PHILADELPHIA, Miss. – Olen Burrage, who was acquitted in the case of three civil rights workers killed by Ku Klux Klansmen in Mississippi in the 1960s, has died. He was 82.

Burrage died Friday at a hospital, the McClain-Hays Funeral Home Chapel said. The funeral home did not release a cause of death.

Burrage owned land in Neshoba County in central Mississippi where the three civil rights workers were buried under an earthen dam after KKK members killed them in 1964. He said he knew nothing about the killings and was acquitted of conspiracy in 1967.

The FBI called its investigation “Mississippi Burning” – which was later used as the title for a 1988 film loosely based on the case.

Among the others charged with conspiracy in 1967, seven were convicted. None served more than six years in prison. The jury deadlocked on charges against a local minister, Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen.

Ex-FBI official under Hoover dies

Cartha D. “Deke” DeLoach, who was the third-ranking official at the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover and briefed the president on the bureau’s activities in the late 1960s, died Thursday at a hospital in Hilton Head Island, S.C. He was 92.

His son Tom DeLoach confirmed the death but did not disclose a cause.

DeLoach spent 28 years at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and was the last surviving member of Hoover’s inner circle. He was, in many ways, the classic agent – a former college football player, a keeper of secrets and a Hoover loyalist to the end.

As assistant to the director, DeLoach led high-profile crime investigations, including the manhunt that led to the capture of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin.