Who Killed King?
What follows is the text of a document I downloaded several years ago, by the "National Insecurity Council". I'd have just linked to it on-line, but I can't find a copy current anywhere. It's long, but fascinating, and especially of concern to Memphians, Americans, or anyone interested in conspiracy theory and/or civil rights.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the most charismatic leaders of the civil rights struggle. By successfully organizing nonviolent boycotts, marches, strikes, and voter-registration drives, he unified the African-American community and demonstrated its economic and political power. Beatings, police dogs, fire hoses, prisons - none of them stopped him. In October 1964, the world honored his commitment to peaceful change by making him the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
Dr. King was deeply troubled when a March 28, 1968, sanitation workers turned violent, injuring 60 people and killing one youth. But he was not deterred. He returned to Memphis a week later, to lead another, peaceful, march.
At 6:00 PM on April 4, King stood on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel smoking a cigarette and talking to aides in the parking lot below. Suddenly, a shot rang out and King was struck by a single fragmenting bullet, which tore open his throat and severed his spine. He lost consciousness almost immediately and was declared dead an hour later.
King's killer escaped. According to the police, as the assailant fled from a cheap rooming house across the street from King's motel, he dumped a bundle onto the sidewalk and then sped off in a white Mustang. The bundle, wrapped in a green bedspread, contained personal items and the 30.06 Remington rifle allegedly used to kill King.
The Official Story:
For more than two weeks, law enforcement agencies didn't know whom they were chasing. The flophouse room had been rented in the name of "John Willard." It was an alias - as were "John L. Rayns," "Eric Starvo Galt," "Harvey Lowmyer," and "Ramon George Sneyd" - all names used by the fugitive.
Finally, on April 19, the FBI announced that the fugitive was James Earl Ray, a prisoner who had escaped from Missouri State Prison the year before. Supposedly Ray had killed King because he hated blacks. He was finally arrested on June 8, 1968, at London's Heathrow Airport - two days after Robert Kennedy's murder in Los Angeles. Ray was extradited and returned home to a country teeming with conspiracy theories and anxiously awaiting answers at his trial.
There was no trial. At a March 1969 hearing, which lasted 144 minutes, Ray pled guilty, waived all rights to a future trial, and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. But the outcome satisfied no one, least of all Ray, who quickly recanted his guilty plea and accused his lawyer of cutting a deal with the judge. (Ray said he had pleaded guilty solely to avoid the electric chair.) Until his death in 1998, Ray called for the trial he never got, supported by King's widow and children. And questions that should have been answered in 1969 remain unanswered three decades later.
Unanswered Questions:
Was King tricked into staying at the Lorraine Hotel?
King had never stayed at the Lorraine before. Because of the many death threats he had received in Memphis, he usually stayed downtown in the Claridge, a relatively secure hotel across from City Hall. The Lorraine was in a run-down part of town.
King's fatal decision to stay there was probably prompted by hostile newspaper editorials mocking his "hasty exit" to a white-owned Holiday Inn when the March 28 protest turned violent. The editorials called King "a Judas" for not staying at the "fine Motel Lorraine…owned and patronized exclusively by Negroes," and said, "There will be no boycott of white merchants for King, only for his followers." Sensitive to its community image, King's group booked his next stay at the Lorraine.
In retrospect, those editorials look suspicious. The taunting quotes were taken verbatim from a press release written by the FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division and sent to Memphis newspapers. (Newton)
The Lorraine Motel, with its balconies facing the street, was less secure than the Claridge. And the second-story rooms, which could be watched from farther away, were even less secure than the ground-floor rooms.
Yet, two days before King's arrival, a man introducing himself as an "advance security man for Dr. King" showed up at the Lorraine and insisted that King's reservation be changed from a ground-floor room to one on the second floor. In the wake of the assassination, it was determined that no such advance man had been dispatched to Memphis for King's visit, and no one in his entourage matched the man's description. (Ibid)
Where was King's police protection?
