THE CIVIL TRIAL
Where once an ordeal
With pain as the goal
A jury now was the means to heal
And truth imposed the only toll
Day after day, they were there
Unsmiling and troubled they stayed
Citizens all required to care
Assessing the facts before them laid.
After the passage of one year, while the Justice Department investigation had yet to produce a report, our case against Loyd Jowers and others was called.
We were indeed “first out” in Judge Swearingen’s courtroom on November 15, 1999. The judge agreed to let one media pool camera in the courtroom along with our own video camera. The media camera, like the media itself, would come and go. They were nearly always absent, with the notable and sole exception of local anchorman Wendell Stacey, who almost lost his job at the time over his insistence that he attend every day. He was eventually fired but won a wrongful dismissal action and was rehired.
Jury selection began that morning in the small Division IV courtroom. We discussed moving the case to a larger courtroom, but because of the judge’s health needs, it was agreed that the trial would remain in his usual room. The judge disclosed to both sides that he had been a member of the group that had carried Dr. King’s casket from the funeral home in Memphis after the assassination. If, therefore, either side wanted him to withdraw, he said he would. We certainly had no reason to do so; Defense Attorney Garrison also had no objections.
After almost despairing about finding an acceptable local counsel, I finally was able to obtain the services of Juliet Hill-Akines, a young black lawyer, who had been admitted to the bar in 1994. Before Juliet agreed, I discussed the possibility with a large number of local lawyers, all of whom turned down the opportunity—usually because they were advised that it would have a negative impact on their careers. Rather than expressing such apprehensions, Juliet took it as a challenge and an honor to be representing the family of Martin Luther King Jr. I admired her decision and was grateful for her independence and courage.
Judge James Swearingen barred the media from the jury selection process. Due to the sensitivity of the case, he was anxious to protect the identities of the individual jury members and, to the most extent possible, ensure their privacy. He would issue a further order barring any cameras from being directed at the jury at any time during the trial.
Since there were five plaintiffs to one named defendant, we had the right to exercise many more exclusions. We used them all since the jury pool—in excess of forty—contained a large number of people who were employed by law enforcement agencies and security firms.
At the end of the first day, a jury of eight men and four women, six of them black and six white, was chosen. The trial would start at 10:00 a.m. the next morning, and after opening arguments, we would begin the plaintiffs’ case with Coretta Scott King as our first witness. On behalf of the plaintiffs, I had drawn together an intelligent, enthusiastic volunteer team.
The trial began on November 16. Opening arguments were finished by lunch, and that afternoon we called Mrs. King as our first witness. Court TV was there to cover her testimony and provide the pool camera. They would pull out for most of the trial, returning for celebrity witnesses but missing most of the material evidence as did the rest of the media. In copycat fashion, local regional and national media were absent for most of the trial.
The plaintiffs’ case was divided into nine areas of evidence:
• The background to the assassination
• The local conspiracy
• The crime scene
• The murder weapon
• Raul
• The broader conspiracy
• The cover-up—its scope and activities
• The defendant’s prior admissions
• Damages
Though many of the witnesses testified to facts with which the reader is already familiar since they emerged in the investigation and were discussed earlier, I will summarize the details of the testimony because, of course, they achieve a new status as evidence given under oath in a court of law.
Mrs. King led off the group of witnesses whose testimony provided evidence about the historical background and events leading up to the assassination. She set the background stating:
• He felt that it was important that he give this support to them because they were a part of what he was really struggling to get the nation to understand, that people work full-time jobs but in a sense for part-time pay. Even people who were poor who worked could not make a decent living. So they would then be invited to join the mobilization for the campaign which was to be held in Washington.
(Transcript of trial proceedings, November 16, 1999, 54–55)
She continued:
• I must say that my husband had wanted to speak out against the war in Vietnam for many years before he actually did do so. He always—he understood the conflict that existed in Vietnam from its inception. And he realized that it was an unjust war in the first place. Then it was being fought against, you know, people of color who were poor. And wars, of course, for him didn’t solve any social problems but created more problems than they solved.
He felt that this particular war was not—we could not win. Of course, history proved him right within a very short period of time after he spoke out. As a matter of fact, one year after he spoke out against the war, he was vindicated in that the nation had reversed itself and its policy toward that war.
That was April 4th, 1968, when he actually spoke out against the war in his first public statement. But he said he had to do it because his conscience—he could no longer live with his conscience without taking a position. He felt that doing so, perhaps he could help to mobilize other public opinion in support of his position, which was, again, against the war.
(Ibid., 58–59)
Concerning the family’s efforts to obtain a trial for James she said:
• Well as a matter of fact, it was because of new information that we had received and largely because of the efforts that you had put forth to investigate a number of these leads that had come out and found that they were reliable enough.
When we looked at it and investigated it, we felt then that we had to take a position. For years we hoped that someday someone else would find out, find the answers. We wanted to know the truth. But the truth was elusive.
We wanted to go on with our lives. We felt the only way we could do it was to really take the position that we did take, because the evidence pointed away from Mr. Ray, not that he might have not had some involvement but he was not the person we felt that really actually killed him.
(Ibid., 64–65)
They offered various perspectives and facts and described the official hostility to Dr. King’s vigorous opposition to the war in Vietnam and his commitment to lead a massive contingent of poor and alienated people to Washington, where they would take up a tent city residence in the Capitol and lobby the Congress for long-overdue social legislation. Dr. King’s support of the sanitation workers’ strike was described by Reverend James Lawson, as was the eruption of violence in the march of March 28, which, Dr. Coby Smith of the Invaders testified, appeared to be the work of out-of-state provocateurs.
Dexter King stressed the importance of his father’s opposition to the war in Vietnam and the media reaction:
Now, the truth of the matter is if my father had not—if he had stopped and not spoken out, if he had just somehow compromised, he would probably still be here with us today.
(Ibid., 1486)
The role of the Invaders and their sudden departure from the Lorraine Motel were testified to in detail by former Invaders members Dr. Smith and Charles Cabbage. Smith said that the Invaders decided to work with Dr. King in the planning of the April march because they had been wrongly blamed for the violence which had broken up the previous march. He insisted that they had conducted their own investigation and become convinced that the disruption was caused by out-of-state provocateurs. He said they had reached a basic agreement with SCLC and Dr. King, and in order to facilitate their participation in the planning process, the group had moved into two rooms in the Lorraine Motel. Their rooms were also on the balcony level some doors south of Dr. King’s room, and he said that they had participated in various planning sessions and meetings with Dr. King following his arrival on April 3.
Cabbage described the Invaders’ sudden departure within eleven minutes of the shooting. He said that a member or the Lorraine staff knocked on their door. It must have been after 5:30 p.m. They were told that they had to leave because SCLC was no longer going to pay their bill. This appeared strange because the bill for that evening’s lodging would have clearly been paid, or obligated to be paid, much earlier in the day. Though it made no sense from any standpoint, he said they accepted the order, which he said they were told came from Reverend Jesse Jackson. They quickly packed up their things and left around ten minutes before 6:00 p.m. The timing of their departure was later confirmed by the testimony of MPD Captain Willie B. Richmond (retired), who noted the event in his surveillance report developed from his observation post inside and at the rear of the fire station. Captain Richmond also testified that around the same time, he observed Reverend Kyles knock on Dr. King’s door. Richmond said Dr. King opened the door, spoke with him briefly, and then closed the door. Kyles then walked some distance north on the balcony and stood at the railing. This account, of course, contradicted the story Kyles has told for over three decades, in which he said he was in Dr. King’s room for about thirty to forty-five minutes before the shooting.
At one point when they were being asked to leave, Cabbage said, he observed the Reverend Jesse Jackson standing on the ground near the swimming pool, which was opposite the balcony rooms occupied by Dr. King and the Invaders. He said that Reverend Jackson kept glancing impatiently at his watch (if he indeed did so) so near the time of the killing. Reverend Jackson has reportedly stated subsequently that he didn’t even remember that the Invaders were staying at the Lorraine.
Cabbage never understood it. In his testimony, he also confirmed that the Invaders occupying the Lorraine rooms were quite heavily armed, as was their usual custom, because of the hostility of the MPD.
The Local Conspiracy
The involvement of produce dealer Frank Liberto in setting up the local conspiracy was conclusively established by a string of witnesses. For the first time in the twenty-two years that I have known him, John McFerren took the stand and testified under oath about hearing (within an hour and a quarter of the killing) Liberto screaming into the telephone to “shoot the son of a bitch on the balcony,” subsequently telling the caller to go to New Orleans to collect money from his brother. John, courageous and forthright, began his testimony by telling the jury about the long history of his family’s ascent from slavery and his civil rights activity and harassment in Fayette County, one of Tennessee’s most racist areas. As he described the events that took place, he repeated the same story under oath that he first put before the FBI/MPD team who interviewed him for hours at the Peabody Hotel on the Sunday evening following the crime. The federal and local officials dismissed his account in 1968, as did the congressional committee ten years later. This time it would be different.
