[mysterious music]
[Kristy]: 60 years ago, September 15th, 1963.
[explosion]
[reporter]: Exploding dynamite shattered Birmingham's
16th Street Baptist Church.
Four young girls dressing for the choir were killed.
[Ben]: In 1995 the chief tells me they're talking about
reopening the 16th Street Church case.
[reporter]: One man was convicted, but police believe several others got away.
[Doug]: Klansmen like Bobby Frank Cherry,
and Tommy Blanton.
- This is absolutely the last time it can be investigated.
And I thought the best opportunity at the time
would be interview Cherry first.
[narrator]: In the FBI we make a lot of headlines.
Drug busts, mob stings,
terrorist takedowns.
[shouting]
We understand why people want to tell stories about us.
- Mark it! - Freeze!
- FBI.
- FBI! [man in the distance]: Action!
[narrator]: But they don't know the half of it.
What really goes down?
We save that for each other.
when we're talking agent to agent.
This is FBI, True.
[dramatic music]
- Summer of 97, we're going to go interview Cherry
who was one of the original suspects in 63,
and was again a suspect in the seventies.
- Bob Eddy interviewed him and almost got a confession out of him in the seventies.
And we decided to take Bob Eddy,
as another shock factor.
- So where is Cherry at this point?
- He's living in Mabank, Texas.
We got there, and we sent a deputy out to his house
to pick him up, bring him to the sheriff's office.
So he comes in and he looks at Bob Eddy
and he's just like he saw an old friend.
- Yeah.
- He said: "Bob, I thought you retired and was
raising cattle somewhere."
And Bob said: "you knew this would never go away.
You knew this would never go away.
we're back here to talk to you again."
He says: "well, my wife got a doctor's appointment
in an hour and a half."
Says: "that's as long as I can talk to you."
And I told him: "well, we'll be glad to try to get it finished in an hour and a half."
And he finally, after a hour and a half, come up,
he goes outside, tells his son to take his wife to the doctor.
And we talk for four hours.
- What does he say for four hours?
- He was bragging, talking about chasing women...
That he had nothing to do with the bombing.
That his wife was sick at the time, and he went home after
he was working at the Modern Sign Company making some
Confederate battle flags.
And that was his alibi that he couldn't have done
the church bombing.
He also said he had a broke back
and he couldn't carry such a big bomb.
I said: "well, how do you know it was a big bomb?"
- There you go! - And he didn't say anything about that.
The closest he came to confessing at that time
was he looked at some of the pictures.
[poignant music]
And he said: "Man, gosh, doggone".
He says: "That's just like pulling the trigger on a gun.
You can't call that bullet back once it's left."
And I thought that we're all on the right track.
- Right. - We've got the right suspect.
- How do you end it with him?
- I told him: "Whether you tell us the truth
or somebody else tells us truth, we will get it."
- What happens then?
- It wasn't very much longer that we get a call
from a Texas deputy.
He says: "Bob Cherry has given an interview
in the square of the town with his lawyer,
and I have taped it."
[Bov McNamara]: Flanked by his attorney, and followed
by cameras, Bobby Frank Cherry, a former Klansman,
came here to answer questions about his past.
- Mr. Cherry had nothing to do with the bombing
in Alabama in 1963.
[reporter]: But Cherry's old links to the Birmingham Klan
brought investigators here to question him again.
- He is saying: "the FBI is bothering me again.
It's been 30 years and they have been harassing me
all my life."
[reporter]: Here, there is sympathy for a local man
who says police have hounded hm about the case for years.
[woman]: That's a long time to dredge up all that
and put that man through that.
I mean, ain't he 60-something years old?
[reporter]: The time may be right for an old man
to make peace with his past.
But it may be too late to find the truth.
[riveting music]
- When Bob Cherry called that press conference
and it was shown in Birmingham,
that's when the phone started ringing.
- Yes. The phone rings and I answer it, and it's
Teresa Stacy, Cherry's granddaughter.
