31

Exit Raoul

It is significant that in Loyd Jowers’s recent versions of his confession, he has included Raoul at his restaurant on the day King was murdered. Raoul is still an integral part of Ray’s defense, and Pepper, Saltman, Herman, and Billings claim a breakthrough regarding Raoul that is as startling as their work with Jowers. Some who have seen the results of their Raoul investigation believe the longstanding mystery has been resolved. “Raoul has been found,” announced Dexter King in April 1997 after meeting with Pepper.1

The break in the Raoul investigation came much the same way as that with Jowers—in the wake of the 1993 HBO mock trial of James Earl Ray, somebody came forward claiming to have new information. In mid-1994, Glenda Grabow, a forty-nine-year-old attractive blonde from Booneville, Tennessee, came to the attention of Lewis Garrison. Her husband, Roy, first called Garrison. “He told me that his wife had some information that I’d probably be interested in,” recalls Garrison. “‘I’ve been trying to get her to come forward for twenty-five years. But she’s real scared.’ They came in a couple of days later. Turns out she had known Raoul down in Texas. She had some picture of his cousin.”²

Glenda and Roy had read about Garrison and his representation of Jowers. They had decided that if Garrison was good enough for Jowers, then he was the one to whom they should speak.

“Garrison called me right away,” recalls Kenny Herman. “He knew all I was doing on the case, and I knew him anyway.”3 Herman met Glenda and Roy and heard an astonishing story, which William Pepper set forth in his 1995 book, Orders to Kill. Glenda had grown up in Houston, where she met a Spanish man in his early thirties. Although she called him Dago, she said his real first name was Raul.* She met him in 1962 when she was only fourteen. At the time, Glenda said, she was being physically abused by an older relative, and she became friendly with Raul, who was protective of her. In 1966, Raul moved away. Around this time, she and Roy made the acquaintance of another Spaniard, named Amaro, who had the same surname as Raul—which in this book is given as Mirabal.^† She did not know it, she said, but Amaro was Raul’s cousin. Through Amaro, Glenda became involved with a group that made false passports and dealt in arms smuggling. In 1970, Raul moved back to Houston. By that time, Amaro had confided to her that Raul had killed Martin Luther King.

Reunited with Raul, Glenda helped him in the arms and passport business, frequently driving him to a local movie theater, where he met with associates of Carlos Marcello. One day in the mid-1970s, she visited a house where Amaro and Raul were meeting with several other men. She happened to be carrying a souvenir-type key ring that had small pictures of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. When Raul saw it, she said, he exploded in anger.

“I killed that black SOB once and it looks like I’ll have to do it again.” He then stomped the plastic key ring to bits and dragged her into another room, where he raped her.⁴ Glenda never reported the rape to authorities, and made an effort to keep her distance from Raul.

In 1978, when one of Roy’s brothers was arrested for murder, she says they mortgaged their house for $5,000 and hired trial lawyer Percy Foreman. Foreman, besotted by her glamorous looks, had an affair with her and always wanted her around the office. When he learned, however, what she knew of Raul and the King murder, he changed. Foreman also knew Raul, Glenda asserted, and in 1979 Foreman said her life was in danger. Not long after, she lost control of her car on the freeway when a tire, which had been sabotaged, came off. That made her and her husband leave Houston.5 Until she told all this to Garrison, she had kept it a secret out of fear for her life.

Garrison and Herman listened intently to her story. “Glenda and Roy are real simple country folk,” says Herman. “Too simple to make it up.” Herman told Saltman about what he heard. Both men were intrigued.⁶ When Saltman met Glenda, he thought she was “near a fruitcake, undoubtedly unusual, as flaky and as totally screwed up as they come, but her story was either the work of a genius in terms of creativity or it is true.”⁷

Glenda and Roy said they were willing to go to Houston to see if any of the people they knew were still around, so Herman gave them $300 for expenses. Roy ended up giving $100 back, which convinced Herman and Saltman that the couple was not after money, and therefore enhanced their credibility.⁸

When the couple returned and told Herman that some of the people they had known were still in Houston, Herman and Saltman decided to make their own research trip.⁹ Glenda had told them that Amaro was a seaman, so the two men visited the Seafarer’s International Union in Houston and discovered there was indeed a listing for Amaro. “Jack used his English background to charm everyone,” Herman recalls, chuckling at the memories. “He used to always talk about how he knew Prince Charles, and after that they’d want to do anything to help him.”¹⁰ At the union, Saltman managed to convince a clerk to “leave Amaro’s file on the desk when he went to the bathroom, and I looked at it. It told us that he had gone to Brazil in 1990.”¹¹ Amaro would have been in his nineties if alive, but when the two men checked further they determined that he was dead. When they discovered how old Amaro was, they decided Glenda was wrong in concluding that Amaro and Raul were cousins, and it was more likely that Amaro was his uncle.

