Smith asked the question again and Miller said, “Yes, sir.”
“I believe I asked you this, but I am not sure,” Smith continued. “You testified that there was some barbed wire in the boat. But did I ask you whether or not the barbed wire was on the person of the deceased?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Miller. “Around the neck.”
For anyone striving to believe otherwise, it was growing harder and harder to evade the conclusion that a murder had been committed. But on cross-examination Breland went after the ghastly description of the injuries to the body. “Now, what you saw about the condition of that man as to his head, you couldn’t tell whether it was caused before or after his death, could you?”
“No, sir,” said Miller.
“And you couldn’t tell whether it was caused in a car accident or some otherwise, could you?”
Miller responded, “No, sir.”
The court then recessed for lunch.13
The defense was offering the jury a thin veil behind which they could pretend to believe that the savage injuries might have occurred in an unknown manner to an unknown person and that the body had then been dumped in the river, recovered, and presented in a gruesome, politically inspired hoax as the body of Emmett Till. It remained to be seen whether the twelve jurors would take up that veil, or even needed to.
After the lunch break Sheriff Strider stared at the black reporters gathering their things for the afternoon session. Some of them had been part of the Mississippi underground that had convinced the additional witnesses to come forward. All of them would be reporting the trial’s proceedings to the world. “Hello, niggers,” he said.14
Robert Hodges, the seventeen-year-old fisherman who found the body snagged in the muddy water of the Tallahatchie, opened the afternoon testimony, followed by B. L. Mims, whose motorboat had pulled the body to shore. In each case the body began to appear more and more indisputably that of a murder victim.15
Then Sheriff George Smith, at least an honorary member of that Mississippi underground that had located the new witnesses, took the stand and testified that he had found Roy Bryant sleeping at the store in Money at about two that Sunday afternoon. He’d had a long talk with Bryant in the front seat of the squad car. “I asked him why did he go down there and get that little nigger boy, and he said that he went down there and got him to let his wife see him to identify him, and then he said that she said it wasn’t the right one, and then he said that he turned him loose.”
Because Sheriff Smith’s testimony conveyed Bryant’s admission that he had kidnapped Emmett Till the defense moved quickly to frame the exchange as a private, confidential conversation between two old friends that Bryant never understood was part of a murder investigation. This was before the days of Miranda, the Supreme Court decision, later familiar to all fans of crime dramas, that decrees suspects of a crime be advised of their right to remain silent and that everything they say can and will be used against them in a court of law. Consequently all the defense could do was insinuate that the interrogation was dishonest, that a uniformed officer interviewing a friend without declaring the risks of admitting to kidnapping and perhaps worse was an act of deceit to which a reasonable jury should take affront.16
Next the prosecution called Deputy Sheriff John Ed Cothran of Leflore County. Cothran had been present when the body came out of the water. He had also been the one to arrest Milam and had talked with him about what had happened to Emmett Till. “I asked him if they went out there and got that boy,” Cothran testified. “I didn’t call anyone by name. I just asked him if they had went out and got that boy. And then he said, yes, they had got the boy and then turned him loose at the store afterwards, Mr. Bryant’s store.”
Carlton quickly objected to this testimony and Swango sent the jury out of the room. Carlton suggested that Cothran’s status as “a good friend of that entire family” made it all the more imperative that he should have informed Milam of the risks of his admission to breaking the law. “And we have a further objection to this witness’s testimony at this time on the grounds that there has been no showing whatsoever in the record that the body taken from the Tallahatchie River and alleged to be that of Emmett Till, that the death was caused by any criminal agency whatsoever.” The judge overruled Carlton’s objections and brought the jury back in.
District Attorney Chatham then asked Cothran, in the presence of the jury, if he’d ever “had occasion to investigate the murder or disappearance of Emmett Till” and had ever talked to J. W. Milam about that. Cothran answered both questions in the affirmative and added that he’d talked to Milam in the Leflore County Jail the day he’d arrested him. Cothran assured the court that he had not promised Milam anything nor threatened him in any way. “I asked him if they went out there and got that little boy, and if they had done something with him. And he said they had brought him up to that store and turned him loose.” This second instance of the defendants’ admission to kidnapping went without further comment.17
Under questioning by Chatham, Cothran described the scene at the riverbank after he’d arrived to find the body in a boat on the shore. Seeking to undermine the defense’s implication that there may have been no murder, Chatham asked about the condition of the corpse. “Well, his head was torn up pretty bad. And his left eye was about out, it was all gouged out in there, you know,” Cothran answered. “And right up in the top of his head, there was a hole knocked in the front of it there. And then right over his right ear—well, I wouldn’t say it was a bullet hole, but some of them said it was.”
Breland piped up from the defense table, “We object to what they said it was,” and Judge Swango sustained the objection.
“There was a small hole in his head right above the ear,” Cothran corrected himself, “over on the right side of his head, over here,” gesturing toward the right side of his own head, “and that was all tore up. There was a place knocked in his forehead.” On cross-examination Carlton once again tried to suggest that Cothran’s friendship with the accused invalidated his testimony and that the damage to Till’s head could have occurred after the body was already in the river. With that the court recessed until ten o’clock Thursday morning. That thin veil the defense was offering the jury now required them to ignore the fact that both defendants had admitted to abducting the boy at two in the morning.18
After the session ended on Wednesday, members of the United Packinghouse Workers of America delegation from Louisiana found Moses Wright standing alone outside the courtroom. One of them, Frank Brown, “asked the old man where he found the courage to testify in the face of probable death. ‘Some things are worse than death,’ Wright told Brown. ‘If a man lives, he must still live with himself.’?”19