26

The Alibi

Ray learned of King’s trip to Memphis the way everyone else did, through the public announcement on April 1 by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King was scheduled to lead a new march on Friday, April 5.

Ray left for Memphis on the same day that King flew into the city, April 3. It was a seven-hour drive, and along the way, at a Rexall drugstore in Whitehaven, Tennessee, he purchased a Gillette shaving kit.1 Later, he stopped for a haircut.² Around 7:15 P.M., with a thunderstorm raging, he pulled into the New Rebel Motel at 3466 Lamar Avenue, just within the Memphis city limits. When Ivan Webb, the night clerk, patrolled the motel’s grounds at 4:00 A.M., Ray’s room was still brightly lit.³

Although he has varied his story over time, Ray’s most persistent claim is the following: He met Raoul at the New Rebel Motel on April 3, and was told that the next day they would complete the first stage of a gunrunning operation. Raoul directed Ray to change motels to the South Main Street rooming house.⁴ While Raoul thought Ray should use his own name (he was known to Raoul as Galt), Ray said he would prefer to use a different alias, John Willard.* The final part of the plan was for Ray to meet Raoul at Jim’s Grill, on the ground floor of the rooming house, at about 3:00 P.M.*

When the Select Committee asked Ray why he could not have done the gun deal at the New Rebel, he said “Well, I don’t know, I, uh, I couldn’t ask that. I was always moving, seems like I was always going from one place to the other. I assumed that the place [rooming house] was, uh, a place like that would be more conducive probably to something illegal.… Nothing would be suspicious down there, or anything, any type of transaction would be normal.”⁵

Ray also told the Select Committee that he gave Raoul the Remington rifle at the New Rebel on April 3. “That was the last I saw of the weapon,” he said.⁶ Of course, if that gun was used to kill King the next day, then Ray was being set up as a patsy—the reason the conspirators had him buy the gun was so it would be traced to him. The same would be true of the rental of a room at the rooming house. But it would also be logical that a key element was to have Ray bring the rifle into the sniper’s nest, in the hope that some witness might be able to identify him entering with the murder weapon. Raoul, as recounted by Ray, had assiduously tried to dissociate himself from the rifle. He would be the last person who would run the risk of personally taking the rifle into the rooming house, or carrying it on the public transportation that Ray believed Raoul used in Memphis.⁷ When the Select Committee asked Ray why Raoul would not have wanted him to keep the rifle, all he could say was “I really don’t know why.”⁸

On the morning of April 4, Ray checked out of the New Rebel, bought a local newspaper, had breakfast, and then spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon in an unidentified “beer house.”^†9 Ray said he drank part of “three or four beers.”¹⁰ Rare as it was for him to drink beer, it may have been necessary to give him the extra nerve for the afternoon’s assignment.^‡

One of the most suspicious things Ray later did was to try and downplay his knowledge in general of Martin Luther King, Jr., and especially that King was in Memphis that day. Ray admitted buying a copy of April 4, The Commercial Appeal, in which King was the subject of a front-page story, with his photo prominently displayed. Yet before the Select Committee, when asked, “Did you know who Dr. King was?” Ray incredibly said, “I probably had a vague idea, but I don’t have any strong idea.” When pressed, “Did you know there was such a person as Dr. Martin Luther King, and that he was purported to be a civil rights leader?” he responded, “At that time, at the particular time I was in Memphis I had no idea, but I probably, I may have had a vague idea that there was such an individual.”11 He said he had never heard that King was in Memphis.

Ray drove to the South Main Street area and parked his Mustang near the rooming house.* He met Raoul, he said, at Jim’s Grill downstairs (in other versions, he claimed he first saw Raoul upstairs in Room 5B, and in another story said he rendezvoused with him first in the Mustang).¹² After being directed by Raoul to rent a room, Ray went upstairs and rented Room 5B from Bessie Brewer, giving his name as John Willard. Raoul then settled into that room and asked Ray to find a pair of “infrared” binoculars.¹³ That prompted Ray’s visit to the nearby York Arms Company, where he bought a $39.95 pair of binoculars.^†