They spent another four days in Houston, talking to people who remembered Amaro. “Quite a few people remembered him and Glenda,” says Herman. “We couldn’t find anybody then who knew Raul, but that was because he would only show up for a week or so at a time and then disappear again.”¹²

Herman then made what he considered a breakthrough. He used a $39 CD-ROM with U.S. telephone numbers and searched for a Raul Mirabal. He found two. “One was too old,” he says. “The other one lived in New York, and was the right age.”¹³

It did not seem to bother Herman that for him to have located the right person, he had to assume that a criminal who was involved in smuggling narcotics and guns with Ray, and then was the mastermind of the King assassination, used his real first name with Ray and then, after all the crimes, not only failed to change it, but actually listed himself in the phone book. “I don’t know,” says Herman, who shrugged his shoulders when questioned about how unlikely that was. “I’ve seen people do some strange things. It’s possible,” he said, as though he was trying hard to convince himself it was a reasonable assumption.*

“Well, in any case, I’ve got a law enforcement contact,” he boasts, “who can get into CIA records, and he got me one page of Raul’s last name, his address, the Portugal arms factory he worked at before he came to the U.S. It was his immigration file. I went back to my contact the next week to get more info from the CIA file but my source told me it had all been removed by then.”¹⁴

“Kenny called me up,” recalls Saltman, “and said, ‘I found Raul!’ He gave me his number so I called him. Now, I have a tape unit on my phone where I can record conversations, but I didn’t start it. It turned out to be the day of his daughter’s wedding. ‘I am a friend of your uncle’s,’ I told him, ‘and I met him when I was in Liverpool. Your uncle used to be in the merchant marine and he lived in Houston and you used to live there with him?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But it is my daughter’s wedding. Please call back later.’ Then I never got him again.”¹⁵

Starting in October 1994, Saltman and Herman placed the New York Raul under a full investigation. John Billings wanted to use hard tactics. “I wanted to just get the truth out of him,” says Billings. “I would have done it the way I’m used to, put him in the trunk of a car with a bag over his head. A bag really scares them into talking. If you don’t use a bag, and just try to knock it out of them, it takes two or three days to break someone.”¹⁶ Saltman and Herman overruled him. Instead, using a 500mm telephoto lens, Herman stalked Raul’s suburban house, snapping photos of him and his wife, daughter, grandchildren, and neighbors.¹⁷ Herman began checking real estate records, credit unions, tax records, and local employment rolls. Although Raul was retired, Herman could not initially determine where he had worked. With a New Jersey-based freelance television producer, Mike Chrisman, he decided to get Raul’s fingerprints to see whether they might match any of the unidentified prints left over from the King assassination. In November 1994, state elections were held in New York. Using election poll canvassing as a cover story, Chrisman knocked on Raul’s door. “He had written down ten or twelve questions about which political party was best, and things like that,” recalls Saltman. “The questionnaire was inserted into a plastic folder and when Raul took the folder he left his prints on it.”¹⁸ John Billings, who learned how “to lift prints in the Boy Scouts,” found eight prints on the plastic folder, three of which were good for identification.¹⁹ Raul and his family had no idea they were under suspicion.

From his secret source, Herman obtained a faxed copy of a photo that purported to be Raul’s November 1961 snapshot from his Immigration and Naturalization file. Herman then decided to put together a photo lineup to show to Glenda and others who might have been able to identify Raul from the 1960s. “It wasn’t professional, but it was pretty good.” (Herman showed the author how he used a handheld video camera to shoot the photos and a video-capture software program to transfer them to his computer. Then he adjusted them to appear similar in density and contrast). He could not remember all five of the other people whose pictures he used, but he took them from books in his study. “One was Carlos Marcello [the New Orleans godfather],” he says, “another was Frank Ragano [Marcello’s lawyer], and Allen Dorfman [one of Jimmy Hoffa’s closest associates]. I’m not sure of the other two.”20

When Herman showed the six-person photo lineup to Glenda Grabow, “she pointed Raul out with no hesitation. She was sitting at the kitchen table in my house and zeroed right in on the guy.”²¹ Saltman was there that day, and he suggested that the group visit Grabow’s younger brother, who lived nearby and had said he remembered seeing Raul. He also picked him from the lineup.²² The next day, he repeated the identification in front of John Billings, who notarized his statement.

