AP, James Ford Seale and Harry MacLean

Wednesday, Dec 23rd, 2009 by Harry | Leave a Comment
Filed under: Resources

I was pleased to see the AP piece on “The Past Is Never Dead” (finally) came out yesterday.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2009/dec/22/attorney-author-examines-miss-racial-struggle/

It has been picked up all over the country, which has to be good for the book. It might have been better if it hadn’t come out so close to Christmas–the story isn’t exactly a Christmas story, after all–but one is happy with what one gets.      When I first began writing, in the late 1980s, my job was to produce a book, and the publisher was supposed to do the rest. With the internet and the publishing in the state that its in, the author is expected to do a good deal more, and I’ve had no choice but to take up the flag and wave it from atop the hill, as much as it goes against my nature. So I hustle the book, in any way that I can, unashamedly (mostly), realizing that each and every sale counts. Only a very few friends and relatives got free books this time around.

Fortunately, I have an excellent publisher this time around. Basic doesn’t give half-million dollar advances, but it produces a first-class product. And it treats each and every book with respect and dignity. Many of the bigger houses put their time and effort into the “big books,” like Sarah Palin’s, and let the others drift in the current, hoping they catch. Basic takes good care of its books, its authors, and for this I am very grateful.

I’ve been thinking of writing something on writing, so stay tuned.

James Ford Seale — An FBI Informant?

Sunday, Dec 20th, 2009 by Harry | Leave a Comment
Filed under: Resources

James Ford Seale, convicted two years ago in the kidnapping and murder of two black youths in Southwest Mississippi in 1964, was known for his intense hatred of law enforcement at all levels, but particularly the FBI. During my research for “The Past Is Never Dead,” I heard that Jack Seale, James’ older brother and generally considered to  be the most violent member of the Seale family, had worked as an informer for the FBI.

New documents show that not only was Jack Seale an informant for the FBI, but that brother James might have supplied some information to the agency as well.  The Concordia Sentinel recently published a piece indicating that Jack had been an active informant for the FBI from 1967 on, and even mentioning the name of the FBI agent who handle him. The information came from the FBI files themselves and discussed a group of Klansmen known at the Silver Dollar Group, which was involved in many bombings during those years. Jack apparently tried to talk his brother James into working with the FBI, and in fact the FBI records indicate that James did meet with an agent and told him names of members of the Silver Dollar Group and gave information about the meetings.

The Seales weren’t the only Klansmen who turned against their comrades. The Neshoba County murders of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney in 1964 were largely solved through the use of Klan informants. By 1970 the FBi had so thoroughly infiltrated the Klan in Mississippi that it was paralyzed by suspicion and paranoia.

The key was money. The FBI handed out cold cash to its informants, many of whom lived in low-income rural areas. Even Klan higher-ups were not imune; a leader of the Franklin County Klan, also on the FBI payroll, ratted out James Ford Seale and others to the FBi for the murder of the two black youths in 1964.

The FBI was well aware of the fact that James and Jack Seale were deeply involved in the murder of the two black youths. That knowledge did not stop the Agency from employing Jack Seale as an informant, despite the blood on his hands. In those days, you needed a Klansman to catch a Klansman.

James Ford Seale –The Uncertainty Continues

Tuesday, Nov 10th, 2009 by Harry | 3 Comments
Filed under: Criminal Justice, James Ford Seale, Mississippi History, The Past is Never Dead, cold cases, true crime | Tags: , ,

One week ago yesterday, the Supreme Court announced its decision not to hear Seale’s appeal on the statute of limitations issue.  Justices Scalia and  Stevens dissented, arguing in essence that the matter was important, affected other cases, and should be heard and decided once and for all.

So Seale remains in jail, and no one knows what to do about the two dozen other cases. If you investigate and prosecute, you could spend all the time and resources, get a conviction, only to see it later overturned. Or you may wait and decide to see what the Court eventually does on the issue, which could take a couple of years, and meanwhile witnesses and defendants die and cases grow even colder.

The urgency of the matter apparently meant nothing to the seven other justices.  They simply didn’t want to hear the case, apparently wary of setting a precedent that would end up overloading their docket.

So administrative, procedural concerns seem once again to have outweighed concerns that justice, however delayed, be done once and for all the victims of these old race murders.

There may be some truth to the adage that justice is too important a matter to be left to the lawyers.

Court Turns Down James Ford Seale

Tuesday, Nov 3rd, 2009 by Harry | Leave a Comment
Filed under: Resources, The Past is Never Dead | Tags: , , , ,

On November 1, the Supreme Court issued a decision declining to hear the appeal of James Ford Seale on the question of whether the statute of limitations applied to his case. Justice Scalia and Stevens agreed for once that the Court should hear it, because it would affect many other cases, but they were overruled by the other justices.

The implications of the case are many. In the short term, it means that Seale will remain in prison. It also means that the appeal will continue, and that the Court could consider the issue at a later time.

