Just months after Emmett Till's murder, Look magazine published "The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi," in which Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam confessed to the crime.
Journalist William Bradford Huie recalled the interview:
The confession in Look
Open the pages of the January 1956 Look magazine to read the killers' confession.
Just months after Emmett Till's murder, Look magazine published "The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi," in which Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam confessed to the crime.![I met Milam and Bryant.We had this strange situation. We're meeting in the library of this law firm. Milam and Bryant are sitting on one side of the table, [lawyer] John Whitten and I sitting on the other side. I'm not doing the questioning. Their own lawyer is doing the questioning. And he's never heard their story. Not once. He becomes as interested in the story as I am. I said, ''Now I'm going to take notes and then during the day I'm going to do two things. I'm going to be roughing out this story, and I'm also going where you say you went, and I'm going to find evidence.'' Milam did most of the talking. Now remember, he's older. Milam was then thirty-five or thirty-six. He was a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army reserve at that time. And so Milam was a bit more articulate than Bryant was. Bryant did some talking, particularly when they talked about what they were told had happened in the store. But J. W. Milam did the killing. He fired the shot when they took Till down on the river and killed him.](images/sf_look_intro_quote.gif)
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