Killing King

by Stuart Wexler

  On June 28, 1968, an informant called law enforcement and told them that two men, Hawkins and Tarrants, were on their way to do the job. Law enforcement was waiting and opened fire on their car. The passenger was mortally wounded, but the driver, Tarrants, managed to exit the vehicle, seriously wounded, returning fire. Eventually law enforcement caught Tarrants, but a surprise awaited them. The passenger killed in the car was not Danny Joe Hawkins, as planned, but Kathy Ainsworth.33 Hawkins had pulled out of the bombing at the last minute. Tarrants went to prison for the crime, while Kathy Ainsworth became a martyr to the white supremacist cause. During the several years he was in prison at Parchman, Tarrants converted to mainstream Christianity, and with the help of two FBI agents, obtained early release in 1976.34

  There are circumstantial reasons to suspect that this shooting was set up as a deathtrap with the provocation of the White Knights themselves. Hawkins’s last-minute decision to leave the bombing is one suspicious fact. More disconcerting is the role of the Roberts brothers. Despite betraying Sam Bowers’s most trusted operatives, the Roberts brothers decided to stay in Mississippi before they went to prison for their role in the MIBURN killings and returned to Mississippi after they served prison time. But they faced no repercussions from a vengeful Bowers. It is noteworthy then, that weeks before the bombing, someone reported Bowers as saying that “the Jews will finance the White Knights.”35 One can take this statement metaphorically and interpret it as saying that Bowers thought his attacks on Jewish targets would rally support for his group. But one can also see it more literally, and wonder if the Roberts brothers transferred some of the money raised from the ADL to Bowers’s organization, in effect acting as triple agents, overtly White Knights, covertly helping the FBI and Mississippi police, while really doing Bowers’s bidding all along. Why would Bowers want Tarrants and Ainsworth killed? We’ve already discussed the possibility that Bowers thought Tarrants was an informant. But it’s just as possible that Tarrants and Ainsworth represented loose ends related to the King assassination. Information developed in the next chapter certainly suggests that, whether Bowers set up a trap for Tarrants that June 28, those in the Swift network felt it necessary to sully Tarrants as a source by framing him for King’s assassination.

  with both ray and Tarrants in jail, one fugitive with an important connection to the King assassination remained on the loose: Donald Nissen. That manhunt began in early April, as soon as the FBI realized that Nissen had skipped Atlanta in violation of his parole. Reviewing his June 2, 1967, assertions about a White Knights bounty offer from Leroy McManaman at Leavenworth prison, the FBI gathered background information on Nissen’s likely locales and associates, and began to look for him. But at the same time, perhaps more importantly, they retraced their steps in investigating the substance of Nissen’s account.

  This began with Jackson agents to Sybil Eure in May 1968. In June 1967, Eure had acknowledged a working relationship with

  McManaman, but claimed ignorance about any connection whatsoever to a bounty on King’s life. Now, almost a year later, her story changed. Eure now claimed that everything was just a major misunderstanding. In the spring of 1964, when McManaman was staying with her, Eure was experiencing financial difficulties. At the same time, she followed reports about the Mississippi Burning murders in the news. Those reports mentioned that Sheriff Lawrence Rainey in Neshoba was part of the KKK and helped orchestrate the murders. Having a dark sense of humor, Eure joked to McManaman that all they had to do to get $100,000 was visit Sheriff Rainey and promise to kill Martin Luther King Jr. McManaman simply misconstrued the joke, and passed it off to a fellow prisoner as a legitimate bounty offer.36

  There are some serious problems with this new version of the story. First, it doesn’t resolve how Eure came to know McManaman in the first place, and why he was in Mississippi in apparent violation of the appeal bond. Second, it doesn’t explain why, having made numerous visits to McManaman at Leavenworth since 1964, and having exchanged several letters with the prisoner, the joke was never cleared up. In revealing Eure to Nissen as a cutout in a major criminal operation, McMamanan was, after all, exposing a woman he supposedly intended to marry to great risk. You’d think the matter would have deserved some discussion between the pair before he made the approach! Finally, and most importantly, there is an issue of timing: when McManaman stayed with Eure during the spring of 1964, the Mississippi Burning murders had not even happened yet. McManaman was gone before the end of April, and the Neshoba killings occurred on June 21, 1964.

  It is remarkable that the Jackson office did not recognize the contradictions immediately, given that they were directly involved in the recent prosecution of the Neshoba murders. But they once again took Eure at her word, and continued their search for Nissen, who traveled around the country, on the run.

