Killing King
Page 18
The unique attention paid to Tarrants, who at that time had no profile as a dangerous extremist, raises serious questions that will be explored later. The interest continued through the middle of April, when the FBI showed Tarrants’s picture to right-wing militants in Los Angeles, on suspicion he might be “Eric Galt.”10 When we took this information to former FBI agent Jim Ingram in 2009, who ran the Mississippi bombing investigation that eventually captured Tarrants, he was stunned that Tarrants had been an early suspect in the King murder. “He wasn’t on our radar,” Ingram insisted.11
eric galt, john Willard, and Harvey Lowmeyer definitely were on the FBI’s radar. The FBI spared no cost, manpower, or hours, as evidence flowed from Memphis. They visited every possible location to find the source of left-behind underwear, or the location of a beer can purchase. They conducted thousands of interviews. Eventually, on April 11, they found Ray’s abandoned white Mustang, registered to Eric Galt in Atlanta—not far from the Lakewood General Motors factory—and traced the registration to the September sale in Alabama. Most importantly, the FBI lab manually slaved through thousands of fingerprints until they matched every identifiable print that they could. Several sets of prints, as will be discussed later, were never matched to Ray or anyone else despite dogged efforts to compare them against potential innocent contributors, such as police officers and FBI agents. But on April 19, the Bureau reached the stunning conclusion that every item could traced to one man: James Earl Ray. The FBI then realized that Lowmeyer and Willard, whom they saw as two separate conspirators with Galt, were aliases for the escaped fugitive from Missouri State Penitentiary. Photographs of Ray soon ran nationwide.12
But then the FBI also grew weary of prospective conspiracy leads. This was unfortunate, because many developed after April 19, including Myrtis Hendricks’s story to the Dallas field office about John’s Café. She entered the field office with her boyfriend, who confirmed elements of the story, but who voiced great fear of retaliation by the Klan against relatives still living in Mississippi. In addition to the story about Deavours Nix receiving news about King’s murder before the shooting, Hendricks offered background information that helps shed additional light on what may have transpired in Laurel, Mississippi. She described discreet and suspicious conversations she overhead between Nix, Bowers, and at least one man with whom she was not familiar, in days leading up to King’s murder. In one notable exchange she recalled that the day before the King murder, Bowers and Nix “worked” the stranger, insisting, about a matter that Hendricks could not identify, that “only you”—the stranger—can “make this happen.”13 Reports from other informants, and Hendricks’s description, make it likely that this individual was L. E. Matthews, the man who took over the White Knights when Bowers went to prison.14 It is worth noting that a separate stream of informant reports, unconnected to Hendricks, shows that fellow White Knights could not reach Matthews because he was arranging for an “out-of-state project” for the Klan. Additionally, Matthews housed both Tommy Tarrants and Eugene “Sunset” Mansfield in his home in the weeks before the King murder.15 Both men, as noted earlier, would become some of the first suspects in King’s murder. Matthews’s unique position in relation to several suspects in the King case is an important dynamic worth remembering as the story of the investigation of King’s murder unfolds.
There were other, additional leads that, like the Hendricks lead, developed after April 19 and did not get the attention they deserved. This included the reports on the 1964 offer to Donald Sparks. The FBI did interview an uncooperative Sparks in jail about the 1964 rumors, but never dug deeply enough into the story to see the obvious connections to McManaman. From the end of April forward, conspiratorial leads were often held in abeyance or minimized if there wasn’t an obvious connection to Ray or, even less logically, if the individuals in question could not be placed in Memphis on April 4. This is what allowed the FBI to eliminate J. B. Stoner as their top lead—he was, recall, literally dancing in celebration in Meridian upon the news of King’s murder—within hours of the crime.16 This, despite their own records showing that the lawyer rarely remained within the same zip code when he knew that a crime, such as a bombing, would take place on his initiative.