And the first words out of her mouth are:
"thank God, somebody's doing the church case".
She related that on numerous family events that Cherry
would brag about blowing up the church.
- I get this call from Michael Goins who had worked
with Cherry in Dallas when he was cleaning apartments
and Cherry admitted being part of the group that bombed
the church that killed the girls.
There was a guy named Birdwell who was friends with
Cherry's son and was in the house the weekend before
and overheard Cherry talking to other men about the bomb
and the bomb being ready in the 16th Street Baptist Church.
[dramatic music]
All these people, I think, had really kind of thought
that that Cherry had gone to prison before.
And they came forward when they saw him on the news.
And then a year later was when we got the real break.
There was a woman Cherry had been married to.
She was his third wife.
We had been looking for her, but couldn't find her.
She was living in Montana and she saw a newspaper article
that had been written. - This big.
- Just a very tiny one.
And called the FBI.
the most significant thing to me was that
she said Cherry's car broke down near the church.
She went to pick him up and he pointed out at the steps,
that area where he said that they planted the bomb.
And he talked about it and the fact that he had killed
before and he would kill again, those kind of things.
- Wow. - Tommy Blanton was a lot different.
Blanton was interviewed first about two weeks
after the bombing.
And when he was asked about what he was doing that weekend,
he said on that Saturday night, he went and picked up
his girlfriend, Jean, but he couldn't really remember
where all they went.
But then he said he had her home by midnight
that night and then went home and went to sleep.
Well, what Blanton didn't know when he was giving this story
is that they had had another witness at the church,
a lady named Glenn, Mrs. Kirthus Glenn.
She had seen Blanton's car behind the church
at 2:00 in the morning.
The dome light was on.
She was able to identify Robert Chambliss from photographs.
But they had Blanton's automobile, a 1957 Chevrolet--
- With a 15-foot antenna.
- Yeah, with a huge CB antenna on it, easy to spot.
And then when the agent told him that we've got a witness
who put his car there at 2:00 in the morning, which was
plenty of time for him to get his buddies and plant
that bomb, he clams up and doesn't talk anymore,
goes home, calls his girlfriend, Jean.
And lo and behold, they get their stories together.
Now they know exactly where they went on that Saturday night,
who they saw, who they didn't see.
And in fact, he had her home at midnight.
But now, according to their stories, he fell asleep
on her sofa and didn't leave till 2:45.
Cherry's little statements that were admissions,
the lies that he gave to the FBI, we had enough
that we felt like that we could get an indictment
for Cherry and Blanton even though it was sure as heck no, no, sure bet.
At that point the statute of limitations had run from
a federal perspective.
So that's when we had to fish or cut bait.
And to do that, we had to move everything over to
a state grand jury that indicted these guys for murder.
- This was a tragedy
of absolutely monumental proportions.
It has scarred the city of Birmingham for 30,
almost 37 years.
There needs to be some kind of closure one way or another
on this matter.
[journalist]: In Birmingham, Alabama, bond was set today
for two white men charged in the 1963 church bombing
that killed four Black children.
A judge set bond at a maximum $200,000 each for
Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton Jr.
- We had a stronger case for Bobby Frank Cherry
but we were hoping that we could try them together and
Blanton's would be filled in a little bit by what Bobby Frank had done.
[reporter]: From the file review, we found
that Attorney General Robert Kennedy had approved
recording conversations between Tommy and his wife Jea.
- These were tapes of bugs that were placed in Blanton's kitchen.
- The were National Security intelligence tapes.
And at that point in time, we weren't being able to use
them as criminal evidence.
- OK. - In 1963, the director
of the FBI had certain authorities for electronic surveillance and bugs.
It was a different law.
And so there was electronic surveillance everywhere.
[man in the film]: To the unpracticed eye,
there is nothing suspicious about this room.
Nevertheless, enclosed within the frame, behind the print,
is a complete battery-operated microphone and transmitter.
Not only can a conversation be plainly heard,
but a permanent record made.
One that can be used for future reference.
