On the anniversary of the Birmingham Church Bombing, Ashley Makar listens to the voice of the killer.

Clanging

pans, shuffling feet, running sink; “bomb”—the most salient sound, Thomas Blanton Jr.’s voice, caught on surveillance tape, telling his wife about the dynamite that killed four black girls in Birmingham, Alabama. The bomb that blew Jesus’ face out of a stained glass window at the 16th Street Baptist Church. The bomb that stopped a downtown clock at 10:24 a.m., September 15, 1963.

By the 2007 anniversary of the church bombing this September, Blanton, the only living suspect, had served a mere six years of his four life sentences—one for each girl the bomb killed. The day a Birmingham jury found him guilty of four counts of first-degree murder, Blanton said “I guess the good Lord will settle on Judgment Day.”

Lord knows what all Blanton was up to that mid-September weekend in 1963. Circumstantial evidence and questionable character witnesses point to no good: Whether Blanton was planning the bomb with fellow klansmen, driving them to the church to plant the dynamite, two-timing his future wife with an ex-girlfriend at the Bluebird Motel, some or all of the above remains unclear—as does most of what Blanton was saying on the recordings (known as the kitchen tapes) that made for a compelling prosecution case against him. In late April 2001, eight white and four black jurors listened, over and over, to Thomas Blanton saying “bomb” three times in a four-minute conversation with his then new wife Jean.

JEAN: “Well, you never bothered to tell me what you went to the river for Tommy… What meeting?”…TOMMY: “To the Big One…The meeting where we planned the bomb.”

JEAN: “Some people at the Modern Sign Company said you weren’t there.”…

TOMMY: “Jean…Every breath they [the FBI] utter is a lie.”

JEAN: “I know, but…the first thing that hit me. You stood me up to go out with Waylene.”

UNKNOWN PERSON (as designated in the FBI transcript of the conversation): “That’s what they want to do…to make you mad, girl.”

In fact, Jean Casey got so mad when Tommy broke their Friday night date on September 13, 1963, she told him she wouldn’t see him again. He’d called and said he had to work that night—something about making signs for a segregation rally. Tommy didn’t tell her much about his business, and Jean didn’t care much, except when it interfered with their dates. But Jean really liked Tommy, and when he said he would take her out the next night, she couldn’t help but say yes.

Waylene Vaughn said she’d spent the Friday night in question with Blanton, according to freelance reporter Donna Francavilla’s trial notes. On one of their alleged dates, Vaughn testified that Blanton showed her bottles of foul-smelling brown fluid—acid, he told her, that would burn skin. She watched him pour it onto the seats of black people’s vehicles and waited in his car while he sneaked some into the meat department of South Way Grocery, saying he hoped to close the store down, because it was owned by Jews who waited on nobody but blacks.

Blanton told Jean he’d gone to the Cahaba River bridge the night he broke their date. But he told his friend Mitchell Burns he’d been with Waylene Vaughn the night of September 13, 1963. Burns, a Warrior Klavern sermonizer, became an FBI informant after he looked over a picture of the four girls who died in the church bombing. In 1965, Burns planted a recording device in Blanton’s spare tire and got what the 2001 Prosecution argued amounts to a confession. On the Burns tape, Blanton says the FBI “ain’t going to catch me when I bomb my next church.”

Burns, who said he’d joined the klan “just for a lark,” testified that Blanton would obsessively drive by the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1965, two years after the bombing. While the two were cruising down the highway, Burns would drink vodka, and the two would stop in bars to drink beer and chase women. (“We didn’t have to chase them,” Burns told the trial court in April 2001.)

The recordings of Burns’s car talks with Blanton and Jean’s kitchen talks with her ex-husband were discovered almost by accident, as Frank Sikora demonstrates in Until Justice Rolls Down. When prosecution attorneys asked FBI agents to do a final check of their Birmingham office to make sure they hadn’t missed any evidence, investigator Bill Fleming came across a note that said “bomb” on a box he first thought was trash. Inside, he found the tapes. Original investigators may have missed the evidence, according to Sikora, because the short, garbled conversation was among the few distinguishable voices amid hours of silence.

Tommy married Jean to keep her quiet, Ben Alldredge, one of Blanton’s father’s tenants, told the FBI. Alldredge further claimed the couple fought a lot because she didn’t agree with his views on segregation. She threatened to leave him if he didn’t take a sign he’d put up on their door saying, “Apartment for Rent–Niggers and FBI need not apply.”

An undercover agent posing as a truck driver did rent the apartment Blanton and his father had added on to their west-end home. In the summer of 1964, an FBI technician drilled into the wall between his colleague’s rented closet and the Blantons’s kitchen—the hole that brought the “bomb” in Tommy’s voice, barely discernible over background clangs—to an Alabama courtroom, thirty-seven years after the shudder in the church.

The truck driver had moved in with little furniture, Jean remarked in Blanton’s pretrial hearing, and she’d noticed the wall was cut out when the man moved out.
Ashley Makar, a Birmingham native, teaches writing at Hofstra University. Her last piece for The Revealer (via its sister site, Killing the Buddha) was “Holy Ghost People.” A portion of this story first appeared in the Birmingham News.