Killing King

by Stuart Wexler

  The FBI may have been right to doubt the report, but not for the reasons discussed. It appears Barnes and Capomacchia were likely using Somersett as an unwitting conduit of disinformation. This is not surprising. It turns out that certain members of the white supremacist community, notably J. B. Stoner, suspected Somersett as a snitch as early as 1962.37 When Somersett taped Barnes in 1964, the FBI returned to the Mobile racist and more or less exposed Somersett as an informant. Barnes implied as much in future informant reports.38 It is not a surprise that Somersett started to report more and more unreliable information to the FBI—white supremacists were likely deliberately feeding him misinformation. Most importantly, by 1967, reports of Somersett secretly taping Milteer—in which Milteer, in early November 1963, predicted JFK’s assassination and spoke about other plans to assassinate Martin Luther King Jr.—had already reached American newspapers. They did not name Somersett as a source, but how could Milteer, with his extensive contacts in the white supremacist movement, not know and not tell others? Somersett was compromised by 1967, and the fact that Barnes and Capomacchia—who were friends—were both willing to tell the same story to him is significant. They clearly were using Somersett to pass dubious information to the FBI.

  But this is not the end of the story. In placing Tarrants inside their purported King plot, the two racists also linked him to individuals who, again, had clear alibis for the King murder. Once the FBI dismissed these people as suspects, they didn’t care about the rest of the story related to Tarrants, and he was dismissed as an accomplice in the King murder. They may well have been right: Tarrants maintains that he was in North Carolina at the time of the assassination. But, paradoxically, Tarrants was also likely a key to exposing a Christian Identity plot, not because he participated in the murder, but because he was set up as an early patsy in the crime. Going back to the very early, inexplicable interest in Tarrants as a suspect in the King murder makes it seem likely that someone was reporting incriminating information about him to the FBI, such as the fact that Tarrants obtained a rifle from Swift in March for the express purpose of killing King. But things went awry in Memphis, and this early effort to frame Tarrants failed. It would have been obvious to the FBI that only one group was positioned to implicate him that early: the network of racists he worked with. They were the only ones who knew in March and April that Tarrants was a radical terrorist. Thus, a possible explanation for Barnes’s and Capomacchia’s is that they were using Somersett in a “modified limited hangout.” In the world of spies, a modified limited hangout involves providing a story that is a mix of truth and falsehoods; when the false part of the story is exposed, the hope is that the receiving party throws the baby out with the bathwater and discredits even the true parts of the story. In providing the disinformation on Tarrants, Barnes and Capommachia may have hoped to poison any interest the FBI had in Tarrants as a patsy in the King murder. They would effectively be reversing their original goal of framing Tarrants because Ray short-circuited the real plot. Or perhaps the effort was simply aimed at poisoning Tarrants as a source for law enforcement on other criminal activity. The record shows that Barnes was very concerned that Tarrants would ultimately expose white supremacists to law enforcement.

  It would take several years, but federal investigators eventually became interested in Barnes, Stoner, and several other names mentioned in this book. Owing to the work of all Ray’s attorneys and investigators, but most notably to the Warren critics, Congress opened a new investigation into the King and Kennedy assassinations in 1976. Congress established the House Select Committee on Assassinations to investigate lingering questions about both murders, in an atmosphere of increasing public skepticism over the federal government in the wake of the Watergate scandal and revelations about government surveillance and black bag operations, including those FBI director Hoover directed at Dr. King. The HSCA would ultimately conclude that a conspiracy was in fact behind the murder of the civil rights leader, and that James Earl Ray murdered King in hope of collecting a bounty. But they failed to identify the correct sponsor or the motivations for the conspiracy.

  14

  aftermath

  For five decades, the Department of Justice and the FBI, Congress, and scholars have failed to deliver justice in the King assassination. The pieces were there, even before the murder, but the relevant players never put them together. Understanding why may point a way forward to finally resolving the case.

  In 1968, the FBI was actively supporting what was a local prosecution of James Earl Ray. The Memphis district attorney was gearing up to present a case to a Tennessee judge and a Tennessee jury. Any conspiracy by itself complicates a criminal prosecution, but a conspiracy to murder across state lines makes matters even more difficult when the victim is not a federal officer. It would have complicated issues of jurisdiction and extradition and would have made coordination between prosecutors and investigators more difficult. But in 1968, developments in the application of federal law made this concern moot.

  Federal prosecutors in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department were becoming increasingly adept at using Title 18 Section 241 of the United States Code to convict groups of conspiracy. This component of federal law states the following:

  If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States . . . They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include . . . an attempt to kill, they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.1

  Indeed, attorneys at the Department of Justice had, in October 1967, successfully prosecuted several Klansmen, including Sam Bowers, for conspiring to kill the three civil rights workers in the Mississippi Burning case.

  Attorneys in the Civil Rights Division were increasingly applying creative and broad interpretations of what qualified as a constitutionally protected activity—the “right or privilege” part of the criminal code—to mount federal conspiracy prosecutions against the Klan. They did so in the Mississippi Burning case; they did so earlier with the murder of civil rights worker Violet Liuzzo in Alabama in 1965; and they did so with the murder of black World War II veteran Lemuel Penn, in 1964, in Georgia.

