Federal Employees Of The Year Medal Serving Justice

f you ask William Fleming or Ben Herren about the role they played in putting Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry behind bars for the rest of their lives, they'll tell you they were just doing their jobs. They'll tell you about courageous witnesses, brilliant federal prosecutors and the dedicated staff at the FBI's Birmingham, Ala., field office, where they work as criminal investigators. They'll tell you about their admiration for the families of four young girls brutally murdered in a crime so hateful it still outrages them. They're much less comfortable telling you how, after nearly four decades of failed efforts, they brought the killers to trial, and ultimately, to justice.

Fleming and Herren are family men, churchgoers, born and raised in the South. Perhaps that helps explain the extraordinary energy the two brought to the investigation. Herren, 49, grew up in Birmingham and was just 10 years old on a warm September Sunday in 1963, when a bomb ripped a hole in the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing 11-year-old Denise McNair and three 14-year-old friends: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson. Twenty others were injured. When the bomb went off, the girls were primping in the basement ladies' lounge, getting ready to go upstairs to the sanctuary to participate in a special youth service

Birmingham in those days was known as "Bombingham" due to nearly 50 racially motivated bombings across the city in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The church was a spiritual, social and political center for blacks in a city terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan. Blacks couldn't eat in the same restaurants as whites, black children couldn't study in the same schools as white children, couldn't even drink from the same public drinking fountains. It was shamefully easy for most Americans to overlook the racial disparity in the Deep South, but the mutilated corpses of four girls preparing for Sunday worship shamed the nation and galvanized the Civil Rights movement.

As it turned out, finding and convicting the killers would take even longer than ending segregation. The FBI investigated the bombing but closed the case in 1968 without bringing charges. Almost immediately, investigators had come up with four suspects, but proving their guilt in an Alabama court in the 1960s seemed impossible. Witnesses refused to testify, fearing Klan retaliation, and the prospect of a white jury convicting whites of killing blacks based on circumstantial evidence was too outlandish to contemplate.

In the early 1970s, Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley opened a state investigation. After relatives of one of the four original suspects came forward with new evidence, Baxley charged Robert Chambliss. Known as "dynamite Bob" in Klan circles for his bomb-making skills, Chambliss was convicted in 1977 and sentenced to life in prison, where he died eight years later. Another suspect died in 1994. That left two: Blanton and Cherry.

Then in 1995, in a 14th floor conference room of the FBI offices just a few blocks from the church, Robert Langford, a former Marine who then headed the FBI's Birmingham office, met with the district attorney, the Birmingham chief of police, community leaders, and one of the relatives who had helped convict Chambliss. Why not take another look at the case?

When Langford asked Special Agent Fleming to reopen the case, Fleming was less than delighted to be taking on a 30-year-old case with no new leads. "I wondered, 'Why are they wasting me like this?'"

Ben Herren isn't quite sure why he was put on the case. At the time he was a Birmingham police detective with nearly 20 years on the force. "I like to think my lieutenant thought I was the best detective she had, but I may have been the one she wanted to get rid of." Herren moved into a windowless cubbyhole in the FBI's office on Eighth Avenue where he and Fleming formed the nucleus of the task force that would begin the third investigation into the bombing, 32 years after the event.

For 15 months, they read the files from the 1963 investigation: all 90 volumes, much of it on onionskin paper. Then they discovered another 40 volumes on the suspects and various Klan members. "And then we discovered that there were three or four informants, and that was another 10 volumes," says Fleming. "And you go through it page by page. I was surprised we didn't get some kind of carpal tunnel syndrome."

Though both had been hoping to find flaws in the records they might exploit for new leads, they instead found themselves impressed by how thorough the original investigation had been. "As we went through the records we'd come across things that we'd get very excited about, and then as we continued along, we'd see where the Bureau had ruled them out," Fleming says.

The case was so old by the time Fleming and Herren got to it that more than 130 witnesses had died. "Once we started into it, I don't think I ever really envisioned success-a guilty verdict anywhere in this case. I thought maybe we might get to the bottom of it and at least know exactly who did what. But I didn't think, given the dead witnesses we had, that we would come to a conviction," Herren says.

Fleming gets annoyed whenever he watches crime shows on television. You never see the hours of tedious reading, the months of getting nowhere, the depression when too much time has passed without a break. For five years, Fleming and Herren worked the 16th Street bombing case, interviewing and re-interviewing witnesses, tracking down new witnesses, checking and rechecking alibis. They added 35 new volumes of data to the file. Herren retired from the Birmingham Police Department Oct. 14, 1997, and the next day went to work for the FBI as an investigative research specialist to continue working the case. Fleming, now 57, canceled his retirement plans. They postponed vacations, gave up weekend hunting and fishing trips, missed wedding anniversaries and birthdays, missed their kids growing up.

Herren, whose compulsion for organization is a marvel to his colleagues, constructed a time line that would prove indispensable to the investigators. "Ben is very analytical, gracious alive, is he analytical," Fleming says. "He just put this timeline together, laid it out. And we could see where they were lying, where they were protecting each other's alibi."

Some of their best witnesses would turn out to be people who weren't around in 1963-ex-wives and grandchildren who later heard Cherry bragging about what he had done. Fleming resurrected long-forgotten tapes that captured Blanton talking about the crime-evidence that had been overlooked at the time due to the poor quality of the tapes.

"We spent weeks trying to turn one 75-year-old former Klansman," Fleming recalls. "We hit him with everything: moral obligation, patriotism, duty. He ultimately cooperated, but he certainly wouldn't have cooperated in '77."

"Bill stayed with this case like a bulldog that wouldn't turn loose," says Herren. "And he was shaking every pant leg he could shake, trying to do everything he could do to get people to talk to us. Bill is a very effective interviewer. He could talk to that lamp post over there and get the lamp post to talk to him."

Through relentless determination, the two men marshaled the evidence that ultimately brought the cases to trial. In May 2001, Blanton, then 62, was sentenced to life in prison. This May, 39 years after the bombing, Cherry, 71, received the same sentence.

Until the verdicts were read, neither Fleming nor Herren would quite believe they had succeeded. Sometimes they still can't quite believe it.

Says Fleming: "We touched history."

"Or history touched us," Herren says.