Memphis

On the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King, there was a march in Memphis. The New York Times carried a photo of the marchers the following day. As it happens, I also took pictures of that march; so I believe The New York Times got that part of the story right.

On the anniversary of the assassination, there was a vigil at the Lorraine Motel, where a single shot took Dr. King's life. According to the Times, "James Earl Ray, a drifter and a petty criminal, admitted firing that shot after his arrest in London..." However, according to the Times:

A certain awkwardness attends this year's commemoration. The King family, which remained in Atlanta for services there, has embraced Mr. Ray's claim of innocence and his contention that he was, at most, an unwitting tool of a conspiracy that authorities have either failed to uncover or refused to unmask...

Only last week, a seven-month review of the killing ended with a declaration by the Memphis District Attorney General, William Gibbons, that the evidence against Ray was overwhelming and that no basis existed for reopening the case.

Why we should find the King family's desire for truth to be "awkward" was not explained. What could account for their stand?

When the national security state wants to sell a story, they turn on the Mighty Wurlitzer. Fill it with quarters and it play relentlesly. "James Earl Ray was a racist," it sings, without the slightest idea who wrote that tune. "James Earl Ray stalked his victim," it goes on, because the chorus always repeats. "He killed Dr. King," is the trailing fade. Then there's a pause and a whir, and the song begins again. It was playing nationwide as the thirtieth anniversary of King's assassination drew near. Newspapers printed excerpts from the lyric; networks played snippets on the six o'clock news. The only detail the campaign lacked was an appropriately colored arm band.

So the most important gathering of the memorial weekend in Memphis received the least coverage. On Friday night, before the march on Saturday, before the candlelight vigil, a group of 130 people attended a real-life truth commission at the Centenary United Methodist Church, the site of Dr. King's last press conference. The Church opened its doors to the Coalition on Political Assassinations, the witnesses, and the public. The press was invited, too. What did they hear?

They heard James Ray's attorney, William Pepper, speak on the passing of Dr. King's legacy. Thirty years ago, blacks were criminalized and incarcerated as a means of social control. Has that changed? Yes, it is true that blacks can walk into restaurants and order lunch without being beaten. But what reality lies beyond that? Is political power more fairly and equally dispersed? Do we still worship the gun In this society?

If equal treatment before the law is the measure of this country's greatness, then consider the treatment accorded Dr. King's alleged killer, James Ray. Pepper introduced the evening's speakers --- people who collectively knew too much. Each one had a little piece of the puzzle where no puzzle was supposed to exist.

Retired Memphis Police Homicide Detective Jerry Williams came forward. His story was simple and direct. For Dr. King's visits to Memphis, security teams of black officers were selected, with Williams, a black man, in charge. But for King's trip in April of 1968, Williams was told that two other officers had been assigned that task. (An entirely white security detail was assembled and then withdrawn, supposedly because of lack of cooperation from King's entourage. Neither the FBI nor the HSCA questioned Williams or any of the black officers who had previously been assigned to protect King.)

On April 4, 1968, John McFerren went to Liberto, Liberto & Latch Produce Company, as he had done many times before, to pick up some items to sell at his gas station/grocery store. He happened to heard Frank Liberto talking to someone on the phone. When McFerren later learned that King had been killed, McFerren knew he had heard something important. But the FBI didn't thirlk so. Neither did the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which canceled his appearance two days before he was scheduled to testify. On April 3, 1998, he stood in Centenary church and related his story.

Lewis Garrison spoke next on behalf of his client, Lloyd Jowers. Five years ago, Lloyd Jowers admitted his part in the conspiracy which ended King's life. He said he was paid $100,000 by Frank Liberto to help arrange the hit. This year, Garrison discussed documentary evidence that after the assassination, investigators were aware of Jowers's involvement. A note on the bottom of a February 3, 1969 memo, in the attorney general's files, disclosed a "reliable witness that has reported to me that someone else committed this assassination..." On February 10, 1969, the district attorney's office received notice of tape recordings of witnesses who implicated Jowers. According to Garrison, authorities have yet to question Jowers about that little matter-or anything else.

Nevertheless, the discrediting of Jowers has gone on full tilt. Jowers, it is claimed, wants money, and lots of it, in exchange for his story. A little thought reveals the claim to be absurd. Jowers has opened himself to prosecution for murder and he is prepared to be questioned on the stand-which would make his story available to everyone for free. If he's looking for bucks, he seems to be going about it the wrong way.

