Body identified as Emmett Till

SUMNER, Miss., Aug. 26 (UPI) -- A body exhumed from an Illinois cemetery has reportedly been identified as Emmett Till, the teenage boy killed by racists in 1955.

The Jackson Clarion-Ledger in Mississippi reports DNA tests confirmed the identity. That was crucial to any further prosecutions because two men who later admitted killing Till said at their trial that a body pulled from the Tallahatchie River was not Till's.

J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, who were acquitted of murder in 1956, are both dead. The most likely defendants if the case is reopened are Bryant's ex-wife, Carolyn Donham and Henry Lee Loggins, an 82-year-old black former plantation worker now living in an Ohio nursing home.

A witness at the trial of Bryant and Milam described seeing four white men and three black men together in a truck the night Till was grabbed from a relative's home.

Till, who lived with his mother in Chicago, was spending the summer in Mississippi. Bryant told a reporter for Look magazine that he killed the 14-year-old because a neighbor told him Till had wolf-whistled at Carolyn Donham.