The Plot to Kill King

by William F. Pepper

  Cohen stated:

  A. I mentioned the terrible occurrence. He said in response, if they had listened to me this wouldn’t have happened. And he went on to explain that the previous night, he got a call from a member of Dr. King’s group in Atlanta who wanted him to change the location of the room where Dr. King would be staying. And he was adamantly against that because he had provided security by the inner court for Dr. King, Dr. King’s room.

  Q. Where did he want Dr. King to stay in his motel?

  A. There was an inner court behind the office which had very good security. In other words, it was not exposed to public view. Per se.

  Q. Right. Do you know if that would have been Room 201?

  A. Pardon?

  Q. Do you recall the number of that room?

  A. No, I don’t.

  Q. But it was in an inner court area?

  A. Yes, Sir.

  Q. And, instead, where did Mr. Bailey say he was being instructed to move Dr. King?

  A. The room—I don’t recall the room number, but the room which Dr. King had occupied that night, that’s the room that they wanted him to occupy.

  Q. A balcony room?

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. For the record, that was Room 306, that balcony room. So Bailey said he was instructed to move Martin King from room—well, you didn’t know the number, but from a courtyard room to a balcony room?

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. Did he say he opposed that?

  A. He adamantly opposed it.

  Q. Did he say who in Dr. King’s organization wanted him placed in that exposed balcony room?

  A. He just mentioned that a member of Dr. King’s group had told him, advised him, he wanted the room changed. He said he knew the person, but I did not question him as to who it was or his name or pedigree or whatever.

  Q. Did he indicate, when he spoke to you, if you can reflect very carefully, Mr. Cohen, did he use the pronoun “he” or “she”?

  A. He used the pronoun “he.”

  Q. So some male member of Dr. King’s Atlanta office instructed the room change?

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. Once again, when did he receive that instruction?

  A. He said the previous night that Dr. King was supposed to stay there.

  Q. Prior to the arrival?

  A. Yes sir.

  (Op. cit. trial proceeding transcript, 266–268)

  At the time of the trial, taxi driver James Milner had known Loyd Jowers for over twenty-five years. He testified that, in fact, in the early- to mid-1970s, Jowers had basically told him the same story that he revealed in 1993 about how he became involved with the assassination, how it was planned and carried out, and that the deceased Lieutenant Earl Clark was likely to have pulled the trigger. Jowers’s ambivalence about the shooter’s identity was consistent. He definitely pointed in Clark’s direction but never positively. Clark was dead. If someone else had been the shooter and was still alive, this could explain Jowers’s conduct. But, if not Clark, who? Who, I agonized, could Jowers be protecting? At one point I remembered that he had said there was a fifth MPD officer at the planning sessions in Jim’s Grill, but Jowers said he did not know him. Possible? Of course, but not likely that he would not have been introduced to him as he had been to the other stranger, Marrell McCollough. Could this fifth officer have played an ultimately more sinister role? Was he the shooter?

  Another driver—J. J. Isabel—testified that on the occasion of St Patrick’s Day 1979 or 1980, he and Jowers drove two chartered buses to Cleveland, taking a Memphis group to a bowling tournament. They shared a hotel room, and after a meal and some drinking on the first evening, when they returned to their room, Isabel said he asked Jowers, “Loyd, did you drop the hammer on Martin Luther King?”

  He said that Jowers hesitated for a moment or two and then replied, “You may think that you know what I did, but I know what I did, but I will never tell it in court.”

  The value of Milner’s and Isabel’s separate testimony is, of course, that like Whitlock, Addison and McFerren, they provide corroboration at least of a local conspiracy, as well as aspects of Jowers’s story, long before his involvement become an issue.

  One of Jowers’s former waitresses, Bobbi Balfour (née Smith), testified that on the day of the killing, Jowers told her not to carry food up to a tenant in the rooming house, Grace Walden Stephens, who was ill. She said that it had been her regular practice with Loyd’s approval to bring food up to Charlie Stephens’s common-law wife during her illness, but on that day, Loyd explicitly told her to stay away from the second floor.

