Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups (42 page)

Gary Revel was Special Investigator to the
House Select Committee on Assassinations
investigating the King assassination in 1977. He
immediately
realized that things were
dramatically
amiss:

“OK, it’s like this. Just pretend for a moment that you are an investigator and are asked to help investigate a high profile murder. You agree to take the assignment and begin your investigation. One of the first things you do is meet the convicted murderer. During your first interview you find he is far from being the cunning killer that the police and the press have made him out to be.This is exactly what happened in my attempt to investigate the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. After the interview and a few days of researching legal documents I was shocked to find the case had little merit. Still today very little evidence is available to convict the man if the case went to court, which it didn’t- James Earl Ray was railroaded into a guilty plea.”
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James Earl Ray was a habitual petty criminal. He went to jail for stealing a typewriter in Los Angeles. He tried to rob a taxicab in Chicago and botched it up and again got arrested. He was caught with postal money orders that were stolen, and he did three years in federal prison. Then he was caught robbing a grocery store in St. Louis. He was a small-time crook who was repeatedly caught at small-time crimes.

As Special Investigator Revel observed:

“Is this the kind of man who could spend several months, single handedly, while being sought after as an escaped convict, travel throughout this country and internationally (Canada and Mexico), methodically, slowly and surely track down the high profile Nobel Peace Prize Winner and hero of the Civil Rights Move-ment, the Reverend and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then when finding him on April 4, 1968, shoot and kill him with one sure and certain pull of the trigger; he would then (again by himself) elude the entire Memphis Police Department (made easier earlier that day by the pullback of 4 tactical police units from the Lorraine Motel area- ordered by their Commander, Memphis Police Department Inspector Sam Evans) and most able Federal Bureau of Investigation directed by the infallible J. Edgar Hoover to escape to Canada and on to Europe.”
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James Earl Ray was an eighth-grade dropout and it was evidenced in his unsuccessful “career” as a petty thief.
That
is one of the main reasons why most open-minded researchers, as well as the head of the FBI’s team on the King murder case, concluded that there had to have been someone like the “Raoul” referred to by the defendant—a conspirator directing the actions of James Earl Ray—because he most certainly was
not
a master criminal and, acting alone, was clearly incapable of the sophisticated use of aliases (five were used), expertly forged passports and the finesse required for international escapes.

For example, Ray used the aliases of actual people living in Montreal, but he was using those aliases
prior
to his traveling there. Four of the five aliases he used during the nine-month period
prior
to the assassination, were the correct identities of real Canadians.
All four
lived in the same area of Toronto. And
three
of the aliases even bore a resemblance to James Earl Ray!
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“Though Ray had used aliases throughout his criminal career, there is no evidence Ray had been to Toronto prior to fleeing there after the King murder, and no explanation for how he came to use these particular names.”
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As FBI Deputy Director William Sullivan, leader of the special FBI unit tracking James Earl Ray concluded:

“Ray was so stupid that I don’t think he could have robbed a five-and-ten-cent store.”
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Therefore, the whole operation was far too complex for a petty criminal like James Earl Ray to have engineered it. That’s why many serious researchers have “interpreted the evidence as a sophisticated operation which brought Ray into an assassination plot and then left him holding the bag at the scene of King’s murder.”
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That was essentially the scenario that the defendant himself detailed when he tried to withdraw his plea of guilty. He told investigators that a controller whom he knew only as “Raoul” had given him his instructions for purchasing and delivering the rifle and had also paid for the purchase of the rifle, the car and other items. Those instructions and cash had to have come from somewhere, that much is clear. Ray claimed that the gun had then been placed there to frame him and, therefore, it was not clear to him until later that he had been duped as part of a larger plot.

As Judge Joe Brown noted, the Defendant explained to the man at the gun shop that he was exchanging the rifle that he had originally purchased because “he was told by others” that the .243 caliber weapon he originally bought was “not a suitable weapon for the purpose.”

•Judge Brown:
“‘Others,’ o-t-h-e-r-s, I’m assuming that means the same to everyone else that it does to me.”
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There were a lot of other noteworthy irregularities about the crime in general and the crime scene in particular—and they are the types of irregularities which create genuine concern that the defendant was set up to take the fall for the crime, just as he claimed:

