on march 2, 1968, the man known to his classmates as Eric Galt graduated from bartending school in Los Angeles. In the graduation photo, James Earl Ray deliberately closed his eyes to make future identification more difficult. On March 3, 7, and 11, Ray spent a sizable amount of his remaining money on plastic surgery to alter his appearance. Again, Ray said this was to make a future identification more difficult.17
Ray’s recruitment into a King conspiracy is further suggested by the manager of the St. Francis Hotel, where Ray had been staying since late January. Allan O. Thompson told investigators he remembered his switchboard operator reporting a series of phone calls to Eric Galt, sometime in March, possibly as early as March 1. The calls came from either New Orleans or Atlanta or both, and the caller left the name
J. C. Hardin. Sometime in the middle of the month, a stranger whom Thompson presumed was Hardin visited the St. Francis looking for Galt/Ray. Thompson reported that another man, a shady character who wanted to avoid law enforcement attention, recalled seeing Ray meeting with a stranger at the same time. They met at the Rabbit’s Foot Club, a bar not far from the St. Francis, and one that Ray was known to frequent.
The authors have identified J. C. Hardin after reexamining the FBI’s investigation into Allan O. Thompson’s claims. Having mined their national files for men who used the alias J. C. Hardin, the FBI presented Thompson with a number of photos. A police artist constructed an “incremental” drawing of the man as Thompson reflected on various facial features. Thompson noted a striking overall similarity between the man who visited the hotel and a photograph the FBI showed him. Inexplicably, the FBI dismissed the match because the hair in the photo was different, ignoring the fact that the J. C. Hardin photo they were showing was taken more than a decade before the King murder! Newly released files (with the redactions removed) make clear that Thompson identified James Wilborn Ashmore from Texas as J. C. Hardin.18
Ashmore had a steady history of criminal offenses, mostly for theft and forgery, and he served more than one stint in prison. Nothing directly indicated that he was connected to a group like the Dixie Mafia, but such information rarely appeared in FBI files prior to the 1970s. Donald Sparks was undoubtedly Dixie Mafia, as revealed in an extensive investigation by the Kansas state attorney’s office, but no FBI file references him as such. A truck driver by trade, Ashmore was exactly the kind of man the Dixie Mafia would recruit for missions: someone who could routinely cross state lines without drawing the attention of law enforcement. More work needs to be done to develop Ashmore, who died in 1973 in California, as possible accessory in the King conspiracy. But it seems probable that he was another go-between in the Dixie Mafia/White Knights bounty plot, and the one who finally integrated James Earl Ray into the scheme. Newly discovered information makes this even more probable. The FBI originally located the Hardin alias for Ashmore in files that connected him to the Ole Miss race riots against the admission of James Meredith. Those riots not only incited many future members of the White Knights, it drew radicals from around the nation, including several mentioned in this book, such as Gale and Crommelin. The file that details Ashmore’s role in the riots may have been routinely destroyed.19
And as of March 17, 1968, James Earl Ray was leaving Los Angeles for good and heading to the Southeast. His destination: Martin Luther King Jr.’s hometown of Atlanta. Martin Luther King Jr. also left Los Angeles on March 17 en route to Memphis.
10
stalking
As spring approached in 1968, King was frequently traveling in efforts to mobilize support for the upcoming Poor People’s Campaign. A movement that had been growing in Memphis to improve the condition of the city’s sanitation workers captured his attention and soon his energy. Protests erupted in Memphis in February, with the proximate cause being the deaths of two garbage men forced to work in terrible weather conditions. For Memphis sanitation workers, this was the final straw in a long history of poor treatment. The sanitation workers earned such petty wages that many were on welfare, and they were forced to work long hours even in harsh conditions. Issues of class intersected, as they often do, with issues of race. The Memphis sanitation workers were also overwhelmingly African American. The strike quickly drew the support of local church leaders and civil rights activists, soon garnering national media attention, with images of hundreds of strikers wearing placards asserting i am a man. That King found solidarity in such a struggle is not surprising.
