by David Wayne
James Earl Ray was a habitual petty criminal. He went to jail for stealing a typewriter in Los Angeles. He tried to rob a taxicab in Chicago and botched it up and again got arrested. He was caught with postal money orders that were stolen, and he did three years in federal prison. Then he was caught robbing a grocery store in St. Louis. He was a small-time crook who was repeatedly caught at small-time crimes.
As Special Investigator Revel observed:
“Is this the kind of man who could spend several months, single handedly, while being sought after as an escaped convict, travel throughout this country and internationally (Canada and Mexico), methodically, slowly and surely track down the high profile Nobel Peace Prize Winner and hero of the Civil Rights Move-ment, the Reverend and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then when finding him on April 4, 1968, shoot and kill him with one sure and certain pull of the trigger; he would then (again by himself) elude the entire Memphis Police Department (made easier earlier that day by the pullback of 4 tactical police units from the Lorraine Motel area- ordered by their Commander, Memphis Police Department Inspector Sam Evans) and most able Federal Bureau of Investigation directed by the infallible J. Edgar Hoover to escape to Canada and on to Europe.”354
James Earl Ray was an eighth-grade dropout and it was evidenced in his unsuccessful “career” as a petty thief. That is one of the main reasons why most open-minded researchers, as well as the head of the FBI’s team on the King murder case, concluded that there had to have been someone like the “Raoul” referred to by the defendant—a conspirator directing the actions of James Earl Ray—because he most certainly was not a master criminal and, acting alone, was clearly incapable of the sophisticated use of aliases (five were used), expertly forged passports and the finesse required for international escapes.
For example, Ray used the aliases of actual people living in Montreal, but he was using those aliases prior to his traveling there. Four of the five aliases he used during the nine-month period prior to the assassination, were the correct identities of real Canadians. All four lived in the same area of Toronto. And three of the aliases even bore a resemblance to James Earl Ray!355
“Though Ray had used aliases throughout his criminal career, there is no evidence Ray had been to Toronto prior to fleeing there after the King murder, and no explanation for how he came to use these particular names.”356
As FBI Deputy Director William Sullivan, leader of the special FBI unit tracking James Earl Ray concluded:
“Ray was so stupid that I don’t think he could have robbed a five-and-ten-cent store.”357
Therefore, the whole operation was far too complex for a petty criminal like James Earl Ray to have engineered it. That’s why many serious researchers have “interpreted the evidence as a sophisticated operation which brought Ray into an assassination plot and then left him holding the bag at the scene of King’s murder.”358
That was essentially the scenario that the defendant himself detailed when he tried to withdraw his plea of guilty. He told investigators that a controller whom he knew only as “Raoul” had given him his instructions for purchasing and delivering the rifle and had also paid for the purchase of the rifle, the car and other items. Those instructions and cash had to have come from somewhere, that much is clear. Ray claimed that the gun had then been placed there to frame him and, therefore, it was not clear to him until later that he had been duped as part of a larger plot.
As Judge Joe Brown noted, the Defendant explained to the man at the gun shop that he was exchanging the rifle that he had originally purchased because “he was told by others” that the .243 caliber weapon he originally bought was “not a suitable weapon for the purpose.”
•Judge Brown: “‘Others,’ o-t-h-e-r-s, I’m assuming that means the same to everyone else that it does to me.”359
There were a lot of other noteworthy irregularities about the crime in general and the crime scene in particular—and they are the types of irregularities which create genuine concern that the defendant was set up to take the fall for the crime, just as he claimed:
•There was not one eyewitness who saw the shooting;360
•There was not one eyewitness who claimed that the gunshot came from the bathroom window of the rooming house. And it has never been proven that the rifle shot actually came from there;361
•There were major credibility problems with the sole witness to Ray’s allegedly fleeing the rooming house bathroom from which he is said to have fired the rifle;362
•Another witness, who actually was credible, testified that he remembered seeing James Earl Ray seated in his car, which was several blocks away, at the time of the shooting;363
•The rifle doesn’t fit the crime scene—literally. The logistics of the bathroom at the rooming house at that time made firing from that bathroom window virtually impossible. It had a wall that prevented a weapon the size of the Remington Model 760 Gamemaster 30.06 caliber rifle from even fitting in the space between the window and a wall that was adjacent to it, at the time. And if the rifle had been positioned out the window so that it would actually fit into the small space, then the shooter would not have been able to look through the gunsight of the rifle to make the shot—there wasn’t enough room! And that wall was later removed (which is suspicious) when the rooming house became part of the complex now known as the National Civil Rights Museum. With that wall there, it must have been pretty blinking obvious that no shooter would use it as their spot from which to take one of the most significant gunshots in history.364
Then go back and match all of those circumstantial inconsistencies with the brutally clear ballistics, and you’ve got a case that no Prosecutor in his or her right mind would take to trial; unless, of course, they were told that they had to by the Powers That Be. Remember, folks—The bullet that was removed from Martin Luther King’s body did not come from Ray’s rifle.
