Killers in Cold Blood

by Ray Black

  Franz Urban drove straight to Konak, the governor’s residence, but although the couple were alive on arrival they died soon afterwards from their wounds.

  Princip, who like Cabrinovic, swalled his cyanide pill and then turned the gun on himself. However, before he could shoot he was mobbed by an angry crowd. Police had to drag Princip away before he was lynched and like Cabrinovic, his pill made his sick but did not have the desired effect.

  The assassination of Franz Ferdinand and Countess Sophie brought tensions between Austria and Serbia to a head. The double murders were seen by the Hapsburg rulers as a case of Serbian state-sponsored terrorism. It was the last straw and they prepared for retaliation. Although the Black Hand involvement would not come to light for many years, Austria wanted revenge and did not wait for conclusive proof.

  As Vienna took a hard line against Serbia, the rest of Europe took sides and the rumbles of war could soon be heard. There is no doubt that the double assassination helped an already tenuous situation spiral into a disaster and, in just over thirty days after the shootings, World War I was underway.

  Leon Trotsky

  Leon Trotsky was a Ukrainian who became a leader of the Bolshevik movement that overthrew the monarchy of Russia in 1917 – the February Revolution. In fact, he was in New York at the time and didn’t return to Russia until May 1917. He was close to both Lenin and Stalin at that time, but his political differences would prove to be his downfall. When Lenin died in 1924 Trotsky found himself in a difficult situation and fell victim to an assassination expressly ordered by Joseph Stalin himself.

  Lev Davidovich Bronstein (Leon Trotsky) was born on October 26, 1879, the son of a hard-working Jewish farmer, in the southern part of Ukraine. Trotsky’s family placed great importance on a good education so at the age of nine, the young Leon was sent to the city of Odessa to stay with his uncle. Leon proved to be a highly intellectual and capable pupil and in 1896 moved to Nicolayev to complete his education. He studied mathematics but it was also during this period that Leon turned revolutionary.

  In 1897 he was involved in forming the South Russia Workers Union and the following year the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), but he was put in prison for his political activities. In 1900 he was deported to Siberia, but two years later managed to escape, adopting the name Trotsky. He made his way to London which is where he met Lenin for the first time.

  Lenin worked on the communist newspaper Iskra (The Spark) and was instrumental in getting Trotsky a job on the same publication. Lenin and Trotsky were both intellectuals and had a great amount of respect for each other. They parted ways, however, in 1903, at the Second Congress of the RSDLP when Lenin led the Bolsheviks and Trotsky went in the other direction with the Menshevik leaders.

  Trotsky returned to Russia in 1905, where he actively took part in the first Russian Revolution. He was appointed President of the St Petersburg Soviet in December 1905, but he was arrested along with other members, and deported to Western Siberia in January 1907. Seemingly a master of escape, Trotsky once again managed to make his way to London, which is where he met Stalin for the first time. He spent his time working on several controversial papers, including Pravda, until, in 1917, he learned that the Tsar of Russia had abdicated.

  Trotsky returned to Russia and by August 1917 he had become a member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, led by Lenin. Trotsky became second in command to Lenin and the following year was appointed People’s Commissar for Military Naval Affairs, assisting with the formation of the Red Army.

  Unfortunately for Trotsky, Lenin fell ill in 1922 and died two years later, leaving Stalin in control of the Soviet Union. Trotsky and Stalin did not see eye to eye, and in 1927 Stalin had him expelled from the Executive Committee of Comintern. To get Trotsky out of the picture, Stalin had him banished to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan and from there deported him to Turkey in 1929.

  There was no doubt that although Stalin and Trotsky both represented Communism, their beliefs went in two totally different directions. While Trotsky liked to view his beliefs in writing, Stalin liked to put his into action and implemented policies that were extremely costly in terms of lives and freedom to the Soviet people. Trotsky used his writings to criticise Stalin and to try and turn communism in a different direction – gathering many followers on the way who became known as Trotskyists.

