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Possible bullet found in Till autopsy |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Thursday, 16 June 2005 |
June 11, 2005
BY NATASHA KORECKI Staff Reporter
GREENVILLE, Miss. -- As the investigation into the 50-year-old murder of Emmett Till continues, preliminary autopsy results indicate examiners have recovered what they believe to be fragments of a bullet, a source close to the investigation told the Sun-Times.
Authorities are still awaiting results of tests that would definitively identify those fragments, as well as DNA tests that aim to positively identify the body as Till's.
Recovery of bullet fragments would be consistent with a confession from the two main culprits in Till's murder, and with what family members believe happened to Till.
Before the autopsy, Cook County Medical Examiner Dr. Edmund Donoghue said recovering a bullet was one of three main objectives in exhuming the body.
Body was never identified
His office, the FBI and Mississippi prosecutors exhumed Till's body from his Alsip grave two weeks ago after the Justice Department reopened the murder investigation last year. Till was killed in 1955. His body was never examined, his cause of death was never determined and he was never identified except through a ring he was wearing.
Joyce Chiles, district attorney for Mississippi's Fourth District, who will determine whether any new charges should be brought in the case, said although the autopsy was necessary, the public has placed too much weight on its importance. Chiles said months of intensive FBI investigation, including numerous interviews, were just as important. "There has been too much emphasis put on the autopsy," Chiles said. "It's just the regular course of business in any murder case."
Till was 14 when he was murdered. His body was remarkably well-preserved considering that he was never embalmed, several sources close to the case told the Sun-Times.
A chemical preservative was used on Till's body, and the scent of that chemical rose from the casket when it was opened 50 years later and authorities found a mummified body. Still inside the casket were charcoal and straw, which were laid under his body to help reduce odor, and newspaper still lay under his head, sources said.
One source close to the case said so far, preliminary autopsy results are consistent with the accounts Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam gave to Look magazine when they confessed to killing Till months after an all-white jury acquitted them of murder charges. In that interview, they said they beat Till with a .45 Colt automatic pistol and later shot him.
Family believed he had been shot
"The youth turned to catch that big, expanding bullet at his right ear," reporter William Bradford Huie wrote.
The men told Huie they sought out Till after accounts that he wolf-whistled at Bryant's wife, a white woman. At 2 a.m., the two men forced their way into the farmhouse where Till was staying, took him from his bed and drove him away in their pickup truck. Till's disfigured body was found by fishermen days later in the Tallahatchie River.
The defense rested on the fact that the body that washed up was never positively identified as Till's. Chiles called that reasoning an "excuse" jurors used not to convict the two men. "In order for it to not be used as an excuse again, we will have identity and cause of death," from the autopsy, Chiles said.
Damage to Till's skull led family members to believe Till had been shot.
Investigators are now looking at whether anyone else was involved in Till's murder or kidnapping. Mississippi Assistant District Attorney Hallie Gail Bridges said current statute allows for kidnapping or murder charges.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-till11.html |
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