Legacy of Secrecy (114 page)

Ray’s story, which evolved over time and repeated telling, makes

little sense. Why would prospective clients buy cheap surplus rifles

when they hadn’t been shown an example of the merchandise? Also,

when Ray finally did buy a high-quality hunting rifle in Alabama, he

didn’t use his “Eric S. Galt” Alabama driver’s license, but another alias

he made up (or was given)—which defeated Ray’s stated purpose in

making the three-hour drive to Birmingham.

What is certain, based on testimony and documentation, is that in

Birmingham on March 29, 1968, James Earl Ray bought “a Remington

.243 caliber rifle, Model 700 with a 2x–7x Redfield telescopic sight” while

“using the name of Harvey Lowmyer.” Lowmyer was not one of the

four Toronto aliases, but was similar to a name known to one of Ray’s

brothers. Ray made the purchase at Aeromarine Supply, located across

from Birmingham’s airport, and he told the clerks he needed the rifle

for deer hunting with his brother-in-law. Later that day, Ray called the

shop to say his brother-in-law wasn’t happy with the gun, and Ray

exchanged it the next day for a more powerful weapon, “a Model 760

30-06 caliber Remington.” Ray had the scope transferred to the new rifle,

but it wouldn’t fit in a Remington box, so the shop provided Ray with a

Browning box large enough to hold it. The total price, which Ray paid

in cash, was $248.59 (more than $1,500 today), including the scope and

twenty cartridges for the rifle.2

Ray said his contact had told him to return the first rifle and then

specified the right one to buy based on some literature Ray had picked

up at the store. In addition, Ray says his contact had given him approxi-

mately $700 to buy the rifle and for other expenses. On these points, Ray

was likely much closer to the truth. Ray may have been given general

instructions about what type of rifle to buy, bought the wrong one, and

then told exactly which more powerful weapon to purchase. Ray could

not have test-fired the first rifle and found it wasn’t powerful enough,

because the Justice Department noted that it “could not be loaded,”

since that part of the rifle was “caked with a hardened preservative

(cosmoline).”3

For those reasons and others, Ray was probably buying the rifle on

someone else’s advice or orders. Though Ray contended that buying

the rifle in another state was his idea, doing so helped to ensure that

the FBI could assert jurisdiction when Martin Luther King was killed.

While shooting King outside of Atlanta was preferable for Milteer and

his Atlanta partners paying for the hit, there was always the chance that

the assassination might have to be done in Georgia. If Dr. King were shot

in Georgia, and if the rifle also had been bought in the state, it might

have been more difficult for the FBI to take control of the investigation.

Bringing in the FBI would actually benefit Milteer and Marcello, since

Hoover and the Bureau had so much to hide: their illegal surveillance

and COINTELPRO operations directed at King, the racism of much of

the Bureau—especially of Hoover and the Atlanta office—and even the

FBI’s past lax treatment of Milteer and Marcello, if leads should ever

point their way. By having Ray live in one state and buy the rifle in

another (and, as it turned out, having Dr. King shot in yet another), the

FBI would have no trouble taking charge of an interstate crime.

As a long-term criminal, Ray could have easily obtained a potentially

untraceable rifle from the underworld. It makes little sense for Ray, on

his own, to have not only bought the rifle at a public store, but to have

also called extra attention to himself with the rifle exchange and scope

remounting. It all seems designed to have left a paper trail, and to make

570

LEGACY OF SECRECY

Ray stand out as a customer. (It’s even possible that Ray was intention-

ally given instructions that caused him to buy the wrong rifle the first

time.) Marcello wouldn’t have wanted authorities trying to trace Ray’s

rifle to the underworld, and Milteer wouldn’t want white supremacist

groups investigated as the possible source, and Ray’s buying the rifle

from a legitimate store solved both of those problems.

Ray stated that the $700 his contact gave him for the rifle purchase

was part of the anti-Castro gun-smuggling operation. However, when

authorities later interviewed the men at the shop who helped Ray, they

said that he never asked about buying quantities of cheap foreign or

surplus rifles. We suspect that Ray knew he was buying the rifle that

would be used to kill Dr. King, and that it wasn’t part of the anti-Castro

operation. However, that doesn’t mean that, aside from the rifle pur-

chase, no such anti-Castro operation existed.4

One often-overlooked piece of evidence provides some support for

Ray’s Cuban gunrunning claims. When Ray’s Remington rifle was

found after Dr. King’s murder, Congressional investigators say that

Memphis police discovered in the same large bag “military ammuni-

tion . . . with machinegun link marks,” that was different from the ammo

used in Ray’s rifle. Ray later said the military ammunition was part of

the anti-Castro gunrunning scheme, but Aeromarine didn’t sell such

military ammunition, and despite years of investigation by the FBI, Jus-

tice Department, and Congress, its source has never been determined.

It would be interesting to know if the military machine-gun ammo in

James Earl Ray’s bag was similar to that used by any of the CIA-backed

Cuban exile groups. If so, its inclusion would have been a simple way

for Marcello or Milteer to further stymie any thorough investigation of

Ray’s associates.5

Ray said that on March 30, 1968, while he was still in Birmingham

at the Travelodge motel, his contact was getting ready to go to New

Orleans. His instructions to Ray were to proceed to Memphis and reg-

ister at the New Rebel Inn motel. Ray claimed he headed straight to

Memphis from Birmingham, staying there until Dr. King’s murder.

