KU KLUX KLAN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18755, 8 January 1923, Page 5

KU KLUX KLAN

MURDER TRIALS OPENED. MACHINE GUNS GUARD COURT. Press Association—By Telegraph—Copyright NEW YORK,, January 5. (Received Jan. 1 ! at 5.5 p.m.) The Bastrop (Louisiana) Courthouse is surrounded by machine guns and soldiers, the open hearings having begun to-day of the Ku Klux Klan murder trials. The State gained an important victory in easily corpus delicti, which the Klan had claimed would never be proved, since the bodies of Daniels and Richards were terrible mangled. Deputy sheriffs searched every person who entered the courtroom for weapons. Dr M’Kain returned from Baltimore today. He declared that he was ready to give whatever evidence was necessary. ' The State to-morrow will have pathological experts’ testimony in the direction that Daniels and Richards were inhumanly tortured before being killed.—A. and N.Z. Cable. DEAD MEN’S CRUEL FATE. EVIDENCE OB' FIENDISH TORTURE. WASHINGTON, January 0. (Received Jan. 7, at 11.25 p.m.) A pathologist at the Ku Klux Klan hearings testified that the murdered men were fiendishly tortured with speciallbuilt machines before being killed. Daniels’s father, and a man named Andrews, who were among the party of five kidnapped men trom which Daniels and Richards never returned, described how they were seized and beaten by men wearing black masks. Because Richards ->*iad Daniels junior cried out the names of some of their assailants, whose masas had slipped from their faces, they were killed. The court adjourned untjj Tuesday.—A. and N.Z. Cable. (A recent telegram from Baltimore, Maryland. stated that Dr B. M’Kain, a former Mayor of Merrougo, hod been arrested on a murder charge upon the orders of Governor Parker, of Louisiana, in connection with the Ku Klux Klan murders. Dr M’Kain described an ambush attempt on his life last August, and he declared that he would return to Louisiana without military protection. He declined to answer questions in rosrard to his membership of the Ku Klux Klan, but related decoy calls made by the Ku Klux Klan on behalf of negro patients on the outskirts of a town. Dr M’Kain protested his entire ignorance in connection with the murders.]