  Finally, Olivia Catling, who lived (and in 2002 still lived) on Mulberry Street, midway between Huling and Vance about 200 yards from the Lorraine, testified that she was at home preparing dinner for her family when she heard the shot. She knew that Dr. King was staying at the Lorraine Motel, and she feared the worst. As quickly as she could, she collected her young children and ran out of her house down Mulberry Street toward the Lorraine. By the time she reached the northwest corner of Huling and Mulberry, the police had already barricaded Mulberry Street with a police car, so she and the children had to stand on the corner. She testified that shortly after she arrived on the corner, she saw a white man running from an alley, halfway up Huling, which ran to a building connected to the rooming house. He arrived at a car parked on the south side of Huling and facing east, got in, and drove quickly away, turning left onto Mulberry and going right past her as well as the MPD officers opposite her who were manning the barricade. She was surprised that the police paid no attention to him and did not try to prevent him from leaving the area.

  She testified that shortly afterward, she saw a fireman—who she believed must have walked down from the fire station—standing near the wall below the bushes, yelling at the police on the street that the shot came from a clump of bushes apparently just above the area where he was standing. She said that the police ignored him.

  Olivia Catling testified that she had never been interviewed by any law enforcement officials. She said that there was no house-to-house investigation. Though she has lived close to the scene of the crime for thirty-two years since the assassination, no one had knocked on her door until I did in November of 1999. She was relieved to finally get it off her chest. She said that she had been so burdened all of these years because she knew that an innocent man was in prison. By the time I met her, James had died, but at least this wiry, clear, and tough-minded Memphian could take satisfaction that at last her story would be heard.

  Memphis Police Department homicide detective Captain Tommy Smith (retired) testified that very soon after the assassination, he interviewed rooming house tenant Charles Quitman Stephens, the state’s chief witness against James Earl Ray, and found him intoxicated and hardly able to stand up. It must be remembered that it was on the strength of his statement that James was extradited from England. In fact, Captain Smith said Stephens was not in any condition to identify anyone.

  The state had always maintained that after firing from the bathroom window, James stopped by his room to pick up his bundle of belongings and fled carrying the rifle and the bundle, eventually exiting the front door of the rooming house, dropping the bundle in the doorway of Guy Canipe’s shop. Then, as the official story goes, James got into a white Mustang parked just slightly south of Canipe’s store and drove away. Stephens was supposed to have caught a glimpse of the profile of the fleeing man.

  Charles Hurley testified that while waiting to pick up his wife from work, he parked behind that white Mustang about an hour and a quarter before the shooting. He said that a man was sitting in it and was still there when he and his wife drove away. Most importantly, however, he again confirmed (though now under oath) that the white Mustang parked just south of Canipe’s store, in which James is supposed to have driven away, had Arkansas license plates. James’s Mustang had Alabama plates.

  We read into the record and introduced into evidence FBI 302 statements taken from two witne
sses who left Jim’s Grill about twenty minutes before the killing. Ray Hendrix and Bill Reed said that late in the afternoon on April 4, they walked north on South Main Street after having looked closely at the white Mustang parked directly in front of Jim’s Grill. The car interested them so they took particular note of it. They both confirmed, in separate statements, that as they were about to cross Vance—two blocks north of Jim’s Grill—the Mustang turned the corner directly in front of them. The male driver was alone. This would have been about 5:45 p.m. This statement was suppressed at the time and never turned over to the defense or revealed to the guilty-plea jury a year later. I found it in the bottom of a file cabinet drawer which housed investigative files in the District Attorney General’s office.

  Olivia Catling was the latest observer to give evidence about the bushes behind the rooming house being the place from where the fatal shot was fired. There was abundant current and historical eyewitness testimony, which clearly established this fact and which was introduced into evidence.