  Nissen eventually called the FBI and agreed to turn himself in on condition that Special Agent Wayne Mack of the Phoenix field office was the arresting officer. Nissen knew Mack from his criminal days in Arizona, and though they were on opposite sides of the law, they enjoyed friendly relations. Mack was heading to St. Louis for an in-service training and agreed to pick him up. Nissen told the same story to Mack and his partner as he did to the Dallas FBI, but also detailed the threat issued against him near the Atlanta Federal Building in December 1967.37

  But if Nissen did talk about Ayers to the FBI, they would have been well aware of the eccentric Georgian by August 1968. This is because Ayers engaged in a series of odd and public behaviors shortly after Dr. King’s death. First, on April 11, 1968, Ayers infiltrated King’s funeral, posing as an usher, even seating presidential candidate George Romney. Things became more sinister than strange not long after, when Ayers posed as a chauffeur and convinced the deceased minister’s father, Martin Luther King Sr., to ride with him to the Atlanta Fulton County baseball stadium. A reporter recognized Ayers as an associate of James Venable, and managed to lure King Sr. away from Ayers, as the two were moving toward a dark and isolated part of the ballpark.38

  Ayers was not the first person with inside knowledge of a King plot to reach out to King Sr. In one of his last acts before going into hiding in Florida post-assassination, Nissen arranged a secret meeting with King Sr. With a secretary recording the conversation, Nissen detailed his Leavenworth story to the grieving father. He excluded some details of his experience, including, ironically, his experience with Ayers, because he remained uncertain about his own safety and legal culpability. Efforts to obtain the tape have been unsuccessful largely because of delays, at the King Center, in fully inventorying their holdings. One wonders to what degree King Sr., aware of both stories after Ayers’s attempted “kidnapping,” was piecing together the story behind his son’s murder.39

  What came next is even more provocative. Ayers appeared outside the White House gates, carrying a folder, asking to speak to President Johnson. The Secret Service arrested Ayers, letting him go soon after dismissing him as an apparent “kook.”40 This would affirm a speculative argument the authors made earlier in the book: that Venable chose Ayers in part because of the salesman’s well-known eccentricity. Anything Ayers would say before or after the King murder could be dismissed as the musings of a mad man. But what the Secret Service did not know is that this eccentric was someone whom multiple sources independently suspected of involvement in the King murder. In fact, Ayers appears to be the first suspect volunteered by law enforcement in Georgia—on April 7, before James Earl Ray had even been connected to Atlanta by way of his Mustang.41 This report predated two independent reports from associates of Ayers in Alabama, both voicing suspicions, based on his comments and odd behavior, that Ayers had something to do with the King murder.

  One of these sources was a lawyer named Bubba Jones who told the FBI on April 14 that he had defended Ayers against DWI charges in February of 1968. At that time, two months before King’s murder, Ayers, according to Jones, “talked of killing any SOB in
the country with a high powered rifle and a scope. He also talked of how easy it was to kill some prominent person. He also seemed to be incensed with racial problems.” Jones, having heard this talk, called KKK leader James Venable, “who said to tell Ayers to get in his car and get back to Atlanta.” Jones then followed up with the FBI’s Mobile office, reporting that Ayers boasted that he “had a high powered rifle behind the dresser in his hotel room.”

  One is left to speculate about what motivated Ayers and what was in that folder he brought to the White House. The early interest in him—before Ray was connected to Atlanta and before Ayers infiltrated King’s funeral proceedings—also raises eyebrows. Ayers’s brother told the authors that Ayers may have associated with Venable, he may have been influenced by Venable, but he was not a hardcore racist. One is left to wonder if Ayers was trying to speak about his role in the crime out of a sense of guilt. If so, no one took him seriously due to his flamboyance. Interviews with Ayers are not available in the current files. The Secret Service claims to have no files on Ayers despite the public references to their interactions with him, following his “visit” to the White House, in newspapers from the time.

  But the FBI took one last, logical step in investigating Nissen’s account: they finally interviewed Leroy McManaman. They had visited Leavenworth in June of 1967, where they found corroboration for Nissen’s story from his cellmate, John May, who acknowledged, just as Nissen claimed, that Nissen described the bounty plot and told the machinist that McManaman was interested in a procuring a special gun for the assassination attempt. May did not take Nissen seriously at the time, but he made an interesting side comment: May himself had heard about $100,000 bounties in bars in North Carolina before he went to Leavenworth. The FBI then approached other inmates with connections to McManaman who, predictably, claimed no knowledge of the plot. But at that time, remarkably, they never interviewed McMamanan himself. Now, more than a year after first visiting the federal prison, the agents from the FBI’s Kansas office first interviewed Leroy McManaman in September 1968.42

  McManaman’s claims were interesting. He acknowledged he did not like King but denied any connection to any kind of plot. Apparently forgetting Eure’s “joke,” he denied any knowledge of a bounty. He did however admit that he intended to marry Eure once he left prison. Finally, he denied ever knowing or associating with Nissen.43 Taken together, these are highly problematic answers. If he was operating on Eure’s joke when he approached Nissen, why couldn’t he remember it? How could he not know Nissen when the two, according to prison records, worked so closely together in the prison shoe factory? If Nissen did not know him at all, how could he know the name of the woman McManaman wanted to marry, much less her address? And if the two had no contact, what reason would Nissen have to implicate McManaman in a crime, a gratuitous act that resulted in Nissen jumping parole—for fictitious reasons, if you believe McManaman—and going back to prison? The FBI asked none of these follow-up questions and let the matter rest.

