Emmett Till accuser reportedly has cancer and is living in Kentucky while pending warrant status

Nearly 70 years ago, Donham accused the teen of flirting with her, an action that broke the unwritten but prominent rules of the Jim Crow South. Emmett was visiting Money, Mississippi from Chicago for the summer and met Donham at her family store. Emmett’s cousin Wheeler Parker Jr. said he whistled at the then 21-year-old woman. Donham said she was terrified and reported the incident to her husband.

Her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, Joe William Milam, kidnapped, beat, tortured, and tied Emmett to a cotton gin fan with barbed wire before throwing him in a river. The couple – who were assisted in the crime by other men who were never charged – were arrested and charged and then acquitted by an all-white jury, but they later admitted to the crime in a magazine interview.

After the teen’s body was discovered in 1955, authorities issued a warrant for Donham’s arrest for her role in Emmett’s kidnapping. The boy’s great-uncle, Mose Wright, said he heard a voice “softer than a man’s” which Emmett identified before he was held at gunpoint in a pickup truck the night before his battered body was washed up in the river was transported away. His injuries were so severe that Wright could only identify him by a ring he wore.

Emmett’s mother, Mamie Bradley, allowed his disfigured body to be shown to the thousands of people who attended his funeral in Chicago. Photos from the coffin are now memorabilia of racist violence. The case became a focal point of the civil rights movement.

Many believe Donham helped her husband and brother-in-law get away with the murder by improving her memory of the incident during the trial. She then said that Emmett grabbed her hand and waist and asked on a date, but she never told authorities that version of events. Duke University professor Timothy Tyson told federal investigators Donham told him in a 2008 interview that she lied about those details on the witness stand. Federal authorities have opened and dropped two investigations into Donham. The last closure was in December.

Emmett’s family and supporters believed Donham could evade prosecution for decades because she was white and Emmett was black. They hope the warrant they discovered in a Mississippi courthouse in late June could help change that. They urge the authorities to “serve it and arrest them.”

Authorities reportedly said in 1955, “They didn’t want to ‘molest’ Donham because she was a young mother of two. There was reportedly a note on the back of the warrant stating that Donham was out of town.

The 88-year-old woman appears hunchbacked in photos released August 1. Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office said last month, “There is no new evidence to reopen the case,” even after Donham’s memoir was released to the media that same week. In it, the woman said she was trying to protect Emmett and never wanted him killed. Tyson reportedly received the document from Donham in 2008.

According to recent reports, local prosecutors have not responded to the Till family attorney’s calls for action.