Murdered in Meridian

To my considerable surprise, it proved rather easy to find out more about Kathy Ainsworth and the circumstances that led to her death. For Ainsworth, as it happens, is a leading heroine of the American far right. Several racial pride websites contain eulogies of Ainsworth, who today has the status of a nativist martyr. (NOTE 1) What did she do to merit her enduring reputation among racial extremists? Quite simply, Ainsworth was an elementary school teacher by day but a KKK terrorist by night. In fact, Ainsworth, who joined the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan as soon as she graduated from college, was so committed to the cause of segregation that she moved to Mississippi because it was the most segregated state in the country. There Ainsworth tried to hold back the forces of progress, working closely with Tom Tarrants, an angry young racist from Mobile, Alabama who moved to Mississippi for similar reasons. Together, they bombed the newly-built Beth Israel synagogue in Jackson on September 18, 1967 - totally destroying it in the process - and carried out a number of other terrorist attacks against Jews and other persons stigmatized as 'race traitors' by the segregationist right. Then, as we have already learned, on June 30, 1968, Ainsworth died while on a mission to dynamite the house of a leading Jewish businessman.

It is obvious that a woman of such extreme rightwing views - one, moreover, with a track record of extreme violence - would have had no qualms about involving herself in a plot to assassinate Robert Kennedy, a man who was, like his brother killed in 1963, fiercely loathed by extreme rightwingers of the sort that furnished the momentum of the Wallace campaign in 1968.

Yet if my theory is correct, Ainsworth would have died in a set up; she and Tarrants would have to have been encouraged to make this bombing attempt in Meridian precisely to create the opportunity for the elimination of the polka dot girl. In other words, it would have been what is referred to in Mafia language as a 'clean up operation.' And in fact, this is what happened, except that (as we shall see) the set up seems to have been aimed primarily at Tarrants and only secondarily at her.

According to Jack Nelson's Terror in the Night (1993), the plot to dynamite the Davidson home began with neither of the two individuals who attempted to carry it out (Tarrants and Ainsworth) but with the FBI. FBI Special Agent Frank Watts is credited by Nelson with having come up with a plan to lay a trap for Tom Tarrants after Tarrants and Danny Joe Hawkins bombed the Meridian synagogue on May 29, 1968. (p. 147) Although the official story is that the set up plan was devised locally, a curious fact is that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover monitored its progress carefully. 'Hoover decreed that every morning, seven days a week, Watts was to file a Teletype to Washington keeping the director abreast of every development.' (pp. 140-41) Hoover's intense interest in the plan to snare Tarrants suggests the possibility that the plan was actually instigated by the FBI director.

BELOW: J. Edgar Hoover, photographed here in 1967, told FBI agent Jim Hosty in 1964 that Robert Kennedy 'disgusted' him. 'As I listened to him talk about Bobby Kennedy,' recalls Hosty, 'it was easy to hear how much he loathed him.' (Hosty, Assignment Oswald, p. 154.) Hoover would have stopped at nothing to prevent Robert Kennedy reaching the presidency - or to cover up his tracks after having had him killed.



Yet an important point to note is that the FBI set up was very much a joint operation with the ADL. While the FBI orchestrated it - and drew upon the assistance of the Meridian Police Department as well as an ONI bomb demolition squad - the ADL put up the money that was required to trick Tarrants into action as well as the ostensible victim. The conspiracy unfolded as follows. First, two Klansmen, Alton Wayne Roberts and his brother Raymond, were enlisted as informants. This was done through a combination of the carrot and the stick. While the ADL raised a substantial amount of money to offer the Roberts brothers as 'reward money' - they were promised $75,000 altogether - Watts and the FBI used a variety of forms of intimidation (including death threats) to pressure them into co-operating.

Second, the Roberts brothers were turned into agents provocateurs. On June 13, Raymond Roberts met with Danny Joe Hawkins and persuaded him to carry out a violent act against a Jewish target before June 29, 1968. The pretext for the attack was that he (Raymond Roberts) was feeling the heat from the FBI, which suspected him of involvement in the May 29 synagogue bombing. 'If he and Alton Wayne could just be somewhere else with an ironclad alibi when another major attack occurred in Meridian, it would help' relieve the pressure. (p. 162) Hawkins acceded to Roberts' request for a 'favor' and promised to execute the mission by the required date. Roberts suggested to Hawkins that he should bomb the house of a Meridian Jew, and in the end the house of a local ADL official, Meyer Davidson, was selected. The bombing was planned for the night of June 27, that is to say, early on the morning of June 28. The plan was to leave the bomb in the carport, which was adjacent to Davidson's bedroom. When the bomb was due to go off, Roberts would be in a nightclub somewhere, where there would be plenty of witnesses to testify to his presence.

Third, what was clearly most important to the FBI, Hawkins decided that Tarrants had also to be involved. For this to happen, Tarrants had to be coaxed out of hiding. (According to Nelson, Tarrants had been in his mountain hideaway in North Carolina since the May 29 bombing.) Nelson does not explain how Tarrants became involved, but after White Knights boss Sam Bowers gave him permission to leave his hiding place, Tarrants made for Meridian. On the evening of June 24, the FBI learned that Hawkins and Tarrants had been seen together in Meridian.

