Ray’s Last Dance
In any other case, after years of legal wrangling and maneuvering, the courts would have finally closed the door to Ray’s antics to free himself. But somehow, in the matter of the State of Tennessee v. James Earl Ray, there always seems to be another proceeding under way before a new judge. Besides Pepper and his investigators, Herman and Billings, the Ray defense team for the past few years has also included a colorful Memphis lawyer, Wayne Chastain, who is a former journalist. With his shock of white hair and seersucker suits heavily stained with ink spots, he is a familiar sight shuffling around the criminal courthouse. Chastain has believed in a conspiracy in the case since the days when he covered it for the now defunct Memphis Press-Scimitar. Even prosecutors do not doubt his motivation, and the word used to describe him invariably is decent. When Chastain became sick in January 1997, Jack McNeil, a former local councilman, filled in for him. McNeil, in sharp contrast, is abrasive and a rabid conspiracy buff who can make even Oliver Stone seem staid.*
While Ray’s defense team was an eccentric assortment of courtroom talent, few expected it to successfully revive Ray’s legal battle nearly three decades after the murder. But that is exactly what they accomplished in early 1997, due largely to a sympathetic judge, Joe Brown, who took charge of the case. He is the first black judge ever to have control of James Earl Ray’s fate, and he waged a complex procedural battle in Memphis’s highly political criminal courts system to have the Ray case assigned to him, and then keep it.*
Brown is one of the most outspoken judges on any U.S. bench, ABC’s Ted Koppel, in a Nightline profile, said he is “foul-mouthed, [has] a lousy temper, and carries a gun—Joe Brown is a man on a mission.”1 A transplanted Californian, Brown relishes shaking up the Memphis establishment. He talks about running for mayor, while at the same time complaining bitterly about how the city’s “secret powers” have conspired to ruin his career.2 Brown dresses in an updated version of 1970s funk, even wearing self-designed judicial robes, one purple, another adorned with an African motif. He often boasts of his own intelligence: “Very few people on this planet have an IQ like me,” he says. “I dumb things down a lot so people can understand.”3 And Brown has little patience for those who are not quick enough to keep up with his rapid delivery. In the fall of 1997, the flamboyant Brown developed his own syndicated legal show on television.
Pepper wisely decided to focus on a single issue before Brown—that the fatal .30-06 round that killed King did not come from the rifle bought by Ray. Early tests by the FBI in 1968 had proven inconclusive, since the gun in question is a model that does not leave distinctive ballistics markings on each cartridge fired. Instead, each bullet has different markings, and since there is no consistency, it is impossible to match any of the bullets ever fired from the gun. Now, Pepper suggested newer technology might settle the issue. There was virtually no risk in Pepper making the request. If, of course, tests eliminated the rifle as the murder weapon, Ray would likely be on his way to a new trial. If, as expected, the tests were inconclusive, then Ray was no worse off than he was before. And even if the tests matched the death slug to Ray’s rifle, it did not ruin the defense that Ray had passed the murder weapon to Raoul the night before the murder. The rifle/ballistics issue was also the perfect one to present to Judge Brown, an avid gun enthusiast who considers himself an expert marksman.*
What infuriated the prosecution about Brown was that he often seemed more of an advocate than a neutral observer. Brown has made no excuse for the apparent courtroom advocacy, believing, he said, that he was given the Ray case to ensure the truth was reached. In a July 1997 hearing concerning the test-firing of the rifle, Brown responded to an objection to one of his rulings by saying, “Dr. King is dead. In his grave. A national hero. A world hero. A national holiday named after him. And I’m not going to allow the vicissitudes of somebody’s artful cross-examination to keep me, as the trier of fact, from getting to the bottom of this.”