There were other things that bothered a lot of people. Andrew Young became Mayor of Atlanta, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and a U.S. Congressman; but during the 1960s, he was a close supporter of Reverend King and had been right there at the motel in Memphis with him on the evening of the assassination. In addition to the obvious, several more obscure things still trouble Ambassador Young about the shooting.
•No member of any law enforcement agency investigating the shooting— Federal, State or local—ever bothered to interview him, even though he had obviously been positioned close to Dr. King at the moment of the shooting.
•In an obvious case of destruction of a crime scene, the City of Memphis had a large portion of the area of the shooting cut down by a landscaping crew the morning after the murder—evidence and all.
ANDREW YOUNG:
“One of the disturbing features about that day for us was that when we were pointing, we were pointing over across the street. There was a building there, but there was also a six-to-eight-foot pile of bushes and some people thought that the shot came from the bushes. The FBI said it came from a bathroom window. But when we got up the next morning, those bushes were gone.”365
Also take note of a very important fact that the historical record conveniently ignores, sidesteps, obfuscates and otherwise attempts to obliterate from our collective memory on this case: James Earl Ray never confessed to the murder of Martin Luther King. From a legal standpoint, a guilty plea and a confession are two entirely different matters. Ray pleaded guilty in a manner that is known legally as taking the Alford Plea—based on the case law in North Carolina vs. Alford, 1970, which essentially states that a defendant can plead guilty if they believe that conviction is imminent, yet still maintain their innocence. So a defendant who believes that they are actually not guilty of a crime still submits a plea of guilty due to circumstances in which they believe that conviction is certain anyway—which is exactly what James Earl Ray’s attorney had been pounding into him relentlessly.366
As James Earl Ray explained it to the investigator hired by his own attorney, he had been under t
he impression that he was only pleading “legally guilty” because he had been involved in the incident, not that he was actually admitting to himself having killed Dr. King. He also clearly believed that there was a conspiracy; in fact, he knew there was, because he had been directly involved in it—he was the guy that they’d framed.367
•He never asked me either question. I would have answered that I did not shoot Dr. King but that I was unwittingly part of a conspiracy since I was hired to purchase a weapon of the type allegedly used in the killing and did bring it to Memphis.”368
•I signed the plea document but told Foreman I didn’t intend to plead guilty. He went to work trying to persuade me to do so. He said I should cop a plea because the media had convicted me already.”369
The package conveniently left for police at the scene was so incriminating that it was virtually a “calling card” for the incrimination of James Earl Ray. It included:
•A Remington 30.06 rifle with serial number matching the rifle that James Earl Ray had purchased in Birmingham, Alabama;
•Ammunition for the rifle and a pair of surveillance binoculars that had James Earl Ray’s fingerprints;
•A radio, upon which was Ray’s inmate number from the Misssouri State Penitentiary;
•The FBI said they found several fingerprints on the items, including prints on the rifle, that matched James Earl Ray.370
Jesse Ventura and Dick Russell point out the obvious insanity of leaving that information for the police—and that he probably was not the one who left it:
“Later, Ray claimed that somebody else had left behind the bundle so as to incriminate him. In fact, one witness, Guy Canipe, said the package was actually dropped in the doorway to his store about ten minutes before the shot was fired. Makes a little more sense, doesn’t it? Another witness, Olivia Catling, saw a fellow in a checkered shirt running out of the alley beside a building across from the Lorraine soon after the killing, who went screaming off in a green ‘65 Chevy.”371
So now ask yourself this: Would a professional assassin seriously take the extra time required to commit the singularly insane act of leaving behind very incriminating evidence before fleeing the scene? It just does not make sense.
And it apparently never even happened to begin with! Circuit Court Judge Arthur Hanes Jr. testified that the owner of the store was a credible witness— Guy Canipe. Mr. Canipe stated that the bundle of incriminating evidence was dropped off in front of his store before the assassination even took place. He remembered that and testified accordingly.372
Judge Hanes also testified that the firehouse near the assassination was already swarming with police prior to the shooting. Some were already watching Dr. King across the street. So “when they saw Dr. King go down, the fire house erupted like a beehive ... In addition to the time involved (if Ray had fired the weapon, returned to his room, boxed it, left the box in front, and then got into his car and drove away), it was circumstantially almost impossible to believe that somebody had been able to throw that (rifle) down and leave right in the face of that erupting fire station.”373 That’s crucial evidence that’s gone unreported, or at least under-reported, but speaks volumes about the impossibility of the official version.