After Ray had dropped the binoculars back at the rooming house, Raoul told him to disappear for a while. Originally, Ray told Hanes and Huie that he simply went downstairs and waited in Jim’s Grill.14 However, they noticed an immediate problem. “With his remarkable memory for detail,” wrote Huie, “Ray accurately described the interiors of taverns in Montreal, Chicago, Puerto Vallarta and Los Angeles. So we asked him to describe the interior of Jim’s Grill. He described it—and missed it by a mile. Then Mr. Hanes drilled him in the correct description of Jim’s Grill.”¹⁵ After Hanes was fired, Foreman came aboard and asked Ray where he was just before King’s killing. Ray told him he had been in Jim’s Grill. “Word for word,” recalled Huie, “his description was what Mr. Hanes had given Ray, not the inaccurate description Ray originally gave Mr. Hanes.”¹⁶

As might be expected, over time Ray has added to his story of where he was in the critical hour leading up to the murder. He is vague about times and the places he supposedly visited, often mentioning a number of possibilities, so that if one fails another might be used as an alibi. Among other stories, he went to a movie theater;¹⁷ was in a drugstore;¹⁸ stopped in one of several restaurants (one of which may have been an ice cream parlor), the names of which he was not certain;¹⁹ and took forty-five minutes retrieving his car, parked in a lot he could not pinpoint, and then sat in the car for another fifteen minutes.²⁰

As for the moment of the murder itself, he first told Huie that he was outside sitting in his Mustang and heard the shot. The next thing he knew, Raoul came running out of the rooming house, jumped into the backseat, and covered himself with a white sheet. Ray immediately drove away. After eight blocks, Raoul told him to stop, then leaped from the car. Ray continued driving to Atlanta and never saw Raoul again.²¹

Once Ray learned there were witnesses at the record store, Canipe’s, who saw only one man run into the empty Mustang and only one man drive away, he claimed the Raoul story “was more or less a joke.”²²

He got a new idea from an article that appeared shortly after the assassination in The Memphis Press-Scimitar. Willie Green, a gas station attendant, was quoted as saying he noticed a “nervous fellow” pacing near the station’s phone booth around the time of the assassination. The station was about six blocks from the rooming house. Green identified Ray as the man he had seen. He also recalled a white Mustang.

After reading this information, Ray completely abandoned the white-sheet story he had given Hanes, and he presented a new alibi to Foreman when he came aboard in November 1968.²³ Ray claimed he was probably at one of several gas stations when the assassination happened, trying to fix a spare tire that had gone flat the previous day.²⁴

“I went to, I think,” he told CBS’s Dan Rather in 1977, “a service station down about, I would say it was about five blocks from Main Street.”25

The Select Committee, the next year, questioned Ray about his latest alibi. “I will go back to my question,” said Congressman Stokes. “I want to know, where were you when Dr. King was killed?”

“I believe I was in the service station, but I’m not positive,” Ray said tentatively.

“You see,” said Stokes, quite exasperated by Ray’s evasive answers, “it is pretty difficult for us to understand when you say, ‘I believe I was but I’m not positive.’”

“Well, it is difficult to pinpoint where you was at a certain time. At six o’clock I could have been at the service station or I could have been driving down the street preparing to come back into the rooming house area.… My best recollection, I would be in the service station or just leaving it.”²⁶

Ray said he could not recall the name of the station. “Anyway, there’s two or three of them in that area.”*²⁷

The committee members were perplexed as to why Ray had failed to tell Hanes about this alibi. “Well, when you were picked up,” asked Stokes, “and brought back from London knowing you were charged with this crime, wasn’t it important to tell your attorneys what gas station you were in?” Ray said that he did not tell Hanes because he feared that Hanes and Huie were passing along the information he gave them to the FBI. “I was a little hesitant,” he said, “in giving Mr. Hanes certain information.”

“All I want to know,” persisted Stokes, “is why you didn’t tell this man who is representing you in a capital case the truth.”

“I just didn’t tell him that,” said Ray. “I intended to tell the jury that.”²⁸

Mark Lane, Ray’s attorney before the Select Committee, worked hard to bolster his client’s alibi. In addition to providing the names of witnesses who might have seen Ray at the gas station, Lane also made a major issue of his discovery of a witness in the rooming house who could supposedly identify a different man than Ray fleeing the scene of the crime.

