Did the FBI Kill Martin Luther King?

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee. The shooter was eventually identified as James Earl Ray, an escaped convict and lifelong racist. But was this the real story, or was there a much darker conspiracy to eliminate King involving J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI?

It is time to venture once more into the breach and examine the world of outrageous sounding conspiracies. Researching the assassination of John F. Kennedy already rocked my world as I discovered that there is a preponderance of evidence indicating that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone, but I assumed that was an outlier.

Most of the famous American conspiracy theories took place decades before I was born. That makes sense, because most of America took place decades or even centuries before I was born. The problem with that is that, unless someone is motivated to research a particular topic, they all kind of get lumped together. The moon landing, the JFK assassination, alien spacecraft at Area 51: these conspiracies were taught to us as footnotes, if at all.

These weren’t complex historical events worthy of greater understanding, they were outlandish conspiracies to be used as punchlines in pop culture. To be fair, in the vast majority of cases that’s an accurate assessment. We really did land on the moon and extraterrestrials have never been to Nevada.

Besides, with decades to uncover these conspiracies before I would have learned about them, then obviously everyone would have known the truth already, right? Even if the full conspiracy had yet to be uncovered, if there was any merit to these ideas then of course those details would have been in history books. But there was nothing there.

Perhaps this was just the result of shitty American public schooling, or maybe it’s because I grew up near Boston, a city famous for viewing a 1965 law to desegregate schools as a friendly suggestion rather than a legally binding mandate. Either way, in school I was taught that King was a civil rights leader who was assassinated by James Earl Ray, an escaped convict and unhinged racist who wanted to stop the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. Day has been a federal holiday since the year after I was born, and yet that’s pretty much all I was ever taught about him.

Never was it mentioned that King was standing in the room when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and that he had moved on to larger goals. In a 1967 report to the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a civil rights group of which he was president, King stated:

We have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights, an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society. We have been in a reform movement… But after Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be the era of revolution. We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things.

We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.

It was one thing when King was just fighting to have a 95 year old amendment to the Constitution actually be enforced, but he was in the process of transitioning into a much larger threat to the status quo of American society. It was the sort of threat that those with money and power might have been motivated to eliminate, far more motivated than a simple racist who probably didn’t want to go back to the prison from which he had escaped by assassinating one of the most high profile individuals in the country.

Our story will begin with the official telling of events of the assassination and end with a 1999 court verdict in which a jury found that King’s assassination was the result of a conspiracy involving government agencies. And somewhere along the way, King will receive a letter from the FBI telling him in so many words, “If you don’t fucking kill yourself, we’ll make sure you live to regret it.”

Walking in Memphis

It all began on February 1, 1968, two months before the assassination took place. Echol Cole and Robert Walker were sanitation workers for the city of Memphis, Tennessee. There were already tensions between sanitation workers and Mayor Henry Loeb. Not only were working conditions terrible and unsafe, but the black sanitation workers were paid significantly less than their white counterparts performing the same job.

In one rather blatant incident, severe weather forced all of the workers to be sent home for the day. The black employees only received two hours of pay for the day while the white ones received the full day’s pay.

The day of February 1st was another day of terrible weather. The rains were so severe that the streets were flooding and the sewers were overflowing. At around 4:20 pm, Echol and Robert decided to take refuge in the back on the garbage truck to avoid the rain.

If you’ve somehow never seen a garbage truck in your life before and are wondering why they didn’t go sit in the front, those seats were occupied by the driver and their coworker; these trucks normally have one or two people hanging off the back of the truck to quickly hop off, toss the trash bags in, and hop back on so the truck can slowly move forward.

Suddenly and for no reason, the truck’s trash compactor malfunctioned and began a compacting cycle. This process is supposed to only be able to be started manually, to prevent this exact sort of thing from happening, but the truck seemed to have a mind of its own. When the sound of the compactor’s engine entered the truck’s cab, the driver immediately stopped and jumped out of his seat, running to the back to hit the emergency stop button. It didn’t help, and the two young men were crushed to death.

Ten days after the tragic deaths of Echol and Robert, the union held a meeting and voted to go on strike demanding safer working conditions, better pay, and some Goddamn city-issued uniforms so they wouldn’t have to go home to their families with their civilian clothes smelling like sewage. Considering two people had just died, their wages were so low that many full time sanitation workers qualified for welfare and food stamps, and bus drivers wouldn’t allow them to take public transportation because they smelled so bad, these demands were extremely reasonable.

The only problem with the union attempting to make these demands was that the city didn’t actually recognize the union. That, and the newly elected Mayor Loeb had been the previous head of the sanitation department where he was responsible for creating many of the conditions they were now complaining about.

The union had expected the city to take immediate action, what with the horrific deaths and all. Loeb deciding to go the opposite direction by being a completely unreasonable douchebag who refused to negotiate. On February 12, the day after the union declared the strike, 930 out of 1,100 sanitation workers didn’t show up to work. Some of those that did show up also walked out once they heard about the strike.

When the mayor refused to meet with the union, protestors marched from the union hall to a meeting taking place at the Memphis City Council. There they found about 50 police officers waiting for them. Loeb led the strikers to a nearby auditorium so they could have a friendly little chat. And by friendly, I mean that Loeb grabbed the microphone from the union organizer and yelled at them to get back to work.

This outburst was met with choruses of laughter and people chanting. Loeb went on to make several public statements about the strike, and in each and every one he looked like a right twat. Within three days of the strike beginning, there was over 10,000 tons of garbage piling up on the streets of Memphis, so Loeb began to hire strikebreakers to pick up the trash.

While all of this had been going on, King was working on creating the Poor People’s Campaign. It was to be a diverse, multiracial coalition of poor people from all across the country. Based on census data, anywhere from 22-33% of Americans were living below the poverty line at the time, so it shouldn’t have been too hard to find people that agreed with the sentiments King espoused in the quote at the beginning.

Since the Memphis sanitation strike was the fusion of a civil rights matter and a poverty issue, it caught the attention of King. On March 18, over a month into the strike, he made his first visit to Memphis. While there, he spoke before a crowd of 25,000 protestors and activists, calling for a city-wide shutdown. He wanted others, like the schools, to go on strike in solidarity with the sanitation workers.

After his speech, he promised to return to Memphis a few days later on the 22nd to lead a peaceful protest through the city.

On average, Memphis receives about three inches of snow over the entire year. The protest march had to be canceled because they were hit by a massive snowstorm that dumped over 17 inches of snow on the city. Undeterred, the protestors opted to reschedule the protest for March 28 rather than canceling it entirely.

The March 28th Riot

When the march began on March 28th, it was a massive turnout. City officials estimated that 22,000 students had skipped school in order to participate in the protest. King was late, and when he arrived the crowd was already on the verge of chaos. It was meant to be a peaceful protest, as that was how they had achieved results in the past. However, unbeknownst to King there was division among the African American residents of Memphis.

The peaceful protest had been infiltrated by a militant Black Power group based in Memphis known as The Invaders. As the march proceeded through downtown, members of The Invaders began smashing the windows to every storefront and looting anything in sight. There were 600 police officers on duty at the protest, nearly the entire police force, and they wasted no time launching tear gas at the crowds. Despite his protestations, King was escorted away to a hotel by those close to him for fear that police would come after him the hardest.

Live media coverage focused on the actions of “Negro youths”, making little to no comment about the use of police force. Not even when the cameras showed the bloodied faces of African American men who were being arrested. Their only comments with regards to the show of force were about the use of tear gas, with one correspondent calmly stating live on air, “Here comes the tear gas…and this reporter just got a sting of it.”

When the dust had settled, there were a total of 276 people arrested and 60 injured during the riot. There was also a single fatality: 16 year old Larry Payne. There were conflicting reports over exactly what happened to Larry, by which I mean the police officer who killed him said one thing and literally every witness said something else.

According to witnesses, Larry came up from his basement in the projects to see what was going on when Officer Leslie Dean Jones pressed his sawed-off shotgun barrel against Larry’s stomach. Larry put up his hands and asked the officer not to shoot, but he pulled the trigger anyway. According to Leslie, Larry was holding a butcher knife, a claim that every witness stated was false. The county court did not press charges, and the Department of Justice said there was insufficient evidence to prosecute him for civil rights abuses.

And stuff like this is why police have body cams now.

That night, Mayor Loeb declared martial law, instated a 7 pm curfew, and brought in about 4,000 members of the National Guard. Keep in mind that everything that happened in Memphis, up to and including the riot, looting, and fatal shooting of a minor, could have been completely avoided if Loeb had just paid his fucking employees enough to not need to go on welfare.

