Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups (41 page)

Seconds after the shooting, aides of Dr. King are obviously pointing up-and-over (to a position about “two o’clock-high”) which was not even
near
the direction of the official version. Dr. King is laying shot, knees up, being comforted by a 4th aide, who is also looking up at approximately two o’clock-high.

The “A-B” line diagrams the direct angle of Ray’s rooming house, the “official” kill-angle. The “B-C” line diagrams where everyone on the balcony was looking and pointing, a dramatically different location. At the time of the assassination, it was a penthouse that provided the high- ground direct shot down at Martin Luther King, precisely what a professional shooter looks for: Positions are “2 o’clock-high” vs. “12:30-low.”

Now here is what they were pointing at. At the time, prior to the erection of a wall that blocked it from view, at the position of “two o’clock high” was a tower which would have been the perfect “higher ground” selection of a professional shooter:

As a landmark, use the fire extinguisher on the balcony; the A-B line is to the window which was the alleged location of James Earl Ray, but is nowhere near the B-C line of where the witnesses were actually looking and pointing.

Now here are the witnesses pointing again in the real photograph, but with the same angles diagrammed in:

Therefore, something is clearly amiss “officially” folks:

The yellow line diagrams where they are actually pointing: 2 o’clock-high. The red line diagrams where they would have been pointing, 12:30-low, had they thought it came from Ray’s rooming house across the street.

“The evidence in the photo taken just moments after the assassination is unequivocal. The claim that the witnesses are pointing to the rooming house where James Earl Ray was staying is a complete fabrication. The gunfire came from another direction high above the bathroom window.”
³⁴⁷

The photographic evidence is day-one documentation from moments after the gunshot and it is unequivocal. In the newspapers that published that photo, the caption read that the men were pointing at the rooming house from where Ray allegedly fired. That was a bald-faced lie. That is
not
where they are pointing.

If you read the articles
“Martin Luther King: The Fatal Shot Came From a Different Direction”
and
“Overlooked Evidence in the Murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”
then you’ll see the common sense in their findings. They’re easily accessible at:
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/ARTICLE1/overlooked.html

Therefore, we have two direct substantiations that the gunshot—and there was only one—came not
not
from where the Official Version tells us it did, but from precisely where the autopsy report and the four witnesses in the photographic evidence were looking and/or pointing two o’clock-high. And it’s a distinctly different location.

Astoundingly, even though they were eyewitnesses to one of the most important crimes of the twentieth century, police
never
even interviewed Andrew Young and other key witnesses who were present:

“Young, Bevel, Jackson and Kiles told
TIME
that although they witnessed everything that happened, no authority from the Memphis Police, the Tennessee State Police or the FBI have ever asked them a single question.”
³⁴⁸

Researcher Ted Wilburn took the matter a step further. He went
into
the second floor bathroom from where James Earl Ray supposedly shot, and photographed the second floor balcony where Dr. King had stood. He and fellow researcher Michael Rivero have diagrammed the supposed shot from that window:

“From this vantage point, we can confirm that the angle from the bathroom window to where Dr. King was killed is nearly level.”
³⁴⁹

Therefore, the bullet could not have traversed its victim’s body in a downward trajectory:

“The bathroom window where police officers claimed the bullet was fired from obviously does not support the eyewitnesses’point- ing fingers or the doctor’s autopsy report.”
³⁵⁰

And
from
that bathroom window, at the
time
of the assassination, whoever would have been clumsily standing on the bathtub ledge in order to see out that window, as the Official Version still goes,
would not have had a clear shot
at Dr. King on the second floor balcony:

“In the original rooming house bathroom where James Earl Ray supposedly shot MLK from, there was a wall right by the window that actually made it impossible to take the shot. As I understand it, the wall was “removed for clarity” when the rooming house was taken over for the museum.”
³⁵¹

The idea of an expert assassin standing on the ledge of the bathtub and trying to line up a shot with a rifle that’s too long to position there, is absolutely preposterous.