However, Ray said it took him an unusually long time to drive the 241

miles from Birmingham to Memphis: four days, for a pace of just sixty

miles per day. Ray claims it took him so long because he drove only “3

or 4 hours a day,” but even that’s implausible. While small Alabama

towns sometimes had speed limits of twenty-five or thirty-five miles

per hour, they were separated by long stretches of highway with speed

limits of at least sixty. In addition, no documentation (receipts, motel

records, etc.) has ever emerged for Ray’s visits to the motels he claims

he stayed at along the way.6

Instead, evidence confirmed by the Congressional investigators and

the Justice Department clearly shows that after his rifle purchase in

Birmingham, Ray returned to his Atlanta rooming house. On March

31, Ray paid his rent in person and on the same day, the rooming house

operator also had Ray write out his name for their official records. On

April 1, 1968, Ray dropped off his clothes at the Piedmont Laundry on

Peachtree Street.7

Despite the evidence, Ray was always adamant that he didn’t return

to Atlanta after buying the rifle in Birmingham, but there are two likely

reasons why Ray felt he had to lie about it. One might have been to con-

ceal a meeting with Joseph Milteer or one of his associates in Atlanta.

Such a contact would occur on April 5, and Ray never mentioned it, so

he might well be covering up a similar contact a few days earlier. At

some point during Ray’s brief stay in Atlanta, either before he went to

Birmingham or after, never explained evidence shows that Ray had a

nice restaurant meal with someone in the city.8

An undated receipt for a meal for two, at a notable Atlanta restaurant

on Peachtree Street, was later found in Ray’s belongings by the FBI. The

restaurant was “Mammy’s Shanty,” one of the few Atlanta restaurants

at the time with a racist theme. In the wake of the desegregation of

the city’s restaurants, the racist image kept black customers away, so

it would have appealed not only to Ray, but also to hardcore racists

like Joseph Milteer and his Atlanta partners, such as Hugh Spake. As

with his return to Atlanta after his Birmingham trip, Ray was evasive

regarding the meal and whom he was with. When his first lawyer asked

him about it, Ray denied knowing anything. But then, as he often did

when evidence surfaced that he hadn’t accounted for, Ray later claimed

to his second attorney to have suddenly remembered having dinner

on Peachtree with the mysterious Raoul. However, the receipt was for

London broil, and Ray told William Bradford Huie that not only had he

never “ordered London broil in a restaurant, he didn’t even know what it

was.”9

There was another, related reason Ray was adamant that he hadn’t

gone back to Atlanta before heading to Memphis: because the well-

traveled Martin Luther King had finally returned to Atlanta for the first

time since Ray had initially arrived in the city. Ray didn’t want to admit

that he was stalking or surveilling Dr. King, who had come home to

Atlanta following his disastrous March 28 trip to Memphis.

572

LEGACY OF SECRECY

On March 28, 1968, Martin Luther King had returned to downtown

Memphis to lead a demonstration to support the striking garbage work-

ers. His visit was plagued by problems from the start, and delays with

Dr. King’s flight from New York caused him to arrive two hours after

the march was supposed to begin. He walked into an already tense

situation, with rumors of police brutality earlier that day and a group

of young protesters, who called themselves “the Invaders,” advocating

for violent action. But all of the protestors were initially peaceful as Dr.

King led the march down Beale Street, toward City Hall. Photographs of

the day show the demonstrators with signs mounted on wooden sticks,

the most notable proclaiming simply: I AM A MAN.

However, the young protesters soon shed their signs and began using

the sticks to smash windows. Dr. King, at the head of the march, was

shocked by the sounds of shattering glass, which meant that for the

first time, one of his protests was turning violent. As a riot began to

erupt around them, Dr. King’s aides feared for his safety and found a

car to drive him from the scene. Since Memphis police had blocked key

roads after the melee started, Dr. King couldn’t be taken to the place

where he usually lodged in Memphis, the black-owned Lorraine Motel.

Instead, the car made its way to the Holiday Inn–Rivermont Hotel—

until recently, a whites-only establishment.

The morning rumor of police brutality had turned out to be unfounded,

but once the riot started, the police lived up to it. Congressional inves-

tigators wrote that “tear gas was fired,” and soon the police resorted to

“nightsticks, mace, and finally guns,” shooting four blacks, one fatally,

and injuring sixty. There were 300 arrests, 150 fires, and Tennessee’s gov-

ernor called on 3,500 members of the National Guard to patrol Memphis

and enforce a curfew.10

At the Holiday Inn, Martin Luther King appeared extremely

depressed. As journalist Nick Kotz described, Dr. King told aide Ralph

David Abernathy, “Maybe we just have to admit that the day of vio-

lence is here, and maybe we just have to give up, and let violence take

its course.” The following day, Dr. King told an aide that people would

interpret the march-turned-riot “as a sign ‘that Martin Luther King is at

the end of his rope.’” He worried that his critics in the civil rights move-

ment would soon be saying, “Martin Luther King is dead! He’s finished!

His non-violence is nothing. No one is listening to it.”11

Dr. King returned to Atlanta and rallied his aides from around the

country to figure out how to return to Memphis, prove that nonvio-

lence could work, and then continue planning the still problematic Poor

People’s March for late April. It was an ambitious undertaking, and

some of the aides were in favor of King’s returning to Memphis but not

of the Poor People’s March in Washington, while others favored nei-

ther. Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, and Hosea Williams argued against

the Washington march. A frustrated Dr. King abruptly left the meet-

ing. He later returned, and after an intense ten-hour conference, all the

aides had agreed to support the Poor People’s March and the return to

Memphis—which is why so many of Dr. King’s aides would be there

with him on April 4. However, the riot’s aftermath had taken a toll on

Dr. King, and the day after the marathon meeting, his associate Wal-

ter Fauntroy observed that King looked like a “spent force.” (Fauntroy

would later chair the Martin Luther King investigation for the House

Select Committee on Assassinations.)12

J. Edgar Hoover was quick to exploit the Memphis riot in his campaign