Under oath, John described his visit to Frank Liberto’s produce market on the afternoon of his assassination.
Q. So Liberto’s warehouse was your last pickup?
A. Was the last pick up.
Q. You would get there around five-fifteen?
A. I got there that day at five-fifteen exactly.
Q. We’re coming to that day. April 4th was a Thursday, the day Martin Luther King was assassinated was a Thursday.
A. That’s correct
Q. Did you go to Frank Liberto’s place that day?
A. I went there that day.
Q. You arrived there at what time?
A. Around five-fifteen. Now—
Q. Would you describe what the layout of the place was and what you did when you arrived at that warehouse?
A. That warehouse faced east and west, but you enter in the gate on the south side, and when I drove around to the north side and come up about fifteen feet of the door, I stopped my truck. At that time I had a three-quarter ton pickup truck with a canvas on it, a cloth canvas over it.
Q. Okay.
A. When I drove up to the—when I stopped the pickup truck out in front of the door, this door is on the north side, and there is a big door that you could roll back and back a truck up in.
Coming in from the north side on the right side there is a little small office, and when I got within ten to fifteen feet of this office, why, Latch was standing up.
Q. Who was Mr. Latch?
A. Mr. Latch had a scar around his neck like this.
Q. What was his relationship with Mr. Liberto?
A. He was a handyman. I never did know, because I was always scared of Mr. Latch. You see, if you looked at him, he had a scar from right here to right there, and he would always be mean, but Mr. Liberto was always friendly. I wouldn’t fool with Mr. Latch. I would stay away from him if I could.
Q. So you walked in that afternoon, into the entrance and the office. You said you were how far from the office?
A. Ten to fifteen feet
Q. Ten to fifteen feet from the office?
A. That’s correct.
Q. Then what happened next?
A. The phone rang. When the phone rang, Latch picked it up. When Latch picked it up Latch said, that’s him again. He give it to Mr. Liberto. Mr. Liberto said, shoot the—
Q. You can just say what he said.
A. Shoot the son of a bitch on the balcony. Well, at that time they didn’t have noticed me. I was just standing up a little closer to them just looking.
I was a cash paying customer. He would always tell me, you go get what you want and come by the office and pay for it. If the warehouse hadn’t been changed, the doors, you have a line formed going in there.
Q. Let’s go back over what you saw. You heard Mr. Liberto talking on the telephone?
A. Telephone.
Q. Around what time of the day was this?
A. I‘d say that was around five—ten minutes after, five fifteen, around five twenty five, not quite five thirty.
Q. Five twenty-five to five-thirty you heard him talking on the telephone?
A. Telephone.
Q. He received a phone call. What did you hear him say once again?
A. Shoot the son of a bitch on the balcony.
(Op. cit., trial proceeding transcript, 144–147)
The role of Frank Liberto was further confirmed by the testimony of Nathan Whitlock and his mother LaVada Addison who provided details about the admissions Liberto made to them separately in 1978, leaving them no doubt that he had participated in the Memphis hit on Dr. King: that there would be no security, the police were cooperating, and that a scapegoat was in place. In subsequent testimony, Dexter King and Ambassador Andrew Young testified that in their separate interviews with Loyd Jowers, he had told them that sometime in March, after Dr. King’s first speech on behalf of the sanitation workers on March 18, he was approached by Liberto, to whom he said he owed a “big favor.” He basically confirmed the story he had told on the Primetime Live program without any mention of Frank Holt being involved. Liberto told him that he would be given $100,000 in a vegetable delivery box and that he was to turn this money over to a man named Raul, who would visit him sometime afterward. He told Dexter, Andy, and me that Liberto had told him no police would be around and that they had a scapegoat. In fact, he said, it all happened in exactly that way. Planning sessions for the assassination were held in his Grill, involving Lieutenant John Barger (whom he had known from his own early days on the police force); Marrell McCollough, a black undercover officer introduced to him by Barger as his new partner; MPD sharpshooter Lieutenant Earl Clark (who was a hunting companion of Jowers); a senior MPD inspector; and finally, a fifth officer whom he did not know. He said he remembered that there were five because he had to pull up a chair to the four-seater booth. Jowers said that if James was at all involved, he was an unknowing scapegoat.
Hence, Jowers also confirmed the involvement of Frank Liberto. Along with the testimonial evidence of McFerren, Whitlock, and Addison, and the deceased Art Baldwin’s earlier disclosures, Frank Liberto’s primary role in the assassination appeared to be clear.
A steady succession of witnesses provided details of the removal of all police from the area of the crime, the failure to put the usual security unit in place as well as the removal of other individuals whose presence in the crime scene area constituted a security risk to the assassination mission.
Firemen Floyd Newsom and Norvill Wallace, the only two black firemen at Fire Station No. 2 on the periphery of the Lorraine Motel, were instructed to report to stations in other parts of the city. Newsom and Wallace said that their transfers left their base station short-handed while they were surplus to requirements at the stations where they were sent to. The transfers made no sense, and they were given no satisfactory explanation. Newsom said eventually one of his superiors told him that the police department had requested his transfer.
Detective Ed Redditt, a community-relations officer assigned to intelligence duty as Willie Richmond’s partner on the surveillance detail at the rear of the fire station, testified that he was picked up by Lieutenant Eli Arkin about an hour before the assassination and taken first to Central Police Headquarters, where he was ordered, by Director Frank Holloman, to go home because of an alleged threat on his life. His protests were ignored. As he sat, parked with Arkin in front of his house, the news of the assassination came over the car radio. He never again heard about the alleged threat, which was explained as a mistake of some sort. He never received a satisfactory explanation, but it was clear that his primary community-relations police duties had caused him to become closely involved with the community, not MPD intelligence. It was understandable that he would not be trusted to be allowed to stay in the crime scene area if dirty work were afoot.
Memphis Police Department homicide detective Captain Jerry Williams had the responsibility of organizing and coordinating a security unit of all black homicide detectives who would provide protection for Dr. King while he was in the city. They would ordinarily remain with him throughout his visit, even securing the hotel—usually the Rivermont or the Admiral Benbow—where he stayed. Captain Williams testified that on Dr. King’s last, and fatal, visit to Memphis, however, he was not asked to form that security unit. At one point, he was told that Dr. King’s group did not want them around; there was no indication, of any kind, from any SCLC source that this was true. In fact, Reverend Lawson remembered being impressed with the group on a previous visit and their verbal promise to him that as long as they were in place, no harm would come to Dr. King. On April 3 and 4, 1968, they were not in place. Testifying out of order, because he had been hospitalized, Invaders member Big John Smith said that though there was a small police presence at the motel earlier on the afternoon of April 4, he noticed that it had completely disappeared within a half hour of the assassination.
University of Massachusetts Professor Phillip Melanson took the stand to testify about the removal of the emergency forces’ TACT 10 unit from the Lorraine Motel on April 4. He said that Inspector Sam Evans admitted pulling back the TACT 10 unit, which had been based at the Lorraine Motel, to the periphery of the fire station. Evans claimed that the decision was taken pursuant to a request from someone in Dr. King’s group. When pressed as to who actually made the request, he said that it was Reverend Kyles. The fact that Kyles had nothing to do with the SCLC, and no authority to request any such thing, seemed to have eluded Evans.
It would be hard to imagine, on that April 4, a more-complete stripping away of not only the available security personnel from Dr. King but also a more thorough removal of individuals who were not deemed completely trustworthy or controllable. And it was all set in motion twenty-four hours before the assassination.
To address why Dr. King’s motel room had been changed, former new York City police detective Leon Cohen testified that early in the morning on the day following the assassination, he learned from Walter Bailey, the manager of the Lorraine Motel, that Dr. King was meant to be in a secluded, more secure courtyard room, but that on the evening prior to his arrival, someone from SCLC’s office in Atlanta called to instruct that Dr. King be given a balcony room overlooking the swimming pool. Cohen, who had moved to Memphis and worked as a private investigator after retiring from the New York City Police Department, testified that Bailey maintained that he tried to talk the person, who Bailey said was a man he knew, out of this decision, but the caller was adamant. Dr. King was moved.
Cohen stated:
A. I mentioned the terrible occurrence. He said in response, if they had listened to me this wouldn’t have happened. And he went on to explain that the previous night, he got a call from a member of Dr. King’s group in Atlanta who wanted him to change the location of the room where Dr. King would be staying. And he was adamantly against that because he had provided security by the inner court for Dr. King, Dr. King’s room.
