The Plot to Kill King

by William F. Pepper

  Meetings were also held in Jim’s Grill, attended by Earl Clark, Marrell McCullough, and another MPD officer who he said he did not know. I believe this was the shooter Frank Strausser, who Jowers did not want to name and, citing his own safety, refused to do so to his last breath.

  Dr. King was planning to return to Memphis to make up for the violent march of March 28. The planned trip to support the garbage workers was accelerated by the deaths of two young workers caught in a vise of their garbage truck, which was deliberately arranged by Bill Holly, a garbage truck driver and one of Adkins’s men.

  After James left, a second white Mustang pulled up and parked further south on South Main Street. While James’s Mustang had Alabama plates, this second one had Arkansas plates. As discussed in detail elsewhere, it would be observed by Charles Hurley who parked behind it waiting for his wife to come off work. They left well before 6:00 p.m.

  Just before 6:00 p.m., Dr. King came out onto the balcony. Ralph stayed behind, ostensibly to apply some aftershave.

  When the fatal shot rang out, James’s belongings, including the rifle he had given away the night before, were quickly taken downstairs in a bundle by someone (we have always suspected Raul), who dropped the bundle in front of a local store, Canipe’s. However, Arthur Hanes, James’s first lawyer, said that Canipe told him that the bundle was dropped before the shot was fired. Jim McCarter, Canipe’s son-in-law, told me that after the shot, Canipe told him that he heard someone run down the stairs, drop the bundle, get in the second white Mustang, and drive away.

  Ron, sitting on his bike, heard the shot and saw Earl Clark drop down from the wall and run up north on Mulberry Street. Ron turned around and followed him and the car he entered, to a rendezvous place that he called a Quonset Hut. Later, they all met at Henry Loeb’s brother’s lodge.

  Right after the shooting, Mulberry Street resident Olivia Catling saw a man run from the alleyway/driveway at the end of the rooming house building and get into a parked green Chevrolet on the south side of Huling and drive furiously away, turning left on Mulberry Street heading north.

  I initially believed that she had witnessed the shooter fleeing the scene. After handing off the rifle, he ran back, leaving his size 13-large footprints, of which a Plaster of Paris cast was made of each footprint. I thought that the shooter went into the alleyway between the buildings and then went down the stairs at the side entrance of the building, into the basement running underneath up to the north wall, where he ran up a stairway in the corner and exited through a door leading to the drive/alleyway that led directly to Huling and the parked getaway car observed by Olivia. No one had discussed this possible getaway route and exit, but I have long suspected that this was how the shooter escaped.

  It was only after I was able to thoroughly examine the basement area and discover that the sections of the basement between the attached buildings prohibited access to the stairway exit at the north end. This indicated that the man Olivia saw exiting from the driveway that was connected to the stairway exit was not the shooter but probably another backup. In this context, at one point, two sisters—Pam Miller and Tammy Lyon—came forward to tell me that when they were children, their father, David Mark Young, asked them on the afternoon of the assassination to ride downtown with him. They drove to South Main Street, arriving around 5:30 p.m., and he parked his truck just up (north) from a bar (likely Jim’s Grill), near the north end of the building where the rooming house was located. They noticed one other car—a white Mustang—parked further south on the same side of the street but near to the southern end of the rooming house buildings. On the other side of the street they remembered seeing the sign of the Green Beetle Bar.

  They said that their father had two rifles wrapped up in the truck and he took them inside, entering through the northern doorway. As discussed later, when I went through that door and up the stairs I walked across the apartment and came to the window that was immediately next to the rooming house bathroom window.

  Pam and Tammy said that after he had been gone for about a half hour they heard a shot. Soon thereafter, they heard the squeal of tires and saw the Mustang speed past them and turn right onto Huling. Shortly after that car passed and turned a second car came down Main Street toward them and turned left onto Huling. They said it could have been an MPD traffic car.