Over the next few months, Herman and Saltman found others they say picked the right picture. One of them was April Ferguson, a federal public defender based in Memphis who had been lover and cocounsel to Mark Lane when he was Ray’s attorney before the House Select Committee in the late 1970s. Once more, the setting was Herman’s kitchen table, and again Saltman was there. “I put the spread on the table,” recalls Herman. “She picked out the photo right away, real fast. ‘That photo used to be passed all around back around the time of the congressional hearings,’ she told us. ‘I remember seeing it back then. Investigators for the committee had it … we had no money to follow up on it then.’”²³

The next confirmation was from Gene Stanley, the attorney who had represented Randy Rosenson before the Select Committee in 1978. It was Rosenson’s business card Ray claimed to have found under his car seat when he reentered the United States from Mexico in October 1967. “It turned out we had actually interviewed Stanley for the HBO trial but he never ended up appearing, since his testimony would have been double hearsay,” says Saltman. “He also said that in 1978 they [Select Committee investigators] had shown him that photo and told him it was Raul.”²⁴

Both April Ferguson and Gene Stanley convinced Saltman and Herman that the Select Committee had focused on the same Raul they had uncovered, but then somehow the investigation stalled.

But the most important person identifying Raul in the photo lineup was James Earl Ray himself. In over twenty-five years, Ray had failed or refused to identify anyone positively as Raoul—he told the Select Committee that he would not do so, even if shown a photo. However, Ray had intimated at times that one or another person looked like, and might even be, Raoul. For a while, the candidate was one of the three tramps whose picture was snapped at Dealey Plaza after the Kennedy assassination.25 Then the candidate was Randy Rosenson, whose card Ray found in his Mustang. Another time it was possibly Raul Esquivel, a Louisiana state trooper who had been traced through a telephone number that Charlie Stein, Ray’s travel mate to New Orleans in 1967, suddenly “remembered.”²⁶ Then, when Esquivel seemed unlikely as a possible Raoul, it was Jules Ricco Kimble, the racist who claimed the assassination was part of a convoluted CIA plot.²⁷ Yet another time, Ray, as well as his brother Jerry, implied it could be a man named Reynard Rochon, but when he turned out to be a successful black accountant in New Orleans, the suspicion did not go very far.²⁸

By failing to positively identify any single person, Ray had thus far avoided putting himself on a ledge from which his long-standing alibi might crumble. Therefore, when Saltman and Herman decided to approach Ray, they were not hopeful he would make a concrete identification. Kenny Herman and John Billings visited Ray in prison. “He looked at the pictures very carefully,” recalls Herman. “He was really examining them. Then he picked out the shot of Raul.”²⁹ The following week, John Billings and Jack Saltman again visited Ray. They once more laid the photo spread in front of him. “James not only picked it out instantly, but also said he had seen the same photo in 1978,” recalls Saltman.³⁰ Ray also identified the photo before his lawyer, William Pepper, as well as in a deposition in 1995 taken by attorney Lewis Garrison.³¹ His positive identification of Raul was a critical turning point in the case.

When William Pepper had picked up word about the breakthrough, he and his Memphis cocounsel, Wayne Chastain, wanted to be let in on the investigation. “Pepper thought he [Raul] lived in Philadelphia, and that his family was in Brazil,” says Saltman. “Finally, we told Pepper everything and gave him all the details about Raul.”³² By the spring of 1995, Pepper began devising ways to make Raul part of a legal proceeding in Memphis, one that might force him to be publicly exposed. “We want to depose this guy,” said Pepper. “We think that’s the case right there.”³³ Pepper also added a witness of his own, who had selected the right photo from the picture lineup: Sid Carthew, a merchant seaman who claimed he had met a Raul in the Neptune Tavern in 1967, and that Raul had been interested in selling guns.³⁴

At that point, Memphis district attorney general John Pierotti says, Saltman called and told him that Raoul had been found, that they had some fingerprints, and that they would provide the information to Pierotti’s office so long as they had the exclusive right to broadcast the final results of the investigation. Pierotti said no.³⁵

Unknown to Saltman, Herman, and Billings, the district attorney general had found out about the New York Raul shortly after Glenda had first contacted Lewis Garrison. One day early in the investigation, at the prosecutor’s office, another of Ray’s Memphis lawyers, Mac Dickinson, had let slip the name of the New York Raul.36 Pierotti had turned the Raoul issue, together with the Jowers matter, over to the special squad he had formed inside the prosecutor’s office.*

Mark Glankler and his partner, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent Johnny Simmons, began collecting background information on the New York Raul. First, they got his Immigration and Naturalization file. Then they checked all records through local, state, and federal law enforcement. Once they discovered that he had been employed by one of the “Big Three” automakers, they started compiling his work records, pension contributions, and a list of fellow employees to interview.³⁷

