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What got Dahmer killed, though, was helping blacks register to vote at a time when that was perilous work. In 1960 fewer than 100 of Forrest County's 8,000 voting-age blacks were registered. Dahmer would drive neighbors to the courthouse and watch in frustration as the white registrar found reasons to turn them away. Eventually, Dahmer got the sheriff to sign out to him a poll-tax receipt book, and Dahmer announced over the radio that blacks could register at his grocery. "I said, 'I wouldn't do this if I were you,'" recalls J.C. Fairley, a friend and fellow N.A.A.C.P. activist. "'You're out there by yourself--they can easily get to you.'" And they did, the first day Dahmer went on the air.
After Dahmer was murdered, his widow was pleased at the speedy jailing of five of the killers. But she would not rest until Bowers was convicted. After repeated mistrials, the government seemed to lose its will. But by 1990, the landscape had shifted. Byron de la Beckwith was rearrested and eventually convicted for the 1963 murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Jackson. "We figured if the Evers case could go forward," Ellie says, "we had a good chance of getting ours back on track."
The family persuaded the district attorney to reopen the case in 1991. But he called it "a long shot." Over the decades, key witnesses had died and disappeared. Memories had faded. And prosecutors would have to persuade a jury to send an old man to jail for something that happened long ago.
Ellie Dahmer set out to improve the odds. She pressed the FBI to share previously undisclosed investigative files with local prosecutors. She talked Attorney General Moore into assigning three investigators and a trial prosecutor to help the local D.A. And then her persistence began to produce some lucky breaks.
Two informants approached the family with fresh information about the killing. Meanwhile, county voters elected a new D.A., Lindsey Carter, who was more committed to the case than his predecessor. Two months ago, the state released 132,000 pages of documents from its infamous Sovereignty Commission, a secretive organization that spied on civil rights activists, and prosecutors have been combing those records, in which Dahmer's name appears more than 80 times, for new leads. Last month a state court ordered the Mississippi archives to hand over a 200-page transcript of an oral history Bowers provided in the 1980s that could contain incriminating statements or leads.
Perhaps most important, the chief witness against Bowers in his earlier trials, who disappeared in 1971, was located and arrested in February. Billy Roy Pitts, one of the Klansmen who attacked the Dahmer house, was convicted on federal conspiracy charges. He served four years, but through circumstances that have never been fully explained, he was not sent back to Mississippi to serve his life sentence for murder. Pitts, who had been living in Denham Springs, La., has agreed to testify against Bowers one more time. Pitts has told of a Klan meeting at which Bowers ordered Dahmer killed. Pitts has also said Bowers assured him that "a jury would never convict a white man for killing a n___ in Mississippi."