28

“The Legal Truth”

A conspiracy in the King assassination has seemed likely to many since the day of the murder. King had numerous enemies, any of whom might have sponsored a triggerman. Ray’s capture only fueled the speculation. Questions of how a career thief was suddenly transformed into a competent assassin were not answered by the Memphis plea agreement. And Ray’s sixty-five-day odyssey after the killing, involving travel to three countries and the use of foreign passports, seemed far beyond the capability of the poor, uneducated hillbilly charged with the crime. William Bradford Huie’s articles about Raoul nurtured the conspiracy talk. A public opinion poll soon after the plea revealed two-thirds of those questioned believed there was a conspiracy.1

But Huie made a U-turn in his third Look installment, published in April 1969. He admitted he had made “a serious mistake” and now believed Ray alone had killed King. He concluded that Raoul was merely a composite of criminals Ray had likely encountered in his fugitive year leading up to the King assassination.² That conclusion was shared by Clay Blair, Jr., in his paperback The Strange Case of James Earl Ray, rushed out in March 1969 at the time of Ray’s plea. Huie followed Blair with a longer version of his lone-assassin thesis in book form, He Slew the Dreamer, the following year.*

But for every former conspiracy believer like Huie who was now convinced that Ray had indeed killed King alone, there was an ever growing number of skeptics about the case. The Greatest Police Fraud Ever: The James Earl Ray Hoax, by German leftist Joachim Joesten, declared that Ray was “the ideal fall guy,” that there was a Ray double, and that “Dr. King was not shot from Mrs. Bessie Brewer’s flophouse window; instead, the fatal shot came from a Memphis replica of the famous grassy knoll in Dallas” (emphasis in original). According to Joesten, “the real assassin has been quietly spirited away to a foreign haven where he is to await his next assignment under the protection of the CIA.”*³ Harold Weisberg, a former chicken farmer who eventually self-published half a dozen convoluted books on the JFK case, also brought out one on the King case, Frame-Up, in 1969.⁴ Included in Weisberg’s speculation was the two-Rays theory—“there were at least two men, only one of whom was arrested and charged.” Although both the Joesten and Weisberg books were riddled with errors, they nevertheless added to the early conspiracy fever.

And Ray himself, through a succession of lawyers, did his best to create confusion in the hope that enough controversy might force the state to grant him a trial. When J. B. Stoner—the National States Rights Party (NSRP) counsel, the founder of the Stoner Anti-Jewish Party, and a cofounder of the Christian Anti-Jewish Party—took over from the dismissed Percy Foreman, the conspiracy speculation accelerated.⁵

The forty-one-year-old Stoner, who thought Hitler was “too moderate,” had the distinction of being one of the country’s most vicious racists. His newsletter, The Thunderbolt, said King’s killer was “actually upholding the law of the land [and] he should be given the Congressional medal and a large annual pension for life, plus a Presidential pardon.”^† In 1969, Stoner had a new roommate: Jerry Ray. Jerry worked for Stoner for more than ten years as an unofficial bodyguard, driver, and general gofer and aide.6 Jerry became a minicelebrity among white supremacists—the NSRP even feted him at a dinner at which he was introduced as “the Honorable Jerry Ray, brother of James Earl Ray.”⁷ In 1970, when Stoner ran for governor of Georgia (he got less than 3 percent of the vote), Jerry Ray was his campaign manager. That same year, Jerry was arrested for shooting a seventeen-year-old member of the American Nazi Party who broke into the NSRP headquarters to steal party files. Stoner defended him that November, and he was acquitted.*

Jerry Ray and J. B. Stoner formed a quick bond because they shared a similar disparaging view of blacks and Jews, the same bigotry all the Ray boys had grown up with. “It might take another 50 or 75 years but the Jews are like the Nigger beast,” Jerry wrote, “give them a rope and they will hang themselves. I am sure when History is written my Brother James Earl Ray, and the Hon. Gov. George Wallace will be Heroes alongside of JB Stoner.” He called Sirhan Sirhan a “hero” and said that when Robert Kennedy was assassinated, he “celebrated.”⁸

Stoner and Ray also shared a similar tendency to embrace wild conspiracy theories, usually with the federal government cast as the villain. A few months after James’s guilty plea, Stoner became the first of Ray’s attorneys to charge publicly that “agents of the federal government” had killed King, “but so far I have been unable to find out what their motive was.”⁹ Stoner said he had evidence that King’s murder and Ray’s conviction were part of the same plot—“Mr. Ray was just a fall guy so they [the federal government] could consider the case closed.”