The FBI knew of at least 50 serious threats made against King's life. And the Memphis Police normally provided police protection for him. But at 5:00 PM, on April 3, the day before the shooting, the officers assigned to protect him were reassigned. (Melanson)
In hindsight, withdrawing security was unwise, but the MPD offered a credible reason for doing so: Dr. King's aides were not cooperating. More than once, for example, King's drivers tried to give the slip to the police cruisers assigned to follow them. (King's people suspected undercover police agents of sparking the March 28 riot.) And even if the security detail had been in place, it could have done little to protect King from a long-range sniper.
A more serious - and suspicious - security lapse was MPD's decision to pull special tactical (TACT) units five blocks away from the Lorraine Motel. According to the official story, "an unnamed member of Dr. King's entourage" had asked for the TACT units to be withdrawn. But those units were not there to protect King in the first place. Rather, the anti-riot squads were there to protect the city of Memphis from Dr. King, whom the MPD called an "outside agitator." It's extremely unlikely that the units would have pulled back at King's request. The pullback, however, was critical: had the TACT units remained in place it would have been extremely difficult for anyone to escape the crime scene. (Ibid)
Did someone help the assassin escape?
Shortly after the Memphis Police broadcast word of a suspect fleeing the murder scene in a white Mustang, a CB broadcaster established radio contact with the police and kept up a running description of a chase involving a white Mustang, a blue Pontiac, and gunfire. Various police units attempted to intercept the cars, while the police dispatcher frantically tried to keep up with conflicting accounts of the chase's progress.
Later the CB broadcast was reported to be a hoax. It was allegedly perpetuated by two teenagers whose identities were never revealed, and who were never prosecuted. Whether the phony broadcast was part of any conspiracy or not, it diverted police pursuers to northeastern parts of Memphis, while Ray made his escape to the southwest.
Even more inexplicable, a "Signal Y" - an all-points bulletin - was never issued by the police for Memphis. Had one been issued, police cars would have driven immediately to preassigned locations - any CB broadcast of a chase regardless - thus blocking all the main exits from the city. MPD blamed the failure to issue a Signal Y on "the massive confusion and huge volume of radio traffic which erupted immediately following the assassination. When asked why law enforcement agencies in the neighboring states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, were never notified of the crime and chase, the MPD Commander of Communications said that he had mistakenly thought that it was the job of the FBI.
Was the eyewitness testimony unreliable?
Because the two bullet fragments taken from King's body were so distorted that ballistics tests were inconclusive, the state's case rested heavily on the eyewitness testimony of Charles Stephens, who lived in the boardinghouse from which Ray allegedly shot King. Stephens said that shortly after hearing a rifle shot, he saw Ray run down the hall, away from the second-story bathroom. But his testimony was disputed immediately by his wife.
Mrs. Stephens claims that on the morning of April 4, 1968, her husband was drunk, and was urinating in the bushes at the front of the boardinghouse at the time he claimed to see the killer run down the hallway. She claims that she saw the killer, carrying a package in his hand, as he walked past her door moments after the shots were fired. When she was shown photographs of James Earl Ray, later, she "unequivocally stated" that he was not the man she'd seen in the hallway that day.
Cabdriver James McCraw corroborated her story that Mr. Stephens was drunk and outside, and claimed that he saw two white Mustangs parked at the curb outside the boarding house.
The FBI and MPD both offered Mrs. Stephen's a reward for identifying Ray, but she refused, promising to identify the real assassin if he were caught. She said that the FBI then threatened her and told her to cooperate. She stuck by her story and, in violation of Tennessee state law, she was sent to a mental institution and held there, despite no record of mental illness, for ten years. (Lane)
The police never investigated McCraw's claims of a second white Mustang.
How did Ray avoid capture for so long after he was identified as the killer?
One of the biggest questions marks lies over Ray's escape. He fled to Canada, England, Portugal, then back to England, where he was arrested while awaiting a flight to Belgium. Where did he get the money to do all of that traveling, and who gave him the phony passports he carried? Although he had no known source of income between the time he escaped prison in April 1967, and was arrested in June 1968, he spent $25,000 on plane fares, lodging, and other expenses. Moreover, Ray was a poor man from a backwater town who'd spent most of his adult life in prison because he was a bumbler. His first burglary ended in a jail sentence because he dropped his army discharge notice at the scene of the crime. Yet he zipped all over the globe after he was identified as King's killer, and he did so with international authorities on his tail.