The rooming house witness was Grace Walden, Charlie Stephens’s common-law wife. They had lived next door to the room Ray had rented, and Stephens was one of two witnesses who could possibly identify Ray as fleeing the scene after the shot. Lane claimed, in an article he wrote for the November 1978 Hustler magazine, that Walden also saw a man flee, but that it was not Ray. Not only that, but she was also offered a $100,000 reward to lie and pinpoint Ray as the man she saw, and when she refused, the government silenced her by forcibly committing her to a mental hospital.29 Lane called Walden one of the case’s “most important” witnesses.

Walden told Lane that after she heard gunfire, she looked out of the doorway of her room, 6B, and “then I saw him. He was moving fast. Not running, but walking very fast right past our doorway.” She later said she told the police that the man was five-five, very thin, about sixty years old, and wearing “a hunting jacket and … a loud colored checkered shirt.” Lane contended that Walden was told she would be in “grave danger” if she testified on Ray’s behalf at trial.³⁰

Once he established Walden as a supporting witness to his contention that Ray was not at the rooming house, Lane then produced the names of witnesses who supported the story that Ray was at a gas station when King was shot. One was Willie Green, the gas station attendant originally quoted in The Memphis Press-Scimitar in 1968. Although Lane had not personally spoken to Green, he chastised the committee that “nobody from the government” had interviewed Green. He also listed two additional people, Dean Cowden and Thomas Wilson. The defense team investigator, Renfro Hays, had found both. That immediately raised the suspicions of some committee members, since Hays had developed many bogus leads with questionable methods, including paying money for stories. Adding to the uneasiness over the new witnesses was that their story had broken in the National Enquirer under the banner headline “Enquirer Uncovers New Evidence … James Earl Ray Did Not Kill Martin Luther King.”³¹ Lane assured the committee, however, that he had personally interviewed both Cowden and Wilson, and he vouched for their credibility.*³²

Cowden was a commodities broker with a local Memphis trading firm in 1968, and he told the Enquirer that on the day of the assassination, “I bought gas at a Texaco station on the southeast corner of Linden Ave. and 2nd St. in Memphis [about 6½ blocks from the rooming house].” He said he saw Ray, sitting in a white Mustang, as late as 5:50 P.M. About five minutes after the assassination, Cowden said he saw Ray again near the gas station, “walking in a leisurely, casual manner with no haste.”³³ As for Thomas Wilson, a retired car salesman, he saw a man in a white Mustang at the same service station around 5:45 P.M. “I feel absolutely sure beyond any doubt that the man I saw was Ray.”34

There are, however, problems with the credibility of each of these witnesses. Grace Walden was indeed committed to several mental institutions for nearly ten years after the assassination—but not, as Lane contended, in an effort to silence her. Walden was in fact an alcoholic who had previously tried to kill herself.³⁵ Her husband, Charlie Stephens, took her to a local Memphis hospital on July 8, 1968, because she had hurt her foot. Walden was in such an anxious state that a staff psychiatrist, Mary Slechta, was called to examine her. Slechta concluded that Walden was suffering from a psychotic depression and was suicidal.³⁶ Three weeks after being committed to the psychiatric ward, Walden tried to hang herself. She began hearing voices. The hospital filed a “lunacy warrant” on her and on July 31 she was committed by the Shelby County Probate Court to the Western State Mental Hospital in Bolivar, Tennessee.³⁷ There she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, chronic brain syndrome induced by alcoholism, and delusional behavior.³⁸ She suffered from “confabulations,” a tendency to concoct stories to fill in considerable gaps in her memory.³⁹

Mark Lane eventually fought to get Walden released, did so in May 1978, and was appointed her coguardian. In the meantime, she had given different stories about the person she claimed to have seen fleeing the rooming house. One time she even said, “I think he was a nigger.”⁴⁰

