Legacy of Secrecy (119 page)

Motel.” From the back of the fire station, they had to “climb down the

concrete wall and [run] across Mulberry Street to the Lorraine.” The

patrolmen quickly covered the Lorraine itself, but didn’t seal off a two-

block area around the Lorraine until five minutes later—four minutes

too late to stop James Earl Ray.21

On the balcony, Dr. King lay dying. Photographs show undercover

officer Marrell McCullough kneeling next to his body, along with Andrew

Young. An officer asked where the shot came from, and a famous photo

shows Young and the other aides standing as they all point in the direc-

tion of the rooming house across Mulberry Street.

Below the rooming house windows was a thicket-covered area,

fronted by bushes along the top of the retaining wall that ran along

Mulberry Street. After patrolmen climbed up the wall and searched the

area, the Justice Department says, “about 10 feet up the alley” that ran

between the two buildings of the rooming house, “they found two fresh

footprints in the mud . . . subsequently, a plaster cast was made of each

footprint. However, the footprints were never positively identified by

either the Memphis Police or the FBI.” According to William Pepper, the

shoe size was large, approximately “13 to 13 ½.”22

Ralph Abernathy said that by the time an ambulance arrived at 6:06

PM, police officers “cluttered the courtyard.” The mortally wounded

Dr. King lay unconscious as he clung to life, and Abernathy rode with

him to the hospital. They arrived at 6:15 PM.23

Martin Luther King was pronounced dead at 7:05 PM.

Chapter Fifty-one

For forty years, many have wondered if James Earl Ray fired the fatal

shot from the rooming house. Rep. Stokes and the HSCA concluded he

did, though they were careful to point out that the direction and source

of the shot could not be determined with scientific precision. No witness

actually saw the shot come from the bathroom window, and no one in

the rooming house watched Ray fire the rifle, or definitively identified

him fleeing with the weapon. The autopsy might have provided con-

clusive information about the bullet’s angle, and thus its origin, but the

doctor who performed the autopsy said he didn’t track the path of the

bullet, so as not to further disfigure Dr. King.1

The bullet recovered from Dr. King’s body could not be matched to, or

excluded from, the rifle Ray had purchased that was left on the sidewalk

in front of Canipe’s. That was true for tests done in 1968 and for the most

recent testing done in the 1990s. Apparently as a result of the first round

of tests, the bullet that was removed from Dr. King in one piece is now

in three pieces, further reducing the chance that authorities will ever be

able to prove it did, or did not, come from Ray’s rifle.2

A shot from the rooming house would not have been difficult for

an experienced shooter. The rooming house was about 205 feet away

from the bathroom window, but with the seven-power Redfield scope,

the distance would have seemed like less than thirty feet. That’s still a

good shot for someone like Ray, who had no documented practice. If

Ray acted alone and not as part of a conspiracy, the idea of his risking

target practice with the rifle in some random part of the Alabama woods

seems unlikely, given his chances of getting caught. The gun was loud,

the bullets powerful, and he would have had to practice in daylight,

increasing his chances of being seen. A simple arrest for trespassing

could have meant the fugitive Ray’s return to prison. On the other hand,

since we feel that Ray was acting for Milteer in the contract that Marcello

brokered, Ray could have had a safe place to practice either through

someone like Milteer’s associate Dr. Swift in California, or via one of

Marcello’s Mafia associates.

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

If the shot was fired from the bathroom window, as the HSCA con-

cluded, then King’s murder was simply a variation of two earlier assas-

sination efforts linked to Marcello and Milteer: the JFK attempt planned

for Tampa and his murder in Dallas, both of which involved a shooter

firing from an open window. In the rooming house bathroom that Ray

shared, the window screen was pushed out, further indicating that a

shot was fired from there. Though the window had jammed when some-

one tried to raise it, leaving only a five-inch gap, positioning the rifle

and scope, then firing, would not have been difficult.3

Could someone besides Ray have fired from the bathroom window?

Second-floor tenant Grace Walden would later claim to have seen a

man who did not fit Ray’s description in various ways, though, as we

noted earlier, she first told authorities she “did not see the man” at all.4

Her later descriptions didn’t match Ray, but varied considerably. Usu-

ally she said he was white, but on the
Today
show in 1978, she said, “I

think he was a nigger.” Grace Walden suffered from mental illness and

was institutionalized later in 1968, and some authors alleged that she

was committed because she wouldn’t accept a $100,000 bribe to say she

had seen Ray. However, Stokes and the HSCA investigated the matter

closely, even having their staff review her medical records and talk to

her doctors. They concluded that all of her treatment “was based on

medical considerations and was not related to her role as a possible

witness,” and that “because of the differences in Walden’s statements

about whether she saw anyone at all, and if so whether the man she

saw was white or black, the Committee found that her testimony was

virtually useless.”5

The HSCA was also cautious about the statements of Walden’s

common-law husband, Charles Stephens, whose identification of the

man he saw fleeing down the hall seemed to grow more like Ray as time

passed. All accounts say that Stephens had been drinking that day, and

most say he was intoxicated to some degree, with some stating he was

“drunk.” Keeping in mind that the rooming house was essentially a

flophouse, the reliability of the witnesses there was far from ideal.

It seems odd that a sniper would choose as his lair the shared bath-

room on a floor where tenants often drank beer for much of the day.