In November 1994, not long after Herman and Saltman had been there, Glankler, Simmons, and two New York State police officers went to Raul Mirabal’s house. No one was home, so they left a business card with a local telephone number. When he returned later that day, Raul called the number on the card. Glankler told him that he needed to talk to him about an ongoing investigation. The heavily accented Raul let them come to his home.³⁸ When the police and investigators arrived, just Raul and his wife were there—their daughter and son-in-law, who lived with them, were still at work. Glankler began asking Raul questions about his background, work, family, and travels. Finally, perplexed, Raul wanted to know what all the questioning was about. At that point, Glankler took out a file several inches thick and explained to the shocked retiree that James Earl Ray’s investigators thought he was the mastermind of the King assassination. “At first I laughed,” Raul told the author in his only on-the-record interview. “I thought it’s crazy. I didn’t take it very seriously because it made no sense to me. I was not the person, so it was a mistake, and would all be over with. That’s what I thought, at least.”³⁹

“I tried to explain the implications to him,” says Glankler. “I had to search his house, to look for anything incriminating. Eventually, I was very comfortable with what he had to say.”⁴⁰

Glankler asked for, and received, permission to take Raul’s fingerprints. Then he warned the Mirabals not to speak to anyone and to be wary of strangers near the house. Mrs. Mirabal became anxious. Is it possible, she asked, that if people learn of this, someone might believe it and attack us or our children or grandchildren? Glankler said it was unlikely, but he was concerned about what could happen to the Mirabals if the Ray team publicly fingered them. “They were a little scared by the end,” he recalled.41

What had Glankler and Simmons learned from their own investigation that convinced them that Ray’s team had almost certainly fingered the wrong man?⁴² Raul was sixty years old, having immigrated to the United States in December 1961. In Portugal, he had worked for six years as a secretary in a munitions factory, after having served his mandatory four years in the army.* He was the first member of his family to come to the States, and had no family member called Amaro. The only reason his last name was even Mirabal was that as the youngest of three brothers, he followed a Portuguese tradition and carried his father’s middle name as his surname.⁴³ Otherwise, he would not even have come up in a search by Ken Herman. More important, he had worked from January 1962 to 1992 for the same automaker. His employment records revealed that he took normal vacations, but had never taken an extended leave of absence, or the time necessary to have been with Glenda Grabow for months at a time.⁴⁴ He was at work on the day of the King assassination. Moreover, until 1980, he had never been anywhere else in the United States except for Portland, Oregon, where he once went for his work. On the way back to the East Coast, his plane stopped in Chicago, but he did not leave the airport. He has never been to Texas or Tennessee.

When Glankler and Simmons left Raul, they still had one thing left to do before they were completely convinced that Ray’s team had picked an innocent man—run his fingerprints against all unmatched prints in the King file. The report from the FBI came back with no matches. That essentially closed the file for the district attorney general, but unfortunately for Raul, Ray’s defense team was increasing its efforts to prove his guilt.

When Saltman learned that Raul had held a job for thirty years and could not have been where Grabow claimed he was, he developed a ready answer: “We were told by a very big firm of investigators that two FBI agents were told to create a false legend for this man.”45 “They can make up paperwork to say whatever you want it to say,” says Billings. “Hell, think about it. They can kill people by inducing heart attacks and putting cancer cells into bone marrow to get cancer growing in you [which is medically impossible]. If they can do that, they can certainly come up with some paperwork to cover something up.”*⁴⁶

Meanwhile, Glenda Grabow began calling Raul’s home almost nightly, saying, “Don’t you remember me, please, don’t you?”⁴⁷ Herman took Grabow to Raul’s neighborhood and they camped out, waiting for him to leave the house. Warned by Glankler, who had picked up word of the trip, Raul and his family remained inside for several days. Meanwhile, Raul, who had started a small import business in his retirement, discovered that Herman and Billings were questioning his colleagues, raising insinuations about him that were causing concerns even among longtime friends.^†48 One day, Saltman and Herman showed up at Raul’s house, wanting to talk to him. His wife answered the door. When she realized who they were, she ran to the rear of the house, screaming in anger. His daughter sprinted to the front and sent them away.

“It was starting to wear on us after several months,” recalls his daughter. “We all live in the same house, and my mother is a very nervous person anyway. Well, this really put a terrible strain on us. We had to tape our calls to give over to the state police so they could monitor what was happening.”⁴⁹

“It was a turmoil,” recalls Raul. “We were always worried that if this crazy charge comes out, it would endanger us.”⁵⁰

Early in the spring of 1995, William Pepper called and talked to Raul’s daughter. He wanted to meet her father. The family said no. Pepper’s response was to serve Raul with a summons on July 5. It was actually an existing civil suit that Pepper had brought for false imprisonment, on behalf of Ray, against Loyd Jowers and the unidentified Raoul. Now that Pepper had a name, he added the New York Raul to the suit.

