The Plot to Kill King

by William F. Pepper

  In their testimonies, Dexter King and Andy Young said that the defendant Jowers had made it clear that the murder weapon was not the rifle in evidence, but the one he took from the shooter. Jowers also told them that he had tried to flush the spent shell down his toilet, but it stopped the toilet up, and he had to remove it.

  We realized that we had demonstrated through clear and convincing evidence that the rifle purchased by James, as instructed, was not the murder weapon.

  The Broader Conspiracy

  We next turned to present the evidence that the conspiracy to kill Martin Luther King Jr. extended well beyond Memphis, Tennessee, and, in fact, reached into the echelons of power in the nation’s capital.

  Former Memphis Police Department intelligence officer Jim Smith took the stand under subpoena. His testimony at the television trial had resulted in him losing his security clearance, being put under surveillance, and, eventually, being in fear for his life, leaving Memphis, only to find that the FBI had permanently blocked him from ever again obtaining a position in law enforcement. Now, six years later, he returned to Memphis, having been transferred there in another line of work. He was uneasy and not willing to testify unless subpoenaed. We served him. He basically restated his earlier testimony that on March 18, 1968, he was assigned to assist a two-man surveillance team parked in a van in the area of the Rivermont Hotel. The van contained audio surveillance equipment and two agents—he did not know which federal agency they were from. I had earlier concluded that they were Army Security Agency (ASA) operatives and that they listened in on conversations and activities in the suite occupied by Dr. King. He did not, himself directly, participate in any of the surveillance, but he observed it and understood what was going on. Back in 1992, I had been able to obtain a detailed description of the location of the microphone placements in the suite. It was so extensive that even if Dr. King went onto the balcony, his conversation would be heard on the tape recorders in the van below. In addition to the covert (non-eye-to-eye) surveillance activities of the ASA agents, the court heard testimony from defense witness Eli Arkin, the MPD intelligence officer, that the 111th MIG was on the scene conducting its own surveillance activities. He said that some of them were based in his office.

  Military historian Doug Valentine (whose book The Phoenix Program mentioned a rumor that photographs of the assassination were taken by army photographers) took the stand to testify about the military affiliation of the man who provided the Memphis police with the false assassination threat against Detective Redditt, justifying his removal from the surveillance detail at the rear of the fire station. Valentine said that when he interviewed the individual, Phillip Manual (who had been in Memphis on April 3 and 4, ostensibly pursuant to his position as a staff member of the McClellan Committee), he learned that Manual previously—and perhaps then as well—worked with the 902nd MIG. I had gradually come to believe that this little-known unit coordinated the federal agency task force activity in Memphis and also liaised with the non-military side of the operation.

  Carthel Weeden, the former Fire Department captain in charge of Fire Station No. 2, testified in detail about how in the morning of April 4, he was approached by two men in civilian clothes who showed him army credentials and asked to be taken up to the roof of the fire station where they would be in a position to photograph people and activity in the area—though Carthel was not certain exactly how he led them up to the roof (it must have been up the outside iron ladder that at the time was attached to the north side of the building near the side door and the fire hose tower). He said that he observed them taking photographic equipment out of their bag. Carthel testified that he did not notice them again during that day and he just assumed that they completed their various tasks. Carthel also testified that he had never been interviewed by any local, state, or federal law enforcement official. The reason for this is obvious. Had he been interviewed, it is quite likely that the investigators would have become aware of the soldiers on the roof. They would then have had the obligation to locate them and the photographs they took. This, of course, would be the path that any serious investigation would have to take. It would be anathema to those efforts which were only set up to conceal the truth. The actual assassin was caught on film, however, lowering the rifle right after the fatal shot.

  In his testimony, Professor Clay Carson read into the record portions of documents which I had provided to the King Papers Project, which he directs, at Stanford University. One of the documents was a report from Steve Tompkins after a meeting at the Hyatt Hotel in Chicago with one of the photographers. Among other details was the photographer’s confirmation that the assassin was caught on film and that it was not James Earl Ray.

  Professor Carson also read the responses to questions I had asked Steve Tompkins to raise with the Green Beret I had referred to as Warren. The exchange is set out in its entirety in the transcripted court record of the trial. As can be seen from Professor Carson’s testimony, a jury heard for the first time the details of the investigative process Steve Tompkins and I employed in order to reveal the presence and the role of the eight-man Alpha 184 unit in Memphis on April 4, 1968. It became abundantly clear from Professor Carson’s testimony that the team did not carry out the assassination but were in fact in position to do so. Steve had always maintained that they were only going to be ordered to shoot in the event of a riot. As mentioned earlier, that never made any sense to me, given the apparent absence of any possible riot at the time in the area of the Lorraine. However, in his testimony Invaders member Charles Cabbage acknowledged that the members of his group, who occupied two balcony rooms just south of Dr. King’s room, were armed. When ordered to leave the hotel shortly before the assassination (actually leaving within eleven minutes of the event), the Invaders might well have been expected to react violently, disrupting the surface calm of the motel. If, instead of leaving peacefully, the Invaders had reacted violently, that could have created the required circumstances and cover for any military action deemed necessary. In any event, the Invaders left peacefully; the killing was not carried out by the army snipers who were ordered to withdraw from their position promptly after the shooting and leave the city immediately.