“No matter what happens in these motions by Ray,” Brown told the author, “eventually I have to decide if enough evidence has been presented to grant him a new trial. No matter what happens with the test results on the rifle, that is only one factor to consider. I have to write findings of fact on this case, and I’ve been thinking about them for a long time. That is what makes everybody so nervous around here.” He broke into a broad smile. “I get to control the fucking historical record.”4
At court hearings, prosecutors seethed as Brown entertained the King family like celebrities in his chambers. “It is unlike anything I have ever seen in a courtroom,” recalls John Campbell, the assistant district attorney general who has led the prosecution’s effort on all the motions. “It is as though I am not just fighting the defense, but also the judge. Any other judge would have closed Ray and Pepper down by now. But Brown has been a lifesaver to them.”5
Brown makes no effort to hide his feelings about the case, most unusual for a presiding judge. He told the author that, as far as he is concerned, Ray “was used in the conspiracy, to throw them off the track. That was his role. I’m sure of it. Somebody told him, ‘You have one last task to do for your country.’ ‘We have Commies here,’ they told him. Ray was a bigot. And he expected to be pardoned for doing his patriotic duty.”6
One of the reasons Brown came to believe there was a wide-ranging conspiracy in the King case resulted from a visit to the assassination scene before the case was even assigned to him. “I know enough about guns to realize that the shot that killed King came from more than three hundred yards away [Ray was less than seventy yards away],” he told the author. “It could have been from a higher location, by a professional shooter. I have shot deer and bears with a .30-06 from a hundred yards, and the bullet either goes through them or disintegrates. But in this case, we have a bullet in bad shape. That will tell you right there that it was fired from much farther than the state says. Hell, that gun [Ray’s rifle] should be taken and shot from a hundred yards to see what it shoots like. No one has asked me for that test. Pepper doesn’t even know what to ask for.”7
The test that Pepper did ask for, in February 1997, was for the Ray rifle to be test-fired and those new bullets compared to the death slug under a high-powered scanning electron microscope, a device that did not exist for the FBI in 1968 or the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978. In March, Pepper added to the public pressure for such a test when he successfully convinced Dexter King to meet James Earl Ray in prison, television cameras rolling. King did so, endorsing Ray’s innocence, and put the case back into the national headlines. At the same time that Pepper was pushing the ballistics issue with Brown, he made the rounds on the media circuit with Dexter King. Even Jerry Ray was trotted out for several shows on Black Entertainment Television and MSNBC. He always proclaimed his brother’s innocence and sounded the alarm that if the process did not move along quickly, James would soon be dead from cirrhosis of the liver. “We’re both victims,” Dexter told Jerry. “I lost a father, and you lost a brother.”8 In April, Pepper made a public plea for help in arranging a liver transplant for Ray. By early May, Brown had conducted hearings and finally ordered a new round of ballistics tests, as requested by Pepper.
Tennessee lawyer Andrew Hall and Mark Lane (who temporarily returned to the case) started a clemency appeal later in the summer.
The May tests on the rifle were inconclusive, as had been the FBI’s original testing. But Judge Brown sealed the results, and entertained motions by Pepper to retest the gun, using a cleaning process that Pepper contended would lead to a conclusive result, and the prosecution argued would damage the rifle barrel and render any test results worthless.
Developments in the case, which were moving along quickly in the spring and summer, suddenly seemed stalled on all fronts. The Department of Corrections refused to let Ray travel out of the state to be examined at a Pittsburgh medical facility that might consider giving him a liver transplant—the two facilities in Tennessee that specialize in such transplants had already rejected him due to his age and the poor aftercare he would get in prison.
In November 1997, Ray fired Jack McNeil, the Memphis counsel who had increasingly tried to dominate the defense’s strategy. (Even without Pepper’s approval, McNeil worked unsuccessfully to bring the information about Loyd Jowers before the local grand jury.) Mike Roberts, a local law professor who temporarily joined the Ray defense team, lasted only a few weeks before Ray dismissed him. Mark Lane left the case again after the clemency appeal failed. By year’s close, few were still standing with Ray. There were, of course, William Pepper, Kenny Herman, John Billings, and, in the most surreal aspect, the King family.
As 1998 began, the request for retesting the rifle was still pending. Meanwhile, the prosecution had made its own motion for the judge to recuse himself because of his evident bias. On January 16, 1998, Brown refused to remove himself.
“We are laying low,” Pepper told one reporter soon afterward. “The thirtieth anniversary of the assassination is coming up next spring. James will have his seventieth birthday right before that. We have solved the case. There is new evidence and witnesses. The truth will emerge by then.”
