Did the FBI Kill Viola Liuzzo?

In Darkness, Highway 80 across Alabama holds no more answers than it does in blinding-white Southern summer daylight. But for some reason, that insignificant strip of road, that dangerous two-lane through the black belt was a political and spiritual magnet for thousands of people. Under overcast morning skies and on rain-soaked afternoons, a nonviolent revolution took place along Highway 80 when people demanded the right to vote. And in darkness, a woman from Detroit named Viola died there and now her children want to know why.

Tony Liuzzo stretched out on the blankets beside his mother and listened to her voice. There had been a mackerel sky at sunset and now the stars had come out and the sky seemed almost pure white and Viola was looking up, gazing at the stars. Tony was nine years old that summer his mother dyed her hair black and took him and his older brother, Tommy, on a camping trip through Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia. They slept outdoors as they traveled--in national and state parks, in open fields, even in graveyards. All three of them went barefoot most of the time. For the boys, it was an adventure. For Viola, it was an escape from the confining, urban pressures of Detroit, and her first chance to show her sons the region where she had grown up--the South.

Now, as he lay beside her in an open field alongside a deserted highway, Tony did not have to tell his mother he was frightened. To all her five children, it was as if she were almost mystical. She could anticipate and predict their feelings even before they experienced them. That night, Tony was spooked and Viola sensed it. So they all sat on their blankets and put their chins on their knees and Tony heard the words that would give him strength years later, when he launched his relentless search for the truth about her murder.

"Look at the stars and the woods," Viola said, her arms outstretched. "This is your heritage. Not what you see in the cities. Not the money and the buildings. This is what people were born for. This is your heritage."

Then she told Tony the words he would never forget: that his body was a shell and the only thing that mattered was the spirit inside the shell--that without the spirit, the body was meaningless, that the real spirit was love.

They were weighty words to a nine-year-old. But Viola always talked with her children as if they were her contemporaries, her best friends, sharing with them her thoughts and feelings and her own basic philosophy of life. She seemed to be in a hurry to teach them everything she knew about life, to show them as much of the world as quickly as she possibly could. She had taken them on the trip South just as she had carried them along on her rock-hunting expeditions to quarries and the Great Lakes, to antique shops and to their cabin in the woods. The children were fascinated by her, by the way she constantly went barefoot and told them, when they appeared worried: "It doesn't matter what other people think. You have to do what you believe is right."

Viola's children were too young then to realize their mother was years ahead of her time, that the uninhibited approach to life that excited them was in reality a threat to others.

•

The night before Tony's tenth birthday, he saw his mother visibly shaken as she watched a television news broadcast of Alabama troopers attacking a line of nonviolent black civil rights demonstrators in Selma. For days after that, it seemed as if Viola were consumed with energy. At Wayne State University, where she was a part-time student, she found that she wasn't alone. Countless other students were enraged over the situation in Selma, too, but no one knew exactly what to do. Should they send money, and if so, to whom? Should they write letters or stage their own demonstration in Detroit? Each day, the news reports from Selma were grim, and as Viola sat watching the television coverage, Tony felt as if he could see his mother's heart.

Viola knew the South well from her early years in rural Tennessee, and she understood the depths of the region's racism. The nightly television coverage was only more proof of the violence white Southerners were ready to unleash against nonviolent blacks in order to maintain the separate-but-unequal structure of their society. Viola had even seen the result of that racism on the streets and sidewalks of Detroit, where thousands of disenfranchised Southern blacks had fled--only to find a stark limbo of chronic unemployment and the empty hostility of urban indifference.

A refugee from the South herself, Viola frequently brought home those refugees. She fed them, clothed them, gave them spending money for their pockets. She was a member of the NAACP and she once phoned its Detroit chapter to ask how she could donate money or clothes to specific blacks in a manner that would not leave them feeling humiliated.

So when Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference sent out telegrams and requests across the nation asking for supporters to come en masse to Selma, Viola responded. With thousands of others, she would go to a bridge at Selma and make her personal statement for oppressed Southern blacks. From the campus of Wayne State, Viola called her husband, Jim, and told him she was leaving.

Tony remembers his mother's call and how his father made Viola promise to be careful. His father was a tough, well-built Italian-American who was devoted to his younger wife and to their family. Although Jim Liuzzo did not know much about the South, he knew it was a dangerous place for blacks and for white civil rights workers. But he understood, too, that Viola had to do what she thought was right, and he agreed to wire ahead the money to cover her trip.

Viola called every night while she was away, and Tony was home the afternoon she phoned from Montgomery to tell his father the march was over and that she would be returning to Detroit the next day. Tony remembers his father's words to her: "Vi, be careful, because the most dangerous time is after a march is over."

That night, Jim Liuzzo and his five children were at home. Penny and Mary, Viola's daughters by a previous marriage, were still awake. Tony, Tommy and their baby sister, Sally, were asleep when Jim received a telephone call from Alabama authorities informing him that his wife, Viola Gregg Liuzzo, 39, had been shot to death on Highway 80 between Selma and Montgomery. Tony was awakened by the screams of his father and his two oldest sisters. For Tony, it was like waking up in an unreal world, a world that would remain unreal for the next ten years of his life--until he could finally fit the pieces into place and discover who had actually murdered his mother and then destroyed the family.

•

The day after Viola's death, Tony heard his father say he wanted to be alone in a room with George Wallace for ten minutes. That same day, Tony watched as President Lyndon Johnson, on national television, announced the arrest of four members of the Ku Klux Klan who were charged with the Federal offense of conspiring to violate his mother's civil rights. As Johnson made the announcement and then denounced the Klan, he was flanked by J. Edgar Hoover. Just as it had always done on television and in the movies, Hoover's FBI had solved another one.

Gary Thomas Rowe, Jr., Collie Leroy Wilkins, William Orville Eaton and Eugene Thomas were taken into custody by FBI agents that day in the Birmingham, Alabama, metropolitan area. Rowe was a high-ranking member of the East-view 13 klavern of the Klan--the most vicious in the South, the klavern allegedly responsible for bombing Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church, where four young black girls were murdered. Wilkins, Eaton and Thomas were members of the Bessemer klavern. The previous day, the four Klansmen had left Bessemer on a Klan "missionary" assignment--to harass and possibly terrorize the black and white civil rights marchers who had walked from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King, Jr.

The speedy arrest of the four men surprised millions of Americans who felt the night-rider slaying of Viola Liuzzo would become another baffling, unsolvable civil rights murder. But law-enforcement observers realized immediately that one of the Klansmen must have broken and confessed in hope of immunity--or that one of the four men was an FBI informant.

