THE FINAL SUMMATION AND AFTERWORD
When it happened, I was shocked
How naïve were we then,
Thoughts of conspiracy openly mocked
Again the sword above the pen.
Half a lifetime later, the truth appears
And darkness yields to light,
Long gone and dried are all the tears,
Dawn follows our longest night.
A painful truth takes its turn,
Without relief or solace,
Even justice, for which we yearn
Can never compensate the loss.
So, what was it for this long endeavor?
The expensive trial for family and love,
And why this tie I could not sever?—er—ver—?
As though being driven from above.
But all journeys must one day end,
So it is with this one,
Confronting the loss of a dear friend
Now, nearly half a century gone,
Punishment is not the goal,
Of a mission driven by love
Each involved has a personal soul,
Without any respite from above.
It has indeed taken nearly fifty years for the fundamental truth to emerge. Over this time, as noted earlier, we have probably acquired more detailed knowledge about this political assassination than we have ever had about any previous historical event.
This is largely because I have been unwilling to leave this case to history’s official dustbin. As a result, witnesses have come forward, evidence has emerged, and a formidable truth has been nurtured.
It may be useful to summarize the relevant events that took place during the last hour (or thereabouts) of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life:
• The shooter arrives in the area and leaves the red and white Chevrolet convertible belonging to the fireman friend of Strausser in the parking area of the fire station.
• Rifle-range janitor Lenny Curtis tries to call a pastor he knows to alert him to his suspicions about what he has observed. He does not make contact.
• Sixteen-year-old Ron Adkins Tyler heads to Memphis on a new Honda bike, carrying what may well be a back-up gun, which he turns over to his brother. He rides around the area for some time and then stops his Honda, as instructed, around 5:50 p.m. near the corner of Butler on Mulberry by the fire station.
• The Alpha 184 snipers determine their target’s location and wait.
• The Invaders meet in their rooms adjoining Dr. King’s on the second floor of the Lorraine Motel and discuss the upcoming march.
• The Holloman-Adkins group, including Raul, the shooter, and Earl Clark, meet in room 5-B of the rooming house. James, having left his belongings and been sent away, is told by Raul to go to the movies.
• Dr. Breen Bland, Head of Surgery at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Adkins’ family doctor, sits waiting in his office in a building adjoining the hospital.
• MPD Community Police Officer Ed Redditt is told by Eli Arkin, Deputy Director of MPD Intelligence, that a threat has been made on his (Ed’s) life and he must leave his post at the fire station. He is taken to MPD Headquarters before being brought home, and he observes more military brass than he has ever seen. It emerges that the threat was confirmed by Philip Manual, a US Senate McClellan Committee lead investigator who was also associated with the 902nd Military Intelligence Group. Redditt is ordered home by Frank Holloman.
• Psy-Ops photographers continue to photograph everything going on at the Lorraine Motel and its parking lot, eventually culminating in one of them filming the shooter as he lowers his rifle and turns away to leave the scene.
• Mama Adkins drives her Chevy Nova down to Mulberry Street and parks north of the Lorraine Motel in case transportation backup is needed.
• Ray Alvis Hendrix of the Corps of Engineers, and William Zanie Reed, a photographic supplies salesman, leave Jim’s Grill around 5:35 p.m. and examine James’s Mustang parked in front. They begin to walk north on South Main.
• James Earl Ray returns to the rooming house at around 5:00 p.m. after getting some ice cream at the Chisca Hotel. Raul is still in the room. James notices a small radio, or walkie-talkie, in his jacket pocket. Raul suggests that James leave and go into one of the local movie theaters for the time being. James walks around and enters a bar, then remembers the flat spare tire, and walks briskly back to the car. He gets into the Mustang around 5:45 to 5:50 p.m. and drives north on South Main in an effort to get his flat spare tire fixed. As he reaches Vance Avenue, one block north of Huling, he turns right just as Hendrix and Reed are about to cross. They observe him.
• James drives to and stops at a gas station and asks to have the tire fixed. He is told he will have to wait. He pulls out to go to another station and buys some gas.
• Around 5:30 to 5:40 p.m., Invaders member Charles “lzzy” Harrington answers the motel room door and is told by a member of the motel staff that the Invaders will have to leave, ostensibly because the SCLC will no longer be paying their bill. The motel worker delivering the message confirms that the instructions come from the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who is observed by Harrington standing in the parking lot looking at his watch. Shocked and angry, they gather up their belongings and are gone by 5:50 p.m.