Though he initially was reluctant to on account of just having one of the single worst days of activism in a 13 year long career, King decided to return to Memphis. If the Poor People’s Campaign and his fight for economic justice were going to succeed, then he needed to follow through in supporting the sanitation strikers. On April 3, he returned to Memphis where he delivered his famous “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech.

There had been a bomb threat, but King was not concerned. He had been the recipient of death threats for well over a decade, and had even survived an assassination attempt ten years prior when a woman stabbed him at a book signing. The tip of the blade had been touching his aorta, and after surgery the doctor told him that if he had sneezed during the hours awaiting surgery, the blade would have punctured his aorta and he would have drowned in his own blood.

But let this serve as a reminder to all of you if you ever find yourself stabbed or otherwise punctured with something: do not pull the object out. Whatever it is that stabbed you is the only thing plugging the wound and keeping you from bleeding out, and trying to remove it may cause even more damage. Because of the position of the knife, it took hours of open chest surgery for doctors to safely remove the blade that had been lodged in King.

Back to the speech, he spoke of the bomb threat, of his own mortality, and even of when he had been near fatally stabbed. The conclusion of the speech is seen as being almost prophetic, with King concluding:

And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don’t know what will happen now.

We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.

And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you.

But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

That was the last public speech he would ever make.

The Assassination

James Earl Ray was staying in Memphis at the New Rebel Motel. On the night of April 3rd, he learned that King was in town staying at the Lorraine Motel. Footage of King and his entourage at the hotel aired on the 10 o’clock news, and the room number 306 was plainly visible in the footage. His location was also published the next day in the Commercial Appeal, a Memphis daily newspaper.

That’s not ideal, but it also wasn’t surprising. King, accompanied by fellow activist Ralph Abernathy among others, stayed in that room so often that it was nicknamed the King-Abernathy Suite. On the afternoon of April 4th, Ray checked out of the New Rebel Motel and traveled across town.

At 3:30 pm, Ray checked into Bessie Brewer’s Rooming House, located on the second floor of a building above Jim’s Grill and across from the Lorraine Motel. Using the fake name of John Willard, Ray rented room 8. He asked to change to room 5B which directly overlooked the Lorraine Motel, but he found that the window from the communal bathroom had the best line of sight view of room 306.

At 4 pm, he traveled to the York Arms Company to buy what must have been an incredible pair of binoculars with a cost of $41.55, or over $350 in today’s money. He then returned to the rooming house to wait.

King and Abernathy were preparing to have dinner at the home of a local minister before attending an event that night. King walked out onto the balcony of the motel room to talk to some of his associates including his driver, musician Ben Branch who would be performing at the event that night, and Reverend Jesse Jackson. According to Jackson, King’s last words before the assassination were, “Ben, make sure you play ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord’ in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty.”

At 6:01 pm, Ray fired a single bullet from his Remington 760 Gamemaster .30-06. The bullet hit King in the right cheek at a downward trajectory, breaking his jaw and several vertebrae, severing his jugular, and finally lodging in his shoulder. Abernathy heard the shot and rushed from the hotel room out to the balcony. King was in critical condition, but still alive.

Approximately two minutes later, Ray was seen carrying a green blanket from the boarding room down the street. He was spooked by something, allegedly the sight of police cruiser, and dropped the blanket in front of the store Canipe’s Amusement Company before running to his white Ford Mustang that was parked on the street and fleeing the scene. The store owner informed police of this at 6:08.

Fifteen minutes after the bullet was fired, King arrived at the nearby St. Joseph’s Hospital. Doctors tried to resuscitate him, but he never regained consciousness. At 7:05 pm, Martin Luther King Jr. was declared dead. But about half an hour before that happened, police arrived at Canipe’s Amusement Company to investigate the bundle that Ray had dropped on the sidewalk.

Upon unwrapping the blanket, they found that Ray had handed them all the evidence they would need on a silver platter. The bundle he had dropped contained his suitcase and the Remington rifle. Inside his suitcase they found the binoculars, a radio, and the Commercial Appeal news story that contained King’s location.

And there was some clothing and a couple cans of beer there too, but that’s far less incriminating. The owner of Canipe’s had seen Ray drive away in the white Mustang, and police were able to learn from investigating the rooming house that John Willard of 5B drove such a car, though they had yet to discover that this was not his real name.

By 8:15 that night, the bundle of evidence that Ray had left behind was handed over to the FBI. While Ray had already found his way to Mississippi by that point, this was not yet known to law enforcement and it seen as highly unusual that the FBI would have gotten involved so quickly.

The FBI generally dealt with interstate crime, terrorism, and financial crimes, especially those involving federally insured banks. I agree that it was a little was weird for them to so quickly commandeer the investigation of the murder of someone who wasn’t a federal employee, but King was a prominent public figure and political force so it’s not necessarily unreasonable. It is a little suspicious, but of all the things we’ll talk about today involving the FBI, this decision was by far the least suspicious so I’m willing to give it a pass.

As reports of the assassination began hitting the news, riots broke out across America in over 110 major cities. Washington D.C. alone saw over 6,000 arrests and 1,000 injured as a result of the riots. Bobby Kennedy was scheduled to have a campaign rally in the heart of the Indianapolis ghetto night while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination. When his plane landed in Indianapolis, he was informed of the assassination.

Despite everyone around him saying that he should not attend the rally, and the police warning him that both a riot was likely and they didn’t have enough people to protect him, Bobby decided to attend anyway. He refused the notes that his press secretary and speechwriter prepared for him, and decided to simply take the stage and just wing it.

By any estimation, this was a disaster waiting to happen. Few names are more synonymous with the idea of white privilege than Kennedy. And there, in the middle of the ghetto while race riots were raging across the nation, a Kennedy was about to be the one to break the news to a predominantly black audience that King had been shot and killed.

As Kennedy informed the audience that King had been assassinated, a cacophony of cries and wails rose up from the crowd. What followed is regarded as one of the greatest speeches in American history, a speech in which he called for peace, love, and compassion. It was also the first time he publically spoke about the death of his brother, JFK, who had been killed over five years earlier.

Perhaps more important than what he said was how he said it. There was no doubt from the audience about his sincerity, likely aided by the fact that he was speaking to them without any prepared remarks. Bobby only spoke for five minutes, but by the end of his speech Indianapolis was left as one of the few major cities in America not to riot.

Unfortunately, as heartwarming as that may have been, there was still a killer on the loose. And it was going to take what was the FBI’s largest ever investigation at the time to track down this criminal genius.

International Manhunt

Ray had a solid head start on his escape. He had immediately left the rooming house where he was staying and driven 11 hours straight on back roads to get to the place he had been staying in Atlanta. Once there, he abandoned his Mustang, wiping it clean of fingerprints, grabbed some things from his room, swung by the cleaners to pick up his laundry, and took a Greyhound bus to Detroit. That’s upwards of a 19 hour bus ride.

If you’ve never taken a Greyhound, zero out of ten, would not recommend. But options are limited when you’re being hunted by the FBI.

On April 6, two days after the assassination of King, Ray’s bus arrived in Detroit. From there, he took a taxi to Canada so he could lay low for a while and try to obtain a passport. His ultimate goal was to travel to somewhere in Africa that didn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States, most like Rhodesia which is modern day Zimbabwe.

Meanwhile, the FBI had been investigating the evidence left behind in Memphis. They were operating under the belief that the assassination was a conspiracy between three men. First there was John Willard, the man that had rented room 5B at the rooming house. Then there was Harvey Lowmeyer, the man that had purchased the Remington .30-06 from Aeromarine Supply Company at a mall in Alabama.

Finally, there was Eric S. Galt. There were laundry tags on the clothes left behind from Home Service Laundry in Los Angeles, and Galt was the name on the receipts.

A week after the assassination, the FBI found the abandoned white Mustang registered to Galt in a parking lot in Atlanta. There was a sticker in the window that showed the car had been serviced in Los Angeles a couple months prior. They simultaneously tried to track his activities in LA and in Atlanta, learning more about the suspected killer, Eric Galt. He had taken dancing lessons, enrolled in the International School of Bartending, and taken a couple classes from the Locksmithing Institute.

Authorities were able to obtain a photo of Galt from the School of Bartending, and investigating his home in Atlanta they found a map of the city that seemed to show he was stalking King. Circled on the map were four locations: King’s home, Ebenezer Baptist Church, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s headquarters, and the Capital Homes housing projects. Most importantly, they were able to pull a clear fingerprint from the map.