  However, being a Communist who had been ousted from his own country, Trotsky found it hard to find a country that would allow him to stay permanently. He spent short periods in several different countries, until Mexico said he could stay in 1937. However, even here he was not safe from the power of Stalin.

  On the afternoon of August 20, 1940, in a peaceful suburb of Coyoacán in the capital of Mexico, Trotsky was in his garden feeding his pet rabbits. He was approached by a nervous young man, who had recently wormed his way into Trotsky’s entourage. The young man asked if he would accompany him to the study to read an article he had just written. Trotsky had no reason not to trust him, but wondered why he clutched a raincoat tightly to his chest when it was such a lovely day.

  Inside the study were piles of books, many written by Trotsky, denouncing Stalin and Russia’s alliance with Hitler, attacking socialist nationalism and urging a revolution.

  Trotsky, now sixty years old, settled down at his desk to read the manuscript. The twenty-six-year-old man stood on his left side making sure that he blocked the panic button which would immediately alert Trotsky’s security guards to any trouble. The man reached inside his raincoat and pulled out a mountaineer’s ice pick and struck Trotsky from behind. In a few seconds, the brain of one of the most brilliant fighters for socialism was destroyed.

  Trotsky died twenty-six hours later from a three-inch hole in his skull. The assassin, Jaime Ramon Mercader del Rio Hernandez, was severely beaten, arrested, tried and convicted of murder. He served twenty years but was released in 1960 and immediately fled to Czechoslovakia.

  Hernandez was the son of a middle-class businessman and a beautiful, but unstable, Cuban who developed into an ardent supporter of Stalin. She fought in the Spanish Civil War and later became the mistress of the Soviet secret police general who was later involved in the conspiracy to kill Trotsky.

  With Trotsky and Lenin dead, Stalin was now ready to institute his revolution without any interference.

  Martin Luther King, Jr

  The original Martin Luther (1483—1546) was a German theologian who founded the Protestant faith in reaction to the excesses of the Catholic Church. The Catholic monasteries had become places of corruption and excess, which Luther saw as betraying the Christian message, hence the term ‘Catholic tastes’ which means to be too undiscerning and open-minded. The idea behind Protestantism was a return to simplicity and piousness, so that the emphasis was on worship of the Christian god. Luther was, in many ways, one of the founding fathers of the straight-laced and superior German cultural view, which would eventually lead to Nazism. It is perhaps ironic then, that Martin Luther King, Jr, a black American, should be named after him.

  Martin Luther King, Jr (1929–1968) was one of the principle leaders of the American civil rights movement, a political activist, a pacifist, a Baptist minister and most importantly one of America’s greatest speakers. From an early age, Martin experienced racism, which made him determined to do something to make the world a better and fairer place.

  Martin Luther graduated from high school at the age of fifteen, receiving a BA in 1948 at Morehouse College, Atlanta, an institution attended by both his father and grandfather. For three years Martin Luther studied theology at the Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where he was elected president of a predominantly white class. Martin Luther proved to have a powerful way of speaking and his vision and determination had his fellow students spellbound.

  Using a fellowship which he won at Crozer, Martin Luther enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, receiving a degree in 1955. During his years at Boston, Martin Luth
er met and married Coretta Scott, a highly intellectual and artistic woman, who shared many of her husband’s views. They had two sons and two daughters.

  In 1954, Martin Luther took the pastorale of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He never stopped dreaming of what could be and became a strong supporter of civil rights. He also became a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, the leading organisation of its kind in the United States.

