The Murder of Medgar Evers | The Fanatic | 2

This episode contains descriptions and details that some listeners might find disturbing.

Listener discretion is advised.

It's late on the evening of June 11th, 1963.

In a residential neighborhood in Jackson, Mississippi, Medgar Evers is driving home in a haze of exhaustion.

Even by his standards, it's been a busy week.

Yesterday, he and his fellow activists organized an all-day sit-in at a local Woolworths lunch counter to protest its segregated seating.

It's been almost a decade since the Supreme Court ruled that segregation was unconstitutional, but you wouldn't know it by looking around at Medgar's home state.

He's been out all day again at the headquarters of the NAACP, trying to figure out how to build on the momentum they've gathered.

It was an energetic meeting full of hope.

People were buzzing about President Kennedy's impending speech on civil rights.

But for some reason, Medgar just wasn't feeling it.

Some days, he believes that they're making real progress.

Other days, like today, the whole thing feels impossible, not to mention dangerous for him and his family.

He's always sworn that he'll never leave Mississippi.

But this month, for the first time, he's wavering.

As Medgar pulls into his driveway, he tries to shake it off.

He just needs a good night of sleep.

Things will look brighter in the morning.

Medgar climbs out of his car and walks around to the passenger side door to collect two boxes of leftover NAACP merchandise.

It's mostly t-shirts, all emblazoned with the same logo.

Jim Crow must go.

He turns around, his arms full of boxes, and takes a moment to look at the house.

This is what he's been looking forward to all day, thinking wistfully of his family, curled up in front of the TV together to watch the president's speech.

At last, he's about to see them.

He starts walking towards the door.

Inside, Medgar's wife, Merly, is still awake.

So are their three children, nine-year-old Daryl, eight-year-old Rena, and three-year-old James, who've been waiting up to see their dad.

They all jump up in excitement at the sound of his car pulling into the driveway.

And then, they hear the sound of a gunshot.

The children instinctively dive to the floor at the sound, just like their dad has taught them to.

But Merly stays on her feet.

Trembling, she tells the children to stay where they are and rushes for the door.

It feels like she's moving in slow motion as she opens it and almost trips right over her husband.

Medgar is sprawled face down on the steps leading up to their door, bleeding profusely from a bullet wound in his back.

Merly screams out Medgar's name and looks around frantically, trying to see where the gunfire came from, but there's nobody in sight.

The light glowing from their home makes the night beyond seem darker, the shadows bigger.

Beyond the end of the driveway, all Merly Evers can see is darkness, surrounding them on every side.

From Airship, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal.

By the early 1960s, Medgar Evers was one of the civil rights movement's most prominent leaders.

His upbringing in the Jim Crow South had instilled him with a fierce desire for justice and equality.

And after serving in Europe during World War II, he returned home with a vision for a better America.

Over the next decade and a half, he worked tirelessly to improve the lives of black people in Mississippi.

His energy, his inspirational leadership, and his anti-segregation activism made him a hero to thousands.

But to plenty of others, it made him a target.

To a certain type of person, equality feels like oppression, and a crusader for justice looks like a villain.

Byron De La Beckwith was as driven by hatred as Medgar Evers was by hope.

Byron grew up believing that he was special, descended from a noble lineage that would guarantee him success in life.

He carried himself with what he thought was old-fashioned gentility, and even before he became a full-blown white supremacist, Byron often wished he'd been born in the Confederate era.

In short, Medgar Evers and Byron De La Beckwith were diametric opposites.

Medgar wanted to push America forward into a new era of equality.

Byron wanted to drag it backwards into its violently racist past.

And in the summer of 1963, his regressive rage boiled over into an act of brutality that robbed the civil rights movement of a hero, and began a decades-long quest for justice.

This is episode 2 in a four-part series about the murder of Medgar Evers, The Fanatic.

It's the fall of 1926, nearly 40 years before Medgar Evers is shot outside his home.

The leaves in Northern California are just starting to change.

On a tree-lined street in the small town of Colusa, six-year-old Byron De La Beckwith is awake early.

He watches from his bedroom window as two men in suits approach the front door, looking stern.

His mother emerges and begins arguing with the men.

