The Murder of Medgar Evers | The Truth | 4

It's just after 1 a.m.

on June 12th, 1963.

Inside the emergency department at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, three doctors are fighting desperately to save Medgar Evers' life.

Medgar is unconscious, but not at peace.

He's thrashing on the gurney, his pulse weak and his breathing labored.

Chief Surgical Resident, Dr.

Martin Dalton, has no idea who Medgar Evers is, but that's because he doesn't know who anybody is when they're on the table.

That's part of the job.

You have to depersonalize it.

All he knows is that this man was brought in six minutes ago with a single gunshot wound to the back.

The bullet ripped all the way through his torso, leaving an exit wound in his chest.

It's a miracle he's still alive, given how much blood he's lost.

They only have minutes to save him.

Martin performs a thoracotomy, making an incision between Medgar's ribs and opening up his chest cavity.

As soon as he gets a look inside, his heart sinks.

The damage to the right lung is horrific, a blast impact with penetrating bone fragments.

Martin and his residents try to clamp the bleeding from the lung.

For a moment, it seems to have worked.

The flow of blood slows down.

But then, Medgar goes into cardiac arrest.

The doctors move quickly and try to shock his heart back into a normal rhythm.

They try again and again, but it's no good.

The blood loss is too extensive, the wounds too devastating.

At last, Martin shakes his head, signals to the two residents to stop.

He looks over to the clock on the wall and calls it.

Time of death, 1:14 a.m.

In a few minutes, Martin will find Medgar's next of kin to tell them the news.

He'll start with the man who brought him in, his neighbor, Houston Wells.

It'll be Houston who makes the call to Medgar's family.

Ten minutes away on Gines Street, Merly Evers is surrounded by friends.

They're trying to comfort her, but she's inconsolable.

Even before she gets the phone call from the hospital, she knows in her bones that her husband is gone.

And when that awful suspicion is confirmed, she'll only have one clear thought.

Whoever did this, I'm going to make them pay.

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

Less than a year after Byron De La Beckwith shot black civil rights leader Medgar Evers in cold blood, he was a free man.

Though he hadn't been acquitted, a pair of mistrials was enough for the court to throw up its hands and let him go.

Medgar's loved ones were left in an agonizing state of limbo.

Meanwhile, the lack of an acquittal ended up working in Byron's favor, burnishing his credentials as a white supremacist hero to members of the Ku Klux Klan.

For a while after his release, he rode high on the glory of what he'd done, relishing the feeling of being admired in the way he'd always wanted.

And yet, it wasn't long before that feeling curdled.

Desperate as ever to blame anyone but himself for his life's disappointments, he found a new scapegoat to rail against and a new inspirational figure to target.

Byron's involvement with the KKK and his increasingly radical beliefs kept him on the FBI's radar for years.

But the murder case against him seemed dead in the water.

Still, Medgar's widow Merle Evers never gave up on her belief that one day justice would be served.

As the years passed, she often thought of a quote from Medgar's friend Martin Luther King.

Just five days before his own assassination in 1968, King gave a speech in which he famously said the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Merle took comfort in that thought, in the idea that this was all part of a longer road.

She couldn't see the end of it just yet, but she had hope that one day she would.

This is episode four in our four-part series on the murder of Medgar Evers, The Truth.

It's the fall of 1964 in Greenwood, Mississippi, a little over a year since Medgar Evers was murdered.

His killer, 43-year-old Byron De La Beckwith, strides out of the Leflore County Jail, his face a mask of anger.

Behind him is his 19-year-old son, Byron Jr., who's avoiding eye contact with his dad.

As they walk down the street towards their car, Byron Jr.

tries to explain himself.

The whole thing sounds worse than it is, he says.

He and his friends didn't slaughter the pig for fun, they just wanted to throw a hog roast and figured the farmer wouldn't miss one out of hundreds of pigs.

Turns out they were wrong about that.

After a while, Jr.

can tell that his dad's not really listening.

He's looking into the middle distance, his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides.

Byron Jr.

knows that his father's capable of violence, but he's not scared of him like he used to be.

When he was a kid, they called him Little De La, but he's taller than his dad now and heavier too.

If it comes to it, Jr.

could take his dad.

Still, the tension's uncomfortable.

When they get to the car, Byron finally cracks.

He grabs Jr.

by the collar and looks him dead in the eye.

Son, he says, a snarl in his voice, if you're gonna kill something, kill something important.

A year ago, Byron De La Beckwith had lain and weighed in the bushes before killing Medgar Evers.

