Killing King

by Stuart Wexler

  But the same passion for justice that these early critics brought to the Kennedy assassination investigation left them open to manipulation by James Earl Ray. These men wrote books detailing the flaws in the Warren Commission report, in support of the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy, and here they had another purported lone assassin asserting the same thing. Both Ray and Oswald used fake names and aliases; both Ray and Oswald traveled to places like New Orleans and Mexico. Only now the accused assassin survived with sufficient knowledge of the grand conspiracy to point a finger at the mysterious figure known as Raul. To Ray’s proponents, who shared leftist and antiwar sensibilities and who saw evidence of right-wing government manipulation in the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, the idea that some government contract agent would manipulate a patsy into murdering an antiwar liberal like King had enormous appeal.

  But the differences between Oswald and Ray would also be obvious if these left-leaning experts brought the same critical faculties they used in defending Ray and attacking the Warren Commission to bear on Ray’s story. Oswald’s trip to Mexico City two months before the president’s murder included provocative visits to the Cuban and Russian Consulates and left a trail of mysterious record keeping, on the part of the CIA, that led congressional investigators to speculate that someone impersonated Oswald during his visit. Ray’s trip to Mexico, on the other hand—other than the unverifiable parts from Ray himself—clearly show someone interested in finding low-level narcotics and engaging in pornography. Ray’s transparent lies about aspects of his Mexico trip, namely that Raul ordered him to purchase the cameras and other material that clearly were meant to help Ray film salacious acts—defy belief. Contract hit men for the government have no need for ceiling mirrors. The use of fake names is also common for criminals like Ray; it is not common for “everyday” individuals like Oswald.

  In fact, it is not uncommon for a criminal to invent a fake person altogether, like Raul, to deflect some or all of the blame for a crime. Recall that Ray and his partner in crime, Walter Rife, invented a fictional scapegoat early in Ray’s criminal career when they invented Walter McBride as a fall guy for their escapades. The most obvious hint that Ray was following inquiries into the Kennedy assassination and using that to curry favor with well-known critics like Lane came during the height of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s very public investigation into the Kennedy assassination, when Garrison tried businessman Clay Shaw for conspiracy to assassinate the president in 1968 and 1969. Garrison famously appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson to advocate his case, and in so doing highlighted a picture of three men—purported tramps—in Dealey Plaza (the site of the Kennedy murder) who each appeared to be dressed abnormally well for hobos. Garrison pointed to one man in particular, commonly referred to as “Frenchy,” as a suspicious character. Not long after, James Earl Ray identified Frenchy as looking remarkably similar to Raul.22 Decades later, in the 1990s, JFK researchers identified Frenchy as a legitimate tramp; not long after, James Earl Ray gave a positive photo ID of another individual as being Raul—only this individual looked absolutely nothing like Frenchy.23

  His ever-shifting stories did give some on his legal team pause about Ray, but they tended to keep their reservations private. Weisberg and Fensterwald exchanged letters lamenting Ray’s mendacity.24 Weisberg, as noted earlier, came to believe that Ray was protecting others, the real King conspirators, by lying to authorities and to his own legal team. Weisberg passed this off as simple self-protection and, because he maintained faith in Ray’s total innocence, only worked privately, and gingerly at that, to press Ray for what he really knew. To his credit, Weisberg recognized the implications of Ray’s fabrications and evasions for any claim of involvement by the U.S. government in the King murder.25 Logically, Ray would not be covering up for U.S. government–sponsored killers while he simultaneously accused the U.S. government, in television interviews, in books, and through his attorneys, of arranging King’s murder. In letters to other researchers, Weisberg ridiculed theories that, for instance, implicated J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI in King’s murder. Ray would not cover for them (indeed he listed them among the conspirators). Weisberg, instead, believed Ray was covering up for those in the criminal underworld. The authors agree with Weisberg that Dixie Mafia–type hoodlums, like James Ashmore (using the alias J. C. Hardin), linked Ray into the conspiracy; unlike Weisberg, we would add that Ray likely also knew, more generally, that certain white supremacist groups helped mastermind the King assassination. That is why we, again, believe he accepted the help of someone like Stoner, with connections to almost every KKK group in the country, especially in the Southeast, to represent him. Outwardly and in practice, however, lawyers like Lane behaved in the same way as Stoner, openly accusing the government of involvement in the King death, even as they privately made excuses for Ray’s evasiveness to each other.