Byron can't hear the conversation, but he instinctively understands what's happening.

These men are here to take their house.

Ever since Byron's father suddenly got sick last summer, things have been falling apart.

His father was a successful businessman and loved to tell Byron about how he built their house from the ground up brick by brick.

With its gabled roof and huge front porch, it was the envy of everyone who lived on the block.

But now, his father's dead, and all of the family's wealth and luck seems to have been buried alongside him.

It's just Byron and his mother now, and although she's tried to put on a brave face, he's had a sense for a while that something bad is coming.

And here it is.

Over the course of that day, the two men will gather everything of any value inside the house, bagging up the smaller items, attaching labels to the larger ones.

His mother will eventually give up on arguing with the men.

She'll sit perfectly still on the front porch, her eyes glassy, almost catatonic with shock.

By the evening, Byron and his mother will be homeless, and although it will be many years before he fully understands what happened, he'll be left with a deep pervasive sense that something has been taken from him.

That feeling of loss is a jarring adjustment for Byron.

When he was born in 1920, his parents were loaded.

Around that time, Byron De La Beckwith Sr.

received a large inheritance following the death of his father.

The Beckwiths used part of that money to build their dream home in Calusa, a small town 60 miles north of Sacramento.

The chic single-story home signaled the family's wealth to everyone who saw it.

They were well connected in town.

Byron Sr.

ran a number of local businesses and a ranch, and the first few years of Byron's life seemed idyllic.

From an early age, Byron's father loved to regale him with stories of his successful business ventures, while his mother Susie was equally proud of her genteel upbringing on a Mississippi plantation.

Byron was raised to believe that he was special by virtue of his bloodlines and that the world was set up for him to succeed.

But behind the fine clothes and the social graces, the family was hanging on by a thread.

Unbeknownst to anyone else, Byron Sr.

had blown through all of his inheritance and was racking up vast debts, using one loan to pay off another, digging the hole deeper and deeper.

He was also a high-functioning alcoholic, and his health was falling apart rapidly.

In the summer of 1926, he was struck down with pneumonia and became so sick that he had to be admitted to a sanatorium.

He died there soon after, leaving Susie to raise Byron alone.

The loss was devastating, but grief was the least of Susie's worries.

After his death, the true extent of Byron Senior's debts came out.

In addition to numerous personal and business loans, he'd stop paying his bills at local stores, leaving huge tabs to be paid.

In total, he died owing more than $150,000, which would be $2.6 million in today's money.

Now that he's dead, his creditors have come for everything they can get.

Susie and Byron have been allowed to stay in their house for a while, but now it's been foreclosed on to pay the estate's debts, and they're forced to leave.

Susie had already been reeling from her husband's sudden death, but the revelation that he's been lying to her for years, and has left them destitute is too much for her to bear.

Her mental health begins to collapse, and she's in no state to find them a new home in California.

So, Susie packs a suitcase, and takes her son back home with her to Greenwood, Mississippi.

There, they move in with her parents, who still live on their family's sprawling plantation.

Susie is fragile, but thankfully she'll get plenty of help raising her son.

There's an army of servants on the plantation, many of them black.

This is a revelation to Byron, who never saw a black person for his entire childhood in California.

He's bewildered, and at the dinner table one night, he asks where black people come from, and why their skin is a different color.

An older cousin tells him the bad little white boys who ask too many questions get dipped in mud and then hung on a fence to dry.

That's how they became, quote, mud people.

The story is intended as a crass joke, but it terrifies Byron.

After that, he stops playing in the mud, and he mostly keeps his curious thoughts to himself.

But there's one question he just can't stop asking.

Why did they have to leave California?

Suzie's determined to keep the truth from him at all costs.

So she eventually tells him that they lost their fortune in the stock market crash of 1929, just like thousands of other families across the country.

Now, the timing of this doesn't make sense.

They lost their house and moved to Mississippi years before the crash, but Byron's too young to really grasp the details.

The explanation seems to satisfy him, and that's all that matters to Suzie.

More than anything, she wants him to be proud to have his father's name.

She wants him to keep believing that he comes from greatness.

Still, Suzie never recovers emotionally from the shocking implosion of her picture perfect life.

