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Investigators have been tracking down everyone who was in on planning the murder, and prosecutors are threatening to bring charges against any who do not talk. And this time prosecutors expect to get a jury untainted by Klan influence. Three jurors from Bowers' 1968 trial said afterward that during deliberations, all the jurors agreed that he was guilty, yet one kept voting "not guilty" in the secret ballots that decide the verdict. But jurors today seem far less afraid to convict Klan defendants. According to documents quoted by the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, an informant recently told investigators that Bowers has said he is worried about losing this time "because he didn't have the contacts he once had, that a lot of them had died."
Samuel Holloway Bowers is a Klan leader right out of central casting. One of his grandfathers was a wealthy Louisiana planter; another was Eaton J. Bowers, a Mississippi Congressman from 1903 to 1911. But as Imperial Wizard of the Klan in Mississippi, Bowers compiled an unequaled record of murder and mayhem. Klan experts suspect him of orchestrating more than 300 bombings, assaults and arsons, plus nine murders. He served six years in prison for conspiracy in connection with the deaths of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, the civil rights workers whose killings were depicted in the movie Mississippi Burning.
Bowers has lived for years in a black neighborhood on the poor side of the railroad tracks in Laurel. He runs a pinball and vending-machine company called Sambo Amusement. He loves NASCAR racing and cars in general and drives two classic baby-blue Ford Falcons. He attends the mainstream Hillcrest Baptist Church, where he has taught Sunday school. He gives generously to the poor, including a family who recently asked the church for children's clothing. "What you see on the news and what you see in the church are totally different," says former Hillcrest pastor Max Parker. But Bowers has shown no sign of renouncing racist violence. He describes proponents of racial integration as heretics and said in a 1994 interview, "When a priest sees a heretic, he can do only one thing: he eliminates him."
As the case has heated up, Bowers has drawn fresh attention from journalists--and has not taken gracefully to it. One CBS-TV reporter says Bowers took a swing at him when he tried to ask him a question. And Bowers tried to ram a TIME photographer with his car. Bowers has declined to comment publicly about the prospect of a retrial, and he did not return telephone calls asking about the Dahmer case or his clashes with journalists.
Lawrence Arrington, the lawyer who defended Bowers in the previous Dahmer trials, hopes to do so again. He is 81 and lives in a Hattiesburg retirement home, but the former Forrest County D.A. is confident that he could make all the difference. "If I'm in the case, there's a 2-to-1 chance of winning," he says. "Without me, it's about even."