A few weeks after Stoner’s announcement, Jerry Ray released to a St. Louis radio station a statement, supposedly from James, that confirmed Stoner’s charge. “In the spring of 1968,” James said, “I was working with agents of the Federal Government, including Raol. They told me that I was helping them to supply arms and guns to Cuban refugees to overthrow Castro and the Communists in Cuba. The reason I made trips to Mexico was in regard to helping the agents of the Federal Government to supply arms to Cuban refugees there to overthrow Castro. The federal agents led me to believe that I was in Memphis in April for the same purpose.… I now realize that they had no interest in overthrowing Castro, and their whole purpose was to use me to cover up their own crime. Two federal agencies are guilty, and I am fully innocent.”10

Actually, Jerry Ray had written the statement without consulting James, and Stoner allowed him to release it. James was initially so angry that he temporarily barred Jerry from visiting him.¹¹ It was nine years before the House Select Committee unmasked Jerry’s fraud.¹²

In addition to the false statement, Jerry began telling the media that the FBI was so eager to stop James from seeking a new trial that it had “tried to frame me with false charges” and “planted evidence in the automobile of our brother, John Ray, of St. Louis, and succeeded in sending him to prison even though he was innocent.”¹³ (John had received a twenty-year sentence for driving the getaway car in yet another bank robbery.) Jerry charged that the Bureau of Prisons had tried to kill John by placing him in the “black jungle,” where black inmates were crammed into cells. (John Ray actually refused to be placed into any prison cell with blacks.*)

While Jerry Ray and Stoner battled to win over public opinion, Stoner and Memphis attorney Richard Ryan and Chattanooga counsel Robert Hill initiated appeals in the Tennessee courts to try and get a new trial for Ray.¹⁴ They also filed a lawsuit—Ray v. Foreman—against Foreman, Hanes, and Huie in the U.S. District Court in Nashville. It charged them with violating Ray’s constitutional rights and tried unsuccessfully to enjoin the publication of Huie’s book.

In the early summer of 1969, only a month after the request for a new trial was made, criminal court judge Arthur Faquin ruled that Ray had given up his right of appeal when he pleaded guilty.¹⁵ The Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, and subsequently the Tennessee Supreme Court, upheld Faquin’s ruling.¹⁶ Ray’s attorneys then resubmitted a motion for a trial, based on a new contention that Foreman had induced Ray to plead guilty on the false promise that he would be paroled in two years.17 Criminal court judge William Williams rejected that argument and was affirmed twice on appeal.

Ray had no better luck in his civil lawsuit against Foreman, Hanes, and Huie. It came to trial in the District Court in December 1969 and was dismissed by Judge Robert McRae as legally insufficient.¹⁸ The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal.¹⁹

In 1971, after the State Court of Appeals had rejected his second application for a new trial, Ray decided to try an alternate route to freedom. This time he would attempt to escape from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. As with his earlier escape attempts from Missouri State Penitentiary in the 1960s, Ray’s effort was ambitious and had taken weeks of planning. He used a welding rod provided by another inmate to remove part of two concrete blocks in his cell, working at the job for several days and carefully replacing the mortar he removed with a temporary paste so the guards would not notice anything unusual when they inspected his cell.²⁰ And for several days he worked with a hacksaw on some bars that blocked an air vent through which he needed to crawl. Every night when he worked on cutting the bars, he put a dummy into his bed so as not to arouse the guards’ suspicions. Finally, on May 2, Ray squeezed into the vent. He again left the dummy in his bed. Working his way through the long vent, he eventually reached the prison yard behind his cell block. Then, using a crowbar, he removed a manhole cover on a steam tunnel. His plan was to crawl through the tunnel to go under the prison wall, emerging outside the prison. But the steam tunnel, which was several hundred degrees Fahrenheit, proved too hot for Ray, so he retreated to the prison yard and hid.²¹ Around 3:15 A.M., guards finally found him hiding in the shadows of one of the large prison buildings.

Nine months later, Ray made another unsuccessful escape attempt, this time trying to cut through the roof in the prison gymnasium.

After two failed escapes, Ray was at least temporarily resigned to put more energy into his legal efforts. He had new lawyers: Bernard Fensterwald, Jr., the founder of the Washington, D.C.–based Committee to Investigate Assassinations, and his assistant James Lesar, as well as Memphis-based Robert Livingston. As with many attracted to the cause, Fensterwald was a conspiracy believer who was not only willing to credit Ray’s tales, but also brought along many of his own theories about political murders, particularly from his work on the JFK assassination. His Committee to Investigate Assassinations, for instance, had a board of directors that included his friend Jim Garrison, the district attorney of New Orleans, and former FBI agent William Turner, both of whom thought a wide-ranging government plot killed JFK. Later, key members of Fensterwald’s group included Penn Jones, who invented the bogus issue of mysterious deaths in the Kennedy case; Richard Popkin, the originator of the two-Oswalds theory; and Fletcher Prouty, the former military officer who spun a wild tale of CIA involvement in JFK’s murder. A friend of Fensterwald’s, conspiracy buff Harold Weisberg, became an investigator for Ray, searching for new witnesses who might bolster or even go beyond Ray’s version of what happened.

Having exhausted his right of appeal in the Tennessee courts, Ray and his lawyers decided to file a special writ of habeas corpus in federal court.22 Ray had been ineffectively represented, they argued, and Foreman and Huie had maneuvered and coerced him into a guilty plea in order to enhance the success of their articles, books, and movies about the case.²³ The legal maneuvering that followed was Herculean. In March 1973, a federal district court rejected Ray’s argument that his constitutional rights had been violated.²⁴ Ray appealed, and in a 2 to 1 decision the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with him, ruling in January 1974 that he was at least entitled to an evidentiary hearing.²⁵ The state of Tennessee appealed that decision to the Supreme Court, but that June the high court declined to hear the case.*²⁶

After the habeas corpus proceeding was returned to district court, an evidentiary hearing that extended over eight days was held in October 1974. When Foreman took the stand, he was surprisingly hesitant, and at times seemed, unwittingly, to bolster Ray’s case that he had done little to prepare Ray for trial. His weak performance prompted press speculation that Ray might well get the trial he had forgone six years earlier.²⁷ But in February 1975, U.S. District Judge Robert M. McRae, Jr., ruled Ray had had adequate counsel after his arrest and that his guilty plea was voluntary.²⁸ Over a year later—in May 1976—the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed McRae’s ruling.²⁹ That December, the case was back before the Supreme Court, which again declined to review it. As a result, Ray decided that he did not like his current batch of attorneys, and he dismissed Fensterwald, Lesar, and Livingston.

While the habeas corpus proceeding was pending on appeal, William Sullivan, the former assistant director of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division, testified before a Senate committee in November 1975 that Dr. King had been a target of an extensive FBI campaign designed to neutralize him.30 The FBI’s counterintelligence program against the Communist Party (COINTELPRO) had also included a secret war against King from late 1963 until his death. According to Sullivan, during the operation—which included extensive physical and electronic surveillance—“no holds were barred.”³¹ Those widely publicized disclosures of the FBI’s gross abuses revived the question of whether the Bureau might have either plotted to kill King or covered up for the real killers during its investigation. To examine that question, on November 24, 1975, the Justice Department began reviewing the FBI’s investigation. Its report was released fourteen months later. It strongly condemned the FBI’s campaign against King, but found the Bureau’s murder investigation into his death to have been generally thorough. The report further tarnished the FBI and Hoover vis-à-vis their personal and sometimes illegal crusade against King, but it did nothing to help Ray. “We found no evidence,” the Justice Department concluded, “of any complicity on the part of the Memphis Police Department or of the FBI.… We saw no credible evidence probative of the possibility that Ray and any co-conspirator were together at the scene of the assassination. Ray’s assertions that someone else pulled the trigger are so patently self-serving and so varied as to be wholly unbelievable.”³²

Meanwhile, Congress had begun considering its own investigation into the King case. Texas representative Henry Gonzalez introduced a resolution in the 94th Congress (1975) calling for a new investigation of not only King’s murder but also the shootings of John and Robert Kennedy and George Wallace. In April 1975, Virginia congressman Thomas Downing introduced a resolution for a reexamination of only the John Kennedy assassination. A tied vote in committee killed any new investigation that year.