  They sincerely believed Ray’s essential narrative of the unwitting dupe, looking past his ad hoc changes and adjustments. For thirty years, for instance, no researcher was able to identify the place where Ray allegedly was having an auto tune-up when MLK was murdered. Mark Lane did unearth two people who claimed they worked on Ray’s car only to have both men exposed as liars in the late 1970s.26 What is never discussed is whether Lane received support for that claim from Ray—to believe otherwise would mean that Lane, a skilled and experienced lawyer, offered alibi witnesses for Ray without ever bothering to ask Ray about them. But if one believes the opposite, that Ray privately endorsed these alibi witnesses before they were exposed as hoaxers by the HSCA, it would represent the second time that Ray offered a false alibi (recall the getaway, white-sheet story he told to Hanes and Huie).

  Of course, the alibi story has never made sense from the perspective of the kind of well-conceived conspiracy and frame-up Ray’s defenders posited. To believe Ray would mean that Raul, the man who masterfully manipulated Ray and managed his movements in anticipation of Ray being framed as a patsy, made a huge mistake when it mattered most. He let Ray wander about Memphis at the very moment the actual shooting was to take place. No amount of supposedly planted evidence would matter if Ray simply had a verifiable alibi. He could have any number of alibi witnesses for instance, or a receipt that confirmed where he was. If so, Raul and the whole conspiracy to frame Ray would have come crashing down. But Ray could never find anyone reliable to verify that he was getting his Mustang fixed. In fact, despite four decades’ worth of investigative attention, no one has even found the supposed location where the repair occurred. Lane tried and failed.

  Perhaps owing to this, Ray once again found another lead counsel to replace Lane: British attorney William Pepper. Pepper is more responsible than virtually anyone else for convincing the country—and King’s closest family members—that Ray is innocent and that a high-level U.S. government conspiracy is behind MLK’s death. Ray’s influence on Pepper may well be similar to his influence on his other lawyers. In Pepper, Ray identified a former ally of King’s from the civil rights movement who, like many of King’s aides, saw the 1968 King as a major threat to the establishment regarding Vietnam and other issues. We will explore the flaws in this thinking in the Appendix, but suffice it to say a belief in a power elite theory of King’s murder has allowed Pepper to march forward even as his critics, time and time again, shoot down his claims.

  Pepper has offered no fewer than three different people as the actual shooters in King’s murder. As each accusation is proved wrong, he simply flips to the next possible suspect. In his latest offering, he paid the person for the interview in which the known criminal claims responsibility. Pepper used clearly fraudulent documents and dubious witnesses to accuse a U.S. Special Forces member, Billy Ray Eidson, of leading the team of shooters in MLK’s death. Pepper claimed that Eidson was then taken out of the country and killed for his sinister knowledge. Pepper had to pay Eidson millions of dollars after he showed up, alive and well, in 1997 on ABC’s Turning P
oint, and directly confronted Pepper about his scurrilous accusations.27

  This did not stop Pepper from using the same sketchy documents and sources to launch a famous civil case in 1998, one in which the King family sued one of Pepper’s chief suspects, Memphis restaurant owner Loyd Jowers, for wrongful death. Pepper claims that Jowers provided the murder weapon to the actual King assassin, as part of a bounty a local mob figure offered at the behest of New Orleans mob kingpin Carlos Marcello. Jowers, after twenty-five years of saying something completely different, volunteered this to Pepper. Pepper could not rest there, claiming that Marcello, in turn, operated on behalf of and in conjunction with U.S. military and intelligence assets to kill King,28 a claim based largely on the same materials and witnesses who falsely implicated the U.S. Special Forces captain. Yet Pepper’s civil trial resulted in a guilty verdict against Jowers, a verdict that advocates for Ray’s innocence often cite in social media as the final word in an MLK conspiracy. But the verdict was all but rigged in advance, for reasons that James Earl Ray’s advocates frequently ignore.

