Attorney General Charlie Crist said Tuesday that he wouldn’t use footage of Evangeline Moore in his TV commercials for governor, even though the daughter of slain civil-rights leader Harry T. Moore had granted him permission to do so.
The 76-year-old Maryland woman was videotaped three weeks ago reading a personal note thanking Crist for his efforts investigating who killed her parents on Christmas night 1951.
But questions about whether Crist’s probe of the famous mystery turned up anything new have dogged the Republican’s gubernatorial campaign against Democrat Jim Davis for weeks. And indications that he was planning to use Moore in a commercial had only heightened the controversy.
Asked if he would use the images of Evangeline Moore, Crist said: “I don’t think so. . . . Too many people are trying to politicize it, and I don’t want to do that to her. She’s a wonderful person.”
Crist has made his civil-rights record a key part of his campaign. In August, he announced that he had found the main culprits in the Mims bombing — four now-dead Ku Klux Klansmen whose names had come up in three previous probes.
At the time, Evangeline Moore praised him profusely.
But weeks later, she said she found herself caught “in the middle” when historian Ben Green, who researched the case for seven years and wrote a book about it, criticized the attorney general’s 21-month investigation as nothing new.
Central Florida Crimeline also decided last month not to issue the $25,000 reward offered in the bombings, saying a retired law officer credited in the Crist report with cracking the case had not uncovered anything new.
The group, whose funding is overseen by the attorney general, recommended it be given to the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Cultural Complex in Mims .
But Crist defended the probe by his civil-rights office.
“Our investigators did great work,” he said Tuesday. “It took a lot of man-hours and a lot of investigative time. I’m proud of their work.”
He also said he thought the reward should have gone to the tipster and has not decided what to do with the reward money.
As the controversy swelled, Evangeline Moore told friends last month that she had not realized the footage shot by Crist’s staff would be used in a commercial and was not endorsing Crist’s campaign. She also stopped talking to reporters and referred all questions to her son, Skip Pagan, 53, also of Maryland.
Pagan said Tuesday that Crist had contacted his mother personally and that she had decided to let him use the video.
“He called and said, ‘If this is too taxing and if you decide you don’t want this to air, then I’ll understand,’ ” Pagan said. However, Pagan also stressed that his mother still was not endorsing Crist’s campaign.
“But she’s not looking at the political climate in the state of Florida. She just wanted to express her appreciation for what he did. She has been looking for over 50 years for somebody — anybody — to help her bring closure to such a major tragedy in her life.”
Evangeline Moore, who has not read Crist’s 370-page report, has said previous probes by the FBI, the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement were half-hearted.
Pagan said he was surprised to learn that Crist had decided not to use his mother in a TV spot after all.
“I think his decision speaks volumes about his character. My mother genuinely thinks he is a good person.”
Green, however, was not impressed.
“They faked the conclusion of the investigation, manipulated Evangeline and her family to do a campaign ad, and did it all to win the black vote,” he said.
“The honorable thing would have been not to put her in the middle of a governor’s race in the first place.”