But in 1976, the momentum for a new investigation revived when Coretta Scott King met with the Congressional Black Caucus and urged them to seek the truth in a case she remained personally convinced involved a major conspiracy. The caucus then spearheaded an effort to meld the Downing and Gonzalez drafts to empower a select committee to investigate both the King and JFK deaths. Their efforts resulted in House Resolution 1540, introduced on September 14, 1976, and passed by a vote of 280 to 65 on September 30. The Black Caucus wanted Mark Lane as general counsel, but eventually Richard Sprague, a prominent Philadelphia prosecutor, was selected. Sprague did not last long, however. He submitted a $6.5 million budget for 1977, considered excessive by some in Congress, and announced he would use polygraphs and stress analyzers on witnesses. Thomas Downing had briefly been the committee chairman, but when Henry Gonzalez replaced him, Gonzalez tried to dismiss Sprague. But Sprague refused to leave unless the entire committee voted him out. In the ensuing standoff, Gonzalez resigned, and it appeared that any congressional investigation was dead.

In March 1977, House Speaker Tip O’Neill appointed Ohio congressman Louis Stokes as the new chairman. Stokes persuaded Sprague to resign, eventually got two years of funding, and hired G. Robert Blakey, a respected attorney and academician, as general counsel.

Starting in the spring, the committee began a series of interviews with Ray. It had completed five when, on June 11, 1977, the forty-nine-year-old Ray finally made a successful escape from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. Ray and five other prisoners used a ladder made of lightning-conductor wire and pipes to scale a fifteen-foot wall. A seventh prisoner, the last up the ladder, was shot and captured before he could get outside.*

More than 125 prison guards, state troopers, FBI agents, and Tennessee Bureau of Criminal Identification agents, assisted by bloodhounds, combed through the thick wilderness that surrounded the maximum-security prison. Fifty-five hours after he escaped, the bloodhounds found Ray, exhausted and cold, hiding under a pile of leaves in the dense woods. He was only five miles from the prison.^†

After he was returned to prison, Ray completed another three interviews with the Select Committee. The committee’s investigators were tough in their questioning. They would not let him modify or change his story without offering a solid explanation. That unsettled Ray, who was accustomed to softer treatment from his own lawyers and investigators. “I could see the handwriting on the prison wall,” wrote Ray. “The fix was in at the Select Committee, and an interview with Playboy to which I’d agreed was turning out to be more aggravation than it seemed to be worth.”33

The Playboy interview was published in September 1977, while the Select Committee interviews were still under way. It, too, was the result of hours of interviews. Even Jerry Ray talked to the magazine. Most significant, however, was that James, on the advice of his new Nashville attorney, Jack Kershaw, agreed for the first time to undergo a polygraph examination. Playboy hired Douglas Wicklander, a well-known polygraph expert at the firm of John E. Reid & Associates, to administer the test.*

To the key questions—“Did you kill Martin Luther King, Jr.?” and “Did you fire the shot that killed Martin Luther King, Jr.?” and “Do you know for sure who killed Martin Luther King, Jr.?”—Ray answered no.

Wicklander reviewed the polygraph tape with John Reid, the company’s owner (also the inventor of the portion of the polygraph machine that measures changes in blood-pressure levels), and Joseph Buckley, the company’s director. All concluded that Ray was lying on each key answer.34

To explore the possibility of a conspiracy, Wicklander then conducted a second test. “Did anyone ask you to kill Martin Luther King, Jr.?” he asked Ray. “Did you arrange with anyone to kill Martin Luther King, Jr.?” “Did anyone give you any money to kill Martin Luther King, Jr.?” Ray again answered each question no. This time the examiners decided he had told the truth on those questions. Playboy asked the polygraph examiners if they had any doubts about their conclusions. Their answer was “None.” As Playboy wrote, the “polygraph tests indicate that Ray did, in fact, kill Martin Luther King, Jr., and that he did so alone.”

