The King Assassination

The King Assassination Revisited

Coretta King marched through the streets of Atlanta last week, honoring the 47th birthday of her slain husband by leading a band of protesters demanding jobs for the unemployed. Before he died, Martin Luther King Jr. had been immersed in planning a Poor People's Campaign with the same goal. Then came the sniper's shot that killed him in Memphis on April 4, 1968, the two-month pursuit of his killer, and the swift conviction of a smirking, small-time thief named James Earl Ray. Yet nearly eight years later, the widespread feeling still persists that King's murder has not really been solved.

In the most recent Harris Poll, 60% of the population has expressed the opinion that there must have been a conspiracy to murder the civil rights leader. Prompted by the revelation that the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had conducted a vicious vendetta to discredit King, the Justice Department is probing both the FBI's harassment of him and its investigation of his death.

Tough to Prove. Certainly there are a number of unanswered questions. Why would Ray have killed King? How did he finance a year of travel, ranging from Acapulco to Montreal, London and Lisbon, between his escape from the state penitentiary in Jefferson City, Mo., on April 23, 1967, and his arrest at London's Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968? How could he have acquired passports, false identification and four cred ible aliases without help? For that matter, did Ray--who has repudiated his guilty plea and demanded a trial--really kill King? The evidence against him is persuasive, but it is also largely circumstantial. The case might be tough to prove in court. Because of his guilty plea, Ray's case never went before a jury.

Intriguing answers to some of those questions will be published this fall in a book about James Earl Ray. The book is the fruit of seven years of dogged research by George McMillan, 62, a freelance investigative reporter from Tennessee now living in Cambridge, Mass.* He wrote magazine articles on Southern race problems before working on an NBC-TV special on the John Kennedy assassination. With an advance from his publisher, Little, Brown, McMillan set out in 1969 to do a psychological study of Ray. As he gradually gained the confidence of various members of the impoverished and prison-prone Ray family (he paid Ray's father, two brothers and one sister a total of $3,850 to help with his research), McMillan became convinced that Ray had the motive, the means and the capability for killing King without any help at all (see excerpts page 18).

As have other writers, McMillan traces Ray's itinerant and difficult upbringing: eldest of nine children; father sometimes fixing and trading junk cars, hauling with a pickup truck, dishwashing, more frequently out of work, then abandoning the family; mother turning to alcohol; two brothers often in prison or reform school; one uncle a convict; life, with no privacy, in a farm shack near Ewing, Mo., and in a grandmother's house in Alton, Ill.; postwar service as an Army MP in Nurnberg, Germany; a discharge for a "lack of adaptability" to military service.

Window Fall. Ray was a bungling burglar. In his first known job, he dropped his savings-account passbook and Army discharge notice in the Los Angeles cafeteria he had broken into. Chased on foot by police after robbing a Chicago cab driver, he fell through the basement window of a house. In a dry-cleaner burglary in East Alton, he was surprised re-entering the place for more loot by cops who had noticed the window ajar. After stealing postal money orders in Illinois with a friend, he left a trail of poorly forged cashed orders and was caught. During two grocery-store stickups in St. Louis, he and accomplices scooped up about $2,000 from cash registers and passed up some $30,000 in locked safes. Arrested after the second stickup, he insisted on taking the stand in his own defense and was unable to offer a credible alibi. On March 17, 1960, at the age of 32, Ray was sentenced to 20 years in the Missouri state prison in Jefferson City. His accomplice got only seven years.

McMillan claims that Ray was a Nazi sympathizer who used to give the

"Heil Hitler" salute around his home (this was one reason he requested duty in Germany); that he was an anti-black racist; and that he developed an intense hatred for King. McMillan supports these claims with statements quoting Ray's relatives, criminal accomplices and fellow inmates. They may all be shaky sources, but they would seem to . have little reason to lie about Ray. McMillan quotes one of Ray's burglary accomplices, Walter Rife, for example, as saying: "Yeah, Jimmy was a little outraged about Negroes. He didn't care for them at all. Once he said, 'Well, we ought to kill them, kill them all.' "

Was Ray recruited by conspirators to kill King? According to McMillan, he was plotting the murder well before he escaped from prison by hiding in a large crate used to carry loaves of bread to a prison honor farm (this required an accomplice in the prison). Moreover, McMillan quotes the assassin's brother Jerry as saying that Ray telephoned him from Memphis on the morning of the murder and said he was going to get "the big nigger" the same day.

Ray has long claimed that he had met a mysterious Latin-looking man he knew only as "Raoul" in a Montreal bar after his escape. Raoul, Ray insisted, had planned the murder and given Ray money to buy a car and a rifle and to finance his travels. But Ray's brother Jerry told McMillan: "The whole thing about Raoul and running drugs from Canada was bullshit. He went to Canada the first time to look the place over, to see how to get out of the country."