The truth, elusive in many legal cases, has certainly suffered in thirty years of conjecture and confabulation in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Raoul. Shooters in the shrubbery. Two Mustangs. As time passes, new witnesses, increasing speculation, and blurred memories from those involved, further obfuscate the real history of April 4, 1968. Whether James Earl Ray ended up in the bathroom window of Bessie Brewer’s rooming house as a tool of conspirators who promised him money, or for his own warped motivation fueled by racism and ego, he knows precisely what happened on the day Martin Luther King was killed.
Ray knew that King was at the Lorraine from either television or radio news on the night of April 3 or the front-page photograph in The Commercial Appeal on the morning of April 4. Since he did not know when he might get a shot at King, he ideally needed a place where he could unobtrusively stay, possibly for a few days. King was scheduled to be in Memphis for at least two days. As with many successful assassinations, luck played some role. For Ray, it was fortunate that King’s favorite Memphis motel, the black-run Lorraine, was located on the edge of a seedy area frequented by transients and drunks. The witnesses to the day’s events would be of poor quality.
A drive past the front of the Lorraine, along Mulberry Street, immediately suggested where Ray might try to set up the sniper’s nest. King’s room, 306, which had been mentioned in the local press coverage, was clearly visible on the second floor, overlooking the motel’s parking lot and swimming pool, toward the street. On the other side of Mulberry was an eight-foot-high retaining wall. Eighty feet up a slight incline from that wall were several buildings that fronted along South Main Street, the next street over from Mulberry. The rear of some of those buildings had windows that faced the Lorraine.
The question that immediately confronted Ray was whether he could get access to any of those buildings. The one on the far right corner from the motel had three windows, one of which had an unobstructed view of King’s room. That, however, turned out to be a furniture company. The next two buildings, in the middle of the block, were connected by a common stairway, and they comprised the two wings of a converted rooming house. The building that made up the left wing had its rear windows boarded over from the inside, but the one on the right had a promising view, with three windows overlooking the Lorraine. One of the windows, on the far right, was a half window, typically indicating a bathroom.
There was no other building for Ray to choose along that street. To the left of the rooming house was an empty lot that some people used for parking. The final building opposite the Lorraine, on the far left of the lot, was Fire Station No. 2.
Ray knew that in order to monitor the Lorraine, and therefore see when King was a clear target, he needed to rent a room that was in the wing without the boarded windows, as close as possible to the rear.
When he arrived at the rooming house between 3:00 and 3:30 P.M., he did not take any of his belongings in with him. It was possible that the only vacancy might not afford him the view he needed. When Bessie Brewer showed him the first room, number 8, it was twenty feet from her own office and was located in the boarded-up wing. He did not even step inside before rejecting it.9
Although he knew he wanted to be in the other wing, he might not have wanted to make a specific request for that location, something that would have been unusual and possibly memorable in such a cheap rooming house. He told Brewer that he did not need a stove and refrigerator (which were visible when the door was opened to the room he had rejected) and asked instead for a sleeping room.
Room 5B, where she next took him, was in the correct wing. It had a single window that faced directly onto the airway that separated the two wings of the rooming house. Ray did not walk into the room, but took it without any hesitation.*
Unsure at the time he rented the room whether his own window would afford a clear shot, he asked Mrs. Brewer where the communal bathroom was located. While any assassin would prefer to set up a sniper’s nest in a private room, as opposed to a shared rest room, he had to decide which afforded the best shot. Luckily for Ray, the bathroom was at the end of the hallway, right where he had spotted the half window when he had earlier canvassed the area. That meant it had one of the best views back to the Lorraine (the other two rear windows were in Room 6B, occupied by Charlie Stephens and Grace Walden).
While Brewer and Ray were standing in the hallway, Stephens came out of his room. Ray kept his head down, glancing away from Stephens, who did not get a very good look at him.
After paying for a week’s rent, Ray finally went inside his room. He must have been disappointed when he discovered that in order to get a clear view of the Lorraine and King’s room, he had to put his head slightly outside the window. That resolved any second thought about choosing between the bathroom and his room as the snipers nest. A quick trip to the bathroom, on the other hand, showed what an ideal location it was. Under the window was an old cast-iron tub. It was pushed against the wall, so that Ray could stand inside with his feet solidly placed on the broad bottom, lean against the wall for support, and have an unobstructed view across to the Lorraine. A small wire-mesh screen was at the bottom of the window.