• Shortly before this, Marrell McCullough pulls up in his car with the Reverends James Orange and Jim Bevel.
• At 5:50 p.m., MPD Officer Willie B. Richmond from the fire station observes Reverend Billy Kyles knocking on Dr. King’s door. It opens slightly and a few words are exchanged. The door closes and Kyles walks north on the balcony, stops around forty to fifty feet away and stands at the railing.
• Between 5:30 and 5:45 p.m., the shooter and Earl Clark leave room 5-B and go down the back stairway and out of the back door to the heavily overgrown brush area behind the rooming house. They are partially observed descending the stairs by Grace Stephens in her room. Outside they are joined by Loyd Jowers, who has come through the kitchen rear door of Jim’s Grill. They set themselves up in an area of the bushes, keeping low and out of sight in the soggy area, with Jowers kneeling down.
• Around 5:30 p.m., David Mark Young arrived and parked near the north end of the South Main street building that also housed the rooming house on the south end of the attached building. He then went upstairs carrying two rifles wrapped in cloth and arrived in the area of an open window immediately adjacent to the rooming house bathroom window.
• Between 5:45 and 6:00 p.m., Olivia Catling has begun to prepare dinner in her home on Mulberry Street between Huling and Vance.
• Also around this time, Yellow Cab driver “Buddy” Butler is trying to fit a lot of luggage into his cab, luggage belonging to a departing Lorraine Motel guest. His cab is parked inside the driveway of the motel.
• Around 5:55 p.m., taxi driver James McCraw, answering a call to pick up Charlie Stephens, drives up and parks in front of the rooming house, goes inside and up the stairs to pick up Charlie. As he reaches the top of the stairs, he notices that the bathroom door is open and appears to be empty, although the light is on. He goes to Charlie’s (and Grace’s) room and finds Charlie passed out drunk with his head on the table and leaves the building, gets into his car, and drives away. In a few moments he hears the news on the radio of the assassination.
• At about 5:55 p.m., as Dr. King’s brother AD is entering the shower in his room, Ernestine Campbell leaves the Trumpet Hotel, which she owns with her husband, and which abuts the Lorraine Motel. She drives up Butler and turns right on Mulberry. She has her radio on and the car windows closed.
• Just before 6:00 p.m., Jowers’s erstwhile mistress and mother of one of his children, Betty Spates, enters Jim’s Grill looking for Loyd. Not seeing him but noticing that the door to the kitchen was unusually closed, she goes into the kitchen to see the back door ajar.
• Just before 6:00 p.m., Dr. King comes out of his room and stands on the balcony near the railing. Abernathy remains behind or returns to the room. Dr. King waits for him on the balcony and converses with the people below.
• At 6:01 p.m., the spotter, Earl Clark, and the shooter stand up, sight the target head on, and fire.
• The shooter turns, passes the rifle either to Jowers or directly to Clark, who gave it to Jowers, who rapidly runs back into the kitchen carrying the rifle, the knees of his pants wet from kneeling and out of breath from running. Reverend James Orange ducks down and turns around to see what he thought was smoke rising out of the bushes. Upon hearing the shot, New York Times reporter Earl Caldwell in room 215, standing in his doorway in his shorts, sees a man (white male) crouched in the high bushes whom then disappears.
• As Jowers entered the Grill, Betty Spates met him at the door. She had entered the Grill looking for him just before 6:00 p.m., and approached the outside door when she heard a shot. She reached the door and saw Loyd running toward her with the rifle.
• He sees her, runs into the kitchen, and begins to break down the gun, wrap up the sections and attempt to flush a shell-casing down the kitchen toilet which jammed, and says, “Betty, you wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, would you?” She replies, “Of course not, Loyd.” She keeps her secret for twenty-four years.
• Immediately after the shot, Earl Clark runs and jumps down from the wall onto Mulberry Street and runs diagonally across the street to get into a car parked on the corner of Huling and Mulberry, which takes off, followed by Ron Adkins Tyler on his Honda.
• With similar haste, after handing off the rifle, the shooter turns and, according to plan, runs back through the alleyway between the two wings of the rooming house and enters through the basement entrance. Running through the basement to the north wall of the building, he climbs up the north wall stairway to an exit door, exits, goes down the external stairway, running out into the alleyway which led to Huling where he is seen by Olivia Catling. A short while later, patrolmen JD Hodges and Torrance Landers struggle through the dense bushes and follow the direction of a large footprint in the mud, arriving at the entrance to the basement. They look in but do not enter.
