His truck, with its lights on, remained there by the store, where it was found the next day.

The Klansmen drove off. They started in at once, shoving and slapping. Who was he? they demanded. What was his name? What had he said to the white woman? Mr. Edwards "was very frightened and pleaded with us not to harm him," Mr. Britt remembered. Over and over, Mr. Edwards denied having said anything to any white woman. Pointing his gun at Mr. Edwards, one Klansman threatened to castrate him for harassing the white woman.

The men drove to the Tyler Goodwin bridge. Mr. Edwards was "sobbing and begging for his life," Mr. Britt told the investigators. Diane Alexander said it had been Henry who insisted to the others that they had found the right man.

The police quickly closed their books on the disappearance of the Winn-Dixie driver. Willie Edwards's 23-year-old wife, Sarah Jean, frantic with grief and anxiety, said she "just about went batty with it." Alone with three small children to raise, she had very little money. No one had information for her, no lawyer would look into it and her husband's employers offered neither help nor comfort. She saw a psychiatrist. "It was just so strange and so terrible and so upsetting," she remembered. "I couldn't understand it." She left Montgomery with her children in 1961 and never moved back. Prosecution: Murder Charges And a Failed Case

Diane Alexander remembers her first glimpse of her husband. It was one night around 1961, and she was a teen-ager on a date. Out of the door of a seedy downtown cafe came a wiry, tough-looking fellow and a stoutish woman. They were fighting furiously, cussing each other and going at it, literally fist and nail, right out in the street. The man's face was all scratched up. This was Henry Alexander, Diane learned.

Ten years later she was working as a waitress, at a Shoney's Big Boy here, when Henry Alexander noticed her. He pursued her, and she soon moved in. He was a moderately successful contractor who had inherited his father's business. He yearned to be respectable, influential. In later years, one of his most prized possessions was a photograph of himself between Montgomery's Mayor and police chief, taken at a civic function.

"I want you to get our stuff together," he told her one day in February 1976. "As soon as I pay the boys, me and you are gonna go to Florida. Don't tell anybody we're going. Let's just go."

She didn't know what was going on, but she didn't ask too many questions. Back at the house, she spotted the state troopers moving from the yard into the office. She remembers the exchange:

"Are you Henry Alexander?"

"What's going on?"

"We have a warrant for your arrest."

Bill Baxley, the attorney general troubled by his state's murderous past, was uncovering old secrets. He was scanning every Southern hate group he could think of, and he was talking to ex-Klansmen. One of them told the young attorney general, "I got out of the Klan when they killed the Winn-Dixie clerk." This was something Mr. Baxley knew nothing about. That's when he gave Raymond Britt immunity, persuaded him to confess, and filed first-degree murder charges against three men: Henry Alexander, Jimmy York and Sonny Kyle Livingston.