Now he decided to take his car and drive until he found a shop that sold binoculars. While two hundred feet might be a good distance for a rifle shot made with a seven-power scope, it was too far for the unaided eye to clearly monitor the activity and easily recognize the individuals at the motel. Although he could have used the Redfield scope mounted on his Remington, it would have exposed him to view, since he would have had to stick the tip of the barrel out the window to get a clear view. It also would not have afforded him the same wide-ranging view as binoculars.
According to witnesses, Ray left about 4:00 P.M. to find the binoculars. It is very unlikely that he had yet brought anything into his room, as it had no doorknob and could only be locked from the outside with a padlock. He had not even asked Mrs. Brewer for the padlock. Ray had been around enough flophouses to know that if he left anything of value unattended in an unlocked room, it would likely not be there when he returned.
The witnesses at York Arms Company, where Ray bought the binoculars, confirm that he arrived about 4:00 P.M. or a little later.10 The store was located just a few blocks from the rooming house. After rejecting two pairs of binoculars that were too expensive, Ray paid $41.55 for a pair of Bushnells. Those binoculars not only turned out to be ones Ray could afford, but they were seven-power, the same magnification as his Redfield scope. That meant Ray could get an accurate idea of how people would appear when viewed through the scope (it was set to its maximum seven-power range when found after the murder).
According to Frances Thompson, a worker at a company across the street from the rooming house, the Mustang returned about 4:30.11 Ray’s excursion for the binoculars had taken half an hour. But he had lost his parking space directly in front of Jim’s Grill. He was now forced to park some sixty feet away, just beyond the Canipe Amusement Company. That was at the edge of an empty lot that separated the rooming house from the fire station. Losing the closer space must have bothered him. The first space afforded him a greater chance of getting the rifle into the rooming house without being spotted, and also a shorter distance to run when escaping from the rooming house to his car.
He did not immediately get out of the Mustang once he returned. It was critical that he pick the right moment to try and get the rifle into the rooming house. He did not want to be identified as the man seen carrying a long box into the place from which Martin Luther King was later shot. Moreover, some female workers at Seabrook Wallpaper Company across the street had finished a shift at 4:30. They were standing inside the showroom window, waiting for their husbands to pick them up. It is possible Ray saw them. They certainly noticed him. Elizabeth Copeland, a customer service representative, remembered that a man sat in the Mustang as though he were waiting for someone or something.12 When Peggy Hurley, another worker, left work at 4:45 P.M., the same man was still sitting behind the steering wheel of the Mustang.13 None of the women remembered him getting out of the car, which would indicate he waited, either by luck or by design, until the last of them had been picked up. What is known is that a few minutes past 5:00 P.M., the Mustang was empty.14 In that fifteen-minute window between Peggy Hurley seeing him in the car and the two men seeing the Mustang empty as they entered Jim’s Grill, Ray had found the right time to dash inside the rooming house.
He had wrapped an old green blanket around the rifle, which was in a cardboard box. He also carried a blue zippered bag. What Ray took upstairs to his room says a lot about his plans for the assassination.
In addition to the rifle, Ray had a box of cartridges; the first section only of that day’s Memphis newspaper; the just-purchased binoculars; a box of Band-Aids; a bottle of aftershave; duckbill pliers and a tack hammer; two maps; a partial roll of toilet paper; a Gillette travel kit filled with a razor, shaving cream, deodorant, hair cream, and a razor blade in a dispenser; a small towel; a white handkerchief; a toothbrush and a tube of Colgate toothpaste; a seven-ounce can of Right Guard deodorant; a pair of black socks; a bottle of Bufferin; a tube of Brylcreem hair gel; three small bars of soap (Dial, Cashmere Bouquet, and Cameo); a tube of Head & Shoulders shampoo; a plastic bottle of Mennen Afta shave lotion; an elastic belt; a hairbrush; a can of Kiwi brown shoe polish; a can of Palmolive Rapid-Shave cream; some loose buttons and bobby pins; a brown paper bag with two cans of unopened Schlitz beer and a plastic six-pack carrier; a toothpick; a key; a metal ring; two coat hangers; and a portable radio.*
The soap, toilet paper, and hangers are evidence of someone accustomed to staying at flophouses, where hotel basics are never provided. But the wide range of toiletries indicates that Ray intended to stay there, at the very least overnight. It was 5:00 P.M. when he finally settled into his room. He had no idea if King was even at the Lorraine at that moment. Once nightfall came—in ninety minutes—he might not be able to get off a decent shot.