  By 1955, Martin Luther felt ready to accept the leadership of the first great African-American nonviolent demonstration – the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott lasted for 382 days and was a formative turning point of the African-American freedom movement. One particular gripe among Montgomery blacks at that time was the segregation law of the bus system. The boycott was triggered by the refusal of a black seamstress, Mrs Rosa Parks, to take her place at the back of a city bus when the driver demanded it. Parks took a stand and refused to get up – minutes later she was arrested and sent to jail. When members of the black community heard about the arrest of Parks, they decided that a boycott of the bus system was long overdue. On December 21, 1956, the Supreme Court of the United States declared that laws requiring segregation on buses were unconstitutional, and from then on blacks and whites rode on buses as equals. However, during the days of boycott, Martin Luther suffered for his part. He was not only arrested, his house was also bombed and he was subjected to personal abuse.

  In 1957, Martin Luther was elected as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was formed to provide representation for the burgeoning civil rights movement. Martin Luther’s ideals were based not only on Christianity, but also on the beliefs of one of his heroes, Gandhi. Martin Luther represented this organisation for a period of eleven years, from 1957 to 1968, travelled over six million miles and spoke over 2,500 times. He not only became the symbolic leader of African-Americans but also an inspiring world figure.

  In October 1964, Martin Luther had to be admited to a hospital in Atlanta, as a result of extreme fatigue. It was while in hospital that he learned he was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, a major achievement in itself, especially as, at thirty-five, he was the youngest man ever to receive this award. When Martin Luther learned about the presentation, he said that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement. Later the same year he was named Time magazine’s ‘Man of the Year’ and politicians from around the world turned to Martin Luther for his views on a wide range of issues.

  Luther King’s final fight for the civil rights movement was in late March, 1968. In an effort to raise money for his campaign, he accepted an invitation to speak in support of some Memphis sanitation workers. They had been striking for better pay and conditions, but their badly handled demonstration had been a disaster. Martin Luther spoke to an audience of 500 people at the Memphis Temple on April 3. He openly spoke about the possibility of his own assassination, which was a recurrent theme in many of his speeches. The following evening his life was cut short, when he was shot on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis.

  On the evening of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther was getting ready to have dinner with minister Billy Kyles. Martin Luther was staying in Room 306 on the second floor of the motel and was in a hurry as he was running late. At about 5.30 p.m. Kyles knocked on his door to try and hurry him along.

  At 6.01 p.m. Martin Luther and his close friend Reverend Jesse Jackson were standing on the balcony outside Room 306, when Martin Luther was hit in the neck by a sniper’s bullet. He fell to the ground and Jackson saw a gaping wound covering a large portion of his jaw and neck.

  Ralph Albernathy, another close friend of Martin Luther’s, ran out of his room when he heard the shot and found his friend lying in a pool of blood. He held Martin Luther’s head saying, ‘Martin it’s all right. Don’t worry. This is Ralph. This is Ralph.’ He grabbed a towel to try and stop the flow of blood while they waited for the ambulance to arrive.

  When he arrived at hospital, Martin Luther was fighting for his life as the bullet had travelled through his neck and severed his spinal cord. Despite emergency surgery, Martin Luther lost his fight for life at 7.05 p.m. at the age of thirty-nine.

  News of his death was greeted not only with immense grief but also rage, and riots erupted all over the United States, primarily in black urban areas. The worst riots occurred in Chicago, Baltimore and Washington, DC, and the police had to recruit federal troops to help them quell the violence. When the violence erupted in Chicago, Mayor Richard J. Daley imposed a curfew on anyone under the age of twenty-one, closed the streets to any traffic, and banned the sale of guns and ammunition. Daley also instructed the Chicago police that they were to ‘shoot to kill’. Despite these measures it took days to restore order, resulting in eleven deaths and over 500 people injured.

  Nearly forty years later the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. is still a matter of endless controversy. The accepted version of the assassination is that James Earl Ray, a known criminal and open rascist, committed the murder. Ray was an escaped convict who was renting a room directly opposite the motel room where Martin Luther was staying. Using a rifle with an attached sniper scope, he shot his target from his bathroom window. Witnesses say they saw Ray running from his boarding house just minutes after the shot was fired. Ray’s fingerprints were also found on a pair of binoculars and the rifle, which he had purchased just six days before the shooting. After a massive manhunt which lasted for two months, Ray was eventually apprehended at Heathrow Airport after he had robbed a London bank.