Walden’s “revelation” was made on November 5, 1968—when she was already committed to the Western State Mental Hospital—to the indefatigable Renfro Hays. On that occasion, she told Hays that the man she saw fleeing the rooming house was about five-two.*⁴¹ But her statement to Hays was not her first about the case. On the day of the assassination, Walden had told the Memphis police that she heard “about five” firecrackers explode, but was bedridden in Room 6B and did not get up to see anything.⁴² The day after the assassination, and also in subsequent interviews over several weeks, she told the FBI that she had heard footsteps walking rapidly in front of her apartment door, but since she was bedridden, she saw nothing.⁴³ She told several newspaper reporters, who subsequently submitted affidavits to the Select Committee, that she did not get out of bed or see a thing.⁴⁴ Moreover, she was unable to see into the hallway from where she was lying.⁴⁵ A reward of $100,000 was never even mentioned to her by the FBI or Memphis police since she was not considered a witness who had seen anything probative.46

As for Dean Cowden and Thomas Wilson, who saw Ray at the gas station around the time of the shooting, Lane promoted them as heavily as he did Grace Walden. In his book Code Name “Zorro,” published just before the Select Committee started its work, Lane wrote, “Cowden told me that during the past nine years he had never been questioned by the Memphis police or the FBI. With all the personnel available to them, they had not located the decisive alibi witness in the case. But Renfro Hays had.”⁴⁷

When the Select Committee quizzed Dean Cowden, he told a story different from the one related by Lane. The forty-three-year-old Cowden admitted that he was not even in Memphis on the day King was assassinated, but was at work as the store manager of Fair Incorporated in Beaumont, Texas, over five hundred miles away.⁴⁸ The Select Committee showed Cowden the story in the National Enquirer in which he was extensively quoted.

“Is this story true?”

“This story is completely false,” Cowden told a stunned hearing room. He also admitted that the story he had given Lane was false. “It was a rehearsed story.”

“With whom did you rehearse the story?”

“Renfro Hays.”⁴⁹

It turned out that during a period in 1973 when Cowden was drying out from a long bout with alcoholism in the psychiatric ward of the Memphis Veterans Administration Hospital, he met Renfro Hays, who was then a patient in the same ward.* Hays later helped support him for about four months. Around December 1975, Hays came up with the story about Ray’s gas station alibi. Hays, who was trying to sell film or book rights to the King murder and his investigation of it, convinced Cowden to tell the lie and said, “If I make a million out of this, you know, I will always take care of you.”⁵⁰ Hays also told Cowden that he would have someone else ready to confirm the story; as Cowden recalled, “It wouldn’t be salable unless he had collaboration.”⁵¹ Lane was not in on the fraud, Cowden told the committee, but “I really think if I had been the lawyer and Mr. Lane had been the witness, I believe I would have asked a little harder questions.”

As for Wilson, the man who had corroborated Cowden’s story, he had died on April 5, 1978, just before the Select Committee was prepared to take his statement. However, the committee had already learned that at the time of the assassination, Wilson was a mile away from the gas station where he supposedly saw Ray.52 Wilson was with a friend at a local shoe repair shop, and had been there since 5:30 that evening, half an hour before the assassination. They did not leave the shop until after King was killed.

Larce McFall, the owner of the Texaco station at which the two witnesses claimed to have seen Ray, and his son, Phillip, were both working at the time of the assassination. At 6:01, when King was shot, they were washing a truck for a customer. There was no sign of anyone who looked like Ray. There was no request by anyone to repair a flat tire that day, and no white Mustang appeared at any time at the station. Both McFalls had provided that information to the Memphis police and the FBI shortly after the assassination, when everybody within several blocks of the rooming house had been questioned about what they had seen on the day of the murder.⁵³

What about the final witness cited by Lane as support for Ray’s alibi, Willie Green, the Esso gas station attendant quoted in The Memphis Press-Scimitar in 1968? There was actually a warning sign in Green’s early statement to the newspaper, when he claimed that the FBI had shown him a photo of Ray before the Bureau even knew that Eric S. Galt was James Earl Ray. But he stuck to his story, which he told again to the Press-Scimitar in 1977: Ray had arrived shortly before King was killed, he said, and was “the most nervous fellow I ever saw.… so nervous he could hardly make a phone call.”⁵⁴

