Deputy investigated Emmett Till’s slaying

John Ed Cothran, 93, a former sheriff’s deputy who investigated the 1955 slaying of Emmett Till in Mississippi, died of heart failure Saturday at a health center in Grenada, Miss.

The murder of Till, a 14-year-old black youth visiting Mississippi from his home in Chicago, galvanized the civil rights movement. Till was reported to have whistled at a white woman in the rural community of Money. On Aug. 31, 1955, Cothran, then Leflore County’s chief deputy, helped pull Till’s bloated and mutilated body out of the Tallahatchie River.

Cothran arrested Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam in the slaying and testified for the prosecution at their trial. However, the two defendants were acquitted by an all-white jury. Cothran later testified against both men before a Leflore County grand jury, which failed to indict Bryant and Milam on kidnapping charges.

Bryant and Milam later confessed in a Look magazine article that they had killed Till. Both have since died.

The investigation was reopened in 2004. Two years later, a Leflore County grand jury declined to indict 73-year-old Carolyn Bryant Donham, the woman Till was supposed to have whistled at, as part of the murder plot.

A native of the northern Mississippi town of Mathiston, Cothran worked for the Leflore County Sheriff’s Department from 1948 to 1964, the last four years as sheriff. He later became a cotton and soybean farmer.