  Solomon Jones, Dr. King’s driver in Memphis, told a number of people at the scene shortly after the shooting (Wayne Chastain being one) that he saw a figure in the bushes come down over the wall. The Reverend James Orange could not appear due to a death in his family, but his sworn statement was read into the record. He said that as he turned around from a crouching position in the Lorraine parking area immediately after the shot, he saw what he thought was smoke (we have since learned that although it had the appearance of smoke, it would have been sonic dust rising from the bushes caused by the firing of the high-powered rifle in the heavily vegetated area). He said no law enforcement or investigative person had ever taken a statement from him.

  Memphis Police Department dog officer J. B. Hodges testified that he arrived on the scene within minutes after the shooting. With the aid of a metal barrel to stand on, he climbed up over the wall and entered the brush area. He described the bushes as being very thick from the edge of the wall for some distance toward the back of Jim’s Grill and the rooming house. He said he had to fight his way through the formidable thicket, but that eventually he arrived at a clearing and went to the alleyway, which ran between the two wings of the rooming house. Not too far into the alley, he said he found a pair of footprints heading in the direction of the rooming house. At the end of the alley was a door leading to the basement that ran underneath the entire building. It had rained the night before, and the ground cover was wet, but there was no growth in the alley, and the mud revealed apparently freshly made large footprints—size 13 to 13½. Hodges guarded his discovery until a cast was made. Those footprints have never been identified or explained. Eventually, I would wonder about the shoe size of the fifth MPD officer at the planning session described by Jowers.

  As a part or their testimonies related to their questioning of Loyd Jowers, Dexter King and Andrew Young separately recounted how Jowers admitted taking the rifle from the assassin whom he said had, in fact, fired from the bushes. An earlier deposition of Jowers’s former waitress/lover Betty Spates was read into the record, in which she claimed having seen him carrying a rifle, running from the bushes in through the back door of his kitchen. In this last instance, the defense raised the question of her credibility, noting that she had altered her story when questioned by official investigators. As noted elsewhere, this was true, but it was the result of their harassment. The last statement she gave to me under oath was consistent with what she originally told me in 1992.

  Former New York Times reporter Earl Caldwell could not break prior engagements in order to testify, but the defense agreed to allow a video of his testimony at the television trial on the condition that the cross-examination conducted by former US attorney Hickman Ewing was also played. We agreed, and the jury saw and heard Caldwell testify that he was sent to Memphis by the Times on April 3 with instructions from national editor Claude Sitton to “nail Dr. King.” He said he was in his ground-floor motel room when he heard the shot, which he said sounded like a bomb blast. In his shorts, he said he ran outside of his room and began to stare at the bushes, from where he instinctively thought the shot must have come. He is certain that he saw an individual crouching in the bushes which, he said, were quite thick and tall. He vividly described the person’s posture in cross-examination, coming down from the stand to demonstrate how the person was squatting and rising.

  Probably the most powerful single piece of evidence (although the cumulative weight is overwhelming) that the assassin fired from the bushes was provided by the testimony of Louie Ward, who recounted the story of a fellow driver who he always knew as “Buddy” who, when in the process of picking up a passenger at the Lorraine just before 6:00 p.m., happened to see, immediately after the shot, a man come down over the wall, run north on Mulberry Street, and get into a Memphis Police Department traffic car, which had been parked at the corner of Mulberry and Huling and then sped away. Louie Ward testified that he later learned that the taxi driver had been killed that night, allegedly having been thrown from a speeding car on Route 55 on the other side of the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge. He heard that the body was found the next morning.