Using the photo obtained from the School of Bartending, the FBI issued a warrant for Galt. However, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had a hunch. The investigators had already begun to suspect that they were dealing with a single culprit operating under different aliases rather than a conspiracy of three men, largely on account of the fact that every fingerprint they found related to the evidence came from the same person.

Suspecting that all three of these names were aliases, Hoover ordered investigators to compare Galt’s fingerprints against the database of all known fugitives in the country.

You might be thinking that should have been the first thing they did, and in modern times it almost certainly would have been among the very first things they did. But in modern times we have computers, and this was taking place in 1968. There were over 53,000 known fugitives in the United States at the time, and detectives would have to perform the fingerprint analysis by hand to match Galt’s prints with that of a known fugitive.

That is an awful lot of fugitives, but they’re not all created equal. So even though there were 53,000 fugitives, I’m going to guess that they were heavily prioritized by different types of crimes. Otherwise, the detectives got damn lucky because on the second day of fingerprint comparisons they found that Galt’s fingerprints matched those of escaped convict James Earl Ray. This was only about the 700th fingerprint comparison they had done, so finding a match could easily have taken them two months instead of two days.

The FBI immediately put out mug shot posters of Ray, announcing that Galt was in fact Ray, and broadcast his image around the country. They extended the search to Canada and Mexico as well since there was proof that Ray had visited both countries since escaping from prison.

On April 21st, the FBI was able to make an appeal to the public for information on a show aptly named The FBI. The show, which was in its fifth season at that point, was a true crime docuseries featuring dramatizations of real FBI cases, and each episode ended with a quick segment featuring the FBI’s current ten most wanted criminals. Unfortunately, all of this had taken far too long.

Ray had already been in Canada for weeks, and just three days after this episode aired he finally obtained a passport under the name George Sneyd with which he purchased a roundtrip ticket from Toronto to London. He obviously had no intention of coming back, but a roundtrip ticket is less suspicious.

However, Ray was just kind of winging it at this point, and not exactly doing a great job of it despite thus far evading capture. On May 6th he exchanged his return ticket to Canada for a ticket to Lisbon, Portugal. He arrived there the next day only to find out he had missed the boat to Africa. I’m not sure how often these boats left, but they must have been pretty infrequent since ten days later Ray flew back to London to try to find another way to reach Rhodesia.

By May 27th, weeks after he had originally arrived in Europe, Ray was running out of money. It is here we get a glimpse into the type of master criminal that was so deftly eluding the FBI. He attempted to rob a jewelry store in Paddington, but the store owners decided they weren’t terribly keen on being robbed. Given this rather unexpected resistance, Ray simply ran off empty handed.

A week later, he decided to try his hand at crime once again, this time robbing a bank. It seems that the robbery was going more successfully this time, but the teller accidentally kicked a metal box. The loud noise, which may have sounded like a gunshot, spooked Ray and he ran off with only 95 pounds, the equivalent of about $240 U.S. dollars or about $2,000 today. It’s a pretty small payday for a bank robbery, but it was enough to keep him afloat a little while longer.

But authorities were closing in. After examining about 175,000 passport applications, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police matched the photo of George Sneyd to that of Ray. Checking the address on the passport, they found that he had been living in Canada under the name Paul Bridgman before receiving his passport. The FBI updated his list of aliases which would result in his arrest a week later, though just barely.

On June 8th, Ray was at England’s Heathrow Airport attempting to purchase a plane ticket to Brussels, Belgium. He nearly was able to leave successfully, but when he gave his passport to an immigration officer, the officer noticed that there was a second passport in Ray’s bag. Were it not for this act of careless, the immigration officer would never have checked the “Watch and Detain” list and discovered that the name George Sneyd had been listed by the FBI.

He was quickly arrested, and the process of extradition began. It took over a month, but he was finally extradited to Memphis where he finally got to meet with Arthur Hanes Sr., his defense attorney. The defense was being bankrolled by journalist William Bradford Huie in exchange for exclusive book rights. It’s weird to me that these two men could make a deal over the rights to Ray’s story without his knowledge, especially since this was before the Son of Sam Laws, but whatever.

On November 10th, a few months after he had arrived back in the United States, Ray discovered that his lawyer felt there was no chance of acquittal, so he fired Hanes. Two days later, an interview he had given Huie was published in Look magazine. This was the public’s first introduction to a man known only as “Raoul”, who we will get to shortly.

In February on 1969, Ray hired a new lawyer, Percy Foreman. Foreman was famous for defending 778 accused murderers and getting 705 of them acquitted, but Foreman said the case was hopeless and convinced Ray to submit a guilty plea to avoid the death penalty. On March 10th, Ray pled guilty to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

That’s the official version of everything that happened, and it could have been the end of the story. However, just three days after pleading guilty Ray again fired his lawyer and recanted his confession, claiming that he was coerced into pleading guilty. For the rest of his life, he would maintain that he had not shot King and was an unknowing accomplice in the assassination. This brings us to the matter of Ray’s side of the story.

James Earl Ray’s Story

James Earl Ray was born on March 10, 1928. This means that he entered his guilty plea on his 41st birthday, so happy birthday! He was born in Illinois as the oldest of nine children, but his family relocated to Missouri to escape law enforcement after his father wrote a bad check. That seems like a huge reaction to what would probably have been a modest fine, but who am I to question his decisions.

At the age of 12 Ray dropped out of school, and he joined the military at the close of World War II, so when he was roughly 17. He was stationed in West Germany, but military life didn’t suit him. He was constantly drunk, and at one point escaped from a stockade, though why he was being detained isn’t clear. It would be one thing if this guy was like Sterling Archer, a severe alcoholic who was also the best at what he did, but he absolutely was not.

As a soldier, Ray was pretty much the worst. He received the lowest possible passing grade on his marksmanship test, and when he was dishonorably discharged in 1948 it was for ineptitude and lack of adaptability. This is a bit surprising since he spoke with his brother, John, about his time serving in the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, the precursor to the CIA. Ray described the OSS as being like the mafia, saying that once you’re in, you’re never really allowed to leave.

That is the first part of the story that there’s no confirmation of, but even if Ray really was in the OSS he wouldn’t have been recruited because of his incredible abilities; it would have been because he was expendable. Allegedly, he was subjected to hypnosis and psychoactive drugs, like a prototype for the MK-Ultra program that the CIA would begin a few years later.

While this is all theoretically possible, it is unlikely it could ever be proven or disproven. This all would have been taking place during the two year period after the OSS was officially disbanded but before the CIA was official formed, so I can’t imagine there’s much of a paper trail for anything that happened during that period. Just keep in mind that the only source we have for that is the word of Ray’s brother.

Since we’re on the topic, we may as well get some of the other unverifiable details of Ray’s life from this time period out of the way. After being discharged from the military, he moved to California where he would begin his life of petty crime; that part is true. More contentious is his reputation in the media as a lifelong racist and supporter of George Wallace, a presidential hopeful famous for stating in his 1963 inaugural address as Alabama governor, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Fortunately, for Wallace “forever” only meant about seven years, because in 1970 he became a born again Christian and apologized for all of his previous racist views.

But where did Ray stand on these issues? Well according to his family and friends, he couldn’t be racist because some of his best friends were black! While living in Los Angeles, Ray lived in a predominantly black apartment building, went to black dance clubs, and had a black girlfriend. Even if all of that’s true I’m not sure it necessarily means he wasn’t racist, though it does make it a much harder sell.

We do need to remember that the main source for this was his brother John, who would have had an ulterior motive in trying to paint Ray in a different light. John owned the Grapevine Tavern, which was known to be a common meeting place for George Wallace’s supporters. Since it is believed that Ray’s two primary motivations for assassinating King were racism and the desire to collect a large bounty from the KKK and other racist organizations for King’s murder, a bounty that allegedly may have come to his attention through his brother’s bar, it would be in John’s best interest to separate Ray from this narrative.

So let’s get back to the parts of Ray’s story that can be verified before we dive headfirst into the conspiratorial waters. After his brief stint in the military, where he may or may not have been drugged out of his mind, he became the newest member of America’s revolving door prison system.

He first entered the prison system after being convicted of burglary in California. Following that, he served another two years in prison for robbing a taxi driver at gunpoint in Illinois for the kingly sum of $11 and change. Once he was released, he was convicted of mail fraud in Missouri.

Ray wasn’t smart enough to commit some sort of actual mail fraud scam, he just strolled into a post office to steal some money orders; apparently this is technically classified as mail fraud. After another four years in prison, he was again convicted of armed robbery, this time for stealing roughly $120 from a Kroger grocery store in Missouri.