Some Possible Answers:
THEORY #1:
James Earl Ray's story was true: "I personally did not shoot Dr. King, but I may have been partially responsible without knowing it."
Ray admitted to renting the room in Memphis under a false name, and leaving a number of personal effects there, but said that he was not in the building when King was killed.
He claimed that in July, 1967, shortly after he'd escaped from Missouri State Prison, he met a fair-haired man in Montreal known as Raoul. Raoul paid Ray several thousand dollars for his help in a few small drug-smuggling and gun-running deals; they met 12 to 15 times in the nine months preceding the assassination - in Birmingham, Mexico, New Orleans, and, finally, in Memphis on April 3 and 4.
Ray contended that Raoul directed every move that would later incriminate Ray in King's slaying: he told Ray to buy the rifle, allegedly to show gun-running clients what they'd be buying; he had Ray rent the boardinghouse room so that they'd have a place to meet with clients; and he had Ray buy binoculars to keep an eye out for the police.
Ray's account of his whereabouts during the shooting was a little sketchy, however. He claimed to've left the boardinghouse to change a flat tire on the Mustang. As he drove back, he said, he saw the street blocked by squad cars, learned of King's death on the radio, realized that he'd be implicated, and fled.
THEORY #2:
James Earl Ray did it, and he acted alone.
He admitted that he rented to room and bought the gun and white Mustang in which he escaped. His mystery accomplice Raoul was never caught or identified (although a man fitting his description was seen in Ray's company in Toronto after the assassination).
As for the bundle he left on the sidewalk, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that Ray saw a police cruiser as he was leaving the boardinghouse, panicked, and dumped the gun and his personal effects. It would have been typical: he had bumbled every crime he had ever undertaken.
The weak point of this theory, though, is Ray's motivation to kill King. Ray had no history of racial extremism and, according to people who knew him well, would have been unlikely to risk his freedom by such a daring act unless he would have gained directly from it.
THEORY #3:
The CIA planned the assassination and set up Ray as a patsy.
Jules R. Kimble, a criminal with ties to New Orleans Mob boss Carlos Marcello and to the CIA, claims to have flown Ray to Montreal, where he brought him to a CIA specialist who provided Ray with his aliases. Kimble is known by law enforcement to have been active in organized crime in New Orleans, Montreal, and Memphis - three cities where Ray claimed to have met with Raoul.
Kimble further claims that Ray was a decoy, and that the actual assassins were two snipers who flew into Memphis using a "West Memphis airfield belonging to a CIA front company." He asserts that while MPD cooperated in the plot, it was coordinated in Atlanta. (Edginton)
THEORY #4:
At the prompting of J. Edgar Hoover, FBI agents conspired to kill King and cover up the crime. Ray was a conspirator, in it for the money, but may or may not have personally killed King.
Hoover hated King, publicly calling him "the most dangerous man in America," and a "moral degenerate." And he didn't stop with name-calling. He illegally bugged the civil rights leader's hotel rooms and then circulated tapes of King's extramarital affairs to King's wife, to members of King's Southern Christian Liberty Conference (SCLC), and to the press.
When King was to be awarded the Nobel in 1964, the FBI tried to get him to kill himself. Assistant Director William Sullivan sent King a composite tape recording of several of his hotel-room indiscretions along with a note, which read in part: "You are done, King, there is only one thing left for you to do…. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation." (Gentry)
Convinced that King was a Communist, Hoover also had the FBI infiltrate King's SCLC staff. James A. Harrison was recruited by the Bureau shortly after joining the SCLC, and was paid a weekly stipend in exchange for his reporting on King's movements and activities.