  To escape the death penalty, Ray pleaded guilty, which meant a trial was waived and he was given a ninety-nine-year prison sentence. Three days later, Ray recanted his confession but, despite many appeals, Ray’s lawyers were unable to produce enough evidence to reopen his case. Many people believe that Ray was not alone in pulling the trigger and that he was simply part of a much larger conspiracy. Until the day he died on April 23, 1998, Ray continued to maintain his innocence, continually trying to put the blame on many people including the Memphis police, the FBI, army intelligence, the Mafia and even the Green Berets.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  The name Gandhi is synonymous with India. Some would say that it is also synonymous with bad fortune, for no less than three Gandhis have been assassinated while ruling the country. The first was the Gandhi. That is to say, Mahatma Gandhi, who took India into its age of independence from the British Empire. The other two were mother and son, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, who were not in fact related to Mahatma Ghandi in any way.

  India is a fundamentally troubled nation, due to its socio-cultural history. Before achieving independence India comprised a far larger area of territory, but ethnic and religious tensions arose following manumission from the empire. In August of 1947, Old India was partitioned into three new countries – west to east they are Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. The purpose of this was to provide the two major religions with their own territories and thereby prevent civil war. India is Hindu, while Pakistan and Bangladesh are Islamic. Nevertheless, there are further religious, ethnic and linguistic divisions in the Indian population.

  From 1947 to 1948 a war was fought between the newly formed Pakistan and India over an area of territory called Kashmir. Gandhi, who followed an anti-war ethos, insisted that India make a promised payment to Pakistan to settle the disagreement, but this proved to be his undoing.

  Many national heroes have gone down in history as valiant warriors, but not in the case of Gandhi. He was a peace-loving, frail man who devoted his life to achieving both social and political progress. Yet, despite his non-violent attitude, just six months after winning independence for India, Gandhi was assassinated by a religious fanatic.

  He was born Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on October 2, 1869, in Porbandar, near Bombay. His family belonged to the Vaisya, or Hindu, merchant caste and his father,
Karamchand Gandhi, had been prime minister of several small native states.

  In May 1883, following family tradition, thirteen-year-old Gandhi went into an arranged marriage with Kasturba Makhanji. However, at the age of nineteen he broke with tradition and travelled abroad to further his studies. He studied law at University College in London, but was rebuffed by his fellow students because of his race and spent many hours studying on his own. Gandhi took to reading books on philosophy and it was through these works that he discovered the principle of non-violence.

  After graduating, Gandhi returned to India, but he struggled to work as a barrister and decided to go to South Africa. Working in Natal, Gandhi was the first so-called ‘non-white’ lawyer to be admitted to the Supreme Court. He managed to build himself a reasonably sized practice and his interest soon turned to the hardships suffered by fellow Indians who had sought work in South Africa. He had seen first hand how these people had been treated as inferiors, not only in South Africa but in England as well, and he was determined to do something about it. He founded the Natal Indian Congress for Indian rights in 1894, but managed to remain loyal to the British Empire throughout.

  It seemed Gandhi’s sole purpose in life was to do good and help his fellow man. During the Boer War he raised an ambulance corps and served the South African government. In 1906, he gave support against the Zulu revolt and later that year he began his non-aggressive revolution. He was resolute in his cause, vowing that he would rather go to jail or even die before he would obey an anti-Asian law. He had the support of thousands of Indians and twice he was imprisoned for his beliefs.

  Gandhi returned to his homeland in 1914, and his reputation had won him many loyal followers. He worked ceaselessly to reconcile all classes and religious sects, in particular Hindus and Muslims, and in 1919 he became a leader in the newly formed Indian National Congress party.