[Doug]: The FBI was monitoring Blanton and there was
an agent taking notes.
[suspenseful music]
[Ben]: We had some transcripts, but they had a lot of gaps in them
and it didn't have the magic words.
"I built the bomb."
- OK. - They weren't all complete
and we couldn't have used the notes because the agent's
gone and it would have all been hearsay.
So we knew that there was some significant information
in these tapes.
We just didn't know where the hell the tapes were.
We didn't have them.
- We went to where they should have been.
In a locked drawer. - An ELSUR?
- An ELSUR room.
And we couldn't find them.
And I had called down like three times, said:
"you've got to have these." Nothing.
[riveting music]
And then I'm turning to walk out and I see this box
by the corner, like it's fixing to be thrown in the trash.
Old, dusty.
And I look at it and damn, if it didn't have the same
number as our case and there's eight tapes in there.
- Was your heart pounding? - Yes, yes.
I mean, it was a very high point.
- Okay, so you get a call from Bill.
What does he say to you?
- I found it!
I found it!
And i may have jumped up and down.
I'm pretty sure I did.
But I'm thinking: "Oh, my goodness."
Now how are we going to get the information?
Because the tapes they were so old, they were so brittle,
- They are 30 years old.
They'll break by the time somebody is listening.
- And it was decided that we'd send them to headquarters
and let the audio units up there put them on the set
we could use for transcribing.
[indistinct chatter]
We listened to them and listened to them and tried to work
on them, tried to work on them.
- What was the problem?
- The problem was when they installed the microphone,
they went through a closet, and it was next to the Blanton's apartment.
- Right up against the wallpaper.
- Right against the wall paper.
But the microphone, it happened to be right under
the kitchen sink. - Oh no.
[Ben]: And all the water and all the clanging, the pots and pans.
They had a radio that was running 24 hours a day.
And you could hear that noise better than you could the human voice.
So we actually sent the tapes back to headquarters to get them enhanced.
- At that point, you discovered THE tape?
- I got THE tape.
It was "Q9'". I can remember it now.
I was making a word for word transcript, and I hear...
- I am jumping up and
I am dialing Doug's number as fast as I can.
And as I start saying: "Doug on the tape"
He says: "Stop, stop, stop. Don't tell me."
- I was saying: "look we may not be able to use the tapes.
And because you've heard them, you may get tainted
for the rest of the investigation.
So let's hold off."
- I'm thinking: "I'm out of the case now."
- Yeah.
- I'm gone. - We had legal issues about
getting the tape into evidence and whether or not they were legal at the time.
We really didn't know. - Right.
[Doug]: We started doing a lot of work, legal work
and to make a long story short about this, we ultimately
satisfied ourselves that the tape was in furtherance
of a conspiracy that included his wife.
A and that's when I finally said: "you gotta tell me,
let's listen to these things."
- Doug, tell me about when you first listened to the tape.
- It's just hard to describe it, because it is that
eureka moment.
We'd already indicted Blanton.
And now we've got this guy on tape three times admitting
he's part of the group that's planning to bomb,
building the bomb, those kind of things.
And significantly, that alibi witness, his wife,
admits on this tape that she lies to the FBI.
That tape was just a stunning turn for us.
I turned it over to Blanton's defense lawyer,
and about four days later he withdraws from the case.
- Okay.
- That was so fortuitous that he saw that tape
in a cardboard box.
And this was the solid evidence that as an investigator
and prosecutor, that you knew you had the right people.
[clock ticking]
- Doug, tell me about when court starts,
- You know right before the Blanton case
is when Cherry raised his competency issue.
[Dan Rather]: Cherry, now 72, was charged last year
with the church bombing,
and then ruled mentally unfit for trial.
- We had to sever those cases and put Cherry aside
for a little bit and go strictly with Blanton first,
in April of 2001.
The media from all over the world was covering this,
so there was a little bit of a pressure on us.
[clock ticking]
I mean, we really made a point legally to talk to the judge
about the fact that we needed to go in to what was happening
in Birmingham in 1963.
