True Crime Case Files

At about two in the morning on January 10, 1966, eight men came up a farm road in Forrest County, Mississippi, in two cars, with shotguns and plastic jugs of gasoline. They shot into the house and set it alight with the family inside.

Vernon Dahmer was fifty-seven. He owned a store, a sawmill, a planing mill and a farm, and he was president of the county chapter of the NAACP. In the last months of 1965 he had put a voter registration book on the counter of his store and announced on the radio that if a man wanted to vote and could not afford the two-dollar poll tax, he would pay it himself.

He got his wife and his children out through the back windows, and stood in the burning house firing into the dark so the men outside would keep shooting at him. He died that afternoon.

Four men went to prison within four years. Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard who ordered it, was tried four times, took the Fifth Amendment four times, and was not convicted until August 1998 — thirty-two years later.

This book is about what that conviction cost. A statement of twenty-two typewritten pages whose origin nobody can account for. The evidence of an accomplice of whom the Supreme Court of Mississippi wrote that his sordid reputation is of record. A jury instruction the same court forbade for the future in the act of upholding the sentence it had produced. And, at the end, the victim's own family asking the Governor to release one of his killers so that he would testify.

Every fact here is traced to the document that carries it, and where the record is silent the book says so — including about the mafia hitman everyone repeats and no paper mentions.

A motion picture tells part of this story. This is the file.