  The fact that Pepper could use sources that he knew, from a previous civil trial, were bogus, is because the opposition party in the civil suit—Loyd Jowers—had no interest in winning the case. Quite the opposite. As Pepper notes in his own book, Jowers wanted to parlay his admission into a book and movie deal that would earn him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Jowers, in fact, by Pepper’s own admission, falsely accused one of the early “shooters” Pepper proposed. But this obvious lie did not deter Pepper. Nor did his numerous witnesses’ lies and changing stories convince Pepper that he may be representing a guilty man (Ray). If Jowers’s attorney, Lewis Garrison (no relation to the New Orleans district attorney), had wanted, he could have used Pepper’s own book on the case, Orders to Kill, to impeach the credibility of virtually every one of the witnesses Pepper presented at the 1998 civil trial. But Garrison did not and Peppers did not because both sides were working toward the same result. The civil suit filed by the King family was for only $1! Memphis and Tennessee law enforcement openly and publicly dismissed Jowers’s story. Jowers knew he could avoid prosecution and any serious civil fees while having a jury “officially” confirm his guilt—an official verdict that, by Pepper’s own admission, Jowers hoped would garner hundreds of thousands of dollars from a movie deal.

  The mutual arrangement, whether by design or by implication, is obvious from transcripts, and even quantifiable. There was only one procedural objection offered by Jowers’s attorney, Lewis Garrison, over a multiday trial. These are the most basic objections, like “no foundation” and “calls for speculation.”29 Garrison did not even object to a husband offering direct testimony in place of his wife (who was ill)—perhaps the most obvious example of hearsay in trial history. In contrast, one can find dozens of these sorts of objections on any day in the O. J. Simpson civil trial for the murder of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.30 The difference is obvious: Simpson stood to lose millions if he lost his case (and he did), and Jowers stood to lose a single dollar and possibly gain a lucrative movie deal if he lost. As Mark Lane noted to pro-Ray researcher Martin Hay: “It was not a real trial . . . both sides offered the same position and I have reason to doubt that the position they offered was sound. The jury, having seen no evidence to the contrary, had no choice. In my view, the court system should not be utilized in that fashion.”31

  Ray’s earliest supporters, like Lesar and Weisberg, do not deserve to be grouped with Pepper. They sincerely hoped to expose the kind of government conspiracy they saw at work in the JFK assassination. They identified many of the problems with the official version of the case that the authors cite in this book. But they fell into the fallacy of the excluded middle: they failed to see that in between the theory that Ray was the total dupe of a massive conspiracy and the theory that Ray was the lone shooter was the possibility that Ray was complicit, in some fashion, with a conspiracy. They needed only to look at the other group of attorneys, and question Ray’s motives in working with them, to see where that conspiracy led.

  James Earl Ray apparently lacked his lawyers’ faith that they could secure his release, even as nearly decades’ worth of advocacy helped propel Congress to reexamine King’s murder. At the same time the HSCA began its new investigation in 1977, on the eve of their first interview with the convicted assassin, James Earl Ray escaped from Bushy Mountain maximum security prison with six other inmates. The escape was, by all accounts, “imaginative and risky” and involved “widespread cooperation by other inmates.” Most importantly it involved what appeared to either be a stroke of good luck or a measure of careful design: the prisoners escaped past the one watchtower, out of six, that was unmanned that night. Representative Louis Stokes, one of the senior members of the HSCA, found the timing and circumstances—the prison warden also happened to be on vacation—to be coincidental at best. It raised the possibility of outside help at a time when Ray ran the risk of exposing conspirators to investigators. “If there was outside participation, the reasons for it are obvious, and the escape would have been perpetrated for one of two reasons; either that once Ray got out he would never be heard from again or that he could have been lured out for the purpose of killing him.”32

