Cash, who died in 1994, was never charged in the case. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama during the Clinton administration, made it a personal crusade.Ĭhamblis and Cherry, who was convicted in 2002, died in prison. Then, in 1997, after other successful prosecutions for Civil Rights Era murders, the FBI Birmingham office reopened the case. Within days, the FBI suspected that Blanton and his KKK cohorts Robert Edward Chamblis, Bobby Frank Cherry and Herman Frank Cash were responsible for the attack after civil rights protests and other bombings had rocked the city nicknamed “Bombingham.”Īlabama Attorney General Bill Baxley convicted the then-73-year-old Chambliss in 1977, after reopening the case in 1971, and then the case remained dormant for decades.īaxley contended that the FBI, which had informants in the Klan in the 1960s and wiretaps on klansmen, wouldn’t share the information that would allow him to build a case against Blanton, Cherry and Cash. Justice was delayed not because the case was a bona fide mystery. And Denise was lying out there with a piece of mortar, it looked like a rock, mashed in her head.” “And there lay all four of them, there side by side on the table. “We drove over to a hospital, and we fumbled around, and we found somebody else who had been in the morgue,” he told reporter Michele Norris. In 2008, during an interview on NPR, Chris McNair recalled seeing his daughter’s body on the day that shocked the nation. “Fact of the matter is he bombed a house of God on Sunday morning and killed four children and needs to do the time for his crimes,” Jones said. attorney who convicted him, Doug Jones, opposed the parole request. ![]() The powerful bomb was planted under the church steps and it collapsed a basement wall into a lounge the four girls used for changing into their choir robes. He won’t be eligible again until 2021, the panel decided.īlanton was convicted in 2001 of murdering Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, all 14, and Denise McNair, 11, and sentenced to life in prison. The 86-year-old Blanton had asked the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles to let him die as a free man, but the panel denied his request Wednesday morning. avoided justice for 38 years in the deaths of four girls in Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963, before being convicted in 2001. ![]() The last living convicted bomber in one of the most notorious terrorist attacks in American history has been denied parole.įormer Ku Klux Klan member Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr.
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