• Dr. King is struck by a bullet to the right side of his face just above the jaw. He falls.
• Abernathy appears; Kyles runs over and is told by Abernathy to get to the phone and call for help.
• As Ernestine Campbell reaches the driveway of the Lorraine, she sees Dr. King go down. Having not heard the shot, she thinks he had a heart attack. She stops to look and also sees Jesse Jackson, with one leg on the stairway, stuffing something into a suit bag. She drives on.
• At that moment, Marrell McCullough climbs up to the balcony and checked Dr. King for life signs. He finds him still alive.
• Immediately after the shot, either Raul or Russell Adkins Jr. gathers all of James’s belongings and runs down the hallway, down the stairs onto the street, turns left, drops the bundle in front of Canipe’s store, runs to the nearby second Mustang, and drives off.
• The shooter, exiting the alleyway, runs around to the driver’s side of the green Chevrolet parked on Huling, gets in and drives away, turning left on Mulberry in front of Olivia Catling.
• Buddy, the cab driver parked in the Lorraine driveway, turns toward the bushes when he hears the shot, and sees a man coming down over the wall and running up Mulberry Street. He calls his dispatcher and reports what he saw. Sometime later he would repeat the story to Louie Ward, another driver.
• Olivia Catling is at her stove when she heard the shot. She quickly puts her cooking aside and runs out of her house on Mulberry toward the Lorraine Motel. She arrives at the corner of Huling and Mulberry and sees a man running out of the alleyway, getting into a green Chevrolet, pulling out from a parking space on Huling, and driving away, turning left on Mulberry and speeding right past her. Moments later, a police officer on Mulberry near the wall, beneath the brushy area, points to that site.
• Solomon Jones, Dr. King’s driver, states that he saw a man coming down from the wall after the shot.
• James is still at the gas station when he hears the ambulance sirens. He gets back in the car and drives down to the South Main Street area. When he approaches and sees a number of cops, he takes off and drives south, only on the way to learn what had happened and how he had been set up.
• The ambulance from St. Joseph’s arrives, and Dr. King, accompanied by Ralph Abernathy and Bernard Lee, is taken to the emergency room of the hospital where those on duty begin to work on him.
• At the hospital, military personnel are everywhere, knowing the names of all staff, most of whom are required to remain overnight.
• Emergency room work proceeds on Dr. King, who is still alive, with the recommendation that he be taken to surgery.
• This is rejected by Dr. Breen Bland, who comes in and takes charge, at one point ordering, “Stop working on that nigger and let him die.” He then ordered everyone out of the ER while remaining there with two men in suits.
• Cab driver Buddy Butler drove his passenger to the airport and there tells fellow driver Louie Ward what he had seen. Butler is killed that evening by Chess Butler, who admitted doing so later on, in his home in front of his wife Mildred, his daughter, Linda, and young Ron Adkins Tyler.
• The Alpha 184 unit is disengaged within minutes of the shooting.
• The Army Psy-Ops team is also disengaged shortly after the shooting.
• “Lurlee” Bailey, the wife of the owner and manager of the Lorraine Motel, runs to her room minutes after the shooting, saying, “what have I done?” and collapses from a cerebral hemorrhage. Taken to the hospital, she dies five days later.
• Dr. Bland and the two men in suits spit on the body of Dr. King. The breathing tube is removed and Dr. Bland places a pillow on Dr. King’s face, ensuring death, which was declared at 7:05 p.m.
These disparate events relating to his death took place within the hour before the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was taken from the world.
While not pretending to know everything, or being able to answer every question, the facts are now clear about this horrific event in American history.
At this point it would probably be useful to tie all of the disparate facts, actions, and events together in a kind of executive summary of Dr. King’s political assassination.
There will inevitably be some repetition of what has been set out above or in an earlier work, but wherever possible, I will try to reference that material.
Though there were some earlier efforts to kill Dr. King, it appears that a firm and final official decision to take him out was made at a senior level of government sometime in1966.
It was during this year that the Missouri prison officials (the Commission of Corrections in that state was particularly close to J. Edgar Hoover), were asked to profile and identify a convict whose escape could be arranged. He must be a man who would follow instructions in order that he could be set up as a scapegoat for a killing. James Earl Ray was identified as an ideal candidate. As noted earlier, $25,000 from Hoover was delivered by Tolson in November or December 1966 to Russell Adkins, who paid it over to Warden Harold Swenson, as confirmed by Adkins’s fifteen-year-old son Ron, whom he brought along for the ride.
