6

The Assassination

In his second-floor room, Dr. King was getting ready to leave for the Reverend Billy Kyles’s new home for dinner. Standing in the bathroom in his trousers and an undershirt, he began applying a powerful depilatory to his face. It was made by mixing water with Magic Shave Powder—which had a horrible odor, akin to rotten eggs—into a thick mud. Because of his sensitive skin, it was the only way King could shave. He applied it using a spatula and in a few minutes, when it dried into a claylike mask, used the spatula to scrape it off. “Under similar circumstances most men would have grown a beard,” said Abernathy, “but Martin was meticulous about this particular procedure, and it was one reason he was always late.”1 On this day, Abernathy was with him, and he sought King’s advice about the difficulty he was having in arranging for a revival-week speaker in Atlanta who would not conflict with the Poor People’s march on Washington.²

There was a knock on the door shortly after 5:30. It was Billy Kyles.³ King was still dressing, while Abernathy sat on the edge of the bed. They started teasing Kyles about the upcoming meal. Unknown to Kyles, King had already had Abernathy call Mrs. Kyles to learn about the night’s menu: roast beef, pigs’ feet, candied yams, chitlins, and vegetables.

“All right now, Billy, I don’t want you fooling me,” said Abernathy. “Are we going to have some real soul food? Now if we go over there and get some filet mignon or T-bone, you’re going to flunk.”

“We don’t want no filet mignon,” chimed in King. “Yeah, now we don’t want you to be like that preacher’s house we went to in Atlanta. Had a great big house, we went over there for dinner and had some ham. A ham bone.”

“Yeah, there wasn’t no meat on it,” agreed Abernathy.

“Yeah, we had Kool-Aid and it wasn’t even sweet,” said King. “And if that’s the kind of dinner we’re going to, we’ll stay here.”

“We’re going to have soul food,” said Kyles. “Now just get ready, let’s go.” They were supposed to be there by 6:00, but King, true to form, was running late.

“I know your wife, she’s so pretty,” King said. “Are you sure she can really cook soul food?”4

King had trouble buttoning the top of his shirt, and the other men teased him about getting fat. As he fussed with his tie, the three changed the subject. “It was just preacher talk,” recalls Kyles, “like people talk baseball talk, or barbershop talk.”⁵

It was approaching 6:00 P.M. Darkness would arrive in less than half an hour.⁶ King finished splashing some sweet-smelling cologne over his face and neck to mask the odor of the Magic Shave Powder and walked outside onto the balcony that ran along the front of the motel. Having seen King put on cologne, Abernathy went to his room to do the same. In the courtyard below was the white Cadillac loaned to King by the local funeral home. Its driver, Solomon Jones, Jr., stood nearby. SCLC general counsel Chauncey Eskridge and aides Andrew Young, James Bevel, Jesse Jackson, and Hosea Williams were milling around the car. Kyles stood near King on the balcony. King leaned over the edge of the three-foot-high railing and began talking to some of those in the courtyard. He told Eskridge to invite Jackson to dinner with them. Jackson walked closer to the balcony with another man. “Doc, this is Ben Branch. Ben used to live in Memphis. He plays in our band.” King told Jackson to get ready to leave and chided him, “You know the whole band can’t go to dinner with us.”

King leaned a little farther over the balcony. “Ben,” he said, “I want you to sing for me tonight. I want you to do that song ‘Precious Lord.’ Sing it real pretty.”

Branch nodded enthusiastically. “I sure will, Doc.”

Solomon Jones yelled out that King should put on a topcoat since it might be chilly later. “O.K.,” King replied, and he started to straighten up. Kyles had turned to walk down to get his car. He had taken about five steps when he heard a loud report and spun around to see King’s body, in profile, lying in a growing pool of blood on the balcony. “Oh, my God, Martin’s been shot!” someone screamed. “Hit the ground,” someone else yelled. Those in the courtyard instinctively took cover near the limousine. Abernathy looked out his door upon hearing the noise and saw King crumpled on the balcony, then bolted outside and gathered his friend in his arms, patting his head.