Within weeks after their arrest, Rowe was, indeed, surfaced as an informant, paid by the FBI to report on the Klan since 1959. It was announced that he would testify against Wilkins, Eaton and Thomas in Federal court and in the courts of Alabama, where indictments were already being prepared against the three men.

According to Rowe, after the Klansmen reached Montgomery and observed the final moments of the voting-rights march, they drove to Selma, where they spotted a white woman riding alone in a car with a black male passenger. The Klansmen chased that car along Highway 80 toward Montgomery. Rowe told his FBI control agents he tried unsuccessfully to get the Klansmen to stop the chase and return to Selma. When the Klansmen finally overtook the car (continued on page 108)Did the FBI Kill Viola?(continued from page 102) and emptied their guns into it, Rowe said he faked firing his own weapon--and that Wilkins had fired the .38-caliber revolver that killed Viola Liuzzo. Following the chase and the murder, the four men returned to Birmingham, where Rowe immediately contacted his FBI control agent, thereby breaking wide open the case. By the time it heard from Rowe, the FBI had already identified Viola. Her passenger, Leroy Moton, had escaped injury and was in protective custody in the Selma jail.

Despite Rowe's testimony--he presented so many conflicting accounts that they became known unofficially as the "12 Rowe lies"--Wilkins and Thomas were acquitted of murder in the Alabama courts and Eaton died of a heart attack before he could stand trial. The men never even took the witness stand in their own defense. But their Klan lawyers successfully challenged Rowe's testimony, chopping away less at his version of the events than at his violation of his Klan oath, his position as an FBI informant. Wilkins, Eaton and Thomas were found guilty in Federal court of conspiring to violate the civil rights of Viola Liuzzo, and received the maximum sentence of ten years in prison.

Although the Liuzzo murder case seemingly had been solved by the FBI with astonishing swiftness, Tony Liuzzo now watched in disbelief as the public reacted to his mother's murder. Crosses were burned on the lawn of the Liuzzo home and stacks of hate mail arrived daily. There were countless late-night obscene phone calls, insults yelled from cars passing their home, and once gunshots were fired into their house from a speeding vehicle. Neighborhood housewives and children hurled rocks and stones at Sally when she walked home from school. Jim Liuzzo had to hire armed guards to protect his children. The world had suddenly turned upside down on top of Tony and his family, and his only rationalization was that this was what happened to the children of people who gave their lives for civil rights.

More devastating to Tony than all of the abuse, however, was the gradual disintegration of his family. The loss of Viola had deprived the Liuzzos of their central, driving force. She had been the one who pushed them all forward in life, and without her that momentum was lost. Tony and Tommy eventually dropped out of school. Viola, who had been unable at their age to finish high school, had always insisted not only that they attend school but that they bring home high marks on their report cards. She had enrolled at Wayne State as a part-time student majoring in English, stating that she intended to enter medical school and become a doctor. After her death, they watched their father's health decline sharply, complicated by a drinking problem he appeared to have lost the will to break.

Attempting to shield his children from as much public abuse as he could, Jim took the brunt of Viola's murder. It was he who sifted through the stacks of hate mail, including the receipt of a Klan magazine that showed on its cover his wife lying dead in her bullet-riddled blue Oldsmobile. And it was Jim who faced what seemed an uncommon level of official indifference from the Justice Department and the FBI when he sought to recover his wife's automobile--on which he continued to make monthly payments--and her personal effects.

The automobile was eventually returned to Jim Liuzzo, who turned it over to the General Motors Acceptance Corporation, which sold it to a man in Birmingham. Soon after the sale, Liuzzo learned of the following advertisement in The Birmingham News: "Do you need a crowd drawer? I have 1963 Olds-mobile 2-dr. that Mrs. Viola Liuzzo was killed in. Bullet holes & everything still intact. Ideal to bring in crowd. $3500. Write D-46, care News."

Jim's protest of the advertisement and the potential exploitation of Viola's car at Klan rallies and carnivals met with the same official indifference. But his constant appeals to the Justice Department, the FBI and Alabama authorities for the return of Viola's personal effects did finally pay off--more than ten years after her death.

During the state trials of the Klansmen, in 1965 and 1966, Klan lawyer Matt Murphy repeatedly implied the possibility of a sexual relationship between Viola and Leroy Moton, and conducted impromptu news conferences in which he suggestively questioned why a white woman from Detroit would have deserted her husband and children to ride around in cars with black men.

Jim read in Detroit newspapers a confidential report on his family prepared and leaked to the Klan by a former Detroit police official. The report included such details as Jim's salary, the amount of monthly payments he was making on Viola's blue Oldsmobile, the stores where the family maintained charge accounts, Viola's student number at Wayne State and a characterization of Viola as being emotionally unbalanced. Jim could do little more than watch as his family was publicly destroyed; he was powerless to prevent what was happening, because neither he nor his children could identify the persons who were responsible for the attacks against them.

Jim Liuzzo died of natural causes in 1978, but he lived long enough to see some of the pieces of the mystery fall into place. Rowe's testimony in a Federal court 13 years earlier had assured the conviction of the three other Klansmen. But in 1975, Rowe described for a Senate committee his years as a paid FBI informant within the Klan, years in which he regularly participated in violent acts against blacks and white civil rights activists--with the knowledge and approval of the FBI.

Then, in the summer of 1978, Jim Liuzzo watched a segment of ABC-TV's 20/20 news program concerning Viola's death. On that program, the two surviving Klansmen, who had served prison sentences for conspiring to violate the civil rights of his wife, broke a Klan-enforced silence. Over national television, the two men said that Rowe had fired the shots that killed Viola. On the same program, Rowe gave his version, claiming that Collie Leroy Wilkins, Jr., had fired the murder weapon. But the two Klansmen and Rowe voluntarily submitted to lie-detector tests. While inadmissible in a court of law, the results of those tests indicated that the Klansmen were telling the truth and that Rowe was deceptive.

In his Senate testimony, Rowe characterized himself as a violent instrument for the Ku Klux Klan, paid by the FBI. The subsequent televised accusations by the two Klansmen finally revealed to the Liuzzo family the source of the official indifference to the abuse they had suffered, and an explanation for that abuse. If Rowe's testimony and the accusations of the Klansmen were taken at face value, then the FBI's chief informant inside the Klan--a man who described himself as an instigator of violence against innocent victims--had been taken off his leash by the FBI and the result was the murder of Viola Liuzzo. Although it seemed incredible at the time, the very organization credited with the astonishingly swift resolution of Viola's murder now appeared to have shared the responsibility for her death--and direct responsibility for the (continued on page 162)Did the FBI Kill Viola?(continued from page 108) destruction of her family.

