6. Henry Alexander
The body of 24-year-old Willie Edwards Jr. Was discovered by a pair of fishermen in April 1957. He had spent his last moments alive being terrorized by members of the Ku Klux Klan, who had abducted him and taken him to a bridge where he was told to jump off, just because he had apparently offended a white woman. Henry Alexander was a Klansman at the time, and though he (along with other members) had been accused of killing Willie, the judge threw out the charges twice.
Henry’s wife, Diane, had always believed that despite the accusations against her husband, he was innocent, so when he told her in the run up to his death in 1993 that he actually had been involved in the tragic death, she was horrified. He told her that he had falsely identified Willie as the man who had insulted the white woman, which lead to the group of Klansmen giving him two options on the bridge that night; run or jump. “I didn’t think he would jump,” he said. “If he’d run, they would never have shot him.”
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