On June 21, one week after the first volunteers arrived for training, three activists, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, disappeared. Schwerner had been working in Mississippi since January and was well-known to the local Klan members and segregationists who disapproved of his work. When the trio went to investigate the burning of Mt. Zion Methodist Church in Philadelphia, Mississippi they were pulled over for an alleged traffic violation and taken into custody by the Sheriff’s Deputy, Cecil Price. They were released later that evening after being denied the right to make a phone call and told to leave the county. They began driving back to Meridian, Mississippi where they were staying but were stopped again by Price. They were forced into a car by Price and then driven to a remote area where he handed the three over to a group of Klansmen. Schwerner and Goodman were shot immediately, and Chaney was beaten and then shot. The search for the missing activists turned into a national news story and brought more attention to the Freedom Summer voter registration activities and the brutal conditions for African-Americans in Mississippi. The FBI conducted a massive search and after 44 days found their corpses on August 4.
After the bodies of the three activists, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, were uncovered in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi the Justice Department began building a case. In December of 1964, federal agents arrested nineteen men and because Mississippi officials refused to prosecute the killers for murder, federal prosecutors, led by John Doar, charged the defendants with conspiring to deprive the three of their civil rights. Eventually seven men were found guilty and sentenced, but none served more than six years.
Many years later, journalist Jerry Mitchell began investigating and writing about the case. Mitchell identified new witnesses, uncovered new evidence with the help of Barry Bradford, a high school teacher and his students. The team uncovered new evidence, and even managed to conduct an interview with Edgar Ray Killen, one of the defendants from the earlier trial. Under pressure from the public and with the new evidence, the case was reopened and on January 6, 2005, a Neshoba County grand jury indicted Edgar Ray Killen on three counts of murder. On June 21, 2005, forty-one years to day the three men were killed, Killen was convicted on three counts of manslaughter and sentenced to three consecutive terms of 20 years.