I have previously noted that Adkins was a powerful Dixie Mafia leader, a Klansman, and a 32nd Degree Mason as well as being a supervisor in the Memphis Public Works Department.
He was also close to J. Edgar Hoover as well as to Carlos Marcello, the Louisiana Mafia boss. It became clear that, for many years, if Hoover wanted something handled in his area, he would send his number-two Clyde Tolson to Adkins with money to make arrangements to take care of the problem. It has become clear that Tolson had become close friends with the Adkins family years before the assassination.
James’s escape was on April 23, 1967. He made his way to Canada, with the identity of one Eric S. Galt. By whom he was provided this alias, he would never say, always refusing to implicate anyone he thought was trying to help him. The real Galt, working with NSA clearance, was the Executive Warehouse Operator Storage Supervisor at the Canadian Union Carbide Plant in Toronto. That warehouse housed a top-secret munitions project funded jointly by the CIA, the US Naval Surface Weapons Center, and the Army Electronics Research and Development Command. At the time, it was collaborating with the 902nd MIG in, among other operations, the covert shipment to Israel of Proximity Fuses (used in surface-to-air missiles, artillery shells, and LAWS).
In August 1967, Galt met with Major Robert M. Collins, a top aide to the head of the 902nd, W. G. Colonel John Downie, and again in September. Unknowingly, his identity provided an ideal cover for Ray since, if he were ever picked up, a check would result in his immediate release. During this time, Ray was tracked and monitored until Raul picked him up in Montréal at the Neptune Bar. From that point in August 1967, to the end, Raul moved him around, feeding him small amounts of money and promising to get travel documents for him.
It was during this period that Downie took over leadership of the 902nd MIG, which was housed in the Pentagon, and was asked by Major General William P. Yarborough (whose liaison with Hoover was Patrick Putnam, a trusted agent) to select members for an Alpha 184 Sniper Unit from the roster of the Twentieth Special Forces Group, with personnel drawn from the Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi rosters.
He did so. That back-up unit contained two snipers and two spotters, and was led by Captain Billy Ray Eidson and Lieutenant William Worley, The latter died mysteriously shortly after the assassination. At least one sniper and spotter fled to Mexico, fearing for their lives. They became providers of information to me through Steve Tompkins. Also in June 1967, a black Army veteran Marrell McCullough was recalled to active duty, trained and assigned to the Memphis Police Department Intelligence Division, where he infiltrated the Invaders and became an informant to the MPD and military intelligence, After the assassination, he would become a CIA operative.
James was kept in Los Angeles for an inexplicably long time, then moved south. Two of the snipers were in Los Angeles, also for a similarly long period of time. We learned that the hit on Dr. King was planned initially to take place in that city, but at some point it was changed and the sniper unit was moved to the Southeast. I suspect that this was because of the plan to assassinate Robert Kennedy after the California primary. It would be unseemly to have two major figures assassinated in the same city within two months of each other.
The sniper unit and James were moved to New Orleans, then Birmingham, and ultimately to the newly chosen assassination site, Memphis. James was instructed by Raul to buy a rifle in Birmingham. He did so, but bought a .223 Winchester instead of the 760, 30.06 Remington. When Raul scolded him and showed him the desired rifle in a brochure, he returned it and bought the correct one (which became the throw-down gun) and carried it to the New Rebel Motel in Memphis, where he stayed on the evening of April 3 and turned it over to Raul that rainy evening. Raul wrote down the address of the rooming house on South Main Street in Memphis (422½) and told him to meet him there in the Grill on the ground floor of the building at 3:00 p.m. the next day.
Meanwhile, there was substantive on-the-ground preparation throughout 1966 and 1967. Clyde Tolson facilitated the second killing on Hoover’s “Prayer List” by making a number of planning visits to the Adkins group. “Prayer Meetings” were held at the Berclair Baptist Church and Adkins home. Others in attendance included his older son Ron Russell Jr., black businessman O. Z. Evers, who was sponsored by Adkins and was the apparent go-between with Billy Kyles and Jesse Jackson; Chess Butler, who would kill the taxi driver; Buddy, who saw Earl Clark come down over the wall; Frank Holloman, the Director of Police and Fire; and Maynard Stiles, a Deputy Public Works Director.
Tolson went on transatlantic cruises with Adkins to plan the killing (see documentation attached as Appendix L). After the final trip, Adkins called his group together and began by announcing, “The coon must go.”
