offered a commission in the intelligence corps, but he declined, being discharged on November 30, 1953. He returned to Jackson to active Army Reserve duty and resumed his legal career. He married Carroll Waller on November 11, 1950 and had four sons and a daughter with her. One of his sons, Bill Waller Jr., later served as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi and made an unsuccessful bid for gubernatorial office in 2019. Early political career Waller was elected District Attorney of the Seventh Judicial District of Mississippi (Hinds County) in 1959 and was reelected in 1963. He was sworn in on January 2, 1960. At the time he took office, the district attorney in Hinds County was a part-time job with little expected of its incumbent. Many previous attorneys had used the office to promote their own private legal services. Waller attempted to reform the position, and provoked the ire of local law enforcement for aggressively prosecuting several cases, including a white man who had murdered a black man and a wealthy woman who had murdered her husband. Despite this, his legal practice expanded during his tenure with several new partners. He also befriended Mississippi political columnist Bill Minor. As the district attorney, Waller prosecuted Byron De La Beckwith in the murder of civil rights advocate Medgar Evers in two trials in 1964, both of which resulted in mistrials due to deadlocked juries. Waller did not approve of Evers' activism and did not view the trials as a means to denounce Jim Crow racial segregation, but saw it as an opportunity to demonstrate that laws would be upheld in the state. Most observers agreed Waller ably presented his case against Beckwith, establishing his rifle as the murder weapon and using witnesses to establish his presence in the vicinity of the killing on the night it had occurred. Though worried that it might backfire among the white jury members, Waller also attempted to establish a motive for the murder by getting Beckwith to testify to his support for white supremacy and staunch opposition to racial integration. Fears among white Mississippians that Waller was a "liberal" for trying De Le Beckwith led his firm to lose clients. Numerous observers speculated that the trials would damage his political prospects, with The New York Times writing in February 1964 that "He may have put his career on the block by his