Her own parents both die within her first few years in Greenwood, making her mental state even more fragile.

It's not long before her physical health begins to deteriorate too.

In 1932, she's diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer, and she dies in a sanatorium not long afterward.

At just 12, Byron is an orphan.

Thankfully, he doesn't have to leave the Greenwood house.

Two of his uncles live there too, and they take him in.

They teach him how to hunt, how to fish, and they also begin to shape his ideas about race.

The family idolizes a local politician named James K.

Vardaman, a former Mississippi governor and proud white supremacist.

Vardaman once made an attempt to repeal the 15th Amendment, which gives black people the right to vote.

Another family hero is Senator Theodore G.

Bilbo, who advocates for total racial segregation and argues that any attempt to integrate black people into white society is dangerous.

These are the idols Byron's exposed to as he enters his teenage years, and predictably, he adopts them as his own.

Having grown up being told repeatedly that he's special, that he's superior to other people, embracing white supremacy isn't much of a leap for Byron De La Beckwith.

But however superior he thinks he is, his grades suggest otherwise.

Byron is a poor student, and as a teenager flunks out of multiple private schools and a military academy.

When he finally starts classes at the local public high school, he struggles to fit in.

Part of the problem is that he's two years behind his peers, but he also speaks with a strange, over-exaggerated gentility, as if he's time-traveled from a different era of the South.

His classmates see him as friendly enough, but just a little off.

Byron manages to graduate high school in 1941 when he's 20, and he even enrolls in college.

But it only takes a few months for him to realize that further education just isn't for him.

That December, the bombing of Pearl Harbor finally gives him an alternative path forward.

He joins the US.

Marine Corps and ships out to serve in the Pacific.

The structure of military life suits Byron, and for the first time, he feels that he's part of something.

It's a feeling he'll keep chasing for years to come.

In December of 1943, Byron is severely injured during the Battle of Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands.

This battle is part of the US effort to isolate the Japanese and cut them off from crucial supplies.

As he and his fellow Marines exchange gunfire with the enemy, Byron's gun jams and he's left completely exposed.

There's a moment as he realizes what's happening that he's certain he's about to die.

But instead, he wakes up at the infirmary with a bullet wound in his thigh and a nurse telling him that he's lucky to be alive.

He'll later learn that more than 1,000 US servicemen died in the battle that he escaped from with a relatively minor wound.

Byron spends the next few months recuperating from his injuries doing light duties as a mechanic at a naval base near Memphis, Tennessee.

One day at work, he meets a young woman named Mary Louise Williams, who goes by Willie.

She's recently dropped out of high school and enlists in the waves, women accepted for volunteer emergency service.

Byron is instantly enamored with her, and the pair soon begin courting.

He's never been too confident around girls, but Willie's different.

She seems to understand him, and unlike the kids at school who made fun of him, she appreciates his southern good manners.

Early in 1945, Byron tells Willie that he wants to marry her.

He woos her with stories of his family's palatial home on a Mississippi plantation, and brags about the generational wealth he comes from, omitting the crucial detail that all of that money is gone.

He promises her that he can provide a life of privilege and luxury.

Willie likes the idea of being the wife of a war hero, and Byron's tales of life in the Mississippi Delta are seductive.

But she intends to make him work for it, and so she doesn't say yes to him just yet.

She wants to meet his family first.

Byron isn't discouraged.

He knows that once Willie sees the Greenwood house and all of the land his family owns, she'll be swept off her feet.

Finally, everything feels like it's falling into place for him.

For as long as he can remember, he's been fed stories about how special he is.

His father's fabled wealth, his mother's family plantation, they're all evidence of this.

And the more distance he gets from the Battle of Tarawa, the more convinced Byron is that God spared him that day for a reason.

He knows now that he's destined for great things.

More than that, he's entitled to them.

But when they don't come to him fast enough, his impotent rage will know no bounds.

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It's a fine spring day in 1945 in Greenwood, Mississippi.

From the front of her fiance's car, 23-year-old Mary Louise Williams looks out the window at the rolling green landscape, stretching far off into the distance.

Today, life is good.

World War II is over, and she's going to marry a war hero.

After months and months of proposals, Byron De La Beckwith has finally worn her down.