What would Jowers tell a truth commission? According to Garrison, Jowers would say:

...that immediately after the shot was fired that a Memphis police of ficer who had been his hunting companion-they had been hunting on many trips before this [time]-either threw or gave him a gun which was still moking, and that he was told to he at the back door of his restaurant at six o'clock...

According to Garrison, Jowers has admitted attending a meeting about the assassination and alleges that Marrell McCollough was present at that meeting. I will not attempt to summarize the McCollough story here. It is sufficient to note that on April 4, 1968, McCollough was photographed kneeling by King's body within minutes of the shot. Jowers has met with Andrew Young and Dexter King and discussed the murder with them. It is only the authorities who remain uninterested.

Reverend James Orange arose to tell the group that he was at the Lorraine Motel when Dr. King was killed. He turned in reaction to the sound of the shot and saw smoke in the bushes across the street. The bushes were cut down the following morning, and official interest in Reverend Orange ended.

Memphis Police Captain Thomas Smith raced to the scene of the assassination, arriving only a few minutes after receiving news of the murder. Smith questioned a man, Charles Stevens, in the rooming house from which the shot supposedly came. Stevens was so drunk that he had to hold onto the door to stand up. But Stevens would later turn out to be the state's star witness, Captain Smith's observations notwithstanding.

Donald Wilson joined the FBI in 1967. He worked at the FBI office in Atlanta when Ray's white Ford Mustang was found there. He noticed that the passenger side door was ajar, suggesting that two people had exited the vehicle. Wilson also found two pieces of paper bearing Raul's name. There was also a phone number-the number of a telephone at the Vegas club in Dallas. (In 1963, the owner of the Vegas had a scrape with the law when he killed Lee Harvey Oswald, but the establishment survived.) Wilson said he kept the scraps of paper because he feared the FBI would destroy them. Wilson now stands threatened with prosecution for obstruction of justice-in other words, for preserving evidence of Raul for all these years.

I asked Wilson later about the FBI's claim that he was not involved in the search of Ray's Mustang. Wilson replied:

Well, this is to be expected. I mean this was predictable. What they said was the FBI 302 report shows that Wilson didn't participate in the search of the vehicle in the basement of the Federal Building. This is very clever on their part, you see. And I didn't. I was on the scene where it was abandoned. But I did follow it back to the garage and I was in the basement, but I didn't systematically disassemble that car.

One spin currently being applied to all the indications of conspiracy is the "little" conspiracy theory: okay, Ray had help and it must have been one of his brothers. Ray was an escaped convict on the run. Yet, in the months leading up to the assassination, he traveled around the country; he bought a car; he took dancing lessons in California; he had cosmetic surgery performed on his nose. Where did he get the money? After the assassination, he traveled to Canada, then England, activities requiring more money. The House Select Committee on Assassinations attempted to explain Ray's finances by suggesting that James and Jerry Ray held up a bank in Alton, Illinois in July of 1967.

Jerry Ray told the crowd at the Centenary Church that when he learned of this back-handed accusation, he turned himself in to Alton police! The robbery had occurred more than ten years earlier, yet Jerry Ray waived protection under applicable statutes of limitation and offered to stand trial! When asked if he was confessing to the robbery, Jerry Ray said no. But Congress had accused him of a bank robbery connected to the assassination, and Jerry was ready to answer his accusers. None came forward, however, and a spokesman for the police announced that Jerry Ray had never been a suspect in the robbery.

At Centenary Church, William Pepper summarized the accounts of other witnesses who were unable to attend the gathering. William Reed and Ray Hendrix left Jim's Grill around 5:45 p.m. on the evening of the murder. They noticed a white Mustang parked in front of Carlipes. They walked two blocks north and were about to cross Vance Street when a white Mustang driven by a man with black hair turned onto Vance from South Main Street. Reed and Hendrix were unable to identify Ray as the driver of the car, but their accounts supported James Ray's contention that he left the area before that assassination in order to get gas for the car and check the spare tire. The FBI took statements from Reed and Hendrix. According to Pepper:

Those FBI 302s are in the Attorney General's files. They've not been mentioned ever by the Attorney General-not mentioned in his report-not mentioned by Mr. Posner, who had full access to the Attorney General's files. When Mr. Posner wrote his book, he said that the Attorney General's office was like a second office. They were so hospitable; they gave him such amenities; he couldn't compliment them enough.

Pepper related the account of Charles Hurley, who did not appear personally. Hurley's wife, Peggy, worked at a wallpaper company across the street from the Rebel Hotel. On April 4, 1968, Charles stopped on south Main Street to pick her up as usual, around 5:00 p.m. Charles parked behind a white Mustang- Ray's Mustang, if the state is to be believed. Mr. Hurley noticed that a man was sitting in the car, which had Arkansas plates. Ray's Mustang had Alabama plates, however, so Hurley was no use to investigators.

