Emmett Till's Confessed Lynch Killers
In August 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till traveled from Chicago to visit relatives in Money, Mississippi, where a white shopkeeper named Roy Bryant accused him of offending Bryant's wife, Carolyn, in their grocery store. A few days later, Bryant and his half-brother J. W. Milam kidnapped Till at gunpoint, beat and mutilated him, shot him in the head, and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River, where it was found tied to a heavy cotton-gin fan.
That September, an all-white Mississippi jury acquitted Bryant and Milam of murder despite eyewitness testimony and strong evidence. Protected by double jeopardy, the two men then sold their story to Look magazine and, in a 1956 article, publicly admitted and detailed how they had killed Till, yet they never faced further criminal charges for the lynching.