By now, he's told Willie so much about the grand plantation mansion he grew up in that she can't believe she's finally going to see it.

But when they reach the famous homestead, she's confused.

She steps out of the car to see a dilapidated farmhouse.

It's big and she can tell it was once a beauty, but right now, it's crying out for a coat of paint and a good cleaning.

Behind the building, Willie can see a small area, a flat farmland which looks barren and a row of rundown shacks.

She looks over at 24-year-old Byron expecting some kind of explanation, but he's beaming at her proudly as if nothing is wrong.

Not for the last time, Willie begins to wonder if she's making a huge mistake.

After that awkward first impression, Willie tries to shake off her misgivings.

Maybe she'd been expecting too much, taking Byron's homesick descriptions too literally.

His family are all very kind to him, almost too courteous in fact.

There's a weird disconnect between the family's demeanor and their circumstances.

They have all the heirs and graces of a wealthy dynasty from the bygone era, but none of the money or material assets to back it up.

Willie's not a materialistic person, but something about the whole vibe unnerves her.

It's like they're all living a Confederate era fantasy and she feels obligated to play along.

Still, she marries Byron in September of 1945, shortly after he receives an honorable discharge from the Marines.

And not long after the wedding, Byron's family proves their worth.

His uncle gets him a job as an airline operations manager at Greenwood's local airport.

At first, Willie is delighted by this until she and Byron start talking about the logistics of their move.

He talks about moving into the family home with the rest of his relatives as if it's a foregone conclusion.

After all, it's the only home he's ever known and since he'll be working nearby, why not save money on rent?

Willie's not thrilled by this arrangement.

Byron, visiting Byron's eccentric uncles is one thing.

Living with them is another thing altogether.

But when she discovers that she's pregnant, she feels like she's got no other options.

She grudgingly accepts the situation for now, just until they get on their feet.

Their son is born in September of 1946 and following family tradition, Byron gives the boy his own name.

Christening in Byron De La Beckwith Jr.

They call him Little De La.

Having never learned the truth about his father's downfall, Byron still idolizes his parents.

He remembers their family life in California as idyllic.

They were well connected and respected all around town.

That's what he wants for himself, and so he eventually comes around to Willie's way of thinking.

They need a house of their own.

Byron's job at the airline didn't pay that well, and he's been bouncing between various other jobs for a while.

But he eventually finds solid, steady work as a salesman for a tobacco and candy company, and starts working towards the goal of owning a family home.

By the early 1950s, he's doing well enough that he and Willie can finally buy a house.

It's not as grand as the one he grew up in, but it's theirs.

Byron also makes sure that Willie has the finest clothes and accessories, just like he promised her when they first met.

From the outside, the young couple have got it made, but a lot of people in town aren't sure of what to make of them, especially Byron.

Just like in high school, his ostentatious politeness and old-fashioned manners make him seem a little strange.

He'll often sink into a deep bow when greeting his neighbors on the street, which isn't normal even in the most formal company.

It's off-putting.

But it's a far sight better than the side of Byron most people don't see.

Behind closed doors, Byron's anything but a gentleman.

He has a filthy temper and can turn on a dime, especially when he's been drinking.

A few months after little De La's born, Byron hits Willie for the first time.

Like so many abusers, he apologizes profusely afterwards with tears in his eyes, and Willie forgives him.

But that doesn't stop him doing it again.

So begins a vicious cycle which plays out repeatedly over the next several years, even as the couple seem to be moving up in the world.

Despite having everything a man is supposed to want, Byron feels constantly on edge, somehow dissatisfied, and he takes it out on Willie.

One night, as they're leaving a friend's house after a cookout, Byron waves a cheery goodbye to the neighbors, opens the car door for his wife like the gentleman he is, and then kicks her hard in the shins as she climbs into the car.

To Willie, it all feels like a power play.

Byron knows she won't react, because she values appearances as much as he does.

So she says nothing.

She just sits quietly next to her husband while he drives home.

Willie can tell that her husband is restless.

They're comfortable.

He should be happy.

But for reasons that are beyond Willie, it's not enough for Byron.

And he's looking for someone to blame.