In honour of his many repeat offenses with very little downtime in between his releases from prison and his next crimes, Ray was finally sentenced to 20 years. It was 1960 when he began serving this sentence, but by 1967 he would make his daring escape. Escaping a prison isn’t easy and practice makes perfect, so of course he had made other attempts before finally being successful.

The first attempt saw Ray build his own makeshift ladder to climb over the prison wall. It was brilliant in its simplicity, and it ended with him falling off a wall and knocking himself unconscious. The second attempt resulted in Ray being found by guards hiding in a ventilation shaft. But third time’s the charm, and it was on the third attempt that Ray finally was able to escape by hiding inside a box on a bread delivery truck.

There’s no real reason that this should have worked as the guards and delivery crew should have been accustomed to making sure there weren’t any convicts hiding in the truck, but it did.

Now we get back to the less reliable information. While I can find lots of sources that mention these alleged facts, all of them list the book written by Ray’s brother John as their source so take it as you will. After each unsuccessful escape attempt, Ray was administered Librium by a doctor who just so happened to be a high ranking military psychiatrist. Librium is a relatively weak benzo that can be used in medical hypnosis, and it is allegedly used to strengthen the effects of MK-Ultra style mind control stuff.

The escape plan allegedly hadn’t originated with Ray either, but rather with his cellmate, Ronnie Westberg. According to the story, Westberg knew that the plan would work but wasn’t able to do it himself because he was under extremely heavy surveillance for his repeated escape attempts. While Ray had tried to escape twice in six years, he was otherwise a model prisoner and his attempts were comedically bad so he didn’t need to be watched as carefully as some of the other inmates. Following the escape, Westberg was found hanging dead in his cell.

His arms and legs were all broken, and the death was ruled a suicide. That would be really suspicious if I could find any evidence other than John’s book that such an event ever transpired.

It was shortly after Ray escaped prison and had traveled to Montreal, Canada that he claimed to have met Raoul. He described Raoul only as a blonde Cuban, and a man that he began working for running guns and possibly drugs. It was Raoul who he claimed set him up with the three fake identities he used: Eric Galt, Harvey Lowmeyer, and John Willard. Now here’s where things start to get really interesting.

Some of the previous allegations that came from John are more than a little bit out there, but Ray’s own account involving Raoul is a bit more credible. First, there are the fake identities he used. To put it very nicely, Ray seems like he was a bit of a dumb-dumb. He could probably be described as a person who had more money than sense, and as a recently escaped convict on the run in a foreign country, he did not have any money.

And yet despite this, Ray was able to come up with genuine credentials for three aliases. Not only that, but the three fake names he used were real Canadian citizens who happened to look extremely similar to him. The name he used most frequently was Eric Starvo Galt, most likely the result of him misreading the signature of the actual man, Eric St. Vincent Galt, who signed his name as “Eric St.

V. Galt”. Physically, these two matched one another almost perfectly, including scars they each had on the forehead and right palm.

According to Ray, Raoul gave him $12,000 and the fake credentials in exchange for doing deliveries for him. He then traveled around the country working under the employ of Raoul who he believed to be selling guns to anti-Castro Cuban militants. One day, Raoul gave Ray $2,000 and told him to get to Birmingham, Alabama to get a car. That is where he bought the white Mustang.

On March 30th, four days before the assassination of King, Raoul informed him that he was making a large deal with the Cubans and would be supplying them with 200 guns. He again sent Ray to Birmingham, this time to buy a Remington 760 .30-06 with a telescopic sight that could be used as a demonstration of the weapons the Cubans would be buying. Ray went to the Aeromarine Supply Company in Birmingham and returned with a Remington 760 .243 Winchester; he had purchased the wrong caliber gun.

The next day, Ray called the store before returning there to exchange it for a .30-06. According to the Aeromarine Supply Company employees, it was clear over the course of his two visits that Ray knew exactly two things about guns: jack and shit. He didn’t know what the right scope for the gun was and, despite being given explicitly instructions, couldn’t even pick out the correct gun.

When he went to make the exchange, the employees told him that the .243 was powerful enough to take down any deer he’d find in Alabama. His response was that he intended to take the rifle hunting in Wisconsin; I don’t think deer are any sturdier up north.

On the day of the assassination, Ray met Raoul at Jim’s Grill, the restaurant below the rooming house and across from the Lorraine Motel. He was instructed to rent room 5B, but it doesn’t sound like he actually spent any time in the room according to his account. This isn’t necessarily without evidence. Though Ray’s fingerprints were found on the discarded gun and beer cans, they were not present in the hotel room or the bathroom.

Sure, he could have wiped everything down or worn gloves the whole time, but there was very little time between the shot being fired and him driving away so wiping the room for prints afterwards becomes less likely. But according to him, he never fired the gun anyway. He bought it and gave it to Raoul, which is why his fingerprints were on it. He was then instructed to wait in the Mustang as a getaway driver in case things went south while Raoul met with the militants in Jim’s Grill.

According to Ray, at 6:01 pm he was waiting in the car when he heard a gunshot. Raoul then ran to the car and they sped off. At that time he believed something had gone down with the arms deal and they were just trying to escape. When the car had nearly exited Memphis, Raoul waited until they slowed down a bit and then jumped out of the moving vehicle, never to see Ray again.

It wasn’t until after he had been driving for a few more hours that he claimed to have first learned King had been shot from a report on the car radio. That report also mentioned the suspect was a white male driving a white Mustang, which is why he claims to have dumped the car and taken a bus to Detroit.

From there, the story of his months on the lam in Canada and Europe is pretty much the same. But who are we to believe, the official story or Ray’s personal account of being accidentally involved? Well first let’s look at the evidence involving Ray, and then we’ll get to the evidence of a potential FBI conspiracy.

The Shaky Evidence Against Ray

I’ve already touched upon some incongruities in the official story. Ray was purported to have worked alone in the assassination, but even on the surface it’s hard to believe that he didn’t have help. He dropped out of high school, essentially failed out of the army, and once he came back from West Germany he was a petty criminal who spent more time in jail than out.

And yet we’re supposed to believe he was able to acquire a large sum of money and authentic passports bearing the names of real Canadian citizens who genuinely looked almost exactly like him? This was the same guy who went to jail for holding a cab driver at gunpoint over $11.

Then of course there’s the rifle. He demonstrated a clear lack of understanding of firearms when he went to purchase the gun, and he had demonstrated a clear lack of ability with guns while in the military. This also wasn’t like Lee Harvey Oswald, a man who earned the designation of sharpshooter from the Marines and had a clear line of sight from the depository window to JFK, regardless of whether or not he was only the shooter. Ray had barely passed his marksmanship test at all, and his line of sight was anything but clear.

The window in the bathroom of the rooming house did in fact face the Lorraine Motel, but fucked if you could see anything. There was a sycamore tree growing right in front of the window, with large branches covering and practically entering the window. In order to take the shot to hit King at the correct angle, Ray would have needed to be standing on top of the bathtub, holding his body in an incredibly awkward position, and using his superhuman x-ray vision to see through the tree in order to aim at his at least somewhat moving target.

Speaking of the bathroom, I did mention it earlier, but this was a communal bathroom. It may have been publicized in the news where King was going to be staying, but there was no way a sniper was hitting somebody inside the hotel room from this bathroom; they would have to be outside. How long exactly would Ray have to have been standing on the bathtub and aiming his rifle at the balcony in the hopes that King might walk outside, and what are the odds that he could wait there that long without somebody else needing to use the bathroom? I can only imagine how awkward an encounter it would have been if someone knocked on the door only for Ray to emerge, giving a polite “Pardon me, ma’am” as he walked out of the bathroom carrying a rifle.

That clearly didn’t happen, but if the sound of a gunshot came from the bathroom of the rooming house, surely another guest might have poked their head out to see what was going on, right? I mean, if it was gunfire coming from inside the building then maybe not. But there was one witness that claimed to see Ray fleeing from the bathroom after the shooting, a man named Charles Stephens. Depending on who you ask he was better known as either Bourbon Charlie or Bay Rum Charlie, but either way Charlie had over 150 arrests, mostly related to his rampant alcoholism.

This was the FBI’s star witness, and the only person to claim to see Ray fleeing the building. Charlie’s wife, his landlord, and another witness all stated that Charlie was too drunk at that point to have seen anything, and the only other witness that saw a person leaving the building said that it was not Ray.

