New Release

WHO KILLED BUDDY HEFLIN?

On a cold New Year’s Day in 1969, Buddy Heflin left his sister’s house in Jackson, Mississippi, got into a car with three men and was never seen again. He left behind a wife and two sons and a forty-nine-year-old mystery.
Just weeks after filing a Missing Person report, his father died of an apparent heart attack. Soon after that tragedy, Buddy’s sister received two threatening phone calls from a man whose voice she did not recognize telling her not to talk about her brother’s disappearance.
One year later, between Christmas and New Year’s Day, the family answered another phone call concerning John Lloyd Heflin; this one came from a life-long friend who reported that Buddy had been murdered and thrown into the Mississippi river near Vicksburg, Mississippi. Not long after making that call, that man committed suicide in his own home.
Living and working in Chicago where she had taken the boys after a separation from her husband, Alexis Heflin knew nothing of his disappearance until eight months after the fact; nor had she heard of her father-in-law’s death until she contacted family members to ask why she and the boys had heard nothing from Buddy. In spite of their separation, they were still married, and Buddy loved his boys dearly. Alexis and close friends of Buddy and his mother and siblings all agreed that he would never have left his sons voluntarily.
Honorably discharged from the Army in 1966, Buddy had served in the Mississippi National Guard in 1962 when President Kennedy federalized Buddy’s company and sent them to the University of Mississippi to quell the riots and safe guard James Meredith, the first black man to break the color barrier in the school. Buddy served there for two weeks.
But his disappearance and reported murder was likely not related to that historic moment in the Civil Rights struggle that not only besieged the state of Mississippi but the nation as a whole.
Buddy was a popular young man whose ability to gather a crowd, especially of young women, would have been much sought after by both the Ku Klux Klan and the FBI; the former seeking recruiters (called Kleagle’s by the Klan) and the latter, undercover agents to infiltrate the Klan.
Estimates are the FBI had three hundred agents in the state, both paid and unpaid-though one has to wonder why anyone would voluntarily risk certain death by the Klan if they were found out. Certainly, the cause of Civil Rights was a just one, and worth the risk.
Flying under the flak of the riots and civil unrest and the war in Vietnam, the so-called, “Dixie Mafia” was active across the Southern states. A loose collection of violent criminals that had no qualms about how they made money or enforcing their one rule-Thou Shalt Not Snitch, the “Southern Mafia”, as it was sometimes called, took full advantage of the thinly stretched local law enforcement and Federal Bureau of Investigation; preying on the citizens of small towns, running drugs and guns, hi-jacking semi-trucks, running chop shops and working as enforcers for Klan events and persuaders at polling places. Prostitution was another of their activities that everyone seemed to know about, but nobody did anything about.
In the early 1970’s, one “Enforcer” for the group bragged of killing 24 people in just four years; not all of whom were “Snitch’s”-not only was the snitch targeted, but his family and friends as well.
In the nearly fifty years since, Buddy’s disappearance and reported death have never been investigated by any agency of the law. Despite assurances Alexis Heflin received from the Sheriff’s Department of Starkville, MS, the police and the FBI, no report or official conclusion has ever been filed concerning Buddy Heflin, and in spite of leads provided by Alexis from her own inquiries, no apparent follow-up was ever done.
With no body, and no evidence he may be alive, Buddy Heflin was finally declared “Legally Dead”.
Working two jobs to support her children, Alexis Heflin had been denied any Social Security benefits due her and the boys until that declaration, leaving just the boys eligible for the three years before they turned Eighteen. Just Six and Four when their father disappeared, they have had no answers, no grave site and no closure concerning their father for almost half a century.
Convinced that Buddy knew or saw something dangerous to someone’s position or career, Alexis Heflin wants justice-for Buddy, her children and herself.
To that end she is releasing a new telling of Buddy’s story in February of 2018. Titled, Mississippi Whispers, the book will be available on Amazon by Carson/Brown Associates, CBA, Publishing.
Perhaps, with the release of this book we will finally answer the question of who killed Buddy Heflin?