Powerful new evidence of a government-abetted conspiracy has prompted King family members to demand a reopening of the investigation into his murder.
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The official story is full of holes. Instead, mounting evidence suggests that King may have been murdered as part of a conspiracy planned and/or abetted by the FBI in coordination with local Memphis police personnel. In this scenario, Ray served as a patsy, like critics allege Lee Harvey Oswald was in the JFK assassination. The real shooter, according to these accounts, struck King not from the boardinghouse bathroom—allegedly from where Ray shot him—but from bushes behind the Lorraine Motel—the King assassination’s version of the grassy knoll.
This article lays out that evidence—as it may soon be laid out in court and a congressional committee—if the King family’s demands to reopen the murder investigation continue to gain traction. What follows is a reconstruction of the events leading up to King’s murder, and the subsequent purported attempts by local and national government officials to cover up their involvement and pin it on a patsy named James Earl Ray.
At 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., was struck in the face by a bullet as he was leaning over the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
An hour later he was declared dead at nearby St. Joseph’s Hospital.
Lone Assassin?
Police authorities fingered James Earl Ray—a career criminal from Alton, Illinois, who had escaped from the Jefferson City, Missouri, penitentiary in April 1967—as the lone
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At his trial, Ray pled guilty and was sentenced to 99 years in prison.
House Select Committee on Assassinations and 1999 Civil Trial
The 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA)—which was convened to investigate the King and Kennedy assassinations—alleged that Ray carried out the killing to collect a bounty from two St. Louis racists, both dead at the time.
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In 2012, G. Robert Blakey, staff director to the HSCA, said, however, that he had been deceived by the CIA—which had failed to inform him that a government liaison to the HSCA, George Joannides, had a CIA background. Blakey told the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger that “thoughtful people today, not just nuts, think that more people than James Earl Ray were involved [in King’s killing].”[5]
In 1999, a mixed-race jury presiding over a wrongful death civil suit by the King family in Memphis reached a unanimous verdict that King was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy involving the U.S. government.
King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, said afterwards that “there is abundant evidence of a major, high-level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband.” The jury found that the mafia and various local, state, and federal government agencies “were deeply involved in the assassination…. Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame.”[6]
Three days after his sentencing, Ray fired his mob-connected attorney, Percy Foreman, and said that he was pressured into pleading guilty and had been set up as a patsy.[7] Foreman was given 60% royalty rights on a book about Ray by William Bradford Huie, which would not have sold if it were about a non-assassin.[8]
The FBI was never able to match the bullet that killed King with the rifle allegedly left by Ray on the steps of the Canipe Amusement Company.
Ray’s fingerprints were also never identified in the room he had rented at the rooming house.
A well-known crime scene investigator determined that the shot from the rooming house bathroom could not have struck King unless Ray had hung out the window or smashed a ten-inch-deep hole in the wall for his rifle to fit into—the angles were all wrong.[9]
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]An Unlikely Assassin
Ray did not have a clear motive for killing King apart from a possible financial one. He could never have survived on the lam after his prison escape and in the two months after the King assassination without outside support. Ray had received money not only for travel and lodging, but also for fake identities, plastic surgery, and even dance and bartending classes and hypnosis. told to buy by the mysterious Raoul (discussed below)—said that Ray “did not seem to know anything at all about firearms, I mean nothing.”[25]
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Loyd Jowers and Jim’s Grill
Taxi driver James McCraw told William Pepper that, on the morning after the shooting, Loyd Jowers, the owner of Jim’s Grill, showed him a rifle in a box on a shelf under the counter, which he said he had “found out back after the killing.”
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Frank Liberto and Carlos Marcello
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Earl Clark and Marrell McCollough
Jowers identified the assassin as Memphis Police Lieutenant Earl Clark—who was regarded as the best shot on the MPD and was close to Liberto.[44] Afterwards, Clark allegedly scaled down a wall adjacent to the Lorraine Motel before jumping into an escape vehicle.[45]
Clark was involved in planning sessions at Jim’s Grill to prepare for the assassination with five other men, only two of whom Jowers could identify.
One of the men, unbeknownst to Jowers, was an undercover police officer and agent provocateur, Marrell McCollough, who was assigned to the MPD from the 11th Military Intelligence Group.
Born in Mississippi, McCollough had served in the military police in Vietnam and went on to work for the CIA in Central or South America. At the time of King’s slaying, McCollough was posing as a member of the Invaders, a militant Black political group, which gave him access to King and his circle. He was identified as the mysterious figure kneeling over Dr. King after he was shot.[46]
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Ray’s Intelligence Background had been planned for many years and originated with his Army service at the end of World War II.
After enlisting in 1946 at the age of 17, Ray served in the 7892nd Infantry Regiment and as a military policeman with the 382nd Military Police Battalion in Nuremburg, Germany. Subsequently, Ray was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He told John Larry that, “when you join the OSS, it’s like joining the Mafia, you never leave.”[49]
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The Mystery of Raoul
After James’s escape, he came in contact with a mysterious figure named Raoul, who provided Ray with phony documents in Montreal, Canada, after the two met at the Neptune Bar.
