The Plot to Kill King

by William F. Pepper

  • The Alpha 184 snipers determine their target’s location and wait.

  • The Invaders meet in their rooms adjoining Dr. King’s on the second floor of the Lorraine Motel and discuss the upcoming march.

  • The Holloman-Adkins group, including Raul, the shooter, and Earl Clark, meet in room 5-B of the rooming house. James, having left his belongings and been sent away, is told by Raul to go to the movies.

  • Dr. Breen Bland, Head of Surgery at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Adkins’ family doctor, sits waiting in his office in a building adjoining the hospital.

  • MPD Community Police Officer Ed Redditt is told by Eli Arkin, Deputy Director of MPD Intelligence, that a threat has been made on his (Ed’s) life and he must leave his post at the fire station. He is taken to MPD Headquarters before being brought home, and he observes more military brass than he has ever seen. It emerges that the threat was confirmed by Philip Manual, a US Senate McClellan Committee lead investigator who was also associated with the 902nd Military Intelligence Group. Redditt is ordered home by Frank Holloman.

  • Psy-Ops photographers continue to photograph everything going on at the Lorraine Motel and its parking lot, eventually culminating in one of them filming the shooter as he lowers his rifle and turns away to leave the scene.

  • Mama Adkins drives her Chevy Nova down to Mulberry Street and parks north of the Lorraine Motel in case transportation backup is needed.

  • Ray Alvis Hendrix of the Corps of Engineers, and William Zanie Reed, a photographic supplies salesman, leave Jim’s Grill around 5:35 p.m. and examine James’s Mustang parked in front. They begin to walk north on South Main.

  • James Earl Ray returns to the rooming house at around 5:00 p.m. after getting some ice cream at the Chisca Hotel. Raul is still in the room. James notices a small radio, or walkie-talkie, in his jacket pocket. Raul suggests that James leave and go into one of the local movie theaters for the time being. James walks around and enters a bar, then remembers the flat spare tire, and walks briskly back to the car. He gets into the Mustang around 5:45 to 5:50 p.m. and drives north on South Main in an effort to get his flat spare tire fixed. As he reaches Vance Avenue, one block north of Huling, he turns right just as Hendrix and Reed are about to cross. They observe him.

  • James drives to and stops at a gas station and asks to have the tire fixed. He is told he will have to wait. He pulls out to go to another station and buys some gas.

  • Around 5:30 to 5:40 p.m., Invaders member Charles “lzzy” Harrington answers the motel room door and is told by a member of the motel staff that the Invaders will have to leave, ostensibly because the SCLC will no longer be paying their bill. The motel worker delivering the message confirms that the instructions come from the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who is observed by Harrington standing in the parking lot looking at his watch. Shocked and angry, they gather up their belongings and are gone by 5:50 p.m.

  • Shortly before this, Marrell McCullough pulls up in his car with the Reverends James Orange and Jim Bevel.

  • At 5:50 p.m., MPD Officer Willie B. Richmond from the fire station observes Reverend Billy Kyles knocking on Dr. King’s door. It opens slightly and a few words are exchanged. The door closes and Kyles walks north on the balcony, stops around forty to fifty feet away and stands at the railing.

  • Between 5:30 and 5:45 p.m., the shooter and Earl Clark leave room 5-B and go down the back stairway and out of the back door to the heavily overgrown brush area behind the rooming house. They are partially observed descending the stairs by Grace Stephens in her room. Outside they are joined by Loyd Jowers, who has come through the kitchen rear door of Jim’s Grill. They set themselves up in an area of the bushes, keeping low and out of sight in the soggy area, with Jowers kneeling down.

  • Around 5:30 p.m., David Mark Young arrived and parked near the north end of the South Main street building that also housed the rooming house on the south end of the attached building. He then went upstairs carrying two rifles wrapped in cloth and arrived in the area of an open window immediately adjacent to the rooming house bathroom window.

  • Between 5:45 and 6:00 p.m., Olivia Catling has begun to prepare dinner in her home on Mulberry Street between Huling and Vance.

  • Also around this time, Yellow Cab driver “Buddy” Butler is trying to fit a lot of luggage into his cab, luggage belonging to a departing Lorraine Motel guest. His cab is parked inside the driveway of the motel.