despite a massive manhunt for people using his various aliases and ultimately for Ray himself, Ray managed to stay one step ahead of his pursuers for several months. Having made a mad dash back to Atlanta, he left and ultimately abandoned his white Mustang near the Capitol Homes housing project. Ray claimed he went back to Atlanta to recover certain belongings, but author Lamar Waldron points to several features of Ray’s return to Atlanta that support the notion that Ray was continuing to reach out to potential assassination sponsors, like Hugh Spake. The Capitol Homes housing project is located near the General Motors Lakeland auto factory; this is, again, where Spake worked and where, according to Waldron’s source, unidentified businessmen and white supremacist Joseph Milteer secretly syphoned off money from union dues to finance a bounty against Martin Luther King Jr. Witnesses described Ray leaving the Mustang and consulting what appeared to be a small black address book, something never found among Ray’s possessions.17 Most intriguingly, information indicates that Milteer himself was in Atlanta at the time, something significant enough to capture the attention of one of Milteer’s closest friends. In an otherwise inconspicuous exchange, Milteer’s friend says, “Looks as though you and the hunted suspect were in the Capitol area about the same time—they found a car there they say.”18 It is unclear if by “Capitol,” the friend meant the state capital, Atlanta, in general, or the Capitol Homes project specifically. But, as investigative reporter Dan Christensen noted in his series of articles that featured Milteer, this was one of the only instances in which Milteer, or any of his correspondents, referenced King’s assassination, even though they despised the civil rights leader.19
Ray certainly did not spend much time in Atlanta, suggesting, again, that he had little specific knowledge of which businessmen sponsored the plot or where to find them—that he, again, “jumped the gun” and, by shooting King, assumed a place in the conspiracy that was not intended for him and that he had not adequately planned for. As it had been the previous spring after escaping Missouri State Penitentiary, Ray’s immediate goal became escaping North America. He once again returned to Canada, only this time with the knowledge he needed to make good on his objective.
Ray claims he made his way to Toronto by April 6 via train and bus. The owner of the rooming house at 102 Ossington Street where Ray rented a room, Feliksa Szpakowska, told investigators that Ray first registered on April 8. The discrepancy suggests Ray’s stay in Atlanta was longer, and that he lied, one might speculate, to hide his efforts to find the bounty sponsors. Either way, Ray spent close to a week in Toronto attempting to obtain a fake passport. Using the Ossington Street address, Ray asked for a copy of a birth certificate under the name Paul Bridgman, on April 10. Not long after, someone claiming to be from the passport office contacted the real Paul Bridgman inquiring whether Bridgman already had passport. If the caller was Ray or someone helping him obtain false identification, they got bad news: yes, Bridgman told him, he already had a passport application on file. Not surprisingly, Ray never obtained Paul Bridgman’s birth certificate after Szpakowska received it on April 14. Instead, one Ramon George Sneyd, another resident of Toronto, received a call asking if he had a passport—Sneyd said no. Ray also soon rented a second room at a flophouse, one located a mile away from Szpakowska’s, at 962 Dundas Street and managed by Mrs. Sung Fung Loo (Ray claimed he rotated back and forth between the two rooming houses to further complicate efforts to find him). It is at Dundas where Ray received the birth certificate for Sneyd.20
Questions remain as to whether Ray had help in creating these documents. All the men Ray used as aliases, including Galt, were real Canadians; some lived close to each other in Toronto. Some authors make much of the fact that the men vaguely resemble Ray—but Ray
had circled their addresses on a map of Toronto, suggesting that he may have scouted them to see if they looked anything like him. Ray always insisted that he and he alone developed the fake identities. This forced even his own lawyers and investigators to question Ray’s honesty. Historians like Philip Melanson, who also believed that Ray used Raul as a composite of several accomplices to throw off authorities, imply that Ray was covering for people, presumably government agents, who helped him with fake identities.