  About five minutes later, their father knocked on the window and got into the truck to drive home. They noticed that he only had one rifle wrapped up.

  He did not speak on the way home and within fifteen minutes after they arrived, a white Mustang showed up to take him away. He was gone for two or three days. He worked at International Harvester as a welder, but they recalled that he lost his job for being absent too often.

  They said that he was quite close to Frank Liberto and used to meet him over at the Scott Street Market. Their mother would entertain them while the men discussed business.

  Eventually, their parents separated and would always elect to live in remote areas. When they pressed him, in later years, about this event on April 4, 1968, he would become angry and tell them to “leave it alone.”

  The man Olivia saw was wearing a hat, and it may well have been Chess Butler. From photographs I have seen, he was rarely without one. Based upon the story from Pam and Tammy (discussed above), it is quite likely that their father was delivering a weapon to a back-up shooter who was in the window—wide open at the time of the shooting—immediately next to the rooming house bathroom window in the adjoining building.

  I entered that building from South Main Street from the same door through which Pam and Tammy’s father, David Mark Young, did, and when going upstairs I walked directly to that window. From that unit there was a direct connection to the exit stairway leading to the alley from which Olivia saw the man in the hat exiting.

  Butler was an in-house killer for the Adkins family. Ron knew he was to have been on the scene as a back-up shooter but was confused when he did not appear to be where he thought he was supposed to be. It is highly possible that he was put in place in that window and then fled after the successful shot was made from the bushes.

  I have finally concluded that the shooter, after giving up the gun, did turn and run backwards toward the rooming house, thus leaving the footprints, but that he went around the building through the vacant lot, got into the second Mustang that was parked right there below Canipe’s store and was driven away by the person who dropped the bundle—either Raul or Ron’s older brother, Russell Jr.

  Russell Jr. told Ron that he was the shooter, but as noted earlier I believe he did so in order to ensure the protection of his younger (sixteen-year-old) brother.

  When Dr. King returned to Memphis, he went straight to the Lorraine Motel. He had never stayed there overnight before, preferring to stay in other, previously all-white, hotels, although he had held meetings with local community leaders during the day at the Lorraine.

  When they arrived, he and Abernathy were given room 306, although they were originally to have occupied room 202, a ground-floor, sheltered, room. Jesse Jackson was tasked with getting Walter and Lurlee Bailey to move him to the upper exposed room. The evidence from Ron Tyler Adkins indicates that he did so. Despite Ralph Abernathy’s insistence that room 306 was their usual room, and indeed they had been forced to wait for it to be vacated upon their arrival, it never their room before (not even for the daytime meetings and certainly not for overnight stays). Furthermore, it was vacant—and unoccupied when they arrived and so they were able to go directly to it.

  Russell Adkins Sr. died in July 1967, and his son Russell Jr. took over the assassination project. In fact, I have come to believe that Frank Holloman himself arranged and facilitated the final details. Holloman regularly attended the Adkins’ meetings, coming out every Sunday, and organized the withdrawal of the two black firemen from the fire station and the removal of black community relations officer, Ed Redditt, from his post. He also had removed the usual group of black police officers
who always provided security for Dr. King in Memphis. They were replaced by a group of white officers who were not trusted and so remained out of the picture.

  Reverend Billy Kyles (at whose home the SCLC group was to have had a barbecue that evening) appears to have been given the responsibility for getting Dr. King out onto the balcony (the MPD report by Willie B. Richmond states that, contrary to Kyles’s longtime assertions, he knocked on the door at 5:50 p.m., spoke for a few seconds, and then walked away down the balcony, standing at the railing about forty to fifty feet away until the shooting). The Reverend Jesse Jackson organized the withdrawal of the Invaders from the motel around twenty minutes before the killing, where they had been working with Dr. King to bring about a peaceful march.