At the close of the interview with Ray, Playboy informed him that he had failed the tests. He seemed unfazed, calling the equipment a “medieval contraption,” and said, “I had a headache all day. I took a bunch of aspirin. I don’t know if that would affect the test or not.”³⁵ (It would not.) Years later, in his book Who Killed Martin Luther King?, Ray called the Playboy interview “a prosecutor’s brief” and suggested that the article was the result of a conspiracy: Hugh Hefner, Playboy’s owner, had slanted the interview in order to curry favor with federal authorities because of the drug conviction of a Hefner aide.³⁶ Because of the Playboy results, Ray fired his attorney, Jack Kershaw.

Now, as Ray continued to appear before the Select Committee, he had a new attorney: longtime conspiracy buff Mark Lane. Lane had attracted Ray’s attention with his book Code Name “Zorro,” cowritten with comedian and political activist Dick Gregory.³⁷ In that 1977 book, Lane argued that the FBI had killed King and that Ray was a dupe.

“Lane and I could see my inquisitors were trying to maneuver me into making misstatements,” wrote Ray. “After my December 2, 1977 session with them, I stopped altogether.”³⁸ But Ray was still scheduled to testify under oath the following year, at public hearings. To counteract the negative publicity of the Playboy publication, Lane arranged in December 1977 for Ray to submit to another polygraph. The results would be aired on columnist Jack Anderson’s syndicated television program.

This time the test would be administered by fifty-six-year-old Chris Gugas, perhaps the most experienced polygraph expert worldwide. Gugas had conducted over 30,000 tests personally and supervised several thousand more. A widely respected lecturer and expert witness, Gugas was past president of both the National Board of Polygraph Examiners and the American Polygraph Association, and had worked for many private companies as well as having directed the CIA’s polygraph program.³⁹

Before starting the exam, Gugas had a long talk with Ray. During that conversation, Ray told him that he had “read up on the polygraph after that last fellow from Reid’s gave me my test. He called me a liar, and I wanted to make sure I knew something about the polygraph before I took your test.”40 When they got to talking about Mark Lane, Ray told Gugas, “He’s been a true friend and an honest attorney.” Lane had taught Ray that “there is the truth, and there is the legal truth.” “And he’s right,” Ray told Gugas. “The evidence they have against me won’t stand up in any objective court.”⁴¹

When the exam finally started, Gugas ran several simultaneous polygraph tapes, a procedure he had devised to ensure greater accuracy on reading the results. The questions were much the same: “Did you shoot Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?” “Were you involved with any other person or persons in a conspiracy to shoot Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?” “Did you know Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was going to be shot?” and “Did you point any weapon toward Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968?” Ray answered “No” to each. During the exam, Gugas noticed that Ray “kept applying pressure to his left arm, the one that held the blood-pressure cuff … only at certain questions.… I thought he was attempting to beat the polygraph.”

Immediately after the tests, Lane eagerly asked Gugas for the results. But since Ray had “tried to manipulate the process,” Gugas told Lane he needed several hours to examine the charts carefully. When Ray later appeared on Jack Anderson’s television program, he not only denied killing King but also said he knew nothing about the assassination. Then Gugas came on and Anderson asked him for the results. Gugas said the results showed “Ray had lied about not shooting Dr. King, but had told the truth when he said there was no conspiracy.” It meant, said Gugas, that “Ray had acted on his own.”*⁴²

Lane’s attempt to counter the effects of the Playboy polygraph had backfired, but Ray did not dismiss him. When the Select Committee began its public hearings in August, Lane was still at Ray’s side.

Lane aggressively represented Ray before the committee. He often attacked the process as unfair and prosecutorial. The committee, in turn, officially chastised Lane in its final report, issued in July 1979, for bogus information he had tried to pass as credible. “The facts were often at variance with Lane’s assertions.… In many instances, the committee found that Lane was willing to advocate conspiracy theories without having checked the factual basis for them. In other instances, Lane proclaimed conspiracy based on little more than inference and innuendo. Lane’s conduct resulted in public misperception about the assassination of Dr. King and must be condemned.”43

As for King’s murder, the committee concluded that while “no Federal, State or local government agency was involved in the assassination of Dr. King … on the basis of the circumstantial evidence available to it … there is a likelihood … of a conspiracy.”⁴⁴ St. Louis attorney and segregationist John Sutherland, who the committee discovered had a standing bounty of $50,000 on King during 1967 and 1968, was the plot’s likely money man.