Dr. King arrived in Memphis on March 18 and spoke to a tremendous crowd of both civil rights activists and laborers. He told the audience: “You are demonstrating that we can stick together. You are demonstrating that we are all tied in a single garment of destiny, and that if one black person suffers, if one black person is down, we are all down.” King left shortly after, but members of the SCLC remained active to help maintain the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike. For King, the strike represented an opportunity to broadcast the socioeconomic themes of the Poor People’s Campaign, and to once again demonstrate the efficacy of nonviolent protest.1 He was not done with Memphis, but he was next heading to a speaking engagement in Selma, Alabama, the site of one of his greatest triumphs.
at approximately the same time James Earl Ray was making arrangements to move to Atlanta, Tommy Tarrants took a pilgrimage to the home of his hero, Rev. Wesley Swift, in Lancaster, California. According to Tarrants’s autobiography, he made contact with Swift some months earlier, impressing Swift enough to be invited to become his understudy.
Swift gave one sermon during Tarrants’s stay in Lancaster, on March 17, entitled “The Children of the Spirit.” Echoing many familiar themes—blaming Jews for manipulating the money supply, for a communist conspiracy, and so on—he also made the following comment:
But we the people of the kingdom realize that we are to destroy the powers of darkness. We are going to haul down the hammer and sickle because we believe God. HE declares that the powers of Gog and Magog, and the powers of darkness, are to be destroyed by the children of the kingdom. Their government is to be thrown down and their evil Priests are going to be removed from their places of authority.2
We do not know if Tarrants heard his idol deliver this sermon, but his other interactions with Rev. Swift have enormous implications for the King assassination. In his excellent book on anti-Jewish and racial violence in Mississippi, Terror in the Night, published in 1993, Pulitzer-winning reporter Jack Nelson used Tarrants as a major source. Tarrants is quoted as saying that he bought a rifle from Swift to shoot Martin Luther King Jr. “That was my ambition,” Nelson quoted Tarrants as saying, “to shoot Dr. King. I hated Dr. King.”3
In a 2007 interview with Jerry Mitchell of Mississippi’s Clarion-
Ledger, Tarrants seemingly backed off from such comments. By this time, Tarrants had been a mainstream Christian minister since the 1970s, having moved away from Christian Identity theology in prison, a life change so profound that it convinced the FBI and even his would-be victims to press for his early release (his sentence was commuted in 1976). Tarrants, while acknowledging to Mitchell that he bought the rifle from Swift in March of 1968, insisted he did so to “get acquainted with Swift. I thought a lot of him and listened to his recordings, was under that influence.”4
Regarding the hatred and ambition to kill Dr. King that Nelson quoted Tarrants as expressing, Tarrants acknowledged “having those views,” but said “a lot of people in the South hated Martin Luther King.”5 Because Nelson did not footnote or explicitly cite his sources and because Tarrants’s quotes are separated from each other in the text, it’s difficult to confirm whether they were recorded at the same time.
New information uncovered by the authors brings this matter more sharply into focus. In materials donated by Nelson’s wife, Barbara Matuszow, to Emory University, the authors found the original tape recording (and transcripts) of Nelson’s interviews with Tarrants. One of the recordings, from 1991, captures the relevant exchan
ge. Nelson first asks Tarrants if the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) interviewed him. It is highly likely that Nelson confused HUAC—which did not exist after 1975, but which at one time investigated the KKK—with the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). The HSCA, as noted earlier, ran a concurrent re-investigation of the JFK and MLK murders from 1976 to 1979. Indeed, Tarrants told Mitchell in 2007 that HSCA investigators did interview him in the late 1970s. Nelson, for reasons that are still unclear, then turned directly to the issue of the rifle purchase.
nelson: Did you testify before the House Un-
American Activities Committee?
tarrants: They sent . . .
nelson: Late ’70s?
tarrants: . . . two investigators down to see me at Ole Miss.
nelson: They must have quoted your testimony at some point in a report or something. Did you say anything about buying a rifle to assassinate King?
tarrants: Yeah, yeah, I told them. I told them that.
nelson: When did you do that?
tarrants: I bought, I think, I bought that from Wesley Swift as a matter of fact.
nelson: Is he still around?
tarrants: Oh, no. He died of cancer, years and years ago.