Q. Where did he want Dr. King to stay in his motel?
A. There was an inner court behind the office which had very good security. In other words, it was not exposed to public view. Per se.
Q. Right. Do you know if that would have been Room 201?
A. Pardon?
Q. Do you recall the number of that room?
A. No, I don’t.
Q. But it was in an inner court area?
A. Yes, Sir.
Q. And, instead, where did Mr. Bailey say he was being instructed to move Dr. King?
A. The room—I don’t recall the room number, but the room which Dr. King had occupied that night, that’s the room that they wanted him to occupy.
Q. A balcony room?
A. Yes sir.
Q. For the record, that was Room 306, that balcony room. So Bailey said he was instructed to move Martin King from room—well, you didn’t know the number, but from a courtyard room to a balcony room?
A. Yes sir.
Q. Did he say he opposed that?
A. He adamantly opposed it.
Q. Did he say who in Dr. King’s organization wanted him placed in that exposed balcony room?
A. He just mentioned that a member of Dr. King’s group had told him, advised him, he wanted the room changed. He said he knew the person, but I did not question him as to who it was or his name or pedigree or whatever.
Q. Did he indicate, when he spoke to you, if you can reflect very carefully, Mr. Cohen, did he use the pronoun “he” or “she”?
Q. So some male member of Dr. King’s Atlanta office instructed the room change?
A. Yes sir.
Q. Once again, when did he receive that instruction?
A. He said the previous night that Dr. King was supposed to stay there.
Q. Prior to the arrival?
A. Yes sir.
(Op. cit. trial proceeding transcript, 266–268)
At the time of the trial, taxi driver James Milner had known Loyd Jowers for over twenty-five years. He testified that, in fact, in the early- to mid-1970s, Jowers had basically told him the same story that he revealed in 1993 about how he became involved with the assassination, how it was planned and carried out, and that the deceased Lieutenant Earl Clark was likely to have pulled the trigger. Jowers’s ambivalence about the shooter’s identity was consistent. He definitely pointed in Clark’s direction but never positively. Clark was dead. If someone else had been the shooter and was still alive, this could explain Jowers’s conduct. But, if not Clark, who? Who, I agonized, could Jowers be protecting? At one point I remembered that he had said there was a fifth MPD officer at the planning sessions in Jim’s Grill, but Jowers said he did not know him. Possible? Of course, but not likely that he would not have been introduced to him as he had been to the other stranger, Marrell McCollough. Could this fifth officer have played an ultimately more sinister role? Was he the shooter?
Another driver—J. J. Isabel—testified that on the occasion of St Patrick’s Day 1979 or 1980, he and Jowers drove two chartered buses to Cleveland, taking a Memphis group to a bowling tournament. They shared a hotel room, and after a meal and some drinking on the first evening, when they returned to their room, Isabel said he asked Jowers, “Loyd, did you drop the hammer on Martin Luther King?”
He said that Jowers hesitated for a moment or two and then replied, “You may think that you know what I did, but I know what I did, but I will never tell it in court.”
The value of Milner’s and Isabel’s separate testimony is, of course, that like Whitlock, Addison and McFerren, they provide corroboration at least of a local conspiracy, as well as aspects of Jowers’s story, long before his involvement become an issue.
One of Jowers’s former waitresses, Bobbi Balfour (née Smith), testified that on the day of the killing, Jowers told her not to carry food up to a tenant in the rooming house, Grace Walden Stephens, who was ill. She said that it had been her regular practice with Loyd’s approval to bring food up to Charlie Stephens’s common-law wife during her illness, but on that day, Loyd explicitly told her to stay away from the second floor.
Finally, Olivia Catling, who lived (and in 2002 still lived) on Mulberry Street, midway between Huling and Vance about 200 yards from the Lorraine, testified that she was at home preparing dinner for her family when she heard the shot. She knew that Dr. King was staying at the Lorraine Motel, and she feared the worst. As quickly as she could, she collected her young children and ran out of her house down Mulberry Street toward the Lorraine. By the time she reached the northwest corner of Huling and Mulberry, the police had already barricaded Mulberry Street with a police car, so she and the children had to stand on the corner. She testified that shortly after she arrived on the corner, she saw a white man running from an alley, halfway up Huling, which ran to a building connected to the rooming house. He arrived at a car parked on the south side of Huling and facing east, got in, and drove quickly away, turning left onto Mulberry and going right past her as well as the MPD officers opposite her who were manning the barricade. She was surprised that the police paid no attention to him and did not try to prevent him from leaving the area.
She testified that shortly afterward, she saw a fireman—who she believed must have walked down from the fire station—standing near the wall below the bushes, yelling at the police on the street that the shot came from a clump of bushes apparently just above the area where he was standing. She said that the police ignored him.
Olivia Catling testified that she had never been interviewed by any law enforcement officials. She said that there was no house-to-house investigation. Though she has lived close to the scene of the crime for thirty-two years since the assassination, no one had knocked on her door until I did in November of 1999. She was relieved to finally get it off her chest. She said that she had been so burdened all of these years because she knew that an innocent man was in prison. By the time I met her, James had died, but at least this wiry, clear, and tough-minded Memphian could take satisfaction that at last her story would be heard.
Memphis Police Department homicide detective Captain Tommy Smith (retired) testified that very soon after the assassination, he interviewed rooming house tenant Charles Quitman Stephens, the state’s chief witness against James Earl Ray, and found him intoxicated and hardly able to stand up. It must be remembered that it was on the strength of his statement that James was extradited from England. In fact, Captain Smith said Stephens was not in any condition to identify anyone.
The state had always maintained that after firing from the bathroom window, James stopped by his room to pick up his bundle of belongings and fled carrying the rifle and the bundle, eventually exiting the front door of the rooming house, dropping the bundle in the doorway of Guy Canipe’s shop. Then, as the official story goes, James got into a white Mustang parked just slightly south of Canipe’s store and drove away. Stephens was supposed to have caught a glimpse of the profile of the fleeing man.
Charles Hurley testified that while waiting to pick up his wife from work, he parked behind that white Mustang about an hour and a quarter before the shooting. He said that a man was sitting in it and was still there when he and his wife drove away. Most importantly, however, he again confirmed (though now under oath) that the white Mustang parked just south of Canipe’s store, in which James is supposed to have driven away, had Arkansas license plates. James’s Mustang had Alabama plates.
We read into the record and introduced into evidence FBI 302 statements taken from two witnesses who left Jim’s Grill about twenty minutes before the killing. Ray Hendrix and Bill Reed said that late in the afternoon on April 4, they walked north on South Main Street after having looked closely at the white Mustang parked directly in front of Jim’s Grill. The car interested them so they took particular note of it. They both confirmed, in separate statements, that as they were about to cross Vance—two blocks north of Jim’s Grill—the Mustang turned the corner directly in front of them. The male driver was alone. This would have been about 5:45 p.m. This statement was suppressed at the time and never turned over to the defense or revealed to the guilty-plea jury a year later. I found it in the bottom of a file cabinet drawer which housed investigative files in the District Attorney General’s office.
Olivia Catling was the latest observer to give evidence about the bushes behind the rooming house being the place from where the fatal shot was fired. There was abundant current and historical eyewitness testimony, which clearly established this fact and which was introduced into evidence.
Solomon Jones, Dr. King’s driver in Memphis, told a number of people at the scene shortly after the shooting (Wayne Chastain being one) that he saw a figure in the bushes come down over the wall. The Reverend James Orange could not appear due to a death in his family, but his sworn statement was read into the record. He said that as he turned around from a crouching position in the Lorraine parking area immediately after the shot, he saw what he thought was smoke (we have since learned that although it had the appearance of smoke, it would have been sonic dust rising from the bushes caused by the firing of the high-powered rifle in the heavily vegetated area). He said no law enforcement or investigative person had ever taken a statement from him.
Memphis Police Department dog officer J. B. Hodges testified that he arrived on the scene within minutes after the shooting. With the aid of a metal barrel to stand on, he climbed up over the wall and entered the brush area. He described the bushes as being very thick from the edge of the wall for some distance toward the back of Jim’s Grill and the rooming house. He said he had to fight his way through the formidable thicket, but that eventually he arrived at a clearing and went to the alleyway, which ran between the two wings of the rooming house. Not too far into the alley, he said he found a pair of footprints heading in the direction of the rooming house. At the end of the alley was a door leading to the basement that ran underneath the entire building. It had rained the night before, and the ground cover was wet, but there was no growth in the alley, and the mud revealed apparently freshly made large footprints—size 13 to 13½. Hodges guarded his discovery until a cast was made. Those footprints have never been identified or explained. Eventually, I would wonder about the shoe size of the fifth MPD officer at the planning session described by Jowers.