An “FBI ballistics expert testified that not even the most skilled gunman could have accurately fired a rifle in the manner claimed by the government prosecution. According to the expert, to effectively line up the rifle for such a shot, the butt of the rifle would have had to stick six inches into the wall. The prosecution countered that Ray had contorted himself into position around the bathtub in order to make the kill shot, which seems equally incredulous.”
³⁵²

Exculpatory Evidence in the Case of James Earl Ray

1.The bullet taken from Dr. King’s body (and there was only one bullet)
did not come
from the rifle of the Defendant.

2.The bullets did not match. Metallurgical testing determined that the bullet that struck Dr. King
did not
match the bullets of the defendant.

3.Ray’s rifle was
not the murder weapon.
It was
never matched
to the bullet that struck Dr. King. That was a crystal clear evidentiary finding: None of the many ballistics tests that were performed on the rifle that James Earl Ray allegedly used, were able to link that rifle to the bullet that struck Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Judge Joe Brown, who presided over two years of hearings on the rifle evidence, held up the defendant’s rifle and told the jury: “It is my opinion that this is not the murder weapon.”

4.Ray’s rifle was not even “sighted in”; the scope had not been sighted properly, meaning that the shooter would not hit what he was looking at through the site (a mistake that an assassin would not and could not make). Judge Brown said: “This weapon literally could not have hit the broad side of a barn.”

5.The trajectory of the bullet reveals that the shot did not come from where the prosecution said it did. It literally had to be from a dramatically different location.

6.The government prosecution team obviously tried everything within their substantial powers to prove that Ray’s rifle was the murder weapon and to attempt to link the rifle ballistically with the bullet that hit MLK. They couldn’t do it.

7.Ray (through his legal counsel) continuously sought advanced testing on the rifle, via the new methods that crime labs had developed and advances in ballistics, to prove conclusively that he could not have done the shooting. Those efforts were continuously denied. What was the government afraid of? Why wouldn’t they allow advanced methods of testing? *

8.New testimony has established evidence that there were two rifles at the crime scene: a “throw-down” rifle to set up the patsy and a “hot” rifle that was broken down and removed from the scene in conjunction with a coordinated plan of escape.

9.Ray could not have committed the crime. The man had an eighth-grade education. Even FBI Deputy Director William Sullivan, who led the FBI investigation of James Earl Ray, was convinced that an eighth-grade dropout like Ray could not possibly have managed everything that was alleged. Sullivan wrote:

“Someone, I feel sure, taught Ray how to get a false Canadian passport, how to get out of the country, and how to travel to Europe because he could never have managed it alone. And how did Ray pay for the passport and the airline tickets?”

10.The government was self-convinced that Ray should be convicted, but the victim’s family certainly wasn’t. They defended the accused killer straight down the line and even worked with attorneys for his release because they were that sure that he wasn’t the man who killed Martin. “The Kings also presented evidence suggesting that Ray’s gun could not have fired the fatal shot.”

* Various reports substantiate years of efforts by the defendant’s legal counsel to allow the rifle to be re-tested with advanced methods that had become available and scientifically acknowledged as more accurate. The fact that it was the defendant who actually sought the ballistics testing and it was the prosecution which forestalled those efforts speaks volumes about who was seeking the truth in this case and who wasn’t (Ray appealed his conviction seven times, continually seeking the expansion of facts in evidence).

Source material for the above chart was derived primarily from the following:

A King-Sized Conspiracy,
Dick Russell, 1999;
American Conspiracies,
Jesse Ventura & Dick Russell, 2010; “Overlooked evidence in the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” Ted Wilburn, 1999; “Martin Luther King - The Fatal Shot Came From a Different Direction”, “The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis’, Jim Douglass, Spring 2000,
Probe Magazine;
“Who Killed Martin Luther King?”, Matt Alsdorf,
Slate Magazine,
December 15, 1999.

But even stronger exculpatory evidence exists that should have exonerated falsely accused James Earl Ray: His bullets didn’t match the crime scene and
neither
did his rifle! That’s right, folks; the top crime labs in the country were never able to match Ray’s rifle to the murder evidence, and Ray’s bullets were found to actually be different than the one that killed Dr. King.