And then William Pepper introduced Judge Joseph Brown. The Tennessee Court of Appeals has removed Ray's appeal from Brown's court, and Brown is now free to speak on certain aspects of the case.

Brown has questions about Ray's aliases. James Ray's travel after the assassination required more than just money; he needed identification and passports. The facts behind Ray's aliases defy non-conspiratorial explanation. (In a nutshell: his aliases were all real men living in a Toronto suburb which Ray had never been to until he fled there after the assassination. Three of the men strongly resembled Ray in general proportions. They had the same hair color, hair style, and hair line. All had facial scars, as does Ray. The primary alias had similar eye color and a history of travel in the southern part of the United States.) How did Ray acquire his aliases? The state dealt with the problem by not dealing with it. Judge Brown thinks the origin of the aliases needs to be explored.

Brown presided over Ray's appeal which resulted in defense tests of the rifle in 1997. To illustrate the problems with the state's case, he described methods of "sighting in" a rifle, i.e., properly aligning the scope. One method, called bore sighting, was not possible with the alleged murder weapon since the rifle had a pump action rather than a bolt action. A second method demands equipment which the gun dealer who sold the alleged murder weapon did not have. A third method available to any shooter requires systematic firing at fixed targets at known distances and progressively refined adjustment of the scope. There is simply no evidence suggesting that ever happened. And as William Pepper noted before introducing Brown, the alleged murder weapon failed an FBI accuracy test on the day after King was killed. If the official story is true, Ray bought a rifle, had a scope mounted but never sighted in, fired exactly one bullet, and landed a fatal shot at a range of over 200 feet.

Did James Ray kill Dr. King? Judge Brown described how ammuntion manufacturers conduct production runs and assign lot numbers for the cartridges, the powder, the primer, and the lead. FBI analysis in 1968 showed that the lead composition of the death slug did not match the rest of Ray's alleged ammunition. How did Ray manage that? The Tennessee Court of Appeals decided that Brown had overstepped his boundaries by pondering such questions. Ray's appeal was removed from Brown's court, and no new judge was ever assigned.

"What?" you ask in amazement. "I never saw any of that in the news."

Very late on Friday night, I caught a rerun on television of a report filed by a pleasant young woman in a red jacket. I recognized her because she had been sitting in the pew in front of me. But let's face it, meaningful discussion of political process is impossible in main-stream electronic news media. The news clip contained several entire words from Ray's attorney. But witness John McFerren is an old man, unaccustomed to public speaking. He isn't television material at all; he doesn't play to the audience or speak in sound bites. And the pleasant young woman never heard the rest of the speakers anyway. The television news crews scurried around to collect their gear and discretely race from the church when McFerren was finished. By the time Judge Brown made his comments, they were long gone.

No doubt they wanted to have their material edited down in time for the ten o'clock news. Perhaps they grew nervous as McFerren slowly described the circumstances surrounding the remarks he overheard, as he described the scene, the hallway to the storerooms and the layout of the office when he came to pick up produce from his usual vendor who was telling someone on the phone to "shoot the son-of-a-bitch when he comes on the balcony." That someone was to go to New Orleans to pick up his money from Liberto's brother, and so on. No techno-crunch could possibly reduce Mr. John McFerren to 17 seconds. The evening had just begun, so to speak, when television coverage ended.

The following morning, Marc Perrusquia wrote about the Centenary gathering for The Commercial Appeal in Memphis. In an article titled "Supporters of King conspiracy preach fervently to the converted," he explained how "the believers and the curious" had come to hear the word of William Pepper and his gospel of conspiracy." It was an "odd night" at the church, during one of "Memphis's more peculiar conventions," where "some 15 'witnesses' took turns 'testifying' to knowledge of a plot to kill Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."

There are many more such witnesses, but the Appeal didn't mention that. The accounts of Reed, Hendrix, Hurley, Williams, Smith, and McFerren were not described by the Appeal; their names were never given.

Even Judge Brown's observations and his condemnation of the tactics of the district attorney's office didn't make the cut. Brown is facing re-election, so his position would appear to have local significance, whatever its larger context. The Appeal summarized Brown's appearance in one sentence --- the last sentence in the article: "Brown was removed from the Ray case for apparent bias."

