Forty-seven years ago, in one of the civil rights movement’s ugliest moments, members of the Ku Klux Klan, including businessmen and police officers in Philadelphia, Miss., conspired, ambushed, abducted and killed three young civil rights workers who were trying to register blacks to vote.

The brutality and the positions of those involved shocked much of the nation and revealed the depths of hatred that existed among some people.

Within a few months, 19 men were arrested in the conspiracy and the killings, and four were eventually convicted and sentenced to relatively short prison terms.

For most people, that event is history. But in places like Philadelphia, Miss., it still boils hot and close to the surface. For years, suspects who had bragged among themselves about what they had done – sometimes in front of their children – boasted they could never be convicted.

That wasn’t entirely true.

Edgar Ray Killen, who arranged the whole thing, was tried in the 1960s but freed because of a hung jury when one juror refused to convict a preacher. In 2005, he was tried again and convicted and sentenced to 60 years in prison.

But some of those involved remain on the streets, says George Smith of Fort Wayne. Smith, a native of Meridian, Miss., was also a civil rights worker in Mississippi during what was called Freedom Summer, and he was friends with Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, the three men who were killed. He had known Chaney much of his life and had gone to school with him.

Every year now, veterans of the civil rights movement, including Smith and his wife, Louise, return to Philadelphia and other spots related to the killings and hold memorial services. A lot of blacks in the town, though, don’t attend the services, Smith says.

They’re still afraid they’ll get fired if they take part, “just like in the ’60s.”

Smith also stays informed about the continuing events in Philadelphia, bits of news that usually go unnoticed on the national scene.

One of those bits was published just a couple of weeks ago in the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger. It turns out Killen, now in his mid-80s, had written letters to a fellow inmate saying he was ready to confess to his role in the killing of the three civil rights workers, as well as 32 other killings in exchange for being released from prison so he could spend his last days with his wife.

The former prisoner turned the letters over to Mississippi’s attorney general, Jim Hood.

In the letters described in the Clarion-Ledger article, Killen said he still believes he was right for his involvement in the killings and justifies it to himself by saying it’s impossible for blacks to have morals.

Clearly Killen hasn’t changed a lick from that night nearly half a century ago when he gathered a group of fellow Klan members and instructed them to go about the killings.

But what of that offer to confess? How did Smith react to that?

Killian is just a tired old man who wants to go home, Smith said. He’s probably just trying to pull a fast one on somebody.

“He’s tired of being in jail,” Smith said.

The chances of Killen being released are somewhere between zero and none. Hood, the attorney general, was quoted as saying if Killen wants to offer information that will implicate others involved in the killings, he’d be happy to listen, but the state doesn’t make deals to let people out of prison.

Smith, for himself, believes that if Killen were to start ratting on the others involved, he’d just be killed. Some of the people involved are well-to-do and politically connected, Smith said. If Killen were to be released in exchange for information, they wouldn’t let him live long enough to talk, Smith said.

Still, Smith would like to see the last of those involved in the civil rights killings brought to justice. Eight of them are still alive, he says.