As a part or their testimonies related to their questioning of Loyd Jowers, Dexter King and Andrew Young separately recounted how Jowers admitted taking the rifle from the assassin whom he said had, in fact, fired from the bushes. An earlier deposition of Jowers’s former waitress/lover Betty Spates was read into the record, in which she claimed having seen him carrying a rifle, running from the bushes in through the back door of his kitchen. In this last instance, the defense raised the question of her credibility, noting that she had altered her story when questioned by official investigators. As noted elsewhere, this was true, but it was the result of their harassment. The last statement she gave to me under oath was consistent with what she originally told me in 1992.
Former New York Times reporter Earl Caldwell could not break prior engagements in order to testify, but the defense agreed to allow a video of his testimony at the television trial on the condition that the cross-examination conducted by former US attorney Hickman Ewing was also played. We agreed, and the jury saw and heard Caldwell testify that he was sent to Memphis by the Times on April 3 with instructions from national editor Claude Sitton to “nail Dr. King.” He said he was in his ground-floor motel room when he heard the shot, which he said sounded like a bomb blast. In his shorts, he said he ran outside of his room and began to stare at the bushes, from where he instinctively thought the shot must have come. He is certain that he saw an individual crouching in the bushes which, he said, were quite thick and tall. He vividly described the person’s posture in cross-examination, coming down from the stand to demonstrate how the person was squatting and rising.
Probably the most powerful single piece of evidence (although the cumulative weight is overwhelming) that the assassin fired from the bushes was provided by the testimony of Louie Ward, who recounted the story of a fellow driver who he always knew as “Buddy” who, when in the process of picking up a passenger at the Lorraine just before 6:00 p.m., happened to see, immediately after the shot, a man come down over the wall, run north on Mulberry Street, and get into a Memphis Police Department traffic car, which had been parked at the corner of Mulberry and Huling and then sped away. Louie Ward testified that he later learned that the taxi driver had been killed that night, allegedly having been thrown from a speeding car on Route 55 on the other side of the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge. He heard that the body was found the next morning.
The Murder Weapon
Independent testimony established that the rifle in evidence was not the murder weapon. Criminal Court Judge Joe Brown took the stand under subpoena to share his particular knowledge of the rifle evidence. I qualified Judge Brown as a ballistics expert for the purpose of his testimony about the weapon, and as he moved through his testimony, his expertise was never in doubt. He began by telling the jury that the scope on the rifle supposedly belonging to Ray had never been sighted, which meant that one could not fire it accurately when lining up a target through the scope. We introduced an April 5, 1968, FBI report that stated that the rifle, on the day after the killing, had failed an accuracy test—firing 3.5 inches to the left and 4 inches below the target. In addition, he said that the metallurgical composition of the death slug lead was different from the composition of the other bullets found in the evidence bundle in front of Canipe’s while the composition of each of the other bullets matched. He had no doubt the rifle in evidence (the rifle purchased by James) was not the murder weapon.
He stated:
Q. Let me just ask you: Moving on, based upon all this analysis and review of this rifle, the testing information, the documentation, is it your opinion that this weapon was the murder weapon that killed Martin Luther King Jr.?
A. Well, I’ve not discussed the further ballistics tests I ordered and the result. But based on the entirely of the record and the further ballistics tests I had run on this rifle, it is my opinion this is not the murder weapon.
(Op. cit., 731–732)
In a startling development, Bill Hamblin, deceased taxi driver McCraw’s housemate for fifteen years, took the stand and testified that for those fifteen years, spanning the 1970s and early 1980s, McCraw had consistently told him (but only when he was intoxicated) that on the morning after the shooting (April 5) Jowers not only showed him the rifle that killed Dr. King but told him to get rid of it. McCraw said that he drove onto the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge and threw it off. In his deposition taken years earlier, McCraw had only gone so far as to say that Jowers had shown him the actual murder weapon on the morning after the killing. If we are to believe that testimony, and there is no reason for Hamblin to lie, but also that Jowers was telling the truth to McCraw, then the actual murder weapon used to kill Dr. King has been deep in the mire of the silt of Mississippi River since 1968.
Hamblin also testified that on one occasion when he and McCraw were renting rooms in a house on Peabody owned by an FBI agent named Purdy, he told the FBI landlord that he should talk to McCraw sometime because he had information about the killing of Dr. King. Promptly after that conversation, he said, they were given their eviction notices, and during the thirty-day grace period, the MPD harassed them on a number of occasions.
At the time of the assassination, Bill Hamblin was working in a Memphis barbershop—the Cherokee barbershop—and his boss was Vernon Jones. Mr. Jones just happened to have as a client, Purdy, the same FBI agent who some years later would become Hamblin’s and McCraw’s landlord. Purdy had been having his hair cut by Mr. Jones for upwards of ten years, and they had a long-standing relationship. Hamblin testified that the agent came in for a haircut within two weeks after the killing, and after he had finished, as the agent was about to leave, Hamblin’s boss pulled him aside and within earshot asked him who killed King. Hamblin said he did not hear the soft-spoken reply, but he asked his boss about the answer and was told “he said the CIA ordered it done.”
Birmingham, Alabama, Probate Court Judge Arthur Hanes Jr., who, along with his father, was James Earl Ray’s first lawyer, testified that in his preparation for trial, which they had no doubt would result in James Earl Ray’s acquittal, he had interviewed Guy Canipe, in the doorway of whose store the bundle of evidence (including the evidence rifle) was dropped. He said that Canipe told him in no uncertain terms that the rifle was dropped about ten minutes before the shot was fired, so it obviously could not have been the murder weapon. Judge Hanes testified that Canipe was prepared to testify for the defense at the trial.
Washington, DC attorney James Lesar, who specializes in Freedom of Information Act legal actions, testified that in one such application, he obtained an FBI report concerning tests that had been conducted on the bathroom windowsill or, more specifically, on a dent in the windowsill that they suspected might have been caused by the assassin resting or pressing the barrel against the old wooden sill. We introduced into evidence the actual report issued by the laboratory in April 1968. Though a prosecutor had alleged to the contrary before the guilty plea jury on March 10, 1969, the report stated that it would not be possible to tie the dent in the windowsill to the rifle in evidence. Thus, the Shelby County district attorney general’s office knew all along that the windowsill evidence was false.
In their testimonies, Dexter King and Andy Young said that the defendant Jowers had made it clear that the murder weapon was not the rifle in evidence, but the one he took from the shooter. Jowers also told them that he had tried to flush the spent shell down his toilet, but it stopped the toilet up, and he had to remove it.
We realized that we had demonstrated through clear and convincing evidence that the rifle purchased by James, as instructed, was not the murder weapon.
The Broader Conspiracy
We next turned to present the evidence that the conspiracy to kill Martin Luther King Jr. extended well beyond Memphis, Tennessee, and, in fact, reached into the echelons of power in the nation’s capital.
Former Memphis Police Department intelligence officer Jim Smith took the stand under subpoena. His testimony at the television trial had resulted in him losing his security clearance, being put under surveillance, and, eventually, being in fear for his life, leaving Memphis, only to find that the FBI had permanently blocked him from ever again obtaining a position in law enforcement. Now, six years later, he returned to Memphis, having been transferred there in another line of work. He was uneasy and not willing to testify unless subpoenaed. We served him. He basically restated his earlier testimony that on March 18, 1968, he was assigned to assist a two-man surveillance team parked in a van in the area of the Rivermont Hotel. The van contained audio surveillance equipment and two agents—he did not know which federal agency they were from. I had earlier concluded that they were Army Security Agency (ASA) operatives and that they listened in on conversations and activities in the suite occupied by Dr. King. He did not, himself directly, participate in any of the surveillance, but he observed it and understood what was going on. Back in 1992, I had been able to obtain a detailed description of the location of the microphone placements in the suite. It was so extensive that even if Dr. King went onto the balcony, his conversation would be heard on the tape recorders in the van below. In addition to the covert (non-eye-to-eye) surveillance activities of the ASA agents, the court heard testimony from defense witness Eli Arkin, the MPD intelligence officer, that the 111th MIG was on the scene conducting its own surveillance activities. He said that some of them were based in his office.
Military historian Doug Valentine (whose book The Phoenix Program mentioned a rumor that photographs of the assassination were taken by army photographers) took the stand to testify about the military affiliation of the man who provided the Memphis police with the false assassination threat against Detective Redditt, justifying his removal from the surveillance detail at the rear of the fire station. Valentine said that when he interviewed the individual, Phillip Manual (who had been in Memphis on April 3 and 4, ostensibly pursuant to his position as a staff member of the McClellan Committee), he learned that Manual previously—and perhaps then as well—worked with the 902nd MIG. I had gradually come to believe that this little-known unit coordinated the federal agency task force activity in Memphis and also liaised with the non-military side of the operation.