In exchange for the documents, Raoul had Ray assist him in smuggling contraband across the border and then sent Ray to Birmingham, Alabama, where he purchased a 1966 white Mustang and a telescopic rifle that appears to have served as the fake murder weapon.[61]
In Montreal, Ray was given the identity of Eric St. Vincent Galt—who happened to be a highly placed Canadian operative of U.S. Army intelligence.[62]Galt ran a warehouse for Union Carbide which housed a top-secret munitions project funded by the CIA, the U.S. Naval Surface Weapons Center, and the Army Electronics Research and Development Command.[63]
At 3 p.m. on April 4, Ray met Raoul at Jim’s Grill where he was told to go to the rooming house next to the Lorraine Motel. He then waited for him after the shooting and helped him flee from the scene, before Raoul jumped out of the car and abandoned him to his fate.[64]
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Kimble said that the assassination was carried out by a team of covert intelligence operatives who had an unmarked van with sophisticated electronic radio equipment that could oversee the crime scene and monitor and broadcast on police radio channels.
Two snipers with the team used rifles identical to Ray’s, while other members obtained Memphis Police Department uniforms. The two snipers concealed themselves in the bushes behind the boarding house; one was a backup, the other shot King. The rifles were then concealed in a prearranged hiding place behind the boarding house where they were retrieved by other operatives.
The two snipers afterwards jumped down onto the sidewalk from the bushes and mingled with the other uniformed officers who were rushing about. A voucher had been established for the police imposters. If anyone asked who they were, they were told to call a certain police captain who would vouch for the “new men on the force.”[69]
Secret Army Intelligence Team
The 902nd Military Intelligence Group under the command of Colonel John W. Downie—LBJ’s CIA Vietnam briefer—had been deployed to Memphis at the time of King’s visit with orders to shoot to kill him and aide Andrew Young [later mayor of Atlanta] on command.[70] King was considered “a Negro who repeatedly preached the message of Hanoi and Peking.”
The 902nd Military Intelligence Group had been involved in gun-running with mobster Carlos Marcello; weapons stolen from Army bases were delivered to Marcello and the proceeds were used to help fund black operations.[71] According to two sources, the 902nd included “Klan guys who hated niggers.” A Green Beret said that nobody in it had “any hesitancy about killing the two sacks of shit [King and Young].”[72]
Another Green Beret who participated in a clandestine training course in riot control and surveillance identified a CIA/NSA agent whom he had recognized from his time in Vietnam climbing down a wall behind the Lorraine Motel just after King was shot.[73]
A contact in the CIA had given Downie’s team a detailed area of operations map, pictures of cars used by the King group and Memphis police radio frequencies. It carried camera equipment and took up positions overlooking the Lorraine Motel and monitored King’s telephone conversations from Room 306 and other communications. They obtained pictures that caught the shooter as he was lowering his rifle and Jowers running back toward the rooming house. These were given to Colonel Downie and never revealed publicly.[74] The secret agent who snapped the photos said that the shooter was not Ray.[75]
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FBI’s War Against King
Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg swore in an affidavit that, during a 1978 conversation with Brady Tyson, then an aide to UN Ambassador Andrew Young, Tyson said that a group of off-duty and retired FBI officers, including a sharpshooter, working under the personal direction of J. Edgar Hoover, killed King and then covered it up.[77]
According to Ron Adkins, Hoover’s right-hand man, Clyde Tolson—who allegedly was routinely given money by Hoover to perform criminal deeds including local contract killings—planned King’s assassination beginning in May 1964 on a cruise to Southampton, England, with Russell Adkins, Sr., Ron’s father and a Memphis city engineer, Klansman, and fixer for the Dixie mafia.[78]
Part of the plot involved Tolson’s providing envelopes of money to be paid to informants and $25,000 to the warden of the Missouri state prison, Harold Swenson, to arrange for Ray’s escape.[79]
Hoover had considered King an enemy of the state. In December 1963, less than a month after the assassination of President Kennedy, FBI officials had met in Washington to explore ways of “neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader.”[80]
Hidden microphones were placed in Dr. King’s hotel rooms in an attempt to pick up evidence of extramarital sexual activity, break up his marriage, or blackmail him.
The Bureau also engaged in surreptitious activities and burglaries against Dr. King and SCLC.[81] In a letter sent to King in 1964 calling King a “colossal fraud,” the FBI even encouraged him to commit suicide.
FBI-MPD Links
The FBI enjoyed very close connections with the Memphis PD.
E.H. Arkin founded MPD’s intelligence unit in 1967 under the tutelage of FBI agent William Lawrence, who headed the FBI Memphis Field Office’s domestic intelligence operations which surveilled King.[82]
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FBI Gets King to Stay at the Lorraine Motel—and Switch His Room
On March 29, 1968, the FBI issued from headquarters a COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) memorandum, written by G.C. Moore, chief of the racial intelligence section, to William C. Sullivan, Assistant Director in charge of the intelligence division, that was designed to influence King to stay at the Lorraine Motel when he returned to Memphis on April 3.
The memo recommended placement of a news item with the Bureau’s friendly sources which would read as follows:
The fine Hotel Lorraine in Memphis is owned and patronized exclusively by Negroes but King didn’t go there after his hasty exit [from] the demonstration of March 28. Instead, King decided the plush Holiday Inn Motel, white-owned, operated and almost exclusively white patronized, was the place to “cool it.” There will be no boycott of white merchants for King, only for his followers.[88]
A retired New York Police detective later uncovered that King was initially supposed to stay in a secluded room in the motel, #202, but was moved to Room 306 with an exposed balcony after the concierge received a call supposedly from SCLC in Atlanta asking for the change in room. According to William Pepper and Phillip Nelson, the caller was actually an FBI infiltrator inside SCLC who acted under the orders of police chief Holloman and had been paid through an intermediary. The infiltrator or possibly infiltrators also had the task of getting King out of his room onto the balcony before 6 PM and making sure he was wearing a tie so he could be identified by the assassin.[89]