It won't be long before a momentous social change gives him a new target for his frustration.

One that has nothing to do with his wife.

In 1954, the US.

Supreme Court rules that segregation is unconstitutional, essentially making it illegal.

Byron has been a staunch segregationist for years, but this decision propels him to new depths of racism.

He becomes consumed with the sense that his way of life is being threatened and believes it's his patriotic duty to defend it.

He's far from alone in that sentiment.

In response to the Supreme Court decision, an organization called the White Citizens Council is formed in Mississippi, and Byron is a founding member.

The WCC's goal is to mobilize white people against the impending racial integration of schools and other public facilities, and to suppress the black vote and civil rights activism.

It brings together fragmented groups of racists from small towns and big cities across the South, and being around like-minded people only makes their hatred burn brighter.

Byron's always loved things that confirm his belief that he's part of a rarefied group.

The sense of belonging soothes this fragile sense of self-worth.

He's already in organizations like the Sons of Confederate Veterans and Sons of the American Revolution.

But the White Citizens Council is different.

It has a radicalizing effect on him, and he becomes incapable of talking about anything but the threat of desegregation.

He gets reckless with money, giving hundreds of dollars to segregationist political candidates, and paying to get his own WCC literature printed.

He finds the organization intoxicating not only because it validates his twisted beliefs, but because it also gives him access to powerful people, lots of prominent Mississippi businessmen and politicians or members.

Being in the council fosters not just his racism, but also his ego.

He believes he deserves to be heard.

So, he soon begins writing angry letters to local newspapers and politicians, railing against integration.

He writes an open letter to President Eisenhower, which is published in a local Greenwood newspaper.

And it's neither eloquent nor subtle.

It reads, in part, We shall not be integrated and thereby mongrelized.

We shall walk away from the field of honor avenged.

Behind us shall lie the remains of all those responsible for the crime of promoting integration.

This dark and threatening language is mirrored by Byron's escalating violence at home.

On various occasions, Byron burns Willie with a cigarette, knocks her out with the butt of his gun, and breaks her fingers.

He once holds a knife to her throat and threatens to kill her.

His efforts to keep up appearances are faltering, and by now, his abuse is widely known in town.

But although the police have been called several times, he's never investigated or charged with any crime.

After all, many cops are WCC members just like Byron, and they protect their own.

So, if she's going to escape the abuse, Willie will have to do something herself.

She leaves him and takes him back repeatedly over the next couple of years, and is seemingly unable to resist his apologies and his promises to change.

Eventually, however, she gives him an ultimatum.

Either he gets psychological help, or she files for divorce.

So, in late 1962, they drive to Jackson, the state capital, to see a highly recommended psychiatrist.

That doctor diagnoses Byron as schizophrenic with paranoid tendencies.

But whether the diagnosis applies or not, there's no record of Byron receiving any further therapy or medication to address the issue after that.

Instead, his paranoia and sense of persecution just keep getting worse, and his abusive nature remains pretty much unchanged.

So, after yet another violent drunken run-in, Willie finally reaches the end of her rope.

In early 1963, she leaves Byron for good, moves out of the house, and gets an apartment with her now-teenage son.

And, left to his own devices, with no wife or son to boss around and intimidate, Byron's obsession consumes him.

See, by this stage, Byron has set his sights on a new target.

In October of 1962, James Meredith became the first black student to ever enroll at the University of Mississippi.

The integration of Ole Miss represented a huge defeat for segregationists, and Byron hasn't stopped talking about it.

But the target of his rage isn't James Meredith himself.

It's the man who mentored him, Medgar Evers.

By now, Medgar is Mississippi's most prominent civil rights activist, and Byron fixates on him.

He never calls him by name, instead calling him that bad n-word or that head n-word.

Prior to this point, his racist rage has been directed towards black civil rights activists in general, but now, for the first time, he has a single human being in his crosshairs.

To him, Medgar Evers embodies the enemy.

Lately, he's been working as a fertilizer salesman, a job which often takes him a long way out of town.

And when he's on the road, he starts coming up with reasons to travel south towards Jackson, which is 150 miles away from his home in Greenwood.

Whenever a colleague asks why he's going that way, he tells them he's on a hunting trip.

