The encounter between African-American teenager Emmett Till and white saleswoman Carolyn Bryant Donham in southern Mississippi will always remain a mystery.

Nearly 67 years after the chance meeting at a grocery store that ended in Till's lynching and fueled the American civil rights movement, a grand jury has once again declined to try Bryant Donham.

The Leflore County Attorney's Office said this week there was insufficient evidence against the now 87-year-old girl.

As early as 2007, a grand jury refrained from holding Bryant Donham responsible for Till's death.

The body of the fourteen-year-old, who had come to Mississippi from Chicago to visit relatives in August 1955, was found in the Tallahatchie River a few days after meeting the then twenty-one-year-old—naked, mutilated, with a shot in the head and an eyeball ripped out.

The young woman's husband, Roy Bryant, and her brother-in-law, John William Milam, admitted a year later to lynching Till.

At a murder trial in segregated Mississippi, an all-white jury had acquitted the white perpetrators a few months earlier.

There has been much speculation over the past few decades about Bryant Donham's role in one of the worst lynchings in American history.

Investigators like Dale Killinger, a former federal police officer (FBI), accuse her of contradicting statements, inconsistencies and possible complicity.

After the body was found, Bryant Donham told police that Till remained silent when her husband and brother-in-law took him to their home to be identified.

In Bryant Donham's memoirs, which were published on the Internet a few weeks ago under mysterious circumstances, she writes that she tried to protect the teenager at the time.

Till herself admitted to her husband and brother-in-law that he was an African American,

whom she had met a few days earlier at Bryant's Grocery & Meat Market, the family's store in the small town of Money.

As Bryant Donham writes in her memoirs, Till groped her and suggested sex.

The 14-year-old allegedly boasted that he had repeatedly slept with "white girls".

On the other hand, several witnesses testified after the encounter that Till and Bryant Donham had only exchanged words.

When Till left the grocery store, he is said to have whistled at her.

The "wolf whistle," as Bryant Donham calls the whistle in her memoir, was already too much under Jim Crow segregation laws.

"Roy never told me exactly what happened when they left with Emmett," the 87-year-old wrote of her late husband.

"But I read the FBI report.

It was awful.”

The organization Equal Justice Initiative registered about 4,000 lynchings up until the 1950s, most of them in southern states such as Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama.

At the end of March, American President Joe Biden finally signed a bill named after Emmett Till that declared lynching a hate crime – almost 67 years after the young African American's death.