As much as Byron hated Medgar, he knew that he was important.

He understood what he represented and what his death would mean.

In his twisted mind, that made Medgar worth killing.

And the fact that he'd gone on punish for the murder was hugely validating to Byron, a vindication of his most bigoted and extremist tenets.

So as soon as he was free, he started doubling down on those beliefs.

The first order of business had been to finally join the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

Byron had become a hero to the KKK for killing Medgar, and they were eager to have him on board as soon as possible.

Within a few weeks of his release from jail, Byron was formally initiated by a robed Klansman, and pledged an oath of allegiance to the infamous white supremacist hate group.

The Mississippi chapter of the KKK was led by a man named Sam Bowers, who believed that a race war was imminent in America, and encouraged Klansmen to arm themselves accordingly.

Byron was obviously thrilled by this.

For years, he'd felt like a lone warrior, fighting back against the threat of integration.

Now, he'd finally found his crowd.

In his mind, he'd won.

But although Byron had dealt a huge blow to the civil rights movement when he killed Medgar, the movement marched on.

In fact, the pain of Medgar's death had only galvanized activists nationwide, and increased the urgency for change.

On July 2nd of 1964, just over a year after Medgar's assassination, President Lyndon B.

Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law.

The bill had been a passion project of Johnson's late predecessor John F.

Kennedy, whose speech on civil rights had enraged Byron the night of the murder.

Now, this bill was a cornerstone of Kennedy's legacy, formally outlawing discrimination on the grounds of race.

Around the same time, the Freedom Summer Project was launched in Mississippi.

This was a huge campaign to register as many voters as possible in historically disenfranchised black communities, and to draw public attention to voter suppression tactics.

Volunteers poured into the state from all across the country, and by the end of the summer, they had helped 17,000 black Mississippians register to vote.

The activists faced violence and intimidation from the KKK and local law enforcement.

But this actually backfired.

Stories about freedom summer volunteers being beaten, intimidated and falsely arrested began to spread far beyond Mississippi, drawing national attention and sympathy for the movement.

Of course, Byron had no sense that he was on the wrong side of history.

He was the perennial victim, the man whose God-given privileges were under threat from outside agitators.

With every victory the civil rights movement chalked up, his rage deepened.

He seemed totally incapable of seeing just how lucky he was.

For one thing, he'd gotten away with murder.

And he's still at his family.

His wife and son had moved back in with him after his release from prison.

But things were not perfect on the home front.

In the fall of 1964, 19-year-old Byron Jr.

began acting out.

Byron got a call from the sheriff's department to tell them that his son was in custody.

He'd been arrested for a crime that sounded pretty sinister on its face.

He'd stolen a pig from a local farm and slaughtered it.

When Byron went to pick his son up and pay his bond, Byron Jr.

tried to explain himself.

This wasn't some creepy satanic ritual.

He and his buddies just wanted to have a hog roast.

Byron was furious, but not because his son had killed a living creature or stolen another man's property.

He was angry because to him, his son's crime was petty.

It had no dignity to it, no gravitas.

Next time, he told Byron Jr., kill something important.

That's Byron's obsession of late, doing something important, being somebody important.

He desperately wants to be respected and admired, and because it's an open secret within the Mississippi KKK that he killed Medgar Evers, he gets his wish in those circles.

But even within the Klan, Byron's limitations are painfully obvious.

When he's invited to speak at senior meetings, he always seems nervous and unprepared, fumbling his words.

His speeches are rambling, and people notice that he doesn't have much to talk about besides himself.

Despite his wild ambitions, Byron just doesn't carry himself like a leader.

Maybe that's part of the reason he so deeply resents men like Medgar Evers and JFK, genuine heroes who inspire the people around them and make it look effortless.

Byron, on the other hand, he just doesn't have what it takes.

It's not just the Klansmen who are seeing through Byron now, though.

Ever since Byron's two trials, his wife Willie has been plagued by doubt, torn between the knowledge that he almost certainly did kill Medgar Evers and her desperate wish that he hadn't.

During their many drunken arguments, she often brings up the murder, asking, did you kill him?

Did you?

She wants to hear him say it.

Byron never directly admits his guilt, but he doesn't deny it either, and eventually that tells Willie everything she needs to know.

In the summer of 1965, she decides she's had enough of her husband's abuse and lies.

She finally leaves Byron for good.

This time, he doesn't try to fight her on it.

He doesn't apologize or beg her to take him back or promise to change.

Instead, he turns around and files for divorce.

