Reputed KKK Member Dies

TERRE HAUTE, IN -- James Ford Seale, a reputed former member of the Ku Klux Klan convicted in the 1964 abduction and killings of two black teenagers in Mississippi, has died in federal prison. He was 75.

Seale died on Tuesday in the Federal Correctional Institution at Terre Haute, Indiana, where he had been serving three life sentences after being convicted in 2007 of two counts of kidnapping and one of conspiracy to commit kidnapping, said Bureau of Prisons spokesman Chris Burke. No cause of death was given.

In 2007 a jury convicted Seale, a former sheriff's deputy, of kidnapping and conspiracy to commit kidnapping in the disappearances of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, both 19. The bodies of both youths were found in a backwater area of the Mississippi River.

Prosecutors alleged he and fellow Klansmen conspired to abduct, beat and murder Dee and Moore in May 1964.

An indictment accused Seale and his cohorts of picking up the two men hitchhiking and driving them into the Homochitto National Forest in southwest Mississippi's Franklin County, where the teenagers were beaten and interrogated at gunpoint.

Dee and Moore were then bound with duct tape, and weighted down by an engine block and a railroad rail, authorities said. The FBI alleged the two were still alive when they were thrown into the Old Mississippi River, where they drowned.

Their bodies were found two months later during a search for three other missing civil rights workers.

Seale had been long suspected in the case. He and another man were arrested in 1964, but released on bond and never tried.

The FBI turned the case over to local authorities, and the investigation was dropped after a justice of the peace said witnesses had refused to testify

Seale was the first and only person convicted in the Moore and Dee case, the Justice Department has said.