In a larger sense, it means that the issue of the applicability of the statute of limitations to crimes such as Seale’s remains unsettled. The 5th Circuit estimated that two dozen other cases may be affected by the ruling.

If prosecutors in Mississippi and other southern states proceed with prosecutions of race murders from the sixties with the same statute of limitation problems, any convictions could later be overturned. This would result in a waste of resources, resources that could otherwise be used prosecuting these types of cases that don’t have statute of limitations problems.

Meanwhile, the odds look better and better that James Ford Seale, a very ill man, may well die in prison before the issue is finally resolved.

To get the Mississippi perspective of the story, see this article in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger.

Book Tour in the South

Sunday, Oct 18th, 2009 by Harry | Leave a Comment
Filed under: Resources, The Past is Never Dead | Tags: , , , , ,

Well, not the whole South, but I did TV, radio and print in Jackson, Oxford and Memphis. In the old days, an escort picked you up at the airport, drove you to the hotel, and transported you to each and every appointment. These days, unless you’re John Grisham, you drive yourself and be glad your publisher is paying to tour you at all.

I knew Jackson pretty well from my months there researching “The Past Is Never Dead,” but Oxford and Memphis were a different story. It rained for all four days of the trip–and I mean “rained”–and the GPS that came with the rental car was busted, so I was on my own. I hydroplaned on highway 55 heading north to Oxford, and nearly slid into a semi.

The noon magazine TV format in Jackson was a little over two minutes, the radio station about ten, so I was pleased to have a one-hour interview with the former mayor and owner of Square Books in Oxford which was taped on C-SPAN and will be on a show called “After Words” on the weekend of November 7 and 8. The owner is a wonderful man,  who had actually read the book and had a list of thoughtful questions. I don’t know how it’ll appear on TV, but it was fun doing it. I was waiting for John Grisham to walk in and ask for his book to be autogrpahed, but I learned that he’s moved to Charlotte.

Some of the stuff has a delayed fuse. A radio station in Memphis did a thirty minute interview, but it was taped and won’t be played until the weekend after Thanksgiving.  That interviewer was also knowledgeable on the subject. In fact, most of the interviewers, TV and radio alike, were appreciative of the fact that I felt that Mississippi was not given credit for the progress that it had made and was generally misunderstood by the Great White North. The owner of Square Books thanked me for writing the book.

All in all, a great adventure, or a continuation of the great adventure that began when I decided to to write the story of the trial of James Ford Seale and poke in the shadows and turn over the rocks in modern day Mississippi. Stay tuned–the fun has just begun.

Publication Day

Monday, Oct 5th, 2009 by Harry | Leave a Comment
Filed under: Mississippi History, The Past is Never Dead, true crime | Tags: , , , , ,

October 5, publication day for “The Past Is Never Dead,” arrived on the heels of the NPR  ”All Things Considered” interview, which played twice on both Saturday and Sunday. I taped the interview on Thursday at the  Colorado Public Radio studio in Denver, and was fairly hyped on caffeine, since I hadn’t slept much the night before. The parts where I talked too much and too fast were mercifully edited out. The interviewer, Guy Ras, had actually read the book, which is not always the case, and I found his questions to be well-thought out and surprisingly focused on the trial itself.  The thirty-minute interview was cut to 7.5 minutes and I thought was edited to make both of us sound like we knew what we were talking about, which is good.

I was a little groggy for an interview on Air America at 5:30 (MT) this morning, but the interviewer, Lionel, was clearly awake and wired. His questions were less about the trial and more about what led up to it. You have to learn to adjust to the interests of the interviewer, but still get your points in, and I’m such a nice guy it’s a little hard to assert myself.

I began Publication Day with a trip to the Tattered Cover, Denver’s famous and much-revered independent bookstore. The book was stacked flat on a table in the new non-fiction area, so I relieved another nearby book of its plastic stand and stood “The Past Is Never Dead” straight up, to look the prospective reader/buyer in the eye. I might need to stop in every day or so and check on its display.

For you Denver people, my signing at the Tattered Cover on Colfax is this Friday night at 7:30. On Sunday, I fly to Jackson for a signing at Lemuria on the 12th, then on to Oxford, for a signing at Square Books on the 13th, which will be taped by C-Span, and finally to Memphis on the 14th for a signing at Davis-Kidd.  I’m glad for an opportunity to talk about the new  book. In this tough publishing world, many authors aren’t touring at all.

New reviews and interviews for “The Past is Never Dead”

Thursday, Sep 24th, 2009 by admin | 2 Comments
Filed under: Criminal Justice, Resources, The Past is Never Dead | Tags: ,

More reviews have been published for The Past is Never Dead. I welcome your reviews and comments!

Crime Rant

Bookpage

In Cold Blog 

Coming up:

Radio interviews on Air America and All Things Considered.