With his father's blessings and encouragement, Tony Liuzzo had been hard at work since 1976 searching for the truth concerning his mother's murder. It would be an uphill struggle to obtain the information he needed, a constant fight that would cost him jobs and financial security, strain his marriage, subject him to public ridicule as a conspiracy-happy Detroit street kid taking on the unassailable FBI and eventually pit him in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with one of the most powerful and intimidating individuals and organizations in the U.S.--Director William H. Webster and the FBI.

•

Tony Liuzzo was puzzled. The night of his mother's death, the FBI reported that three witnesses claimed to have seen a 1955 Ford in the vicinity of the murder--but the Ford was never mentioned again. What had happened to it? Why were no fingerprints ever taken on the murder weapon or on his mother's car? He did not know then that by asking these and other questions, he was about to discover one of the most questionable murder investigations ever conducted by the FBI, and in the process reveal why that investigation remains suspicious. He had only two sources of information--the periodical rooms of libraries and the telephone--but his street-smart instincts kept him on the right trail. He had tried to reach Leroy Moton by calling every Moton listed in the Prattville, Alabama, phone book. Moton had testified in the trials of the Klansmen and then seemingly disappeared. While Tony was unable to contact Moton, if his basic questions about the murder and the investigation could not be answered by someone who was present that night, then that alone was a clue, a possible explanation for the FBI's official indifference in the years that followed Viola's death.

Tony went first to a small library in Detroit to read the ten-year-old press accounts of his mother's murder. The individual accounts were not only different from one another, they were contradictory. According to the U.P.I, news release, the man in the car with Viola said the murder weapon had been a high-powered rifle. According to another news agency, the FBI said two revolvers had been used. According to the news reports during the trials of the Klansmen, the murder weapon had been a .38.

The search took him to two larger libraries, the Detroit Public Library and the Henry Ford Centennial Library. But there Tony encountered the same puzzling contradictions. The facts concerning his mother's murder were so scrambled as to be rendered unintelligible. There was no useful information to be found, only discrepancies that produced more questions. Tony had never been to Alabama, so he could not accurately visualize Highway 80 or the scene of the attack; but in his imagination, he could hear the cars at high speeds, the sounds of the guns as the Klansmen opened fire.

His mother had been an aggressive driver. He had ridden with her when she drove her blue Oldsmobile at high speeds. Once when she was angry, he had watched her ram his father's car. Rowe's testimony in the Alabama courts indicated that the Klansmen had little problem overtaking the Oldsmobile. But Tony remembered his mother as not being afraid of anything, the sort of woman who would have had her car flying along Highway 80 if she had felt herself in danger. The mother Tony remembered would have moved her car directly into the path of the Klan car, a red-and-white 1962 Chevrolet Impala. She would have made an aggressive move against the car that was threatening her, Tony reasoned, unless her car were hemmed in by another, third vehicle. Such as the 1955 Ford.

Tony was young, impatient and frustrated because his research was not paying off and he could not afford to spend hours in libraries, away from his home, his job. But he refused to give up. Before leaving the library one day, he copied the names of some of the individuals quoted in the clippings. And when he returned home and glanced at the list, he suddenly realized he had hit pay dirt. Whoever these people were--and the majority of them were ministers--and wherever they might be living years after the event, he had to find them. These were people who had been in Selma with his mother.

He called California, Missouri, Illinois. In the middle of the night, he tried to track them down through the headquarters of the denominations they had represented on the Selma march. He called the Lutherans, the Presbyterians and the Disciples of Christ. He had to find the people who had been there that night, people whose memories of the most seemingly insignificant detail might lead him to the truth.

Finally, he reached a minister who had been quoted in the Los Angeles Times. He told him he was Tony Liuzzo, Viola's son. There was a long pause at the other end, and then the man told Tony that he had been on Highway 80 the night Viola died.

The minister had driven a rented truck that night. It had been crowded with about 40 marchers he had picked up at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in downtown Montgomery, and as he had driven west toward Selma, he had been stopped twice by Alabama troopers.

He remembered the troopers as having been unusually hostile. Alabama troopers had aroused the nation's conscience three weeks earlier with their armed assault on peaceful blacks at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. That assault, known as Bloody Sunday, had actually set into motion the events that would lead to the successful, triumphant entry into Montgomery of the 30,000 black and white civil rights activists who had walked from Selma to ask that blacks be given the right to vote. Throughout the days of the march, Alabama troopers had been under a stern Federal court order to protect the same marchers they had recently brutalized. As soon as the march was over, though, they had felt the court injunction was lifted. Returning from Montgomery to Selma that last night of the march, countless cars and trucks carrying marchers had received hostile treatment from the enraged troopers, who had issued tickets as fast as they could write them. But, curiously, a red-and-white Chevrolet Impala carrying four men had also been stopped by the troopers that night, at 6:20 P.M. The driver of the Impala was released with a warning.

The minister told Tony he had been given a ticket, threatened with jail and cursed by the troopers. While he felt he had been stopped unnecessarily, he was convinced of that when he realized the highway ahead of him was wide open. There had been no cars or trucks in sight, no headlights coming toward him, no taillights moving away. A highway that should have been clogged with vehicles ferrying marchers back to Selma was empty.

Then, as the minister had driven toward Selma after his release by the troopers, he was flagged down by a tall young black male standing in the middle of the two-lane strip of Highway 80, wildly waving his arms. The man ran to the cab of the truck and said that a woman had been shot and killed. He had then climbed onto the back of the truck and the minister had driven nonstop into Selma. There the FBI was notified of the shooting. The young man, Leroy Moton, had been a passenger in the front seat of Viola's car when the shots were fired.

Tony asked the minister what time his truck had been stopped by Alabama troopers. As well as he could recall, he told Tony, his truck had been stopped and held up on Highway 80 from eight P.M. until approximately 8:30.

The minister's account confirmed what Tony had initially perceived and feared the most: Either by coincidence or by design, Highway 80 had been blocked off by Alabama troopers at the precise moment his mother's blue Olds-mobile was under attack by a red-and-white 1962 Chevrolet Impala--and possibly a 1955 Ford.

In 1978, Tony and his family, with the assistance of the Michigan affiliate of the A.C.L.U., filed under the Freedom of Information Act for all FBI documents relating to the murder of his mother. And while he waited for the FBI to respond to his family's request, Tony returned to the Detroit libraries. He had already turned up too many coincidences and discrepancies. Something was wrong. Not only could he smell it, he could see it--because similar coincidences were beginning to enter his own daily life.

He sat in the libraries, reading the details of the shooting, haunted by the minister's account, knowing that the characterization of his mother as someone who could have been picked off like a clay pigeon was wrong. One day, as he again left the library having found that the press reports didn't jibe, he walked out into the sunlight toward the parking lot--then stopped dead in his tracks.