After the Friday night meeting ended, I caught up with William Pepper in the church parking lot, and asked him about the Eidson situation. Believing that Eidson was dead, Pepper used Eidson's real name in the book Orders to Kill. Pepper was later confronted with Billy Eidson in an ABC interview. The program showed an indignant Eidson demanding a retraction, but the specific claims made by Pepper were never discussed, nor was the nature of Eidson's alibi. Eidson brought a suit against Pepper, and I asked Pepper how that was progressing:

There's a law suit going on in the courts of South Carolina at the present time and it's in the discovery stage. We made a motion to dismiss; the judge hasn't ruled on it yet. But it may be that it will go through. We don't think the courts of South Carolina have jurisdiction over the case.

Pepper filled in some details behind the ABC program which never made it onto the screen:

Eidson was in jail; that's why our people couldn't find him. He was in prison for murder; he had two charges of murder against him. And then when he copped to negligent homicide, he was serving a year-whatever they gave him-then he fled to Costa Rica. That's why our people thought he was dead. They [ABC] never told the viewers that their guy was in jail. They also didn't tell the viewers that I gave them another deep-cover witness. They interviewed him for three hours --- never used a second. He outlined the whole functioning of the team because his best friend was J.D. Hill, one of the snipers.

On Saturday night, COPA arranged for some of the speakers from Friday night, and some new ones, to appear at another open meeting. Wallace Milam, known for his work on the assassination of President Kennedy, discussed Dan Rather's recent program on the King murder. For help in understanding the case, Rather turned to Gerald Posner, author of a recent book on King's murder titled Killing the Dream. (A capsule version of his book can be found in the April 6, 1998, Newsweek.)

Posner's earlier book on the Kermedy assassination, Case Closed, followed the party line in every detail --- which has also been true of Dan Rather and CBS. Still, it was surprising to hear that James Earl Ray must be a racist since he "refused to transfer to an honor farm because blacks were in there." What? Ray wasn't already in a prison with black men? He turned down a transfer to better circumstances because blacks were there, too? That proves he's a racist?

Milam listed other interesting ideas from corporate news, such as the idea that if Ray had had help, he wouldn't have been caught! (Now why didn't I think of that?!) Milam quoted Posner to the effect that Ray had never identified a photo of Raul. But according to Pepper, James Ray identified a photo of Raul in the late 1970s, so perhaps Posner's information was simply not timely.

Pepper says that he has found Raul and that four other people have identified Raul in photo spreads. This has made it necessary to proclaim that Pepper's "Raul" cannot be Ray's "Raul" because the exhaustive FBI investigation proved that Ray's "Raul" doesn't exist. Pepper's "Raul" declined to be interviewed by CBS because, reportedly, he feared for his safety. Our hearts must go out to Raul if he is in danger. But the King family and the Ray family have nothing whatever to gain from Raul's death. So who does he fear?

The last speaker on Saturday night related a story that you already know. He spoke of the destruction of evidence before trial, of falsified ballistics reports, of suppressed and manipulated medical evidence, of defense attorneys who stipulated their client's guilt, of documentary proof that evidence in the archives had been doctored as recently as four years ago, etc., etc. The locale had changed and all the names were new; but that was to be expected. The speaker was attorney Lawrence Teeter. His client, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, allegedly killed Senator Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles, which is a long way from Memphis. Right?

There was a Memphis in Egypt and so there is a pyramid in Memphis, Tennessee --- a theme building in the City of Kings. And what were the pyramids in Egypt, if not tombs? As I was leaving Memphis, I realized that I had never given any thought to going inside that building. I'm not trying to be superior; I live in the city that killed Fred Hampton in his sleep. Still, the pyramid struck me as being so out of place that I momentarily thought I was in Las Vegas.

There is a statue of Elvis Presley in Memphis and finding a place to hear his music is easy. You can still hear B.B. King's music in Memphis, too, and it still feels like a genuine source. But the most important king to pass through Memphis was killed there; the underlying tension there is tremendous. I was going back to Chicago. But a lot of people in that march live in Memphis, and they were going to wake up in Memphis the next morning.

So what can we do? The arrogance of deceit knows no bounds. At the site of King's death, there is a marker bearing an inscription from the Bible. "They said one to another, behold, here cometh the dreamer. Let us slay him and we shall see what will become of his dreams." And what do we see? William Pepper observed that the King family's request for a truth commission has been dismissed in some quarters as "laughable." President Clinton has instructed Attorney General Janet Reno to meet Coretta King. However, the Justice Department clearly cannot be trusted in this matter. Historians, archivists, researchers and community leaders must disclose the truth of Memphis, because the quarters are falling again. The music swells and the choir sings about serene innocence in a world of complete coincidences.

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