  • Around 5:55 p.m., taxi driver James McCraw, answering a call to pick up Charlie Stephens, drives up and parks in front of the rooming house, goes inside and up the stairs to pick up Charlie. As he reaches the top of the stairs, he notices that the bathroom door is open and appears to be empty, although the light is on. He goes to Charlie’s (and Grace’s) room and finds Charlie passed out drunk with his head on the table and leaves the building, gets into his car, and drives away. In a few moments he hears the news on the radio of the assassination.

  • At about 5:55 p.m., as Dr. King’s brother AD is entering the shower in his room, Ernestine Campbell leaves the Trumpet Hotel, which she owns with her husband, and which abuts the Lorraine Motel. She drives up Butler and turns right on Mulberry. She has her radio on and the car windows closed.

  • Just before 6:00 p.m., Jowers’s erstwhile mistress and mother of one of his children, Betty Spates, enters Jim’s Grill looking for Loyd. Not seeing him but noticing that the door to the kitchen was unusually closed, she goes into the kitchen to see the back door ajar.

  • Just before 6:00 p.m., Dr. King comes out of his room and stands on the balcony near the railing. Abernathy remains behind or returns to the room. Dr. King waits for him on the balcony and converses with the people below.

  • At 6:01 p.m., the spotter, Earl Clark, and the shooter stand up, sight the target head on, and fire.

  • The shooter turns, passes the rifle either to Jowers or directly to Clark, who gave it to Jowers, who rapidly runs back into the kitchen carrying the rifle, the knees of his pants wet from kneeling and out of breath from running. Reverend James Orange ducks down and turns around to see what he thought was smoke rising out of the bushes. Upon hearing the shot, New York Times reporter Earl Caldwell in room 215, standing in his doorway in his shorts, sees a man (white male) crouched in the high bushes whom then disappears.

  • As Jowers entered the Grill, Betty Spates met him at the door. She had entered the Grill looking for him just before 6:00 p.m., and approached the outside door when she heard a shot. She reached the door and saw Loyd running toward her with the rifle.

  • He sees her, runs into the kitchen, and begins to break down the gun, wrap up the sections and attempt to flush a shell-casing down the kitchen toilet which jammed, and says, “Betty, you wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, would you?” She replies, “Of course not, Loyd.” She keeps her secret for twenty-four years.

  • Immediately after the shot, Earl Clark runs and jumps down from the wall onto Mulberry Street and runs diagonally across the street to get into a car parked on the corner of Huling and Mulberry, which takes off, followed by Ron Adkins Tyler on his Honda.

  • With similar haste, after handing off the rifle, the shooter turns and, according to plan, runs back through the alleyway between the two wings of the rooming house and enters through the basement entrance. Running through the basement to the north wall of the building, he climbs up the north wall stairway to an exit door, exits, goes down the external stairway, running out into the alleyway which led to Huling where he is seen by Olivia Catling. A short while later, patrolmen JD Hodges and Torrance Landers struggle through the dense bushes and follow the direction of a large footprint in the mud, arriving at the entrance to the basement. They look in but do not enter.

  • Dr. King is struck by a bullet to the right side of his face just above the jaw. He falls.

  • Abernathy appears; Kyles runs over and is told by Abernathy to get to the phone and call for help.

  • As Ernestine Campbell re
aches the driveway of the Lorraine, she sees Dr. King go down. Having not heard the shot, she thinks he had a heart attack. She stops to look and also sees Jesse Jackson, with one leg on the stairway, stuffing something into a suit bag. She drives on.

  • At that moment, Marrell McCullough climbs up to the balcony and checked Dr. King for life signs. He finds him still alive.

  • Immediately after the shot, either Raul or Russell Adkins Jr. gathers all of James’s belongings and runs down the hallway, down the stairs onto the street, turns left, drops the bundle in front of Canipe’s store, runs to the nearby second Mustang, and drives off.

  • The shooter, exiting the alleyway, runs around to the driver’s side of the green Chevrolet parked on Huling, gets in and drives away, turning left on Mulberry in front of Olivia Catling.

