Tape of Klansmen Is Played at Trial

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. —  There they were, three Klansmen--Bobby Frank Cherry, Thomas E. Blanton Jr., Mitchell Burns--driving around this angry city on a March night in 1965.

They were bashing the FBI, wearing out racial slurs, talking about bombs, when someone blurted: “So then they [FBI agents] asked me where were y’all when the bomb went off. And I told them: ‘We were trying to make ours for the weekend and find a good spot.’”

The men laughed. But one of them was faking it. Burns was an informant for the FBI collecting evidence against Blanton and Cherry in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four black girls. He had a reel-to-reel tape deck in his trunk.

But 37 years later, as the murder case against Cherry unfolds tape by scratchy tape in a much-changed Birmingham, it’s not clear how much evidence there ever was.

The quality of the tapes played Wednesday was so bad, it was difficult to understand what was said and who was saying it.

There’s no doubt Cherry, now 71, used to run with a violent crowd and detested integration down to the last nerve in his body. But so far there’s been little direct proof that he helped plan, build or deliver the bomb, which produced one of the most infamous attacks of the civil rights era.

On the trial’s second day, prosecutors spent the morning focusing on technical aspects of the blast. Many jurors looked tired as explosives experts talked projectile velocity and refractive indexes.

Despite extensive lab work and even modern-day simulations, none of the forensic tests was conclusive, said FBI bomb investigator Charles L. Killion. He was one of the agents who picked through the rubble and scraped blackened windowsills for residue hours after the church was bombed on Sept. 15, 1963.

“Actually, Mr. Killion, you have no conclusions about the type of explosives used, do you?” asked defense lawyer Mickey Johnson in an ornery cross-examination.

“No,” Killion said, “We don’t.”

An interesting twist came when Killion, a prosecution witness, poked a hole in the long-held theory of how the bomb was set.

Blanton and another Klansman, Robert Chambliss, already have been convicted in the bombing, and in both cases prosecutors said the men planted the bomb at the church the night before and rigged it with a timing device.

But Wednesday, Killion said that theory was “illogical.” There were too many people around the church who could have discovered the bomb, he said, and it was more likely the device was left “one or two hours” before the explosion.

Burns testified Wednesday that Cherry told him “he lied all the way through” to FBI investigators and that FBI agents “think we made the bomb somewhere else.” Neither comment was recorded.

It was hard to understand Cherry on the tapes, but one comment was unmistakable.

Talking about what he would like to do to trouble-making blacks, Cherry said: “George Wallace [then governor of Alabama] said on TV to use any force necessary.”

The trial is expected to last another week.