Bowers

HATTIESBURG, Mississippi (CNN) -- A former FBI informant who has admitted participating in the 1966 murder of civil rights worker Vernon Dahmer testified Wednesday that former Ku Klux Klan leader Sam Bowers ordered the slaying.

And in a dramatic twist, Billy Roy Pitts also said that Bowers' attorney, Travis Buckley, attended meetings where the attack was planned.

Buckley immediately asked for a mistrial. Judge Richard McKenzie denied the motion but instructed the jury to disregard the testimony about Buckley.

Bowers, now 73, is on trial in Hattiesburg for the 32-year-old slaying of Dahmer, who died from injuries he suffered after his house was firebombed in January 1966.

Pitts, a former Klansman and FBI informant, testified that at a meeting in December 1965, Bowers, the imperial wizard of the White Knights of the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan, ordered Dahmer killed, shortly before Bowers was to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

"He wanted to show people in Washington that people down South meant business," Pitts said.

At the time, Dahmer, a businessman and local NAACP official, had been leading an effort to register black voters.

Bowers was tried in Dahmer's killing four times in the 1960s, and all four times, juries deadlocked. Four others who participated in the slaying were convicted, with Pitts the key witness against them.

Pitts was also convicted of murder and arson in state court and of federal civil rights charges. Although he served his federal sentence, he was never returned to Mississippi jails to serve the life sentence he received for the murder conviction.

When the Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson revealed that lapse in January, Pitts surrendered and is now serving the sentence.

As cross-examination began, defense attorneys assaulted Pitts' credibility, alleging that he received substantial amounts of money from the federal government back in the 1960s after he agreed to testify.

Pitts testified that on January 10, 1966, he was a lookout for the Klansmen who tossed bottles of burning gasoline into Dahmer's home and business.

"When I was leaning on the brick wall, I heard a man's voice that sounded like someone in distress," Pitts said. "This has followed me even to this day. I wasn't raised to do the things I did."

Earlier, during dramatic testimony, members of Dahmer's family testified that Dahmer braved flames so intense that the skin burned from his arms as he helped his wife and children escape the fire.

He died later in his wife's arms, his lungs seared by the flames.