HATTIESBURG, Miss. Former Ku Klux Klan leader Samuel H. Bowerswas convicted Friday of ordering a 1966 firebombing that killed acivil rights activist.
A jury took two hours to find Bowers, 73, guilty of murder andarson in the slaying of Vernon Dahmer, who prosecutors say was killedfor helping fellow blacks register to vote.
"Oh, this is a happy moment for us," Dahmer's widow, EllieDahmer, said as a handcuffed Bowers was led away to begin serving amandatory life sentence at the state penitentiary at Parchman. "Itis a moment we have been waiting for about 30 years."
It was Bowers' fifth trial for the crime. Four trials duringthe 1960s - at least two of them in front of all-white juries - endedin deadlock.
In a measure of how far Mississippi has come since then, theForrest County Circuit Court jury this time consisted of six whites,five blacks and one Asian. During the 1960s, blacks were preventedfrom registering to vote in Mississippi, and were thereby kept fromserving on juries.
Bowers showed no emotion as the verdict was read, but earlier hesmiled while posing for pictures with members of his defense team.
Defense attorney Travis Buckley said he will appeal. Bowerscould be eligible for parole after 10 years.
State Attorney General Mike Moore, whose office had helpedForrest County prosecutors revive the long-dormant, 32-year-old case,said the verdict "makes me feel very good, makes me feel proud of mystate, proud of the Dahmers, proud of the entire judicial system."
Ellie Dahmer had pressed for years to get the case reopened, andstepped up her efforts after the state of Mississippi in 1994convicted white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith in the 1963 sniperslaying of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Access to long-sealedstate records and old FBI files helped convince prosecutors that theycould gain a conviction.
Ellie Dahmer and other family members hugged as the courtroomemptied.
"These tears that I am shedding, I am shedding for Vernon,because I know he is looking at us today," she said.
Bowers, who ran a business that supplied pinball machines andother amusements, previously served six years in prison for his partin one of the most notorious crimes of the civil rights era, the 1964deaths of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman andMichael Schwerner near Philadelphia, Miss.
Before dawn on Jan. 10, 1966, two carloads of Klansmen arrivedat Dahmer's house, shot it up and tossed gasoline bombs through awindow. Dahmer held the Klansmen at bay with a shotgun while hisfamily fled. His lungs seared by heat and flames, he died in hiswife's arms 12 hours later.
"Vernon Dahmer was a farmer, a businessman, helping people tovote," Assistant District Attorney Robert Helfrich said after theverdict. "He believed in the American dream. He built his own homefrom scratch. He worked hard and he got rewarded - and the rewardthe KKK gave him wasn't good."
Four Klansmen who participated in the raid were found guilty inthe 1960s. The 1968 guilty verdict for one of them was believed tobe the first Klan conviction in the killing of a black man inMississippi.
Prosecutors said Dahmer was killed for offering to let blackspay their poll tax at his grocery store. The state's witnesses,mostly former Klansmen turned FBI informants, said that Bowersordered a "No. 4," Klan code for assassination, and that he laterbragged that "my boys" had carried out his instructions.
According to testimony, the firebombing was planned months aheadof time and included even a "dry run."
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