Carthel Weeden, the former Fire Department captain in charge of Fire Station No. 2, testified in detail about how in the morning of April 4, he was approached by two men in civilian clothes who showed him army credentials and asked to be taken up to the roof of the fire station where they would be in a position to photograph people and activity in the area—though Carthel was not certain exactly how he led them up to the roof (it must have been up the outside iron ladder that at the time was attached to the north side of the building near the side door and the fire hose tower). He said that he observed them taking photographic equipment out of their bag. Carthel testified that he did not notice them again during that day and he just assumed that they completed their various tasks. Carthel also testified that he had never been interviewed by any local, state, or federal law enforcement official. The reason for this is obvious. Had he been interviewed, it is quite likely that the investigators would have become aware of the soldiers on the roof. They would then have had the obligation to locate them and the photographs they took. This, of course, would be the path that any serious investigation would have to take. It would be anathema to those efforts which were only set up to conceal the truth. The actual assassin was caught on film, however, lowering the rifle right after the fatal shot.
In his testimony, Professor Clay Carson read into the record portions of documents which I had provided to the King Papers Project, which he directs, at Stanford University. One of the documents was a report from Steve Tompkins after a meeting at the Hyatt Hotel in Chicago with one of the photographers. Among other details was the photographer’s confirmation that the assassin was caught on film and that it was not James Earl Ray.
Professor Carson also read the responses to questions I had asked Steve Tompkins to raise with the Green Beret I had referred to as Warren. The exchange is set out in its entirety in the transcripted court record of the trial. As can be seen from Professor Carson’s testimony, a jury heard for the first time the details of the investigative process Steve Tompkins and I employed in order to reveal the presence and the role of the eight-man Alpha 184 unit in Memphis on April 4, 1968. It became abundantly clear from Professor Carson’s testimony that the team did not carry out the assassination but were in fact in position to do so. Steve had always maintained that they were only going to be ordered to shoot in the event of a riot. As mentioned earlier, that never made any sense to me, given the apparent absence of any possible riot at the time in the area of the Lorraine. However, in his testimony Invaders member Charles Cabbage acknowledged that the members of his group, who occupied two balcony rooms just south of Dr. King’s room, were armed. When ordered to leave the hotel shortly before the assassination (actually leaving within eleven minutes of the event), the Invaders might well have been expected to react violently, disrupting the surface calm of the motel. If, instead of leaving peacefully, the Invaders had reacted violently, that could have created the required circumstances and cover for any military action deemed necessary. In any event, the Invaders left peacefully; the killing was not carried out by the army snipers who were ordered to withdraw from their position promptly after the shooting and leave the city immediately.
Covert operative Jack Terrell desperately wanted to testify in person but his liver cancer became worse and he was not allowed to travel. We had to use his video deposition taken in Orlando, Florida, on February 7, 1999. It stunned the court. After describing his previous covert activities on behalf of the government, he described his close friendship with the Twentieth SFG Green Beret JD Hill whom he came to know in Columbus, Mississippi, contradicting the Alpha team leader and Twentieth SFG Commander Cobb’s statements on ABC’s Turning Point. He said that JD told him that the Twentieth would train for two weeks every summer at Shelby and that he would return in excellent physical condition. He said that on one such occasion in 1975, JD seemed to want to unburden himself. It was then that he began to spell out the details of a mission for which he had trained that was to be carried out in Memphis. He said that his unit had trained for a considerable period of time to carry out the assassination of a target or targets who were to be in a moving automobile. He said that snipers were placed high above and a considerable distance away from the target vehicle. They were not told who was the target but suspected it might have been an Arab.
Jack said JD told him that on April 4, 1968, he and his unit set out for Memphis, still not aware of who the target was to be. In my first session with Jack in 1994, he had indicated that JD told him that the team was already in Memphis and had been in position on three occasions—similar to Warren’s version—when they were told to withdraw. The discrepancy arose between his 1999 deposition and the statement he originally gave to me in 1994. There may, in fact, be no discrepancy at all. In his earlier account it was clear that the unit was staying somewhere in the area but outside of Memphis. They would travel to town and take up their positions—water tower, building roof, and window—and then leave at the end of the day. It may be that when he testified, they were en route to Memphis; when they were told to withdraw, he was referring to the last trip in on April 4. When he heard about the assassination, JD told Jack, his initial reaction was that another team was also involved and his unit did not get the call. What is incontrovertible, however, is that JD Hill was a member of a unit that trained to carry out an assassination on American soil and that the event was to take place in Memphis, Tennessee, on or around April 4, 1968.
When, shortly afterward, JD learned that Dr. King had been assassinated on the day of their mission, he realized that this was his unit’s mission. Terrell then described the suspicious circumstances of JD’s death in 1979 where his wife was alleged—though not indicted—to have put a neat semicircle of .357 magnum bullets in his chest after he returned home late at night. As noted earlier, Terrell said it was impossible for JD’s wife, who weighed about ninety pounds, to have handled the .357 magnum with such precision.
The Cover-Up
A large number of witnesses testified to the extensive range of activities that caused the truth in this case to remain hidden and justice denied for nearly thirty-two years. Incredibly, the chronicle of events and actions included murder, solicitation of murder, attempted bribery, suppression of evidence, alteration of the crime scene, and the control, manipulation, and use of the media for propaganda purposes.
Former taxi driver and security officer Louie Ward testified, as noted earlier, about what he learned from the observation of Yellow Cab taxi driver “Buddy” who, when picking up a passenger at the Lorraine at the time of the shooting, saw a man come down over the wall, run north on Mulberry Street, get into a Memphis Police Department traffic car and be driven away. Louie Ward testified that he heard this account directly from Buddy, who was driving car number 58 on that day. He said that Buddy told him this story just before two police officers arrived and were told the same thing. Later that evening Ward said he saw a number of MPD cars parked at the Yellow Cab officers. He was certain that they were taking a statement from Buddy.
Since he was only a part-time driver, Ward said he did not return to work as a driver for about two weeks. When he did, he asked where Buddy was. He said he was told that he was dead, having been thrown from a car on Route 55 on the other side of the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge on the night that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
Ward testified that he watched the newspaper for an obituary or death notice, but did not see any. Massachusetts attorney Raymond Kohlman testified that he had inquired about death records in Memphis and the neighboring states and found that there was no record of Buddy’s death.
Though we were never able to locate with certainty the dispatcher on duty that night, one person who Ward believed also knew what happened and who may have been the dispatcher on duty the evening of April 4, refused to discuss the matter. This same person apparently came into a substantial amount of money after the event and bought a very expensive house, which would have certainly been beyond both his means as a taxi driver or any apparent family resources.
We had no doubt that Louie Ward was telling the truth. He had no reason to come forward at this point in time and lie. He never asked for anything, and our team concurred unanimously that he was one of the most credible witnesses we put before the jury.
The effectiveness of the cover-up of this side of the murder event, however, was staggering. There was no police report or statement taken from the driver, in any file, and no death record or report existed. No driver alive, except Louie Ward, remembered or was willing to talk about the incident, although Hamilton Smythe IV, the present manager of the Yellow Cab company, did acknowledge to Nathan Whitlock that he heard about such an event, but then quickly said only his father could comment. The father, Ham Smythe III, as noted earlier, stated that he did not believe it ever happened.
Maynard Stiles, in 1968, was a senior administrator of the Memphis Department of Public Works. In 1999, he had been retired for a number of years living outside of the city, but he readily agreed to testify about what he did early on the morning of April 5, 1968.
The day after the assassination, Maynard Stiles’s day began at 7:00 a.m. when his phone rang. He said MPD Inspector Sam Evans was on the other end, and he had an urgent request. He asked Stiles to send a team to completely clean up the area behind the rooming house on South Main Street. The team would work under police supervision, but the basic job was to cut the thick brush and bushes to the ground and rake them into piles so they could be carted away. Stiles hung up and called Dutch Goodman, who he instructed to pull a team together. Willie Crawford was recruited along with some others who began working that morning.
Stiles said that he checked on the progress in late morning, and he recalls that the job was so extensive that it took his men more than one day to complete.
As far as he was concerned, he was cooperating with the police. It was not his job to question the decision to clean up the area. For all he knew they were looking for evidence. In fact, a cardinal rule of criminal investigation was contravened. An area which was part of the crime scene was not only sealed off, preventing intrusion, but also a clean-up crew was brought in for the express purpose of drastically altering the entire physical setting itself so that it could never be examined, considered, and analyzed as it was at the time of the crime.
