THE QUESTION OF CONSPIRACY

James Earl Ray, the bungling petty gunman and burglar whose life of crime has been mostly one fizzle after another, was back where he had always longed to be: at the center of national attention. With his renewed prominence, painful memories--and nagging questions--flooded back concerning his slaying of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on a Memphis motel balcony on April 4, 1968.

Now all the little questions within the big question--Did he really conceive and carry out the assassination of King alone?--would loom large once more. Where did this inept criminal get the money to finance his year of flight, from April 23, 1967, when he broke out of the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, through the slaying of King and Ray's arrest at London's Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968? Where did he pick up the savvy to adopt four clever aliases in Canada during that flight and then acquire a passport to travel to London and Lisbon, eluding for so long one of the most massive man hunts in modern times?

The seeming paradox of the two-bit thief who destroyed one of America's heroic figures is certain to tantalize imaginative minds forever. Ray grew up in a farm shack near Ewing, Mo., in an impoverished, quarreling family that in his early years struggled to survive. His father at times worked at local hauling jobs with a pickup truck, and as a railroad hand. He had also spent two years in prison for larceny. Ray turned to crime, following the precedent of his father, an uncle and a brother. His parents split in 1952, after his mother had become an alcoholic.

Ray grew into such an incompetent criminal that he dropped telltale identification at the site of one breakin; got lost after a holdup and drove his getaway car back into the robbery neighborhood, to be pursued and caught by surprised police; was caught another time when he re-entered the window of a business as he tried to steal more items from a place he had already robbed. Despite his reputation as an escape artist, most of his many efforts ended in frustration (see box).

Beyond that background, another reason that questions persist is that no official investigation has even attempted to lay out publicly all the details of Ray's involvement in King's murder. When Ray pleaded guilty in court on March 10, 1969, Tennessee prosecutors merely declared that they had examined all the evidence compiled by local and state police, the FBI and even international agencies and concluded that "we have no proof other than that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by James Earl Ray and James Earl Ray alone, not in concert with anyone else." Ray's attorney at the time, the flamboyant Percy Foreman, said he had grilled Ray for some 50 hours, checked all his expenses "down to 75-c- for a shave and a haircut," and reluctantly concluded that Ray had had no help killing King.

But after telling the Memphis judge that he had indeed shot King, Ray injected an objection that has fanned conspiracy theories ever since. He said he did not agree with the conclusions, cited by Foreman, of the Tennessee attorney general, U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover that there was no conspiracy. But Ray refused to elaborate.

Although Judge W. Preston Battle failed to pursue Ray's tantalizing reservation, he did repeatedly ask Ray if he understood just what he was admitting and that he was waiving forever his right to a trial. Said Ray: "Yes, sir." The judge: "Has anything besides your sentence of 99 years in the penitentiary been promised to you to get you to plead guilty?" Ray: "No, no one has used pressure."

Later, in letters that he wrote to his biographer William Bradford Huie, Ray claimed that he had merely followed directions from a man he had met in a Montreal bar after his escape from the Missouri prison. Ray claimed he knew the blond Latin stranger only as "Raoul." He told Huie that Raoul had asked him to smuggle unnamed contraband into the U.S. from both Canada and Mexico, then buy a car and a rifle in Birmingham, and finally to drive to Memphis and check into a sleazy rooming house facing the Lorraine Motel, where King was staying. Ray insisted later to his lawyers that he was not even in the room overlooking the motel when King was shot. He was fixing the spare tire on his car. Ray contended that Raoul must have done the shooting.

Without Ray's confession, the case against him was strong but circumstantial. There was no doubt he had bought the rifle and binoculars left near the scene of the crime; he had rejected a room in the rooming house that did not have a view of the Lorraine before taking one that did, was seen near the murder site within minutes of the killing. No one actually saw him fire the rifle, of course, and the bullet that killed King was too fragmented to be conclusively linked with the gun, which bore Ray's fingerprints.

Hiring and firing various attorneys, Ray fought in vain for a trial, claiming that Foreman had pressured him into confessing. Foreman concedes that he advised Ray that both the evidence and the outraged mood of the country were so strong against him that he probably would be sentenced to death if he insisted on a trial at first, instead of admitting his guilt. Last year Ray's attempt to withdraw his guilty plea and gain a trial was rejected by both the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Judicial Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court. At the time of his escape, Ray had virtually no prospect at all of ever being freed from prison through the judicial system.

Indeed, as the chances of a House committee investigation grew, Ray began to hint that he had concocted the story about Raoul. Before Richard Sprague, the veteran Philadelphia prosecutor, resigned as counsel to the House Select Committee in a flurry of internecine committee bickering, Sprague interviewed Ray in prison three times. Sprague said they were beginning to develop a rapport. After these interviews, Sprague concluded that Raoul "does not and did not exist." Ray did insist, however, that he had had some help from unnamed others while he was a fugitive in Canada, Portugal and England after King's death. The notion, however, that Ray was about to reveal sensational conspiracy details to House investigators at the time of his escape last week has no basis in fact.

