Ex-Wife: Suspect in 1963 Church
Bombings Bragged of Involvement

AP
22-JUL-99

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) -- An ex-wife of a man suspected by police in a
1963 Alabama church bombing that killed four black girls says he told her he
was involved in the crime.

"He admitted it," Willadean Brogdon, 59, told The Birmingham News on
Wednesday. "He bragged about it."

The statement by Brogdon, who was married to Bobby Frank Cherry for two
years in the early 1970s, comes as a federal grand jury hears evidence in a
reopened investigation of the bombing. The blast tore through a church wall on a
Sunday morning and galvanized national awareness of racial tension in the South.

Several other relatives of Cherry have said the 69-year-old retired truck driver
and former Ku Klux Klansman talked of helping with the bombing. His
granddaughter recently told the grand jury he had bragged about participating.

Cherry has repeatedly denied any involvement. A woman who answered the
phone at his home in Mabank, Texas, on Wednesday night declined comment.

Klan member Robert Chambliss is the only person to be convicted in the
bombing, which killed 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and
Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair, 11, as the girls prepared for services the
morning of Sept. 15, 1963. Chambliss died in prison in 1985.

Along with Cherry, investigators long ago publicly identified Herman Cash, who
died in 1994, and Tommy Blanton, as suspects in the case. Blanton has also
denied involvement.

Cherry's oldest son, Thomas Frank Cherry, 45, told the News he supplied the
grand jury on Wednesday with names of people his father said were responsible
for the blast, but would not reveal them.