In the filing, he states that his grounds for separation are habitual drunkenness and habitual cruel and inhumane treatment from Willie towards him.

He's literally describing his own years long abuse of Willie and trying to make himself the victim.

Willie's lawyers make damn sure that this line is stricken from the official record and they threaten to make his abuse of nature very public if he doesn't agree to the edit.

Byron backs down and the divorce proceeds.

As soon as it's finalized, Willie begins making plans to move out of the state and reverts to her maiden name, Mary Louise Williams.

To Byron, this is a devastating parting shot.

He was raised to be proud of his name and of the lineage it represented.

But now Willie's casting it off like an old skin, like something she was ashamed of.

The slight enrages Byron and drives him into deep denial.

Even after the divorce is finalized, he convinces himself that it's only a temporary thing.

Willie's always changed her mind in the past.

It's just a matter of time before she comes crawling back to him.

He tries to console himself with the fact that his son is still with him.

Byron Jr.

doesn't want to move to Arkansas with his mom, but he decides he doesn't much want to live with his dad either.

Not long after his mom leaves, he enlists in the US.

Marine Corps and ships out to boot camp in the fall of 1965, leaving his dad behind.

For the first time in his adult life, Byron De La Beckwith is alone.

Even in jail, he had a steady stream of visitors.

But now, as months go by without any word from his ex-wife, he begins to realize that Willie really might not be coming back this time.

He tells himself that it doesn't matter that he's better off without her.

She was holding him back.

Now there's nothing to distract him from becoming the great man he's destined to be.

She'll see.

They'll all see.

At the start of 1967, Byron moves to Jackson.

Strolling around the streets of the city where he killed Medgar Evers, he feels renewed, in control.

Once again, he's here in the state capital for a very specific purpose.

He's running for public office.

That February, he launches a campaign for Lieutenant Governor of Mississippi.

In a formal announcement, he says, I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to the fine Christian people of Mississippi for the manner in which they have sustained and sheltered me in times past.

Put another way, he'd like to thank his fellow white Mississippians for allowing him to get away with murder.

And now, he's hoping he can count on their vote.

It's been a rocky couple of years, but as he begins his campaign, Byron's back to feeling on top of the world.

During a press conference after his announcement, a reporter asked Byron if he thinks being an accused murderer will hurt his chances.

With a smile, Byron says, no, no, I don't.

Those murder trials are ancient history.

At least they are to him.

But the FBI disagrees.

From their perspective, the Medgar Evers case is still very much open.

And they haven't given up on putting Byron away for the crime.

Eventually, their tenacity will pay off.

Just in time to prevent history from repeating itself.

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It's shortly after midnight on September 27th, 1973, ten years since the assassination of Medgar Evers.

Louisiana is coming off a days-long heat wave, and the air is balmy.

52-year-old Byron De La Beckwith winds down the window of his Oldsmobile as he cruises down Interstate 10, heading south towards New Orleans.

As he's about to cross the Twinspan Bridge, Byron notices a blue light flashing in his rear-view mirror.

There's a police car tailing him.

He pulls over onto the shoulder right away like the law-abiding citizen he tells himself he is.

As two officers approach his car, he climbs out with an agreeable smirk on his face.

But these officers aren't smiling back.

They tell him to put his hands on the hood of the car.

They frisk him and immediately find a.45 caliber automatic pistol on him.

Then they tell him that he's under arrest.

Byron is handcuffed and put into the squad car to wait while the officers search his vehicle.

Underneath the floorboards, they find multiple rifles, a bunch of ammunition and a plywood box with its lid screwed shut.

The police already have a sense of what they're going to find inside.

Sure enough, when they open the box, they see a device made up of multiple sticks of dynamite, crudely taped together alongside a wind-up alarm clock.

It's a homemade bomb.

When he's questioned later that night, Byron will be surprised to learn that the New Orleans police have had him under surveillance for days.

They know exactly what he's been planning and who that bomb was meant for.

And despite what Byron might think, at least in the state of Louisiana, he is not above the law.

Byron De La Beckwith truly did not expect to be caught that day.

He'd spent the last 10 years feeling pretty close to untouchable.

Not that everything had gone his way.

His campaign for lieutenant governor of Mississippi wasn't the glorious ride to victory he'd imagined.

In fact, he finished in fifth place out of six candidates.

After his defeat, he returned to Greenwood, his ego bruised and deflated.

But within a few weeks, his disappointment gave way to that old, familiar rage, and he launched back into his activities for the White Citizens Council and the KKK with renewed enthusiasm.

