Justice reports show.
“The last thing the bad guys—the Klan—wanted was Black police officers,” said the FBI’s Reed.
Late on June 2, 1965, Rogers and Moore were investigating a brush fire when they noticed a Chevy pickup with a Confederate flag trailing them. As the truck careened past them, a passenger fired his hunting rifle into their squad car. Moore was killed instantly, and Rogers was blinded in his right eye.
The FBI launched a massive investigation. The New Orleans office alone deployed 71 agents, many of whom worked overtime for no extra pay. In all, agents interviewed some 1,400 people and generated 2,000 reports.
Yet in a close-knit community, getting people to talk was difficult. Many feared Klan retaliation, FBI reports show.
One man was charged with Moore’s murder: Klan member Ernest Rayford “Ray” McElveen. When he was picked up in Mississippi, authorities found a noose, guns and ammunition. Klan members helped raise his $25,000 bond, and he was released nine days later.
The state ultimately dropped the charge, citing a lack of evidence. The murder weapon was never found, and witnesses were scarce or uncooperative. Over the years, other potential suspects surfaced, but agents could never solve the murder.
McElveen died in 2003. Rogers, the blinded deputy who stayed on the force and retired as a captain in 1988, died in 2007.
“Despite the enormous amount of resources that the FBI has devoted to solving this case, the FBI is no closer to solving it today than they were fifty years ago,” DOJ’s Civil Rights Division wrote in 2016, formally closing the matter. “Many of the subjects and witnesses have passed away, taking their secrets with them.”
Reed said the case speaks to the challenges of unlocking long unsolved crimes – but that the bureau remains committed to pursuing civil rights era hate crimes.
“There’s not a time limit on that,” he said.
All-White Jury
In Yalobusha County, Mississippi, Sheriff James Gray “Buster” Treloar had campaigned on a platform of prohibition. So it was little surprise that he arrested Woodrow Wilson Daniels, an area bootlegger, in June 1958 and put him in the local jail.
Yet when the sheriff saw that Daniels had wandered into the “White section” of the jail, he ordered him to move back to his cell. When Daniels refused, the sheriff severely beat him with a blackjack, a leather-covered club with a heavy head, Justice reports show.
Released from jail a day later, Daniels sought medical treatment for head injuries. He died little more than a week later.
On July 29, 1958, the sheriff was indicted for manslaughter.
His case was heard by Judge Curtis M. Swango, who also presided over the trial of the killing of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old bludgeoned to death in Mississippi by White men after the wife of one alleged the Black youth had whistled at her. Till’s savagely beaten body was found days later in the Tallahatchie River. An all-White jury acquitted the killers. At his funeral, Till’s mother insisted that his casket be open, so the world could see “what they did to my baby.”
A new investigation into the Till case, brought under the act that bears his name, was closed without charges in December 2021.
In the Mississippi jail beating case, Swango presided as several inmates testified the sheriff pounded Daniels’ head with the club. The sheriff admitted hitting Daniels, but said it wasn’t in the head and that he was simply reacting to a contentious inmate. He suggested Daniels was drunk and banged his head when he fell.
When the all-White jury cleared him, Treloar winked at his wife and declared: “Now, by God, I can get back to rounding up bootleggers and n___.” He died in 2006.
When the FBI reopened the case in 2008, it said the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation and Mississippi Attorney General’s Office had no records.
With the sheriff and key witnesses dead, the case was closed, joining other federal reviews shuttered without charges as investigators chase old cases like ghosts.
In examining the deaths, the Justice Department must look back at the statutes in effect at the time—yet federal hate crime laws weren’t enacted until 1968.
A Justice spokesperson called the civil rights era murders “some of the most heinous crimes in our country’s history.” Despite the barriers to prosecution, “the department is determined to carefully examine these cases and to bring justice whenever possible,” the spokesperson added.
“Even with our best efforts, investigations into historic cases are exceptionally difficult, and rarely will justice be reached inside of a courtroom,” said the US Attorney General’s report to Congress on the Till Act in September 2022.
Costs and Cases
The measure, introduced in Congress in 2007 and signed into law a year later by President George W. Bush, ordered a “well-funded effort to investigate and prosecute racially motivated murders.”
“Men and women disappeared never to be heard from again. People were lynched and left hanging,” said the late Georgia Rep. John Lewis, who introduced the law. “These are acts that must be answered by our society.”
Congress set aside $13.5 million annually for the effort—$10 million a year for the DOJ to pursue unsolved homicides, and another $3.5 million for grants and technical assistance to state and local agencies.
Under that allotment, the government has earmarked more than $200 million thus far under the Till Act, Bloomberg Law found. Nationwide, 88 federal prosecutors have pursued cold cases.
In its report to Congress, the US attorney general cited two successful modern civil rights era federal prosecutions and three at the state level. The report said the Justice Department had referred 10 cases to state authorities. A new report released to Bloomberg Law in January said the Justice Department referred an 11th matter to state authorities, involving a 1970 killing in North Carolina.
The two federal investigations were launched prior to passage of the Till Act. In each case, the DOJ secured life terms for racially motivated killings in Mississippi. One state conviction came after the Till Act, when federal authorities helped Alabama secure a 2010 misdemeanor manslaughter plea and six-month prison term for a 1965 killing.
In 121 other cases involving 130 victims in which investigations have concluded since the Till Act, Bloomberg Law found in a review of the cold case closeout memos, the FBI and DOJ closed the inquiries without new charges. The DOJ lists slightly higher totals, with 125 resolved cases and 135 victims, possibly because closeout memos are not yet posted in some cases.
In 2022, PBS Frontline, working with Northeastern University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, focused a lens on the killings of the era and the figures lost to racism.
To Reed, an FBI supervisory special agent, success in decades-old murders should not be measured by the number of prosecutions. Instead, he said, the standard is if agents from the bureau’s 56 field offices launched thorough investigations. A key part of the process is meeting with families, showing them the government has not forgotten.
“You have to manage expectations,” he said. “Even though the vast majority of cases are not prosecuted, it goes back to us being able to provide closure to the family.”
Reed recalls one case where agents sat down with the family to tell them no new charges were forthcoming. One family member darted from the room in anger, he said. Others sat down to hear what the FBI had discovered.
“You have to just apologize and sit and take whatever the family wants to dish out,” he said, be it praise or scorn.
The initial Till Act empowered the FBI and DOJ to investigate unsolved civil rights killings through the 1960s. When Congress reauthorized the Act a decade later, it pushed the cold case timeline to the 1970s.
“That opens up all new possibilities,” Reed said.
Syracuse’s Johnson says success can mean different things to different people, and that “correcting the historical record can be justice” for many survivors.
“It’s disappointing that more of the cases didn’t lead to actual prosecutions, but in some ways that’s the nature of cold cases,” Johnson said. “The families are seeking closure. The families still want that and deserve that.”
Tip line: The DOJ Civil Rights Division encourages those with information about cold cases to reach out at: Coldcase.Civilrights@usdoj.gov
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