  The Murder Weapon

  Independent testimony established that the rifle in evidence was not the murder weapon. Criminal Court Judge Joe Brown took the stand under subpoena to share his particular knowledge of the rifle evidence. I qualified Judge Brown as a ballistics expert for the purpose of his testimony about the weapon, and as he moved through his testimony, his expertise was never in doubt. He began by telling the jury that the scope on the rifle supposedly belonging to Ray had never been sighted, which meant that one could not fire it accurately when lining up a target through the scope. We introduced an April 5, 1968, FBI report that stated that the rifle, on the day after the killing, had failed an accuracy test—firing 3.5 inches to the left and 4 inches below the target. In addition, he said that the metallurgical composition of the death slug lead was different from the composition of the other bullets found in the evidence bundle in front of Canipe’s while the composition of each of the other bullets matched. He had no doubt the rifle in evidence (the rifle purchased by James) was not the murder weapon.

  He stated:

  Q. Let me just ask you: Moving on, based upon all this analysis and review of this rifle, the testing information, the documentation, is it your opinion that this weapon was the murder weapon that killed Martin Luther King Jr.?

  A. Well, I’ve not discussed the further ballistics tests I ordered and the result. But based on the entirely of the record and the further ballistics tests I had run on this rifle, it is my opinion this is not the murder weapon.

  (Op. cit., 731–732)

  In a startling development, Bill Hamblin, deceased taxi driver McCraw’s housemate for fifteen years, took the stand and testified that for those fifteen years, spanning the 1970s and early 1980s, McCraw had consistently told him (but only when he was intoxicated) that on the morning after the shooting (April 5) Jowers not only showed him the rifle that killed Dr. King but told him to get rid of it. McCraw said that he drove onto the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge and threw it off. In his deposition taken years earlier, McCraw had only gone so far as to say that Jowers had shown him the actual murder weapon on the morning after the killing. If we are to believe that testimony, and there is no reason for Hamblin to lie, but also that Jowers was telling the truth to McCraw, then the actual murder weapon used to kill Dr. King has been deep in the mire of the silt of Mississippi River since 1968.

  Hamblin also testified that on one occasion when he and McCraw were renting rooms in a house on Peabody owned by an FBI agent named Purdy, he told the FBI landlord that he should talk to McCraw sometime because he had information about the killing of Dr. King. Promptly after that conversation, he said, they were given their eviction notices, and during the thirty-day grace period, the MPD harassed them on a number of occasions.

  At the time of the assassination, Bill Hamblin was working in a Memphis barbershop—t
he Cherokee barbershop—and his boss was Vernon Jones. Mr. Jones just happened to have as a client, Purdy, the same FBI agent who some years later would become Hamblin’s and McCraw’s landlord. Purdy had been having his hair cut by Mr. Jones for upwards of ten years, and they had a long-standing relationship. Hamblin testified that the agent came in for a haircut within two weeks after the killing, and after he had finished, as the agent was about to leave, Hamblin’s boss pulled him aside and within earshot asked him who killed King. Hamblin said he did not hear the soft-spoken reply, but he asked his boss about the answer and was told “he said the CIA ordered it done.”

  Birmingham, Alabama, Probate Court Judge Arthur Hanes Jr., who, along with his father, was James Earl Ray’s first lawyer, testified that in his preparation for trial, which they had no doubt would result in James Earl Ray’s acquittal, he had interviewed Guy Canipe, in the doorway of whose store the bundle of evidence (including the evidence rifle) was dropped. He said that Canipe told him in no uncertain terms that the rifle was dropped about ten minutes before the shot was fired, so it obviously could not have been the murder weapon. Judge Hanes testified that Canipe was prepared to testify for the defense at the trial.

  Washington, DC attorney James Lesar, who specializes in Freedom of Information Act legal actions, testified that in one such application, he obtained an FBI report concerning tests that had been conducted on the bathroom windowsill or, more specifically, on a dent in the windowsill that they suspected might have been caused by the assassin resting or pressing the barrel against the old wooden sill. We introduced into evidence the actual report issued by the laboratory in April 1968. Though a prosecutor had alleged to the contrary before the guilty plea jury on March 10, 1969, the report stated that it would not be possible to tie the dent in the windowsill to the rifle in evidence. Thus, the Shelby County district attorney general’s office knew all along that the windowsill evidence was false.