Frank Liberto, a lieutenant of local boss Gene Luchese and Carlos Marcello, who had excellent relations with the MPD, was assigned the on-the-ground task for the hit. He lined up Loyd Jowers (forgiving his gambling debt and giving him a huge sum of cash, which Loyd hid in an unused stove oven in his Jim’s Grill). He also appears to have lined up the shooter and even spoke with him on the telephone just before the shooting, telling him to “Shoot the son of a bitch when he comes out on the balcony … and don’t call [him] again but … go to New Orleans to pick up your money from my brother.”
Meetings were also held in Jim’s Grill, attended by Earl Clark, Marrell McCullough, and another MPD officer who he said he did not know. I believe this was the shooter Frank Strausser, who Jowers did not want to name and, citing his own safety, refused to do so to his last breath.
Dr. King was planning to return to Memphis to make up for the violent march of March 28. The planned trip to support the garbage workers was accelerated by the deaths of two young workers caught in a vise of their garbage truck, which was deliberately arranged by Bill Holly, a garbage truck driver and one of Adkins’s men.
After James left, a second white Mustang pulled up and parked further south on South Main Street. While James’s Mustang had Alabama plates, this second one had Arkansas plates. As discussed in detail elsewhere, it would be observed by Charles Hurley who parked behind it waiting for his wife to come off work. They left well before 6:00 p.m.
Just before 6:00 p.m., Dr. King came out onto the balcony. Ralph stayed behind, ostensibly to apply some aftershave.
When the fatal shot rang out, James’s belongings, including the rifle he had given away the night before, were quickly taken downstairs in a bundle by someone (we have always suspected Raul), who dropped the bundle in front of a local store, Canipe’s. However, Arthur Hanes, James’s first lawyer, said that Canipe told him that the bundle was dropped before the shot was fired. Jim McCarter, Canipe’s son-in-law, told me that after the shot, Canipe told him that he heard someone run down the stairs, drop the bundle, get in the second white Mustang, and drive away.
Ron, sitting on his bike, heard the shot and saw Earl Clark drop down from the wall and run up north on Mulberry Street. Ron turned around and followed him and the car he entered, to a rendezvous place that he called a Quonset Hut. Later, they all met at Henry Loeb’s brother’s lodge.
Right after the shooting, Mulberry Street resident Olivia Catling saw a man run from the alleyway/driveway at the end of the rooming house building and get into a parked green Chevrolet on the south side of Huling and drive furiously away, turning left on Mulberry Street heading north.
I initially believed that she had witnessed the shooter fleeing the scene. After handing off the rifle, he ran back, leaving his size 13-large footprints, of which a Plaster of Paris cast was made of each footprint. I thought that the shooter went into the alleyway between the buildings and then went down the stairs at the side entrance of the building, into the basement running underneath up to the north wall, where he ran up a stairway in the corner and exited through a door leading to the drive/alleyway that led directly to Huling and the parked getaway car observed by Olivia. No one had discussed this possible getaway route and exit, but I have long suspected that this was how the shooter escaped.
It was only after I was able to thoroughly examine the basement area and discover that the sections of the basement between the attached buildings prohibited access to the stairway exit at the north end. This indicated that the man Olivia saw exiting from the driveway that was connected to the stairway exit was not the shooter but probably another backup. In this context, at one point, two sisters—Pam Miller and Tammy Lyon—came forward to tell me that when they were children, their father, David Mark Young, asked them on the afternoon of the assassination to ride downtown with him. They drove to South Main Street, arriving around 5:30 p.m., and he parked his truck just up (north) from a bar (likely Jim’s Grill), near the north end of the building where the rooming house was located. They noticed one other car—a white Mustang—parked further south on the same side of the street but near to the southern end of the rooming house buildings. On the other side of the street they remembered seeing the sign of the Green Beetle Bar.
They said that their father had two rifles wrapped up in the truck and he took them inside, entering through the northern doorway. As discussed later, when I went through that door and up the stairs I walked across the apartment and came to the window that was immediately next to the rooming house bathroom window.
Pam and Tammy said that after he had been gone for about a half hour they heard a shot. Soon thereafter, they heard the squeal of tires and saw the Mustang speed past them and turn right onto Huling. Shortly after that car passed and turned a second car came down Main Street toward them and turned left onto Huling. They said it could have been an MPD traffic car.
About five minutes later, their father knocked on the window and got into the truck to drive home. They noticed that he only had one rifle wrapped up.
He did not speak on the way home and within fifteen minutes after they arrived, a white Mustang showed up to take him away. He was gone for two or three days. He worked at International Harvester as a welder, but they recalled that he lost his job for being absent too often.
