Feds turn up heat to solve cold cases of civil rights days

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http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0404/p02s01-usju.html

Feds turn up heat to solve cold cases of civil rights days

Changing attitudes in the South and old wiretaps are helping the FBI reexamine nearly 100 unsolved crimes.
By Patrik Jonsson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

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ATLANTA - As he treks across the Dixie roads he traveled as a young FBI agent in the mid-1960s, Jim Ingram gets a similar question from many people about his quest to solve murder cases dating back to the civil rights era.

"We say, 'Look, a law has been broken, and we're committed,'" says Mr. Ingram, who came out of retirement at the FBI's request. "Then they say, 'Why are you doing this now?' Ingram answers: "Because it was not carried to its final conclusion 40 years ago."

The US government recently announced that it is reexamining nearly 100 such cold cases – an effort that's being helped by changing attitudes of law enforcement and the public in the South, even among former supremacists.

"These days, people see that it was wrong," says Ingram, "and that if it was their families, they'd want us to solve these cases."

But circumstances were different during the civil rights era. "In the 1960s ... there were Klan members in law enforcement, and it was a direct pipeline back to the very people they were investigating," says former US Attorney Doug Jones, who brought two Ku Klux Klan members to trial in 2002 for a 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls in Birmingham, Ala. "Today, people are coming forward to assist."

In one case, kidnapping and conspiracy charges were brought in January against reputed Klansman James Ford Seale because one of Mr. Seale's confidantes decided to talk to Ingram. Seale was allegedly involved in the killings of two black men in 1964.

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