THE MANTRAP

BIRMINGHAM POLICE DETECTIVE SERGEANT Ben Herren couldn't think of a reason he would be in trouble — recently anyway — but when his beeper went off with a message to return to the office and see the lieutenant, he acknowledged it with the enthusiasm of a student called to the principal's office. It was two years prior to the interview with Bobby Frank Cherry, and the bombing of a church thirty-two years ago was hardly on his mind. Herren wrapped up his interview with a burglary victim and headed back to the police administration building without a clue that his life was about to change.

His new boss, Lieutenant Diane Cribbs, had started out on the wrong foot with her detectives. From the minute she hit the door, she made it her mission to change everything. She rearranged the office, the paperwork, and the assignments. Everyone was grumbling behind her back. As senior detective, Herren felt he should do something. On the third day, he told her, "Lieutenant, have you got any idea what my responsibilities are here?"

"Yes," she said, puzzled. "You're the South and the West Precinct sergeant over the detectives."

Herren shook his head. "No, I've got three responsibilities, and only three. First responsibility is I gotta get them guys out there to do what you want them to do. Second, I gotta keep them from killing you. Third, I gotta keep you from making stupid mistakes" — he took a deep breath — "and you're making my job hard."

To his surprise, she had taken this well, and they developed an understanding, discussing issues and working them out together. Still, he didn't like being called to her office without a clue as to what it was about. Police are paranoid by nature; it tends to keep them alive.

"Ben, I've got an assignment for you," she said when he stepped through the doorway of her small glass cubicle at police headquarters. Space was a rare commodity in the aging building, which had once been the Birmingham jail — the very one from which Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his famous letter in April 1963 (written on the edges of a newspaper and bits of paper supplied by a jail trustee and smuggled out through his lawyers) declaring that citizens have a moral duty to challenge unjust laws.

"An assignment? More cases than the ones I've got?" Herren protested.

She shook her head. "The chief called down and asked me who my best detective was, and I said you."

He blinked, instantly suspicious. "What am I getting into?"

"He wants you to go over and talk to the FBI. They're thinking about reopening the Sixteenth Street bombing case."

Herren was stunned. Birmingham's chief was Johnny Johnson, the first black chief in the history of the city, so he wasn't surprised Johnson would be interested in the civil rights struggle. But the church bombing happened in 1963. This was 1995. Herren finally got his wits together enough to say, "Well, you know, that's an old case," an understatement if he had ever uttered one.

"Yeah, I know; they're just looking at it. We're not even sure we're going to commit manpower to it, but the chief wants you to go over there part-time and see what you think about it."

That was how it began for him.

* * *

The real beginning took place several months earlier when Robert "Rob" Langford, the FBI special agent in charge (SAC) invited several black community leaders to the FBI offices to talk. At first none of them responded. Langford went out to meet some of then, enlisting their support in calling a meeting. His intent was simply to talk with them about the FBI and to try to break the ice in the frigid relationship between the Bureau and the Birmingham African American community. When the meeting was finally held, Reverend Abraham Woods blurted out, "Why didn't the FBI investigate the bombing of the church? The FBI never did do anything."

The comment surprised Langford, who had come to the Birmingham office in 1993, thirty years after the bombing of the church. He replied that he was sure the Bureau had investigated it extensively. Woods was not persuaded, "Well, they never did anything about it." Langford promised to look into it.

Near the conversation's end, Woods fired a parting shot; Langford wasn't sure whether it was meant to be serious or in jest —"By the way, none of us want to eat your donuts because we're afraid they're poisoned."

Langford called for the case files to look into the matter, and about thirty files were brought to him. The FBI had definitely investigated the case, but closed it after a decade with no prosecutions. Several years later, in 1977, the state of Alabama had tried and convicted one of the suspects, Robert "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss.

Langford was a good friend of Reverend Chris Hamlin, the pastor of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church at that time. Hamlin introduced him to Petric Smith, the witness who had broken open the case at the Chambliss trial. With Reverend Hamlin's assurance that the FBI SAC really wanted to reopen the investigation, Petric Smith agreed to an interview with Langford at Smith's home.

Langford then floated the idea of reopening the investigation to one of the assistant US attorneys and received a "lukewarm reception," so he turned to David Barber, the district attorney for Jefferson County, who was very receptive and supportive. Langford talked Barber into driving with him to Montgomery to speak to a man Langford thought could answer the question that had burned in his mind since Abraham Woods's comment. The man was Lieutenant Colonel Bob Eddy of the Alabama Department of Public Safety, the primary investigator in Chambliss's trial eighteen years earlier.

"In your opinion, Bob, can we solve this case?" Langford asked Eddy.

Eddy's answer was, "I believe you can, if there are some witnesses still alive."

Langford asked Eddy to come to Birmingham for a meeting in the FBI's office. This was the first meeting Herren attended. When Eddy began to talk,...