They said that he was quite close to Frank Liberto and used to meet him over at the Scott Street Market. Their mother would entertain them while the men discussed business.
Eventually, their parents separated and would always elect to live in remote areas. When they pressed him, in later years, about this event on April 4, 1968, he would become angry and tell them to “leave it alone.”
The man Olivia saw was wearing a hat, and it may well have been Chess Butler. From photographs I have seen, he was rarely without one. Based upon the story from Pam and Tammy (discussed above), it is quite likely that their father was delivering a weapon to a back-up shooter who was in the window—wide open at the time of the shooting—immediately next to the rooming house bathroom window in the adjoining building.
I entered that building from South Main Street from the same door through which Pam and Tammy’s father, David Mark Young, did, and when going upstairs I walked directly to that window. From that unit there was a direct connection to the exit stairway leading to the alley from which Olivia saw the man in the hat exiting.
Butler was an in-house killer for the Adkins family. Ron knew he was to have been on the scene as a back-up shooter but was confused when he did not appear to be where he thought he was supposed to be. It is highly possible that he was put in place in that window and then fled after the successful shot was made from the bushes.
I have finally concluded that the shooter, after giving up the gun, did turn and run backwards toward the rooming house, thus leaving the footprints, but that he went around the building through the vacant lot, got into the second Mustang that was parked right there below Canipe’s store and was driven away by the person who dropped the bundle—either Raul or Ron’s older brother, Russell Jr.
Russell Jr. told Ron that he was the shooter, but as noted earlier I believe he did so in order to ensure the protection of his younger (sixteen-year-old) brother.
When Dr. King returned to Memphis, he went straight to the Lorraine Motel. He had never stayed there overnight before, preferring to stay in other, previously all-white, hotels, although he had held meetings with local community leaders during the day at the Lorraine.
When they arrived, he and Abernathy were given room 306, although they were originally to have occupied room 202, a ground-floor, sheltered, room. Jesse Jackson was tasked with getting Walter and Lurlee Bailey to move him to the upper exposed room. The evidence from Ron Tyler Adkins indicates that he did so. Despite Ralph Abernathy’s insistence that room 306 was their usual room, and indeed they had been forced to wait for it to be vacated upon their arrival, it never their room before (not even for the daytime meetings and certainly not for overnight stays). Furthermore, it was vacant—and unoccupied when they arrived and so they were able to go directly to it.
Russell Adkins Sr. died in July 1967, and his son Russell Jr. took over the assassination project. In fact, I have come to believe that Frank Holloman himself arranged and facilitated the final details. Holloman regularly attended the Adkins’ meetings, coming out every Sunday, and organized the withdrawal of the two black firemen from the fire station and the removal of black community relations officer, Ed Redditt, from his post. He also had removed the usual group of black police officers who always provided security for Dr. King in Memphis. They were replaced by a group of white officers who were not trusted and so remained out of the picture.
Reverend Billy Kyles (at whose home the SCLC group was to have had a barbecue that evening) appears to have been given the responsibility for getting Dr. King out onto the balcony (the MPD report by Willie B. Richmond states that, contrary to Kyles’s longtime assertions, he knocked on the door at 5:50 p.m., spoke for a few seconds, and then walked away down the balcony, standing at the railing about forty to fifty feet away until the shooting). The Reverend Jesse Jackson organized the withdrawal of the Invaders from the motel around twenty minutes before the killing, where they had been working with Dr. King to bring about a peaceful march.
As noted elsewhere, the shooter, Strausser, was observed receiving a “special” rifle at the MPD shooting range the day before the killing, and then breaking it in by practice firing it most of that day and the next (taking a lunch break with Captain Earl Clark on April 4), before leaving in the red and white Chevrolet convertible of his fireman friend. Before leaving, he put the rifle in the backseat and took off his shirt, wearing only an undershirt and ruffling up his hair so that he would look more like an off-duty fireman than a police officer and sped off.
Also observed arriving at the MPD firing range building where he met with the shooter and Earl Clark were Director Holloman and Mayor Henry Loeb.
My informant, Lenny Curtis, was in an ideal position to observe everything that took place at that facility, which he told us under oath (see the deposition of Lenny Curtis).
As noted elsewhere, he was obviously in a vulnerable situation and became subject to intimidation and harassment. After the assassination, the shooter asked him to accompany him on a ride downtown to pick up salary checks and he drove through a wooded area with his hand on his gun as he questioned him about the assassination, asking him if he believed Ray was guilty. Later, as an unmarked car was parked across from his house, he opened the door to enter and was about to light a cigarette when he smelled escaping gas. Someone had turned on the gas on his kitchen stove. Still later, he discovered a sniper’s “V” facing his kitchen window from a tree behind the house, and a neighbor told him of a stranger being on the property.
