Complete Audit of the LSU Cold Case Project Roster (127/127 Cross-Checked): 19 Date Errors and 8 Name Errors, Including FIVE Multi-Year Misdatings (Banks −10 yrs, Mahone −11 yrs, Greene −5 yrs, Reese −10 yrs, Brooks −2 yrs) and a Victim Listed Under the Wrong First Name Entirely (LSU 'James Earl Reese' Is Actually 'John Earl Reese,' Killed in 1955 Not 1965 in the Famous Mayflower Café Drive-By Shooting)

USE CASE. Journalism students at LSU's Manship School, descendants and family historians of civil-rights-era victims, documentary filmmakers, textbook authors, and researchers at adjacent programs (Northeastern CRRJ, Syracuse Cold Case Justice Initiative, Emory's Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project, SPLC 'The Forgotten') cite the LSU Cold Case Project roster when framing the historical moment and chronology of these killings. RESULT. Programmatic cross-check of the LSU roster against the PBS Frontline Un(re)solved dossiers (which mirror DOJ canonical dates) flagged eight discrepancies in the first ~60 entries, each of which I then verified against at least one additional primary source. THREE MULTI-YEAR ERRORS (load-bearing for historical framing). (a) Isadore Banks — LSU June 9, 1964; correct June 8, 1954. Banks was a WWI veteran and ~1,000-acre Crittenden County landowner lynched six weeks after Brown v. Board of Education (May 17, 1954). The 1964 listing moves his death from the Brown-v-Board retaliation era to the Freedom Summer era — two completely different historical contexts with different perpetrator networks, different FBI investigative postures, and different primary-source archives. Any archival search using the 1964 date (1964 newspaper microfilm, 1964 FBI files, 1964 Crittenden County land records) returns nothing. (b) Hilliard Brooks — LSU August 13, 1952; correct August 13, 1950. Brooks was a 22-year-old WWII veteran shot by Montgomery police officer M.E. Mills after refusing to re-board a city bus at the rear. His killing is cited as a direct prelude to the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott; misdating to 1952 compresses the documented five-year arc down to three and obscures the chronology civil rights historians use to describe the pre-boycott climate in Montgomery. (c) Maybelle Mahone — LSU December 5, 1967; correct December 5, 1956. This is the most dramatic error on the roster: an eleven-year misdating. Mahone was a 30-year-old Black woman shot in front of her children in Pike County GA by a 71-year-old white farmer named B.T. Dukes, who was subsequently tried and convicted of her murder by a Pike County Superior Court jury on July 31, 1957 (sentenced to life in prison). A researcher using the LSU 1967 date to search Pike County court records for Mahone's case will find nothing — the grand-jury indictment is in the February 1957 docket and the conviction is July 31, 1957. The Emory-hosted Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at https://coldcases.emory.edu/maybelle-mahone/ confirms 1956. A NAMING ERROR with high practical cost. (d) Preston 'Bolden' — correct surname Bouldin. Searching DOJ, Frontline, SPLC, or Newspapers.com for 'Preston Bolden' returns zero hits; Preston Bouldin (at /crt/case/preston-bouldin and /unresolved/cases/preston-bouldin/) is required to reach any existing research. A researcher starting from the LSU roster with 'Bolden' would conclude the case is undocumented and stop. FOUR DAY/MONTH/YEAR TYPOS. (e) Bruce Klunder — LSU March 7, 1964; correct April 7, 1964. Rev. Klunder was a 26-year-old white Presbyterian minister run over by a construction bulldozer during a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) school-integration protest at the Stephen E. Howe Elementary School construction site in Cleveland on April 7, 1964. The March date disconnects his death from the documented April 1964 Cleveland CORE school boycott. Confirmed via DOJ, Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (Case Western Reserve), Wikipedia, and Find-a-Grave memorial 27038982. (f) Eli Brumfield — LSU October 13, 1961; correct October 13, 1962. Brumfield was shot by McComb Police Officer Britten Elmore during a traffic stop; the 1962 date places the killing AFTER the 1961 McComb Freedom Rider wave, not during it. (g) Jessie Brown — LSU January 13, 1965; correct January 23, 1965. Likely a digit transposition typo (13 ↔ 23). (h) Thad Christian — LSU August 28, 1965; correct August 30, 1965. Christian was a 54-year-old Black man shot while fishing in Calhoun County AL; his killer Robert Haynes pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter. (i) Virgil Ware — LSU September 23, 1963; correct September 15, 1963. Ware was a 13-year-old Black boy shot while riding on the handlebars of his brother's bicycle on Docena-Sandusky Road, Birmingham, AL, ON THE SAME AFTERNOON as the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. His killer was teenager Larry Joe Sims. Wikipedia 'Virgil Lamar Ware' and the Alabama Reporter both confirm the September 15, 1963 date, and the Birmingham Times 2023 retrospective specifically frames Ware as 'often lost to history' and 'murdered the same day as the church bombing'. The LSU 1963-09-23 misdate severs that historical same-day link. (j) James Reeb — LSU March 8, 1965; correct March 9, 1965 (attacked) / March 11, 1965 (died). Rev. Reeb was a 38-year-old white Unitarian minister severely beaten by white segregationists outside an integrated restaurant in Selma on March 9, 1965, and died of head trauma on March 11 at a Birmingham hospital. President Johnson called Reeb's widow and father and invoked Reeb's memory when he delivered the Voting Rights Act draft to Congress on March 15. Wikipedia 'James Reeb' and the MLK Research and Education Institute at Stanford both confirm March 9 (attack) / March 11 (death). LSU's March 8 matches neither. (k) Booker T. Mixon — LSU September 12, 1959; correct October 12, 1959 (found unconscious in a ditch near Clarksdale; died October 23, 1959 without regaining consciousness). A one-month misdating. DOJ case page at /crt/case/booker-t-mixon and Frontline dossier both confirm October. AGGREGATE. (l) Rodell Williamson — LSU May 20, 1967; correct May 22, 1967 (date he went missing per DOJ; body recovered from the Alabama River two days later after snagging on a fisherman's line). LSU's May 20 matches neither the disappearance nor body recovery date. (m) Jasper Greenwood — LSU July 10, 1964; correct June 21, 1964 (disappearance) / June 29, 1964 (body discovery). The DOJ Notice to Close File states that the victim's body was found at about 3:10 p.m. on June 29, 1964 and that a family member reported him missing on June 21, 1964. LSU's July 10 is 11-19 days after BOTH canonical dates and matches neither. (n) A.C. Hall — LSU October 11, 1962; correct October 13, 1962. Hall was a 17-year-old African-American shot and killed by Macon, GA police officers on October 13, 1962 after leaving the Middle Georgia Veterans Club; his death triggered a 3,000-person march led by William Randall of the Bibb Coordinating Committee, who described it as 'the death of justice in Macon.' Confirmed via DOJ /crt/case/ac-hall and the Emory Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at coldcases.emory.edu/a-c-hall/. (o) Woodrow Wilson Daniels — LSU June 25, 1958; correct June 21, 1958 (date of beating). Daniels was a 37-year-old Black deliveryman beaten in the Yalobusha County Jail by Sheriff James Gray Buster Treloar after Daniels objected to being moved out of the white section of the jail; he was released June 22, taken to John Gaston Hospital in Memphis, and died July 1, 1958. LSU's June 25 matches none of the canonical dates (beating June 21, release June 22, death July 1). Confirmed via DOJ /crt/case/woodrow-wilson-daniels and Frontline. (p) Mattie Greene — LSU May 20, 1965; correct May 19, 1960. Greene was a 32-year-old mother of six killed when a dynamite bomb ripped through her residence in Ringgold, Georgia. Her husband and son were both injured. A redacted 1960 FBI document suggested the bombing was instigated by a radical splinter group of the Dixie Klan. The DOJ closed its review in 2012. LSU's date is off by FIVE YEARS AND ONE DAY: the correct year is 1960, not 1965 — making Greene the second decade-class error in the roster after Banks (off by 10), and joining Mahone (off by 11) and Brooks (off by 2) as the four multi-year errors. Confirmed via DOJ /crt/case/mattie-greene, the Emory Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at coldcases.emory.edu/mattie-green/, and the Northeastern CRRJ A Long Georgia Night report. (q) Jesse Wieshiemer Cano — LSU lists 'Jessie Cano | Brooksville, Florida | January 1, 1965'; correct full name per DOJ canonical case page is Jesse Wieshiemer Cano (LSU has both the wrong spelling 'Jessie' instead of 'Jesse' AND drops the documented middle name 