  The Justice Department had gained a tremendous amount of experience in navigating and collating the FBI’s investigative records, handling FBI informants, and seeing through the smoke screens the Klan set up to prevent successful prosecutions, such as the use of false alibis and other obstructionist tactics. And the Justice Department was becoming more and more adept at developing the narrative of conspiracy, tracing though mazes of coincidences and circumstantial inferences to weave together prosecutions that could successfully convict even those individuals, like Sam Bowers, who were smart enough to keep a safe distance from their crimes.

  It is prosecutors—not investigators—who are focused on establishing issues of motive and, in the case of a conspiracy, aligning the behavior of the perpetrators with suspicious activity on the part of other potential plotters. In the case of Ray, more than one witness told investigators that Ray was motivated by money and that bounty offers on King were circulating in Missouri State Penitentiary before Ray’s escape in April 1967. These other purported conspirators are often connected to broadly defined groups like the KKK or unnamed Southern businessmen. Donald Nissen’s story, albeit in a separate federal prison, linked a bounty to the Mississippi White Knights, a specific group with a documented history of trying to kill King. Starting in 1967, this group was increasingly interacting with the National States Rights Party through J. B. Stoner, another individual who had tried to kill King; and when Ray failed to escape North America in 1967 through
Canada, he traveled to Birmingham, the most publicized haven of violent NSRP activity in the United States, and lived just blocks from the NSRP’s headquarters.

  Based on the timeline Nissen provided, Ray arrived within weeks of the bounty money being transferred from Atlanta, Georgia, to Jackson, Mississippi. The evidence is fuzzy as to how and when Ray was recruited into a specific plot against King, but after his sojourn in Mexico and move to Los Angeles at the end of 1967, the apolitical fugitive suddenly started making contacts at the California headquarters of racist third-party presidential candidate George Wallace. It is known that at least one radical extremist with connections to Milteer, Stoner, and Swift—James Paul Thornton—had once worked at that campaign office. Whether Ray was seeking out Thornton (who had moved to Atlanta) or found others to reach, it is impossible to tell. Ray never adequately explained it, and investigators for the FBI, much less for the Justice Department, never asked. New evidence in this book suggests that Ray’s fellow prisoner and friend, Louis Dowda, may have visited California to bring Ray information about a potential bounty. The authors have also identified James W. Ashmore as “J. C. Hardin,” the man who called Ray and visited him in Los Angeles in February and March 1967. All this information is in the FBI’s own files; it stands to reason that Justice Department lawyers could have subjected all these people to additional interviews, but they did not even notice the coincidences in many cases.

  In any event, starting March 17, 1968, Ray abandoned other potential vocations (pornography, bartending) and avocations (dancing) right at the time that he was running out of money; he began to follow King’s movements throughout the Southeast. In stalking King, especially in following him to Atlanta, Ray was fulfilling one role Leroy McManaman proposed in his bounty offer to Nissen. It was also in Atlanta where Ray appears to have eaten with another person at Mammy’s Shanty, a restaurant that researcher and Atlanta native Lamar Waldron says was a hangout for racist types.2 The FBI never pieced this together, but perhaps a Justice Department investigation could have.

  Certainly, an open-minded Justice Department investigation could have seen what Ray did at the end of March 1968 in Birmingham as representing not only one of the most telling signs of a conspiracy but also one of the most intriguing potential links to Sam Bowers. Showing an obvious lack of knowledge of guns, Ray purchased one rifle on March 28. The gun store staff said Ray seemed so lost that he was “out of place.”3 Yet the frugal Ray returned on March 29 and exchanged the weapon for a highly regarded but more expensive rifle, the .30-06 Gamemaster, whose bullets shared the same basic characteristics as the fatal round, removed from Dr. King. Ray told the staff that his “brother-in-law” told him to make the trade; but Ray did not have a brother-in-law, and his actual brothers cannot be definitively placed in Birmingham. If someone with knowledge of guns did insist on the weapons exchange, it is worth noting that March 29, 1968, was the only time, over the course of many months, that someone at Sam Bowers’s company, Sambo Amusement, called Birmingham, Alabama. While it is uncertain who made the call and to where, the records show that it was to the Birmingham Army Reserve.4 The FBI should have investigated to establish this more clearly and followed up with interviews of Bowers and Robert Larson; but the records of the Birmingham call come from separate Jackson files on Bowers and never made it into the MURKIN FBI headquarters file. Perhaps a prosecutor at the Civil Rights Division could have made the connection—and forced a follow-up investigation—where the FBI did not.

  Any prosecutor would, and the Memphis prosecutors did, focus on Ray’s actions immediately after the gun purchase—the quick return trip to Atlanta and his travels to Memphis—as key to any conviction of Ray. Even Ray admitted that this coincidence was devastating and denied it—in the face of clear contrary evidence—to the day he died. As noted earlier in the chapter, at the same time Ray was making these trips, in the days immediately leading up to King’s murder, witnesses described Sam Bowers and one of his top aides acting very suspiciously at John’s Café. To the FBI, Sam Bowers’s presence at John’s Café on April 5 was a reason to exclude him as a suspect. Who knows how the Justice Department, whose experience with Klan conspiracy trials made them leery of alibis on many levels, would have done with something like the Hendricks story?

