New evidence collected in 1946 lynching case - CNN.com: ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- State and federal investigators said Tuesday that they spent the past two days gathering evidence in the last documented mass lynching in the United States: a grisly slaying of four people that has remained unsolved for more than six decades.
In a written statement, the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said they collected several items on a property in rural Walton County, Georgia, that were taken in for further investigation.
On July 25, 1946, two black sharecropper couples were shot hundreds of times and the unborn baby of one of the women cut out with a knife at the Moore's Ford Bridge. One of the men had been accused of stabbing a white man 11 days earlier and was bailed out of jail by a former Ku Klux Klan member and known bootlegger who drove him, his wife, her brother and his wife to the bridge.
The FBI statement said investigators were following up on information recently received in the case, one of several the agency has revived in an effort to close decades-old cases from the civil rights era and before.
"The FBI and GBI had gotten some information that we couldn't ignore with respect to this case," GBI spokesman John Bankhead said.
Georgia state Rep. Tyrone Brooks, a longtime advocate for prosecution in the Moore's Ford case, called news of the search encouraging.