nelson: He was in what city? In, ah, . . .
tarrants: Lancaster, California.
nelson: Lancaster, California.
tarrants: Um, yea, yea. That was my ambition . . .
nelson: Right.
tarrants: . . . to shoot Martin Luther King.
nelson: So you bought . . .
matuszow (nelson’s wife): Oh, really?
tarrants: Yea. I hated him worse than any of the Blacks.6
The readers may judge for themselves if the explanation Tarrants provided to Jerry Mitchell, in 2007, captures the spirit of what Tarrants told Nelson on tape. Tarrants’s responses to Mitchell leaves open to interpretation whether he misled Mitchell. It would benefit the historical record if he cleared up this matter. The authors have unsuccessfully reached out to Tarrants on more than one occasion.
The immediate temptation is to see the quotation and the timing of the rifle purchase as evidence that Tarrants was involved in King’s murder. But the authors believe that Tarrants’s other claim to Mitchell is likely true: that he had no role in King’s murder. Upon closer inspection, what appears to be a suggestive circumstantial case against Tarrants for some kind of involvement in King’s murder looks more like the result of a carefully orchestrated effort to frame him for the crime. The idea of a frame-up is well-worn in theories on the King assassination. For decades, the only man convicted in the crime, James Earl Ray, insisted he was a patsy in the murder. But Ray’s actions from the end of March through the beginning of April substantively contradict this assertion. Instead they strongly suggest that he played a conscious role in the crime.
james earl ray agreed to drop off a package in New Orleans for Marie Martin on his way to Atlanta. After that brief stop sometime between March 19 to 21, James Earl Ray ventured to Atlanta, but not before making a highly suspicious detour along the way, one that took him directly to the vicinity of Dr. King. Almost three years after marchers stood their ground against club-carrying Alabama policemen on horses, Martin Luther King Jr. returned to Selma, Alabama. Dr. King was there to give a speech on March 22, one that newspapers had publicized in advance. James Earl Ray, who according to any logical, direct route to Atlanta would have traveled through Birmingham, somehow found his way to Selma at the same time, and stayed at the Flamingo Hotel. Confronted with this coincidence, Ray claimed that he made a wrong turn. But Selma is completely out of the way of Birmingham, and available maps from the time show the “wrong turn” described by Ray wasn’t even possible given the available exits.7 Even some researchers sympathetic to Ray, notably Harold Weisberg, his chief investigator, acknowledge that someone or something related to King’s murder lured him to the city.
King returned to his hometown of Atlanta on March 23, and Ray followed, traveling through Montgomery and Birmingham. Ray had never spent any time in Atlanta before in his life. On March 23, he rented a room at a cheap rooming house known to lodge drunks and vagrants on Peachtree Street. Once again, he used the alias Eric Galt.8
Other than the constantly inebriated rooming house owner and the owner of a Laundromat, both of whom had short and limited interactions with Ray, there is no one who can describe Ray’s movements in Atlanta. Ray of course says he was in Atlanta waiting for his next directives from Raul. Until Raul told Ray to meet him in Birmingham at the end of March, Ray did nothing but hang out in his room—or so Ray says. There is evidence that suggests he made contact with someone in Atlanta, someone whom Ray never identified. Investigators found a receipt for a dinner for two at Mammy’s Shanty, a local dive that, according to author Lamar Waldron (an Atlanta native), was frequented by racists.9 When confronted about this by one of his earliest chroniclers, author William Bradford Huie, Ray was unable to explain it. Ray also could not adequately explain why he had a second key made for his room, or why after the assassination police found clothing among his possessions that would not have fit Ray.
Also suspiciously, Ray obtained a commercial map of Atlanta, and as was often his custom, marked areas that were relevant to him. On this map, Ray circled his rooming house on Peachtree, but also Martin Luther King Jr.’s home (twice!). Ray also marked several other locations. Ray never offered an adequate explanation for why these areas were marked on the map.10 But new evidence makes it clear that the FBI also misrepresented the location of the markings of the map. The FBI claimed that they walked to the other locations that Ray circled on the map and that Ray also circled the headquarters for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King Jr.’s church.