Defenders of Ray suggest that he might have taken all of those items into his room not because he intended to stay, but because he feared leaving them in the Mustang in a dicey area. However, Ray left several hundred dollars’ worth of camera equipment in the Mustang, so he was clearly not concerned about having things stolen from the car.
Ray set about to rearrange Room 5B so he could easily monitor the Lorraine. He pushed away a wooden dresser that rested under the window ledge, and instead replaced it with a straight-back chair. Sitting in that chair, with the curtains pushed to one side and the window open three-quarters, he could lean slightly and watch the motel. He tuned his radio to a local station that would have provided news updates about King and his entourage, one of the biggest stories in Memphis.
Ray went into the bathroom a couple of times, without the gun, probably to get used to it as a sniper’s nest. He might even have taken his binoculars with him, to see what a seven-power magnification looked like from that perch. However, it is unlikely that Ray was in there as much as his neighbors Willie Anschutz and Charlie Stephens later estimated to the police. Staying in the bathroom for an extended time would have unnecessarily called attention to him. And Ray would certainly not have remained there with the rifle—that would have been too much a risk—and he could just as easily monitor the motel from his own room. Since he might have to remain at the rooming house for a day or two, it is unlikely that he started off his stay locked in the bathroom.
King, in fact, had been at the Lorraine all day. Twice that late afternoon he had appeared, both times walking between his room and his brother’s downstairs room, number 201. That required King to walk about ten feet along the balcony that ran along the second floor, then take an inside staircase to the first floor before proceeding about twenty feet along the edge of the parking lot to reach Room 201. When walking between both his room and the stairwell, and his brother’s room and the stairwell, King was exposed to Ray. Even if Ray was watching at those times, King was visible only briefly and he was moving all the time. That ten- to twenty-second exposure would have afforded Ray little chance for a shot if he was just monitoring the motel from his room. Anyway, Ray had just settled into the rooming house. He was in no rush.
Shortly before six, with half an hour before darkness, King again emerged from his room and moved to the edge of the balcony. There he leaned with his elbows against the railing, and started talking to people gathered in the lower courtyard. King’s friends and aides later differed in their estimates of how long he was on that balcony before the shot was fired. One of the shortest estimates was from the Reverend Billy Kyles, who thought King was there about six minutes, and the longest was from SCLC attorney Chauncey Eskridge, who estimated fifteen minutes.15
The considerable time that transpired from when King came onto the balcony until he was shot is the best evidence that Ray did not expect to get such an early opportunity. If Ray was sitting in the chair monitoring the motel, he would have seen King exit his room and stand at the edge of the balcony. He might have expected him to start walking at any second toward the stairwell, as he had earlier when going to his brother’s room. Instead, King remained fixed on the balcony. Dusk was just starting to darken the sky.* And King was still there, not apparently in any rush to leave. Ray had to make a fast decision. Should he wait until he had figured out a schedule for King coming and going from the motel over the next couple of days, carefully choosing his time and then carrying out the assassination, or should he try to shoot him now? He realized that every trip he took to the bathroom with the gun increased his chance of detection. By the time he got there and set up, King might have left the balcony, and then he would have to risk bringing the gun back to his room. And what about his toiletries, his maps, the rest of his goods? King was still standing there. He was not walking from side to side. It was a dead-on shot. Ray could not hesitate any longer.
He grabbed for the box of Band-Aid sheer strips. He probably intended, as he did on other crimes, to use them over his fingertips to ensure he did not leave behind any prints. But he did not have the time.* Instead, he would have to wipe down anything he touched. He had not been in the room long enough to leave many prints, and when moving the furniture, he had likely used his handkerchief and towel so nothing was left behind.