  Nissen insists that he told the FBI about his interactions with Ayers and his package delivery to Eure’s Jackson home in 1967 when Mack interviewed him in August 1968. If that is the case, the material has been excised from the record. This could be to protect the FBI’s reputation, as Nissen’s story, and their failure to adequately follow up on it, puts the Bureau’s competence into serious question. It could also be that Special Agent Wayne Mack, who enjoyed a friendly relationship with Nissen, may have kept that material out of Nissen’s report to protect Nissen, either from harm from unknown conspirators or from potential criminal charges that really were not warranted. A more likely explanation is that Nissen withheld that information himself and that he is confusing his interrogation by the FBI with revelations he later made to prison authorities. Nissen went to prison in Indiana in 1969 for his parole violation and he continued to fear for his life. Nissen says he explained his predicament to the prison warden, who followed up and became sufficiently concerned to transfer Nissen to another prison in 1970. At the time of this transfer, Minnesota’s Sandstone Prison, where the warden sent Donald, was one of only a handful of prisons just designated as Protective Custody Units under the new federal witness protection program.

  Presumably, a warden would not transfer a prisoner merely on the word of an inmate, so the authors attempted to obtain the records of that transfer with no success to date. But the authors suspect that Nissen, he says he did, told the prison warden the stories about Ayers and Eure and the package, while he withheld that information from the FBI in St. Louis when he first turned himself in. We do not doubt his sincerity, but with more than forty years of time separating his account to investigators from his account to us, he may simply be confusing what he told the warden with what he told the FBI.

  Although the Bureau of Prisons found Donald’s story credible and serious enough to send him into protective custody, the FBI did not take him seriously enough to fully develop the leads Nissen had given them. As it had with his original report, the FBI took a superficial approach with Nissen’s 1968 account. Had they integrated the information from all three manhunts, they may have been able to solve the case in 1968. The last hope for an official resolution did not come for almost another decade. But not before James Earl Ray, his brothers, and various white supremacists attempted to mislead those who questioned the official narrative of the King assassination.

  13

  misdirection

  Following his arrest at Heathrow Airport on June 8, James Earl Ray soon found himself on a plane to the United States to stand trial for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in a Tennessee court. Having then been placed in virtual solitary confinement in a jail in Shelby County, Tennessee, Ray pleaded guilty on March 10, 1969, conceding the charges read by Judge Preston Battle in the Memphis courtroom. The surprisingly quick end to the trial—before one even began—resulted in a ninety-nine-year sentence for Ray and spared him a death sentence. But even as he agreed to several pages’ worth of stipulations of fact, James Earl Ray started to plant the seeds of confusion that would characterize the case in the decades that followed. Aware that United States attorney general Ramsey Clark had discounted the possibility that he had any confederates (something Clark later admitted he said to calm a tense nation), Ray publicly took exception on one issue. “I don’t really accept the theories of Mr. Clark,” he told the court on March 10. “I mean on the conspiracy thing,” he clarified.1 By March 13, Ray had fully recanted his confession, blaming it on poor advice from his lawyer, Percy Foreman. Ray had already been working with journalist William Bradford Huie for months on a series of long-form articles in which he would develop the “Raul” story for public consumption. But Huie, like the numerous appellate courts that Ray presented his story to in the decades that followed, did not buy his tale of complete innocence, and for good reason.

  If the authors are right, James Earl Ray faced a much more complicated challenge than a criminal proceeding. He wanted the bounty money, or a large share of it, and the evidence makes clear that he could not find a sponsor willing to give him his due. But he risked a conviction that could have easily elicited a death sentence. If Ray, on the other hand, conceded his guilt to obtain a lesser sentence, he still faced decades, even life in prison, where bounty money would do no good. If he chose to go further, and identify potential conspirators, he might be released much earlier—but he would forgo any chance of a bounty. Moreover, with any cooperation, he’d be exposing himself to grave harm. While in custody and facing trial in Tennessee, Ray would be kept in isolation, but once convicted, he’d be in a state prison with a giant target on his back. Dixie Mafia hoodlums or white supremacists could kill or maim him. Even if such people did not attempt to kill Ray, a lack of friends on the inside would make him a prime target for black prisoners who would have resented him for participating in a King plot. Ray’s actions going forward are best explained by this core dilemma—having to thread the needle between stayi
ng alive and safe in prison while preserving his chances to get the money he felt was rightly due to him if he could find a path to freedom.

  One can find Ray’s attempted solution to this problem in his choice of—and use of—attorneys and investigators. Other than the attorneys who were assigned to defend Ray in his initial trial, he chose two basic groups of people to advance his cause. On the one hand, Ray surrounded himself for decades with lawyers with very strong connections to white supremacists. This likely served two purposes: signaling to the group of people Ray broadly understood as backing the plot that he intended to keep their involvement a secret, and attempting to reach out to lawyers who could serve as middlemen between Ray and the sponsors he never found, in the same way mob attorneys serve as conduits between lower-level mafioso and senior leaders. In the case of the former, Ray could obtain a measure of protection from those same Dixie Mafia and white supremacist inmates while in prison by assuring conspirators outside of prison that he was “playing ball”; in the case of the latter, he could secure money in the event he obtained an early release from prison. That is where the second group of attorneys came in: people whom Ray could convince of his innocence and who could work tirelessly to see him freed, even in the face of his negative public image.