"Cold Case Initiative"; Mississippi

[Mr. Shaman]

Time to (finally) clean-up the trash.​

"Allen, a black World War II veteran who helped civil rights workers, was shot to death just before he could move away from Liberty. He wanted to escape the harassment and threats he endured for talking to the FBI about witnessing the murder of a black civil rights volunteer. Sheriff Jones investigated Allen's murder; he found no suspects.

"60 Minutes" approached Jones on his farm with a hidden camera. In a cordial conversation, the former sheriff said there was no bad blood between him and the victim, that he had investigated it and knew Allen was murdered, but he did not want to discuss it further. He did answer more of Kroft's questions, however. Was he in the Ku Klux Klan? "I take the Fifth on that," he replies. Could he look Kroft in the eye and say he had nothing to do with the murder? "No sir, I wasn't involved in it," he says. Told he could clear the whole thing up by taking a lie detector test, Jones tells Kroft, "Well, then it ain't getting cleared up."

The FBI says it hopes to clear up the Allen case, and 100 more like it, with a project it calls the "Cold Case Initiative." The idea is to re-investigate unsolved murders from the civil rights era, and according to the FBI, Allen's is one of the most promising. That's because there's plenty of circumstantial evidence pointing to Jones."

"60 Minutes" - 4/10/11​