Who Killed Harry T. Moore? (A must read, a long one) Moore House After BombingNearly fifty years after it occurred, the Moore bombing remains unsolved, despite three separate investigations by law enforcement-in 1951-52, 1978, and 1991-92. One fundamental difference between the Moore case and the later assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. is that no suspect has ever been arrested, charged, tried, or convicted. 1951- 52 Investigation J. Edgar Hoover was certainly no friend of civil rights, and his abysmal track record in later civil rights cases (including his vicious persecution of Martin Luther King and his extra-legal COINTELPRO operations against other civil rights leaders and organizations) has, not surprisingly, led to decades of speculation that the FBI only half-heartedly tried to solve the Moore case, at best, and at worst, may have even covered up the murders. Today, it is possible to respond to those charges with hard facts, rather than speculation, as a result of a courageous decision by State Attorney Norm Wolfinger, representing Brevard County, who in 1992 made the complete, unedited FBI case files available to the public (as opposed to the heavily redacted files typically released by the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act). What those unedited files show is that the FBI conducted a surprisingly thorough and exhaustive investigation, with Hoover taking a strong personal interest in the case. Although he was more likely motivated by a desire to offset the negative publicity that the Bureau was receiving in the wake of the unsolved Florida bombings, rather than by any personal commitment to racial justice, the Bureau nonetheless mounted a full-bore, aggressive investigation of the Ku Klux Klan in neighboring Orange County, which was infested with Klansmen (including the local sheriff and several other elected officials). Agents developed informants to infiltrate Klan chapters, installed telephone taps (some of which may have been illegal) and maintained intense physical surveillance on suspects; indeed, Hoover used some of the same techniques against the Klan in 1952 that he was later criticized for using against civil rights and leftist organizations in the 1960s. Before daylight on the morning of December 26, FBI agents from Daytona Beach had arrived on the scene in front of Harry Moores wrecked home, and by that evening a special squad of seventeen agents had turned Mims only motel into a command headquarters. The local sheriff, whose staff consisted solely of himself and two deputies, deferred almost completely to the Bureaus overwhelming manpower and expertise, although he cooperated with the FBI and provided the first big break in the case. While one team of FBI agents swarmed over and under Moores house, searching for clues, other agents fanned out across the state, interviewing every resident of Mims and all of Moores NAACP and PVL associates. Harriette Moore was interviewed three times in her hospital bed, prior to her death on January 3, 1952. Among Moores friends and relatives, the most likely motive for his death was his involvement in the Groveland case. And when anyone mentioned Groveland, one name inevitably came to mind: Sheriff Willis V. McCall of Lake County, Florida, who in December, 1951, was the most notorious law officer in the country. His name would be intractably linked to Moores for over forty years. Other initial suspects included A. Fortenberry, the former chairman of the Brevard County Commission, whom Moore had helped defeat in 1950; and a Mims citrus grower who had threatened Moore several weeks earlier, telling a black preacher that Moores neck should be broken because he was putting notions in niggers heads. The first testimony linking the Klan to the murder surfaced on December 31, 1951, when five black residents of Mims said that two white men had come into the Mims Confectionary Store in July 1951, asking directions to Moores house. One witness, O.K. Washington, provided detailed physical descriptions of the two men. When his descriptions were relayed to informants in the Orange County Klan, three informants immediately identified them as Tillman H. Belvin and Earl Brooklyn, two renegade Klansmen with violent reputations. One informant even claimed that Brooklyn had displayed a hand-drawn floor plan of Moores house at a Klan meeting and had asked for help to do a few jobs. This was a sensational break, and Hoover urged agents to give very prompt and thorough attention. Over the next two weeks, the focus of the investigation shifted powerfully to Brooklyn and Belvin, both of whom were suffering from serious medical problems. Agents began interviewing all known Klansmen in Orange County. Among those was Joseph Neville Cox, 61, an old-time Klansman (from the heyday of the Klan in the 1920s) who was secretary of the Oralando klavern. Although agents were not finding any direct evidence linking Brooklyn or Belvin to the Moore bombings, or any corroboration of Brooklyns showing the floor plan, they were uncovering a great deal of evidence about other violent incidents, including the murder of a black custodian, Melvin Womack, in March 1951, the shooting of a black taxi driver, the bombing of a ice cream parlor in Orlando that refused to have a separate service window for blacks, and numerous floggings. FBI leaders developed a strategy of pursuing these other incidents, hoping that by putting pressure on Klansmen about those, someone would eventually crack on the Moore bombing. By late March 1952, the strategy appeared to be working: a half-dozen Klansmen had provided sworn statements implicating their brother Klansmen in a litany of terrorist acts. On March 29, Joseph Neville Cox was interviewed a second time. He kept asking if the FBIs evidence would hold up in court, attributing his inquisitiveness to human nature. The next day, he committed suicide. The FBI was so locked in on Brooklyn