Two men wearing trench coats, white shirts and dark ties sat in an automobile parked near his. There was no license plate on the front of their car. When Tony walked toward them, they appeared to be quickly covering something on the front seat of their car. Then they sped away.

Shielding his eyes as he watched them drive off, Tony wondered if he were now being stalked. Could it be only a coincidence that after his family had filed its F.O.I.A. request and he had begun to research the murder, men in trench coats resembling characters in B movies had suddenly popped up and just as quickly disappeared?

Eventually, the nearly obsessive pursuit of the truth by the Liuzzo children would take its toll, leaving them vulnerable to their own romantic notions: that they were being followed, that random coincidences in their own private lives were actually the results of conspiracies against them, that their phones were bugged, that FBI agents watched them constantly. Employers indifferent or unsympathetic to their search materialized as hostile adversaries. While a successful request for F.O.I.A. documents and eventually a civil suit against the FBI for damages in the wrongful death of their mother would not conceivably destroy the bureau or its future work, they now perceived themselves as powerful threats to the FBI, and they saw themselves stalked by G men. Unfortunately, the delays and frustrations inherent in their search for the truth only magnified their speculations. On "heavy" days, either just prior to important meetings with sympathetic lawyers or immediately following such meetings, their phones were invariably disconnected for nonpayment of enormous bills. To them, such coincidences took on awesome implications. Not only was someone actively seeking to keep them away from the truth concerning their mother's murder but their own lives were now threatened.

•

The meeting was arranged in the fall of 1978 by U.S. Senator Donald Riegle, a Michigan Democrat, and held inside Riegle's offices. It was a meeting Tony had not really anticipated, but if his search for the truth had now brought him to a head-on confrontation with the FBI, that, too, would have to be met.

The participants in the meeting recall that William Webster, the new director of the FBI, was surprised when he was introduced to Tony Liuzzo, the Detroit street kid who had been badgering his office for months concerning bureau documents relating to the murder of his mother in Alabama in 1965.

It is said that Webster had no indication before the meeting that Tony would be present. But if he appeared surprised to the others present, Tony sensed a somewhat sharper reaction from the FBI director.

"The only vibes that came out of him were like shock," Tony later told a friend. "He came walking in and Senator Riegle said, 'Judge Webster....' And he just looked at us and looked at Riegle like, What the shit is this?"

It is said the meeting, however strained, went smoothly for a while. Tony, Riegle and Dean Robb, an attorney representing the Liuzzo family, were interested in receiving the family's requested F.O.I.A. documents as soon as possible. Then Tony asked Webster why there had been so many delays, why the FBI had not already released the documents. In turn, Webster asked Tony why he really wanted to see them, since there were allegations in the documents that his mother had taken drugs and been hanging out sexually with blacks.

Tony then asked Webster why the FBI was still trying to smear his mother's reputation. Webster denied the bureau was doing so. But Tony knew from his own research that at the Alabama trials of the Klansmen, the Alabama toxicologist had testified there was no evidence of drug usage by his mother and that the autopsy revealed no evidence of sexual intercourse.

As one of those present characterized the exchange, "Webster only mouthed the J. Edgar Hoover imprecisions that there was wrongdoing on the part of Mrs. Liuzzo. And he was silent about the role of the FBI informant."

Webster did, however, agree to an immediate release of those documents that the FBI could release. And soon thereafter, Tony was on his way to the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. There he received 1500 pages of heavily censored FBI documents.

The FBI censoring process was peculiar, to say the least. One page might be half blacked out, but a duplicate of that page with a different portion blacked out soon turned up. Quotations from the public record were often excised with the reference left intact. Many pages were covered with Hoover's own almost indecipherable handwriting, which was then transcribed on other pages by diligent clerks. But while the FBI censoring process in itself appeared rather ridiculous, the contents of the documents received under the F.O.I.A., along with other FBI reports and documents, were devastating.

On the strength of those documents, it can be argued that Viola Liuzzo was the victim of a random act of racist violence perpetrated in the presence of a paid FBI informant. It can also be argued that taken at face value, the different accounts of the murder given during the 1965--1966 Klan trials by Rowe, the FBI informant, suggest that the shooting took place before he could interfere and stop the crime. And, despite the feelings of the Liuzzo children and their revealing questions about discrepancies in the case, it can also be argued that there was no conspiracy to murder Viola Liuzzo.

But as Tony sifted through the pages of the FBI documents, he could barely contain his anger. He had now come face to face with an undeniable mastermind of evil. Even if there were no conspiracy to murder his mother, starting within hours after the discovery of her body beside Highway 80, there was a conscious effort to smear her reputation. And that smear campaign was carried out by J. Edgar Hoover.

A Hoover memorandum of 9:32 A.M. on March 26, 1965, describes his first conversation with President Johnson:

I told the Attorney General that the President asked if he should (continued on page 174)Did the FBI Kill Viola?(continued from page 164) talk to the husband of the woman in Detroit who had died and I suggested the President have [Presidential counsel] Lee White call this man and, if the man behaves himself, the President could consider talking to him later. I stated the man himself doesn't have too good a background and the woman had indications of needle marks in her arms where she had been taking dope; that she was sitting very, very close to the Negro in the car; that it had the appearance of a necking party.

A Hoover memorandum of 9:39 A.M. covers roughly the same terrain:

The President called and said they want him to talk to the husband of the woman who was killed.... He said, before he talked to the man, he wanted to be sure I don't have any reason why he shouldn't, because our report indicated the man is a Teamster man. I told the President I don't say the man has a bad character but he is well known as a Teamster strong-arm man and on the woman's body we found numerous needle marks indicating she had been taking dope, although we can't say that definitely, because she is dead. I said I would be inclined to have White or someone like that talk to the husband rather than the President. The President said all right, White has already talked to him.

Hoover had made Johnson his first recipient of fabricated information concerning Viola. Millions of Americans would eventually receive that same information through FBI "leaks" to the bureau's Ku Klux Klan informants and to members of the press who published the information without questioning its authenticity. But Jack Valenti, an aide to Johnson at the time, remembers the President's reaction. Johnson had been around Washington and J. Edgar Hoover long enough to know what to listen for when the formidable FBI director held forth. So it was that Johnson was impressed by one particular feature in the Liuzzo murder case, an interpretation that would go largely overlooked by Federal and state authorities and the media for almost 15 years.

"I was sitting with the President and Hoover called him and told him about the murder and then told him a fascinating story," says Valenti. "I remember it very well, because the President had this look of amazement on his face. What sticks in my memory is that look of amazement."

Johnson then told Valenti that Hoover said they had an FBI man in the car with the murderers.