“I looked down at Martin’s face,” Abernathy recalled. “His eyes wobbled, then for an instant he focused on me. ‘Martin, it’s all right. Don’t worry. This is Ralph. This is Ralph.’”*⁷

King had been struck in the lower right jaw by a single .30-06 bullet. It was a fatal shot. Because of the angle at which King was standing, the bullet smashed his jawbone, pierced his neck, tearing major blood vessels and nerves, including the jugular vein, and then severed the spinal cord before coming to rest in his shoulder blade against the skin.⁸

Pandemonium erupted at the Lorraine, with King’s aides and friends, other guests, and reporters all scurrying about trying desperately to find out what had happened. Most thought the shot had come from across the street, in the vicinity of the rooming house.† Solomon Jones had jumped into the car and was driving it frantically back and forth across the parking lot as though doing so might exorcise what had just happened. Kyles was pounding the bed in a motel room as he tried to get an ambulance. Others were gathering around King on the balcony, trying in vain to see some flicker of life in their fallen leader.

Just before the shot was fired, W. B. Richmond was the policeman on duty responsible for watching King through the peephole that had been cut into the newspapers covering the fire station windows. A fireman, George Loenneke, came into the locker room to get a pack of cigarettes. He asked Richmond if he could look through the peephole for a moment. As he put his eye to the window, he saw King on the balcony, leaning on the railing, looking down and talking to someone in the parking lot. Then there was the crack of a rifle. “He’s been shot,” yelled Loenneke. He ran back into the main part of the fire station, screaming the news.9

There had been no contingency plan in case of trouble at the Lorraine or an attack on King. Richmond ran from his observation post to a telephone several feet away and placed a call to the intelligence section at police headquarters to inform them of the shooting. Simultaneously, all the other police officers and firemen responded instinctively, immediately rushing out of the station and toward the Lorraine. Most dropped over an eight-foot retaining wall at the rear of the fire station in their rush to the crime scene.10 However, that meant they ran away from South Main Street, the road on which the rooming house fronted, and from which any shooter would emerge. That was fortuitous for the assassin, who could not have known when he picked his perch at the rooming house that the neighboring fire station was teeming with police.

At the rooming house, the rifle shot startled most tenants. Willie Anschutz was watching television when he heard a sound that he thought was a gunshot. He walked to his door and, as he opened it, saw a man moving quickly toward him. As he passed Anschutz’s door, the man—who was carrying something long and wrapped in a blanket in one hand—held his free hand and arm over his face, preventing Anschutz from getting a good look at him. Anschutz felt it might be the new tenant from Room 5B, but he was not certain. “I thought I heard a shot,” Anschutz said. “Yeah, it was a shot,” the man muttered as he rushed by.¹¹ Anschutz, who thought the shot came either from the bathroom or Room 5B, glanced quickly at the bundle in the man’s arm. It looked like a gun. Meanwhile, Charlie Stephens, who had heard a gunshot that sounded like it came from the bathroom that adjoined his room, opened his door and glanced down the hallway. He saw a man leaving the vicinity of the bathroom, carrying a three-foot-long package wrapped in what appeared to be newspaper. It was possibly the new tenant in 5B, but since he saw him only from the rear, he based that hunch on the man’s general build, dark hair, and dark suit. Stephens watched as the stranger hurried down the hallway and turned left to leave the building.*¹²

A moment after Stephens and Anschutz saw the stranger flee the rooming house with a bundle in his arms, Guy Canipe, the owner of the Canipe Amusement Company, located on the ground floor at the front of the rooming house, heard a thud outside. He looked to the front of the store and immediately saw a white man in a dark suit walking south on the sidewalk—the direction in which Willard would have had to go to retrieve his Mustang. After hesitating a moment, Canipe walked outside, looked in both directions, and saw a white compact car, with only the driver inside, speed away from the curb. Two customers had been in the store, and one of them, Bernell Finley, was peering out the door behind him, and later identified the car that screeched away as a Mustang.13

Willard’s escape in the Mustang preceded the arrival on South Main of two officers from TACT 10 by a matter of seconds. The two approached the rooming house from opposite directions after having first gone toward the Lorraine. Canipe saw one of them, Lieutenant J. E. Ghormley, walking rapidly toward him, a revolver drawn. Within a couple of minutes, more police had arrived. Their interest quickly focused on the package that had caused the thud against the front of the store. It was a long bundle consisting of an old green blanket wrapped around a large pasteboard box. From the top of that box the tip of a gun barrel was evident. A zippered bag was also inside the blanket.¹⁴ The murderer had gotten away, but he had left the murder weapon behind.