  As noted elsewhere, the shooter, Strausser, was observed receiving a “special” rifle at the MPD shooting range the day before the killing, and then breaking it in by practice firing it most of that day and the next (taking a lunch break with Captain Earl Clark on April 4), before leaving in the red and white Chevrolet convertible of his fireman friend. Before leaving, he put the rifle in the backseat and took off his shirt, wearing only an undershirt and ruffling up his hair so that he would look more like an off-duty fireman than a police officer and sped off.

  Also observed arriving at the MPD firing range building where he met with the shooter and Earl Clark were Director Holloman and Mayor Henry Loeb.

  My informant, Lenny Curtis, was in an ideal position to observe everything that took place at that facility, which he told us under oath (see the deposition of Lenny Curtis).

  As noted elsewhere, he was obviously in a vulnerable situation and became subject to intimidation and harassment. After the assassination, the shooter asked him to accompany him on a ride downtown to pick up salary checks and he drove through a wooded area with his hand on his gun as he questioned him about the assassination, asking him if he believed Ray was guilty. Later, as an unmarked car was parked across from his house, he opened the door to enter and was about to light a cigarette when he smelled escaping gas. Someone had turned on the gas on his kitchen stove. Still later, he discovered a sniper’s “V” facing his kitchen window from a tree behind the house, and a neighbor told him of a stranger being on the property.

  On one occasion, when he was driving quickly away from home, he drove past the park and saw an unmarked car and recognized the shooter—Strausser—in the driver’s seat. He was thus intimidated into silence for a long time before I convinced him to go under oath in 2007.

  On the day of the shooting, Russell Adkins Junior instructed his sixteen-year-old brother Ron to take a gun from a closet in his home and carry it on his Honda bike downtown where he gave it to his brother. Being unaware of the rifle-range activity, he assumed that the gun he carried was the murder weapon. It was not. A number of guns were reported to have been taken to the area of the rooming house and the neighboring adjoining units. It would seem that, in addition to the Alpha 184 Group, there were other civilian backups.

  As for the military, at 4:30 a.m. at Camp Shelby in Mississippi, the eight man Alpha 184 unit was briefed. They were shown large photographs of Dr. King and Andrew Young and told these were enemies of the State and their targets. Soon after, they began to drive to Memphis. It is interesting that in a copy of the orders provided to me, there is an explicit reference to the 4:30 a.m. briefing where they were instructed to do nothing unless ordered otherwise.

  Upon their arrival in Memphis, they took up positions on the roof of the Illinois Central Railroad building and a water tower opposite the Lorraine Motel. The building sniper and spotter were greeted by the Eli Arkin, Department Head of MPD intelligence, who thanked them for coming to save the city. They were then taken by a government spook to their position. When the shooter fired, the railroad building unit thought that the other unit had fired. Only then were they told to disengage.

  An army Psy-Ops team of two photographers were put on the roof of fire station by Captain Carthel Weeden. They trained their cameras on the balcony and the parking lot and photographed everything, seemingly for the purpose of identifying any potential witnesses. They also photographed the shooter, lowering his rifle in the bushes. One of the members of that team told us it was not James Earl Ray.

  Ron took up a position on his Honda, facing north on Mulberry Street near the fire station, some distance south of the Lorraine. He said his mother was parked in the Chevy Nova down the street, also south of the Lorraine, ostensibly in case more transport was needed. While waiting, he noticed a yellow taxicab that had pulled into the parking lot.

  As discussed elsewhere, James arrived at Jim’s Grill around 3:00 p.m. and parked in front. He went inside to wait for Raul, who showed up soon after. Raul told James to go upstairs in the rooming house, rent a room, and leave his belongings there. James did this, and was kept out of the room for most of the afternoon, at one point being sent to buy some binoculars. The room was used as a staging area and the shooter and the spotter (Earl Clark) went down the back stairs—one of them was briefly observed descending by Grace Stephens—out into the bushes near the time of the shooting.

