and that was the 50-page constitution of the united klans of america. documents that you don t get to see unless you re in a klan. so i said, i d like to take these with me. he said, no, i want you to get my son off death row. i said, well, a jury put him on death row, a judge did, and i can t do anything about that. but don t you destroy these documents. so i walked out of there with nothing. in about a week or two, benny hayes was arrested and put into mobile county jail. he had burned his house down to get money to hire a lawyer to represent his son. and he had been indicted for that. we were able to establish it was, in fact, arson. so our office prosecuted him under the mail fraud charge. the judge gave him five years.
bob had investigated the klan successfully. bob eddy solved the 63 church bombing in birmingham. the klan felt that they were either protected or purely invincible. their influence and sympathizers were embedded throughout government, throughout law enforcement, in both the city and the state level. in spite of the fact that four innocent negro girls were brutally murdered in a church in birmingham, alabama, not a single arrest had been made. well, over six years after the bombing, i was elected attorney general of alabama. that meant i had the real position where i could do something about it. so, i got a terrific investigator named bob eddy. one great witness bob eddy found was chambliss s niece. she testified that two or three days before the bomb went off,
people were telling me, there ain t no such thing as the klan. michael must have been doing something wrong. the truth will come out, because we ain t going to let it rest. we originally arrested the wrong people. it was my mistake. eventually, mr. galanos realized, he said, look, we re going to go back, and we re going to investigate the michael donald case from day one. behind the scenes, there was a lot going on. there were two separate investigations. one track was the federal track, the other was the state track. we were both trying to get to the same place, following different paths. on the state side, i went to jeff sessions and said, i ve got this guy named bob eddy. he was chief investigator for the da.
those decades cannot be taken back. they cannot be given to those four little girls. so when we think about michael donald, we have to ask ourselves, how long will it take for his family to get justice? thomas figures believed that the klan was responsible for this and that we should pursue it. so the idea was that we would call a grand jury. we would call every witness that was relevant in any way, put them under oath, and question them aggressively. the reason we needed a federal grand jury is because a state grand jury convenes for a single session. the lifespan of a federal grand jury can run months. so federal grand jury convenes
Beulah Mae Donald and her attorney Michael Figures join forces with Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center to wage a multi-million-dollar civil suit.