"That's how he put it," says Valenti, "An FBI man. Hoover said they knew exactly who did it."

The participation of an "FBI man" in a murder would remain virtually unchallenged for years because Hoover's agents in Alabama had covered their asses. They had told Hoover exactly what he wanted to hear--drugs and necking with blacks. While the FBI should never have allowed Rowe to be anywhere near Selma or Montgomery that day, its field agents would now escape the embarrassing consequences of Rowe's presence. For Hoover's benefit, the presence of a white woman alone in an automobile with a black male at 7:34 P.M. would be dramatized into a necking party. From out of the blue, they would then introduce drugs into the scene, ensuring that further information about the woman would be irresistible to Hoover.

Further, they would insist an all-points bulletin had been put out on the red-and-white Chevrolet, thereby shifting to the Alabama state troopers any speculations of willful negligence for not apprehending Rowe and the other Klansmen when they were pulled over at 6:20 P.M. No fingerprints would ever be taken on the murder weapon, thereby restricting the debate over who fired it, pitting the words of Rowe against those of the three Klansmen. Rowe would be surfaced, relocated and, with the reputation of the FBI firmly backing him up, he would be touted as an FBI hero who stepped on Viola's evil Klan killers.

In the upcoming murder trials of the Klansmen, Rowe's description of the events would convey the official imprimatur of the bureau. And while no one in his wildest dreams ever envisioned the conviction of a Klansman in an Alabama court of law, the trials and their publicity would give the FBI strategic opportunities, through Klan lawyers and the press, to spread reckless rumors about Viola: that she took drugs, that she'd abandoned her family, that she slept with black men, that her husband was not only a Teamster official but a strong-arm extortionist as well, that unlike Rowe and the Klansmen, she had no business in Selma, that she got what she deserved.

No moment in the slain woman's life would go uninvestigated. A murder victim, Viola was investigated by the FBI as if she herself had murdered someone. But that was exactly what Hoover wanted, and his agents enthusiastically delivered. Hoover was eager for any derogatory information he could use in his private war against Martin Luther King, Jr., and even the most unsubstantiated, sordid rumors about civil rights workers and their supporters went directly into his files. Hoover even maintained a "Do Not File File" for certain items he considered too hot to leave his ready grasp.

The funeral of Viola Liuzzo in Detroit was as closely monitored by FBI agents as if they were observing a gathering of gangsters. From the bureau's constant electronic surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr., agents were able to report in an urgent teletype to Hoover: "Martin Luther King has telephonically advised the family he will arrive in Detroit on Sunday, March 28."

When Hoover received a telegram from Martin Luther King, Jr., congratulating the FBI for the "speedy arrest of the accused assassins of Mrs. Liuzzo," an FBI internal memorandum reflected the bureau's official attitude:

I do not believe this wire should be acknowledged, because a reply would only help build up this character and a communication from Mr. Hoover, which King would undoubtedly publicize, will tie us in with him, and put us under an obligation to him. I likewise feel that King's telegram to the director should not be released to the press for the same reasons.

Despite the FBI's efforts to distract attention away from Rowe and direct it instead to the campaign against the Liuzzos, at least two members of the national press commented on Rowe. In a radio broadcast, Fulton Lewis, Jr., noted that if the FBI had an informant in the murder car, then that person should have had a moral obligation to prevent the killing.

Hoover apparently ignored the Lewis comment. But his marginal notations on memorandums concerning an Inez Robb column are evidence of his own obsession with destroying Viola's reputation.

"What troubles me," wrote Robb, "is the moral aspect of Rowe's presence in the car when an innocent woman ... was gunned down." Robb pointed out that Rowe had opportunities to prevent the murder but neglected to do so. She asked: "Under what kind of secret orders did Rowe work? Was the infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan more important than the saving of an innocent woman?" Then Robb concluded her column with this note: "It is one woman's opinion that the FBI owes the nation an explanation of its actions in the Liuzzo case."

An obligatory FBI file check was run on Robb. Each person who corresponded with the bureau or Hoover concerning the Liuzzo case was subjected to an immediate FBI file check, including junior high school students who wrote to praise Hoover and his agents. As was the case with most of the junior high students, the FBI memorandum on Robb stated: "Our files reveal no information of a derogatory nature identifiable with Robb."

But, obviously, either the Robb column or the unsuccessful file search on her had driven Hoover right to the edge. He scrawled across the memorandum: "This is absolutely untrue. Back in the Thirties or Forties, she vilified the FBI and me personally when I was in Miami Beach and even picketed my cottage there. H."

Then, in the margins of a second memorandum concerning the disturbing questions raised by Robb, Hoover's scrawled comment suggested the columnist was a "bitch." Interestingly, in a barely decipherable marginal note on the same page, Hoover reacted to the memorandum's suggestion that Robb be informed Rowe was not an FBI employee. Hoover wrote: "He was a paid informant...is mere quibbling to say he was not organization employee. H."

After the flak from Robb, the bureau's defensive walls quickly surrounded Rowe. No member of the press was to be allowed near him. All attention was to be diverted away from Rowe and focused on Viola.

And so it was that a Michigan housewife who had gone to Selma for the cause of racial justice would have her life discredited. Although it would take years for her personal effects to be returned to her family, when Jim Liuzzo inquired about the status of the blue Oldsmobile three months after her death, Hoover wrote: "Liuzzo seems more interested in cash rather than in grief over his wife's death. H."

•

As Tony studied the documents, he knew the woman portrayed in them was not his mother but an invention of the imagination of Hoover and his agents. Hoover had initiated the campaign against the Liuzzos--but he had done so only because his Alabama agents had failed to prevent the murder from taking place.

According to the FBI documents, Rowe had informed his FBI control agent on the morning of the murder about his scheduled trip that day to the black belt of Alabama. He lived in Birmingham, where he had initially been recruited by the FBI in 1959 to infiltrate the Klan and work as a paid informant. He told his agent the plans for the trip.

Martin Luther King's voting-rights march from Selma to Montgomery was scheduled to end that afternoon at the Alabama capitol. The Klan had called Rowe and told him he was to go to Montgomery, that this was to be his "big day," that he had finally been chosen to do the greatest deed of his life for the Klan. Rowe knew the names of the Klansmen with whom he would be going to Montgomery. The FBI was aware of Rowe's own record and history of uncontrollable violence. Its files on his companions revealed equally volatile and disturbed men. Still, Rowe was quickly given a green light, even though the FBI would have been daydreaming not to have known immediately that the presence of Rowe and his three companions in Montgomery would result in an act of violence, perhaps even murder.