and Belvin, and other known members of the Klans wrecking crews, that the light bulb never went on. And then, in May, the bottom fell out. The Klan informant who had charged Brooklyn with exhibiting the floor plan retracted his earlier offer to take a polygraph. O.K. Washington, the black eyewitness from Mims, was refusing to testify in court. The Bureaus main witnesses were back-pedaling, and its primary suspects were nearly on their death beds. In May, Brooklyn underwent surgery for a hemorrhaging stomach. In August, Belvin died of natural causes; Brooklyn followed him to his grave in December. Several other Klan suspects were closely scrutinized, but the Bureau could never find direct evidence linking them to the Moore bombing. Running out of options, the FBI devised a ploy to convince a federal grand jury to indict local Klansmen for perjury, hoping that once they were brought before a federal grand jury, one of them might crack on the Moore case. In March 1953, a federal grand jury in Miami, after hearing testimony on the Moore case and other Florida bombings, issued a blistering 12-page presentment, describing the Klan as a cancerous growth and listing nineteen separate violent acts-a catalogue of terror that seems incredible-between 1943 and 1951. In June, the grand jury returned indictments against seven Orlando klansmen, but the federal judge trying the case eventually dismissed all charges, ruling that there was no federal jurisdiction in any of these incidents (murder and flogging were state crimes, not federal), so it was irrelevant whether the Klansmen had lied to agents about their involvement. The FBI case was dead. It was officially closed in August, 1955. Summary of the 1978 reopening of the Moore case In December 1977, on the twenty-sixth anniversary of the Moore bombing, nearly 500 people gathered in Mims for the Harry T. Moore Pilgrimage, sponsored by the Florida NAACP. The keynote speaker, NAACP Executive Secretary Dr. Benjamin Hooks, called for a reopening of the case. As a result of the extensive press coverage of the pilgrimage, the Brevard County sheriff reopened the case in January, 1978, and called for anyone with information about the case to come forward. One week later, the phone rang. I know who did it, said the intoxicated man on the other end. The caller was seventy-year-old Edward Spivey, a dyed-in-the-wool Klansman who was terminally ill and wanted to clear his conscience before he died. In an interview at his home, which investigators secretly record, Spivey claimed that in 1952, shortly after the Moore bombing, a fellow Klansman named Joseph Neville Cox, the secretary of the Orlando klavern, told Spivey that he had been paid $5,000 to kill Harry T. Moore. Just a few days after this admission, Cox committed suicide. When Brevard County investigators began checking out Spiveys story, they found some startling corroboration: Cox death certificate showed that he had, in fact, committed suicide in March 1952, only one day after his second interview with FBI agents investigating the Moore bombing. During that interview, Cox had repeatedly asked if the FBI had any evidence that would hold up in court. The next day, he killed himself. FBI agents had talked to the local police chief, who reported that Cox had no known medical or financial problems and that his family had no explanation for his death. At that point in the investigation, however, FBI agents were so focused on other suspects, particularly Earl Brooklyn and Tillman Belvin, that they let it drop. Cox was an older man, sixty-one at the time, and the FBI was zeroing in on younger Klan head-knockers. Today, with the hindsight of Spiveys 1978 confession, that was clearly a major blunder. Although Cox had been dead for 26 years, Brevard County investigators repeatedly tried to convince Ed Spivey to testify before a grand jury, but he adamantly refused. When he died several months later, his story was filed away. Two months after Spiveys phone call, another drunken white man confessed to making the bomb that killed the Moores. Raymond Henry Jr., a house painter with a long arrest record for public drunkenness, made this startling confession to a NAACP leader from Vero Beach and two local police officers, who tape recorded his statement. Henry claimed he had made the bomb at the behest of the Ku Klux Klan, and that two local law officers had been on the hit squad. The next day, he gave a written statement to FBI agents which greatly expanded on his original story and added a host of provocative details, including a claim that the St. Lucie County sheriff and a Brevard County deputy had also participated. Most sensational of all, Henry claimed that the entire Moore bombing had been bankrolled by Sheriff Willis McCall. Henry agreed to go to Brevard County and meet with Investigator Buzzy Patterson, but never showed. As suddenly as he had appeared, Raymond Henry vanished without a trace. Shortly thereafter, the Brevard County sheriff closed the Moore case. Summary of the 1991-92 FDLE investigation In August 1991, Governor Lawton Chiles ordered the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to conduct a re-investigation of the Moore case. This occurred after an Orlando woman, Dottie Harrington, claimed that her ex-husband, Frank Harrington, had been a member of the Klan and had boasted to her, on four or five separate occasions, about killing Harry T. Moore. Inspector John Doughtie headed the FDLE probe, who first pored over the 2,000 pages of the original FBI investigative file. Then he set out to locate Frank Harrington. After a circuitous ten-day search, Harrington was tracked down in Hollywood, Florida. He denied any knowledge of or participation in the Moore bombing, and also denied having ever told his ex-wife that he had been involved. Although he admitted joining the Klan for two or three years, he claimed it had been in the late 1950s or early 1960s, long after the Moore