During a pretty fantastic interview televised on CBS news, a reporter held a picture of Ray up to Charles, and Charles did not recognize him at all. When the reporter asked if it looked like the man he had seen, his reply was “No sir, it certainly doesn’t.” I cannot possibly stress enough that this was the FBI’s star witness against Ray.

Next, there’s the bullet that killed King. Initial testing showed that it was consistent with a bullet fired from a Remington 760. Guns use rifling to spin the bullet through the barrel, and the spin makes its flight path more consistent. All guns of the same model should have similar rifling, but not necessarily identical. That is, of course, barring some sort of defect like was present on the gun with Ray’s fingerprints.

Early ballistics tests came back as inconclusive. That isn’t proof of anything one way or the other. However, later tests using updating techniques, while still not 100% conclusive, began telling a different story. The judge presiding over Ray’s final appeal was Judge Joe Brown. For fans of daytime television, yes, that Judge Joe Brown. Brown was presented with updated ballistics tests that showed in 12 of the 18 trials using the alleged murder weapon, the resulting bullets did not match those of the fatal bullet.

The rate of rifling on the bullet pulled from King was one turn every 11 and a half inches, but the rate of rifling on the test bullets was only one turn every ten inches. There were also marks on the test bullets from a manufacturing defect in Ray’s gun that were not present on the fatal bullet. That’s fairly huge, and if two thirds of the test bullets did not match that would mean it is more likely than not that the rifle with Ray’s fingerprints was not the one that killed King. More likely than not, but not guaranteed.

Brown requested additional ballistics testing at which point he was removed from the trial for his alleged bias. You know, bias in wanting the most accurate possible evidence with which to make a decision. But even if it’s twice as likely that this rifle wasn’t the murder weapon, people saw Ray drop it on the ground before fleeing the scene. That’s gotta be damning evidence, right?

If that’s what people saw then it absolutely would be, but allegedly it’s not. In the 1999 trial that we’ll be getting to later, Ray’s original lawyer that he fired, Arthur Hanes, told a different story. By this point he was Judge Arthur Hanes, and he was telling his story in the form of testimony sworn under oath. Hanes stated that he had interviewed Guy Canipe early on in his investigation of the scene, before anyone had the opportunity to tamper with the witness.

Guy Canipe was predictably the owner of Canipe’s Amusement Company, the store in front of which Ray is said to have dropped the bundle of evidence. According to Hanes, Guy said that the bundle containing the alleged murder weapon was dropped in front of his store 2-5 minutes before the shot was fired, and the man who dropped it off was a dark-skinned white male with a “chunky build”, a description that did not fit Ray. Other witnesses that were in the store at the time agreed that Ray was not the person they had seen drop off the bundle.

Another issue with the evidence against Ray is that no one seems to have actually heard the shot come from the bathroom window. However, there are a whole lot of witnesses who claimed to have heard the shot come from bushes outside the building, directly across the street from the Lorraine Motel. Bushes from which someone would have had a much better vantage point. There were numerous reports of the gunshot coming from the bushes, followed by a plume of smoke coming up from the bushes.

People even saw a man with a white shirt leap out of the bushes afterwards and run around the building. All of these people were told by police that they were mistaken.

If there was someone in the bushes that took the shot, who could it have been? Was it this enigmatic “Raoul”, a magical being like The Great Gazoo or Snuffleupagus that only one character can even see? Well, it turns out there’s some evidence that Raoul may have in fact existed. It’s somewhat questionable evidence, but it’s there. At one point after his prison break, Ray was driving from Los Angeles to New Orleans to meet Raoul. Along for the ride was a songwriter named Charles Stein.

During their journey, Ray stopped to call Raoul from a payphone. For reasons unknown, Stein decided to write down the number that he called. Stein brought this information to an investigative reporter back in the 1970s, and the reporter did the only logical thing: call the phone number. The phone call reached a Louisiana State Police barracks in the New Orleans area, barracks that happened to be well known as a staging ground for CIA-sponsored guerilla operations against Fidel Castro.

And the man who answered the phone call was one Raoul Esquivel.

This could of course be a coincidence. If federal intelligence agencies were involved, it seems a bit silly to think that an operative would actually give their real name to the intended fall guy; that’s just sloppy. Know what else is probably a coincidence? I mentioned that there was a witness besides the drunk guy who saw someone leave the rooming house bathroom after the shot was fired.

When that witness was shown pictures of different individuals, the person she identified as having seen happened to be a Louisiana State Trooper.

The final issue with this whole thing is the timing. I’m not sure on the reliability of the sources for this one, but I’ll throw it out there anyway. As I said, it would be weird if Ray just happened to go into the bathroom at the precise moment that King decided to go out to the balcony to talk to Jesse Jackson, his driver, and others. He would probably have to have waited in the bathroom for a while in the hopes that King came out. But what if it’s an even less believable time window than that?

Allegedly, King had gone out onto the balcony before 6:00 pm for a cigarette, and was out there for 15 minutes talking to people and waving. It is true that he was a regular smoker, but you’d be hard pressed to find a picture of him smoking because he tried to hide this from the public and especially from his children so they wouldn’t take up the habit. That fact makes me less convinced of the veracity of the claim that he would be smoking in public while waving at people, but we’ll at least consider the idea for a moment.

If someone was stalking King, monitoring his balcony in the hopes he would emerge, wouldn’t it make more sense for him to be shot during the 15 minutes window he was on the balcony rather than letting him go back into the room and waiting for him to emerge again for a minute? And isn’t it unlikely that Ray would have entered the bathroom after King had been out for a smoke but before had had left the room for the night? Unless, of course, the shooter wasn’t yet in position because the hit was planned for precisely 6:00 pm.

But I mean, how could anyone know exactly when King was planning to leave his room? In order to know that, you’d probably have to be stalking him intently, wiretapping his phones, bugging his hotel rooms, listening in from adjoining rooms…you know, all of that shady shit that the FBI was absolutely doing, no “allegedly” required. I think. Let’s say it just in case.

The FBI vs. Martin Luther King Jr.

J. Edgar Hoover was a bit of a dick, and most historians agree he was a massive racist as well. Hoover essentially created the FBI, and he ran the organization for 48 years the way he saw fit. Unfortunately, the way he saw fit was by no means appropriate. Although he is probably best known for his intense anti-communist stance, a stance that wasn’t particularly controversial at the time, Hoover greatly opposed anything he saw as leftist or subversive. This included the civil rights movement.

Thanks to a slew of FOIA requests in the 1970s, we know some of the lengths that the FBI went to in order to monitor and harass King for the better part of a decade. Over 70,000 pages of FBI secret files on King were released, but that’s not even close to the whole story. The majority of the documents and recordings were sealed away by federal court order until 2027. According to the final report from the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, aka the Church Committee, published in 1976, the FBI’s extensive attempts to discredit King were “one of the most abusive of all FBI programs.”

The unofficial harassment of King by the FBI may have begun in the 1950s in the form of newspaper articles and the like, but it was in 1962 that a more official vendetta against him began. One of King’s closest advisors, New York lawyer Stanley Levison, was pegged as a communist by FBI informants. While it is true that Levison had been one of the top financiers of America’s Communist Party previously, it does not appear that he was still active with the party at this time.

But as far as Hoover was concerned, once a communist, always a communist. This also meant that King may have been a communist by association, something that they could use to discredit him.

On June 22, 1963, King got to meet with President Kennedy at the White House to discuss civil rights. There was a public perception about Kennedy and King, one that is credited with helping Kennedy win the presidency. In October of 1960, shortly before the election, JFK made a phone call to King’s wife, Coretta. It was a short call, maybe only a minute long, in which he expressed his condolences to her over the fact that her husband was sitting in a jail cell at the time.

It was a phone call that everyone in his campaign told him not to make because it would cost them the election.

But in addition to the phone call, both JFK and Bobby Kennedy had been working hard behind the scenes to try to get King released. After 30 hours in jail, King was let go on bail. When speaking to the press, he credited the work of Kennedy in his release. Though he did not officially endorse Kennedy, King spoke very highly of him and said that he held “Senator Kennedy in very high esteem.”

Before this, Kennedy hadn’t been particularly popular with the black community. Even though he was supposed to be far more progressive than his opponent Richard Nixon, he lost the support of many civil rights activists for being seen as catering to racist white southerners in an effort to win their votes. With King’s statements after his release from prison, he received a huge wave of support with black voters. From then on, he and King were seen as friends and allies. But this wasn’t actually the case.

They may have had similar goals in terms of civil rights, but they weren’t actually friends and had a rather complex association. In a recording of Kennedy from a month before their meeting, he spoke about the schedule for that day. He wanted to push the meeting with King further back in the day and to surround it with meetings involving southern governors. He said, “The trouble with King is everybody thinks he’s our boy”, later adding “King is so hot these days it’s like Marx coming to the White House.”

This is important because of the Kennedys’ complicity in what eventually followed.

During the meeting, Kennedy led King out of the Oval Office and into the Rose Garden. King would later joke that Kennedy took him out of the office for fear it was bugged. Once in the garden, King was informed that Levison was a communist and he had to drop him. Kennedy also warned that King was under surveillance as well, and that he couldn’t allow there to be any scandal that would damage the administration’s chances of getting a civil rights bill through congress.

Unfortunately, King felt that this covert request from the president was just a polite suggestion that there was no harm in ignoring. The FBI had gotten approval to wiretap Levison, and once it was discovered that he and King were still in contact, Hoover went to Attorney General Bobby Kennedy to get approval for wiretaps of King’s home and office. Bobby approved the wiretap with the caveat that he wanted a full report in 30 days after which he would determine whether or not there was reason to continue with the surveillance.

Of course, that never happened. The FBI never submitted a report, but Bobby never brought the subject up again either. Because he hadn’t explicitly rescinded the authorization for wiretapping, the FBI was able to use the original authorization to conduct even more wiretapping over the following years. The Kennedys were privy to some of the FBI’s monitoring of King, but it is unclear exactly how much they knew.

Hoover had been keen on discrediting King so that he could derail the civil rights movement, and he felt nothing would be more effective than finding proof that King had communist ties. Although the wiretaps never resulted in evidence of communist rhetoric, what the FBI uncovered was far more salacious. Rather than calling Levison to discuss his Marxist ideals, King was calling him to talk about his extramarital affairs.

As far as Hoover was concerned, he had just hit the fucking jackpot. Proving King was a commie would have been great, but the country was filled with communist sympathizers who might not have been dissuaded by such a revelation. But a Baptist reverend who couldn’t keep it in his pants? Now that was a scandal he thought the entire nation could get behind.

The extent of the surveillance against King ramped up dramatically following this revelation, and there seemed to be no limit to the lengths that the FBI would go in order to find proof of his infidelity. At least one FBI operative was planted within the Southern Christian Leadership Council, though King wasn’t an idiot and was reportedly well aware that this person was on Hoover’s payroll.

But that was only the beginning. Thanks to all of the wiretaps, the FBI knew exactly where King was traveling at all times and what hotels he would be staying it. It became standard procedure for them to arrive at the hotels beforehand and make management let them into the room King would be staying in so that they could plant bugs. They would also book the room next door so they could listen in through the walls.

The documents compiled by the FBI are startling, both in their content and their volume. They were monitoring King’s every word, every movement, and every pelvic thrust. According to the monitoring from the FBI, King had affairs with between 40 and 45 different women, hosted orgies, and would engage in “unnatural sex acts”.

Of course, this was the 1960s, so God only knows what they meant by that. Up until 1962, sodomy was a felony in every single state, and the law wasn’t even really targeting homosexuals; it should have gone without saying that being gay was a crime back then. The anti-sodomy laws prohibited any sexual act that wasn’t performed with the intent of procreation. While the enforcement of such laws varied greatly, the term “unnatural sex acts” could have easily just referred to stuff like oral sex.

In fact, there’s a good chance that’s exactly what it meant, at least in part. In 1964, FBI Deputy Director William Sullivan wrote a memo paraphrasing one of the recordings of King. In the memo, he wrote that when King was trying to coerce a woman to let him perform “unnatural acts” on her, he declared to the room that he had started the “International Association for the Advancement of Pussy Eaters”.

While that may be the single greatest phrase I have ever seen in an official government document, page 19 of file number 62-HQ-116395 for anyone that wants to see it for themselves, the scene as its described actually comes off as a bit rapey on the part of King. In fact, this same document alleges a scene in which a minister raped a woman while King just looked on and laughed.

There are two important things to note here. The first is that these documents are only the FBI’s accounting of what happened. Recordings exist, but those are all locked away until 2027 so we can’t yet verify how honest they were being. The second important thing is that the FBI was listening in on what happened from the room next door.

If the account is accurate, that means that the FBI also just sat there doing nothing while they listened to a woman be raped. If this is what the bureau gets up to, it kinda makes me glad they never accepted my application.

With proof and recordings of King’s infidelity, there was only one thing left for Hoover to do: release the information to the public to destroy both King’s credibility and the civil rights movement in one fell swoop. He felt this would be a foolproof plan, and yet it didn’t work. The funny thing about news media back in the 1960s is that it wasn’t nearly as sensationalist as it is today. It’s not entirely clear whether Hoover was trying to shop the recordings around to various news outlets or if he just mailed copies of the tapes to them, but either way the end result was the same: nobody gave a shit.

That’s not to say that the public wouldn’t have cared, because they absolutely would have, but no news outlet was interested in releasing the information. Given the world that we live in today this is almost impossible to imagine, but back then the press didn’t think that the private lives of public figures was anybody’s damn business. They had declined to publish proof of JFK’s affairs, and they weren’t going to publish proof of King’s affairs either. So if Hoover couldn’t take care of his problem in the court of public opinion, he was going to have to try a more personal approach.

The FBI-King Suicide Letter

If the FBI couldn’t get the press to play the tapes of King’s affairs, then it was time to be more direct. They mailed some of the tapes along with an anonymous letter to King’s house. Coretta received the package, though she claimed to not really be able to make anything out in the tapes, referring to the audio as a bunch of “mumbo-jumbo”. When King returned home and read the letter, he immediately and correctly assumed it was sent by the FBI.

The existence of the letter, often referred to as the FBI-King Suicide Letter was known, but it had only existed in a heavily redacted and unreadable form. It had been discovered in 1971 when an activist group broke into an FBI office and stole about 1,000 classified documents, including the suicide letter. It wasn’t until a 1975 investigation during the Church Committee hearings that an unredacted copy of the letter was found alongside other papers that had been in the desk of FBI deputy director William Sullivan, the presumed author. I wouldn’t think this needed to be said, but do not keep carbon copy records of your crimes in your work files.

The letter was received on November 21, 1964, just two days after Hoover had publically stated to an assemblage of reporters that King was “the most notorious liar in the country.” The suicide letter claimed to be written by a fellow African American and former supporter of King’s, but it wasn’t fooling anyone. The author called him a fraud multiple times, referred to him as an “evil, abnormal beast”, and kept repeating the phrase “you are done.”

The letter concluded, “King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

There are only a couple possibilities for what the author was specifying that King should do. One proposal was that he should decline to accept the Nobel Peace Prize he had won that year, but the ceremony was only 19 days away and I suspect the FBI could ensure a package would be delivered in less than 15 days. The other alternative was that he was being asked to simply step down from his role as a civil rights leader and president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. That 34 day deadline, which would have been Christmas, doesn’t make sense any real sense in this scenario, but it’s perfectly likely that it wasn’t meant to mean anything and was actually chosen arbitrarily to give a sense of urgency to the matter.

Of course, those two readings of the letter are the minority opinion. To the vast majority of people, the words “There is but one way out for you. You better take it” can mean nothing but a call for King to commit suicide, especially given the harsh tone of the letter. But for skeptics, there’s some more evidence that this was intended to coerce him into suicide.

It was not known to the public, but King had pretty severe bouts of depression. He hid this as much as he could because of how awful the stigma surrounding mental health was at the time, but those in his private life knew. And since the FBI was listening to everything he said, that meant they knew as well. There is evidence that they frequently timed their harassment to exploit his depression.

The FBI also would have likely been aware of the little known fact that, by the age of 13, King had already tried to commit suicide twice.

In the more dramatic of the two events, he snuck out to a parade after promising his grandmother that he would stay home with her. When he returned home from the parade and found out she died of a heart attack while he was gone, he was overcome by guilt and jumped out of a second story window. The FBI’s attempted exploitation of his depression was absolutely deplorable, and there’s a reason that the Church Committee said this was one of the most abusive FBI programs of all time.

Since this letter was received in 1964 and King wasn’t assassinated until 1968, you’ve probably already figured out that the threat didn’t work. Those 34 days passed, and nothing happened. Nothing special, anyway. It was just a continuation of your run of the mill abuse of power by Hoover that continued all the way until April 4, 1968.