“What is this?” Raul asked his daughter, “What do we do now?”51

“I knew we could not use a small-town lawyer to stop this,” she says. The next day at work, at a financial institution, she talked to her boss. He referred her to the company’s attorneys, a prestigious Manhattan firm, Reboul, Mac-Murray, Hewitt, Maynard & Kristol. A meeting was set up, but when Raul’s daughter explained their problem, the company lawyer mistakenly assumed it was a criminal matter and called in Ed McDonald, a partner and the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. McDonald immediately realized it was a civil suit and brought in Janet Mattick, a partner specializing in civil litigation.

“I really felt sorry for these people,” recalls Mattick, “so I suggested to Ed that we should take it on pro bono. They clearly did not have the money to pay us, and since it was a Tennessee matter, they were already going to have to hire local counsel there and that would certainly cost them. Ed agreed.”⁵² “I’ll eat my shoes in front of everyone if this guy had anything to do with the King assassination,” McDonald announced to the firm’s partners.*⁵³

In Memphis, John Pierotti had resigned as the district attorney general, and he persuaded a colleague in private practice, David Wade, to take the case on a reduced fee. Still, as the legal wrangling intensified, the costs mounted.

“It’s the part that made my father so very upset,” recalls Raul’s daughter. “These were his life savings that he had put aside after thirty years of work, and now he was spending it on lawyers over something that he knew was completely false. It really hurt.”⁵⁴

In Memphis, the court records were temporarily sealed to ensure that Raul’s name did not become public. Soon, however, Pepper sent a notice of deposition for Raul’s wife and extensive interrogatories for both of them. Janet Mattick, who had already made a motion to dismiss, asked the court to postpone the deposition, and she advised her client not to appear. That left Pepper cooling his heels at the appointed time and place.⁵⁵ The motion to dismiss was finally granted in February 1996, and the court permanently sealed the record.

But even the dismissal of the suit did not end Raul’s problems. Ray’s team then turned to selected press contacts, and the next thing the supposedly anonymous Raul knew, a Memphis reporter showed up at his door, a New York Daily News reporter camped outside his house, and local television cameras chased him from his backyard.56 Although none used his last name or precise location in their reports, it did not help his mood. “Even when the suit was dismissed, it did not make me feel better,” he recalls. “My whole life was in chaos. I couldn’t go into my own backyard, or walk around in the town. We actually thought of moving back to Portugal, but my wife and I did not want to leave our grandchildren.”⁵⁷

Behind the scenes, unknown to Raul and his family, things were getting worse. Saltman was now trying to sell the story to an American television network, with himself as producer and Herman and Billings as consultants. ABC News, which had broken the Jowers story, was interested. “Yeah, I talked to the producer all the time,” recalls Herman. “They actually got copies of seven of the thirty-seven unidentified prints in the King case, and they wanted to match the three prints we had lifted from Raul. They came to my house. But eventually there was no match between the prints, so they sort of lost interest.”⁵⁸ Then Saltman got the attention of 60 Minutes. The leading CBS news program spent nearly a month looking into the story. “60 Minutes was really interested,” says Saltman. “They paid plenty for three weeks of our research. But they wanted more and told us they would run it when we had a smoking gun. At that point I wouldn’t need them—I could do the show myself.”*⁵⁹

In March 1997, Saltman and Herman went to the district attorney general and met with John Campbell and Mark Glankler. Not knowing that the prosecutor’s office had been aggressively investigating the case for more than two years, Saltman and Herman hoped to convince the office to undertake an inquiry into the man they had pinpointed as Raul.

“We had three good prints from Raul,” says Saltman. “We gave them to Glankler and said, ‘Please match this against the prints unidentified in the case.’ He never got back to me. I don’t know if they have done anything with it.”⁶⁰

“I don’t know what Saltman is talking about,” says Campbell. “We gave them all the info about the prints about a month later. They know there is no match there. Maybe they just don’t want to hear that.”⁶¹

“The shame in all of this fiasco,” former district attorney general John Pierotti told the author, “is that I think this is a cruel hoax against this innocent man in New York. I do not have the proof, but I bet the Ray people know it’s wrong.”⁶²

The author uncovered information that supports Pierotti’s view that the Ray team has at least not told the truth about everything it discovered. This conclusion centers on Glenda Grabow, the woman who instigated the entire Raul hunt. The author obtained a two-hour video of Grabow being questioned by Jack Saltman. It raises extremely disturbing questions about the accuracy of her story as well as her own stability. In it, Grabow refers to Raul as Dago. Pepper has said that Dago was only a “nickname.”63 However, at the beginning of the tape, when she first refers to him as Dago, Saltman interrupts her and says, “Let’s call him Raul for this interview.” (In September 1997, Grabow told the district attorney general’s office that she never knew his name was Raul until she learned it in a session when the defense team placed her under hypnosis.⁶⁴) During the often rambling tape, Saltman sometimes asks leading questions and puts words in Grabow’s mouth. At one point, when she stumbles with an answer, he says, “It doesn’t matter if you get it wrong, we can go back.” At several points, the tape is stopped and then restarted. Grabow appears to be medicated, often having trouble understanding straightforward questions, laughing at inappropriate times, and occasionally wandering away from the conversation.