Rowe was to travel in a car owned by Eugene Thomas. FBI files on Thomas revealed that he was a member of the Bessemer, Alabama, klavern of the United Klans of America. On August 6, 1959, wearing a white robe and hood, he had participated in an automobile caravan to the Cahaba Heights section of Birmingham, where crosses were burned. On June 8, 1963, he had been arrested near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and charged with carrying a concealed weapon. On September 26, 1964, after a Klan rally, he and other Klansmen had prepared to bomb the Flame Club in Fairfield, Alabama, because they had observed "Negro and white people intermingling." When police cars were observed in the area, the plan to bomb the club was abandoned.

Thomas had had a lot of arrests during his 43 years, but on that morning, as he and Rowe and their companions departed for Montgomery, he carried with him a commission card designating him a special constable for the purpose of law enforcement; a small metal police badge bearing his name and the designation Special Police, Fairfield, Alabama; and a commission card titled Commission for Special Policeman, City of Bessemer, State of Alabama. Thomas' arrest record was apparently of no significance to local police authorities. He was a Klansman they used to help them terrorize blacks.

William Orville Eaton, also 42 years old, was the only occupant of the car that morning whose FBI records were not extensive. He had been arrested in Birmingham on April 22, 1954, and charged with "VPL" distilling--probably a violation of prohibition laws. He had pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years. The sentence was suspended and Eaton had then been placed on probation for two years.

Collie Leroy Wilkins, Jr., was only 21 years old when he climbed into Thomas' Chevrolet. He had first been arrested on May 15, 1960, and charged by the Fair-field police with petty larceny and destruction of private property. He was arrested in Birmingham on August 29, 1961, and charged with malicious destruction of property. Then on March 11, 1964, he was arrested by Hueytown, Alabama, police and charged with driving while drunk.

The Hueytown police had spotted a revolver under Wilkins' feet and his car was searched. They then found a sawed-off shotgun, a small baseball bat, a slingshot, a Kloran--the book that sets forth the Klan rituals--and a Klan robe. Wilkins denied membership in the Klan or knowledge of the Kloran. He denied owning the Klan robe but admitted owning the shotgun. According to an FBI report, "He stated he felt he needed the gun to protect himself against Negroes." Wilkins was sentenced to two years' probation for possession of the sawed-off shotgun--a violation of the National Firearms Act.

Rowe's criminal record had been carefully blacked out in the FBI documents. But the morning following Viola's murder, FBI information on Rowe, Thomas, Wilkins and Eaton would increase dr? matically, reflecting an even darker side of those four men.

In searches of their homes, FBI agents found arsenals of varying personality and firepower. Easily, the Thomas collection was the most potent, ranging from a bullwhip to a sawed-off shotgun; the Eaton residence contained the kinds of guns and ammunition found in homes throughout the South--though admittedly in greater quantity; at Wilkins' home, the only weapon found was an old Wards Western field repeating rifle that was disengaged from its stock and hadn't been fired in years.

Rowe's, though, was a puzzling collection--a hodgepodge of ammunition, but no weapons to fire it. The FBI already had in its possession Rowe's Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver loaded with six rounds of ammunition, and it had also taken one gun patch that had recently been run through the .38. But Rowe's collection was an indication of his methods as a person who characterized himself as an instigator of violence. For years, he could readily have supplied untraceable ammo to his fellow Klansmen, thereby encouraging them to acts of violence, just as Thomas and Wilkins would claim years later that Rowe had provoked them into being accomplices to murder.

•

In 1977, the Liuzzo family filed notice of a damage claim against the U.S. Government and its agency, the FBI. In 1979, the family brought suit against the Federal Government for the wrongful death of Viola Liuzzo and asked for $2,000,000 in damages. The information contained in the censored FBI documents strengthened their convictions that their mother would still be alive if an FBI informant had not been present on Highway 80 on the night of March 25, 1965. They filed suit in Federal district court in Michigan, and the U.S. Department of Justice immediately sought to have the suit thrown out on technicalities. According to the Justice Department, the two-year statute of limitations applicable to Federal tort claims had expired for the Liuzzos in 1967. The Justice Department argued that the Liuzzo family should have filed its suit at that time.

But on February 29, 1980, U.S. District Court Judge Charles W. Joiner denied the Government's motion to dismiss the Liuzzo case. He ruled that the statute of limitations for the Liuzzos actually started running in 1975, when Rowe testified before the U.S. Senate. Judge Joiner later set a January 1981 trial date for the Liuzzo case, and he signed his order for that trial date on March 25, 1980--the 15th anniversary of the murder of Viola Liuzzo.

In September 1978, the Lowndes County, Alabama, grand jury indicted Gary Thomas Rowe for first-degree murder in the death of Viola Liuzzo. It indicted Rowe after hearing testimony from the two Klansmen who had broken their silence on the 20/20 report and on the basis of testimony given by people who had been afraid to speak up in 1965.

When Rowe was indicted, Tommy Liuzzo was living in Michigan. Of the five Liuzzo children, Tommy was the one on whom Viola's murder had taken the saddest toll. For years, he appeared to internalize everything derogatory said about his mother and his family. He eventually drifted away from home, wandering across the country through a mind field of drugs that left him even less capable than before of dealing with reality. He married, had a son, divorced, then married again. By the summer of 1980, Tommy's frustrations had overpowered him and he is alleged to have sexually abused his own son. In desperation, Tony filed a formal complaint against his brother and, following the hearing, a judge in Michigan committed Tommy to a state mental hospital.

But in 1978, hearing of Rowe's indictment, Tommy had packed his wife, son, three Dobermans and all their belongings into a van and driven to Alabama to be present for the trial. He thought that once Rowe was indicted, it would be only a matter of weeks, perhaps months, before the trial. He did not realize that Rowe, who lived and worked as a private investigator in Savannah, could fight extradition in the courts of Georgia and Alabama for over a year and a half--and in Federal courts for almost the same length of time.

Tommy expected that soon after his arrival, he would sit in the Southern Gothic courtroom in Lowndes County and see both Rowe and the FBI brought to trial for the death of his mother. At that time, all of Tommy's romantic notions of a master conspiracy to murder his mother would be enacted on a courtroom stage in front of him. and all of the countless people who had harmed him would then be punished. He remained in Lowndes County for almost a full year while he waited for Rowe to be brought to trial. But within a short time after his arrival in the tiny, sparsely populated county, news of his appearance had spread to almost everyone.

Connected to the outside world by Highway 80 on the north and the new interstate on the south, Lowndes is one of those primordial, remote Southern counties with long memories and uncertain futures. Before Tommy arrived, his mother's name was part of its memory, and his presence unsettled the daily, fixed routine and gossip of the place.

