Killing King

by Stuart Wexler

  Even before he was extradited to the United States, Ray’s choice of attorneys reflected these two parallel tracks. The British courts asked Ray for Americans to represent him in his extradition hearings. Ray offered three choices: F. Lee Bailey, a nationally known defense attorney famous for winning a not-guilty verdict for Dr. Sam Sheppard in a 1966 retrial for his wife’s murder; Melvin Belli, the California-based mob attorney who represented Jack Ruby for shooting Lee Harvey Oswald; and Arthur Hanes Sr., the former mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, who won acquittals for four men accused of murdering civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo.2 Ray would have to wait to find a more reliable group of people to invest in his sincere innocence: Bailey and Belli turned him down. But in Hanes, Ray connected with an attorney who at least, in theory, could reach the kind of white supremacists who might free Ray.

  Hanes would claim that he chose to take on Ray’s case because he was convinced Ray was the patsy in a conspiracy against King. But an investigation strongly suggested that North Carolina–based KKK operatives offered Hanes $12,500 in another case as a proxy payment to convince Hanes to represent Ray.3 That such a deal came from North Carolina is significant. Joseph Milteer, the Wesley Swift acolyte who the authors believe tapped into his network of rich racist friends to help raise the money for the King bounty, had, according to research from author Lamar Waldron, extensive connections to property and friends in North Carolina.4 Tommy Tarrants stayed in a paramilitary camp run by Swift devotees in North Carolina when King was shot in Memphis. Margaret Capomacchia connected those camps to the Sullinger family out of Florida. Ferris Sullinger is noted in government documents as being one of the chief sponsors of Swift’s church and other white supremacist groups.5 On the other hand, Ray’s choice of Hanes is not suspicious on its face, given Hanes’s well-

  regarded reputation as lawyer.

  It was that reputation that encouraged the courts in Tennessee to maintain Hanes as Ray’s main lawyer. Eventually the chief duties for representing Ray in court fell to Percy Foreman, another court-designated attorney with a strong reputation as a litigator. Foreman is the attorney who convinced Ray to accept a guilty plea. Even then, Ray planted the seeds for his eventual defense. Having heard the judge detail the official narrative of the case, Ray acquiesced to every charge but took exception to one: the idea that there was no conspiracy. Eventually, as will be detailed shortly, Ray would blame Foreman for misleading him into accepting any guilt at all and highlighted the conspiracy as the core of his counternarrative. But this is an ad hoc defense. While there are many aspects of Foreman’s counsel that deserve scrutiny and even criticism, Foreman knew what the long-time criminal Ray also knew: the evidence against him was damning, and a death penalty verdict by a jury was a distinct possibility. Yes, the ballistics markings tying the Gamemaster rifle Ray bought in Birmingham to the fatal bullet that killed King were inconclusive, and the witnesses from Bessie Brewer’s rooming house were uncertain in their identifications of Ray as the shooter because many, on April 4, were inebriated. But there were also these facts: Ray’s movements closely track King’s from Los Angeles to Selma, to Atlanta to Memphis; he purchased a rifle in Birmingham found near the scene of the crime; only his fingerprints were found on that rifle; he purchased binoculars the day of the crime; he registered at Bessie Brewer’s rooming house across from Lorraine from whence witnesses heard the shot; he fled Memphis immediately after the shooting and eventually escaped the continent in search of a country with no extradition orders.

  To work his way around this incriminating set of facts, Ray arranged through Hanes to work with a famous writer, William Bradford Huie, to construct a counternarrative to the official version of events. In an exchange of letters—virtual essays in some cases—between Huie and Ray, Ray attempted to explain away everything, arguing that he was a complete and total patsy, one whom Foreman browbeat into what amounted to a guilty plea. As noted in various places in the book, Ray offered the mysterious figure of “Raul,” a gun-running, drug-running man of mystery with hints (that would grow stronger as Ray’s narrative evolved) of intelligence community connections. When Ray planned to escape from North America via Canada in 1967, Raul convinced Ray to instead remain in North America in gun- and drug-running operations. Raul promised, but failed to deliver, time and time again, the papers Ray would need to flee the country. Instead, as Ray claimed to realize only after King’s murder, Raul was manipulating Ray into visiting places and engaging in activities that would, after the fact, make Ray look very guilty as a potential King assassin. Ray’s movements only tracked King’s in those last two weeks, Ray claimed, because Raul moved the escaped fugitive around like a pawn on a chessboard. Raul told Ray to buy a weapon. Raul told Ray to meet him in Memphis, and then to leave the weapon at Bessie Brewer’s rooming house. Raul sent Ray away, and then (presumably) shot King, fleeing in the same style car, dropping the rifle with Ray’s belongings outside Canipe Amusement Company, leaving Ray to be captured and suffer the blame for one of the most important crimes in American history.6

