Blog

Deputy who investigated Emmett Tills death dies

GREENWOOD, Miss. – John Ed Cothran, a former sheriff’s deputy who investigated the 1955 slaying of Emmett Till, which galvanized the civil rights movement, has died of heart failure. He was 93.

Cothran died Saturday at Grace Health and Rehab in Grenada, according to officials with Wilson & Knight Funeral Home in Greenwood.
Continued —

Photo taken September 27, 1962, Oxford, Mississippi.

Left to right: Sheriff John Henry Spencer, Pittsboro. Sheriff James Ira Grimsley, Pascagoula. Sheriff Bob Waller, Hattiesburg. Sheriff Billy Ferrell, Natchez (holding club). Sheriff Jimmy Middleton, Port Gibson. Deputy Sheriff James Wesley Garrison, Oxford. Sheriff John Ed Cothran, Greenwood.

Burial story —

Here are some links to Mississippi Sovereignty Commission files that mention Cothran’s involvement in various investigations–

October 6, 1960, visit to Leflore County over voting issues

Feb. 19, 1965, news story on complaints of violence/federal police force

Meeting, April 7, 1961 with Sovereignty Commission investigator, Tom Scarbrough

March 17, 1961, Cothran warned by Sovereignty Commission that a group of Yale students will soon arrive for sit-ins

Feb. 7, 1963 Cothan warned of impending visit by Dick Gregory

Sovereignty Commission name search page (for 12 more records)

About Susan Klopfer

Susan Klopfer and her husband once lived on the grounds of Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary where Fred was the state's chief of private prison psychologists. While there, Susan roamed the Delta, visiting older people in small cotton hamlets who'd lived through the modern civil rights movement (1955 to 1968). She became intrigued with this era, after learning new stories surrounding the murders of Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Cleve McDowell, Birdia Keglar, Adlena Hamlett and others who were all key participants to bringing change in those turbulent years.

Susan later wrote The Emmett Till Book, Who Killed Emmett Till, and Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited (all nonfiction) before writing The Plan, her first foray into fiction. She describes her latest work as paranormal, historical, alternative fiction.

Susan has worked as a journalist on daily newspapers in Texas, Missouri and Nevada, and as an acquisitions and development editor for Prentice Hall Computer Books. She won journalism awards for her investigative reporting on nondisclosed private/public partnerships in Missouri and received a Global eBook award (honorable mention) for Who Killed Emmett Till. She wrote a computer book, Abort! Retry! Fail! that was named an alternate selection by The Book-of-the-Month Club.

Susan Klopfer lives and writes in Cuenca, Ecuador. She is currently investigating the alleged kidnapping and murder of Boris Weisfeiler, a Russian immigrant to the United States and a former math professor at Penn State University, as well as Colonia Dignidad, a torture camp in Chile. With a unique focus on remote viewing, this yet named book will be a sequel to The Plan, the first work in her Civil Rights Mystery Sleuth action adventure series.

Susan is a graduate of Hanover College in Communication and Computer Science, and Indiana Wesleyan University, where she received a Master's Degree in Business Administration.