He was one of two men successfully prosecuted by Doug Jones.
Thomas E. Blanton, 82, died of natural causes Friday morning at William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility in Jefferson County. He was found at 5 a.m. having cardiac issues, taken to the infirmary at Donaldson. He went into full arrest and was pronounced dead at 6:10 a.m., according to Jefferson County Chief Deputy Coroner Bill Yates.
Blanton was one of three Klansmen eventually convicted in the Sept. 15, 1963 10:15 a.m. blast that killed 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Cythnia Wesley and Carole Robertson. The girls were killed as they changed into their choir robes. Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry both were arrested in 2000 on murder charges, nearly four decades after the deadly Birmingham bombing.
Cherry and Blanton were two of the four longtime suspects in the bombing. The initial investigation in the 1960s yielded no charges. Then, a decade later, Attorney General Bill Baxley conducted a second investigation which led to the conviction of Robert Chambliss, who died in prison in 1985. A fourth suspect, Herman Cash, died in 1994.
U.S. Senator Doug Jones – then a federal prosecutor – was appointed a special prosecutor in the state case. At Blanton’s trial in 2001, the biggest pieces of evidence against him were secretly recorded FBI tapes from the 1960s in which he told his then-wife that he had been at a meeting where “we planned the bomb.”