Edgar Ray Killen
| Edgar Ray Killen | |
|---|---|
| Born |
January 17, 1925 Philadelphia, Mississippi |
| Nationality | American |
| Other names | Preacher |
| Criminal charge | Murder (3 counts) |
| Criminal penalty | 60 years imprisonment |
| Criminal status | Incarcerated |
| Conviction(s) | Manslaughter (3 counts) |
Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen (born January 17, 1925) is a former Ku Klux Klan organizer who planned and directed the murders of three civil rights activists—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner—in 1964. He was found guilty in state court of three counts of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, the forty-first anniversary of the crime, and sentenced to 60 years in prison. He appealed against the verdict, but the sentence was upheld on January 12, 2007, by the Mississippi Supreme Court.
Edgar Ray Killen was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the second of eight children of Lonnie Ray Killen (1901–1992) and Etta Killen (née Hitt; 1903–1983). Killen was a sawmill operator and a part-time minister. He was a kleagle, or klavern recruiter and organizer, for the Neshoba and Lauderdale County chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.
During the "Freedom Summer" of 1964, James Chaney, 21, a young black man from Meridian, Mississippi and Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, two Jewish men from New York, were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Killen, along with Cecil Price, then deputy sheriff of Neshoba County, was found to have assembled a group of armed men who conspired against, pursued, and killed the three civil rights workers. Samuel Bowers, who served as the Grand Wizard of the local White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and had ordered the murders to take place, acknowledged that Killen was "the main instigator."
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