  • Buddy, the cab driver parked in the Lorraine driveway, turns toward the bushes when he hears the shot, and sees a man coming down over the wall and running up Mulberry Street. He calls his dispatcher and reports what he saw. Sometime later he would repeat the story to Louie Ward, another driver.

  • Olivia Catling is at her stove when she heard the shot. She quickly puts her cooking aside and runs out of her house on Mulberry toward the Lorraine Motel. She arrives at the corner of Huling and Mulberry and sees a man running out of the alleyway, getting into a green Chevrolet, pulling out from a parking space on Huling, and driving away, turning left on Mulberry and speeding right past her. Moments later, a police officer on Mulberry near the wall, beneath the brushy area, points to that site.

  • Solomon Jones, Dr. King’s driver, states that he saw a man coming down from the wall after the shot.

  • James is still at the gas station when he hears the ambulance sirens. He gets back in the car and drives down to the South Main Street area. When he approaches and sees a number of cops, he takes off and drives south, only on the way to learn what had happened and how he had been set up.

  • The ambulance from St. Joseph’s arrives, and Dr. King, accompanied by Ralph Abernathy and Bernard Lee, is taken to the emergency room of the hospital where those on duty begin to work on him.

  • At the hospital, military personnel are everywhere, knowing the names of all staff, most of whom are required to remain overnight.

  • Emergency room work proceeds on Dr. King, who is still alive, with the recommendation that he be taken to surgery.

  • This is rejected by Dr. Breen Bland, who comes in and takes charge, at one point ordering, “Stop working on that nigger and let him die.” He then ordered everyone out of the ER while remaining there with two men in suits.

  • Cab driver Buddy Butler drove his passenger to the airport and there tells fellow driver Louie Ward what he had seen. Butler is killed that evening by Chess Butler, who admitted doing so later on, in his home in front of his wife Mildred, his daughter, Linda, and young Ron Adkins Tyler.

  • The Alpha 184 unit is disengaged within minutes of the shooting.

  • The Army Psy-Ops team is also disengaged shortly after the shooting.

  • “Lurlee” Bailey, the wife of the owner and manager of the Lorraine Motel, runs to her room minutes after the shooting, saying, “what have I done?” and collapses from a cerebral hemorrhage. Taken to the hospital, she dies five days later.

  • Dr. Bland and the two men in suits spit on the body of Dr. King. The breathing tube is removed and Dr. Bland places a pillow on Dr. King’s face, ensuring death, which was declared at 7:05 p.m.

  These disparate events relating to his death took place within the hour before the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was taken from the world.

  While not pretending to know everything, or being able to answer every question, the facts are now clear about this horrific event in American history.

  At this point it would probably be useful to tie all of the disparate facts, actions, and events together in a kind of executive summary of Dr. King’s political assassination.

  There will inevitably be some repetition of what has been set out above or in an earlier work, but wherever possible, I will try to reference that material.

  Though there were some earlier efforts to kill Dr. King, it appears that a firm and final official decision to take him out was made at a senior level of government sometime in1966.

  It was during this year that the Missouri prison officials (the Commission of Corrections in that state was particularly close to J. Edgar Hoover), were asked to profile and identify a convict whose escape could be arranged. He must be a man who would follow instructions in order that he could be set up as a scapegoat for a killing. James Earl Ray was identified as an ideal candidate. As noted earlier, $25,000 from Hoover was delivered by Tolson in November or December 1966 to Russell Adkins, who paid it over to Warden Harold Swenson, as confirmed by Adkins’s fifteen-year-old son Ron, whom he brought along for the ride.

  I have previously noted that Adkins was a powerful Dixie Mafia leader, a Klansman, and a 32nd Degree Mason as well as being a supervisor in the Memphis Public Works Department.

  He was also close to J. Edgar Hoover as well as to Carlos Marcello, the Louisiana Mafia boss. It became clear that, for many years, if Hoover wanted something handled in his area, he would send his number-two Clyde Tolson to Adkins with money to make arrangements to take care of the problem. It has become clear that Tolson had become close friends with the Adkins family years before the assassination.