  Covert operative Jack Terrell desperately wanted to testify in person but his liver cancer became worse and he was not allowed to travel. We had to use his video deposition taken in Orlando, Florida, on February 7, 1999. It stunned the court. After describing his previous covert activities on behalf of the government, he described his close friendship with the Twentieth SFG Green Beret JD Hill whom he came to know in Columbus, Mississippi, contradicting the Alpha team leader and Twentieth SFG Commander Cobb’s statements on ABC’s Turning Point. He said that JD told him that the Twentieth would train for two weeks every summer at Shelby and that he would return in excellent physical condition. He said that on one such occasion in 1975, JD seemed to want to unburden himself. It was then that he began to spell out the details of a mission for which he had trained that was to be carried out in Memphis. He said that his unit had trained for a considerable period of time to carry out the assassination of a target or targets who were to be in a moving automobile. He said that snipers were placed high above and a considerable distance away from the target vehicle. They were not told who was the target but suspected it might have been an Arab.

  Jack said JD told him that on April 4, 1968, he and his unit set out for Memphis, still not aware of who the target was to be. In my first session with Jack in 1994, he had indicated that JD told him that the team was already in Memphis and had been in position on three occasions—similar to Warren’s version—when they were told to withdraw. The discrepancy arose between his 1999 deposition and the statement he originally gave to me in 1994. There may, in fact, be no discrepancy at all. In his earlier account it was clear that the unit was staying somewhere in the area but outside of Memphis. They would travel to town and take up their positions—water tower, building roof, and window—and then leave at th
e end of the day. It may be that when he testified, they were en route to Memphis; when they were told to withdraw, he was referring to the last trip in on April 4. When he heard about the assassination, JD told Jack, his initial reaction was that another team was also involved and his unit did not get the call. What is incontrovertible, however, is that JD Hill was a member of a unit that trained to carry out an assassination on American soil and that the event was to take place in Memphis, Tennessee, on or around April 4, 1968.

  When, shortly afterward, JD learned that Dr. King had been assassinated on the day of their mission, he realized that this was his unit’s mission. Terrell then described the suspicious circumstances of JD’s death in 1979 where his wife was alleged—though not indicted—to have put a neat semicircle of .357 magnum bullets in his chest after he returned home late at night. As noted earlier, Terrell said it was impossible for JD’s wife, who weighed about ninety pounds, to have handled the .357 magnum with such precision.

  The Cover-Up

  A large number of witnesses testified to the extensive range of activities that caused the truth in this case to remain hidden and justice denied for nearly thirty-two years. Incredibly, the chronicle of events and actions included murder, solicitation of murder, attempted bribery, suppression of evidence, alteration of the crime scene, and the control, manipulation, and use of the media for propaganda purposes.

  Former taxi driver and security officer Louie Ward testified, as noted earlier, about what he learned from the observation of Yellow Cab taxi driver “Buddy” who, when picking up a passenger at the Lorraine at the time of the shooting, saw a man come down over the wall, run north on Mulberry Street, get into a Memphis Police Department traffic car and be driven away. Louie Ward testified that he heard this account directly from Buddy, who was driving car number 58 on that day. He said that Buddy told him this story just before two police officers arrived and were told the same thing. Later that evening Ward said he saw a number of MPD cars parked at the Yellow Cab officers. He was certain that they were taking a statement from Buddy.

  Since he was only a part-time driver, Ward said he did not return to work as a driver for about two weeks. When he did, he asked where Buddy was. He said he was told that he was dead, having been thrown from a car on Route 55 on the other side of the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge on the night that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

  Ward testified that he watched the newspaper for an obituary or death notice, but did not see any. Massachusetts attorney Raymond Kohlman testified that he had inquired about death records in Memphis and the neighboring states and found that there was no record of Buddy’s death.

  Though we were never able to locate with certainty the dispatcher on duty that night, one person who Ward believed also knew what happened and who may have been the dispatcher on duty the evening of April 4, refused to discuss the matter. This same person apparently came into a substantial amount of money after the event and bought a very expensive house, which would have certainly been beyond both his means as a taxi driver or any apparent family resources.

  We had no doubt that Louie Ward was telling the truth. He had no reason to come forward at this point in time and lie. He never asked for anything, and our team concurred unanimously that he was one of the most credible witnesses we put before the jury.

  The effectiveness of the cover-up of this side of the murder event, however, was staggering. There was no police report or statement taken from the driver, in any file, and no death record or report existed. No driver alive, except Louie Ward, remembered or was willing to talk about the incident, although Hamilton Smythe IV, the present manager of the Yellow Cab company, did acknowledge to Nathan Whitlock that he heard about such an event, but then quickly said only his father could comment. The father, Ham Smythe III, as noted earlier, stated that he did not believe it ever happened.

  Maynard Stiles, in 1968, was a senior administrator of the Memphis Department of Public Works. In 1999, he had been retired for a number of years living outside of the city, but he readily agreed to testify about what he did early on the morning of April 5, 1968.