But if Ray was covering up for others, he certainly would not be protecting government agents; he spent his entire life blaming the U.S. government and government agents for framing him. It is possible, on the other hand, that Ray was covering for those in the Canadian criminal underworld who ran a pipeline for fake identification at the time. One of the most accomplished criminals in Missouri State Penitentiary, George Edmondson, referenced this enterprise to the FBI and insisted that Ray would have been aware of it. John Nicol, a Canadian reporter, tied Ray to a Canadian hoodlum, George Kapakos, someone with extensive underworld ties; Nicol argued that he was among those who helped Ray obtain his aliases. What cued Nicol to the address was an incident in which Ray was stopped for jaywalking by Toronto police; Ray provided the address of 6 Condor Avenue to the authorities and claimed, later, that this was a random place he had never visited but that belonged to a woman whom he had identified in a lonely hearts advertisement in a Canadian newspaper. This, Nicol asserted, was another lie Ray told to cover for criminal accomplices. The address was for a brothel run by Kapakos’s wife and Ray had circled it on the map.21
On April 16, Ray visited a Toronto travel agency and arranged for a round-trip flight to England. Operating, once again, under the false assumption he might need a Canadian citizen to vouch for him, Ray initially arranged for a ticket three weeks in advance. But the travel agent corrected Ray’s misperceptions this time, and Ray filled out the necessary paperwork to exit North America. While waiting for his passport to be delivered, Ray claimed he once again went to Montreal until May 1, looking for a ship to take him to an African country without an extradition treaty. But investigators believe that Ray, if he did visit Montreal at all, spent additional time in Canada—Ray’s vaccination records show a Toronto doctor during this time, and Sung Fung Loo told investigators that Ray ended his stay at her flophouse on April 26. After almost a month in Canada, Ray flew to London on May 6, and then to Lisbon, Portugal, on May 7, where he spent ten days continuing to try to find some means to travel to an African country from whence he would not be extradited.22
Back in the United States, the FBI was receiving interesting reports from two informants close to Jerry Ray, James’s brother, with whom he was in close contact. Over several decades, Jerry Ray offered public statements, sometimes to the media and other times to authors, either implying his brother’s guilt or strongly defending his innocence and then sometimes recanting or claiming to have joked. But those were statements made with the expectation of public attention. In June 1968, Jerry Ray made private statements to his then-girlfriend and landlady in Newark, New Jersey, neither of whom he realized were FBI informants. The informants asked Jerry Ray if “he thought his brother shot King. Ray replied by pointing out if he were in his brother’s position of having an 18 year sentence to serve once he was apprehended and someone offered him money to kill someone he did not like and thereafter be able to leave the country, he would do it . . .” Later he added that James was “paid either $100,000 or $500,000,” but would not elaborate.23
It is unlikely that James Earl Ray had yet received the $100,000 or more, as he was running out of cash in London. Eventually, he ran out of money and robbed a bank in London on June 4. By this point, information on Ray was widely disseminated throughout Europe via Interpol. Detectives finally arrested Ray on June 8 on his way to Brussels at Heathrow Airport. He was soon extradited to American custody. Ray had hoped that in Brussels he could find former British mercenaries, veterans of combat in the Belgian Congo, who could help him find his way to an African country out of the reach of American authorities.24 The same day of his arrest, June 8, 1968, the Reverend Wesley Swift finally returned to give his first sermon since the King assassination. He titled it “Ye That Have Killed for Gold.”25
One popular view of Ray’s escape is that, up until his being taken into custody in London, Ray had moved swiftly and smoothly out of the United States, through Canada, and multiple European countries. That view argues that he had been well funded by co-conspirators
who maintained ongoing contact with him. But we find little evidence to support that view and much that contradicts it.
Ray was forced to make a last-minute effort to sanitize his car and his apartment before heading out for Canada. He did a poor job of that, leaving behind key evidence in both locations; there is no indication that he had made any preparations to cover his trail prior to the shooting in Memphis. The only precautions he appears to have taken during the entire period were to buy the rifle in a name other than Galt (he used the name Harvey Lowmeyer) and to register at the Memphis rooming house under yet another name (John Willard). Up until the evening before the Memphis shooting, he was still using the Galt name for motel registration. However, he had no counterfeit identification papers for either the Lowmeyer or Willard names, so he had to use the Galt name as he fled the country.