After all, it's the truth, but he's not hunting deer.

In early June, he makes a few trips into the city and begins asking around in Medgar's neighborhood.

He knows the general area he lives in, that's common knowledge.

He just doesn't know the street address.

For a while, he comes up empty.

People in town know that Medgar Evers gets a lot of death threats, and they're not eager to give out his address to a stranger, much less to a white stranger.

But eventually, Byron gets the information he needs.

Now, he just has to decide when to make use of it.

In early June, the news that President Kennedy will be making an address to the nation on civil rights pushes Byron over the edge.

It confirms all of his worst fears about what's happening in America and what he must do in response.

On June 11th, the night of Kennedy's speech, Byron will drive to Jackson, arriving in Medgar Evers' neighborhood in the evening.

He'll park his car at a vacant lot down the street, unload a rifle from the trunk, and hide in a clump of bushes opposite the Evers' home.

And then, he'll wait.

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It's June 12th, 1963, in Jackson, Mississippi.

It's been less than 24 hours since Byron De La Beckwith shot Medgar Evers as he got home from work.

The civil rights leader died at the hospital a short time later.

No one yet knows who's behind the assassination, but mass demonstrations have erupted across the city in response, with angry, grieving protesters clashing with police.

The streets are chaotic, but inside the Pearl Street African Methodist Episcopal Church, it's quiet.

30-year-old Merle Evers stands before a huge crowd who are gathered at a vigil for her husband.

She forces herself to take a deep breath in than a longer one out.

She watches as the reverend introduces her, feeling far away, like she's watching the whole thing from outside her body.

But when the crowd looks to her, a sudden clarity comes over Merle.

She knows what Medgar would say, so clearly that she can almost hear his voice in her ear.

Don't waste the moment.

She steps up to the altar.

She doesn't try to stop the tears from falling down her cheeks, as she says, I come here with a broken heart, but I come because it is my duty.

Nothing can bring Medgar back, but the cause can live on.

We cannot let his death be in vain.

In her speech, Merle Evers calls for collective, unified action, in honor of Medgar and everything he'd sacrificed.

She knows it's already happening on the city streets outside, and she intends to do everything she can to keep that momentum going.

Through the dark haze of shock and grief, that goal is the only path forward she can see.

Four days after Medgar Evers' murder, mourners gather at the Masonic Temple in Jackson for his funeral.

Among them are family members, friends, and a number of prominent civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr.

The building is packed, and people are spilling out onto the pavement outside.

Four thousand mourners have come to pay their respects, and after the service, they join a silent procession from the temple to a local funeral home, trailing Medgar's hearse.

Mississippi won't be his final resting place.

As a World War II veteran, Medgar is entitled to a military burial at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

His friends and fellow activists are all for this.

Not only will it allow Medgar to get the honor he deserves in death, it will also mean that his grave will be just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC., the nation's capital.

At first, Murley is firmly against this.

Medgar had always fought so hard to avoid leaving Mississippi.

This state is his home, and she's certain that he would want to be buried here, in the plot that's already been set aside for him at a local cemetery.

But eventually she relents.

She knows that Medgar deserves every honor available to him.

She's also aware that he's become a beacon of hope to people all across America.

It's only right that he should be laid to rest at the country's political heart.

On June 19th, Medgar Evers is buried at Arlington with more than 2,000 attendees at his graveside service.

Following the burial, Medgar's immediate family members are invited to the White House.

Murly, along with the couple's three children and Medgar's brother Charles, meet with President John F.

Kennedy, who assures them that he's taking a personal interest in the case.

He'll make sure that Medgar's murder is thoroughly investigated.

Back in Jackson, the police already have some solid leads to go on.

On the night of the murder, officers found a rifle in a clump of bushes opposite the Evers house.

An analysis confirms that it had been recently fired, and the bullets matched the type that killed Medgar.

Two days after the crime, a photograph of the murder weapon was published to newspapers nationwide.

That evening, a Mississippi farmer called the Jackson police and said that the gun looked a lot like one he'd recently traded to a fertilizer salesman in Greenwood.

He remembered the guy who bought the gun too because he was such a segregation fanatic.

He talked about little else for their entire interaction.