The whites of Lowndes had resented his mother and had voluntarily participated in the denial of her martyrdom, to the extent of applauding the acquittal of the Klansmen who had been accomplices in her murder. To them, Tommy's unexpected arrival on their parched landscape in the dry, hot fall of 1978 was generally regarded as nothing less than the appearance of a ghost, a name from beyond the grave. Unfortunately, not long after he arrived and set up housekeeping, Tommy came close to haunting the entire county.

Anticipating a short stay, he had brought along all the money he could scrape together. As the weeks of waiting for Rowe's trial dragged into months, his funds ran out and he searched for work. A professional truck driver in Michigan, Tommy now encountered the economic reality of a region where any salary above minimum wage was considered extravagant and the unemployment rates among men his age were staggering.

Unable to shake his dissatisfaction with the jobs offered him, Tommy appeared to many not to want to hold down a job, to take affront in the day-to-day existence of Lowndes County.

Actually, the county had changed in the years following the murder of his mother. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 had enabled the black-majority population to elect black officials for the first time. But in Lowndes County, political enfranchisement and economic growth did not run parallel. Although the brutality of whites toward blacks was no longer a feature of daily life, the economic growth by blacks was only slightly altered from 1965. During his year in Lowndes County, Tommy received job offers and assistance from the county's blacks. The whites were terrified that he had come to extract wholesale revenge for his mother's murder.

And as he applied Michigan pay scales and working conditions to jobs offered to him by blacks who had only recently found political freedom and were still themselves dreaming of economic advantages, Tommy believed himself to be facing frustrations in his day-to-day life in Lowndes identical to those he had faced in his quest for the truth concerning his mother's murder. On the night of her death, when Tommy and Tony were awakened by the screams of their father and sisters, Tommy stepped inside a world that was to alternate for him between romance and reality, revenge and resignation. By the fall of 1978, when he arrived in Lowndes County, he firmly believed his mother had been assassinated because of a conspiracy. In Tommy's theory, his mother was the crucial, missing link between the Southern civil rights movement and the labor unions. Someone in the Government, probably the FBI, did not want Viola to tie together Southern blacks and Northern labor unions.

When the locals of Lowndes County asked Tommy why he had moved there, he told them it was not for revenge. He had come to see the Rowe trial, but more importantly, he had come to find the proof for his theory. Having listened at length to his scenario, the locals would quietly back away. And as he began to tell people that there were contracts out on his life in Lowndes County, people began avoiding him.

Random, brutal Klan and racist-inspired violence was so heavily a part of the immediate memories of the locals that Tommy's conspiracy theories were unconvincing. And when he started reporting threats against his own life, he convinced many of the locals that he was unhinged.

Tommy remained in Lowndes for as long as he could hold down jobs and make a living; but as the days of waiting for the Rowe trial dragged on, his impatience for vengeance was characterized by even more self-destructive behavior and new romances of intrigue and conspiracy. The same people who had murdered his mother, Tommy reasoned, were now deliberately delaying Rowe's trial as they hired gunmen to find him.

He moved into a small house at the end of a long, winding red-dirt road, deep in the backwoods. The gunmen would have to search to find him--and then they would have to get past his Dobermans. Barefoot, he sat sipping a beer on his cement front porch at sunset. His long black hair was unkempt, his clothes freshly laundered but un-ironed. In the twilight, as steam rose from a bank of trees on the ridge-line hill, Tommy could have been just another working-class Southerner. But then he would launch into his theories.

"The word is out over there in Selma that somebody's gonna kill me, " Tommy said, his voice flat and unemotional, his gray-green eyes as cold and flat as a sheet of ice. "I've just learned to live with it here. I'm not here to make trouble. Nobody's burned a cross on our lawn yet."

A great spray of steam rose from the trees. Somewhere on the other side of that ridge, several miles away, the newly resurgent Ku Klux Klan was marching from Selma to Montgomery, pausing at the site of his mother's murder to spit on the ground where she had died, to say she deserved what she got. But Tommy appeared oblivious to the inherent dangers in a revived Klan, in tune only with the conspiracy to wipe him out.

"There's an elitist group of powerful people that create changes at a whim." he said. "They saw the civil rights movement as an untapped source of money and labor. They selected Dr. King. He had everything--the charisma, the voice--and when they were done with him, they threw him away. They had to have that Voting Rights Act. People had to die, blood had to be shed. They gunned educators, ministers, young people and my mother. They were all gunned for psychological advantages. Probably as long as I live, I'll think about that."

At times, his words and theories were as elusive as the steam rising from the trees. But there was nothing elusive in how Tommy sat dead-still on his front porch, staring into the deep woods surrounding his house, as it watching and waiting for the men who had been paid to kill him.

Either Tommy's patience or his ability to evade hit men finally ran out in Lowndes County. He placed an ad in the classified section of the Selma Times-journal.

Son of slain civil-rights worker, Viola Liuzzo, desperately needs money to get home. Contact Tom Liuzzo, Star Route, Box 100, Minter Alabama 36761. By October 15.

If the whites of Lowndes County or their paid assassins had been searching the woods for Tommy, he had now published his address in the newspaper. And within a few weeks, having received, as he termed it, "a measly $100" from his ad, he was heading back to Detroit, the front of his small house riddled with buckshot.

Local newspapers ran stories about the shooting incident. Tommy said that he and his wife and kid and dogs had been away from home when the shooting took place. State investigators and the Lowndes County sheriff's office arrived to check out his story. While they were present, Tommy's moods shifted violently from romance to reality. Within days he had returned to Michigan, but within hours there were few people in Lowndes County, black or white, who doubted that Tommy had shot up his own house.

•

In response to Rowe's public admission of violence against innocent people while on the FBI payroll, and in light of his indictment for murder and the press exposures of his violent history, the Justice Department in 1978 initiated an internal investigation of Gary Thomas Rowe. The Rowe Task Force, as it came to be known, is said to have written a 302-page report, a chronicle of Rowe's day-to-day acts of violence (see box).

Tony Liuzzo wants to see that 302-page report. He also wants to see the uncensored pages from the FBI documents, as well as 1500 pages of additional FBI documents that are said to relate to his mother's murder and to the following investigation.

The Justice Department and the FBI have refused to release any additional information, stating that to do so might interfere with Rowe's chances for a fair trial on the murder charges. But there are other reasons as well.

The FBI charter is now up for Congressional review, and with the exposure of violent informants like Rowe, many questions are being asked concerning the use of such informants. While they are indispensable to any law-enforcement or investigative agency, informants like Rowe seem ultimately counterproductive.