Former Atlanta FBI agent Arthur Murtagh claims that when he and a fellow FBI agent heard the news of King's death over the radio, his colleague "leapt up, clapped his hands and said 'Goddamn, we got him! We finally got him.'" Murtagh also claims that, whether the FBI was involved in a plot to kill King or not, the bureau office in Atlanta "washed out consistently and deliberately" evidence relating to the crime. (Edginton)
J.B. Stoner, former chairman of the National States Rights Party and an admitted racist and white supremacist, claimed that the FBI offered him $25,000 to kill King. (Shaw)
The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that "the Bureau had contributed to a moral climate conducive to the murder of Dr. King," but it stopped short of accusing the FBI of actual involvement in the killing.
Footnote:
Conspiracy theorists like to point out similarities between events, and often these take the form of demonstrations of "the power of serendipity," as is the case with the admittedly interesting similarities between the lives and deaths of Abraham Lincoln and JFK. More disturbing are those that illustrate a more concrete similarity, such as that between the modus operandi of two assassinations. Consider these, between the death of JFK and that of Dr. King:
* A rifle with telescopic sight was dropped at the crime scene in both cases. Ballistics evidence was inconclusive, whether either rifle had been used to fire the fatal shots in either case.
* Following both killings, the local police networks were penetrated, interfering with efforts to catch the suspects.
* In both cases, high law enforcement officials alleged that the slayings were done by lone assassins, even before investigations were underway.
* In both cases, there is reason to believe that the FBI falsified evidence.
* In both cases, the assassins were allegedly motivated by political beliefs that neither can be documented to have had prior to the assassinations.
* Investigative files for both investigations were sealed, for reasons of "national security," for long periods of time: JFK's for 75 years, and King's for 50.
Bibliography
"Are You Sure You Know Who Killed Martin Luther King?" by Bynum Shaw (Esquire, March 1972)
J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and His Secrets (W.W. Norton & Co., 1991)
The King Conspiracy, by Michael Newton (Holloway House Publishing Co., 1987)
The Martin Luther King Assassination: New Revelations of the Conspiracy and Cover-Up, 1968-1991, by Dr. Phillip H. Melanson (Shapolsky Publishers, 1991)
"The Murder of Martin Luther King Jr." by John Edginton and John Sergeant (Covert Action, Summer 1990)
"Some Disturbing Parallels" by William Turner (Ramparts, July 13, 1968)
Who Killed Martin Luther King? The True Story By The Alleged Assassin, by James Earl Ray (National Press Books, 1992)
Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the most charismatic leaders of the civil rights struggle. By successfully organizing nonviolent boycotts, marches, strikes, and voter-registration drives, he unified the African-American community and demonstrated its economic and political power. Beatings, police dogs, fire hoses, prisons - none of them stopped him. In October 1964, the world honored his commitment to peaceful change by making him the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
Dr. King was deeply troubled when a March 28, 1968, sanitation workers turned violent, injuring 60 people and killing one youth. But he was not deterred. He returned to Memphis a week later, to lead another, peaceful, march.
At 6:00 PM on April 4, King stood on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel smoking a cigarette and talking to aides in the parking lot below. Suddenly, a shot rang out and King was struck by a single fragmenting bullet, which tore open his throat and severed his spine. He lost consciousness almost immediately and was declared dead an hour later.
King's killer escaped. According to the police, as the assailant fled from a cheap rooming house across the street from King's motel, he dumped a bundle onto the sidewalk and then sped off in a white Mustang. The bundle, wrapped in a green bedspread, contained personal items and the 30.06 Remington rifle allegedly used to kill King.
The Official Story:
For more than two weeks, law enforcement agencies didn't know whom they were chasing. The flophouse room had been rented in the name of "John Willard." It was an alias - as were "John L. Rayns," "Eric Starvo Galt," "Harvey Lowmyer," and "Ramon George Sneyd" - all names used by the fugitive.
Finally, on April 19, the FBI announced that the fugitive was James Earl Ray, a prisoner who had escaped from Missouri State Prison the year before. Supposedly Ray had killed King because he hated blacks. He was finally arrested on June 8, 1968, at London's Heathrow Airport - two days after Robert Kennedy's murder in Los Angeles. Ray was extradited and returned home to a country teeming with conspiracy theories and anxiously awaiting answers at his trial.
