Reputed Ku Klux Klansman James Ford Seale arrives at the federal courthouse in Jackson, Mississippi, yesterday. Seale is charged with kidnapping and conspiracy charges connected to the 1964 slayings of two black teenagers in southwest Mississippi. - AP

JACKSON, Mississippi (AP):

The cold case trial got under way yesterday in the deaths of two black teenagers who were beaten and dumped still alive into the Mississippi River during the state's dark days of racial brutality.

Ku Klux Klansman James Ford Seale faces federal kidnapping and conspiracy charges along with potentially damaging testimony from a man also charged back in 1964. U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate began questioning prospective jurors yesterday.

"We're at the doorstep of justice," said Thomas Moore, the brother of one of the victims, Charles Eddie Moore.

For decades, books and news accounts treated the killings of Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee as footnotes in Mississippi's troubled history at the start of the U.S. civil rights movement for racial equality. They were 19-year-old friends who were hitchhiking on May 2, 1964, near Meadville when carloads of Ku Klux Klansmen were chasing rumours of a possible armed insurrection by black people in the area.

Recent court records said the two were driven to the Homochitto National Forest and beaten, then stuffed into a trunk and driven more than 70 miles (113 kilometres) to the Mississippi River near Vicksburg. They were weighted down with engine parts and dumped, still breathing, into the Mississippi.

Their bodies were found about two months later, when authorities were conducting a massive search for slain civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, who disappeared from central Mississippi on June 21, 1964.

Seale and reputed Klansman Charles Marcus Edwards were arrested in 1964 in the deaths of Dee and Moore. But the FBI was consumed by the investigation of the three civil rights workers a landmark case that inspired the 1988 film "Mississippi Burning" and the Dee-Moore case was turned over to local authorities, who threw out all charges against Seale and Edwards.

The Justice Department in 2000 reopened an investigation.