But for Ray personally, there was little comforting news. The committee concluded not only that Ray “knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily pleaded guilty,” but also that he alone “fired one shot at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The shot killed Dr. King.”⁴⁵

Ray dismissed the Select Committee as a “Five million dollar hoax orchestrated by professional hoaxers.”⁴⁶ Yet, while he seemed unconcerned, he must have realized that its conclusions were yet another obstacle—and a major one—in the way of obtaining a new trial. Ray still used Mark Lane as his attorney. No one else was volunteering for the job.

Lane made another application for a new trial the same month the Select Committee issued its report. It was quickly rejected.⁴⁷ Ray then went on a litigation binge. He sued Congressman Stokes and the committee, seeking $75,000 in damages to his reputation. The suit was dismissed.⁴⁸ He also filed separate actions against one of the committee’s members, Representative Harold Ford, who had said Ray had killed King alone, and also against the U.S. Department of Justice and an Illinois sheriff, both for providing evidence to the committee that Ray and his brothers might have robbed the Alton, Missouri, bank in 1967. Those suits were also dismissed.⁴⁹ The same fate befell a new legal action against Percy Foreman, this time for malpractice.⁵⁰

In November 1980, over a year after the Select Committee had issued its final report, Ray submitted a clemency appeal to the Tennessee Board of Parole. By March 1981, he had completed his answers to the Board of Parole, the first step in the process. Two months later, while the clemency appeal was pending, several black inmates attacked Ray at Brushy Mountain. The assault took place in the law library in the early morning. Ray was stabbed twenty-two times with a twelve-inch homemade knife made from a metal window brace. There were wounds on his cheek, the side of his neck, his left hand, and his chest. He needed seventy-seven stitches to close the punctures, but none of the wounds was deep or serious.

However, there were immediately questions about the nature of the attack: The attackers were alone with Ray for several minutes and were not stopped by guards until they had finished and were on their way out of the library.

Lane flew to the hospital where Ray had been taken and refused to allow a state photographer to photograph the wounds. That kicked off speculation that Ray might have staged the attack in order to win sympathy for his clemency appeal. The prison authorities eventually charged three inmates: Dock Walker, Jr., John Partee, and Jerome Ransom, all members of Alkebu-lan, a black nationalist prison organization.51 Another inmate, William Wynn, came forward and testified that he had overheard Ray offering $50 for someone to stab him. Wynn passed a lie-detector test. Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and Corrections Department officials concluded that the stabbings were not intended to kill Ray, but were done by the three inmates to attract attention to their organization.*⁵² Mark Lane contended that the knifing was part of a conspiracy to silence Ray.⁵³

Following his recuperation from the stabbing, Ray continued his litigation spree. He sued Playboy over his 1977 interview and polygraph exam, contending the test was “rigged” and hurt his chances for any successful appeal. Ray also named Jack Kershaw, his former lawyer, as a defendant, asserting that he had profited from the article, to the detriment of Ray’s legal case.⁵⁴ Two months after he initiated the Playboy lawsuit, Ray brought an action against several Tennessee officials, a television reporter, and a local congressman. “I believe they conspired to have me stabbed,” he told a newspaper. “I think they wanted to keep me from talking.”⁵⁵ The courts quickly rejected all of Ray’s new litigation. Predictably, at the same time, the Parole Board voted four to one against even granting Ray a hearing.⁵⁶

For the first time since the assassination, the case and Ray temporarily became quiet. In the mid-1980s, Ray and his lawyers seemed to have run out of legal options and enthusiasm. But just at the point when many had begun to forget about the confessed killer and the chances for further dramatic developments, yet another lawyer entered the case, one who would put Ray and the controversies surrounding King’s assassination in the spotlight as never before. British-based Dr. William Pepper, who had been at the periphery of the proceedings a decade earlier, was about to become Ray’s new lawyer.*

* Delacorte Press originally signed the Huie book as “They Slew the Dreamer,” but the title was modified after Huie changed his mind about what happened in the murder.

* German leftists were particularly attracted to the King case, in part because they simplistically saw the murder as the right-wing plot of a secret government to end the civil rights movement. One of the most talked-about plays in 1970 in Germany was Rolf Hochhuth’s Guerrillas, in which the CIA organized the King murder.