On one occasion, when he was driving quickly away from home, he drove past the park and saw an unmarked car and recognized the shooter—Strausser—in the driver’s seat. He was thus intimidated into silence for a long time before I convinced him to go under oath in 2007.
On the day of the shooting, Russell Adkins Junior instructed his sixteen-year-old brother Ron to take a gun from a closet in his home and carry it on his Honda bike downtown where he gave it to his brother. Being unaware of the rifle-range activity, he assumed that the gun he carried was the murder weapon. It was not. A number of guns were reported to have been taken to the area of the rooming house and the neighboring adjoining units. It would seem that, in addition to the Alpha 184 Group, there were other civilian backups.
As for the military, at 4:30 a.m. at Camp Shelby in Mississippi, the eight man Alpha 184 unit was briefed. They were shown large photographs of Dr. King and Andrew Young and told these were enemies of the State and their targets. Soon after, they began to drive to Memphis. It is interesting that in a copy of the orders provided to me, there is an explicit reference to the 4:30 a.m. briefing where they were instructed to do nothing unless ordered otherwise.
Upon their arrival in Memphis, they took up positions on the roof of the Illinois Central Railroad building and a water tower opposite the Lorraine Motel. The building sniper and spotter were greeted by the Eli Arkin, Department Head of MPD intelligence, who thanked them for coming to save the city. They were then taken by a government spook to their position. When the shooter fired, the railroad building unit thought that the other unit had fired. Only then were they told to disengage.
An army Psy-Ops team of two photographers were put on the roof of fire station by Captain Carthel Weeden. They trained their cameras on the balcony and the parking lot and photographed everything, seemingly for the purpose of identifying any potential witnesses. They also photographed the shooter, lowering his rifle in the bushes. One of the members of that team told us it was not James Earl Ray.
Ron took up a position on his Honda, facing north on Mulberry Street near the fire station, some distance south of the Lorraine. He said his mother was parked in the Chevy Nova down the street, also south of the Lorraine, ostensibly in case more transport was needed. While waiting, he noticed a yellow taxicab that had pulled into the parking lot.
As discussed elsewhere, James arrived at Jim’s Grill around 3:00 p.m. and parked in front. He went inside to wait for Raul, who showed up soon after. Raul told James to go upstairs in the rooming house, rent a room, and leave his belongings there. James did this, and was kept out of the room for most of the afternoon, at one point being sent to buy some binoculars. The room was used as a staging area and the shooter and the spotter (Earl Clark) went down the back stairs—one of them was briefly observed descending by Grace Stephens—out into the bushes near the time of the shooting.
James remembered that he had a flat spare tire and decided to try and have it repaired, so he drove away about fifteen minutes before the shooting, taking his second right on Vance Avenue and passing two witnesses (Hendrix and Reed) who had just before observed his parked car as they left Jim’s Grill. Shortly after six, while waiting at the garage, he heard the ambulance sirens and decided to drive back to the South Main Street area. Seeing police everywhere, his first inclination as an escaped convict was to take off, which he did. He drove to Atlanta and parked the car in a housing project parking area.
Some days later, a young FBI agent, Donald Wilson, as part of the team checking out the car, found and kept discarded papers that fell out of the passenger side door when he opened it. Those documents contained the name “Raul” along with the telephone number of one of Jack Ruby’s clubs in Dallas.
When Dr. King was just a preacher reaching out for the civil rights of his people against the perpetrators of long discredited practices, he was acceptable. But then something came over him. He began to see the bigger picture, as did Malcolm X when he insisted that we are living in an era of revolution and the revolt of the American Negro is only a part of the rebellion against the oppression and colonialism which have characterized this era.
While it was permissible in the halls of power, though not in the southern states, for a black leader to seek to change the historical Jim Crow laws, it was not expected that such a leader would take this struggle into the realm of challenging the inherent and self-perpetuating inequality of the basic system itself.
This is where Dr. King was headed before I met him. Consequently, before the decision was taken to kill him, all manner of ploys to discredit him were undertaken. Making him a martyr would always be a last resort.
By the time I met him in 1967 to discuss my observations and photographs of Vietnam, he had already begun to connect social and economic injustice in America with the plight of impoverished people everywhere. So I was in no way primarily responsible for this personal revelation, though perhaps my work accelerated the process, and along with it also hastened his pace along the road to his execution.