Where potential evidence was stumbled upon or acquired, it frequently was ignored or suppressed—this was the case with the two FBI 302 statements given by William Reed and Ray Hendrix, which we put into evidence. They were the two men who left Jim’s Grill about twenty minutes or so before the killing and spent some time looking at James’s Mustang before walking north on South Main Street. Just as they reached Vance, about two blocks away, they saw the white Mustang, driven by a dark-haired man, turn the corner in front of them. These observations, in fact, corroborated James’s account of how he left the scene several minutes before the shooting in an effort to have the flat spare tire repaired. In other words, they constituted an alibi but were kept from the defense and suppressed.
Also suppressed were critical scientific reports known to the prosecution at the time. First, that the dent in the bathroom windowsill, which the state contended had been made by the murder weapon, could not have been proved to have been made by a rifle. Second, that the death slug removed from Dr. King’s body could not be linked to or matched with the rifle in evidence, and that this alleged murder weapon had failed an accuracy test on the morning after the shooting because it had never been sighted in.
Though this evidence was noted earlier, it is important to focus on it here in terms of the cover-up. Near the end of his tenure as James Earl Ray’s lawyer—he was replaced by Mark Lane in 1977—and during the early period of the investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Jack Kershaw testified that he was asked to attend a meeting in the offices of a Nashville publishing company. The meeting was held in a large conference room, and those present included author William Bradford Huie. He didn’t recognize any of the other persons, but he said that two of them appeared to be government types.
He was asked to take an offer to James Earl Ray. The offer consisted of a sum of money (in this instance $50,000), parole, and an opportunity for a new life if James would finally admit that he was the killer. Kershaw said he listened, challenged Huie at one point in terms of the reason behind the offer, and the feasibility of the arrangements, but agreed to take them to his client. He said James rejected the proposal out of hand.
James’s brother Jerry took the stand to testify how, sometime later, he was personally contacted by author Huie, who made the same offer except that this time the amount of the offer had increased to $220,000. James was still having none of it.
The jury heard evidence of two other more sinister cover-up efforts to put an end to James Earl Ray’s protestations of innocence and request for a trial. Former congressman and HSCA King subcommittee chairman Walter Fauntroy testified that after James Earl Ray escaped with a number of other inmates in 1976, they learned that the FBI had immediately (and uninvited) sent a SWAT team consisting of upwards of thirty snipers to the prison. Their information was that this unit was there not to help capture Ray but to kill him. Fauntroy said that at his urging HSCA Chairman Stokes called Tennessee Governor Ray Blanton and asked him to intervene in order to save their main witness and Blanton’s most famous prisoner. Blanton promptly took a helicopter to the prison and ordered the FBI out of the area, thus saving James’s life, for he was captured non-violently shortly afterward.
April Ferguson, who later became a federal public defender, was, in 1978, Mark Lane’s assistant. She testified that their office was contacted by an inmate named Tim Kirk at the Shelby County jail. When she and an assistant went out to interview Kirk, he told them that he had been asked by Memphis mob-connected topless club owner Arthur Wayne Baldwin to put out a contract on James Earl Ray. Kirk, who had some lethal connections at the Brushy Mountain Penitentiary, could have organized the hit but he became suspicious. Baldwin did not reach him that first time, and he had to return the call. When he did call back, he realized that the number was to a suite of rooms in a hotel near the Memphis airport, where rooms were kept by the local US attorney’s office and the FBI and used to interview witnesses and for other purposes. He thought that he might have been set up, and so he decided to contact Ray’s lawyer. Another effort to silence James was aborted.
Half a day was occupied with the testimony of attorney William Schapp, who we qualified as an expert on government use of the media for disinformation and propaganda purposes. After providing the jury with a survey of these practices by governments throughout history in a detailed question and answer exchange, Schapp introduced the court to these practices of the United States government in other cases, or issues, where intelligence and/or national security interest were believed to be involved. A number of examples were cited. One, for example, involved a CIA propaganda story that was spread all over the world and widely believed for four years regarding Cuban troops fighting in Angola:
1. Raped Angolan women
2. Were tried and convicted of these crimes
3. Were executed by the victims
In fact none of the above was true. The story was revealed by the agent who promulgated it to be false and to have been totally concocted at the CIA station in Zaire and disseminated through the extensive worldwide agency network. Schapp revealed that his research clearly indicated that the agency alone—not to mention its counterparts in the rest of the American intelligence community—owned or controlled some 2,500 media entities all over the world. In addition, it had its people, ranging from stringers to highly visible journalists and editors, in virtually every major media organization. As we had seen and were indeed experiencing every day of the trial, this inevitably resulted in the suppression or distortion of sensitive stories and the planting and dissemination of disinformation.
Schapp then turned to the coverage of the King assassination and examined the extraordinary universal media hostility against Dr. King when he came out against the Vietnam War and the same reaction against his family when they decided to advocate a trial for James Earl Ray. Cited were specific examples of media distortions and blatant lies, which characterized the media coverage of the case and James Earl Ray’s alleged role for over thirty years. Particular mention was made of the totally baseless New York Times front-page column piece reporting on alleged investigations by the FBI, the HSCA, and the Times of the 1967 Alton Illinois bank robbery. This piece was far worse than distorted or slanted reporting since the investigation did not take place and the Ray brothers were never even suspects as the Times article stated. It was a domestic example of the type of pure fabrication similar to the story about the Angolan rapes.
Schapp explained that a Harvard neurologist had helped him to understand the power of the neurological impact upon human cognizance, intelligence functioning, and reasoned decision making when the same story is told over and over again. The impact makes sense when the same story is told repeatedly. That impact makes the story a knee-jerk part of the people who are exposed to it. Even if they are convinced on one occasion by powerful evidence to the contrary, the next day will usually find them reverting to the long-held belief, which has became a part of themselves—often integral to their very identity. Nothing less than some sort of intense deprogramming experience with ongoing reinforcement is required.
After analyzing the powerfully comprehensive control of the media by the forces that control American public policy and examining their identical policy and coverage in terms of the assassination, the systematic brainwashing of Americans in respect of this case became abundantly clear to the court, jury, and those present. Bill Schapp’s analysis and testimony highlighted the absence of the media in our courtroom. In effect, by not being there, they proved his point. As noted earlier, only one local television journalist stayed.
Considering all of the aspects of the cover-up in this case, the ongoing media role is the most sinister precisely because it, if not powerfully controverted, as was done with the trial, perpetuates the lies and disinformation from one generation to the next, for all time.
The Defendant
The defendant Loyd Jowers had made a number of admissions over the years that, taken cumulatively, constituted powerful evidence of his involvement in the assassination. A number of witnesses took the stand, each with a particular piece of the picture of Jowers’s role.
Taxi driver James Milner, who met Jowers in the early 1970s, recounted how he came to work closely with Jowers during 1979 and 1980, seeing him about eight hours a day. On one occasion during this time about twenty years ago, he testified that Jowers told him that Dr. King was killed not by James Earl Ray but by a law enforcement officer and that he knew all about it.
Milner said that after Jowers told him that Dr. King was actually killed by a law enforcement officer, he added that, “You can take that to the bank.” After that admission over twenty years ago, Milner said that in 1998 he carried on a long-distance telephone relationship with his friend over a period of around three months. During these conversations, Milner testified that Jowers essentially told him what happened. Milner said he asked Jowers if he pulled the trigger, and the response was, “I was involved to a certain extent, but I did not pull the trigger.” He said Jowers stated that Frank Liberto sent him a large sum of money in a produce box. He took it and put it in an old stove. Then, the man he knew as Raul picked it up. Loyd told him that the assassination was planned for over two days in meetings in his café, attended by five men—only three of whom he knew.
Milner said that Jowers told him that Frank Liberto instructed him to be at the back door around 6:00 p.m. where he would receive a “package.” He was there, heard a shot, and then took the “still-smoking” rifle from his friend Earl Clark. He tried to flush the cartridge shell down his toilet, but it stopped up his toilet. When he retrieved it later that night, he threw it in the Mississippi River. The next morning, Jowers said Raul picked up the rifle.
As noted earlier, J. J. Isabel testified, confirming his earlier statement that he and Jowers each drove a chartered bus to Cleveland and shared a hotel room, and after dinner and beers (with Jowers having more than a few), sat on their beds talking. Isabel said Jowers confirmed his knowledge about his involvement in the assassination. Isabel said Jowers’s response gave him pause. He dropped the subject and never raised it again.
Bobbi Balfour (Betty Spates’s sister, previously Smith), one of Jowers’s waitresses, testified that on the morning of the day of the assassination, Jowers instructed her not to bring food upstairs in the rooming house to Grace Walden Stephens, who was bedridden and recuperating from an illness. Grace and Charlie Stephens’s room was right next to the one rented by James Earl Ray in mid-afternoon, and which appeared to have been used by Raul for setting up James. Ms. Balfour also testified that Jowers picked her up and drove her to work the next morning. On the way, she said, he told her that the police had found the murder weapon out behind the cafe.
