Editor's note: This story is updated to include the judge's sentence.
PHILADELPHIA, Miss. (ABP) — Forty-one years after the crime, Baptist preacher and former Ku Klux Klan member Edgar Ray Killen was sentenced to 60 years in prison for his connection with the slaying of three college-age civil-rights workers who were beaten and shot.
He received the maximum sentence of 20 years for each slaying.
Killen, now 80 and confined to a wheelchair, was connected with the 1964 shootings that took place in Neshoba County, Mississippi.
The victims were 21-year-old James Chaney, a black man from Meridian, Miss., and two white men from New York — Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24. All three were “Freedom Summer” volunteers who taught local blacks how to vote.
Their bodies were found 15 feet under a dam more than a month after their murders. They had been investigating the burning of a black Methodist church. Arrested by police and released, the three were then attacked by Klansmen and killed on a deserted road. It was later found that the police had conspired with the Klan.
Their deaths inspired the movie “Mississippi Burning.”
Killen is the first person to be charged by the state of Mississippi with these murders. He was indicted in 1967 on federal charges of violating the victims' civil rights but acquitted by an all-white jury. Seven others were convicted and served terms of less than 10 years. The case was reopened in 1999 and led to state charges.