Rather than a well-planned and sophisticated escape, we see Ray leaving the United States by bus, building his own fake identity in Canada, buying the cheapest possible ticket overseas ($340 round-trip to London), and then making his way to Portugal, where he fruitlessly tried to contact companies who provided mercenaries for service in Africa, apparently hoping they would employ him and provide the transportation and paperwork to get him there. With only $840, Ray could have flown directly to Rhodesia and at least been safe from extradition, but apparently he didn’t have that relatively modest amount. Even if he had made it back through London to Brussels, what would have become of him is unclear. Certainly he didn’t have the money to play tourist forever. He was so desperate for money that he was forced into multiple robbery attempts in London, finally stealing $240 from a London bank. When he was taken into custody at the airport, Ray had a total of $143 on his person.26 While there is ample evidence that Ray had help of some sort in the lead-up to the April 4 shooting, Ray’s escape afterward follows the same pattern demonstrated throughout his criminal career—the execution of the crime was more successful than the execution of the getaway. And that further suggests that Ray never was able to contact the people he needed to reward him for King’s murder; those people never planned for Ray to be the actual shooter.
If they had lost interest in conspiratorial activity when they identified Ray in April, the FBI became only more narrow-minded once he was captured. This extended even to suspicious activity by Ray himself. Ray for instance, once wrote his other brother, John, a mysterious letter in which he directed his brother: “Don’t discuss any part of this case with anyone until I get back especially the libel part. I think pity will have a good thing. If you see Fu Manchu or the Tongue tell them am OK. Take it easy.” John Ray never explained this, especially who “Fu Manchu” and “the Tongue” were.27 John Ray did tell reporters that his brother would never “name names under any any circumstances. That is not his way.” He added, in that same article, that James had told him that “I’m not the only one in on this.”28
according to tarrants, he received word of King’s murder, both to his surprise and to his glee, while hiding out at a paramilitary camp run by Swift followers in the city of Franklin in the mountains of North Carolina. The FBI, months later, was able to find witnesses to Tarrants’s presence at the camp, and to document his relationship with the family who owned the property, especially the son,
J. A. Hendrickson.29 Tarrants told author Jack Nelson that he had no insight into anything that happened to King, and there is no evidence, to this day, that Tarrants knows about the FB
I’s mysterious and as-yet-still-unexplained interest in him as a possible conspirator in King’s murder. Tarrants told Nelson he stayed in North Carolina until
April 18, when he went back to Mobile and then stayed in New Orleans for several days. Tarrants was short on details in describing this stay, but records show he at least visited his old mentor, white supremacist Sidney Crockett Barnes, in Mobile. Tarrants says that for the next several weeks, until June, he floated back and forth between North Carolina and Mississippi, sometimes visiting White Knight Danny Joe Hawkins, sometimes bringing Danny Joe with him to North Carolina. Along the way, he committed a number of robberies, including of a grocery store in Mississippi.30
It was only at the end of May 1968 that anything developed that could justify consider treating Tarrants as a suspect in the King mur-
der. The Jackson field office received a tip that Tarrants was “the Man,” the “mad dog killer” who had terrorized Mississippi’s Jewish and black population for the past several months.31 By this point, all bets were off with Mississippi law enforcement groups when it came to Klan opposition. How they dealt with Tarrants and the underground hit squad is probably the most controversial manifestation of a war that had been raging for months. Having raised outside money from Jewish groups, mainly the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to pay two White Knights, Raymond and Alton Wayne Roberts, to become informants, the Meridian Police Department and the Jackson field office gathered information confirming that Tarrants and Danny Joe Hawkins were part of Sam Bowers’s secret terrorist group. But rather than arrest the men, law enforcement arranged for the Roberts brothers to lure the two men into a trap by encouraging them to bomb a synagogue in Meridian. The record makes it clear that law enforcement had no intention of taking these men alive in this sting.32