She tells a remarkably different story to Saltman from the one presented to the public in William Pepper’s Orders to Kill. On the tape, Grabow’s most explosive disclosures are not about the King assassination, but rather about Raul and the Kennedy assassination. According to Grabow, she had seen Jack Ruby in Houston four or five times during 1962 and 1963 (even though there is no evidence that Ruby was ever in Houston), and he used to meet there with Raul. Two to three weeks before JFK arrived in Texas, Ruby again visited Raul in Houston. “They talked, ‘He’s coming to town,’” Grabow says. “He [Ruby] brought some uniforms, a light blue, and a tan, and a dark uniform, and hat all in paper bag, and they were talking about stuff like Mr. Lee and stuff. I wasn’t paying too much attention.”

On November 21, Grabow says she went to Houston’s airport to see President Kennedy arrive. As she pulled up along the road with her husband, Roy, she saw other cars parked there. One was in a ditch, and she saw a man standing on its hood with what appeared to be a rifle. Then she nudged Roy to look at him. “He [Roy] said it was probably Secret Service,” said Grabow. “And I went to the car and got my glasses and put them on. He knew I was watching him. No doubt, it was Raul, and it was a gun in his hand. A big rifle with a telescopic site. When Raul saw me and Roy he acted real mad and he jumped down off the hood of the car and threw the gun in the backseat and started racing up and down the road because he really didn’t know which direction the president was going to go.”

The next day, when she heard that JFK had been killed in Dallas, “I just knew it was Raul,” says Grabow. “Raul told me he was in Dallas on that day when JFK was killed. He told me later. He said he was there with Mr. Lee. He was upstairs with Oswald. He was shooting the gun, not Oswald.”

Of course, the real Raul was working in his car factory during all of 1962 and 1963, and not on vacation at the times Grabow said she saw him in Texas.

At other points in her astonishing story, she claims that Ruby molested her once in a car, and that he was involved in “Lolita” films and books with Raul and Jack Valenti, the current head of the Motion Picture Association of America. “He [Raul] said he wanted to make a million dollars with Jack Valenti,” she said. Jack Ruby actually produced the books, according to her, and she was even photographed, nude, when she was only fourteen. Also, “in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I used to take Raul and drop him off at the Alabama Theater.” There, before the theater opened to the public, Raul would meet with associates of Carlos Marcello and Jack Valenti.

As for the King assassination, she gives different versions throughout the tape. She repeats the story that Pepper relates in his book—that Raul stomped on a keychain with King’s picture—but adds the words “I killed this black so and so, do I have to kill him again” only on her third rendition. Also, Grabow says that Raul admitted to her that he was at the scene of the King murder and “he tripped over some mimosa tree, and somehow leaned on it or tripped over it, and he said no one could have missed all the stuff he knocked off that tree.” There was no mimosa tree in the area of the Lorraine Motel where King was killed.65 When she repeated the story of the tree for the third time, Saltman asked her, “He told you he tripped over the tree after he shot Dr. King?” She had never mentioned Raul shooting King. But after Saltman feeds her the question, she softly replies, “I guess that is how it was.”

Sometimes, Grabow says she saw Raul the week after the King assassination. At other times, she says she did not see him for several years. She describes in detail her supposed affair with lawyer Percy Foreman, and the fact that he knew Raul and told her to leave Houston because her life was in danger.* As to the possibility that someone tried to kill Grabow by sabotaging her tire, even Saltman told the author, “That is the one area I am a little skeptical about.”⁶⁶ Pepper, in his published account, says she and Roy moved from Houston because they were fearful of being killed for what they knew about the assassination. What he does not disclose is that Grabow admits on the tape that after a few years they moved back to Houston.