^† When Stoner was asked about King the night of the assassination, he said, “He has been a good nigger now since six or seven o’clock tonight.” Stoner had Joined the Chattanooga Klan at eighteen. In 1944, he petitioned Congress to pass a law establishing that “Jews are the children of the Devil.” The following year he organized the Stoner Anti-Jewish Party and worked toward passing laws to make Judaism a crime punishable by death, including the use of gas chambers, electric chairs, and firing squads. In 1950, the Chattanooga Klan expelled him because he was so extreme. In 1964, Stoner ran for vice president on the NSRP ticket, and he later ran unsuccessfully for governor and senator from Georgia. In 1980, he was convicted of conspiracy to bomb a black church in Birmingham nineteen years earlier. In the 1990s, Stoner founded a new organization, Crusade Against Corruption. He frequently lectures about how AIDS—since it affects many gays and minorities—is “God’s gift because he loves us white people.” Some of James Earl Ray’s supporters are clearly ashamed of his Stoner connection. Ray’s current attorney William Pepper, in his 1995 book, Orders to Kill, writes about every possible aspect to a conspiracy in the case, but does not even mention Stoner or the NSRP.

* If Jerry Ray, or any of the Rays, knew Stoner before the King assassination, that would be critical. Stoner and many in his NSRP celebrated King’s death, and could be prime suspects if there was an early Ray-Stoner connection. Jerry testified before the House Select Committee that he had never heard of Stoner until after the assassination. Harry Avery, the commissioner of the Tennessee prison system, said that Jerry had admitted to him that Stoner had “been our lawyer for at least two years before Martin Luther King was killed.” Jerry Ray said Avery was “lying” and called his testimony “a joke, a sick joke.” Whatever the relationship, when James Earl Ray gave waivers of his attorney-client privilege to the House Select Committee so they could interview his former lawyers, he refused to give one only for Stoner, leading many to believe that even if Stoner was not involved in King’s murder, the Rays had confided the truth to him.

* Jerry also complained that the Bureau of Prisons almost had John killed by putting him in a shoe shop with a “half Jew and half Indian who is completely crazy.” He also wrote, “They [prison officials] only put the Whites in solitary and never the blacks. To show how biased against Whites they can be, the federal officials have ordered that Martin Luther King’s birthday always be celebrated as a holiday in all federal prisons. It is time to end the jungle conditions in the prisons and to return them to the control of the decent White people.”

* While Ray’s legal machinations were under way to win a new trial, he made sure that his lawyers also stayed busy on several civil fronts. After the publication of Gerold Frank’s An American Death in 1972, Ray sued former Memphis prosecutors Phil Canale and Robert Dwyer, charging that they were in collusion with Frank and his publisher, Doubleday, to keep him in prison. He unsuccessfully sought $300,000 in damages. In 1976, he brought a $3 million suit against, among others, Time magazine and authors George McMillan, William Bradford Huie, and Gerold Frank, for libel and civil rights violations. Judge Harry Wellford ruled that because of his past criminal convictions Ray was “libel proof,” and he dismissed the suit. That did not stop Ray from filing another suit against George McMillan, the publishers Little, Brown, William Bradford Huie, and others. U.S. District Judge Bailey Brown rejected that action. And while Ray was active, his brother Jerry also was litigious, filing a $2.25 million suit against McMillan, Time, and a former assistant attorney general. It was also unsuccessful.

* William Pepper, who became Ray’s attorney in the 1980s, writes in Orders to Kill that Ray “was no sooner over the wall … when a large SWAT team (upwards of 30 FBI snipers) took up position in the area. The function of snipers is not to apprehend. It is to kill.” Pepper claims the reason the FBI snipers had been assigned to kill Ray was that “some people feared what James might have testified to before the HSCA.” He fails to mention that the Select Committee had already interviewed Ray five times by the time he escaped. He also does not explain how thirty FBI snipers somehow missed Ray. While that allegation is typical of the fantastic charges that fill Pepper’s book, he also contends that a New Orleans mobster wanted Ray killed immediately after the assassination, but “the killing had been botched up.” Again, he does not explain why, if professional hit men were supposed to kill Ray in 1968, they had never finished the job in the intervening decades. Although prison is one of the easiest places to have someone killed, Ray was safe there. “The fact that Ray is still alive is one of the best arguments against the existence of any sophisticated conspiracy,” former Select Committee counsel Robert Blakey told the author. “If the mob, government, or anything like that had been involved, Ray would not have lived for very long after King was murdered.”

