Sitting now at her dining table, reaching back three decades, Ellie Dahmer can speak calmly of the night the Ku Klux Klan came to kill her husband. Two cars of white-hooded men burst out of the darkness on Jan. 10, 1966, firing guns and hurling flaming jugs of gasoline at her house in Hattiesburg, Miss. "It happened so fast," Ellie recalled, that she turned to her husband Vernon and said, "I believe they've got us this time." He held off the attackers with a shotgun while she led their children out the back. Everyone escaped, but Vernon was badly burned and died the next day.
The private pain of the Dahmer (pronounced DAY-mer) family was also a national tragedy. Vernon, a prosperous businessman, headed the Hattiesburg branch of the N.A.A.C.P., so the Klan targeted him with a "No. 3" and a "No. 4": shorthand for arson and murder. At his funeral, thousands of admirers poured into Shady Grove Baptist Church. President Johnson sent Ellie Dahmer a telegram mourning her husband and calling for a federal investigation.
This was not, however, a case where local lawmen winked and looked the other way. Forrest County, named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general and patron saint of the K.K.K., charged 14 Klansmen with murder and arson. Five were convicted or pleaded guilty and received life sentences. But not Sam Bowers, the Klan's Imperial Wizard for Mississippi, whom prosecutors accused of ordering and planning the murder--and whom Klan experts describe as the most dangerous man ever to don a white hood.
Bowers was tried twice by the state in the 1960s for Dahmer's murder, but by votes of 11 to 1 and 10 to 2 to convict, juries failed to reach the unanimous verdict required to send him to jail. A federal trial also ended in deadlock. Prosecutors say they suspected witness tampering by the Klan but couldn't prove it. Bowers, now 73, is a free man living in Laurel, just 30 miles up the interstate from the Dahmer family.
The Dahmers have worked and prayed for years that the case against Bowers might be reopened. Now, thanks to new evidence and a shift in the state's public attitudes and politics, prosecutors appear ready to do just that--perhaps in the next few weeks. "We're very close to a reprosecution," says Michael Moore, the Mississippi Attorney General. "We're very optimistic we can bring Sam Bowers to justice."
Vernon Dahmer stood out from his neighbors of both races. The son of a mulatto mother and a white father, he was light-skinned enough to eat at whites-only restaurants. But Dahmer chose to live as a black man. He inherited land and in time farmed 400 acres; he also ran a sawmill and grocery store. His success brought respect from some whites, including prominent businessmen, and resentment from others.
Dahmer didn't let hatred infect his generous spirit. When two college kids ran out of money and gas on the highway near his store, Ellie says, he gave them fuel from his pump and lent them $20. The boys, like many people he helped, were white.