  Huie leaned toward the possibility of a conspiracy for much the same reason the authors and others do: Ray did not strike him as a violent racist. Yet Huie suspected that violent racists likely sponsored King’s murder. To Huie’s credit, he did not fully trust Ray either. He set out to evaluate and confirm Ray’s claims, assertion by assertion. Huie found some tantalizing evidence of a conspiracy—the dinner for two at Mammy’s Shanty,7 the fact that Ray returned the rifle for a better weapon and cited someone else (his brother or brother-in-law) as the reason. But Huie ultimately—and the authors believe mistakenly—dismissed Ray’s claims because of holes in Ray’s story and Ray’s reluctance to go into detail on key matters. Huie came to realize what other historians, even those sympathetic to Ray, later observed: that Ray’s ability to remember even minute details about his life after he escaped from Jefferson City became noticeably less acute when he began to describe potentially incriminating activities. This is noticeable, for instance, when Ray described his activities and whereabouts during his stay in New Orleans in December 1967.

  One could argue—as we do—that these gaps in Ray’s descriptions could represent opportunities for a guilty Ray to have engaged with conspirators, that Ray was hiding the involvement of others. But on Ray’s key conspiratorial claim—his manipulation by Raul—Huie could find no one to confirm any interactions between Ray and the mysterious Raul figure. Ray also blatantly lied to Huie about important parts of his story. In his original account, Ray claimed that Raul fled with Ray; after presumably shooting MLK and fleeing Bessie Brewer’s, Raul got into Ray’s white Mustang, found Ray, and urgently ushered him into the vehicle. At that point, in Ray’s original story, Raul insisted Ray hide himself under a white bed sheet as they fled Memphis.8 Ray later admitted this story was false, telling Arthur Hanes that it was a joke meant to mock Huie’s pursuit of a Klan angle in the case (white sheet, white hood). But Huie may have viewed that claim the way many others view it—an unlikely subject for a joke when the fake alibi is also being communicated through Hanes, the man responsible for saving Ray from the electric chair. Huie ultimately, and the authors believe wrongly, concluded that Ray solely murdered Martin Luther King Jr.

  Ray openly branded Huie a traitor to the cause, someone desperate to monetize the simplest story, the official narrative. To an extent Ray was right—Huie made a small fortune from the book that resulted from his interactions with Ray. Percy Foreman, who helped negotiate the deal with Huie, also deserves criticism, as his dealings with Huie represented a potential conflict of interest. The claim there would be that once Huie decided to write a book invested in the official narrative, Foreman had a fiduciary interest in Ray accepting blame for the crime. But this ignores Huie’s legitimate concerns about the Raul story, flaws, as we will detail later, that only get worse over time. One clear example: Ray told Huie that the decision to exchange the Browning rifle for the Gamemaster rifle in Birmingham
at the end of March came from Raul. Raul, in this initial telling, opened the Browning rifle from its box, handled the rifle, and then returned it to Ray when he found it wanting. Ray did, as previously noted, cite someone else as motivating the rifle update when he returned it, and by all accounts, the escaped fugitive did not have the knowledge of weapons to know why a Gamemaster would be superior to the Browning. The problem is that Ray’s fingerprints are the only ones found on the Gamemaster. When he was confronted with this, Ray changed his story: Raul no longer directly handled the rifle in Birmingham; in fact, he never took it out of the box. When he fired the fatal shot, Ray contended, Raul must have used gloves.9

