RINGGOLD, Ga. (CN) — It was a scene all too common in the South six decades ago: Another bomb had struck, seemingly at random. Someone had placed explosives underneath the bedroom of Jethro and Mattie Green, a black couple in Ringgold, Georgia, a small town about a dozen miles southeast of Chattanooga, Tennessee.
During World War II, Jethro served as a construction foreman in the Army in the India-Burma campaign. After the war, he worked as an auto mechanic and also cleaned a drug store. Mattie worked as a housekeeper. Together, they had six children.
Around 1 a.m. on May 19, 1960, just as a train rolled through the small town, the bomb rent the house, blowing laundry that Mattie had been doing earlier that evening up into nearby trees and wires.
The blast injured Jethro and the couple’s 17-month-old son. But the house crumpled on Mattie. She died in the ambulance on the way to a hospital 15 minutes away.
A police officer from the Ringgold Police Department came to guard the scene until daylight.
In the darkness, the questions lingered, as they continue to today: Who did it, and why?
Even as the smell of explosives hung in the air, some suspected the bombing was racially motivated.
Four hours after the bomb went off, according to an FBI memo, the FBI’s Civil Rights Division thought that if the bombing was found to be a civil rights matter, then whoever set off the bomb could be prosecuted under the Civil Rights Act of 1960 — which had taken effect days before.
But in the following days, several rumors started to grow. Was Mattie Green’s death the result of a love triangle gone bad? Maybe the Greens’ house was targeted by mistake. Newspapers declared there were no clear clues that the bombing was racially motivated.
The governor of Georgia, Ernest Vandiver, posted a $500 reward for information leading to the solving of the case. Almost 1,000 miles away, The New York Times published a short bulletin about the bombing.
With few leads, the FBI looked at Jethro Green as the possible murderer of his wife, but ruled him out. Eventually, the FBI quit the case. Catoosa County Sheriff J.D. Stewart did not ask for its assistance. And there was no proof that the bomber moved explosives across the Georgia-Tennessee state line, only a few miles away.
The FBI wrote its final memo July 22, 1960. The case — from the FBI’s perspective for the time being — was closed.
In 2009, the FBI reopened the case. Mattie Green’s death was one of 103 cold cases the FBI re-examined as part of a mandate under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, to take another look at whether people who committed murders during the civil rights struggle could be prosecuted decades later.
From the beginning, then-FBI Special Agent Marc Veazey faced the challenges of investigating a long-cold case.
“I had no physical evidence,” Veazey told Courthouse News. “I had no living witnesses. I had no one that gave me any firsthand knowledge of anything.”
The FBI destroyed its original case file in 2005. It recovered a redacted version of the file for its investigation because the Southern Poverty Law Center submitted a Freedom of Information Act request in 2003.
Veazey talked with more than 20 people for his investigation, people who lived and continue to live in Ringgold. After hearing three theories of what had happened, being unable to find any living suspects and identifying no clear prosecutable violations, the FBI closed the case again in 2010.
“Back in the civil rights era, what usually happened is that you would have a black male be accused of either having an affair with, whistling at, doing something inappropriate to a white female,” Veazey said. “You saw that all the time. ... You didn't have anything like that (with this case). I mean, I could not uncover motive one. And in a homicide case, you try to start with a motive. I didn't have anything."