Armed with this information about Grabow, the author interviewed investigators Herman and Billings. They showed no surprise and readily admitted that that was her story and they believed it. “There’s even more,” says Herman. “When we put her under hypnosis she gave a new thing out, that Amaro and Raul had a fifty-five-gallon drum in the room, and she heard a noise of someone inside the drum. Then they both shot it full of bullets. Then the noise stopped, and the two dumped the drum into the river port.”67 Also, according to both investigators, Grabow swears that her oldest daughter is Jack Ruby’s child.⁶⁸

“We have thought of secretly clipping the hair from some of Ruby’s relatives,” admits Billings. “Then we could prove that her child is Ruby’s and that would tie everything together.”⁶⁹ “We found a firm, Valenti and Mirabal, in Orange County, California,” whispers Herman, as though he is imparting highly classified information. “It was an import-export business, and after John [Billings] started to make inquiries, they changed their name. Some coincidence, huh? Jack Valenti is key here. Kiddie porn. What do you think now of the fellow who tells Americans what they should see in movies?”*⁷⁰

“We are almost sure that the person taken in a picture with Oswald in New Orleans is really Raul,” says Billings. The photo is actually of a man that Oswald picked from an unemployment office to help him distribute leaflets on a street corner in 1963.^†

By October 1997, Billings had taken Grabow to meet a number of Kennedy assassination buffs in Dallas. Once they heard her story, some of them became convinced that they had seen Raul at Jack Ruby’s club in Dallas. Billings and Herman had latched on to a new theory that Jack Ruby might even be alive, part of the witness protection program.⁷¹

When I asked Ray’s investigators why all the information about the Kennedy assassination and Raul had not been published, Billings had a quick answer. “I was the one who called Pepper when we heard what Glenda said. I told him, ‘I have good news and bad news for you. We have found Raoul. That’s the good news.’

“‘What’s the bad news?’ asked Pepper.

“‘We can tie him into the Kennedy assassination a lot better than the Martin Luther King assassination.’

“‘Oh, no!’ Pepper yelled. ‘We can’t say that! That would ruin everything.’”72

In Orders to Kill, Pepper omitted all of Grabow’s claims about Raul killing JFK, Jack Valenti being in the kiddie porn business, and Ruby having had an affair with her.

But what about the other witnesses who identified the early 1960s photo of Raul in a picture lineup? Her brother, it turns out, was only six when he remembers seeing Raul. Saltman was not troubled by that. “Granted he was only six,” Saltman says, “but his memory still seems good. I do not believe it was a setup with his sister.”⁷³ April Ferguson, who supposedly picked out the photo on Kenny Herman’s kitchen table and remembered that Select Committee investigators had shown it to her, backed off when contacted by the author. “I have no idea, I can’t tell you anything one way or the other,” she says. “I personally don’t even remember ever talking to anyone for the Select Committee. Why would they want to talk to me? It was so long ago. I think I saw the picture before, but I cannot recall the circumstances.”⁷⁴ Gene Stanley, Randy Rosen-son’s attorney, does not support Saltman’s claim either. “I could not identify any photograph at the trial. No way. If I saw any photograph from the Select Committee investigators, I couldn’t identify it today or identify it in 1993. Hell, it’s fifteen years later.”⁷⁵

Sid Carthew, reached in England, had a most unusual response to the author’s inquiries about his identification of Raul from a photo lineup. “I’m sorry, but I won’t talk to you unless William Pepper gives me permission. And I want you to know that I am not a Nazi [something the author had never heard before Carthew raised it], I do not know Nazis in the United States, and I do not know James Earl Ray. It’s just a shame that an innocent man is being held for killing that King.” He then hung up.⁷⁶ It turns out that Carthew was actually the Yorkshire regional organizer for the fascist British National Party for years, and had been a self-proclaimed “nationalist” since the 1960s.⁷⁷ Carthew’s extreme political affiliation raises the question of whether he might try supporting Martin Luther King’s killer by concocting a story to help set him free.⁷⁸

But, of course, the most important identification is that made by Ray. Finally, after almost three decades, he decisively picked out a photograph of Raul. Now that Raul turns out to be an innocent man completely unconnected to the case, Ray’s long-standing alibi falls apart.

On a brilliantly sunny autumn day in Manhattan, the author met with Raul in his midtown Manhattan lawyer’s office. It had taken months of talking to his counsel, Janet Mattick, to convince her to produce her client. Raul was impeccably dressed in a gray pinstriped suit, set off by a crisp white shirt, dark blue tie, and a cotton pocket handkerchief. His thick hair was neatly cut and combed. He was of average height and trim. His daughter and son-in-law accompanied him. He was clearly uncomfortable at having to discuss the assassination of Martin Luther King. “I am still not sure why I am here, why I am answering all of this,” he said somberly. “They have turned my life upside down. This is the time of my life, my retirement, when I should be enjoying what I have worked thirty years for. And now I cannot go outside my own house without worrying that someone is there with a long-range camera to take my picture. They talk to my friends, people wonder what is happening. And my life savings, a lot went to lawyers to fight this. I didn’t think this could happen in America. When Dexter King said that I had been found, my wife and I were shocked. This will never end for me, I fear. There will always be someone crazy out there who will believe it. Doesn’t the truth matter anymore in this country? Who will give me back my life?”

