Two days before his execution, a former Ku Klux Klansman broke down and allegedly confessed to the lynching of a black teenager, a crime he had denied for 16 years.
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The Rev. Bob Smith mentioned the confession at Henry Francis Hays' funeral on Saturday, shocking friends and relatives. Hays, 42, was executed in Alabama's electric chair early Friday for the 1981 slaying."He told me he was guilty," the Rev. Bob Smith said in an interview that appeared in Sunday editions of The Mobile Register. "He said, `You're the only one who knows this.' "