Interview — The Past Is Never Dead

Wednesday, Sep 16th, 2009 by Harry | 1 Comment
Filed under: Resources, cold cases | Tags: ,

I’m excited about a new interview true crime writer Gregg Olsen just published on the book at his site for “The Past is Never Dead”: http://www.crimerant.com.  I think you’ll enjoy it.

No Death Bed Confession

Tuesday, Sep 15th, 2009 by Harry | 46 Comments
Filed under: Criminal Justice, In Broad Daylight, Ken Rex McElroy, Skidmore Missouri, Town Bully, Vigilante Justice, true crime | Tags: , , ,

September 15, 2009

NO DEATH BED CONFESSION

Trena McElroy was sitting next to her husband, Ken Rex, in his Chevy Silverado when rifle shots shattered the rear window and exploded her husband’s head onto the dashboard. That was July 9, 1981, and Trena claimed that just before the shots were fired she looked over her shoulder and saw a local cowboy pull a rifle from her pickup and take aim at Ken. She swore to the law and three grand juries that the man on the 30.30 was Del Clement, a member of a prominent ranching family.

When I first traveled to Skidmore in 1982, the first name I heard as the shooter was Del Clement. Over the years I spent there researching “In Broad Daylight” I never heard another name seriously mentioned as the rifleman. Del, a short man with a chip on his shoulder and a hot temper, wore a cowboy hat and drank heavily. It wasn’t hard to imagine him jerking the gun from his pickup in a burst of anger and opening up on the large black head on the other side of the rear window of the pickup. He and his brother owned the D & G Tavern, in front of which McElroy was parked when he died and which had recently begun closing whenever he came to town.

A few years after the book came out, I encountered Del one evening in a bar in nearby Maryville. He was drunk and became outright hostile to me. He pointed out all the untrue facts in the book—such as that he was short—and seemed on the verge of throwing a punch, until a friend stepped in.

There has been no prosecution in the death of Ken Rex McElroy. Some of the witnesses to the crime left town, and as time wore on a few of them died. The only hope for solving the crime seemed to be that one of the witnesses, or maybe one of the killers, would confess on his deathbed in order to clear his conscience. Such evidence is allowed into courts of law as an exception to the hearsay rule on the theory that someone on his deathbed would have no reason to lie.

Del Clement died of liver disease this last spring. He always denied any role in the killing. Dying of sclerosis of the liver is a slow process; it allows the person time to reflect on his life, to prepare to meet his maker. Del Clement died without a word about who shot Ken McElroy.

Ken Rex McElroy

Strange Justice

Wednesday, Sep 2nd, 2009 by Harry | Leave a Comment
Filed under: Criminal Justice, The Past is Never Dead | Tags: , ,

Never underestimate the eccentricities or bizarre outcomes generated by the American criminal justice system. The fate of James Ford Seale remains undecided because the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals violated one of the cardinal rules of appellate court justice: never sit an even number of justices on the bench. (Nine sit on the U.S. Supreme Court; 7 in Colorado). In the fall of 2008, a three-member panel of the 5th Circuit reversed Seale’s 2007 conviction of conspiracy and kidnapping in the murder of two black youths in Mississippi in 1964.  The entire Court decided to review the panel’s decision, which was somewhat unusual in itself. The Court consists of 23 judges, but five of them are on senior status, which, as I understand it, means that they can’t participate in an en banc reviews of a panel’s decisions.

So, that left eighteen judges. I traveled to New Orleans in May of this year to watch the oral arguments, and I could not imagine a more terrifying scene for a lawyer. Standing alone at the podium, as eighteen federal judges in black robes stared/glared at you, interrupting you at will. And ask questions they did; one after another, occasionally interrupting each other.  I was sweating—I had read the briefs, and I still had a hard time following the arguments—but the lawyers managed to keep their cool. The basic questions were whether a court decision throwing out the statute Seale was charged under was to be applied retroactively or not.  If it was, then the statute of limitations had run five years after the crime and the prosecution was barred, which was what the three-person panel had held.

When I walked out of the courthouse, I felt fairly certain from the questions and the comments that the Court would affirm the panel’s decision and that Seale would soon be a free man. Wrong.  A few weeks later, the Court deadlocked 9 to 9 on the statute of limitations issue. Tie goes to the government, apparently, so Seale is still in the slammer.

That is no way to decide a man’s fate, or an issue of this importance. The fate of other civil rights crimes from the sixties could hang in the balance. The 5th Circuit apparently agreed: A few weeks ago it voted to ask the Supreme Court to decide the issue. I get the image of a bunch of children squabbling over a toy, and finally asking their parents to decide who gets it.

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »


Home  |  About  |  The Past Is Never Dead  |  In Broad Daylight  |  Once Upon A Time  |  Events  |  Media  |  Blog  |  Contact
All Rights Reserved 2009 Harry MacLean. Web Hosting and Web Design at EduCyber, Inc.