  Ray could not convince Huie of his innocence. He could not get Bailey or Belli to defend him. In the period before Percy Foreman became co-counsel, when Hanes was his only attorney, Ray reached out for additional help. One of his first choices in that search is among the most suspicious—so suspicious that the attorney himself likely turned Ray down for fear of how it may have appeared. Ray tasked his brother Jerry with obtaining the services of Percy Quinn as a lawyer. This decision defies any innocent explanation, as Quinn’s main, and often only, clients were the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi.10 Quinn did not even have a listed phone number or legitimate office in southern Mississippi. He worked from within his own home.11 When the authors asked Jerry Ray about this, he could not remember how he acquired or who provided him with contact information for Quinn. Jerry also said someone referred Quinn to James while he was awaiting trial in a Tennessee jail.12 But, as noted earlier, from the start, Tennessee prison authorities kept Ray in isolation from other prisoners well into his trial. Quinn did represent Klan members (including, notably, Sam Bowers) in several widely publicized trials in the late 1960s, but Quinn also lost almost every one of those cases. That Ray reached out first to an attorney for a group that actively tried to kill King for years and that, as established in this book, offered a bounty to kill King in federal prisons across the country, is a strong sign that Ray knew, at least in general terms, who the driving force was behind King’s murder. One can surmise that Quinn understood (or was made to understand) the risks involved in having Sam Bowers’s chief attorney represent the accused King assassin. Quinn turned Ray down.

  But bad optics did not discourage Ray from attempting to employ some of the most ardent and overt racists in the country as his attorneys, even if one forgives him Hanes because of his legal reputation. The list includes neo-Confederate Jack Kershaw, whom Ray kept as legal counsel for years, and who personally sculpted, in the 1990s, a

  twenty-five-foot monument to the KKK’s first Grand Wizard General Nathan Bedford Forrest in Tennessee.13 It also includes Raulston Schoolfield,14 who once ran for governor in Tennessee on a segregationist platform. In the courtroom, Raulston’s most famous effort came in defense of John Kasper,15 who later ran for president of the United States on the ticket for the National States Rights Party.

  Kasper’s vice presidential running mate was none other than J. B. Stoner, whose involvement with Ray’s defense is deeply suspicious. That Stoner sought Ray as a client is not dubious on its face, as Stoner loved the publicity that came with defending anyone accused of a racist crime. Ray’s decision to welcome Stoner on his legal team, on the other hand, despite Hanes strongly advising against it, is highly suspicious.16 Hanes knew that with a jury trial pending, Ray needed to avoid even the appearance that he murdered King out of racial animus. Stoner, nationally known as one of America’s worst racists, wouldn’t help Ray’s cause. Stoner, oddly, then hired Ray’s brother, Jerry Ray, as his security guard. Years later, when Congress reexamined the King murder, James Earl Ray waived attorney-client privilege for everyone who represented him in the past, except for J. B. Stoner. This was convenient for Stoner, whom Congress thought should be treated as a suspect; under the cloak of attorney client privilege, Stoner frustrated that inquiry.17

  Stoner’s involvement as Ray’s attorney, and his decision to hire Jerry Ray as a security officer for years, suggests that Stoner was some kind of conduit between Ray and the conspirators. If so, the timing and substance of a note Ray wrote and placed in the gar-

  bage—recovered by prison guards—is highly suggestive. Author Pate McMichael, building on the work of investigative reporter Marc Perrusquia, suggested the note was written at approximately the same time that Ray began meeting with Stoner in prison custody. At the bottom of half of the note, Ray wrote: “I got a murder charge instead of 10,000 for listening to promises. No more fool pants.”18

  Stoner’s association with Jerry Ray deserves more attention than most historians of the case assign to it. It is often treated as an afterthought even though Jerry Ray and Stoner maintained the relationship for years. One might be tempted to think that this is a marriage of convenience, with Jerry keeping an eye on his brother’s attorney while Stoner used Jerry to improve his racist bona fides, but this ignores the degree to which Jerry Ray appears to have embraced Stoner’s ideology. The HSCA, for instance, found a letter, sent to the NSRP member and signed by Jerry Ray, in which Jerry Ray openly condemns Jews and their satanic-communist conspiracy.19 Jerry’s very association with Stoner, like his brother’s decision to hire the NSRP leader as an attorney in the first place, only reinforced the perception of James’s guilt—the racial-animus theory—in the minds of investigators.