Ray quickly threw almost all his goods into the zippered bag. In his rush, some items, such as the newspaper, two maps, the pliers, and toilet paper, fell into the blanket. He grabbed the zippered bag, the blanket, and boxed rifle, and quickly moved down the hallway into the bathroom. He left behind only the strap to the binocular case and the elastic belt he had brought up from the Mustang. Now in the bathroom, he locked the door behind him and glanced outside the window. King was still there. He took the rifle out of the box. In the cartridge box, probably using his handkerchief as a holder, he loaded a single bullet into the chamber. Now, rushing to get a shot off while King was an easy target, he did not have time to load the clip with extra bullets, or at least, not enough time to load it while ensuring his prints stayed off each one. One shot would have to do.
It must have been almost 6:00 P.M. when Ray finally stepped into the tub. He had to steady himself against the left wall as he used the tip of the gun barrel to push out the small wire-mesh screen at the bottom of the window. The police later found the screen in the backyard behind the rooming house, under the bathroom window. Ray was not the type to be burdened with a conscience that would have given him last moments of self-doubt, but a first murder, even for someone amoral like him, must have given him a tremendous rush of adrenaline. At the other end of the telescopic site was one of the country’s key civil rights leaders.
Ray’s excitement at this moment is best evidenced by the window itself. After knocking out the wire screen, he pushed the window up and shoved it so hard that it jammed. Now he only had a five-inch gap through which to shoot. He glanced outside again. Two hundred feet away he had a perfect view of King, still leaning slightly over the railing. He put the gun through the window’s opening, and for the first time watched as King’s head filled the scope’s lens. With seven-power magnification, King seemed less than thirty feet away. Ray’s mind might have raced back to the advice he had picked up in the last week at several gun stores. The .30-06 would drop very little at this range. There was a slight crosswind (7 miles per hour), but he didn’t have to compensate. During his practice rounds near Corinth, Mississippi, the gun had fired with a solid but not jarring kick. How easy it must have seemed then to hit fixed targets. Ray placed the crosshairs right in the middle of King’s head, steadied himself as much as possible, and pulled the trigger.16
Ray must have seen King crash onto the balcony. He knew he had hit King, but just did not know how successful a shot it was. He jumped from the tub, quickly wiped the rifle to clean it of prints, and then threw it into the box. He grabbed his small bag and the blanket and wrapped the gun in the middle so it formed a single, long bundle. With his head down, he walked quickly out of the bathroom. He moved down the hallway at a fast pace, not a run. Two men came out of adjoining rooms. One said, “That sounded like a shot.” Ray could not contain himself. “It was,” he muttered as he passed, never once looking up.
There were two staircases Ray could have used to exit. It is likely he used the one between the two buildings, because in that way he avoided having to pass by rooms in the other wing, where still more tenants may have spilled into the hallway because of the noise.
Once outside, he turned left to walk to his Mustang. In less than fifty feet he could get the bundle of evidence into his car and safely away from the scene of the murder. No sooner had he started to walk briskly along the front of the rooming house, however, than he suddenly noticed the rear of two police cars. They were parked at the end of the block, in the driveway of the fire station, about 170 feet away from him, near Butler Avenue. (Ten minutes before the assassination, TACT 10 squad, consisting of three police cars with eleven men, had pulled up to the fire station for a rest break.) Ray had to make an instantaneous decision. Were policemen sitting in the cars? He could not see the inside of either of them, but by the time he got to the Mustang, he would be in plain view of whoever was there. Were there police already on the street and he hadn’t yet seen them? If caught with the gun, he was finished. He dropped it, almost instinctively, against a storefront at 424 South Main Street, only a few doors from where he had exited the rooming house. The windows of the store, Canipe’s, were dark. It seemed closed. The doorway in which he tossed the bundle was recessed from the street. Maybe no one would find it for a while.*
In thirty seconds he was inside the Mustang and had flipped on the ignition and squealed away from the curb. The first policemen who arrived on the scene, about two to three minutes after the shooting, did not see Ray or the Mustang. He had managed to leave the scene literally seconds ahead of their arrival.
James Earl Ray was no longer a two-bit punk from the backwaters of Missouri. He had gambled on the big time and pulled it off. He pointed his car in the direction of Atlanta and drove straight into the history books.