Betty Spates’s story, which first surfaced in 1992, was put into evidence as a rebuttal witness through her deposition and her earlier affidavits, in which she stated that she was standing at the back door of the Grill’s kitchen around 6:00 p.m. on April 4, 1968, when she saw Loyd running from the bushes carrying a rifle. His face was white as a sheet, and the knees of his trousers were wet and muddied. Rushing by her, she said he broke down the rifle; then wrapping it in a cloth he carried it into the Grill, where he put it under the counter. For all of the intervening years, Betty Spates thought Loyd himself was the assassin because she didn’t see anyone else in the bushes.
Defense counsel Garrison attacked Spates’s credibility, quoting from a statement she gave to the Shelby County district attorney general and FBI investigators, in which she denied seeing anything. She had subsequently told me that she felt threatened by the two official investigators. We intended to call defendant Jowers at this stage of the proceedings, but after the first week of the trial, his health deteriorated, preventing his return to the courtroom. Consequently, we read portions of his deposition into evidence. That evidence included the statements discussed earlier that he confirmed he made in a December 16, 1993, television interview with Sam Donaldson on his Primetime Live program, in which Jowers admitted that he became involved in facilitating the assassination at the request of Memphis mobster Frank Liberto, to whom he owed a big favor. As noted earlier, he was told that no police would be around and that a scapegoat was in place.
The most critical testimony in terms of evidence-damning admissions by Loyd Jowers came from Ambassador Andrew Young and Dexter King.
Both testified that Jowers admitted to being approached by Frank Liberto. Jowers would receive a lot of money, which he was to turn over to a person named Raul who would visit him and who would leave a rifle with him.
He said these events took place, and subsequently there were meetings in his Grill where the assassination was actually planned.
The testimony revealed that Jowers said that on the day of the planned event, Earl Clark collected the rifle from him within an hour of the killing. The next time he saw the rifle was when he took it from the shooter when it was still smoking after the shot.
Jowers insisted that he didn’t know who was going to be killed and contended that he did not actively participate in the planning sessions. Both Dexter King and Andrew Young testified that on this point, they didn’t believe him. They agreed that he appeared to be an old man wanting to relieve himself of a great burden, but that he didn’t quite seem able to bring himself to be completely truthful as to his role and the extent of his knowledge in front of the victim’s son.
The interview session conducted by Dexter King and Andrew Young was tape-recorded, and that recording, authenticated by Ambassador Young was introduced into evidence in its entirety.
Damages
The King family did not bring the action for the purpose of obtaining a large damage award against Loyd Jowers or his co-conspirator agents of the City of Memphis, State of Tennessee, and the Federal Government.
The family decided to request only nominal damages in the amount of $100 toward the funeral expenses of their loved one. Three of the five family members testified with great dignity. Mrs. King, Dexter, and Yolanda, each in her or his own special way, told the jury what it meant to lose Martin Luther King Jr. as a husband and a father. From their perspectives, the jury and the court had a unique opportunity to focus on the personal loss to young children of a loving, caring, and playful father, as well as the sudden absence suffered by their mother as she was traumatically separated from her lifetime partner. One began to get a glimpse of the burden of being the close family of a man, a human being, who becomes a legendary, heroic figure in life, then mythologized, and perhaps beatified, if not sainted, on earth. (At the time of this writing, Dr. King has been declared a martyr by the Vatican—the first step toward sainthood.)
The Case for the Defense
Defense counsel Garrison called this case the most important litigation he had tried in his forty years of practice. He had, however, been placed in a most difficult position by his client’s admissions, which were driven by a desire, on the one hand, to obtain immunity from prosecution (which began in 1993) and, on the other, to unburden his conscience in his waning years. The defense therefore took the position that Mr. Jowers had no liability, but if he did, it was minuscule compared with that of the co-conspirators, who were agents of the city, state, and federal governments. The strategy was to minimize Jowers’s involvement, and consequently, it made little sense not to acknowledge the role played by the alleged co-conspirators.
Therefore, throughout the presentation of the plaintiffs’ case, the defense focused on eliciting evidence from relevant witnesses on cross-examination, which tended to minimize his client’s involvement, though not that of a co-conspirators’.
At the conclusion of the plaintiffs’ case, the defense moved for a dismissal on the grounds that the plaintiffs’ wrongful death action had been filed outside of the one-year statute of limitations. After extensive oral arguments, the judge denied the motion.
The most hotly disputed defense motion, and the last before Lewis Garrison opened his case, was for a mistrial based upon the inability of his client to attend the trial and assist with his defense due to his deteriorating health condition.
The judge was unhappy with the language of a doctor’s letter in support of this motion, noting that it did not explicitly state that Jowers was unable to attend court or testify. The court denied the motion for a mistrial, and the defense moved on with its case.
First, he called Reverend Samuel “Billy” Kyles. In response to questions put to him on direct examination, Reverend Kyles described his civil rights experiences in Tennessee and the events surrounding the sanitation workers’ strike and Dr. King’s visit. He said that they were all under surveillance and he referred to the Redditt-Richmond surveillance operation which was conducted from the rear of the fire station. He said that he learned that one of the black officers (he was referring to Willie B. Richmond) who engaged in that activity was so troubled by it that he became an alcoholic, left the police force, and died (implying that he committed suicide). He gave his usual account of how he went into Dr. King’s room about an hour before the assassination, spending the last hour of Dr. King’s life with him. He described their conversation or “preacher talk.” He gave an emotional statement of how he had come to believe that it was God’s will that he had been present when this great man died. He said, inexplicably, that Dr. King did not die using drugs or from engaging in some other criminal activity but because he was there to help the garbage workers. He described how a little old lady came to one of his speeches and told him how she just wanted to shake his hand because his hand had touched Dr. King. Thus, he considered himself blessed to have had this experience. When Lewis Garrison surrendered the witness, Kyles was riding high with his credibility intact.
I had decided that my associate Juliet Hill-Akines would conduct the cross-examination of Reverend Kyles. Her task was to destroy any credibility that came from him being a pastor. She focused on how he drew pleasure from women, such as the one he described reaching out to him and seeking to touch his hand. Then, her questions dealt with Willie B. Richmond, indicating not only that he was alive but also that he had testified at this trial. Kyles was surprised. The jurors appeared to be amused. She walked him through a previous statement Richmond had made which refutes his claim to have been in Dr. King’s room. He had said he simply knocked on the door and had a few words with Dr. King who then closed the door, and Kyles walked over to the balcony some way down from the room.
Richmond stated:
A. Immediately after the Invaders left, the Reverend Samuel Kyles came out of room 312 and went to the room where Martin Luther King was living. He knocked on the door and Martin Luther King came to the door. They said a few words between each other and Reverend Martin Luther King went back into his room closing the door behind him, and the Reverend Samuel Kyles remained on the porch.
Q. Right. So you’re telling us there from your eyewitness report that Reverend Kyles knocked on Martin Luther King’s door at about ten minutes to six or shortly after ten minutes to six, said a few words to Dr. King after he opened the door. Then when the door was closed, Dr. King went back into his room and Reverend Kyles remained on the—you call it the porch, but on the balcony?
A. The balcony.
(Op. cit., 1096)
Reverend Kyles said that statement was simply not true. He could not explain, however, why Richmond would lie about these simple facts. Then Juliet played a videotape of a speech he had given on the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination. In it, he described again how he spent Dr. King’s last hour on earth with him and Reverend Abernathy in room 306. Then, as he described how he and Dr. King stood together on the balcony at the railing, he seemed to get carried away as he said, “… only as I moved away so he could have a clear shot, the shot rang out….” The jury and the judge looked stunned.
Juliet played the tape three times, so it became very clear that Kyles had, in fact, admitted stepping aside so that a shooter could get a clear shot. When she asked him who he was thinking about getting a clear shot, he said he supposed it would have been James Earl Ray.
(Whereupon a portion of the videotape was replayed for the court and Jury.)
Rev. Kyles: “What preachers talk about when they get together, revivals and all the like. About a quarter of six we walked on the balcony, and he was talking to people in the courtyard. He stood here and I stood there. Only as I moved away so he could have a clear shot, the shot rang out.”
(Op. cit., 1596)
At one point during cross-examination, Kyles mouthed silently to her, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” The jury was stunned; some mouths opened in disbelief. When he was dismissed, he walked behind the attorneys’ chairs and asked Garrison, “What did you get me into?”
Garrison replied, “I just called you as a witness.”
Yolanda King sat through Reverend Kyles’s testimony.
Next, the defense called Frank Warren Young from the Shelby County criminal clerk’s office. He brought with him the original transcript of the record of the guilty plea hearing and authenticated it so that it could be placed in evidence and in the record. The defense thus ensured that James Earl Ray’s guilty plea was in evidence for the jury’s review.