But to the Ray defense team, there are more important things at stake than Raul’s reputation. “The Oliver Stone film will be the last big thing done on this case,” says Kenny Herman, leaning forward while he lights another cigarette. “And you know how they are in Hollywood. Hell, they aren’t interested in the facts, they just are looking for the best story. I actually don’t know whether Ray did it or not. But I know the whole case has changed as a result of what we have uncovered. We have one hell of a story for ’em out in Hollywood.”79

* This man spelled his name differently (Raul) not the way Ray and his previous lawyers spelled it (Raoul). Ray and Pepper have now changed their spelling of the name to Raul so it matches that of the person described by Grabow. In this chapter, whenever referring to the person described by Grabow, the author also uses the Raul spelling.

^† Court documents that identify the person fingered as Raoul are sealed, because in absence of proof that he is involved in the case, disclosure of his name would certainly injure his reputation. Press reports about him, even in those instances in which journalists have known his name, have not included it.

* Jerry Ray testified before the House Select Committee that “the guy just calls him[self] Raoul.… That wasn’t his real name.”

* The special team, led by Assistant District Attorney General John Campbell, not only had the Jowers and Raul stories to track down. Other “leads” continued to pour in after the HBO trial. Among them, one involved a Raoul who supposedly lived in Mississippi, another was about a Raoul in Pennsylvania, and there was even an intricate tale of a man who claimed to be oilman Bunker Hunt’s accountant. He said he could prove Hunt had paid for the King assassination. None of the new leads panned out when investigated.

* Of course, conspiracy buffs such as Pepper try to tie the fact that the New York Raul once worked in a munitions factory with the fact that Ray claimed his Raoul had asked him to buy a rifle for a gun-smuggling operation in Memphis. Also, when Raul applied for his work at the American automaker, he listed his former munitions job as “mechanic’s assistant.” He told the author he did so because he thought having a mechanics background would be helpful at the assembly line factory to which he had applied. However, to Saltman, it means that Raul “was shipping arms illegally from the arms factory he worked in—he was in a department shipping weapons, and was known to be shipping privately guns out.”

* Billings is an avid conspiracy buff who says that in his business as a private investigator “there is no such thing as coincidence.” He talked to the author about far-fetched plots. Among them, he thinks the prison recently tried to give Ray a diet that would kill him. Billings was even suspicious of my wife and me, reluctant to talk to us because of my 1993 book, Case Closed, in which I concluded Oswald acted alone in killing JFK. As for Billings, the day we met at his home, he had just received a telephone call informing him that he could not visit Ray the next day since Billings had a charge pending against him for sneaking contraband (a knife) to a prisoner. “I find it really suspicious,” Billings told us, “that you walk through my door at the very moment I get a call that says I cannot see James tomorrow. Something is not right about that. It just can’t be a coincidence.”

^† Saltman and Herman both told the author that they had questioned distributors in Raul’s new business and that no one knew him, something they found suspicious. In fact, the other importers did know Raul. When they were contacted by the investigators and asked a series of detailed questions, they proclaimed ignorance, and then called Raul directly to tell him about the unusual inquiries.

* There has been much suspicion over the fact that such a prominent firm represents Raul, who evidently could not afford their services. However, few know about the firm’s pro bono decision.

* 60 Minutes was still interested in the Raul story as late as January 1998. Mike Chrisman, who worked with the CBS team at the time of their original interest, said that producer Phil Sheffler still called on a “regular basis” to check on the status of the research. “If we can put a couple of more things together,” says Chrisman, “they are ready to run a program.”

* It appears that Grabow did at least know Foreman. She still has an autographed sketch of him. As to whether they had a sexual affair as she claims, there is no way to confirm or dispose of the allegation.

* When the author spoke to Jack Valenti, he was flabbergasted to hear about the accusations. “I don’t even know what to say,” he replied. “How can you answer something that is just so crazy? How do these people invent these things? It’s just pure fantasy, completely and utterly false. It’s either malicious or the product of someone who is disturbed.” It was impossible for Grabow to have seen Valenti in Houston during most of the time she claimed, since he was living and working in Washington, D.C., in a high-profile job in the Johnson administration.

^† Billings, who seems the more rabid conspiracy devotee of the two investigators, told the author that he feared he was so close to the truth in the King assassination that the government might kill him. “That’s why I have just rewritten my will, so that if I am killed, my vital organs go to James Earl Ray. That way, Ray could get the new liver he needs [because of his terminal cirrhosis]. It is also my life insurance policy to make sure the FBI doesn’t do away with me.”