Judge Hanes summarized how utterly preposterous the official version of events is, while referring to an official exhibit that depicted the crime:
With police swarming all around like angry bees, “James Earl Ray had fired the shot from the bathroom on that second floor, come down that hallway into his room and carefully packed that box, tied it up, then had proceeded across the walkway the length of the building to the back where that stair from that door came up, had come down the stairs out the door, placed the Browning box containing the rifle and the radio there in the Canipe entryway.”374He then simply got into his car and left, unassisted, and simply drove the same car from Memphis, Tennessee all the way to Atlanta, Georgia, never once challenged by a police officer. Yeah, right. Sure he did ̾
Another witness stated “that right after the shot was fired he received a smoking rifle at the rear door of Jim’s Grill from Clark. He broke the rifle down into two pieces and wrapped it in a tablecloth. Raul picked it up the next day.”375 That obviously has to be a different rifle than the throw-down weapon that incriminated the Defendant—there had to be two rifles; we know that Ray’s rifle wasn’t the murder weapon—and there had to be another rifle that was.
And another witness testified that he was in the rooming house at the exact time of the shooting, was in the hall near the bathroom that Ray supposedly shot from, and that at that time the door to the bathroom was open and there was no one in there. That fits with another testimony which places James Earl Ray sitting in his car at the time of the gunshot—a reliable eyewitness saw him there and he was several blocks away at the time.376
Ray was also known to be a rather lousy shot with a rifle, making the alleged feat—one perfect shot at a very high-profile target—additionally difficult to fathom. One thing that’s crystal clear in all this is that there’s no way that our Defendant, the eighth-grade dropout, masterminded this crime. It quite simply is just not even possible.
“Ray’s skill with a rifle is dubious, and while he did commit armed robbery he had never harmed anyone previously during his criminal endeavors. And the man whose career one author described as “a record of bungled and ludicrously inept rob-beries and burglaries” purportedly managed to kill King with one perfect shot and then elude authorities for longer than any other American political assassin.”377
But we are told—instead of believing what is clear and obvious—to believe in our government’s Official Version of events, that:
•Just like Lee Harvey Oswald—James Earl Ray was a “loner” and “lone nut” and there were no conspirators ̾
•Just like they told us about Jack Ruby ̾
•And (a very short time later when Bobby Kennedy was murdered) just like they told us about Sirhan Bishara Sirhan .
•Even though the “Official Versions” are full of impossibilities and gaping holes so huge that you could drive a truck through them .
•And even though there was NO APPARENT MOTIVE for James Earl Ray, just like there was none for Oswald, none for Ruby, and none for Sirhan.
In Ray’s case, he was clearly a small-time criminal, with no motive for murder:
“A petty criminal, Ray seems unlikely to have committed the crime purely out of racial hatred, and anecdotes of his racism are thin. The idea that he killed King in order to achieve notoriety is implausible given the lengths to which he went to avoid capture (nearly succeeding).”378
He had no known motive for killing Martin Luther King, nor was one presented by the prosecution. To this day, there is no known motive and no motive has ever been given—its absence is very conspicuous:
“Prosecutors did not outline a motive for the killing or accuse Ray of being a racist. He repeatedly but unsuccessfully sought the trial that his guilty plea had forestalled.”379
Another huge factor is that James Earl Ray had no history of violence: His crimes were thefts—stealing money in order to get money—and he made a point of not hurting people in the process. His history backs that up. The defendant’s brother spelled it out plain and simple for all to see. He said:
•“If my brother did kill King he did it for a lot of money—he never did anything if it wasn’t for money .. .”380
•Ray’s other brother echoed the same sentiment:
“I said if he had done it there had to be a lot of money involved because he wouldn’t do it for hatred or just because he didn’t like somebody, because that, is not his line of work.”381
But he was the perfect “patsy”; he was enough of a crook to follow the scent of making some money, but not smart enough to realize that he was in the process of being set up. That is why many serious researchers “have interpreted the evidence as a sophisticated operation which brought Ray into an assassination plot and then left him h
olding the bag at the scene of King’s murder.”382 That scenario certainly makes a lot more sense than the “official version” of events, which is not only preposterous, but literally impossible.
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Rioting in over 100 American cities was the immediate response to the assassination of Martin Luther King. A man of peace and reason had been gunned down in broad daylight and nothing less than rioting in the streets should have been expected.
The period of the 1960’s was known for hippies and the politics of peace and love, but the hard realities of contemporary events sent it rapidly freefalling from the Summer of Love in 1967 to the upheaval, one year later, of tanks and armored personnel carriers moving National Guard soldiers in to “protect” American streets from their own people. We were a nation in turmoil toward the end of the decade. And it was the assassination of Martin Luther King that precipitated that social descent:
•The bloody Battle of Khe Sanh and then the relentless onslaught of the Tet Offensive, reveal the real horrors of the Vietnam War to a shocked American public closely following its hopelessness at home on their televisions;
•North Korea captures the crew of the USS Pueblo, a Naval Intelligence vessel, and holds the ship and its eighty-three-man crew hostage, for violating Korea’s territorial waters;
