JASPER, Texas -- It was 10 years ago that word came out of Jasper, Texas, about a crime too horrible to imagine.

Three white men had used a pick-up truck to drag a black man to his death.

In Jasper today, no one can forget what happened here a decade ago, try as they might.

AP

Betty Byrd Boatner pauses at the gravesite of her brother in Jasper. James Byrd Jr. was chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to death down a country road 10 years ago in the early morning hours of June 7, 1998.

“The entire community would give anything if it’d just go away,” former Jasper County Sheriff Billy Rowles said.

Early one morning in June, the sheriff went to investigate what he first thought was a gruesome hit-and-run.

But the blood trail from the body wasn’t a few feet long — it went on for more than three miles.

The victim, a local man named James Byrd, had been chained to a pick-up by his ankles and dragged to death.

“Like somebody on an inner tube behind boat,” Sheriff Rowles said. “Just bouncing.”

Police marked where they found his dentures here, his head there.

By late that same afternoon, police had arrested three men, all of them white: John King, Lawrence Brewer and Shawn Berry.

What happened on that country road outside of Jasper shocked the nation. It was the kind of racist violence that Americans like to think is far behind him, something you read about in history books, not on the front pages.

All three men had roomed together in Jasper. Berry was the supposedly likable manger of a local movie theater.

Blacks even testified he wasn’t known to be a racist.

But the other two?

They were burglars who’d gotten out of state prison just months earlier.

Notes and letters confiscated from them while in prison read:  “Aryans rule” and “white pride.” And they also said to flat-out kill black people.

“Yeah, yeah — ‘death to all, ’the N-word,” Lamar University professor Stuart Wright said.

Wright is a professor who’s an expert on hate groups and reviewed these letters and notes for the defense.

He has a theory to help explain how two small-time crooks came to be accused of one of the most vicious hate crimes in modern American history.

“I have a theory, and it won’t be a popular theory: that prisons are places, cultures of violence,” he said. “And I think prison culture breeds violence.”

He believes not enough is being done to fight racist prison gangs or deal with inmates like King and Brewer once released.

But on the night of the murder, they may not have started out looking for violence. The sheriff says, they were looking for women.

“I think they were drunk,” Rowles said. “They were supposed to go to a party and meet three girls up in Rayburn.”

But he said the trio never did because they got lost.

So maybe they weren’t just drunk, but frustrated and looking for someone on which to vent.

“And they started back to town, and James Byrd just happened to be staggering down the road,” Rowles said. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

11 News thought we’d have the chance to ask one of the three if that’s how it happened.

Earlier this week, Brewer agreed to talk from death row. But on the day we were to sit down with him, he canceled.

King is also on death row, and Berry continues serving a life sentence.

And back in Jasper, some black residents say white racists continue to be a threat.

Others say no more so here than anywhere else.

And Rowles, now retired, is traveling the nation, talking to police groups about what happened here 10 years ago.

He tells them it gives him a recurring nightmare. In it, he sees three wolves tearing apart their prey.