Did you know that the King family still believes James Earl Ray did not kill Martin Luther King and was framed by the FBI? Yep, for 50 years. They still don't believe the James Earl Ray lone wolf fairytale.
Given that we know now that the FBI facilitated the ISIS attack in Garland, Texas, were involved with the shooter in the Pulse massacre, are part of the coup of President Trump, and have been unable to provide believable information about Parkland and Vegas, or visual evidence of Paddock's or Cruz's guilt, why shouldn't we believe the Kings? Are they all conspiracy theorists?
“It pains my heart,” said Bernice King, 55, the youngest of Martin Luther King’s four children, "that James Earl Ray had to spend his life in prison paying for things he didn’t do.”
Until her own death in 2006, Coretta Scott King, who endured the FBI’s campaign to discredit her husband, was open in her belief that a conspiracy led to the assassination. Her family filed a civil suit in 1999 to force more information into the public eye, and a Memphis jury ruled that the Government was liable for King’s death. The full transcript of the trial remains posted on the King Center’s website.
“There is abundant evidence of a major, high-level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband. The jury found the mafia and various government agencies were deeply involved in the assassination and Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame.”
King’s two other surviving children, Dexter, 57, and Martin III, 60, fully agree that Ray was innocent. And their view of the case is shared by other respected black leaders.
Even those who believe that Ray, who died in prison in 1998, killed King tend to think that he received assistance from someone, whether it was his two brothers or the FBI or the Mafia. Because Ray suddenly pleaded guilty in 1969, less than a year after the shooting, there was no trial. If the FBI or CIA was involved, they had destroyed the evidence by 1979.
Witnesses in Memphis support this theory of the case: that J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, used his longtime assistant, Clyde Tolson, to deliver cash to members of the Memphis underworld, that those shadowy figures then hired a sharpshooting Memphis police officer, and that officer — not Ray — fired the fatal shot.
Ray was born in 1928 and grew up outside St. Louis. His chosen profession was theft and armed robbery, and after his third felony conviction in 1959, he was sentenced to 20 years in the Missouri State Penitentiary. He escaped from the prison in April 1967, and some believe he had help from prison authorities, as part of the opening stanza of the conspiracy.
Ray moved around while on the lam, staying in Chicago, Los Angeles, Mexico and Canada over the next year. He has claimed that while in Montreal he met a man named Raul, of varying physical descriptions over the years, who enlisted him in several small gunrunning schemes, and instructed him to buy a rifle in Birmingham, Ala.
On the afternoon of April 4, Ray checked into a boardinghouse in Memphis, with a bar called Jim’s Grill on the first floor. He paid $8.50 for a week’s stay. The rear of the boardinghouse faced the Lorraine Motel across Mulberry Street.
King was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine outside room 306 when a single rifle bullet was fired into his lower jaw at 6:01 p.m. He died an hour later at St. Joseph’s Hospital. The rifle Ray had purchased in Birmingham was found near the front of the boardinghouse with Ray’s fingerprints on it. Those are about the only facts that aren’t in dispute.
According to the criminal justice system of the state of Tennessee, James Earl Ray fired the shot from the second-floor bathroom of the boardinghouse. He then grabbed some belongings in a blanket, stashed the rifle in it, left the building and dropped the bundle in the doorway of a nearby building. He drove away in a white Ford Mustang before the area was barricaded, went to Atlanta and then to Canada and England before being arrested in July 1968.
Ray pleaded guilty to the murder of King nine months later, on March 10, 1969. He signed a detailed stipulation of facts to the shooting, having had weeks to review it. In court, Ray answered the standard series of questions about whether he was knowingly and voluntarily admitting he committed murder. In exchange for his plea, prosecutors did not seek the death penalty and Ray was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Officially: case closed.
Within days, Ray filed a motion to withdraw his plea, claiming he had been coerced by his attorney and the FBI. Three decades of legal machinations never succeeded in reopening the case, but they revealed new details and led to new theories of how King might have been killed.
At the same time, the misconduct of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI was coming to light. Hoover had ordered surveillance, wiretaps and listening devices placed in King’s rooms starting in 1963, apparently infuriated by King’s criticism of the FBI for not having black agents or investigating civil rights cases.
Recordings and photos of King having sex with women other than his wife were offered to reporters and government officials, often by Hoover himself, and sent to King associates. Hoover once told a group of reporters, on the record, that King was “the most notorious liar in the country.”
Coretta King and Abernathy, aware of the FBI campaign, immediately suspected FBI involvement after King’s death. But Ray’s sudden guilty plea stopped all official investigations.
Ray began to claim that the man he knew only as Raul was present in Memphis on April 4, and that Ray himself was at a nearby gas station when the shot was fired. No one saw the actual shot fired. The screen from the bathroom window was found on the ground below. Some witnesses, including then-New York Times reporter Earl Caldwell, said they saw a man moving in the thick bushes behind Jim’s Grill, below the bathroom. For reasons unknown, Memphis public works employees cut down the bushes and destroyed a possible crime scene the very next morning.
Ballistics tests could not prove that the rifle dropped outside the boardinghouse, a Remington .30-06 Gamemaster, either did or didn’t fire the fatal shot, because the gun did not create distinctive grooves on the bullet, as most guns do.
“That weapon was not the weapon,” Martin Luther King III said. “You’re going to kill somebody and then drop the gun right there?” Ray claimed that he had given the gun to Raul, but only Ray’s fingerprints were on the gun.
Then Loyd Jowers, the owner of Jim’s Grill, began claiming publicly that he was involved in a conspiracy to kill King. He had consistently denied any knowledge of the case for a quarter-century, but now he alleged the gunman was a Memphis police officer who fired from the bushes behind the grill, then handed Jowers the murder weapon. Jowers stashed the rifle behind the bar and said it was later picked up by Raul and tossed in the Mississippi River.
More Memphis witnesses came forward, including a former girlfriend of Jowers, who said she saw him with the rifle shortly after the gunshot rang out, and saw him break it down and place it in the bar.
On April 4, Bernice King will lead commemorative events in Atlanta, including a wreath laying at her father’s grave, a ceremony awarding Martin Luther King Peace Prizes, a reception for children and a March for Humanity through the city. Then, at 6:01 p.m., she will lead a bell-ringing at the exact moment of the shooting, 39 times for every year of her father’s life, certain that the person who killed him has never been caught.
