FBI Informer Reveals Facts of Liuzzo Slaying

May 4, 1965 - An informer for the FBI told a jury today in Hayneville, Ala., that two Ku Klux Klansmen emptied their pistols at a car driven by Mrs. Viola Liuzzo during a 100-mile-an-hour night-riding chase through Lowndes County.

Gary Rowe Jr. (pictured) of Birmingham, the state’s closely guarded star witness, took the stand this afternoon against Collie LeRoy Wilkins Jr., one of three Klansmen charged in the death of the white civil rights worker from Detroit.

Rowe said Wilkins boasted after the shooting: “I don’t miss. That so-and-so is dead.”

The informer said he and the three Klansmen drove back to Birmingham after the March 25 killing. He said the driver of the car, Eugene Thomas, suggested, “Let’s go by the Dragon’s house and tell him what a good job we did.”

However, the lights were out at the home of Robert Creel, the Alabama grand dragon of the United Klans of America, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc., and the men did not stop, Rowe said.

Rose said the first shots were fired by Wilkins. Wilkins, 21, is the first of the three to go on trial. Thomas and William Eaton are scheduled to be tried in the fall.

Rowe said that Wilkins thrust a .38-caliber pistol out the right rear window of the Klan car as it pulled even with Mrs. Liuzzo’s car on U.S. Highway 80.

“As the back window of our car pulled even with the front window of the other car,” Rowe testified, “the lady looked around and looked directly at us. Just as she looked at us, Wilkins fired two shots through the window of her automobile.

“Then Gene [Eugene Thomas, the driver] said: ‘All right, men, shoot the hell out of them.’ Then everybody started shooting.”

Mrs. Liuzzo, wife of a Teamsters union official, came to Alabama 10 days before she died to take part in the civil rights struggle.

The Selma-to-Montgomery Freedom March ended the afternoon of March 25. That night, Mrs. Liuzzo and Leroy Moton, a 19-year-old Negro, ferried marchers back to Selma in her 1963 Oldsmobile. She was shot returning to Montgomery.

Rowe said it was the sight of a white woman riding with a Negro man that caused the Klansmen to follow the Liuzzo car. 

When the shooting started, Rowe testified, he laid his gun across the open window of the car and pretended to shoot but did not.

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