The fourth development is by far the most intriguing. The date for the bombing was changed to the night of June 29, a change that apparently obliged Hawkins to drop out of the operation. One of the most serious weaknesses of Terror In The Night is that it glosses over the apparently last minute change of plan that guaranteed Ainsworth's involvement. Quite simply, Danny Joe Hawkins' departure obliged Tarrants to rely on his other partner, Kathy Ainsworth. Curiously, Tarrants was still able to use Hawkins' vehicle - a green Buick Electra - as he had on many earlier occasions. So whatever it was that precluded Hawkins' participation in the June 29 bombing attempt, it was obviously something that did not require him to have his own vehicle.

Although the FBI and the Meridian police officers who took part in the shootout that ended with her death claimed to have had no idea until shortly before the shooting that Tarrants' partner that night was 'a woman,' this is probably a cover story. By removing Hawkins from the picture, it had to have been a foregone conclusion that Ainsworth would take his place.If the set up was Hoover's plan to eliminate Ainsworth and Tarrants, as I believe, then Hawkins' abstention was preordained.

Finally, on the night of June 29, as the Roberts brothers made for a bar attached to the Meridian Motel (where they planned to stage a fight to draw attention to themselves), Tarrants and Ainsworth made their final preparations in a secluded wood several miles north of Meridian. After Tarrants had checked the circuitry and set the detonator for 2 am, the pair drove to Meyer Davidson's house on the corner of 29th Avenue and 36th Street. Hawkins' Buick was laden with 29 sticks of dynamite and a detonator. Tarrants was armed with a 9mm Browning automatic pistol and a German Schmeisser submachine gun, while Ainsworth had a Belgian-made .25 calibre automatic pistol hidden inside her purse. What they did not know, as they drove back into Meridian at about 12.30 am, was that, several hours earlier, Davidson and his family had been moved to the local Holiday Inn. They were walking into a trap.

At about 12.50 am, Tarrants parked the Buick in the front entrance to Davidson's home. He got out of the car with the bomb and began walking, apparently on tip toe, to the Davidsons' carport. All of a sudden, Detective Luke Scarbrough called out to him, 'Halt! Police!' Whether or not Tarrants really fired his weapon first (as Nelson states), he was soon on the receiving end of a fusillade of shots fired from at least four different weapons. As Tarrants ran back to the car braving a hail of bullets, Ainsworth tried to open the driver's door for him. She was hit by two bullets and killed virtually instantly.

Tarrants, on the other hand, managed to get behind the steering wheel. He drove off, initiating a police chase that lasted for fifteen blocks. But after its tyres were hit, the Buick skidded to a halt at the corner of 21st Street and 30th Avenue. Here the gun battle resumed. Finally, Tarrants collapsed after he tried to climb over an electrified fence. Four gunmen kept shooting at him until they saw no signs of life. As they approached the subdued body, the four officers were shocked to find that Tarrants was still breathing. After a hasty debate about whether to kill him or not, the officer who decided to kill him found that he had run out of bullets. But it didn't really matter anyway, because Tarrants was so badly wounded that no one expected him to live. He was taken to the Mattey Hersey Hospital, where the doctor gave him only about 45 minutes.

However, in a remarkable turnaround, Tarrants recovered from his wounds. He stood trial in November 1968 and was imprisoned for thirty years. After a failed escape bid in 1969 or 1970, he experienced a religious conversion, as well as a shift to a more politically correct pro-Zionist worldview. Thanks to the intervention of FBI Special Agent Frank Watts, the man who had orchestrated the set up on Hoover's behalf, Tarrants was released prematurely from prison in 1976. Although the sincerity of Tarrants' conversion to Christianity is usually cited as the factor responsible for his early release, it is not hard to see that his decision to sign a document exonerating the FBI from the charge of having entrapped him would have been all important. Tarrants is still alive today. He heads a Christian religious organization, the C.S. Lewis Institute. He has written a book that discusses the shootout in Meridian, but says very little about the rest of his career as a KKK terrorist.

Kathy Ainsworth, on the other hand, was buried in Magee, Mississippi, in early July at a funeral with a significant Klan presence. Her Hungarian mother, Mrs Capomacchia, from whom it is believed Kathy inherited her hardcore racist worldview, told one of Ainsworth's fellow schoolteachers that 'Kathy was put here for a purpose and she died for that purpose.'

BELOW: The synagogue in Meridian blown up by Tarrants and Danny Joe Hawkins on May 29, 1968. If my identification of the Kathy Ainsworth as the polka dot girl is correct, the next thing Tarrants did after he bombed the synagogue was to drive to Los Angeles to join Ainsworth for further 'fireworks.'

This website sets out a theory of who the polka dot dress girl was. Establishing her identity is probably the only means we have of finding out who killed RFK and why.

NOTES

(1) For example, http://women.freespeechsite.com/heroines/ainsworth.html
(2) http://cuban-exile.com/doc_101-125/doc0114.htm
(3) Jack Nelson, Terror In The Night: The Klan's Campaign Against the Jews, Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1993, p. 140.

For information about the RFK assassination: