At 3:00 a.m. Lewis took a break for another cigarette as he made the same walk around the courthouse. It cleared his mind, got the blood flowing. The truck had not been moved.
It had license plates issued by Hancock County. Lewis waited impatiently through the night and called the sheriff in Bay St. Louis at 7:00 a.m. The sheriff went to the courthouse and to the office of the tax assessor. The license tags had been reported stolen four days earlier.
At 9:00 a.m., the stores were opening, though the streets were still blocked. The courthouse, of course, was closed. Working from his dining room table at home, Judge Oliphant issued a search warrant for the Dodge pickup. Under its seat, FBI agents found a set of license plates issued by Obion County, Tennessee. Hidden under the floor mat was a key to Room 19 of the Beach Bay Motel in Biloxi.
Judge Oliphant issued a search warrant for Room 19. Since Agent Lewis had the key, he did not bother with notifying the manager of the motel. He and Agent Spence Whitehead, accompanied by a Biloxi city policeman, entered the small room and found a pile of dirty laundry and an unmade bed. Someone had been there for a few days. Between the mattress and box springs, they found a wallet, some cash, two pistols, keys on a ring, and a pocketknife. The Tennessee driver’s license identified their man as Henry Taylor, address in the town of Union City, date of birth May 20, 1941. Thirty-five years old. The wallet also held two credit cards, two condoms, a fishing license, and eighty dollars in cash.
Agent Lewis placed the two pistols in a plastic bag. They left the other items precisely as they found them, and returned to the courthouse. Technicians collected fingerprints from the weapons, and Agent Whitehead returned them to Room 19.
With a flurry of phone calls, more pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Henry Taylor had been charged with blowing up a black church near Dumas, Mississippi, in 1966, but an all-white jury acquitted him. In 1969, he was arrested for bombing a synagogue in Jackson, but again was acquitted by an all-white jury. According to the FBI office in Memphis, Taylor was believed to still be active in the Klan. According to the sheriff of Obion County, he ran a carpet-cleaning business and had never been a problem. After some more digging, the sheriff reported that Taylor was divorced with no kids and lived just south of town.
Lewis directed another agent to begin the process of obtaining a search warrant for Taylor’s home.
Having had no sleep in thirty hours, Lewis and Whitehead left the scene and stopped at a café near the beach. Though they managed to control their excitement, they could not help but revel in their success and marvel at their luck. In about twenty-four hours, they had not only identified the killer but had him under watch in a hospital room.
They slugged coffee. Lewis was too wired to rest. He caught Whitehead completely off guard when he said, “Now that we’ve got him, we let him go.”
Whitehead, slack-jawed, said, “What?”
“Look, Spence, he has no idea we know what we know. We get him released from the hospital with no questions asked, just a bunch of dumb rednecks down there, right? He goes home, assuming he can drive with a broken leg, and considers himself a lucky man. Cops had him under their nose and let him get away. We tap his phones, watch him like a hawk, and, with time, he’ll lead us to the man with the money.”
“That’s crazy.”
“No, it’s brilliant.”
“What if he gets away?”
“Well, he won’t. And why should he run? We can pick him up anytime we want.”
Chapter 41
Gulf Coast Register:
jesse rudy killed in courthouse explosion
Jackson Clarion-Ledger:
biloxi courthouse bombed: d.a. dead
New Orleans Times-Picayune:
mob strikes back—prosecutor dead
Mobile Times: