but anyway, so he overheard sam bowers give the orders to kill vernon damar. and so he told us that. and after he met with us, we met with the district attorney and the case got reopened. this was in '97. the guy who had been kind of the key witness back in the 1960s was this guy, his name is billy roy pitts. billy roy pitts had been involved in the killing of vernon damar, dropped his gun, got caught. he was researching how many time these guys like pitts actually served in prison in mississippi. because it was a bit of a joke. governors pardoned some of these guys, they commuted their sentences. there were only a few convicted, but the ones who were convicted didn't spend much time in prison. and so i was researching each one of those and i got to him, and he -- i couldn't find any record of his state time but i was told he went in the federal witness protection program. so i was checking with the federal bureau of prisons to see how much federal time he did. so i'm talking to the archivist there, she pulled his file. i said, i understand he had a five-year

it's kind of interesting, but vernon damar's father was actually a white man and he lived his whole life as a black man. very interesting, right? you know, but that was not something they told me the first time i showed up. and that was the story they told me after years of beginning to trust me, but i thought it was a fascinating story. i'm only giving you parts of that story, but it's very fascinating story. vernon damar was the only one who stayed, the whole rest of the family moved, left mississippi and some passed for white up north, which was a whole another kind of interesting saga as well. those are the kind of stories you find out over time and why do you find that out? because the family trusts you and you begin to share information, like i said, what you begin to do, you have all this information and then gradually say is this something you would be comfortable talking about in a news story. you don't instantly jump and say, hey, i'm going to do a story on this. you begin to get them to trust you like a source, let's take an aside from these families. you go and you talk