  Many began to question if Jerry Ray himself was a co-conspirator in the crime. James Earl Ray consistently referenced his unnamed “brother” in explaining a host of his decisions, from leaving Los Angeles in March 1968, after which he proceeded to stalk King, to upgrading his rifle purchase from a .243 Browning to a .30-06 Game-

  master in Birmingham. The authors cannot dismiss the possibility of Jerry Ray’s involvement but it seems unlikely that James Earl Ray would invoke his brother, even ambiguously, if it could expose Jerry Ray to consequences with the law. Similarly, it seems unlikely that Jerry Ray would implicate his brother if, in fact, Jerry shared criminal culpability.

  And time and time again, Jerry Ray said things, in public and in private, that painted James Earl Ray in a guilty light. We have already discussed the private conversation he had with his FBI-informant love interest and her landlady, in which Jerry said James killed someone he already didn’t like (King, in the context of the conversation) in hopes of getting anywhere from $100,000 to $500,000. But Jerry also gave public interviews where he implied the same guilty knowledge. In interviews with George McMillan, Jerry insisted that the Raul narrative was “just a story Jimmy made up” for William Bradford Huie and that his brother’s account of a drug-smuggling operation from Canada was a “lie.” But almost from the moment McMillan’s book was released, Jerry claimed he was misquoted or pulling jokes on McMillan and reasserted his faith in the Raul story. Jerry also said in newspapers that James Earl Ray had provided him with phone numbers of conspiratorial contacts in New Orleans that Jerry was keeping in a safe deposit box.

  Historians and others sympathetic to James Earl Ray have had to completely disavow Jerry at times; others selectively quote Jerry’s statements that help James Earl Ray but ignore the statements that hurt him. The authors believe Jerry may have been part of the misdirection game himself, walking, in many ways, the same tightrope as his brother James between assuaging the actual conspirators (like Stoner) and working toward obtaining his brother’s release.

  No group of people were more frustrated by Jerry than the other team of legal experts Ray assembled to help his cause, a group of left-leaning attorneys and investigators who became convinced of James Earl Ray’s counternarrative. Almost to a person, they included the earliest critics of the Warren Commission’s report on the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. This included Mark Lane, Bud Fensternwald, Jim Lesar, and Harold Weisberg among others including comedian and civil right activist Dick Gregory. The first three represented Ray in some capacity or another as attorneys; Weisberg, as noted ear
lier, was one of Ray’s chief investigators. Weisberg, in particular, would write James Earl Ray with his frustrations about Jerry Ray and the inflammatory statements Jerry made to interviewers. But there was little Weisberg or anyone else could do.20

  Weisberg would hear out Jerry and James’s other brother, John Ray, when it came to conspiratorial leads. Most notably, Weisberg, at the two brothers’ urging, became interested in the 1965 Ohio plot, in which Venable and likely Stoner offered $25,000 for a group of men to massacre King and his family when King spoke at Antioch College.21 As noted earlier, Weisberg operated under the assumption that James Earl Ray was protecting the real conspirators, and this assumption appears to have extended, in some way, to Ray’s brothers. But Weisberg also doggedly stuck to the notion that Ray was completely innocent of the crime. To be fair, a portion of his thinking was informed by his opinions of the physical evidence in Memphis. But it is also is clear that James Earl Ray took advantage of deeply rooted skepticism that Weisberg, and several of his other attorneys, held in respect to federal investigators and the government as a whole, doubts that lingered from the inquest into President Kennedy’s murder. Some of Ray’s legal advisors even suspected that agencies of the U.S. government participated in the president’s murder and, just as importantly to Ray, that the agencies framed accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. That the U.S. government was once again claiming that a “lone nut” (James Earl Ray) assassinated another liberal icon (King) amplified preexisting biases in favor of Ray’s story about Raul.

  These critics deserve substantial credit for raising some of the biggest problems with the official investigation of King’s murder. This included the issues with physical and eyewitness testimony in Memphis, Ray’s gun purchases and movements, Ray’s purported motivations, and other matters, many of which have been described in this book. They were dogged and determined enough in developing and publicizing these findings that they helped push Congress to reopen the case.