  James remembered that he had a flat spare tire and decided to try and have it repaired, so he drove away about fifteen minutes before the shooting, taking his second right on Vance Avenue and passing two witnesses (Hendrix and Reed) who had just before observed his parked car as they left Jim’s Grill. Shortly after six, while waiting at the garage, he heard the ambulance sirens and decided to drive back to the South Main Street area. Seeing police everywhere, his first inclination as an escaped convict was to take off, which he did. He drove to Atlanta and parked the car in a housing project parking area.

  Some days later, a young FBI agent, Donald Wilson, as part of the team checking out the car, found and kept discarded papers that fell out of the passenger side door when he opened it. Those documents contained the name “Raul” along with the telephone number of one of Jack Ruby’s clubs in Dallas.

  When Dr. King was just a preacher reaching out for the civil rights of his people against the perpetrators of long discredited practices, he was acceptable. But then something came over him. He began to see the bigger picture, as did Malcolm X when he insisted that we are living in an era of revolution and the revolt of the American Negro is only a part of the rebellion against the oppression and colonialism which have characterized this era.

  While it was permissible in the halls of power, though not in the southern states, for a black leader to seek to change the historical Jim Crow laws, it was not expected that such a leader would take this struggle into the realm of challenging the inherent and self-perpetuating inequality of the basic system itself.

  This is where Dr. King was headed before I met him. Consequently, before the decision was taken to kill him, all manner of ploys to discredit him were undertaken. Making him a martyr would always be a last resort.

  By the time I met him in 1967 to discuss my observations and photographs of Vietnam, he had already begun to connect social and economic injustice in America with the plight of impoverished people everywhere. So I was in no way primarily responsible for this personal revelation, though perhaps my work accelerated the process, and along with it also hastened his pace along the road to his execution.

  As I recounted the incidence of atrocities and devastation inflicted on a civilian population consisting mostly of women, children, the aged, and infirm, he saw the photographic images, and his shock and horror gave way to tears. Corporate-owned mainstream media, even though far less controlled and filtered than it is today, still largely shielded the American public from the most extreme war crimes committed by their troops. There were about 650 reporters/media people in Vietnam on March 16, 1967, the day of the “My Lai Massacre.” No one reported it until about a year later. Seymour Hersh broke the story. Lieutenant Colin Powell was, at the time, the Public Information Officer charged with obfuscating that atrocity and covering it up. He did his job well, as he did as US Secreta
ry of State before the United Nations Security Council in 2003, in advocating the assault on Iraq based on false facts and illegal grounds.

  Things moved very quickly in the late winter/early spring of 1967. I became Director of the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) and we headed toward a National Convention with the goal of nominating a third political party of Martin King Luther King Jr. and Dr. Benjamin Spock to oppose the war presidency of Lyndon Johnson.

  That summer the nation exploded. It began with riots in Newark, New Jersey, in July. A couple of weeks later there was rioting in Detroit. The cities burned. Twenty-six were killed in Newark and forty-four in Detroit. Nearly one hundred other cities burned. Typically, the officials were all white and the populations increasingly black. Police methods and practices in some instances would have done the Reich Gestapo proud. Cumulative incidents often preceded a final straw which caused a gathering explosion.

  As we prepared for a People’s political convention, the nation was burning, the Black Power movement was rising throughout the country, though being infiltrated by military intelligence officers (remember, Hoover’s FBI had no black agents) and I would learn almost twenty-eight years later that special forces army sniper teams had been dispatched to troubled cities with “mug books” of targeted black community leaders. We will probably never know how many of these local leaders were taken out. Federally, LBJ commissioned, through executive order, the Kerner Commission to investigate and recommend a means of suppressing “civil disorder.” Dominated by military and police personnel, it hatched the US Army’s “Garden Plot” plan, designed to suppress “civil disturbance” in America. It is history, of course, covered elsewhere, concerning government surveillance, infiltration, and provocation which spilled over into the NCNP convention.