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News Article "Mississippi Horror: a Doctor's Report"

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News Article ~lJfOPSY ON RIGHTS CRUSADER )ff. W~"t, Mississippi HorrOrrr:,;:, But I wos disappolnted, too, .r I hecause I wouldn't ha.\'e a chance now 1o do something th 1 that rnl~ht help find the mur· r? A Doctor's Report ' 1 derers of those kids, Good· l rich, when he came on the .,._ phone, resoh·ed my amblva· il BY DAY1D 8PAIX, :'.\I.D. I was as surprised by the post· unteer for the Medical Com· t lent feelings for me. fj C09Yright 19'4, The Layman's Pren midnight call as I would have mittee for Human Rights. Reprinttcl bY Permission "Get d0\\'11 here anyway. g . been if I looked out the win· "Dave, can. you get dov,n Take the late plane. There's y The phone rang about 1 :30 dow and saw my ailing out­ here, right away?" something tunny g o i n g on a .m. I had just gone to sleep, board motor running a.round "To Mississippi?" about this business. I think r after a restless hour In bed by itself in the bay. "Immediately. The autopsy we may be able to arrange conjugating tour days of utter • • • for you to examine the bodies t failure to get my outboard for those three kids Is sched· THE OPERATOR said Jack· uJed fo r tomorrow, and the later. It may all be a Wild J motor running, and I walked son, Miss., was call!ng. goose chase, but let's try." i half-asleep down the dark hall­ attorneys for :Mrs. Chaney and The man on the \~ire was )lickey Schwerner's famllr I said goodby, and then way to the telephone certain Dr. Charles Goodrich, a New told my wife that I was going that It was a wrong number. want an expert pathologist at York p h y s i c i a n who was the examination. a!! an lnde· to Mississippi, after all. The phone doesn't ring too spending his vacation in Mi~­ pendent observer." The Newa rk plane left on often at our summer home on sissippi giving medical aid to time and I had just unfastened )fartha's Vineyard Island, and civil-rights workers as a vol- I had been horrified by the my seatbelt when I heard a newspaper accounts of the man across the aisle tell the discovery of the bodies o! the stewardess to Jet him know it three young civil-rights work· "she ran across anybody C ers. I would do an)'ihing I could to help. Goodrich said Turn to Page 5A, Column 1 IC he had verbal permission for me to observe tile autopsy. ir People in New York were working on a way to get me Behind The Doetor!s Story from the little island off the coast of Massachusetts to On J une 21, 1964, two white men-Michael Schwerner, Mississippi by I u n c h t I m e. "You find a way to get me 24, and Andrew Goodman, 20, both of Kew York-and a Ii there, and I 'II go," I said. Negro, James Chaney, 21, of Meridian, ~ss., were killed • • • near Philadelphia, Miss.. THEN I WE:ST back to bed The FBI says it knows who the killers were but "in­ and waited. tensive investigation'' is continuing to build a court case. At 3 a.m., the phone rang The three young men were civil-rights workers. The again. There is a small air­ suspicion that they had been killed was confirmed when port on Martha's Vineyard l ~land. I was to be there at their burned-out s tation wagon was discovered near Phila­ 7 a.m. delphia two days after their disappearance. A special .plane would ts.kb • -* (< ' • ·--· • 'i:· ~ J rr.e tt-Kfillneu~ lu.1..:,:r.:.DL•i...ct1 TIIE ABS0LUTE FAC'.r of their deatlis was estab-. where I oould catch A 9:1.5 lished Aug. 4, when their bodies were found by FBI a.m. flight to Mlsslsslppl that agents, buried under a concrete footing beneath a 20-foot would get me into Jackson ·15 earthen dam on a farm six miles southwest of Phila­ minutes before the autopsy C was ischeduled to begin. delphia. a A coroner's jury reported two months later that it It was still <lark when we t. had been "unable"· to determine the cause of death. No got up and my wife drove me to the airstrip. But there was "f, official autopsy report ever was issued. no small plane. Instead, we But Dr. Da,id Spain, 51, clinical professor of pathology got a phone call from the at New York Downstate l\ledk.al Cent,er, performed autop· pilot. He couldn't get his motor &!es on two of the bodies-Chaney"s in Mississippi and started. I told him I Jmew ( Schwerner's in New York. just how he felt, and put in a call to Jackson to tell Good­ His own account of what happened in Mississippi Is rich that things looked pretty printed in the Free Press for the first time in the Detroit hopeless. ~ area. • • • Dr. Spain says flatly that Chaney was brutally beaten THE o~"LY scheduled flight 1 with chains or a pipe and may have been dead before he from the island Into Kennedy was shot. Death by gunshot was the verdict of Mississippi was at 10 e..m., too late to make the morning plane to doctors who performed an "unofficial examination." Mississippi. and the next Dr. Spain, director of pathology at New York's Brook­ flight for Jackson le~ at 4 in dale Hospital Center and a former medical examiner of the aiternoon from Newark JI Westchester County, N.Y., performed an autopsy on Airport. t1 Schwerner's body when it was returned to New Y ork for As I waited in the telephone a burial. booth for the operator to get ti through, my feelings were y * * • mLxed. I was relieved at not HE SAID FRIDAY in an interview with the Free P ress having to interrupt my vaca· lh that he found only a bullet wound, and no indication that tion, and I hadn't particularly s, Schwerner had been beaten. looked forward to the recep- 1!1 Dr. Spain added that he also found no indication that tion an alien white man can e1 any previous autopsy had been performed. get in Mississippi. ~: "The point," he said, ''is that, with an obvious case of murder, they hadn't even conducted an autopsy. That's one reason I'm still active in the civil-rights movement." .
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