  If Ray had help, he did not disclose it, just as he never disclosed his accomplices in the King murder. He did manage to win over one other convert to his cause. The court stenographer at Ray’s trial for his escape, Anna Sandhu, not only bought Ray’s claim of innocence in the King murder, she developed a relationship with and eventually married Ray in 1978. For years, she publicly proclaimed his innocence and worked for his release from prison. But relations with Ray became strained over time. In 1993, Ray called Sandhu, angry that she had not visited him. Sandhu asked Ray for $800 to help fix her car. Ray offered to give her the sum under one condition: if she did not pay it back, he would send someone to shoot at her house. Sandhu did not sense Ray was joking. “You’re starting to sound like a somebody who would kill Martin Luther King,” she recalled telling him, years later. “Yeah, I did it,” he replied, “So what? I never got a trial.” The two divorced shortly after. Asked what would motivate Ray to kill King, Anna Sandhu Ray speculated that he did it for money. “He didn’t do anything for free,” she told reporter Jerry Mitchell in 2013. “He was the kind of person whose whole world revolves around money.”33

  if ray hoped to mislead his lawyers and the public at large in search of his elusive payday, the white supremacists who bore ultimate responsibility for King’s death also began their own effort to foil the investigation. The conspirators who raised the money for the King bounty and who advanced the plot to Memphis began playing games with investigators. Notably, Tommy Tarrants’s arrest in the Meridian sting on June 28, 1968, triggered a new wave of reports connecting him to possible involvement in the King murder. Both sets of reports emanated from a trip law enforcement informant Willie Somersett took. The Miami Police Department, which sponsored the trip, thought so highly of Somersett that they asked him to travel the United States and investigate the King murder, using his contacts in white supremacist circles.

  In July, Willie Somersett visited his old friend Sidney Barnes in Tommy Tarrants’s hometown of Mobile, Alabama. Barnes, as detailed previously, was part of an assassination plot against King in 1963, and while Somersett secretly taped him, Barnes confessed that this plot continued through 1964. Barnes also mentored Tommy Tarrants and Kathy Ainsworth in the ideology of Christian Identity and enjoyed close relationships with members of the White Knights in Jackson, Mississippi, where Barnes and his zealously racist wife, Pauline, in 1969. In July of 1968, Barnes invited Somersett to come to Mobile, where he told his friend an explosive story. A CB radio in Tommy Tarrants’s car was used to jam police radio broadcasts in Memphis the day of King’s assassination. This would not be out of character for Tarrants; he had described using police radios to monitor police frequencies when he engaged in petty racist activi
ties as a teenager in Mobile. The story closely echoes the CB radio diversion that in fact happened that day. Barnes continued, saying that Tarrants hid out with him for some time in Mobile not long after the King murder. A receipt found in Tarrants’s belongings at the Meridian bombing crime scene, recently discovered in Mississippi FBI files, conclusively establishes that Tarrants spent time in April with Barnes. The report from Somersett, however, on Barnes’s July 1968 revelations, never appears to have reached the FBI.

  One set of reports from Somersett did make it to the FBI, however, and it corroborates much of what Barnes said. Somersett also visited Margaret Capomacchia, Kathy Ainsworth’s mother, mourning her daughter’s shooting death. Capomacchia also revealed important information on the King assassination, apparently provided to her by her daughter. Capomacchia independently affirmed everything Barnes had to say about Tarrants: the CB radio jam in Memphis and his stay with Barnes. But she directly accused “him” of involvement in the King murder. She also accused several other members of the White Knights of participating in the King conspiracy. Somersett reported concerns about her mental stability and returned for a second round of conversations.34 There, Capomacchia focused her attention more on Tarrants, explaining that he had fled to North Carolina and stayed with someone Somersett reported as “Henderson,” who threw Tarrants out when he became “too hot.” At that point, Tarrants went to stay with Barnes.35 The FBI investigated Capomacchia’s story and found it inconclusive; given her mental instability, she must be making it all up. While Capomacchia identified several key figures in the Mississippi White Knights, all of them had alibis, and one of them had already been exposed as an FBI informant.36 Moreover, while the Miami PD valued Somersett as an informant, the FBI discontinued using him several years earlier, after a number of the stories he relayed about white supremacists, including other assassination plots, turned out to be false.