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FBI special agent reviews Emmett Till case for CCTC students
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
Before Dale Killinger’s boss told him to investigate the case, he’d never heard of Emmett Till.
Till was 14 when he was kidnapped from his uncle’s house, beaten, shot and killed after whist-ling at a white woman in August 1955 in Money, Miss.
Killinger, a native of rural Pennsylvania, was an FBI special agent in Mississippi. When his boss told him he wanted to reinvestigate, Killinger didn’t know about the case.
“I’m a white guy from Pennsylvania, I had no idea what Mississippi was like in 1955,” he told students Wednesday at Choffin Career and Technical Center.
The agent had to educate himself.
“I went to the library and learned about the case,” Killinger said. “I worked it for two years.”
The case was reopened at the time because some of those involved and others with knowledge of the events were still alive.
Simeon Wright, Till’s cousin, was there when two white men came into his family’s home, woke Till, ordered him to get dressed and took him away.
“We never saw him again,” Wright told the students.
Before they left, the men threatened to kill Wright’s father if he told anyone what happened.
The family didn’t have a telephone but even if they had, they wouldn’t have been able to call police.
“It wasn’t permitted under the Jim Crow system for blacks to call the sheriff in the middle of the night,” Killinger said.
Till’s naked body was found a few days later in a river, an industrial fan wrapped around his neck.
“There was no autopsy,” Killinger said.
Defense attorneys contended the body found wasn’t Till’s.
Two men, one the husband of the woman at whom Till whistled, were charged in the 1950s but acquitted of the murder despite the evidence against them.
Wright called the trial a sham.
Three days after the verdict, the Wright family left Mississippi and moved to suburban Chicago.
After the verdict, the two men admitted to the crime in a Look magazine story. Double-jeopardy law prevented another trial.
Killinger’s investigation found evidence including witnesses who proved the woman’s husband had been looking for Till. The man questioned one youth inside his store, and another young man was picked up by a group of men in a pickup truck. The woman said it wasn’t him and the teenager was dumped out of the vehicle.
Till’s body was exhumed and Wright’s DNA compared to that of the corpse. The teeth were examined and an anthropologist from the Smithsonian Institution confirmed the skeleton was that of a 14-year-old boy.
“It is Emmett, and we can scientifically prove it beyond a reasonable doubt,” Killinger said.