Bowers is sentenced Friday to life imprisonment

HATTIESBURG, Mississippi (CNN) -- Former Ku Klux Klan Wizard Sam Bowers was found guilty of murder on Friday and automatically sentenced to life in prison for the firebomb killing of a civil rights activist 32 years ago.

The jury deliberated just over two hours before convicting Bowers, now 73, of arson and murder for masterminding the firebomb attack that killed Vernon Dahmer.

"Take him away," Circuit Judge Richard McKenzie ordered after the verdict, which carried an automatic life term, was read. Authorities said Bowers would be moved immediately to the state penitentiary in Parchman.

There was no word from defense attorneys as to whether Bowers plans to appeal. He made no comment as he was taken from the Forrest County Courthouse.

Bowers had been brought to trial four previous times in the killing, and each time all-white juries were unable to agree on a verdict. The jury this time was made up of six whites, five African-Americans and an Asian-American.

A newspaper headline tells the story of the 1966 firebombing

Dahmer, his lungs seared by flames, died in his wife's arms hours after two carloads of Klansmen shot up and bombed their home. Prosecutors say Dahmer, an NAACP official, was killed for helping fellow blacks register to vote by letting them pay their poll tax at his grocery store.

On Friday, his widow Ellie and other family members hugged after the verdict was read.

"These tears that I am shedding, I am shedding for Vernon, because I know he is looking at us today," she said. "This is a happy moment for us all."

Forrest County District Attorney Lindsay Carter said Bowers expected the conviction.

"Before the jury come out, he started emptying his pockets, took off his watch in anticipation of what was going to happen," Carter said. "I think he knew what was coming."

The Dahmer home after the 1966 bombing

In closing arguments Thursday, prosecutor Bob Hilfrich said that although the firebombing that killed Dahmer happened in 1966, "justice delayed is not justice denied."

Bowers' defense attorney Travis Buckley said Bowers was the victim of aspiring politicians and aggressive news media, which pursued the case through repeated trials.

"That's not justice, that's persecution," Buckley said.

Prosecution witnesses said Bowers ordered the firebombing and then bragged about it.

"Look at what my boys did to that Dahmer nigger for me," former Klansman and one-time FBI informant Robert Earl Wilson quoted Bowers as saying while holding up a newspaper account of the attack.

Cathy Lucy, a KKK leader's widow and a surprise witness, testified she was present when Bowers made the comment. She described him as "smiling and jubilant."

Nix claims that he joined the Klan thinking it was a benevolent group that gave fruit baskets to the needy

Klansman Deavours Nix's testimony Thursday was at the core of Bowers' defense. Sitting in a wheelchair and hooked to an oxygen tank, Nix denied that Bowers ordered the death of the black store owner.

"I never heard a racial slur or a threat come from him," said Nix. "Sam was a gentleman at all times."

State and Forrest County prosecutors plan to retry Nix and Charles Noble in the Dahmer case. Noble is charged with arson and murder, Nix with arson.

Bowers has served jail time, but not in the Dahmer killing. He went to prison for six years for one of the slayings of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County in 1964.