Edgar Ray Killen, the 1960s Ku Klux Klan leader who was convicted over the infamous deaths of three civil rights workers in Mississippi, has died.
The 92-year-old was serving a 60-year sentence, after being jailed in 2005, four decades after the 1964 murders.
Their disappearance and deaths shocked the country and helped catalyse the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
The triple killing was also the basis for the 1988 Oscar-winning film Mississippi Burning.
The movie is a fictionalised take on the events named after the FBI investigation into the case.
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, all in their 20s, were members of the Congress of Racial Equality (Core) and had been working on the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign to register black voters in the southern state.
The men were detained by police, before being ambushed and shot by Klansmen who were tipped-off about their release.