  James’s escape was on April 23, 1967. He made his way to Canada, with the identity of one Eric S. Galt. By whom he was provided this alias, he would never say, always refusing to implicate anyone he thought was trying to help him. The real Galt, working with NSA clearance, was the Executive Warehouse Operator Storage Supervisor at the Canadian Union Carbide Plant in Toronto. That warehouse housed a top-secret munitions project funded jointly by the CIA, the US Naval Surface Weapons Center, and the Army Electronics Research and Development Command. At the time, it was collaborating with the 902nd MIG in, among other operations, the covert shipment to Israel of Proximity Fuses (used in surface-to-air missiles, artillery shells, and LAWS).

  In August 1967, Galt met with Major Robert M. Collins, a top aide to the head of the 902nd, W. G. Colonel John Downie, and again in September. Unknowingly, his identity provided an ideal cover for Ray since, if he were ever picked up, a check would result in his immediate release. During this time, Ray was tracked and monitored until Raul picked him up in Montréal at the Neptune Bar. From that point in August 1967, to the end, Raul moved him around, feeding him small amounts of money and promising to get travel documents for him.

  It was during this period that Downie took over leadership of the 902nd MIG, which was housed in the Pentagon, and was asked by Major General William P. Yarborough (whose liaison with Hoover was Patrick Putnam, a trusted agent) to select members for an Alpha 184 Sniper Unit from the roster of the Twentieth Special Forces Group, with personnel drawn from the Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi rosters.

  He did so. That back-up unit contained two snipers and two spotters, and was led by Captain Billy Ray Eidson and Lieutenant William Worley, The latter died mysteriously shortly after the assassination. At least one sniper and spotter fled to Mexico, fearing for their lives. They became providers of information to me through Steve Tompkins. Also in June 1967, a black Army veteran Marrell McCullough was recalled to active duty, trained and assigned to the Memphis Police Department Intelligence Division, where he infiltrated the Invaders and became an informant to the MPD and military intelligence, After the assassination, he would become a CIA operative.

  James was kept in Los Angeles for an inexplicably long time, then moved south. Two of the snipers were in Los Angeles, also for a similarly long period of time. We learned that the hit on Dr. King was planned initially to take place in that city, but at some point it was changed and the sniper unit was moved to the Southeast. I suspect that this was because of the plan to assassinate Robert Kennedy after the California primary. It would be unseemly to
have two major figures assassinated in the same city within two months of each other.

  The sniper unit and James were moved to New Orleans, then Birmingham, and ultimately to the newly chosen assassination site, Memphis. James was instructed by Raul to buy a rifle in Birmingham. He did so, but bought a .223 Winchester instead of the 760, 30.06 Remington. When Raul scolded him and showed him the desired rifle in a brochure, he returned it and bought the correct one (which became the throw-down gun) and carried it to the New Rebel Motel in Memphis, where he stayed on the evening of April 3 and turned it over to Raul that rainy evening. Raul wrote down the address of the rooming house on South Main Street in Memphis (422½) and told him to meet him there in the Grill on the ground floor of the building at 3:00 p.m. the next day.

  Meanwhile, there was substantive on-the-ground preparation throughout 1966 and 1967. Clyde Tolson facilitated the second killing on Hoover’s “Prayer List” by making a number of planning visits to the Adkins group. “Prayer Meetings” were held at the Berclair Baptist Church and Adkins home. Others in attendance included his older son Ron Russell Jr., black businessman O. Z. Evers, who was sponsored by Adkins and was the apparent go-between with Billy Kyles and Jesse Jackson; Chess Butler, who would kill the taxi driver; Buddy, who saw Earl Clark come down over the wall; Frank Holloman, the Director of Police and Fire; and Maynard Stiles, a Deputy Public Works Director.

  Tolson went on transatlantic cruises with Adkins to plan the killing (see documentation attached as Appendix L). After the final trip, Adkins called his group together and began by announcing, “The coon must go.”

  Frank Liberto, a lieutenant of local boss Gene Luchese and Carlos Marcello, who had excellent relations with the MPD, was assigned the on-the-ground task for the hit. He lined up Loyd Jowers (forgiving his gambling debt and giving him a huge sum of cash, which Loyd hid in an unused stove oven in his Jim’s Grill). He also appears to have lined up the shooter and even spoke with him on the telephone just before the shooting, telling him to “Shoot the son of a bitch when he comes out on the balcony … and don’t call [him] again but … go to New Orleans to pick up your money from my brother.”