^† In one of the bizarre turns in Ray’s unusual life, during his 1977 trial for the escape he met an attractive, blond courtroom artist, Anna Sandhu. The thirty-two-year-old Sandhu and Ray enjoyed their brief courtroom conversations, and when Ray testified before Congress in 1978, she was in the public gallery. Convinced that Ray was innocent, and that he might win release easier if he was married, Sandhu proposed to him. The two were married in a surreal thirty-five-minute ceremony on October 13, 1978. The Reverend James Lawson, a former friend of Dr. King’s, who had come to believe in Ray’s innocence, performed the service. Mark Lane was best man. Sandhu then went on a national press tour to proclaim her husband’s innocence and ask for a new trial or a pardon. She visited Ray in prison at least twice a week for several years, and Ray tried to polish his image by taking a Bible study course with Sandhu, saying he had returned to Christianity. Sandhu, though, filed for divorce in November 1990, citing “inappropriate marital behavior.” The divorce was finalized in 1993. Sandhu went on another national press tour, including appearances on Geraldo! and The Phil Donahue Show in which she now claimed that Ray was an expert manipulator and she no longer believed him innocent. In 1997, she told the National Enquirer that the real reason she divorced Ray was that during a phone argument she told him, “I’ve never believed you could have killed Martin Luther King,” and Ray yelled, “Yeah, I did it. So what?” Then he slammed down the receiver. Ray’s answer to that is that he would never have made that admission on a prison phone because he always assumes that officials are listening.

* Wicklander had personally administered over 2,500 polygraph exams, had written a text used by trainees in the field, and had designed the “control question” technique that had become standard in the profession.

* The House Select Committee appointed three experts to review the polygraph examinations administered to Ray. As for the two-part Playboy test, the panel unanimously concluded that Ray had lied when he denied participating in King’s murder. Yet when Ray said no one had told him to shoot King, as opposed to Wick-lander’s definite conclusion that Ray had also lied there, the panel interpreted the results as inconclusive. As for the Gugas exam, the panel thought that “the apparent attempt by Ray to create artificial reactions to control questions” had affected the results. Nevertheless, it agreed that Ray lied both when he said he did not know who shot Martin Luther King and that he did not shoot King. The answers relating to the possibility of a conspiracy, however, were inconclusive (HSCA vol. XIII, pp. 143–51).

Jerry Ray repeatedly bragged to the author about passing two polygraph examinations. He says they indicated that he was telling the truth when he denied having any part in the Alton bank robbery or the King assassination.

* When the three were tried two years later, Ray was placed on the witness stand, but said he could not identify any of them. All three were convicted of first-degree assault with intent to commit murder, and their jail sentences were extended.

* It was Pepper’s January 1967 article in Ramparts about the horrors the U.S. military had inflicted on the children of Vietnam that had originally caught Dr. King’s attention and eventually led to his strong moral stance against the war. Pepper had moved to England in 1980, claiming in Orders to Kill that he was forced to move because the mafia in New England had made him “a marked man” after he led a successful effort at reorganizing a school system “rife with corruption.” Actually, a company of which Pepper was the president had received more than $200,000 from the state of Rhode Island to run a foster-care program for troubled youths. On July 6, 1978, Pepper was charged with four felony counts of transporting two teenage boys “to engage in lewd and indecent activities.” The local police also learned that in 1969 a U.S. Senate subcommittee heard statements from two young boys who said Pepper had sexual contact with them when they were eight. No charges were filed against him then. Shortly after his arrest, a state audit charged that more than half of the money given to Pepper’s firm could not be accounted for. His legal problems worsened when a real estate company sued him civilly, claiming he had reneged on a deal to sell his $350,000 Westchester, New York, home. Eventually, the felony morals charges were dropped to misdemeanor charges. He left for England, and finally in 1990 the morals charges were dismissed for lack of prosecution. Pepper denied the charges and claimed that his legal problems were part of a conspiracy to punish him for his anti-Vietnam stance in the late 1960s and his friendship with Dr. King.