But the author discovered internal working files of the Press-Scimitar reporters that covered the case, which were donated to the University of Memphis’s collection on the sanitation strike. Among the many documents are several pages of typed notes, listing the names of people who were either already interviewed or still needed to be interviewed by staff reporters. On the “ray 7” page is the following listing: “Willie Green, an attendant at a service station at 189 Linden, said the Galt picture resembled a nervous man who used a phone booth near the station right after King was slain and paced up and down there until he [Green] closed for the curfew” (emphasis added).⁵⁵ In his original notes, the reporter took Green’s statement as placing a Ray look-alike at the station not at the time of the assassination, but afterward, and then keeping him there for a few hours until the police closed down the city. Ray had actually left the area in his Mustang a few minutes after 6:00 P.M.⁵⁶

There are no witnesses to support Ray’s ever-changing story of being at a service station at the time of the assassination. Rather, after Ray returned to the South Main Street rooming house after buying the binoculars, there is no evidence he left before King was murdered.

* Ray told the Select Committee that he could not recall how he came up with the Willard name, although he claimed to have used it “indirectly once before.” However, there was a real John Willard living in the same Toronto suburb as three other men whose names Ray used.

* There was a Jim’s Grill near the rooming house, and also a Jim’s Grill directly underneath the rooming house. Ray told Dan Rather that he initially went to the wrong one, before finding the right one at the rooming house.

^† In one of his interviews with the Select Committee, Ray said he had stayed at the New Rebel until 2:00 P.M. and then left directly to meet Raoul at the rooming house (HSCA vol. IX, pp. 14–15).

* Author George McMillan wrote that Jerry Ray, while on a break on his job at the country club, received a telephone call from James on the morning of April 4. McMillan says it lasted less than three minutes, and that James said, “Jerry, tomorrow it will be all over. I might not see you and Jack for a while. But don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right! Big Nigger has had it!” Jerry Ray has emphatically denied giving that story to McMillan. The author, however, reviewed notes taken by George McMillan of his interviews with Jerry Ray, and his contemporaneous notes reflect precisely such an interview (McMillan/Southern Historical Collection). Also, McMillan gave a sworn statement to the House Select Committee that the quote was accurate, and had been given to him by Jerry. William Bradford Huie confirmed to researcher David Lifton, as well as to the Select Committee, that Jerry had told him about the same phone call in November 1968. However, Huie did not print the information since he did not believe Jerry’s story. The committee investigated the issue and concluded that Jerry had indeed told both authors about such a call, but since his “credibility was highly suspect” it assumed that he concocted the story “motivated by a simple desire for financial gain.”

* As with almost every issue of the day on the assassination, Ray has given multiple versions, even on apparently simple matters such as where he parked his car. It appears Ray parked it directly in front of the rooming house, near Jim’s Grill. However, Ray once told the Select Committee that it was six blocks away, and another time told the committee it was eight or nine blocks; to one of his attorneys, Robert Hill, he said it was a mile; to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and in his habeas corpus proceeding he said it was two or three miles.

^† In the 20,000 Words, Ray said he made one trip to the store. To the Select Committee, he said he got lost the first time, returned to the rooming house to get more information from Raoul, and then found it on his second trip. The salesman, Ralph Carpenter, said Ray never inquired about any infrared binoculars, the type that Raoul supposedly sent him to find.

* While Ray had told Dan Rather that the station was “about five blocks from Main Street,” in his first interview with the Select Committee staff, Ray said the station was “three blocks north and three or four blocks east from the rooming house.” In a May 1978 interview with the staff, Ray was certain the station was “three or four blocks down north and then turn right and go four or five blocks more, somewhere along in that area.”

* Harold Weisberg, in his quest to free Ray, personally interviewed dozens of people in the 1970s in the vicinity of the rooming house, looking in vain to find support for Ray’s gas station alibi. He found two “new” witnesses who claimed to remember seeing Ray and his Mustang in front of the rooming house at the time of the shooting, something contradicted by contemporaneous witnesses interviewed by the police.

* In his 1978 Hustler article, Lane quoted Walden, who was five-three, as saying the man she saw was “maybe two inches taller than me.” But in his 1977 book, Code Name “Zorro,” Lane quoted the original Walden statement, “this man was not quite as tall as I am.” Still, in the next paragraph, Lane somehow summarized Walden’s testimony incorrectly as describing a man “approximately five feet, five inches tall.”

* At the time of Cowden’s testimony, Renfro Hays was back in the psychiatric ward of the same hospital.