  The day after the assassination, Maynard Stiles’s day began at 7:00 a.m. when his phone rang. He said MPD Inspector Sam Evans was on the other end, and he had an urgent request. He asked Stiles to send a team to completely clean up the area behind the rooming house on South Main Street. The team would work under police supervision, but the basic job was to cut the thick brush and bushes to the ground and rake them into piles so they could be carted away. Stiles hung up and called Dutch Goodman, who he instructed to pull a team together. Willie Crawford was recruited along with some others who began working that morning.

  Stiles said that he checked on the progress in late morning, and he recalls that the job was so extensive that it took his men more than one day to complete.

  As far as he was concerned, he was cooperating with the police. It was not his job to question the decision to clean up the area. For all he knew they were looking for evidence. In fact, a cardinal rule of criminal investigation was contravened. An area which was part of the crime scene was not only sealed off, preventing intrusion, but also a clean-up crew was brought in for the express purpose of drastically altering the entire physical setting itself so that it could never be examined, considered, and analyzed as it was at the time of the crime.

  Where potential evidence was stumbled upon or acquired, it frequently was ignored or suppressed—this was the case with the two FBI 302 statements given by William Reed and Ray Hendrix, which we put into evidence. They were the two men who left Jim’s Grill about twenty minutes or so before the killing and spent some time looking at James’s Mustang before walking north on South Main Street. Just as they reached Vance, about two blocks away, they saw the white Mustang, driven by a dark-haired man, turn the corner in front of them. These observations, in fact, corroborated James’s account of how he left the scene several minutes before the shooting in an effort to have the flat spare tire repaired. In other words, they constituted an alibi but were kept from the defense and suppressed.

  Also suppressed were critical scientific reports known to the prosecution at the time. First, that the dent in the bathroom windowsill, which the state contended had been made by the murder weapon, could not have been proved to have been made by a rifle. Second, that the death slug removed from Dr. King’s body could not be linked to or matched with the rifle in evidence, and that this alleged murder weapon had failed an accuracy test on the morning after the shooting because it had never been sighted in.

  Though this evidence was noted earlier, it is important to focus on it here in terms of the cover-up. Near the end of his tenure as James Earl Ray’s lawyer—he was replaced by Mark Lane in 1977—and during the early period of the investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Jack Kershaw testified that he was asked to attend a meeting in the offices of a Nashville publishing company. The meeting was held in a large conference room, and those present included author William Bradford Huie. He didn’t recognize any of the other persons, but he said that two of them appeared to be government types.

  He was asked to take an offer to James Earl Ray. The offer consisted of a sum of money (in this instance $50,000), parole, and an opportunity for a new life if James would finally admit that he was the killer. Kershaw said he listened, challenged Huie at one point in terms of the reason behind the offer, and the feasibility of the arrangements, but agreed to take them to his client. He said James rejected the proposal out of hand.

  James’s brother Jerry took the stand to testify how, sometime later, he was personally contacted by author Huie, who made the same offer except that this time the amount of the offer had increased to $220,000. James was still having none of it.

  The jury heard evidence of two other more sinister cover-up efforts to put an end to James Earl Ray’s protestations of innocence and request for a trial. Former congressman and HSCA King subcommittee chairman Walter Fauntroy testified that af
ter James Earl Ray escaped with a number of other inmates in 1976, they learned that the FBI had immediately (and uninvited) sent a SWAT team consisting of upwards of thirty snipers to the prison. Their information was that this unit was there not to help capture Ray but to kill him. Fauntroy said that at his urging HSCA Chairman Stokes called Tennessee Governor Ray Blanton and asked him to intervene in order to save their main witness and Blanton’s most famous prisoner. Blanton promptly took a helicopter to the prison and ordered the FBI out of the area, thus saving James’s life, for he was captured non-violently shortly afterward.

  April Ferguson, who later became a federal public defender, was, in 1978, Mark Lane’s assistant. She testified that their office was contacted by an inmate named Tim Kirk at the Shelby County jail. When she and an assistant went out to interview Kirk, he told them that he had been asked by Memphis mob-connected topless club owner Arthur Wayne Baldwin to put out a contract on James Earl Ray. Kirk, who had some lethal connections at the Brushy Mountain Penitentiary, could have organized the hit but he became suspicious. Baldwin did not reach him that first time, and he had to return the call. When he did call back, he realized that the number was to a suite of rooms in a hotel near the Memphis airport, where rooms were kept by the local US attorney’s office and the FBI and used to interview witnesses and for other purposes. He thought that he might have been set up, and so he decided to contact Ray’s lawyer. Another effort to silence James was aborted.

  Half a day was occupied with the testimony of attorney William Schapp, who we qualified as an expert on government use of the media for disinformation and propaganda purposes. After providing the jury with a survey of these practices by governments throughout history in a detailed question and answer exchange, Schapp introduced the court to these practices of the United States government in other cases, or issues, where intelligence and/or national security interest were believed to be involved. A number of examples were cited. One, for example, involved a CIA propaganda story that was spread all over the world and widely believed for four years regarding Cuban troops fighting in Angola: