From: Brad Pierce <pierce@CS.UCLA.EDU>
Subject: CAIB: The Murder of Martin Luther King Jr. (1/3)
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: ?
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 08:15:49 GMT

Reprinted with permission from Covert Action Information 
Bulletin, Number 34 (Summer 1990), pages 21-27.
Subscription information & back issues at end of part 3.

The Murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

by John Edginton and John Sergeant

[Editors' Note: In April 1988, John Edginton, a British 
independent film maker, began an inquiry into the circumstances 
surrounding the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Edginton had 
just completed a film about King's life ("Promised Land") and was 
intrigued by comments by King's friend, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, 
that King was murdered by government forces. By January 1989, 
Edginton had gathered enough evidence disputing the official 
verdict that BBC Television agreed to fund a documentary: "Who 
Killed Martin Luther King?" John Sergeant joined the team as 
associate producer. The film aired in England in September 1989 
and on cable television in this country in March 1990. The 
following article is derived from information gathered in their 
investigation and raises questions about government complicity in 
the assassination of the civil rights leader.]


Introduction

Equivocation, uncertainty, and doubt have never been fully 
dispelled with respect to the untimely death of Martin Luther 
King Jr. in 1968. This could be put down in part to the intensity 
of public suspicion over the killing of President John F. 
Kennedy. But suspicions linger primarily because of the 
inherently unconvincing nature of the official version of the 
events.

In an apparently {bona fide} effort to lay these ghosts to rest, 
the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations 
(HSCA) concluded an investigation in 1979 which reaffirmed the 
guilt of convicted assassin James Earl Ray but conceded the 
probable existence of a conspiracy behind him - headed by a group 
of St. Louis businessmen with ties to organized crime. It 
referred its leads to the Justice Department which quietly closed 
the case in 1983.

However, new revelations clearly demand official answers. The 
case should now be reopened and the whole 22-year-saga of James 
Earl Ray's conviction and imprisonment should now be rigorously 
reviewed.

The first important new revelation involves Jules Ron Kimble, a 
convicted murderer serving time in a federal prison in Oklahoma. 
In a recent interview, Kimble admitted being intimately involved 
in a widespread conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of 
King. He said that this conspiracy involved agents of the FBI and 
the CIA, elements of the "mob," as well as Ray. In the late 
1970s, investigators of the HSCA interviewed Kimble but, 
according to their report, he denied any knowledge of the murder. 
Now, for the first time, Kimble publicly admits participating in 
the assassination. [1. Kimble made this admission while being 
interviewed for the film documentary {Who Killed Martin Luther 
King?} The interview took place at the El Reno Federal 
Penitentiary, El Reno, Oklahoma, in June 1989.]

Kimble, a shadowy figure with ties to the U.S. intelligence 
community and organized crime, corroborates much of Ray's self-
serving story. He alleges that Ray, though involved in the plot, 
did not shoot King and was in fact set up to take the fall for 
the assassination. [2. {Ibid}.]

Jules Kimble, in implicating the mob and CIA in the 
assassination, claims to have introduced Ray to a CIA identities 
specialist in Montreal, Canada, from whom Ray gained four 
principal aliases. In August 1989, a former CIA agent serving in 
Canada around the time of the King assassination, confirmed that 
the CIA did indeed have such a false identities specialist 
operating out of Montreal in the late 1960s. [3. Telephone 
interview with ex-CIA agent who requests anonymity, August 1989; 
in-person interview in December 1989.]

An investigation by Dr. Philip Melanson revealed that the 
identities that Ray adopted during the period of the 
assassination were far more elaborate than previously realized. 
Melanson concluded that in at least one instance, Ray's alias 
could only reasonably have derived from a top secret security 
file accessible only to military and intelligence agencies. [4. 
See Philip Melanson, {The Murkin Conspiracy} (New York: Praeger, 
1989).]

Finally, Ray who has been protesting his innocence for over 20 
years, has always claimed that he was set up for the 
assassination by a mysterious "handler" called Raoul whom he had 
first encountered in Montreal nine months before. The former CIA 
agent who served in Canada named the agency's Montreal identities 
specialist at the time as Raoul Maora. [5. {Op. cit.}, n. 3.]

Jules Ron Kimble cannot be dismissed out-of-hand. For a start he 
has a long record of mob activity and violence, often with 
political overtones. He is currently serving a double life 
sentence in El Reno, Oklahoma, for two murders he admits were 
political. He has proven links to the Louisiana mob empire of 
Carlos Marcello (frequently accused of involvement in political 
assassination) and admits to having done mob-related work in New 
Orleans, Montreal, and Memphis during the late sixties - three 
key cities in Ray's odyssey. [6. A July 1989 phone interview with 
a Baton Rouge police detective confirmed Kimble's close ties to 
organized crime. State investigator Joe Oster also investigated 
Kimble because of allegations of Kimble's involvement in the 
murder of union leader Victor Busie. In this investigation, Oster 
found that Kimble had ties to the Ku Klux Klan and organized 
crime.]

Investigative records from the period confirm Kimble to have been 
involved with the underworld and the KKK, to have been in 
Montreal in the summer of 1967, and to have been called in for 
questioning in connection with the Kennedy assassination by then-
New Orleans District Attorney, Jim Garrison. During this 
questioning, Kimble admitted being linked to the local FBI and 
CIA and Garrison accepted this admission as true. [7. Statement 
taken from Jules Kimble by New Orleans District Attorney Jim 
Garrison on October 10, 1967.]

Like his contemporary, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jules Kimble had been 
living in Crescent City, California during the early 1960s and 
was associating with gangsters, segregationists, the FBI and, he 
forcefully asserts, the CIA. He is known to have been in contact 
with David Ferrie, the dead CIA flier who has been repeatedly 
implicated in the assassination of John Kennedy. [8. {Ibid}.]

Most astonishingly, Jules Ron Kimble is not dismissed out-of-hand 
by James Earl Ray. When Ray was recently confronted with the 
alleged connection, he said that Kimble may have been one of two 
mysterious figures he saw on the afternoon of the assassination 
but he wasn't sure. Ray then asked if Kimble was in prison (which 
he was) but rejected Kimble's allegations about their connection 
as some sort of "government disinformation." [9. Interview with 
James Earl Ray, June 1989, Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary, 
Tennessee.]

Although James Earl Ray, now 60, stands convicted of shooting 
Martin Luther King, most observers agree the truth of what really 
happened has never been established. New evidence from Kimble, 
compounded with other recent revelations, establish that the 
issue is not whether government operatives were involved in the 
King assassination but rather how high up the chain of command 
the conspiracy ran.


The Lone Gunman

In late March 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came to 
Memphis to support the city's striking sanitation workers who 
were predominantly black. He led a march of 6000 protesters which 
disintegrated into violence between police and demonstrators, 
giving conservative forces the opportunity to scorn King's 
doctrine of nonviolent political struggle. Determined to prove 
the sanitation workers' protest could be peaceful, King returned 
to Memphis on April 3rd to lead a second march.

On April 4, a few minutes before 6 p.m., Dr. King walked out on 
the balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel. 
He was scheduled to attend a dinner at the local Reverend Billy 
Kyles's house and was bantering with his chauffeur down in the 
parking lot below. At 6:01 p.m. there was a shot. A high-velocity 
dum-dum bullet hit Dr. King in the neck, severing his spinal 
column and leaving a massive exit hole. One hour later, in St. 
Joseph's Hospital in Memphis, King died.

Public suspicions over the investigation of Dr. King's death 
surfaced almost immediately. In 1968 there was already a growing 
body of opinion at odds with the official explanation that Lee 
Harvey Oswald had been the lone assassin of John F. Kennedy. In 
Memphis, King too had been shot with a high-velocity rifle, 
ostensibly from a window. Moreover, like Dallas, the 
assassination had taken place under the noses of the authorities 
in broad daylight.

Soon after his murder, questions surrounding the assassination of 
King began to emerge. How had so many police arrived so quickly 
on the scene - within moments of the shot being fired - yet 
failed to spot the assassin either arriving or departing? Who, in 
an apparent attempt to distract police radio control, had 
broadcast a hoax car chase involving a Mustang on citizens band 
radio less than half an hour after the police radio announced the 
suspect car to be a white Mustang? If, as the police claimed, the 
shot had come from the bathroom window, why did at least three 
people claim to have seen a gunman in the bushes across the 
street?

The official scenario of how Ray shot King is as follows: Ray was 
supposed to have checked into a rooming house on Main Street, the 
back of which faces the Lorraine Motel; established a sniper's 
post in the bathroom; shot Martin Luther King; panicked and 
dropped his belongings on the sidewalk as he fled the rooming 
house, leaving the rifle to be discovered with his fingerprints 
on it; and then raced out of Memphis in a white Mustang.

Suspicions of conspiracy in the murder of King did not diminish 
with the capture of Ray, though officials continued to maintain 
he was a lone assassin. On the contrary, expectations of major 
revelations at Ray's forthcoming trial were very high. But these 
expectations were never gratified. The public was kept ignorant 
of many anomalies and peculiarities in the case, some of which 
were even ignored by investigators.

The most prominent of these inconsistencies in the state's case 
was the self-contradictory and inconsistent testimony of its 
chief witness, Charlie Stephens. Stephens, who the state claims 
saw Ray emerging from the bathroom, did not recognize Ray in a 
photo he was shown shortly after the assassination. The state 
also failed to mention that Stephens was an alcoholic and was 
drunk the afternoon of the King murder.


Why Did Ray Plead Guilty?

It has never been established where the idea of Ray's guilty plea 
originated but certain facts stand out. Ray's lawyers in the 
original trial were Hugh Stanton Sr., the Shelby County Public 
Defender and Percy Foreman. It is interesting to note that 
earlier Stanton had acted as lawyer to Charlie Stephens - the 
prosecution's chief witness. No one in the judicial system, 
however, saw his acting as Ray's attorney as a conflict of 
interest.

In December 1967, Foreman proposed to prosecutor Phil Canale that 
Ray could be convinced to plead guilty in exchange for a slightly 
reduced sentence and no death penalty. Canale was favorable to 
the idea and consulted with the King family lawyer, Harry Wachtel 
(former Governor of Tennessee), officials at the Justice 
Department, and finally the Attorney General. Everyone agreed 
that the guilty plea was a splendid idea. It was Foreman's job to 
convince Ray. [10. Interview with Phil Canale, Memphis, 
Tennessee, June 1989; interview with Dr. William Pepper, Memphis, 
Tennessee, June 1989.]

Ray would have none of it. And it took more than two months for 
him to cave in, despite all manner of tactics employed to 
pressure him and his family into agreeing. Foreman even assured 
Ray in a letter that there was a 100% chance he would be found 
guilty and a 99% chance of the electric chair (even though the 
state's case was very weak and no one had gone to the chair in 
Tennessee in more than a decade). Ray also discovered he could 
not change his lawyer again and that Foreman was doing nothing to 
develop a defense. Finally Ray somehow believed that if he 
pleaded guilty he could dismiss Foreman, demand a new lawyer, and 
receive a new trial. [11. {Ibid}.]

The so-called trial took place suddenly on March 10, 1968 and 
following a lengthy list of charges the state would have tried to 
prove, Ray pleaded guilty as arranged and was sentenced to 99 
years. He immediately petitioned for a new trial, which was 
denied, and has been petitioning on every conceivable ground ever 
since, also to no avail.

In 1974, however, Ray succeeded in prying from the state an 
evidentiary hearing. The hearing was to determine whether Ray had 
enough grounds for a new trial based on his being negligently 
represented by attorney Percy Foreman. Harold Weisberg, a veteran 
of the John Kennedy case and a writer, was taken on as an 
investigator on Ray's legal team.


Major Inconsistencies in the State's Evidence

Weisberg's investigation was a searching and vigorous one. 
Although he differs with many experts in his conclusions - he 
believes Ray to be totally innocent, a fall guy or "patsy" - many 
of his arguments about the weakness of the official case and the 
existence of a conspiracy remain persuasive to this day. Through 
his relentless pursuit of FBI documentation under the Freedom of 
Information Act, Weisberg found many documents which revealed 
numerous irregularities in the Bureau's investigation. Among 
other inconsistencies, the state's examination of the alleged 
murder weapon is very revealing.

An internal FBI report on the bullet which killed King said that 
it was too mangled to compare against the rifle that allegedly 
fired it. The report states that "... its deformation and absence 
of clear cut marks precluded a positive determination." Yet the 
evidence presented at Ray's "trial" gave the impression that the 
"death slug" was proven to have been fired from the rifle. [12. 
Internal FBI ballistics report, released under the Freedom of 
Information Act, dated April 17, 1968.]

Weisberg consulted with a ballistics expert who examined the 
bullet and concluded that there were indeed sufficient markings 
on it to make test-fire comparisons. The ballistics expert is 
adamant about the fact the FBI could and should have carried out 
such tests. [13. Herbert McDonnell, the ballistics expert who 
made this claim, is regarded as a leading authority. He presented 
these views in an interview conducted June 1989, Memphis, 
Tennessee.]

One of Weisberg's most powerful arguments concerns the crime 
scene itself. How, he wonders, did the assassin, who would have 
had to stand in a bathtub to fire at King, manage to take a 
single shot, run from the bathroom into the bedroom, bundle up 
the rifle and a bizarre collection of personal belongings into a 
blanket (ensuring that the belongings but not the bathroom or the 
bedroom had his fingerprints on them), run the length of the 
rooming house, down a flight of stairs, dump the bundle in the 
street, walk calmly to his waiting Mustang and drive away within 
the one to two minutes it took uniformed officers to reach the 
same location?

Official records as to precisely what took place on the street 
outside the rooming house - Main Street, one block west of the 
motel - in those critical minutes, are astonishingly chaotic.

At Ray's trial in 1969, testimony was given by Inspector N.E. 
Zachary of the Memphis Police Department that he found the rifle 
and the bundle first. By the time of the 1974 evidentiary 
hearings (after various books had researched the question), the 
state conceded that another officer, Sheriff's Deputy Bud 
Ghormley was first to discover the bundle.

Yet Ghormley, in turn, has been contradicted by Sheriff's Deputy 
Vernon Dollahite. Dollahite, now chief of detectives, insisted 
that he was the first onto Main Street and first to see the 
bundle. Dollahite has been consistent in his story from the 
beginning. After one of his early FBI interviews, they calculated 
that the time he took from the shot being fired to his arrival on 
Main Street was 1 minute 57 seconds.

The extraordinary factor in Dollahite's testimony is that though 
alert for anything unusual as he raced around the corner onto 
Main Street, he not only missed the Mustang pulling away, he did 
not even see the bundle with the rifle in it. Only after he had 
entered Jim's Grill beneath the rooming house, told everyone to 
stay put, and come out again, did he spot it lying in a doorway a 
few yards away. He and the FBI agreed that whomever was about to 
dump the bundle had probably seen him coming, hidden behind the 
staircase door until he had gone into the grill, then run onto 
the street throwing down the bundle while Deputy Dollahite was 
inside.

There is an obvious problem with this scenario. How could Ray run 
out of the doorway, throw down the incriminating bundle, and then 
manage to climb into a white Mustang and drive off unnoticed 
within the seconds it took Dollahite to emerge from Jim's Grill 
just feet away?

The judge at the evidentiary hearing took more than a year to 
conclude that Ray had no grounds for a retrial. The defendant's 
guilt or innocence was immaterial to the issue at hand, he said.

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