Suspicious Events on the Day of the Assassination

So we already know that Hoover and the FBI had it out for King in a big way. That is established fact supported by tens of thousands of government documents. And sure, they may have tried to gently extort him into suicide, but does that mean they would actually go so far as to kill him? When it was just about civil rights, maybe not.

For most of his life, King was just campaigning for African Americans to actually get to enjoy the rights that Congress had promised them nearly a century earlier. That really shouldn’t have been seen as a big ask.

But after the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, his attention had shifted. He was still involved in civil rights activism, but he was expanding beyond that. King was vocal in his opposition to capitalism and the Vietnam War. The way he saw it, America was fundamentally broken; it needed to be burned down (figuratively) and rebuilt from the ground up so that we could be a more equitable society that respected the rights of all people and worked together to vanquish poverty within our nation.

God, what a fucking monster, no wonder the government wanted him dead.

When King was returning to Memphis on April 3rd, he was a bit wary given the riots that had taken place less than a week prior during his last visit. As an extra security precaution, he and his team decided to book room 202 at the Lorraine Motel rather than the normal King-Abernathy Suite. Room 202 was more secluded, and the door and balcony didn’t open out to the main street.

However, before he arrived the motel received a call from a person claiming to be part of King’s entourage. That person requested that they be moved back to room 306. By the time King arrived at the motel and learned of the change, a change that nobody on his team had requested, every other room was booked so they stuck with room 306.

The City of Memphis wasn’t thrilled about King returning after his last visit resulted in a riot, and he was put under surveillance by the Memphis Police Department. It’s probably worth noting that the MPD had five paid informants who were working with the FBI. When he arrived at the airport, King was met by four police officers who had been assigned to protect him. He hadn’t requested police protection and wouldn’t tell them where he was staying, but they followed him to the motel anyway.

In addition, there were also two black plain-clothes officers that began tailing him from the moment he arrived at the airport. One of these officers was Detective Edward Redditt. The police detail would stay as close to King as possible for his protection while the undercover officers kept an eye on him from the fire station across the street, a fire station that the FBI happened to mention had an “excellent vantage point” of the Lorraine Motel.

Other than the room change, so far this isn’t suspicious. A notable and contentious public figure was back in town, and the MPD had dedicated half a dozen men to ensuring his round-the-clock protection. I get why King and his team wouldn’t have been thrilled about the police detail, but personally I’d have been happy knowing that my safety was being taken seriously. It wasn’t until the next day that things started to get really strange.

There were only two black firemen who worked at the station across the street from the motel, both of whom were called and given the day off on April 4th. Shortly after noon that day, Detective Redditt received a threatening phone call. He and the other undercover officer were sent back to the station, and upon arriving Redditt was informed that threats had been made against him and his family; they would have to stay at a hotel under a fake name until it all blew over. Redditt would never hear another word about the alleged threats.

At 5:05 pm, less than an hour before the assassination, the four policemen guarding King were called back to the station. This hadn’t been scheduled, and they had no idea why there were called back. When the chief of police was asked why they were asked to return to the station, he claimed that he didn’t remember it happening. In fact, the chief of police claimed that he didn’t even remember there being any officers assigned to King’s protection.

That’s a pretty bold stance to take since there’s testimony on the matter from all of the officers involved, but you do you, chief.

One interesting thing that came from their testimony is that Redditt said it was his idea to use the fire station; he and his partner hadn’t been given a specific location from which to surveil King. I’m not saying that the alleged threats against his life and his family wouldn’t have happened if he had a chosen a different location, I’m just saying.

So over the course of that afternoon, King went from having six police officers on site and dedicated to his protection down to zero thanks to mysterious orders from the police department in which the FBI had multiple people on its payroll. Nothing to see here.

By the way, do you remember when I mentioned that most of the witnesses not only heard the shot come from outside in the bushes but saw a man in a white shirt run out of the bushes and around the building? You’re not supposed to, but all I can do is tell that every one of those witnesses must have been wrong. Do you also remember when I said that there was a tree blocking the window from the rooming house and the shot would have been nigh impossible, especially for the rather inept Ray? Well you definitely aren’t supposed to have remembered that, and the City of Memphis was going to make sure you didn’t remember it.

On April 5th, there was no tree. One officer testified that he heard several conversations at the police department with others saying the shot couldn’t have come from that window because of a sycamore tree that was in the way. A work order was put in on the 4th, and after working all night the MPD had finished removing the tree by the morning of the 5th. This allowed for a clear line of sight from the bathroom window to the Lorraine Motel.

Oh yeah, they also removed the bushes while they were at it. So if anyone said they saw the shooter in the bushes, the police could shrug their shoulders with a smug grin and say, “What bushes?”

All of those rather suspicious things are a combination of established fact and sworn testimony by the people involved. This final part was sworn testimony as well, but I’m gonna put a big fucking allegedly here because this is a second hand account told over 30 years after the fact.

This story came from the son of Lulu Mae Shelby, a surgical aide that had been working at St. Joseph’s Hospital the night that King was shot and allegedly the last person to leave the room before he died. I mentioned that King still had a pulse when he was shot.

He arrived at the hospital at 6:16 pm and his time of death was recorded as 7:05 pm, meaning hospital staff spent 50 minutes unsuccessfully trying to save him. Lulu allegedly told her family, including her son, the following story after returning home from work the next morning. King’s room was full of doctors and aides, desperately trying to save his life.

It was just after 7 pm when the chief of surgery entered the room, accompanied by two men in suits. They ordered everybody else out of the room, with the chief of surgery very allegedly telling them, “Stop working on the n***** and let him die.” The men in suits then allegedly removed his breathing tube while the doctor allegedly smothered him with a pillow.

In some tellings of the story, the men were also expectorating on King’s body. Personally, this part of the conspiracy is a bridge too far for me. Sources that quote this testimony as irrefutable fact also tend to add that the FBI didn’t allow an autopsy to be performed on King to hide his cause of death, and that’s just not true.

Since I can tell you that King’s spleen weighed 80 grams and that his stomach contained 10 ccs of partially digested food fragments, I think we can view those sources with a healthy dose of skepticism. According to the doctor that performed the autopsy, King had the heart of a 60 year old man despite only being 39. This was likely the result of intense stress from his 13 years in civil rights activism.

It also meant that between the state of his heart and the severe damage the bullet had done, his wounds would almost definitely prove fatal anyway without the need for him to be smothered. Lulu also died a few months after King, so that whole story is relying entirely on the testimony of what she allegedly told her son once 30 years prior. I had to bring up those claims for completion’s sake, but there’s already enough shady stuff going on that we can actually prove as well as the years long FBI persecution of King; we don’t need to add in murderous doctors bandying around the N word just for the Hell of it.

So where does all this leave us? We know that the FBI, particularly Hoover, absolutely hated King and wanted to do everything in their power to discredit him and take him out of the equation. We know that there is a lot of suspicious stuff surrounding the events of the assassination, particularly actions taken by a police department that had been compromised by the FBI.

We also know that Ray was never found guilty at trial. Despite recanting his guilty plea and filing every appeal he could, he was never given the opportunity to be tried by a jury of his peers. While Ray never went to trial, I did mention a rather surprising 1999 court verdict at the very beginning of this episode.

I’d say it’s high time we examine that case. The Loyd Jowers Trial Fortunately, we’ve already covered most of the evidence that was presented in this trial so we don’t need retrace our steps. The official name of the court case was The King Family vs.

Loyd Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators. By 1999, the King family was firmly of the belief that Ray did not kill Martin Luther King and had been used as a patsy. Not only were they all vocal about this in the media, but King’s son Dexter even visited Ray in prison and told him in person that they knew he was innocent and were doing everything in their power to seek justice.

That’s all well and good, but who the Hell is Loyd Jowers? Loyd Jowers owned Jim’s Grill, the restaurant below the rooming house. The backdoor of his shop led directly to the bushes that were definitely never there so please stop talking about them.

According to Jowers, he was paid $100,000 by alleged local mobster Frank Liberto to help organize the assassination. His version of events claimed the involvement of Raoul, the MPD, and the mafia. He even went so far as to name Police Lieutenant Earl Clark as the shooter.

It sounded like Jowers was involved in some of the planning, but more than anything he was being used for the location of his restaurant. After Clark allegedly shot King, he passed the Remington rifle through the door to Jowers who then hid it behind the bar. That way, even if someone could have identified Clark, they wouldn’t be able to say that they saw him carrying the murder weapon.

Beyond that, the evidence presented was mostly things we’ve already discussed. After a nearly four week trial, it took the jury only one hour to deliberate. The jury unanimously found that Jowers was responsible, along with conspirators including “governmental agencies”.