* Among the first to reach King’s body was Marrell McCollough, a Memphis police undercover officer. A former Army officer, he grabbed a towel and tried to slow the flow of blood. The fact that he was an undercover agent who was close to the King entourage has since raised much consternation. McCollough subsequently went to work for the CIA, where he was still employed as of 1998. The House Select Committee extensively investigated his role and found that while he supplied surveillance information to the police, who in turn provided it to the FBI and other intelligence agencies, he performed only that role and had no hand in inciting violence during the March 28 riots. The committee also determined he had no contact with King or his schedule on the day of the assassination. McCollough, despite repeated requests through the CIA’s Office of Information and Privacy, refuses to be interviewed.

† Witnesses who provided statements soon after the assassination included Bernard Lee, a secretary and bodyguard to King, who knew from his Army experience that the sound was from a high-caliber rifle and thought it came from the buildings, including the rooming house, across the street from the motel (MURKIN ME, Sub. D, section 1, pp. 29–30); Marrell McCollough knew the sound was a gunshot and almost immediately looked west to the rooming house (MURKIN ME, Sub. D, section 1, pp. 58–59); Chauncey Eskridge thought the sound was a firecracker, but once he realized it was gunfire, thought it originated from the rooming house area (MURKIN ME, Sub. D, section 1, p. 113); the Reverend Billy Kyles believed it was likely a rifle shot and looked west to the buildings that included the rooming house (MURKIN ME, Sub. D, section 1, p. 178), as did Jesse Jackson and Ben Branch (HSCA Rpt., p. 377).

There were those who thought the shot originated elsewhere. Ralph Abernathy, who was in his motel room at the time, thought the shot came from directly outside his door (MURKIN ME, Sub. D, section 1, p. 104). To Andrew Young, King’s top aide, the sound was a firecracker and it came from the bushes above the retaining wall across the street from the motel (MURKIN ME, Sub. D, section 1, p. 106); Solomon Jones, the driver assigned to King by the funeral parlor, told the police it sounded like a firecracker, and that after he ran around the area to see if he could spot anything unusual, he saw something or someone moving quickly through the bushes across the street—which has raised the specter over the years that an assassin was hiding in the foliage (Memphis’s version of Dealey Plaza’s infamous Grassy Knoll) (MURKIN ME, Sub. D, section 1, pp. 148–49). However, Jones admitted, in a sworn statement to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, that he saw the object only for a brief time. He did not see a head or arms; he assumed the object was human simply because he could offer no other explanation, but he could not tell whether it was black or white, or male or female. In addition, Jones stated that at the moment of the assassination both Bernard Lee and Andrew Young “reached and got me on each shoulder and pulled me to the ground.” He stated further that by the time he got up off the ground, policemen had “almost” arrived at the Lorraine Motel from a nearby firehouse. The Select Committee believed that the movement Jones perceived actually “occurred several moments after the shot. If it was, in fact, a person it may have been a law enforcement officer responding to the shot” (HSCA Rpt., p. 377). Rev. Kyles, who knew that Jones had a criminal record and a reputation for embellishing stories, told the FBI that Jones was standing behind a brick retaining wall that surrounded the motel’s swimming pool and that he could not even see to the west side of the street where there was foliage (MURKIN ME, Sub. D, section 1, p. 178). Others who looked directly into the bushes did not see anything like Jones described.

Finally, Harold “Cornbread” Carter gave an August 1968 interview in which he said he had been drinking wine in the bushes across the street from the motel when he heard the rifle shot. Next he saw someone run through the foliage carrying a gun. The problem is that Carter, who lived at the rooming house where the shot originated, told the FBI and Memphis police immediately after the shooting that he was in his room when he heard the shot and he stayed inside until the police arrived about fifteen minutes later. He did not see anything unusual before or after the shot (MURKIN 2322, section 20, p. 47).

* There has been much controversy over the years as to whether Charlie Stephens had been drinking that day, especially since he later developed into the state’s key eyewitness against Ray. Even if sober, his testimony was not that compelling, as the best he could say for the prosecution was that the man leaving the scene of the crime looked like the 5B tenant by build, hair, and clothes. However, the author spoke to ex-Memphis homicide detective Roy Davis. “I took the written statement from Stephens at the police station within a couple of hours of the shooting. He was not real drunk, but he was not sober even then. I distinctly remember that he said he could not identify the man. I would not like to rely on him as my only witness.” (Interview June 16, 1997.)