But unbeknownst to him, he was now under surveillance.

In the summer of 1966, three years after Medgar Evers' murder, the FBI received an intriguing tip from an informant within the KKK.

This source reported that he had been in a meeting where a man had claimed that he'd been Byron's accomplice in planning and carrying out the murder of Medgar Evers.

He described the crime in such great detail that the informant felt convinced he was telling the truth.

This was a potentially big deal.

In order to reopen the case against Byron and push for a third trial, the feds needed some new major evidence or witnesses, and this could have been it.

But the informant wasn't willing to risk coming forward to testify about what he heard.

And besides, if he did, it would be the end of a valuable pipeline of intelligence from inside the KKK.

The FBI didn't want to give that up, especially with no guarantee of a conviction.

So for the time being, they simply placed Byron under surveillance.

They had eyes on him when he made his triumphant move to Jackson, and they had eyes on him when he slunk back to Greenwood following his election defeat.

They already had a pretty detailed view of what Byron was like at KKK meetings, and exactly how violent and radical his ideas about race were.

They knew he was dangerous.

By keeping tabs on him, they hoped that they could either uncover new evidence in the Medgar Evers case, or at least intercept any other attacks Byron could be planning.

For years, nothing came of it.

His KKK involvement aside, Byron seemed to be living a pretty quiet life in Greenwood.

He rented a small apartment downtown, found a new job as a salesman for a manufacturing company, and mostly kept to himself.

But he was just as angry and volatile as ever.

And by the early 1970s, his bigoted rage had shifted focus.

He was now obsessed with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, railing against Jews as he once railed against black people.

And he soon set his sights on a new target who embodied all of the things he hated most.

On September 26th, 1973, the FBI got a new tip from inside the KKK.

Byron De La Beckwith was planning a bombing in New Orleans.

The target was AI.

Botnik, a Jewish civil rights activist and regional director for the Anti-Defamation League, a national organization which works to combat anti-Semitism.

After so many quiet years, the Bureau had dialed back its surveillance of Byron.

But now they sprung into action.

Within hours, a team of agents had him covertly surrounded.

They coordinated with the Louisiana authorities and arranged for police officers to intercept Byron as he drove to Botnik's house in New Orleans.

Early the following morning, the cops pulled Byron over on the bridge and arrest him.

They find the homemade bomb hidden under the floorboards of his car alongside numerous guns, rounds of ammo and a bunch of racist literature.

Although the bomb looks a little janky, it's capable of destroying multiple residences.

They've narrowly averted a massacre.

But this still won't be an easy case to prosecute.

The DA declines to pursue an attempted murder or arson charge because the only evidence of Byron's plan comes from informants, and he doesn't think the case is strong enough.

Instead, he charges Byron with something he's confident they can get him on, transporting dynamite without a permit.

And this approach pays off.

In May of 1975, a jury convicts Byron, and he's sentenced to five years in prison.

He's allowed to remain free on bond while he appeals, during which time the KKK and other racists rally around him, providing donations to his legal fund.

But Byron De La Beckwith's luck has finally run out.

His appeals fail, and in the spring of 1977, he begins his sentence.

Prison is a rude awakening for Byron.

His incarceration back home in Mississippi had been a cake walk, sometimes literally, since his jailer often took him out for a stroll and a cup of coffee.

But here in Louisiana, he's treated like the criminal he is.

For the first time in his life, he's also in the minority.

He's one of very few white prisoners in the state penitentiary, and unsurprisingly, he is not popular.

It's widely known that he killed Medgar Evers and got away with it, and plenty of inmates are interested in delivering some overdue justice.

So Byron's quickly moved to solitary confinement for his own safety.

He doesn't have a lot of visitors there, and spends most of his time writing letters to friends, business acquaintances and organizations asking for money.

Most of them go unanswered, but he keeps writing.

How else is he going to pass the time?

In January of 1980, Byron is released early for good behavior, having served less than three years of his sentence.

At 59 years old, he's free once again, but he's also on his own.

He's never done well alone, and after so much time in solitary confinement, he knows he needs somebody around.

He needs a wife, and this time, he needs to pick someone who sees things just the way he does.

A mutual friend introduces him to Thelma Lindsay Neff, a retired nurse who lives near Chattanooga, Tennessee.

She's ultra conservative and a proud white supremacist and anti-Semite, just Byron's type.

After three years of dating, Byron and Thelma get married in June of 1983, and he moves to Tennessee to be with her.

As far as he's concerned, this is his happily ever after.