Tony Liuzzo still has many questions about what happened that night on Highway 80. He has listened patiently to Tommy's romantic theories, and then returned to his own investigation. Not having the Justice Department report on Rowe, nor the additional documents from the FBI, however, his research has still carried him to what he thinks might be an accurate re-creation of his mother's murder.

The Selma-to-Montgomery march had ended and Viola was searching for her car. All around her on the wide expanse of asphalt in front of the white-domed capitol of Alabama, 30,000 civil rights marchers and their supporters appeared to be in a hurry to leave. Viola was in a hurry to find her car. She had not seen it since she arrived in Selma a week before and turned the keys to the '63 blue Oldsmobile over to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for its use in transporting workers and marchers. She wanted her car and she wanted to find a working telephone so she could call Jim and the children to tell them the march was over, that she would leave for Detroit the next day. She would stay another night in Alabama so she could help that evening in transporting marchers from Montgomery back to Selma.

She went first to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and was told that her car was at the City of Saint Jude, a Roman Catholic conference center outside Montgomery. At the City of Saint Jude, Viola spotted her car. It was being driven by Leroy Moton, a young black male from Selma who was a transportation coordinator for the march, who did not have a driver's license. Viola then drove a carload of marchers back to Selma.

Later, some of the passengers in her car would say they thought they were being followed along Highway 80. At a high speed, a car pulled up quickly behind Viola and put on its brights.

"They want to see my license plates," Viola said and slowed her car.

The other car passed, its lights still on bright. Viola sped up, flashing her lights on bright, saying she was giving the driver of that car a taste of his own medicine.

In Selma, Viola discharged her passengers at the George Washington Carver homes and turned her car around toward Montgomery. Moton remained inside the car to make the return trip with her.

She stopped at a gas station and bought 10.7 gallons of gasoline, paying $4.16 in cash. She and Moton also bought soft drinks. Then, as they drove toward the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Moton noticed on the City National Bank clock that it was 7:34 P.M. He also noticed a car with four whites that had pulled up beside them as they waited for the streetlights to change.

Viola was singing aloud the verses to We Shall Overcome as she crossed the bridge in Selma and hit the accelerator for the trip to Montgomery. She had not noticed the car that was now following her. By the time she actually realized a chase was on, that her life and the life of the young black stranger were in danger, it was too late.

The four men in the car behind the blue Oldsmobile had been gunning for Martin Luther King, Jr. The successful voting-rights march from Selma to Montgomery had infuriated the Ku Klux Klan, and the four men in the car were on a Klan "missionary" assignment to get revenge.

They had left Birmingham early that morning and driven to Montgomery. There, from a service station near the state capitol, they observed the marchers, the thousands of blacks and their white supporters walking triumphantly into town arm in arm. Frustrated in Montgomery because they could do nothing more harmful than yell insults at the marchers, and determined to strike back for the Klan, the four men left for Selma. They stopped en route at a bar, Jack's Tavern, and one of the men, Eugene Thomas, made arrangements for all four to be bonded if they were picked up for any reason. They then sped rapidly along Highway 80 toward Selma.

They were pulled over after they passed through a radar check point set up by Alabama state troopers. Thomas was told he had been stopped because of a loud muffler. When he gave the Alabama trooper his driver's license, he also handed him his honorary badge from the Fairfield, Alabama, police department. Thomas got off with a warning ticket. The ticket was clocked in at 6:20 P.M.--almost ten hours after Birmingham FBI agents claimed they had put out a bulletin on the red-and-white 1962 Chevrolet Impala driven by Thomas and carrying Gary Thomas Rowe. The Alabama troopers would later remember stopping the Chevrolet with the four men, and one of them would remember that Rowe was the passenger on the right rear seat.

The men crossed the bridge into Selma and stopped at the Silver Moon Café. There they encountered a heavy-set man who had been released on bond after being arrested for the recent murder of the Reverend James Reeb, a white minister who had come to Selma to march. As they left the Silver Moon, the man said to them: "I did my job, are you going to do yours?" Armed, they drove along Selma streets. They spotted blacks and whites walking together and were about to attack when they saw an Army truck parked nearby. So they moved on, searching for another place to strike, wondering if they would find Martin Luther King, Jr., or another important civil rights leader. Eaton packed a .22. Rowe carried a .38 that belonged to Thomas. He had asked Thomas to lend him the gun, explaining that his own .38 was defective, and, lucklessly, Thomas gave him the gun.

The men rode along Broad Street in downtown Selma and as they approached the bridge, they pulled up alongside a '63 blue Oldsmobile bearing Michigan license plates. A white woman was driving. Seated next to her was a black male. The Klansmen had finally isolated a perfect target: a white woman riding alone with a black male in a big car with license plates from a Northern state. They could unload their guns into her car on the spot and in their dark reasoning believe they had redeemed the Klan from its humiliation over the voting-rights march. As the traffic lights changed and the two cars made their way toward the bridge and the narrow highway to Montgomery, the sidewalk clock at the City National Bank building flashed the lime: 7:34 P.M.

According to Alabama law, an hour later, all four occupants of the Thomas vehicle were guilty of the murder of Viola Liuzzo, a Michigan housewife who died instantly when a .38-caliber bullet hit the spinal cord at the base of her brain. But a few hours after they sped away from Highway 80, the four Klansmen were back in Bessemer, celebrating their success, confident they had gotten away with murder.

"That bitch is dead and already in hell," one of the men said.

In Bessemer, Rowe returned the .38 to Thomas, and Thomas accepted the weapon. Rowe then left the three men and went to a phone booth and called his FBI control agent.

Tony was never convinced that the Klan car overtook his mother's car as effortlessly as their statements said they did. But as Viola drove east along Highway 80 and finally realized she was being chased, she pushed her car to speeds of 80, 90 and 100 miles per hour.

The car behind hers never relented. In the rearview mirror, she saw its headlights gaining on her, and then she heard it drawing up alongside the Olds. On her right, Moton did not even realize they were being chased, and he fiddled with the dials on the car radio. Viola hit the accelerator again, but now the other car had the momentum. As Viola glanced quickly to her left, she saw two revolvers aimed at her car. But she never heard them fired.

"Rowe participated in violent acts against civil rights activists--with the approval of the FBI."

"Highway 80 had been blocked off by troopers at the moment his mother's Olds was under attack."

"A murder victim, Viola was investigated by the FBI as if she herself had murdered someone."

Playboy has filed suit against Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti and the Justice Department in an effort to obtain release of the Rowe Task Force Report. Although United States District Judge John Garrett Penn has ruled in favor of Playboy on an early motion, the Justice Department contends that release of the entire report must await its review by Civiletti. Since the report was completed in July 1979, as we go to press, Playboy is preparing to ask the court to direct the Attorney General to carry out his obligation without further delay.