As I recounted the incidence of atrocities and devastation inflicted on a civilian population consisting mostly of women, children, the aged, and infirm, he saw the photographic images, and his shock and horror gave way to tears. Corporate-owned mainstream media, even though far less controlled and filtered than it is today, still largely shielded the American public from the most extreme war crimes committed by their troops. There were about 650 reporters/media people in Vietnam on March 16, 1967, the day of the “My Lai Massacre.” No one reported it until about a year later. Seymour Hersh broke the story. Lieutenant Colin Powell was, at the time, the Public Information Officer charged with obfuscating that atrocity and covering it up. He did his job well, as he did as US Secretary of State before the United Nations Security Council in 2003, in advocating the assault on Iraq based on false facts and illegal grounds.
Things moved very quickly in the late winter/early spring of 1967. I became Director of the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) and we headed toward a National Convention with the goal of nominating a third political party of Martin King Luther King Jr. and Dr. Benjamin Spock to oppose the war presidency of Lyndon Johnson.
That summer the nation exploded. It began with riots in Newark, New Jersey, in July. A couple of weeks later there was rioting in Detroit. The cities burned. Twenty-six were killed in Newark and forty-four in Detroit. Nearly one hundred other cities burned. Typically, the officials were all white and the populations increasingly black. Police methods and practices in some instances would have done the Reich Gestapo proud. Cumulative incidents often preceded a final straw which caused a gathering explosion.
As we prepared for a People’s political convention, the nation was burning, the Black Power movement was rising throughout the country, though being infiltrated by military intelligence officers (remember, Hoover’s FBI had no black agents) and I would learn almost twenty-eight years later that special forces army sniper teams had been dispatched to troubled cities with “mug books” of targeted black community leaders. We will probably never know how many of these local leaders were taken out. Federally, LBJ commissioned, through executive order, the Kerner Commission to investigate and recommend a means of suppressing “civil disorder.” Dominated by military and police personnel, it hatched the US Army’s “Garden Plot” plan, designed to suppress “civil disturbance” in America. It is history, of course, covered elsewhere, concerning government surveillance, infiltration, and provocation which spilled over into the NCNP convention.
As noted earlier, when Dr. King keynoted the convention, a note was passed to me over my shoulder warning me to get him out of the Palmer House Convention site and Chicago or the so-called “Black Caucus” already formed would take him hostage and embarrass him before the world.
Dominated by black Chicago (Blackstone Rangers) gang leaders in the pay of the government, the provocateurs went on to deeply divide the convention and the peace and justice movement. The temperature of the fear which Dr. King was generating in official circles was beyond anything we appreciated at the time.
After the Detroit riots, when military intelligence officers interrogated young blacks who had been apprehended, they were astounded to learn that their idol was not H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, or other Black Power leaders—but Martin Luther King Jr. His increasingly strong position against the Vietnam War threatened to force the government to end it before all profit had been wrung from it. As though that was not enough, in the autumn Dr. King turned his attention to the plight of the growing impoverished masses whom he pledged to lead in the establishment of a massive tent city in the nation’s capitol, where the poor, in the hundreds of thousands, would non-violently lay siege to their representatives and demand a refunding of social programs with money long absorbed by the war budget.
With that act, his bridging of the requirements of foreign and domestic peace, Dr. King became intolerable, and all indications are that the decision to rid the nation of this pastor and prophet was taken in the spring of 1967, and accelerated that autumn and winter.
In the long history of political assassinations that have afflicted human society since the dawn of its existence, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has had as profound an impact on this nation and its future as any other. His execution, ordered by the ruling forces of the Republic and carried out by officials of the State and their minions, eliminated a powerful force for change.
The “Prayer List” of J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson, implemented by a cadre of officials and their civilian agents, reshaped the social, economic, and cultural life of our Republic. Given the absence of independent print, audio, or visual mass media, two generations of citizens have been raised in a milieu of ignorance about these events that have shaped their world.
I publish these findings in the hope that one day we might achieve the justice that the truth of this seminal and tragic event demands.
One should not, however, underestimate the consolidated power and control by the ruling forces over the mass media, (see Epilogue) though I expect it will be far more difficult for them to continue to suppress the full truth of Dr. King’s assassination. After all, as Dr. King was fond of saying: “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.” And so, as we near the end of this long journey, it appears that with respect to his own demise, we may finally witness the risen truth of this demonic event.