These records include Federal Bureau of Investigation memoranda and research notes, Federal Bureau of Investigation witness testimonies, federal informant reports, Federal Bureau of Investigation memos, and Federal Bureau of Investigation case files. According to an announcement by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, there are photographs of exhumation of victims bodies and subsequent autopsies. There are also aerial photos of the burial location.The collection is stored in three records: Series 2870 contains the attorney generals research files; Series 2902 contains the FBI memos; and Series 2903 contains the photographs.All three Freedom Summer workers were in their 20s and had been investigating the burning at a black church in Philadelphia, Mississippi, when they vanished in June 1964.After alerting a mob, a Philadelphia deputy sheriff had taken them into custody on a traffic offense. The Mississippi governor claimed that their disappearance was a hoax. Senator Jim Eastland, a segregationist, told President Lyndon Johnson that it was a publicity stunt. Their bodies were then dug up and found in an earthen dam weeks later.In the 1967 case, federal charges were brought against nineteen men. Seven men were convicted for violating civil rights of victims. None were sentenced to more than six years.The investigation was reopened by the Mississippi Attorney Generals Office in 2004. This led to Edgar Ray Killen's June 2005 conviction on charges of manslaughter. Killen was a leader in the 1960s Ku Klux Klan and a Baptist minister.Witnesses testified during Killen's 2005 state trial that Killen drove to Meridian on June 21, 1964 to gather carloads klansmen and ambush Schwerner Chaney, Goodman. Killen also told some klan members to bring rubber gloves or plastic gloves. Witnesses claimed Killen then went to Philadelphia's funeral home to hide while the attack took place.Killen was killed in 2018 in prison. In 2016, Jim Hood, the Mississippi Attorney General, officially closed the investigation.