Author Huie, who at first promoted Ray's Raoul story in a series of magazine articles, later concluded in a book, He Slew the Dreamer, that Ray had misled him. Huie decided that Ray had acted alone in killing King. But what had motivated Ray? Huie, who dug into much of Ray's life, contended he was just a small-time career crook determined to impress the big shots in his chosen profession by scoring one major hit.

George McMillan, a freelance writer and investigative reporter, came up with a somewhat different, although not conflicting motivation after probing Ray's relatives and prison associates for seven years. He found fellow convicts who described Ray as a racist. They claimed Ray had often talked in prison about getting the man whom Ray called "the big nigger." To McMillan, Ray may have been a bumbler as a thief, but he grew shrewd in the ways of prison life and earned much money dealing in drugs and other contraband behind the walls. McMillan claims Ray sent about $6,500 out of prison from such earnings--and that this money later largely financed his travels as a fugitive (TIME, Jan. 26,1976).

So far no one has presented any evidence that anyone else helped Ray plot the murder of King or instigated the crime. After reading the various accounts of other writers on Ray's activities before and after the murder, Freelancers Jeff Cohen and David S. Lifton claimed in a New Times article last April that Raoul probably was Ray's brother Jerry, who works at a country club near Chicago. They base that theory--a matter of pure conjecture--on the sequence of Ray's various mentions of both Raoul and his brother in these accounts. They also note that Jerry much later became a driver and bodyguard for J.B. Stoner, of Savannah, Ga., a racist who publishes the National States Rights Party's ultra right-wing Thunderbolt magazine. The implication is that King's murder was some kind of far-right conspiracy.

Conspiracy theories have also been advanced by Attorney Mark Lane, who has earned a lucrative living over the past 13 1/2 years by exploiting all the uncertainties over both the J.F.K. and the King assassinations. In May he published a book, Code Name: "Zorro," with Comedian Dick Gregory, another assassination buff, which portrays Ray as the fall guy for the real assassins, who of course are not remotely identified.

The indefatigable Lane has been largely responsible for convincing influential blacks that the King case needs official restudy. He persuaded King's widow Coretta that there was unspecified new evidence warranting an investigation. Her support influenced the Congressional Black Caucus to push creation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Incredibly, when that committee was first set up, it offered the job of chief counsel to the totally biased Lane. Even he realized his acceptance would destroy the investigation's credibility, and the job was offered to Richard Sprague. The highly independent Sprague sought an unreasonably large budget, fought fiercely with the committee's equally stubborn chairman, Texan Henry Gonzales--and both chairman and prosecutor were replaced. The committee still exists but shows little promise of pursuing a judicious inquiry.

One extensive review of the King case was made in 1976 by the Justice Department under Attorney General Edward Levi. It was prompted mainly by revelations that the FBI had conducted a highly personal crusade against King on the orders of J. Edgar Hoover. King's hotel rooms had been bugged by the FBI and, incredibly, the tapes were circulated in Washington. Hoover's hatred of King fueled speculation that the FBI might have been behind the killing or failed to investigate it thoroughly.

The Justice Department's report, released last February after Levi's departure, concluded that King's privacy had been invaded by the FBI surveillance, although it said the fact that "one alleged Communist was a very influential adviser to Dr. King" was sufficient reason for the FBI to be interested in his activities. As for the murder, the Justice report concluded that the FBI'S investigation "was thoroughly, honestly and successfully conducted." The report concluded: "The sum of all the evidence of Ray's guilt points to him so exclusively that it most effectively makes the point that no one else was involved."

The report concedes a loophole: "Of course, someone could conceivably have provided him [Ray] with logistics, or even paid him to commit the crime. However, we have found no competent evidence upon which to base such a theory."

Certainly, the questions about "logistics" are valid. Author McMillan's contention that Ray supported himself as a fugitive mostly from the proceeds of his prison smuggling sounds convincing, although it has not been supported by official investigators. The general claim by FBI and police sources that he lived, as usual, mainly off holdups and burglaries while in flight lacks persuasiveness; no such crimes by Ray have been pinpointed, although there is evidence that he robbed a bank in London shortly before his capture.

Some reporters have concluded that he obtained aliases in Canada during his flight merely by looking up birth announcements in old newspapers at a Toronto library and selecting the names of persons about his age. As for his ready access to a passport, he apparently acquired it under a then common Canadian procedure of swearing that he was indeed the "Ramon George Sneyd" whom he claimed to be. The real Sneyd recalled getting a mysterious phone call from someone asking if he had a passport; presumably Ray was taking a precaution against asking for a passport for a man who already had one.

As Ray's latest escape focuses new attention on all the lingering questions, it may well give new urgency to an official and detailed review of the case. Yet there is serious doubt that such a political body as a House committee is the proper base from which to conduct a credible probe. Certainly, the behavior so far of the House group charged with that duty raises questions about its objectivity and devotion to a responsible inquiry. Some nonpolitical, nongovernmental special commission would seem a better means of getting at the truth.

It would be ideal, of course, if James Earl Ray, finally convinced of the futility of concealing all of the details of his involvement in King's murder and of breaking out of prisons, would lay all the facts on the line in a persuasive way. But after all the twists and turns in his story so far, who would believe him? Moreover, no investigation of any sort is likely to still the doubts of the Mark Lanes and the others who live in the mental world of conspiracy.

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