There was no trial. At a March 1969 hearing, which lasted 144 minutes, Ray pled guilty, waived all rights to a future trial, and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. But the outcome satisfied no one, least of all Ray, who quickly recanted his guilty plea and accused his lawyer of cutting a deal with the judge. (Ray said he had pleaded guilty solely to avoid the electric chair.) Until his death in 1998, Ray called for the trial he never got, supported by King's widow and children. And questions that should have been answered in 1969 remain unanswered three decades later.
Unanswered Questions:
Was King tricked into staying at the Lorraine Hotel?
King had never stayed at the Lorraine before. Because of the many death threats he had received in Memphis, he usually stayed downtown in the Claridge, a relatively secure hotel across from City Hall. The Lorraine was in a run-down part of town.
King's fatal decision to stay there was probably prompted by hostile newspaper editorials mocking his "hasty exit" to a white-owned Holiday Inn when the March 28 protest turned violent. The editorials called King "a Judas" for not staying at the "fine Motel Lorraine…owned and patronized exclusively by Negroes," and said, "There will be no boycott of white merchants for King, only for his followers." Sensitive to its community image, King's group booked his next stay at the Lorraine.
In retrospect, those editorials look suspicious. The taunting quotes were taken verbatim from a press release written by the FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division and sent to Memphis newspapers. (Newton)
The Lorraine Motel, with its balconies facing the street, was less secure than the Claridge. And the second-story rooms, which could be watched from farther away, were even less secure than the ground-floor rooms.
Yet, two days before King's arrival, a man introducing himself as an "advance security man for Dr. King" showed up at the Lorraine and insisted that King's reservation be changed from a ground-floor room to one on the second floor. In the wake of the assassination, it was determined that no such advance man had been dispatched to Memphis for King's visit, and no one in his entourage matched the man's description. (Ibid)
Where was King's police protection?
The FBI knew of at least 50 serious threats made against King's life. And the Memphis Police normally provided police protection for him. But at 5:00 PM, on April 3, the day before the shooting, the officers assigned to protect him were reassigned. (Melanson)
In hindsight, withdrawing security was unwise, but the MPD offered a credible reason for doing so: Dr. King's aides were not cooperating. More than once, for example, King's drivers tried to give the slip to the police cruisers assigned to follow them. (King's people suspected undercover police agents of sparking the March 28 riot.) And even if the security detail had been in place, it could have done little to protect King from a long-range sniper.
A more serious - and suspicious - security lapse was MPD's decision to pull special tactical (TACT) units five blocks away from the Lorraine Motel. According to the official story, "an unnamed member of Dr. King's entourage" had asked for the TACT units to be withdrawn. But those units were not there to protect King in the first place. Rather, the anti-riot squads were there to protect the city of Memphis from Dr. King, whom the MPD called an "outside agitator." It's extremely unlikely that the units would have pulled back at King's request. The pullback, however, was critical: had the TACT units remained in place it would have been extremely difficult for anyone to escape the crime scene. (Ibid)
Did someone help the assassin escape?
Shortly after the Memphis Police broadcast word of a suspect fleeing the murder scene in a white Mustang, a CB broadcaster established radio contact with the police and kept up a running description of a chase involving a white Mustang, a blue Pontiac, and gunfire. Various police units attempted to intercept the cars, while the police dispatcher frantically tried to keep up with conflicting accounts of the chase's progress.
Later the CB broadcast was reported to be a hoax. It was allegedly perpetuated by two teenagers whose identities were never revealed, and who were never prosecuted. Whether the phony broadcast was part of any conspiracy or not, it diverted police pursuers to northeastern parts of Memphis, while Ray made his escape to the southwest.
Even more inexplicable, a "Signal Y" - an all-points bulletin - was never issued by the police for Memphis. Had one been issued, police cars would have driven immediately to preassigned locations - any CB broadcast of a chase regardless - thus blocking all the main exits from the city. MPD blamed the failure to issue a Signal Y on "the massive confusion and huge volume of radio traffic which erupted immediately following the assassination. When asked why law enforcement agencies in the neighboring states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, were never notified of the crime and chase, the MPD Commander of Communications said that he had mistakenly thought that it was the job of the FBI.