On cross-examination, I asked him to look at the first pages of the transcript and observe whether or not James Earl Ray had been put under oath by Judge Preston Battle (required practice during a guilty plea hearing). He had not been sworn. I next asked him to read James’s interruption of the proceedings when he stated that he had never agreed with Ramsey Clark or J. Edgar Hoover that there had been no conspiracy and he did not want to do so now.
As their next witness, the defense called former MPD lieutenant Eli Arkin. Arkin, who was a senior intelligence officer, confirmed that he had picked up Detective Redditt at the fire station and eventually, after the meeting in the MPD Central Headquarters, on director Holloman’s instructions, taken him to his home. Shortly after they arrived, the assassination took place. Eli Arkin’s confirmation of the presence and activity of the 111th Military Intelligence Group in Memphis added to the defense’s mitigating claim.
The first wife of Lieutenant Earl Clark, Rebecca Clark, was called as the next defense witness. Prior to her testimony, she had asked for a copy of her deposition to review and was provided with it. Mrs. Garrison established that her husband kept a large collection of guns and that he was an expert shot. She said that she got off work at 4:00 p.m. She then said she believed that her husband got home about an hour or so later and lay down for a nap which lasted thirty to forty or forty-five minutes until a report came over the police walkie-talkie radio, which he had left on the dining room table for her to monitor.
When word of the assassination came through, she woke him up, and he told her to go and get his clean uniform from the cleaners before they closed. She set out for the cleaner which was about fifteen minutes away while he took a bath. When she returned, he left.
Attorney Garrison raised the fact that the kind of walkie-talkie she was talking about was not available during those times. She couldn’t comment on that. On cross-examination, I came back several times to the question of whether she was lying to protect her dead, divorced husband and her children. She denied that she would lie for that purpose. One major problem with her alibi for her former husband was the timing of the events, and the conflict between her earlier recollections in her deposition of April 1999 and her current story.
In her deposition, she had clearly stated that she usually worked until 3:00 p.m., but on that day, she worked until 4:00 p.m. She also set the time of his unannounced arrival at about ten to fifteen minutes after her own. She indicated that he was not asleep very long when the announcement came on the radio. In court, she now remembered that he could have arrived as much as forty-five minutes after her, putting his arrival at or around 5:00 p.m. and that his nap could have lasted for quite some time—an hour or more.
It appeared to me that she was trying to cover up for an unexplained period of an hour, which may have meant that both she and her husband came home earlier and that he left well before the assassination.
Attorney Garrison read portions of a “John Doe November 5, 1999” telephone deposition into the record. The witness, who contacted Garrison, declared that he was involved in the assassination of Dr. King, and that he was present when a contract for the killing was put out by Walter Reuther, the leader of the United Auto Workers’ Union. He contended that Reuther was being pressed by Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson because of Dr. King’s antiwar activity, and that Carlos Marcello cooperated but was not directly involved, and James Earl Ray was not even there, having left for Atlanta.
The defense had subpoenaed Marvin Glankler, the investigator in charge of the Shelby County district attorney general’s last investigation, and retired judges James Beasley and Robert Dwyer, who were assistant attorneys general in 1968 and prepared the state case against James Earl Ray. Beasley’s case actually presented the state’s evidence to the guilty plea jury. Garrison said that initially they told him they would be pleased to take the stand and defend their work and the case against James.
By early December, close to the time they were due to take the stand, their positions had changed. A motion to quash the subpoena was filed on their behalf by the state attorney general. The motion was argued out of the presence of the jury; the judge denied the motion and ordered the former judges to appear.
Garrison attempted repeatedly to draw information from Glankler on the attorney general’s investigative report, which was published in 1998. He was met with continual objections from the Tennessee assistant attorney general who was there to represent the state; the Shelby County district attorney general, and, of course, Investigator Glankler. The state lawyer was up and down like a jack-in-the-box. His intention was clearly to limit Glankler’s testimony to the minimum extent possible. He basically contended that the report should speak for itself, and since Glankler did not write it, he could not comment on it. Garrison was able to extract the facts that the district attorney general’s office began an investigation in 1993 and ended it in 1998, that he, Glankler, was the chief investigator, and that the investigation may have included statements taken from about forty witnesses.
On cross-examination, I took a different tactic. I asked Glankler if he had interviewed twenty-five named witnesses, the evidence from all of whom had already been heard by the jury. I asked him about each one in turn. Of the twenty-five, he had interviewed only two. He had not even heard of most of the others. The negative impact on the credibility of the district attorney general’s investigation and report was evident in the expressions of disbelief on the jurors’ faces.
The defense next called LaVada Whitlock Addison, Nathan Whitlock’s mother, and, as noted earlier, she testified in detail about the time in her cafe when her regular customer, Memphis produce man Frank Liberto, told her that he had arranged the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. She said that she ran the little pizza parlor—which was between Liberto’s home and his warehouse in the Scott Street market—between 1976 and 1982. On the day in question, she said they were sitting together at two tables pushed together, and something came on the television about Dr. King. (The congressional hearings were being televised in 1978.) Liberto leaned toward her and said, “I had Dr. Martin Luther King killed.”
She said she recoiled and told him, “Don’t be telling me anything like that. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t believe it anyway.” She said this was the only time he ever mentioned it to her, though she saw him many times afterward.
Attorney Garrison read large portions of James Earl Ray’s deposition into the record, which basically set out James’s story and the history of his involvement from the time he escaped from prison in 1967.
After the Spates rebuttal evidence, discussed earlier, was concluded, defense counsel Garrison renewed his motion for a mistrial, based upon his client’s absence from court. This was denied promptly, and he then filed a motion for directed verdict, which he argued was justified because the plaintiffs did not meet the required burden of proof. I argued that the evidence adduced on behalf of the plaintiffs was overwhelming and though we had met the standard, we decided not to move for a directed verdict in this case because we wanted it to go to the jury. The judge denied the motion, and closing arguments began.
Meanwhile, the attorney general appealed Judge Swearingen’s denial of the motion to quash the subpoenas served upon judges Beasley and Dwyer to the court of appeals and the court promptly overturned the ruling and ordered the subpoena quashed. Judges Beasley and Dwyer were spared the inevitably uncomfortable task of defending the state’s investigation and justifying certain representations made on March 10, 1969, to the guilty plea hearing jury.
The Closing Arguments
Over a period of nearly two hours, I took the jury through the evidence, step-by-step, reminding them that the King family had brought this trial because the initial investigation was badly flawed and had not been remedied by any subsequent official local or federal investigation. I reminded them that the truth had been covered up for thirty-one years but that in this courtroom, even though the media had been absent most of the time and the outside world had not learned about the evidence or even heard about the trial, the truth had been revealed. As Dr. King had said, “Truth crushed to earth shall rise again”—and so it did.
During the last half hour, with the use of computer graphics, we took the jury through the last twenty-one minutes of Dr. King’s life and the eleven minutes immediately following the killing. Lewis Garrison contended that if his client had any liability, he was at worst only a small cog in the conspiracy that took Martin Luther King’s life. He tried to focus the jury’s attention on the city, state, and federal government as well as on James Earl Ray.
The Jury Instructions
By late morning, we were finished and the judge instructed the jury. He gave the standard instructions, defining direct and circumstantial evidence, advising them that they, and only they, must decide questions of and how much weight to put on the various aspects of evidence that had been laid before them, while he would determine the law. He reminded them that they must find for the plaintiffs if they found that the plaintiffs’ allegations were proved by a preponderance of the evidence—in other words, if the allegations were more likely true than not. On the issue of damages, he reminded them that they were bound by the parties’ stipulation that the damages should not exceed $100—a payment toward the funeral expenses.
Finally, he told them that he had prepared a jury verdict sheet, which contained these questions to be answered:
• Did the defendant Loyd Jowers participate in a conspiracy to do harm to Dr. Martin Luther King? If yes,
• Did you also find that others, including governmental agencies were parties to this conspiracy, as alleged by the defendant?
• What is the total amount of damages to be awarded to the plaintiffs?
The case went to the jury just before lunch.
The Verdict
It took the jury about one hour to decide. After nearly four weeks of trial and about seventy witnesses they found that:
• Yes—Loyd Jowers participated in a conspiracy to do harm to Martin Luther King.
• Yes—others, including governmental agencies, were parties to this conspiracy, as alleged by the defendant.
• Total damages to be awarded to the plaintiffs—$100.
The issue of comparative liability was agreed to rest with the judge. Based on the evidence before him, Judge Swearingen apportioned liability as follows:
• 30 percent—defendant Loyd Jowers.
• 70 percent—all other co-conspirators, including state, federal, and city agencies and officials.