There was nothing to prevent an irate tenant like Stephens or Anschutz

from banging on the locked bathroom door while—or just after—the

shot was fired, then getting a good look at whoever came out of the

bathroom, and what he was carrying. Then again, Ray wasn’t an expe-

rienced hit man, and if Sartor’s sources in the Justice Department memo

were accurate, a schedule change scarcely an hour earlier had sped up

the hit’s timing, putting additional pressure on the shooter.

Some of Ray’s defense attorneys have said the shot came from the

bushes below the rooming house windows. Such a shot would have

been closer to the Lorraine, and therefore easier. But debates have raged

for years about how thick the foliage was, and whether a shooter there

would have been spotted easily by tenants looking out of their windows

(police noticed several women peeking through those windows not long

after the shots). Also, aside from the two footprints mentioned earlier, no

other prints were found, as would have been expected if someone had

gone through the area, especially given the recent very wet weather.6

Aside from Andrew Young’s brief statement at the time, three other

witnesses indicated seeing something in the area of the bushes, but there

are issues with each of their stories. Volunteer driver Solomon Jones

later testified to the HSCA that after he got up off the ground, where

Young had pushed him when the shot rang out, “he saw a movement

of something white and ‘as tall as a human being’ in the brush beneath

the rooming house,” but “for only a brief time. He did not see a head or

arms; he could not tell whether the object was black or white, male or

female.” Since Jones didn’t look at the brushy area until after he got up

off the ground, as the police were starting to enter the area, the HSCA

concluded that he likely saw one of the officers in the brush.7

On the day of the shooting, Jones gave varying accounts of what he

saw: He told a reporter within minutes that “the shot came from the

bushes ‘over there,’ pointing across Mulberry Street to the thick brush

behind the rooming house.” According to William Pepper, Jones told

the Memphis Police “he saw a man heading back toward the rooming

house,” but “in a statement given to the media [that] evening [Jones] said

he saw a man come down over the wall and onto or near the Lorraine

property, only to drift away.” At that point, Jones said he was “desperate

to follow [the man, so] he tried to find a way out of the Lorraine Motel

parking area, becoming hysterical when he couldn’t find a clear path

to drive out.”8

Earl Caldwell, covering King’s Memphis trip for the
New York Times
,

later said he was standing in the doorway of his first-floor room at the

Lorraine when he heard what sounded like an explosion. As William

Pepper recounted, Caldwell “was looking at the brush area at the rear of

the rooming house on the other side of Mulberry Street and saw a figure

in the bushes, a white male wearing what appeared to be coveralls. The

man was crouched or semi-crouched in the midst of the high bushes and

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

was staring at the balcony . . . he didn’t see a gun in the hands of the man,

and he was quickly distracted by Solomon Jones, who began driving

the car back and forth frantically in the driveway of the motel. When

Caldwell looked back to the brush area, the man had disappeared.”

However, critics of his account point out that Caldwell didn’t go pub-

lic with his story for years, and that he didn’t mention it when author

Gerold Frank interviewed him a year after Dr. King’s murder.9

A minister with Dr. King said he saw “a puff of white smoke” com-

ing from the bushes—but critics point out that the gunpowder in use at

the time didn’t generate smoke, and no other witnesses reported see-

ing the “puff.”10 Those are the only reports of activity in the bushes that

have emerged after forty years that are even close to being credible. A

few other stories surfaced at various times, but have been discredited.

Ray’s many defense attorneys tried to do their job, which was to cast

reasonable doubt on their client’s possible guilt, by using any testimony

available. (Ray said he fired one of his attorneys because the lawyer was

more interested in finding out the truth than in defending him.)

None of our work is based in any way on the claims of Lloyd Jowers,

the owner of Jim’s Grill on the first floor of Ray’s rooming house. In the

early 1990s, Jowers began telling stories about his involvement with

another shooter and rifle, though his accounts varied greatly over time.

A Tennessee civil jury found Jowers liable for the death of Dr. King in

1999, a case in which he essentially offered no defense and paid dam-

ages of $1. Jowers’ and his associates’ claims changed so much over

the years, and lacked corroborating evidence, that even his supporters

acknowledge that their stories are problematic. One of Jowers’ biggest

supporters, Ray’s last attorney, William Pepper, wrote that “Jowers’s

impetuousness, often combined with his drinking, resulted in behavior

which is used to undermine his credibility.” Of another key witness

involved in Jowers’ story, Pepper wrote that her “credibility has been

hurt as much by some of those working for me as it has by the agents of

the state who wish to discredit her.” The only thing that can be said with

certainty about Jowers is that he was a gambling associate of Frank C.

Liberto, so he may have heard about part of the plan or had some role in

it. Jowers seemed motivated by a desire for financial gain, and started to

go public with his story only in the wake of the success of Oliver Stone’s

JFK
, when Carlos Marcello was near death.11

One alternate theory holds that Ray was doing only surveillance for

the hit, an option mentioned in one of the earlier cited prison-bounty

stories. In that scenario, either the real shooter set Ray up to take the fall,

or Ray himself suddenly decided to make additional money by shooting

Dr. King, as well as doing the surveillance. However, the fact that Ray

had to buy binoculars just an hour before the shooting indicates that he

was poorly prepared if his main job was merely surveillance.12

After weighing all the evidence from the past forty years, it does

appear that the shot came from the second-floor bathroom. However,

it can’t be stated with absolute certainty. We don’t rule out the possibil-

ity that someone else tied to the contract was in the immediate vicinity,

either helping Ray or ensuring that he was tied to the crime—or both.

The HSCA also looked closely at the Memphis Police Department’s