Alabama Man Pleads Guilty to Federal Murder-for-Hire Charge for Attempting to Hire Ku Klux Klan to Kill Neighbor
| U.S. Department of Justice October 24, 2013 |
WASHINGTON—A Talladega County, Alabama man pleaded guilty today in federal court to attempting to hire a member of the Ku Klux Klan to murder an African-American neighbor, the Justice Department announced today.
Allen Wayne Densen Morgan, 29, of Munford, Alabama, entered a guilty plea before U.S. District Judge Karon O. Bowdre to one count of using and causing someone else to use interstate facilities and travel—a telephone and a motor vehicle—with the intent to commit a murder-for-hire. Morgan’s sentencing is scheduled February 27, 2014, and he faces a statutory maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
Federal officials arrested Morgan in August of 2013 after he told FBI agents posing as members of the KKK that he would pay them to murder his neighbor. Morgan admitted he offered a watch, a necklace, and a gun as payment for the murder and gave explicit details for the man’s torture and murder.
Morgan’s efforts to arrange the paid murder of his neighbor unfolded as follows, according to his plea:
Morgan talked to an undercover FBI agent by telephone on August 22, 2013, who identified himself as a KKK member. The men arranged to meet three days later at an Oxford motel to discuss payment for the murder. In that phone conversation, Morgan used a racial slur to describe the man he wanted killed and bragged that he had just fired several shots toward the man to intimidate him. Morgan also described, in detail, how he wanted the man to be “hung from a tree like a deer and gutted,” to have body parts cut off, and to “die a slow, painful death.”
“The defendant attempted to arrange the brutal murder of his neighbor as vengeance for a perceived wrong,” said Jocelyn Samuels, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. “The Justice Department will prosecute with vigor those who seek violent vigilantism.”
“This defendant’s effort to solicit a murder-for-hire is a federal crime,” Joyce White Vance, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama said. “The prosecution here was swift and the punishment will be in a federal penitentiary. Future wrongdoers are on notice that we vigorously prosecute these crimes."
The FBI investigated the case. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Pat Meadows and John B. Felton of the Northern District of Alabama and Civil Rights Division Trial Attorney David Reese are prosecuting the case.