A new analysis by researcher Jerry Shinley suggests a reason why both Ray and the FBI would want to cover up the markings on this map and their implications. One of Ray’s markings appears very close to a restaurant that served as a front operation for Cliff Fuller, a Dixie Mafia criminal who later turned into a federal informant. Another mark appears very close to a nightclub frequented by Fuller’s partner in crime Harold Pruett. Fuller enjoyed relationships with criminals in Mississippi, among other places. Ray may have been hiding his contacts with the criminal underworld—something, again, that even Harold Weisberg believed to be the case. The FBI, in turn, may have been protecting their informant, Fuller, and the embarrassment it may have caused to have such an informant caught up in something like the King assassination. As will become clear and as has been hinted at elsewhere, the FBI may have had more than one informant in a position to have known about, and potentially stopped, the King murder. But the FBI, throughout its history, has had a difficult time balancing the need to protect informants while waiting to maximize said informant’s ability to implicate other outlaws, and the need to preemptively stop a crime.
It is clear Ray stalked King in Selma and on through Atlanta. As such, it is important to recall the offer extended by Leroy McManaman to Donald Nissen. McManaman told Nissen that he could have a stake in the bounty in one of two ways. He could participate in the actual killing, or he could case King’s movements and report them to the would-be killers. Specifically, McManaman mentioned casing King’s movements in Atlanta—Nissen’s destination following his immediate release.11
It makes sense that any conspiracy involving Ray would more likely use him in the “stalker” role, since he had no background as a professional killer or sniper. One could safely assume that as this secondary role was far less risky, it promised much less of the bounty. Whether that would sit well with Ray as he proceeded through the “mission” is another matter.
in his autobiography, Tarrants says he decided to leave Swift and visit his uncle in San Diego, after which his cousin joined him when he returned to Mobile. There, Tarrants says, he spotted FBI agents in round-the-clock surveill
ance of his residence. In going to California, Tarrants jumped bond for his upcoming trial for the firearms charge. Already upset with the government, Tarrants decided to pursue an even more serious form of resistance against the enemies of white Christians.
Inspired by the example of Robert DePugh, the leader of the Minutemen, who had evaded the FBI for months to avoid firearms and bank robbery charges, Tarrants decided that he, too, could become a lone-wolf terrorist while dodging capture. On March 28, one week before King’s murder, he wrote a note that police discovered months later:
Gentlemen:
I have committed myself totally to defeating the Communist-Jew conspiracy which threatens our country—any means necessary shall be used. Please be advised that since 23, March, 1968, I, Thomas Albert Tarrants III, have been underground and operating guerrilla warfare. I have always believed in military action against the communist enemy.12
The connection to DePugh is significant for another reason. Files on the Minutemen reveal multiple accounts from informants referencing assassination plots. The radical antigovernment group, heavily influenced by Swift and Christian Identity zealots, articulated a secret plan to be activated if DePugh and his colleagues were captured by federal authorities. Hardcore members were to assassinate key political figures in retaliation, among them Martin Luther King Jr. Although DePugh and his main aide, Wally Payson, continued to elude the FBI and remain in hiding from the time they were charged in January 1968 until 1969, the seven other Minutemen arrested in connection with the same charges began their trials in March of 1968.13
At least one person who developed a relationship with Tarrants insists that the young terrorist most identified with the Minutemen as of 1968—more so than even the White Knights. Records show that Tarrants met with a senior Minuteman leader, Dennis Mower, on his trip to see Swift in the middle of March. This makes sense, as Mower served as a key aide to Swift. Mower also enjoyed a close relationship with Sam Bowers. But most relevant to our discussion, Keith Gilbert, a one-time close ally of Mower, insists that Mower was behind the 1965 plot to blow up the Palladium theater when King visited. Notably, Gilbert claims that he was to be a fall guy for Mower—that Mower manipulated him into a position where he would either die in the attack or die from the death penalty if he survived the attack and was captured. Gilbert says he tipped off the police about the 1965 plot for this very reason, and he did, in fact, shoulder all the blame for stealing the dynamite. Based on this and his direct experiences with Mower, Gilbert is convinced that Mower had something to do with the King murder on April 4.
Killing King Page 14