•There was not one eyewitness who saw the shooting;
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•There was not one eyewitness who claimed that the gunshot came from the bathroom window of the rooming house. And it has never been proven that the rifle shot actually came from there;
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•There were major credibility problems with the sole witness to Ray’s allegedly fleeing the rooming house bathroom from which he is said to have fired the rifle;
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•Another witness, who actually
was
credible, testified that he remembered seeing James Earl Ray seated in his car, which was several blocks away, at the time of the shooting;
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•The rifle doesn’t fit the crime scene—
literally.
The logistics of the bathroom at the rooming house at that time made firing from that bathroom window virtually impossible. It had a wall that prevented a weapon the size of the Remington Model 760 Gamemaster 30.06 caliber rifle from even
fitting
in the space between the window and a wall that was adjacent to it, at the time. And if the rifle had been positioned out the window so that it would actually fit into the small space, then the shooter would not have been able to look through the gunsight of the rifle to make the shot—there wasn’t enough room!
And
that wall was later removed (which is suspicious) when the rooming house became part of the complex now known as the
National Civil Rights Museum.
With that wall there, it must have been pretty blinking obvious that no shooter would use it as their spot from which to take one of the most significant gunshots in history.
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Then
go back and match all of those circumstantial inconsistencies with the brutally clear ballistics, and you’ve got a case that no Prosecutor in his or her right mind would take to trial; unless, of course, they were told that they
had
to by the Powers That Be. Remember, folks—The bullet that was removed from Martin Luther King’s body
did not come from Ray’s rifle.

There were other things that bothered a lot of people. Andrew Young became Mayor of Atlanta, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and a U.S. Congressman; but during the 1960s, he was a close supporter of Reverend King and had been right there at the motel in Memphis with him on the evening of the assassination. In addition to the obvious, several more obscure things
still
trouble Ambassador Young about the shooting.

•No member of any law enforcement agency investigating the shooting— Federal, State or local—
ever
bothered to interview him, even though he had obviously been positioned close to Dr. King at the moment of the shooting.

•In an obvious case of
destruction of a crime scene
, the City of Memphis had a large portion of the area of the shooting cut down by a landscaping crew the morning after the murder—evidence and all.

ANDREW YOUNG:

“One of the disturbing features about that day for us was that when we were pointing, we were pointing over across the street. There was a building there, but there was also a six-to-eight-foot pile of bushes and some people thought that the shot came from the bushes. The FBI said it came from a bathroom window. But when we got up the next morning, those bushes were gone.”
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Also take note of a very important fact that the historical record conveniently ignores, sidesteps, obfuscates and otherwise attempts to obliterate from our collective memory on this case: James Earl Ray
never confessed to the murder
of Martin Luther King. From a legal standpoint, a guilty plea and a confession are two
entirely
different matters. Ray pleaded guilty in a manner that is known legally as taking the
Alford Plea
—based on the case law in
North Carolina
vs.
Alford, 1970,
which essentially states that a defendant can plead guilty if they believe that conviction is imminent, yet still maintain their innocence. So a defendant who believes that they are actually
not
guilty of a crime
still
submits a plea of guilty due to circumstances in which they believe that conviction is certain anyway—which is
exactly
what James Earl Ray’s attorney had been
pounding
into him relentlessly.
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As James Earl Ray explained it to the investigator hired by his own attorney, he had been under the impression that he was only pleading “legally guilty” because he had been involved in the incident, not that he was actually admitting to himself having killed Dr. King. He also clearly believed that there was a conspiracy; in fact, he
knew
there was, because he had been directly involved in it—
he was the guy
that they’d framed.
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•He never asked me either question. I would have answered that I did not shoot Dr. King but that I was unwittingly part of a conspiracy since I was hired to purchase a weapon of the type allegedly used in the killing and did bring it to Memphis.”
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•I signed the plea document but told Foreman I didn’t intend to plead guilty. He went to work trying to persuade me to do so. He said I should cop a plea because the media had convicted me already.”
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The package conveniently left for police at the scene was so incriminating that it was virtually a “calling card” for the incrimination of James Earl Ray. It included:

•A Remington 30.06 rifle with serial number matching the rifle that James Earl Ray had purchased in Birmingham, Alabama;

•Ammunition for the rifle and a pair of surveillance binoculars that had James Earl Ray’s fingerprints;

•A radio, upon which was Ray’s inmate number from the Misssouri State Penitentiary;

•The FBI said they found several fingerprints on the items, including prints on the rifle, that matched James Earl Ray.
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Jesse Ventura and Dick Russell point out the obvious insanity of leaving that information for the police—
and
that he probably was
not
the one who left it:

“Later, Ray claimed that somebody else had left behind the bundle so as to incriminate him. In fact, one witness, Guy Canipe, said the package was actually dropped in the doorway to his store about ten minutes
before
the shot was fired. Makes a little more sense, doesn’t it? Another witness, Olivia Catling, saw a fellow in a checkered shirt running out of the alley beside a building across from the Lorraine soon after the killing, who went screaming off in a green ‘65 Chevy.”
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