Back in a ramshackle house in Missouri, Speedy talked to a reporter. He seemed unimpressed by all the publicity surrounding his now infamous son. Sure Jimmy might have killed King. He was always the smartest child. He knew that “niggers are behind all these troubles.” He was the one who would have understood that King was going to be president if somebody did not stop him.
The more they talked about James, the more contemplative Speedy became. He seemed to stare almost at the horizon instead of the reporter. He shook his head, more to himself than to anyone else. Maybe Jimmy was just too ambitious for his own good, wanted to get too far away from his roots, become somebody he was not. “People try to get too much out of life,” Speedy said, slowly pronouncing each word as though he were repeating the thought as it entered his head. “Sometimes I think Jimmy outsmarted himself. I can’t figure out why Jimmy tried to compete with all them bigshots. Life don’t amount to a shit anyway. Jimmy had too much nerve for his own good. He tried to go too far too fast.”17
* McNeil refused to meet with me because of my book Case Closed, about the JFK murder. “Do you work for the CIA?” he asked over the telephone. Later, he went on to explain how Jack Ruby had been injected with cancer cells by the CIA, and how his cocounsel, Chastain, had also been injected with cancer. “I move around,” he said. “I don’t sleep in the same place all the time. I won’t make it easy for them to find me.”
* In September 1997, another Criminal Court judge, John Colton, appointed a special master to investigate Judge Brown’s handling of the case, and the special master determined that Brown had left the files in “shambles.” Judge Colton tried to move the case back to his own Division 3. Brown fought Colton in a nasty public dispute, and the Court of Appeals made both judges declare a truce. The case stayed with Brown.
* In the court hearings over the testing issue, Brown frequently asked more questions of the experts than did either the defense or prosecution. In his chambers, he usually keeps several rifles, with large telescopic sights, leaning against the wall, and will gladly show visitors the guns and their special attributes. When he met the author, he told in hushed tones a bizarre story about semiautomatic weapons he claimed had been stolen from his house, with no sign of forced entry or a break-in. “Somebody powerful is trying to set me up,” he said.
* Some charge that there was only one room available for rent on the necessary side, raising the possibility that a conspiracy arranged for the room to be left empty. In fact, there were six rooms vacant at the rooming house, and three were on the “correct” side for the assassin.
* That radio turned out to have Ray’s Missouri State Penitentiary inmate number etched on the side, but Ray had scratched it out. Some conspiracists argue that Ray would never have left behind, after the assassination, a piece of evidence that so directly tied back to him. However, the author examined the radio, and the identification number is barely noticeable, almost requiring a magnifying glass to see. Ray effectively obliterated it by scratching over it. Moreover, that identification number, even if made out, could have referred to anything, including the owner’s own filing system. There was no indicator it referred to a system maintained at the Missouri State Penitentiary. The radio and its number did not help the FBI identify Ray as the shooter. The FBI, in its original examination, did not even see the etched number. Only after the FBI had identified Ray from fingerprints, and realized that he had escaped in 1967 from the Missouri State Penitentiary, did they learn that the radio and its number were from there (MURKIN 2634, section 26).
* Ray probably did not know that his Redfield scope had its lenses treated with a chemical formula that not only prevented the fogging, distortion, and color halos that affected cheaper scopes, but also enhanced objects seen through the scope at dusk, when lighting conditions are just slightly reduced.
* When the police found the Band-Aids, it was a newly purchased box, containing twenty-one regular adhesive bandages and ten “junior” bandages, the same number advertised on the front of the container.
* “If he had not dropped the bundle there,” John Campbell, an assistant district attorney general, told the author, “he might well have gotten away with the crime. It was that close to being a perfect assassination.” Ray had indeed been careful inside the rooming house. None of his prints were in Room 5B or the bathroom. As for the bundle, his prints were found on the rifle, telescopic site, binoculars, newspaper, bottle of aftershave, and one of the beer cans. In an interview with Playboy in 1977, Ray suggested that the FBI “transferred my prints to some objects so they could use that as evidence.” When the Playboy interviewer asked Ray, “To which objects do you think the FBI may have transferred prints?” Ray astonishingly replied, “The beer cans are the only thing I can think of. I believe my prints would have been on the gun. I seldom drink beer. I never buy it. I would have bought whiskey.”