Yet Jerry, a drifter for many of his 40 years and now a night watchman in northern Illinois, changed his story last week and told TIME in an interview that the mysterious Raoul was behind everything. Jerry insisted that his brother had been "set up" in the case and quoted Ray as telling him recently: "I've got witnesses to prove I was some place else when the shot was fired." Jerry now claims that he never talked to Ray on the day of the murder.

McMillan maintains that Ray was sending large sums of money out of prison and that this was sufficient to cover his expenses and travel for the year in between his escape and his arrest. Although a failure as a crook, Ray was a sharp operator in prison, a moneymaking "merchant" who dealt in drugs, prison food supplies and other contraband.

Illicit Earnings. McMillan reports that Ray's brothers Jack and Jerry gave Ray $4,700 in cash in a Chicago hotel right after Ray's escape, while Jerry retained another $1,500 for Ray to use later. In all, according to McMillan, Ray had sent out from prison illicit earnings of about $6,500, then netted about $500 in laborer's jobs while a fugitive and probably spent about $6,800 in his year of freedom. Ray committed a holdup in England before his arrest, indicating that his funds probably had run out--and that no conspirators seemed to be financing him, at least then.

The McMillan book also tackles some peripheral questions that have bothered other investigators. Why did Ray order expensive photo equipment from a Chicago supplier? Possibly to see if he could make money selling pornographic pictures: McMillan quotes two of Ray's brothers as saying they discussed this venture with Ray. Why did he drop a bundle of evidence, including a rifle and binoculars, on the sidewalk near the rooming house from which King was shot? Because a police car was near by and Ray feared he would be caught with the goods.

But how could Ray obtain false ID and passports and thus elude police for so long? McMillan's book, which drops the narrative after the shooting of King, suggests that Ray had picked up some of his aliases from the novels he had read. Since four of the names Ray used in his flight, including Eric Starve Gait, were living residents of the Toronto area, the explanation of other investigators sounds more reasonable. They claim that Ray went to a Toronto library, looked at old newspapers for birth announcements that gave names of men roughly his own age and picked up his aliases from them. He might well have learned of this tactic while in prison. At least two of the men whose names were used by Ray received calls from someone posing as a government official and inquiring if they had ever applied for passports; Ray presumably did not want to get caught by applying for a passport that had already been issued. He did, in fact, get a passport merely by swearing that he was "Ramon George Sneyd," a Canadian citizen. Ray's false identity had been cleverly established; he even underwent plastic surgery in Los Angeles to alter the shape of his nose--but in the end he left a telltale series of fingerprints at the scene of the King crime.

But what of a more serious concern--that the FBI either bungled the whole investigation because of Hoover's hatred for King, or may even have helped plan the murder? As part of its own fresh investigation of the King case, TIME has learned that a Justice Department review of the FBI's work will conclude there is no evidence of any kind that the FBI 1) helped arrange the killing, or 2) failed to do everything it could to run down the sniper and any conspirators. Since the FBI is an arm of the Justice Department, of course, that will carry little weight with most critics of the FBI's role. A more independent review would be required to still all doubts, and in fact Justice officials apparently will urge that a special prosecutor or independent commission be named to make a separate inquiry.

Raise Doubt. Ray is now pushing for a trial, claiming that he was coerced into pleading guilty by his lawyer at the time, Percy Foreman. An expensive and flamboyant attorney, Foreman believed that the case against his client was so strong that only a guilty plea could save him from execution. Moreover, Foreman argued, a Southern jury, in the aftermath of national revulsion over the John and Robert Kennedy assassinations, would want to show that the South did not tolerate such acts. Nevertheless, one state witness, who claimed to have seen Ray leaving the rooming house after the shooting, seemed unreliable. The bullet that hit King was too fragmented to be conclusively linked to Ray's rifle by ballistics tests. No one saw Ray shoot. A sharp lawyer presumably had a chance to raise reasonable doubt in the minds of a jury about Ray's guilt. On the other hand, the lawyer would have had to explain Ray's thumbprint on the weapon, his purchasing binoculars and a rifle, and the fact that Ray rejected a room in the Memphis rooming house where he stayed in favor of one with the assassin's view.

Among the experienced writers who spent years researching books on the assassination, most (including McMillan, Gerrold Frank and William Bradford Huie) have concluded that Ray acted alone. Even if they are right, their work is unlikely to dispel all doubts in a period when, with some justification, many people are unwilling to reject readily any conspiracy theory.

* McMillan's wife Priscilla is writing a book with Marina Oswald on President John Kennedy's assassination.

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