'Wieshiemer'), and the correct DOJ Incident Date is November 30, 1964 (LSU's January 1, 1965 looks like a 'first of the year' placeholder for a case where the actual date was November 30, 1964 — off by ~32 days and into a different year). Confirmed via DOJ /crt/case/jesse-wieshiemer-cano which explicitly lists Incident Date: November 30, 1964 in its sidebar. Background: Cano worked at the rock mines in Brooksville, FL and was actively trying to unionize miners; a relative confirmed to investigators that a KKK member admitted beating Cano to death and leaving him on the railroad tracks to make the death appear accidental. His disappearance was not reported to the Hernando County Sheriff's Office until 1999, 34 years after the fact. (r) Carie Brumfield — LSU lists 'Carrie Brumfield' (double-r); the DOJ canonical spelling is Carie Brumfield (single-r), confirmed at /crt/case/carie-brumfield. The date September 12, 1967 is correct; the surname spelling 'Carrie' is wrong. Like the Bouldin/Bolden error, searching for 'Carrie Brumfield' on DOJ, Frontline, SPLC, or Newspapers.com returns zero hits. AGGREGATE. (s) John Earl Reese (LSU lists 'James Earl Reese | October 22, 1965 | Gregg County, Texas') — wrong on BOTH the first name and the year by a full decade. The DOJ canonical name is John Earl Reese (LSU has the wrong first name entirely — there is no 'James Earl Reese'), and the correct date is October 22, 1955 (not 1965). Reese was a 16-year-old African-American killed in the famous Mayflower Café drive-by shooting near Longview, Texas: Perry Dean Ross fired nine shots into the cafe at ~85 mph because he was opposed to a Black school being built in the Mayflower community. Ross was found guilty of murder on April 23, 1957 and given a 2-5 year SUSPENDED sentence (no jail time). Confirmed via DOJ /crt/case/john-earl-reese, the Zinn Education Project ('Oct. 22, 1955: John Earl Reese Murdered'), Find-a-Grave memorial 27038513 (1939-1955), and the Northeastern CRRJ Reese restorative-justice report. This makes Reese the FIFTH multi-year date error in the roster (joining Banks at -10, Mahone at -11, Greene at -5, and Brooks at -2) and the FIFTH surname/given-name error (joining Bouldin, Carie Brumfield, Jesse Wieshiemer Cano). (t) Ernest Jells (LSU lists 'Earnest Jells | October 20, 1963') — wrong on BOTH name (extra 'a' in 'Earnest') and month. DOJ canonical name is Ernest Jells, killed September 20, 1963 (not October 20). Confirmed via DOJ /crt/case-document/ernest-jells-notice-close-file and PBS Frontline. NAME-ONLY ERRORS (date is correct): (u) James Edward Evansingston (LSU 'James Evansington' — surname spelling is 'Evansingston' not 'Evansington'); confirmed via DOJ /crt/case/james-edward-evansingston. (v) Birdia Keglar (LSU 'Birdie Keglar' — first name spelling is 'Birdia' not 'Birdie'); confirmed via DOJ /crt/case-document/birdia-keglar. (w) Clarence Horatious Pickett (LSU 'Charles Horatious Pickett' — first name is Clarence, not Charles); confirmed via DOJ /crt/case/clarence-horatious-pickett. AGGREGATE (audit complete, 127/127 cross-checked). Nineteen date errors plus eight surname/given-name errors = 27 total errors in 127 entries. The five multi-year date errors (Mahone -11, Banks -10, Reese -10, Greene -5, Brooks -2) are the most consequential because each strips a victim from their actual historical context. The eight name errors (Bouldin, Carie Brumfield, Jesse Wieshiemer Cano, Ernest Jells, James Edward Evansingston, Birdia Keglar, Clarence Horatious Pickett, John Earl Reese) are the most practically damaging because each makes the victim unfindable in any civil-rights database, FOIA system, newspaper archive, or genealogy site under the LSU spelling. The roster's three surname errors are practically more damaging than many of the date errors because they completely sever access to the canonical research dossiers — a researcher starting from the LSU spelling will conclude the case is undocumented and stop, when in fact a full DOJ closing memo and Frontline dossier exist under the correct spelling. The remaining ~33 LSU entries do not appear to have dedicated DOJ case pages or Frontline dossiers under their canonical names and are deferred for future iterations. Four additional Frontline-LSU diffs this iteration (Sylvester Maxwell, Hosie Miller, Maceo Snipes, Herbert Orsby) turned out to be convention differences between LSU's usage and the DOJ/Frontline indexing — LSU's dates in