bombing. He agreed to take a polygraph test, which he passed. After that, Harrington was essentially dropped as a suspect. It was a combination of two factors: he had passed the polygraph, and his name did not appear in the original FBI files. Some people wont want to believe this, but I bet the FBI identified ninety percent of all the Klansmen in the Orlando area, Doughtie says. Ironically, Doughtie still believes the ex-wifes claim. [Harrington] had probably had a beer or two and was bragging about it, but there is no evidence, other than hearsay, to actually tie him to the murder, he says. With Harrington out of the picture, Doughtie turned his attention to finding Raymond Henry Jr., who had not been seen or heard from since 1978. After locating a current address for Henry through the Veterans Administration, FDLE found him living in Vero Beach, where he had been waging a valiant battle to stay off the bottle. In a series of recorded interviews, Henry eventually recanted his entire story, claiming that he had made it up to get back at law officers who had arrested him for drunkenness. It turned out that the officers Henry had claimed were the killers had been adolescents at the time of the Moore bombing and several were living out of state, as was Henry himself. Over a six month period, Doughtie interviewed all of the principals in the Moore case, including three of the surviving Klansmen who had been indicted for perjury by the FBI in 1952; none of them knew Frank Harrington or Raymond Henry. There was really only one suspect left: Willis McCall. In a tape recorded interview with Doughtie, the eighty-one-year-old McCall vehemently denied Henrys accusations about him financing the bombing. Doughtie asked McCall to take a polygraph, but his doctor vetoed it, saying that McCall, who had been suffering from heart disease for years, might be adversely affected by the test. Nonetheless, Doughtie had found no evidence linking McCall to the crime. Ole Willis had escaped another investigation, the fiftieth of his career. On April 1, 1992, FDLE officially closed the Moore case, saying no new evidence had been uncovered. Doughtie wrote an eighteen-page summary of the FBIs original investigation, identifying the main suspects in the FBIs probe and how the investigation eventually collapsed. He concluded by saying that he hoped his report would resolve some of the concerns, doubts and myths surrounding the case. To this day, the Moore case remains unsolved. Conclusion So who really killed Harry T. Moore? Was it Tillman Belvin, Earl Brooklyn, Joe Cox, Raymond Henry, Willis McCall, or someone else? Although there is no hard evidence linking him to the murder, Cox remains the most suspicious person in this story. Why would a man with no known financial or medical problems, who was running for public office (Orange County supervisor of elections), suddenly commit suicide one day after his second interview with the FBI, during which he kept asking if its evidence would hold up in court? And why would his fellow Klansman, Ed Spivey, come forward twenty-six years later, wanting to clear his conscience before he died, and finger Cox? One thing is certain: Spivey certainly didnt come forward out of any regard for Harry Moore; his primary concern, repeated over and over in his taped interview, was that the Klan was going to look bad, because, as he put it, We didnt authorize it. He insisted that Cox had acted on his own, without Klan authorization. Given all of the evidence, here is one likely scenario for Moores death. If one accepts Spiveys contention that $5,000 (or even some amount approaching that) was paid to kill Moore, that kind of money would have likely come from prominent grove owners or businessmen concerned about Moores growing political influence. It is a known fact that one such grove owner, the head of the Mims Citrus Exchange, had threatened Moore shortly before his death, saying that he was putting notions in niggers heads and his neck should be broken. If this man, or others, were willing to put up the cash to take Moore out, who better to turn to than a reputable Klan official like Joe Cox, the secretary of the Orlando klavern, to arrange the killing. Cox may have been too old to be on the hit team himself, but could have easily recruited two or three younger headknockers to do it. Klan protocol dictated that only the immediate members of the hit team would know the actual details (to protect other members of the Klan), and they would have taken a blood oath of secrecy. With the Moores living most of the year in Lake Park, it would have been a simple matter to case their house. In fact, their house was broken into in the months before the bombing. That may have been the purpose of the two white men appeared in the Mims Confectionary Store, asking for directions. The Klan barbeque near Sanford on Christmas Day provided the perfect alibi for the killing. The barbeque was held on Lake Jessup, east of Sanford, only a twenty minute drive to Mims. By a stroke of luck, the thick blanket of fog would have hidden their movements. Sometime after 9 p.m., a man driving down Old Dixie saw a car idling across the road from the Moores driveway, with a white man behind the wheel. It may have been a getaway car. After the bombing, a sheriffs bloodhound tracked the bombers footprints from the Moores house to Old Dixie, where the tracks ended. The hit team could have planted the bomb, blown up the Moores, and been back at the Klan barbeque before anyone noticed their absence. The entire operation could have easily been done in less than an hour. Resources: Book The definitive biography on Harry T. Moore Additional Reading Selected readings on related civil rights issues. Web Sites View a partial listing of organizations with interest in the issues raised by the documentary.
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 15:42:25 +0000
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