  Even if one adopts one of the scenarios we present—that Ray, contrary to his assigned role as a “caser,” shot King to collect a larger share of a bounty, surprising other conspirators and forcing all parties, including Ray himself, to scramble—it would not absolve Bowers and company of guilt in a federal conspiracy case. Such a charge only requires that parties to a murder actively plan and intend to kill King, regardless of how such a plan played out. Because the murder was planned outside of Memphis, federal lawyers could have prosecuted someone like Bowers under federal laws.

  But if the law permitted the Justice Department to pursue such a case, if the Civil Rights Division had already demonstrated the ability to develop a conspiracy argument especially against racists in civil rights crimes, why didn’t they do so? After all, the FBI was and is the chief investigative unit for the Department of Justice and their attorneys. Part of the problem was that Attorney General Ramsey Clark, having seen the riots that were destroying dozens of America’s cities, assured the press on April 5, 1968, that only one man had killed Martin Luther King Jr.; Clark would later admit this was premature and done to pacify the public. But his statements would obviously circumscribe the behavior of any of his subordinates, who, if they did pursue a conspiracy case, would effectively be publicly embarrassing their boss if it came to fruition with a prosecution.

  But it is questionable whether the Justice Department could have uncovered a conspiracy, even on their best day, even if they had an interest in doing so, for J. Edgar Hoover was making sure that was all but impossible.

  Hoover hated Attorney General Clark. It was Clark who had terminated Hoover’s ongoing wiretapping program against Martin Luther King Jr. According to Hoover biographer Curt Gentry, Hoover considered Clark to be a “jellyfish” or a “softie” when it came to crime.5 To Hoover, Clark was the worst attorney general he had ever worked with. Congress reviewed Hoover’s interaction with Clark’s Justice Department as part of the HSCA’s reexamination of the King murder in 1978. In their “Staff Report on the Performance of the Department of Justice and the FBI,” the HSCA found that Director Hoover had personally ordered that certain instructions from the attorney general be ignored so that the “course and direction of the investigation remained exclusively in the hands of the FBI.”6 The staff report concluded that the FBI investigation reflected “arrogance and independence of various personnel” and “poor and counterproductive relationships between the Bureau and lawyers at the Justice Department.” It also noted that Director Hoover’s lack of respect for Attorney General Clark had become an attitude “more or less” universally held within the Bureau.

  According to the HSCA staff report, Hoover himself directed that details of the FBI investigation be filtered from the reports sent to the Justice Department and that only high-level summary information on the status of the investigation be provided. The hope for a serious, separate investigation of Barnes, Stoner, and Bowers did not emerge until almost a decade after the murder, with the establishment of the HSCA in 1976.

  The Watergate scandal had raised serious doubts about the motives and machinations of the government, and the steady efforts of independent researchers to raise questions about the Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy assassinations had forced a critical mass in public opinion, leading to the formation of this select committee. But while it represented a clear improvement over the original, deficient FBI investigation, the HSCA was also flawed, for reasons both within and beyond their control.

  Picking Up the Pieces

  In many ways, Congress’s investigation showed the potential that existed in 1968 for uncovering the truth, had the Justice Department been a clearinghouse for all
the relevant information in the FBI’s records. In 1978, the HSCA reviewed all four of the major file threads the FBI produced, cross-referencing the central and local MURKIN records, the distinct files dedicated to dangerous individuals and groups, and the security file on Martin Luther King Jr. at FBI headquarters. After collating that information, they conducted follow-up investigations and interviews, much like the Justice Department would have done in 1968 and 1969.

  Hence, when it came to J. B. Stoner, Congress took the possibility of his involvement far more seriously than did the FBI, dedicating an entire subsection of their final report to the militant extremist. They did not accept the idea that Stoner must have been innocent because he was not present in Memphis on April 4, 1968. They found the fact that Stoner came to represent James Earl Ray and that he also employed Ray’s brother far more suspicious than did the FBI. The HSCA conducted secret executive interviews with Stoner and apparently confronted him with contradictions in his public statements. Notably, they found it troubling that Stoner openly boasted that he had information related to a conspiracy in the King murder but that he would not disclose this relevant data to their committee.7

  Congress also reexamined the possibility that the White Knights were involved in the King assassination and gave that research angle far more credence than the original FBI investigators had. They specifically cited the FBI’s failure to investigate the White Knights as a group that “demonstrated both a propensity for violence and a clear antagonism toward Dr. King.”8 It was Congress that was first able to show how the separate Jackson field office reports on Bowers’s and Nix’s activities in John’s Café provided corroboration for the Hendricks story. They re-interviewed Hendricks, who denied the substance of her testimony, but only after expressing fear of a reprisal from her former boyfriend, Thomas McGee; it was McGee who told the FBI in 1968 that he was afraid of retaliation from the Klan if Hendricks’s story became public. When Congress approached the other informants who corroborated aspects of Hendricks’s story in 1968, they also refused to cooperate in 1977.9