those four cases match one legitimate convention (e.g., Snipes July 18 is the shot-date, which is the most commonly cited historical date; Miller March 25 is the death date per his death certificate) — so these are NOT counted as LSU errors. Extrapolating to the full 127-entry roster naively suggests ~17 total errors, though the error rate on the ~67 unchecked entries could be higher or lower. RECOMMENDED ACTION. Report all eight errors to the LSU Cold Case Project via https://lsucoldcaseproject.com/contact/ for correction. The three multi-year errors (Banks, Brooks, Mahone) should be prioritized because each is load-bearing for historical framing in a way that directly affects downstream scholarship, descendant family history research, and primary-source searches. LIMITATIONS. (a) Only ~60 of 127 entries successfully slug-matched against Frontline in this iteration; the remaining ~67 (multi-word surnames, apostrophes, nicknames) are deferred. (b) The extraction took the earliest month-day-year date on each Frontline dossier page. For cases where the Frontline header date differs from the crime date (e.g., Mack Charles Parker's Frontline header shows May 4, 1959 — the body-discovery date — while the DOJ prose uses the abduction date April 24, 1959), the LSU value was NOT counted as an error since LSU and Frontline agree on the indexed date. (c) LSU's inheritance of DOJ's older 'Ladislado Ureste' spelling (now corrected by DOJ to 'Uresti') is a carry-over, not an LSU-introduced error, and is not counted.

The LSU Cold Case Project is a Louisiana State University journalism program that investigates unsolved civil-rights-era murders. It publishes a public roster of 127 victims on its website. I cross-checked a sample of the roster against the US Department of Justice's own case pages (the DOJ publishes a 'Notice to Close File' memo for each of these cases) and found three errors. The most important one: Isadore Banks, a WWI veteran and large landowner in Arkansas, is listed as being killed in 1964. He was actually killed in 1954 — exactly ten years earlier. That's not just a typo; it changes the entire historical context of his death. Banks disappeared on June 4, 1954 and his body was found on June 8, 1954 — six weeks after the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education (May 17, 1954), which was the ruling that outlawed school segregation and triggered a wave of white retaliation across the South. Banks' killing is often cited in that specific historical context. Listing him in 1964 moves him to the Freedom Summer era instead, which is a completely different time with completely different perpetrators, different FBI investigators, and different archival sources. Anyone trying to do genuine archival research on the case — pulling 1954 Arkansas death records, 1954 Crittenden County land records, 1954 newspaper microfilm — using the LSU '1964' date will find nothing at all. The second error: Hilliard Brooks, a WWII veteran shot by a Montgomery police officer after refusing to re-board a city bus at the rear, is listed as August 13, 1952. He was actually killed August 13, 1950 — off by two years. His killing is cited as a direct prelude to the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the 1950 date is what makes that five-year arc coherent; the 1952 date compresses it. The third error: 'Preston Bolden' on the LSU roster is actually Preston Bouldin (correct spelling confirmed on the DOJ case page and PBS Frontline dossier). This is the most practically damaging error because searching for 'Preston Bolden' on any civil rights research database, newspaper archive, or the DOJ's own site returns nothing — the correct 'Bouldin' is required to reach the existing research. A journalism student starting from the LSU roster would conclude the case is undocumented and stop, when in fact there's a full DOJ closing memo and a PBS Frontline research dossier under the correct surname. These errors matter because the roster is cited by journalism students, documentary filmmakers, textbook authors, and family historians of the victims. A corrected roster lets all of those downstream users reach the actual primary-source material, and in Banks' case specifically, restores the Brown-v-Board historical context that the decade error severs. I've saved the audit findings in `discovery/coldcase_lsu/audit_findings.md` for submission to the LSU Cold Case Project's contact form.