His name was Byron De La Beckwith.

Thanks to the president's interest in the case, the FBI has also been assisting with the investigation.

Medgar was under semi-regular FBI protection at the time of his death, so the Bureau has a stake in catching the killer.

They get a huge number of tips.

One comes from an informant who claims to have overheard a conversation several weeks ago between some men at a bar during which they discussed killing Medgar.

Some of the men present were leery of doing the actual killing, but there was one man in particular who wasn't.

He said he was willing to do whatever had to be done.

Although the informant didn't know this man's name, the description matches Byron.

The evidence against him is mounting up, but it took a while for the Jackson Police and the FBI to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

Early on, the cops failed to share a few key pieces of information with the FBI, including the story of the farmer who said he'd sold Byron the murder weapon.

Now, it's possible this was all just a simple breakdown in communication or old-fashioned professional rivalry between state and federal law enforcement, with local police wanting to show that they could solve the case on their own.

But a less charitable interpretation is that the cops were deliberately dragging their feet.

Certainly how it looks from the outside, especially to Medgar's friends and family.

Among them is James Meredith, the University of Mississippi law student who was mentored by Medgar.

Shortly after the murder, he issued an emotional statement to the press, saying, if I were charged with finding Medgar Evers' killer, I would look first and last among the ranks of law enforcement in this state.

He later retracts the accusation, but he's not alone in his suspicion.

Plenty of Mississippi police officers are card carrying members of the White Citizens Council, and some are friends with Byron De La Beckwith.

So even if a cop wasn't the one to pull the trigger, it's easy for people to imagine they're not going out of their way to solve the crime.

But eventually, the local and federal teams get their acts together and fall into step, and Byron De La Beckwith becomes their lead suspect.

But if an arrest is to be made, more evidence will be needed.

A single fingerprint was found on the scope of the murder weapon, and the FBI runs it through a centralized national database.

In the early hours of June 22, 11 days after the murder, they get a match.

It's Byron, whose fingerprints are on file thanks to his military service.

It's the proof investigators need it.

Now they just have to locate their suspect.

FBI agents begin searching for Byron within minutes of the fingerprint match being confirmed.

Unfortunately for them, one of his neighbors sees FBI agents swarming his backyard and calls Byron at his company's office to warn him.

Byron's first move is to call his friend Hardy Lott.

Hardy is a city attorney and a former president of the White Citizens Council.

He tells Byron to come over to his house instead of going home.

Then Hardy will let the agents know where he will be.

At Hardy's place, Byron takes a shower and changes into fresh clothes.

He doesn't want to be arrested in sweaty work clothes, after all.

When the FBI agents arrive, he shakes their hands and goes peacefully into custody.

The whole scene is strangely pleasant for everyone involved.

At no point does Byron try to run, even though his neighbor's tip could have given him a head start.

Maybe since the feds are on to him, he figures there's no point.

Or maybe he doesn't think there's anything for him to run from.

Maybe he knows that in the entire history of Mississippi, a white man has never been put on trial for killing a black man.

And maybe he knows that even if he makes it into a courtroom, there's not a snowball's chance in hell that any jury will convict.

From Airship, this is episode two in our series on the murder of Medgar Evers.

On the next episode, the first two trials of Byron De La Beckwith and how an outrageous miscarriage of justice allowed him to walk free for decades.

We use many different sources while preparing this episode.

A few we can recommend are Portrait of a Racist, The Real Life of Byron De La Beckwith by Reed Massengill, Of Long Memory, Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers by Adam Nossiter, and Ghosts of Mississippi, The Murder of Medgar Evers, The Trial of Byron De La Beckwith, and The Haunting of the New South by Mary Ann Vollers.

This episode may contain reenactments or dramatized details, and while in some cases we can't know exactly what happened, all our dramatizations are based on historical research.

If you or someone you know has experienced domestic abuse or intimate partner violence, information and resources are available at nomoredirectory.org.

American Criminal is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz.

Audio Editing by Mohammed Shazi.

Sound Design by Matthew Phillip.

Music by Thrum.

This episode is written and researched by Emma Dipton.

Managing Producer, Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are Joel Callan, William Simpson, and Lindsey Graham.