But the story ain't over yet.

In the years after her husband's murder, Murley Evers worked hard to move forward.

Watching Medgar bleeding to death and then seeing his killer walk free almost destroyed her.

But she was tough and determined, and she knew that giving up was the last thing Medgar would want her to do.

After the trials, she moved to California with her children and returned to college to finish her undergraduate degree.

She then went on to build a career in the corporate world, working in advertising and community affairs.

In 1970, she ran for Congress in California, but lost to her Republican opponent.

Unbowed by this defeat, she continued serving her community.

Now, in 1987, Murley becomes the first black woman ever to serve as a commissioner on the Los Angeles Board of Public Works.

It's a busy, rich, full life, but Murley has never given up on the possibility of justice for Medgar.

Sometimes, it feels like she's the only one who hasn't, but in 1989, it becomes clear that her husband hasn't been forgotten.

That January, the Mississippi Clarion-Ledger publishes a story by reporter Jerry Mitchell about the jury selection process in Byron De La Beckwith's second trial.

The article talks a lot about a mysterious now-defunct organization called the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission.

This was essentially an anti-civil rights group, a secret spy arm of the state government, formed with the goal of combating racial integration in Mississippi.

The article cites leaked papers showing that Byron's defense team enlisted the commission to screen potential jurors in order to get an acquittal.

Living on the West Coast, Murley doesn't have a Clarion-Ledger subscription, but she learns about the article within hours of its publication.

She quickly gets a hold of a copy, and when she reads it, her hands start shaking.

She's always known that the trial was stacked against them.

Seeing the Mississippi governor shake Byron's hand right there in the courtroom in 1964 had told her everything she needed to know.

But she never thought that there'd be such clear, incontrovertible evidence that the government was interfering with the case.

Surely, she thinks, this is jury tampering.

And surely, this will be enough to get the case reopened.

But as Murley will soon discover, it's not that simple.

At this point, 25 years have passed since Byron De La Beckwith's double mistrial, and the bar for getting a third trial is incredibly high.

The Clarion Ledger article alone isn't enough, but Murley can feel that after almost a lifetime of waiting, this just might be the spark she needs to light a fire.

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It's the spring of 1989 in Jackson, Mississippi.

At the DA's office, 56-year-old Merle Evers is waiting in a small meeting room.

She looks down at the notepad in her hand, where she's written some bullet points.

This is her first in-person meeting with state prosecutor Bobby De Lauder, and she wants to make the most of it.

When De Lauder comes in and shakes her hand, she can tell that he doesn't have good news for her.

When they spoke on the phone, they discussed the possibility of trying to get the case reopened off the back of the Clarion Ledger story.

But now De Lauder tells her that the state can't find most of the evidence from the previous trials.

It's disappeared.

He holds up a single slim case file, which contains just a few pieces of paper.

This is all they have.

Somehow, Murley stays calm when she hears this.

After everything she knows about how the trials went down last time, she could be excused for thinking the worst.

But the way she sees it, this is an entirely new ballgame.

De Lauder is a young guy, mid-30s at most, a generation removed from the prosecutors who handled the case last time.

And while the world isn't perfect, Willie knows that a whole lot has changed since 1964.

So she looks at the pitiful sheaf of papers and tells him, well, that's a start.

At first, the whole thing seems impossible.

Those three pages really are the entirety of the DA's remaining case file on the Medgar Evers murder trial.

There are no transcripts from the original trial to be found, no evidence retained by the court, and very few surviving jurors to talk about their experience.

This essentially means they'll have to reassemble the case against Byron from the ground up, 30 years after the fact.

But thanks to Murley's unflagging determination and optimism, De Lauder and his team decide to give it a try.

They spend more than a year piecing together the state's case from 1964, digging through records to find missing transcripts, and also searching for any new leads they can use to bolster their argument.

Meanwhile, the Clarion Ledger article has reignited public interest in the case, and numerous federal, state and city officials advocate for a new trial.

In a move that shows just how the public's attitude has shifted, the Jackson City Council passes a resolution demanding that the case be reopened.

And finally, in late 1990, it happens.

That December, a grand jury indicts Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers, setting things in motion for a new trial.

Now 70 years old, Byron is incredulous.

He's been living the good life out in Tennessee for years now, and he has no intention of coming back to Mississippi for anything, much less for this.

He spends the next few years throwing every legal roadblock he can at the new trial, trying to have the charges dismissed.

His lawyers argue that the new indictment violates his right to a speedy trial and due process.