You’ll note that I said “responsible” rather than “guilty” and that’s where things start to get a bit interesting. You see, this wasn’t a criminal trial, it was a civil suit for wrongful death. Despite being a civil suit, it wasn’t about money; the King family was only seeking $100 in damages.

They wanted it on the record in a court of law that the government was responsible, but that’s really hard to do. Thanks to a little thing called sovereign immunity, you can’t file criminal or civil charges against the government unless they agree to let you. This may come as a shock, but the government was not about to go to court to defend themselves against a conspiracy theory.

By naming “unknown co-conspirators” in their filing, it left the door open for the jury to name government agencies as conspirators without the Kings actually having to sue the government. But because this was a civil case, the burden of proof is dramatically lower. The prosecution only needs to show that something is more likely than not, rather than proving it beyond a reasonable doubt.

There is a huge difference between a person being 50.1% sure of something and a person being 100% sure of something. Reactions to the verdict were more than a little mixed. The Kings felt vindicated.

They believed it was finally on the record in a court of law that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated as the result of a conspiracy. The government felt differently, and the Department of Justice decided to reopen the case in 2000 to investigate the evidence that was put forth in trial. After reviewing all of the evidence, Attorney General Janet Reno declared that she could find no evidence of a conspiracy, that Frank Liberto wasn’t a member of the mafia, and that Jowers had made his entire story up for financial gain.

But that’s just what they want you to think. Wrap Up I’ve laid out as much potential evidence as I can and been as forthright as possible about the credibility of that evidence. So where did you land on this one?

Was James Earl Ray acting alone in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., or he was he an unknowing patsy that took the fall as part of a larger, FBI conspiracy? In my eyes, the official story leaves a lot to be desired. Ray was an incompetent criminal and a terrible rifleman.

Even if he was somehow capable of pulling this off alone, the evidence is really suspicious. The murder weapon covered in fingerprints was left gift wrapped on the street despite no fingerprints in his room or the bathroom, and the FBI’s star witness was a drunk who looked at a picture of Ray and said, “Nah, that’s not the guy.” On the other hand, the story given in the Jowers trial isn’t great either.

Because Jowers was the main defendant, instead of emphasizing the released FBI documents it had to focus on Jowers’ story. This included a lot of second and third party testimony of events, like the doctor smothering King with a pillow. There’s a fair chance that he really did make up his involvement in the hopes of selling his story.

If neither of those stories seems great, that brings us back to all the declassified documents from the FBI and the accounts of the police officers that were tasked with protecting King that day. Based on all that, it looks really bad. There’s no direct evidence of a murder conspiracy, but they had already told King to kill himself and he refused to take the hint.

It’s not unreasonable to think that as his fight against capitalism and for human rights intensified, so too would the response of an incredibly corrupt and vindictive FBI and J. Edgar Hoover. All I know is that where there’s smoke there’s fire, and there was an awful lot of smoke in today’s episode.

But there wasn’t any plume of smoke coming from the bushes. There are no bushes across the street from the motel and there never were, so just keep your mouth shut about it. Key Takeaways Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.

James Earl Ray, an escaped convict, was identified as the shooter, but conspiracy theories suggest FBI involvement. King’s assassination followed his shift from civil rights to broader human rights and anti-capitalism advocacy. The FBI had a long history of surveilling and harassing King, aiming to discredit him.

A 1999 civil trial found Loyd Jowers and ‘governmental agencies’ responsible for King’s assassination. Frequently Asked Questions What was the official story of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination? The official story is that Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed by James Earl Ray, an escaped convict and lifelong racist, on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.

What was the FBI’s involvement in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.? The FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, had a long history of surveilling and harassing Martin Luther King Jr. due to his civil rights activism and opposition to capitalism and the Vietnam War.

They sent him an anonymous letter in 1964, urging him to commit suicide, and were involved in various suspicious activities on the day of his assassination. What was the significance of the 1999 court verdict involving Loyd Jowers? In 1999, a civil trial found Loyd Jowers and other unknown co-conspirators, including government agencies, responsible for the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

The King family sought to establish that the government was involved in the conspiracy. What was the role of James Earl Ray in the assassination? James Earl Ray was identified as the shooter and was convicted for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

However, Ray maintained his innocence, claiming he was set up and was an unknowing accomplice. The evidence against him is considered shaky by some, including witness testimonies and ballistics reports. What were some of the suspicious events surrounding King’s assassination?

Suspicious events include the removal of a sycamore tree and bushes that obstructed the line of sight from the rooming house bathroom, the withdrawal of police protection just before the assassination, and the alleged involvement of FBI informants within the Memphis Police Department. What was the FBI’s motivation for targeting Martin Luther King Jr.? The FBI, particularly J.

Edgar Hoover, targeted Martin Luther King Jr. due to his civil rights activism and his opposition to capitalism and the Vietnam War. Hoover saw King as a threat to the status quo and worked to discredit and eliminate him. What was the FBI-King Suicide Letter?

The FBI-King Suicide Letter was an anonymous letter sent to Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964, urging him to commit suicide. The letter was part of the FBI’s efforts to discredit and harass King, exploiting his known bouts of depression. What was the significance of the Memphis sanitation strike?

The Memphis sanitation strike was a pivotal event that drew Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis. The strike highlighted issues of civil rights and economic justice, and King’s involvement in the strike was part of his broader campaign for human rights and economic equality. What was the role of the Memphis Police Department in the assassination?

The Memphis Police Department had several paid informants working with the FBI and was involved in various suspicious activities on the day of the assassination, including the withdrawal of police protection and the removal of obstructions that would have hindered a clear line of sight for the shooter. What was the outcome of the 1999 trial involving Loyd Jowers? The 1999 trial found Loyd Jowers and other unknown co-conspirators, including government agencies, responsible for the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

The King family sought to establish that the government was involved in the conspiracy, but the verdict was based on a lower burden of proof typical in civil cases.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the official story of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination?

The official story is that Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed by James Earl Ray, an escaped convict and lifelong racist, on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.

What was the FBI’s involvement in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.?

The FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, had a long history of surveilling and harassing Martin Luther King Jr. due to his civil rights activism and opposition to capitalism and the Vietnam War. They sent him an anonymous letter in 1964, urging him to commit suicide, and were involved in various suspicious activities on the day of his assassination.

What was the significance of the 1999 court verdict involving Loyd Jowers?

In 1999, a civil trial found Loyd Jowers and other unknown co-conspirators, including government agencies, responsible for the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The King family sought to establish that the government was involved in the conspiracy.

What was the role of James Earl Ray in the assassination?

James Earl Ray was identified as the shooter and was convicted for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. However, Ray maintained his innocence, claiming he was set up and was an unknowing accomplice. The evidence against him is considered shaky by some, including witness testimonies and ballistics reports.

What were some of the suspicious events surrounding King’s assassination?

Suspicious events include the removal of a sycamore tree and bushes that obstructed the line of sight from the rooming house bathroom, the withdrawal of police protection just before the assassination, and the alleged involvement of FBI informants within the Memphis Police Department.

What was the FBI’s motivation for targeting Martin Luther King Jr.?

The FBI, particularly J. Edgar Hoover, targeted Martin Luther King Jr. due to his civil rights activism and his opposition to capitalism and the Vietnam War. Hoover saw King as a threat to the status quo and worked to discredit and eliminate him.

What was the FBI-King Suicide Letter?

The FBI-King Suicide Letter was an anonymous letter sent to Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964, urging him to commit suicide. The letter was part of the FBI’s efforts to discredit and harass King, exploiting his known bouts of depression.

What was the significance of the Memphis sanitation strike?

The Memphis sanitation strike was a pivotal event that drew Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis. The strike highlighted issues of civil rights and economic justice, and King’s involvement in the strike was part of his broader campaign for human rights and economic equality.

What was the role of the Memphis Police Department in the assassination?

The Memphis Police Department had several paid informants working with the FBI and was involved in various suspicious activities on the day of the assassination, including the withdrawal of police protection and the removal of obstructions that would have hindered a clear line of sight for the shooter.

What was the outcome of the 1999 trial involving Loyd Jowers?

The 1999 trial found Loyd Jowers and other unknown co-conspirators, including government agencies, responsible for the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The King family sought to establish that the government was involved in the conspiracy, but the verdict was based on a lower burden of proof typical in civil cases.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Did the FBI Kill Martin Luther King?
• Hero image source by Morganlefay11 / openverse, by-sa.