? ? ?
Despite the unsettling sight of human toes protruding from the water, Robert Hodges finished checking his fishing lines, then hurried home to find his father, who reported what Robert had seen to B. L. Mims, their landlord. Mims called his brother, Charles Fred Mims, then Deputy Sheriff Garland Melton of the Tallahatchie County Sheriff’s Office. The deputy called Sheriff H. C. Strider, who telephoned his teenage son. “My dad called and asked me did I have a boat in the river,” Clarence Strider Jr. recounted, “and I told him I did. Then he said we’ll be down there in a little while and he sent the deputies to go with me.”21
Deputy Melton and Deputy Ed Weber picked up young Strider and made their way to the landing at Pecan Point, twelve miles north of Money, where they met Robert Hodges and his father. They took both boys’ boats into the muddy river and quickly saw what Robert had seen. “Well,” B. L. Mims said, “we saw a person—from his knee on down and including his feet—we saw that sticking above the water. And we could tell by looking at it that it was a colored person.” With the engine humming low, they navigated over to the body. Something was holding it head downward in the water. The men tied a rope around the legs and used the motor to pull the body upriver a few feet, until the weight holding the head down came unsnagged from whatever pinned it to the bottom of the river. Towing it over to the landing, they dragged the corpse up onto the bank. There they could see that an iron fan, the kind used to ventilate cotton gins, was lashed to the corpse’s neck with several feet of barbed wire. Packed with mud from the bottom of the river, the fan weighed about 150 pounds. Whoever had disposed of the body had intended that it never rise from the river bottom.22
As the men examined the body, Deputy Sheriff John Ed Cothran of Leflore County arrived, as did Sheriff Strider of Tallahatchie County. Strider noted what looked like a bullet wound above the right ear and that the other side of the boy’s face was “cut up, pretty badly like an axe was used.” That left side “had been beat up or cut up—plumb into the skull.” The sheriff estimated that the bloated body had “been in the water about two days.”23 He dispatched Cothran and another deputy to Money to fetch Moses Wright to identify the body. Cothran also contacted Chester Miller, a black undertaker at Century Burial Association in Greenwood, who, along with one of his assistants, met them down at the river.
Miller testified that when he approached the body, it was lying facedown in a boat. Turning it over, he saw what looked like a heavy wheel attached to the corpse with a strand of barbed wire that “was well wrapped” around the neck. He unwound the wire to remove the fan. Miller turned to Moses Wright and asked, “Will you identify the body as the boy who was taken from the house?”24
“I was standing right up over him,” Wright recalled. “They turned him over and then I saw all of it.” He nodded at Miller, who saw no reason why Wright should have any trouble identifying the body, even in its state of considerable damage and decomposition. Deputy Cothran told reporters soon afterward that Wright “definitely identified the body as the boy.” The law officers asked Miller to remove the silver ring from Till’s finger. Miller gestured to his assistant, who was wearing rubber gloves. “Well, he had the gloves on,” Miller explained, “and then I said to him, ‘Take [the ring] off.’ And then he took it off and handed it to me. I laid it on the floorboard of the ambulance,” referring to the hearse he had driven to the river. Miller noted that the ring was engraved with the initials “L.T.”25
As he prepared to transfer the body to a casket, Miller was stunned at the extent of the wounds. “The crown of his head was just crushed out and in, and a piece of his skull just fell out there in the boat, maybe three inches long [and] maybe two and a half inches wide, something like that.” There was a hole perhaps half an inch square above the right ear, which Miller assumed was a bullet hole. He and his assistant placed the body in the casket and hefted the casket into a metal shipping case, which they then pushed into the hearse and drove to the Century Burial Association.
Given the state of the body, there was little magic that the undertaker’s art could perform; a closed-casket funeral seemed certain. An officer from the Greenwood Police Department took pictures of the corpse. Miller assumed that the family would contact him about the funeral, but Sheriff Strider phoned Miller with an unusual demand: he should bring the body to Reverend Wright’s Church of God in Christ in East Money for burial that very day. Apparently Strider wanted no one to see the condition of the corpse. Miller did as he was told: “I delivered it to the cemetery at Money.”26
Strider announced his jurisdiction over Milam and Bryant’s case even before murder charges had been filed against them. Although the kidnapping had occurred in Money, which is in Leflore County, and no one knew where the boy had been killed, Strider maintained that the body was put into the river “a good 10 miles” into Tallahatchie County and must have been dumped there since “it couldn’t have floated up the river.”27 District Attorney Sanders sided with Strider: the youth was abducted in Leflore County but the body was recovered in Tallahatchie County, thus giving Tallahatchie jurisdiction for prosecuting the case.28
His authority over the case confirmed, Sheriff Strider determined that the body would be buried immediately. Charged with investigating a presumed murder, he saw no reason for an autopsy. They needed to get on with it, he thought. Nobody needed to see this body. And so someone notified a few of Till’s Mississippi family members that the body was to be buried right away and that they might want to be present. That they immediately complied probably illustrates the extent to which it was not safe for African Americans to challenge white men in 1950s Mississippi, which was doubly true if the white man in question was Sheriff H. C. Strider. Moses Wright began preparing his eulogy, and others readied their funeral clothes.