Many working class whites feared greater job competition from blacks if integration changed the society and tensions were high over desegregation of schools.

[4] James Ford Seale abducted the two young African-American men, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, each 19, as they were hitchhiking near Roxie on May 2, 1964.

According to the January 2007 indictment, the Klansmen took the pair, who were reportedly still alive, to a nearby farm where Seale duct-taped their mouths and hands.

The Klansmen wrapped the bloody pair in a plastic tarp, put them into the trunk of another Klansman's red Ford (the deceased Ernest Parker, according to FBI records), and drove almost 100 miles to the Ole River near Tallulah, Louisiana.

At the river, the Klansmen took the pair away from shore in a boat, where they tied them to an old Jeep engine block and sections of railroad track rails with chains before dumping them in the water to drown.

[10] Edwards, who was granted immunity for his testimony after being indicted for aiming a shotgun at the two black men while fellow Ku Klux Klan members beat them, also testified that Seale had in fact attached heavy weights to the boys and then dumped them alive into the river.

[10] The bodies of the pair were found about two months later by US Navy divers who were working on the investigation associated with the disappearance in June of three civil rights workers: Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman; both from New York City and James Chaney from Meridian, Mississippi.

[8] The FBI made an investigation of the Dee-Moore murders (they had more than 100 agents around Natchez, trying to reduce violence), and presented their findings to local District Attorney Lenox Forman.

FBI agents and Mississippi Highway Patrol officers arrested Seale, then 29, and fellow Klansman Charles Marcus Edwards, 31, on November 6, 1964.

Forman said he dismissed the case because it had been prejudiced toward the defendants, who "put out the story" in Meadville that, after their arrest, they had been "brutally mistreated," as reported in 2005 in an investigation by Donna Ladd of the Jackson Free Press.

The Klansmen repeatedly pleaded the Fifth Amendment, while the chief investigator Donald T. Appell and House members placed into the record what they believed the men had done, including kidnapping and murdering Dee and Moore in 1964.

Appell accused Seale and Edwards of claiming "false arrest" by Mississippi highway patrolmen to help them escape criminal charges.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, in Betrayed: The Presidential Failure to Protect Black Lives, (1996), also wrote about the Dee-Moore case, naming Seale and another suspect as responsible.

[11] Seale, a member of the Silver Dollar Group, was one of the suspects in the carbombing assassination of civil rights activist Wharlest Jackson in Natchez that took place in 1967.

[4] The Silver Dollar group is also suspected of a failed attempt to assassinate Natchez NAACP chapter president George Metcalfe by carbombing.

This spurred the FBI to take another look, as the location gave them jurisdiction, but some of their resources got diverted to the revival of the investigation of Edgar Ray Killen in the 1964 Neshoba County murders.

At the end of July 2005, the paper published Thomas Moore's response to an editorial that appeared in the Franklin Advocate, the weekly in Meadville, in which the editor said the case should not be re-opened.

The "introductory allegations" begin: The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKKK) operated in the Southern District of Mississippi and elsewhere, and was a secret organization of adult white males who, among other things, targeted for violence African Americans they believed were involved in civil rights activity in order to intimidate and retaliate against such individuals.The document says that Seale and other Klan members suspected Dee of being involved with civil rights activity.

After he was confronted by Thomas Moore and David Ridgen during filming of a scene in Mississippi Cold Case, state and federal officials gave him immunity from prosecution to tell the full story of what happened.