While Liuzzo was being honored as a martyr, Bureau Director J. Edgar Hoover was increasingly concerned about the embarrassing fact that Rowe had telephoned his FBI contact on March 25 and received permission to “work” during the march despite his history of violent behavior toward civil-rights activists. Rowe had participated in the beatings of Freedom Riders in Birmingham in 1961 and was suspected of involvement in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. In order to deflect criticism, Hoover shifted the focus of the national news coverage from the FBI to Liuzzo’s motivation for joining the march. He consistently referred to her as an “outside agitator,” despite her southern upbringing, and at a private meeting with President Johnson reported that Liuzzo’s husband Jim was a Teamsters organizer with “a shady background.” Hoover also suggested that Liuzzo and Moton had stopped for a romantic interlude. When the president ignored his innuendos, Hoover instructed FBI staff to leak his speculations to the bureau’s Klan informants, who subsequently leaked them to the press. Liuzzo was widely portrayed in the media as an unstable woman who had abandoned her family to cause trouble in the South.
On May 3, 1965, the trial of Collie Leroy Wilkins, alleged by the prosecution to be the trigger man in the Liuzzo murder, began in Hayneville, Lowndes County. Defense attorney Matthew Hobson Murphy Jr., Grand Klonsel of the United Klans of America, informed the jury that since Rowe had broken his Klan loyalty oath by testifying against his fellow Klansmen they should not believe anything he said, and that Liuzzo was a white woman alone in a car with a black man at night and whatever happened to her was her own fault. Murphy was successful in his attempts to blame Liuzzo for her own fate, and the trial ended in a hung jury. In subsequent trials, Alabama juries cleared Wilkins, Eaton, and Thomas, but federal juries convicted them of violating Liuzzo’s civil rights and sentenced them to 10 years in prison. Eaton, died in March 1966 before beginning his sentence, whereas Rowe was granted full immunity and placed in the federal witness protection program. {read}