[suspenseful music]
Because we had jurors on that panel who had not been born
when this case happened.
- Did you find it difficult to convey the environment
of the sixties to a jury of today?
- We tried to lay it out in a way that told a story.
We connected the dots between the children's march,
the desegregation of the schools that occurred right before
the bombing...
[crowd shouting]
with the children, with the church.
In the trial, the families were pretty amazing.
Chris McNair, Denise's dad, testifies of coming over to
the church and then being directed to the makeshift morgue
at the hospital to identify the body of his only daughter
at the time, still with a piece of mortar embedded
in the middle of her skull.
When you saw Ms. Robertson testifying about the whole
world was shaking when the bomb went off.
When you hear a mother talking about screaming:
"my baby, my baby", knowing that Denise was down there.
When you see Reverend Cross, who was the minister who always
had the guilt of the church being a focal point in living
with these girls' death, you're more than just a prosecutor, an investigator.
You're part of that family.
You're part of that community.
They became part of us.
- When the jury foreman stood up in the Blanton trial,
it was so quick they came back.
And I'm saying they didn't believe a word.
They're claiming his innocence.
I'm standing there and it took about the second or maybe third
verdict for me to really understand that she said guilty.
- Clear the hall! - Clear the hall.
- It took the jury only about two and a half hours to find him
guilty on the strength of that tape recording that Bill found.
[Dan Rather]: A judge ruled tht former Ku Klux Klansman
Bobby Frank Cherry is mentally competent to stand trial for murder.
- The Cherry case is a series of admissions and lies
with Bobby Frank Cherry where he had lied to the FBI
when he was interviewed so many times in the 60s.
Some really damning testimony came from his ex-wife.
She was really, I mean, she was strong,
she knew exactly what was going on.
[reporter]: You heard him point to the church and say:
"I put the bomb underneath those steps, correct?"
- Several times he said that.
[reporter]: You also said that he said he lit the fuse?
- Yes [reporter]: When did he say that?
- Different times he said he lit the fuse.
[journalist]: Cherry's granddaughter, Teresa Stacey
also testified against him, telling the court:
"he said he helped blow them up".
- Sarah, the survivor, she was the last witness
that we had in both of these trials.
[sad music]
She talked about going into the ladies' lounge
and she said: "I saw my sister tying the sash of Denise's new dress."
And then there was the explosion, and she's buried
under all the rubble.
When I asked her, I said:
"did you ever see her alive again?"
She said: "No, sir."
And with that, I looked up and said:
"your honor, the state of Alabama rests its case."
[reporter]: Whatever this jury decides instantly
will become a part of history's judgment on this city,
and its moment of infamy.
To many people here, the Bobby Cherry verdict will represent
the difference between justice delayed, and justice denied.
- When these jurors reached the verdict, they just all started crying.
It was guilty.
[Group singing]: Keep your eyes on the prize.
[journalist]: Joy arrived today in Birmingham,
along with a sense of justice decades overdue.
- It was really justice for the four of them.
This lets them know they didn't die in vain.
- This verdict today sends a message that's important today.
That the people that bomb and kill our innocent citizens
and children, we will never give up.
You know, I've been really blessed in my life
with some really cool stuff, being elected to the U.S.
Senate, United States attorney.
But this case is at the top of everything because
it meant so much to so many people.
I think that what sums it up is Ms. Robertson, Alpha Robertson.
when she died and I went to her memorial, her son, he said:
"thanks for what you did.
It's because you she died with a smile on her face."
That doesn't get too much better as a lawyer.
- Yeah.
[calm music]
[Ben]: It was probably the most important case
that I've ever worked on.
It was for the girls.
It was for the victims.
- I consider this the most significant event, period, in my life.
And were just the two that were selected,
to, I like to say to put our hands on history.
Ben, you like to say. - History touched us.
- Yeah. - That and we had the chance...
[Bill and Ben]: To change history.
Subtitling: difuze