Was the eyewitness testimony unreliable?
Because the two bullet fragments taken from King's body were so distorted that ballistics tests were inconclusive, the state's case rested heavily on the eyewitness testimony of Charles Stephens, who lived in the boardinghouse from which Ray allegedly shot King. Stephens said that shortly after hearing a rifle shot, he saw Ray run down the hall, away from the second-story bathroom. But his testimony was disputed immediately by his wife.
Mrs. Stephens claims that on the morning of April 4, 1968, her husband was drunk, and was urinating in the bushes at the front of the boardinghouse at the time he claimed to see the killer run down the hallway. She claims that she saw the killer, carrying a package in his hand, as he walked past her door moments after the shots were fired. When she was shown photographs of James Earl Ray, later, she "unequivocally stated" that he was not the man she'd seen in the hallway that day.
Cabdriver James McCraw corroborated her story that Mr. Stephens was drunk and outside, and claimed that he saw two white Mustangs parked at the curb outside the boarding house.
The FBI and MPD both offered Mrs. Stephen's a reward for identifying Ray, but she refused, promising to identify the real assassin if he were caught. She said that the FBI then threatened her and told her to cooperate. She stuck by her story and, in violation of Tennessee state law, she was sent to a mental institution and held there, despite no record of mental illness, for ten years. (Lane)
The police never investigated McCraw's claims of a second white Mustang.
How did Ray avoid capture for so long after he was identified as the killer?
One of the biggest questions marks lies over Ray's escape. He fled to Canada, England, Portugal, then back to England, where he was arrested while awaiting a flight to Belgium. Where did he get the money to do all of that traveling, and who gave him the phony passports he carried? Although he had no known source of income between the time he escaped prison in April 1967, and was arrested in June 1968, he spent $25,000 on plane fares, lodging, and other expenses. Moreover, Ray was a poor man from a backwater town who'd spent most of his adult life in prison because he was a bumbler. His first burglary ended in a jail sentence because he dropped his army discharge notice at the scene of the crime. Yet he zipped all over the globe after he was identified as King's killer, and he did so with international authorities on his tail.
Some Possible Answers:
THEORY #1:
James Earl Ray's story was true: "I personally did not shoot Dr. King, but I may have been partially responsible without knowing it."
Ray admitted to renting the room in Memphis under a false name, and leaving a number of personal effects there, but said that he was not in the building when King was killed.
He claimed that in July, 1967, shortly after he'd escaped from Missouri State Prison, he met a fair-haired man in Montreal known as Raoul. Raoul paid Ray several thousand dollars for his help in a few small drug-smuggling and gun-running deals; they met 12 to 15 times in the nine months preceding the assassination - in Birmingham, Mexico, New Orleans, and, finally, in Memphis on April 3 and 4.
Ray contended that Raoul directed every move that would later incriminate Ray in King's slaying: he told Ray to buy the rifle, allegedly to show gun-running clients what they'd be buying; he had Ray rent the boardinghouse room so that they'd have a place to meet with clients; and he had Ray buy binoculars to keep an eye out for the police.
Ray's account of his whereabouts during the shooting was a little sketchy, however. He claimed to've left the boardinghouse to change a flat tire on the Mustang. As he drove back, he said, he saw the street blocked by squad cars, learned of King's death on the radio, realized that he'd be implicated, and fled.
THEORY #2:
James Earl Ray did it, and he acted alone.
He admitted that he rented to room and bought the gun and white Mustang in which he escaped. His mystery accomplice Raoul was never caught or identified (although a man fitting his description was seen in Ray's company in Toronto after the assassination).
As for the bundle he left on the sidewalk, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that Ray saw a police cruiser as he was leaving the boardinghouse, panicked, and dumped the gun and his personal effects. It would have been typical: he had bumbled every crime he had ever undertaken.
The weak point of this theory, though, is Ray's motivation to kill King. Ray had no history of racial extremism and, according to people who knew him well, would have been unlikely to risk his freedom by such a daring act unless he would have gained directly from it.
THEORY #3:
The CIA planned the assassination and set up Ray as a patsy.