He also tries to claim that he's immune from being tried again for the same crime because of double jeopardy, but double jeopardy doesn't apply if there's been a mistrial.

The case goes all the way to the Mississippi Supreme Court, which denies his motion for dismissal.

After years of dodging consequences, Byron's number is up.

In February of 1994, the third trial begins.

In some respects, it plays out a lot like the first two trials.

A lot of the prosecution evidence is the same, including Byron's fingerprints on the rifle and the witnesses who placed his car at the scene, whose original testimony is presented from the unearthed transcripts.

The defense also presents pretty much the same case as before, including the alibi witnesses who supposedly saw Byron 90 miles away from Jackson on the night of the murder.

And Byron himself is as unrepentant as ever, showing up to court with a Confederate flag pin on his lapel.

But in other ways, this trial is completely different.

For one thing, the jury is not all white.

Instead, it comprises eight black and four white jurors.

De Lauder and his team have also been able to secure several new witnesses who all separately testified that they heard Byron talking openly about the murder.

One of them is Mark Riley, a former prison guard who worked at the Louisiana prison where Byron was incarcerated for three years.

Riley describes in detail how he witnessed an argument in which Byron admitted to killing Medgar.

Another key witness is Delmer Dennis, an FBI informant who testifies that he heard Byron bragging about the murder at a KKK rally in 1965.

Between the old and new witnesses, there's now a total of six credible people all telling very similar stories.

After a week of testimony, the trial concludes.

The jury deliberates for just five hours before returning with their decision.

Byron shows no emotion at all as the verdict is read.

Murley cries as she hears the word, gripping her daughter's hand.

She's imagined this moment so many times that she can't believe it's actually happening.

At last, justice.

A few moments later, she and her family leave the courthouse via a side door to get a little fresh air before facing the press and the crowds.

Murley walks out into the afternoon sun, barely feeling the ground beneath her feet.

She looks up at the impossibly blue sky and murmurs, Medgar, I've gone the last mile of the way.

The next day, Byron De La Beckwith is sentenced to life in prison.

He spends the rest of his days fighting bitterly against his conviction, unrepentant to the end.

True to form, he tries every avenue he can to wiggle out of doing his time.

But the state supreme court upholds his conviction in 1997.

He then tries to escalate it to the US.

Supreme Court, but that goes nowhere.

In January of 2001, he dies in prison at the age of 80.

After winning her decades-long fight for justice, Merle Evers continued to build on her husband's legacy.

In 1995, she was elected chairwoman of the NAACP, the organization Medgar worked so hard for.

She also established the Medgar and Merle Evers Institute in Jackson, which promotes racial justice, civil rights, and education for underserved communities, carrying on and celebrating the causes Medgar held so dear, fights he never got to see through.

Medgar Evers knew he was living on borrowed time.

As the most famous black civil rights activist in the South's most segregated state, his daily life was scored by a relentless drumbeat of death threats.

But he refused to live in fear.

Growing up in Jim Crow, Mississippi, he'd seen how fear gets its claws into people, paralyzes them, makes them too afraid to fight for their own betterment.

Walking past the bloodied clothes of a family friend who'd been lynched, he'd been horrified by the silence of his community, the learned helplessness, the way terror had beaten people down.

And he'd sworn to himself he'd never let fear be his compass.

Living by that oath, Medgar made a choice every day to go out into the world with a target on his back.

He knew that if he fled Mississippi as so many others did during the Great Migration, he'd be ceding ground to the white supremacists who believed that his home state belonged to them.

So he stayed and he fought, and in the end, it cost him his life.

Today however, Medgar remains an icon of the Civil Rights Movement, a man whose legacy of service reshaped America for the better.

Where Byron De La Beckwith is remembered at all, it's only as a monument to the bigotry of the small-minded, and also ran opponent of the Civil Rights Movement who gained notoriety thanks to the easy violence of a rifle's trigger.

He killed Medgar Evers, but he didn't triumph over him.

As Murly ever said not long after her husband's murder, you can kill a man, but you can't kill an idea.

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

On the next series, we revisit one of the biggest crime stories in American history, one that's got the whole world talking all over again.

If you'd like to learn more about the life and murder of Medgar Evers, we recommend Of Long Memory, Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers by Adam Nosadar, Portrait of a Racist, The Real Life of Byron De La Beckwith by Reed Massengill, and Medgar and Murley, Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America by Joanne Reed.

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.

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

Audio editing by Mohammed Shahzid.

Sound design by Matthew Filler.

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.