Jules R. Kimble, a criminal with ties to New Orleans Mob boss Carlos Marcello and to the CIA, claims to have flown Ray to Montreal, where he brought him to a CIA specialist who provided Ray with his aliases. Kimble is known by law enforcement to have been active in organized crime in New Orleans, Montreal, and Memphis - three cities where Ray claimed to have met with Raoul.
Kimble further claims that Ray was a decoy, and that the actual assassins were two snipers who flew into Memphis using a "West Memphis airfield belonging to a CIA front company." He asserts that while MPD cooperated in the plot, it was coordinated in Atlanta. (Edginton)
THEORY #4:
At the prompting of J. Edgar Hoover, FBI agents conspired to kill King and cover up the crime. Ray was a conspirator, in it for the money, but may or may not have personally killed King.
Hoover hated King, publicly calling him "the most dangerous man in America," and a "moral degenerate." And he didn't stop with name-calling. He illegally bugged the civil rights leader's hotel rooms and then circulated tapes of King's extramarital affairs to King's wife, to members of King's Southern Christian Liberty Conference (SCLC), and to the press.
When King was to be awarded the Nobel in 1964, the FBI tried to get him to kill himself. Assistant Director William Sullivan sent King a composite tape recording of several of his hotel-room indiscretions along with a note, which read in part: "You are done, King, there is only one thing left for you to do…. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation." (Gentry)
Convinced that King was a Communist, Hoover also had the FBI infiltrate King's SCLC staff. James A. Harrison was recruited by the Bureau shortly after joining the SCLC, and was paid a weekly stipend in exchange for his reporting on King's movements and activities.
Former Atlanta FBI agent Arthur Murtagh claims that when he and a fellow FBI agent heard the news of King's death over the radio, his colleague "leapt up, clapped his hands and said 'Goddamn, we got him! We finally got him.'" Murtagh also claims that, whether the FBI was involved in a plot to kill King or not, the bureau office in Atlanta "washed out consistently and deliberately" evidence relating to the crime. (Edginton)
J.B. Stoner, former chairman of the National States Rights Party and an admitted racist and white supremacist, claimed that the FBI offered him $25,000 to kill King. (Shaw)
The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that "the Bureau had contributed to a moral climate conducive to the murder of Dr. King," but it stopped short of accusing the FBI of actual involvement in the killing.
Footnote:
Conspiracy theorists like to point out similarities between events, and often these take the form of demonstrations of "the power of serendipity," as is the case with the admittedly interesting similarities between the lives and deaths of Abraham Lincoln and JFK. More disturbing are those that illustrate a more concrete similarity, such as that between the modus operandi of two assassinations. Consider these, between the death of JFK and that of Dr. King:
* A rifle with telescopic sight was dropped at the crime scene in both cases. Ballistics evidence was inconclusive, whether either rifle had been used to fire the fatal shots in either case.
* Following both killings, the local police networks were penetrated, interfering with efforts to catch the suspects.
* In both cases, high law enforcement officials alleged that the slayings were done by lone assassins, even before investigations were underway.
* In both cases, there is reason to believe that the FBI falsified evidence.
* In both cases, the assassins were allegedly motivated by political beliefs that neither can be documented to have had prior to the assassinations.
* Investigative files for both investigations were sealed, for reasons of "national security," for long periods of time: JFK's for 75 years, and King's for 50.
Bibliography
"Are You Sure You Know Who Killed Martin Luther King?" by Bynum Shaw (Esquire, March 1972)
J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and His Secrets (W.W. Norton & Co., 1991)
The King Conspiracy, by Michael Newton (Holloway House Publishing Co., 1987)
The Martin Luther King Assassination: New Revelations of the Conspiracy and Cover-Up, 1968-1991, by Dr. Phillip H. Melanson (Shapolsky Publishers, 1991)
"The Murder of Martin Luther King Jr." by John Edginton and John Sergeant (Covert Action, Summer 1990)
"Some Disturbing Parallels" by William Turner (Ramparts, July 13, 1968)
Who Killed Martin Luther King? The True Story By The Alleged Assassin, by James Earl Ray (National Press Books, 1992)