MLK Assassination “Anomalies”

Excerpted from Monumental Myths

I was about 2½ months old when it happened. On April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) was assassinated. The official story is that a single “lone nut” bumbling petty crook, James Earl Ray, was staying at a rooming house located at 422 South Main Street. In the back of this rooming house was a shared bathroom with a window that looked out onto the swimming pool of the Lorraine Motel.

Since the window in the bathroom was over his head, Ray stood on a bathtub and fired the shot that killed MLK. He then ran from the bathroom into the bedroom, bundled up the rifle and a bizarre collection of personal belongings into a blanket (ensuring that the rifle and belongings but not the bathroom door or the bedroom door had his fingerprints on them), ran the length of the rooming house (down a flight of stairs), dumped the bundle in the street, walked calmly to his waiting Mustang and drove away within the 90 seconds it took uniformed officers to reach the same location.

He drove off in his white Mustang and single handedly evaded a police dragnet in Memphis, drove a conspicuous white Mustang all the way to Atlanta, then left the country and journeyed as far as Portugal before finally being apprehended in London’s Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968 and charged with the assassination of MLK.

Or so the “official story” goes…

But there were many anomalies in the “official story.”

Did you know…

Within minutes after the shooting of MLK, a local police officer discovered a Remington 30-06 rifle, several unused bullets, and other effects that belonged to James Earl Ray, wrapped inside a blanket, outside Canipe’s Amusement store. The owner of the store recalled someone dropping the package at his door before the time of the assassination.

Did you know…

Judge Joe Brown, who presided over two years of hearings on the rifle, testified that “…67% of the bullets from my tests did not match the Ray rifle.” He added that the unfired bullets found wrapped with it in a blanket were metallurgically different from the bullet taken from MLK’s body, and therefore were from a different lot of ammunition. And because the rifle’s scope had not been sited, Brown said, “this weapon literally could not have hit the broadside of a barn.” Holding up the Remington 30-06 rifle, Judge Brown told the jury, “It is my opinion that this is not the murder weapon.”

Did you know…

There was never a police investigation of the MLK assassination. No house-to-house investigation. Neighbors as late as two weeks later stated “they never knocked on my door.” In thirty years, they never talked to the Captain who ran the fire station across the street.

Did you know…

Solomon Jones was MLK’s chauffeur in Memphis. The FBI document, dated April 13, 1968, says that after MLK was shot, when Jones looked across Mulberry Street into the brushy area, “he got a quick glimpse of a person with his back toward Mulberry Street. … This person was moving rather fast, and he recalls that he believed he was wearing some sort of light-colored jacket with some sort of a hood or parka.” When he was interviewed by the police at 11:30 PM on the day of the murder, Jones provided the same basic information concerning a person leaving the brushy area in a hurry.

Did you know…

Earl Caldwell was a New York Times reporter in his room at the Lorraine Motel the evening of the assassination. In videotaped testimony, Caldwell said he heard what he thought was a bomb blast at 6:00 PM. When he ran to the door and looked out, he saw a man crouched in the heavy part of the bushes across the street. The man was looking over at the Lorraine’s balcony. Caldwell wrote an article about the figure in the bushes but was never questioned about what he had seen by any authorities.

Did you know…

Within hours of the assassination, the crime scene (bushes and brushy area that Solomon Jones, Earl Caldwell, and several others were identifying to the Memphis police as a cover for the shooter) had been “sanitized” by orders of the police. In a 1993 affidavit from former SCLC official James Orange that was read into the court record, Orange said that he “… noticed, quite early the next morning around 8 or 9 o’clock, that all of the bushes and brush on the hill were cut down and cleaned up. It was as though the entire area of the bushes from behind the rooming house had been cleared.”

Maynard Stiles, who in 1968 was a senior official in the Memphis Sanitation Department, confirmed that the bushes near the rooming house were cut down. At about 7:00 AM on April 5th, the day after the assassination, Stiles told the jury that he received a call from Memphis Police Department Inspector Sam Evans “requesting assistance in clearing brush and debris from a vacant lot in the vicinity of the assassination. … They went to that site, and under the direction of the police department, whoever was in charge there, proceeded with the clean-up in a slow, methodical, meticulous manner.” It seems that Memphis Police Department was more concerned with cleaning up an alleged crime scene than investigating the murder. Hmmmmm….

Did you know…

Just two hours before the assassination the Memphis Police Department’s patrolling “TAC Units” (each comprising three cars) were pulled back five blocks from the vicinity of the Lorraine Motel. Police chief Holloman claimed that he did not know of that decision until afterwards. Furthermore, immediately after the shooting, no “All Points Bulletin” was issued. This would have ensured that the major escape routes out of Memphis were sealed. So, despite the official story, there was no “police dragnet in Memphis” on that day.

Did you know…

The only person to ever identify James Earl Ray as having been at the rooming house (never mind shooting) at the time of the murder was Charlie Stephens, a man so drunk a cab driver even refused to take him anywhere that day. Imagine how drunk you’d have to be for a cab driver to refuse service!

Did you know…

Charlie Stephens was the government’s “star witness” in a trial that resulted in the conviction and imprisonment of James Earl Ray in March 1969? Oh yes, did I mention that Stephens couldn’t identify Ray when he was later shown a photograph?

Did you know…

William Hamblin told the court a story he was told many times by his friend James McCraw, now deceased. McCraw was the taxi driver who arrived at the motel to pick up Charlie Stephens shortly before 6:00 PM on the day of the shooting. In a deposition read earlier to the jury, McCraw said he found Stephens in his room lying on his bed too drunk to get up, so he turned out the light and left without him. Amazingly, only a few minutes later (according the “official story”), Stephens identified Ray as he was passing down the hall from the bathroom. McCraw also said the bathroom door next to Stephen’s room was standing wide open, and there was no one in the bathroom. Why is this important? Because that was the bathroom where James Earl Ray was supposedly balancing on the tub as he was preparing to squeeze the trigger and kill MLK.

At the trial, Hamblin told the jury that he and McCraw were close friends for about 25 years. Hamblin said he probably heard McCraw tell the same rifle story 50 times, but only when McCraw had been drinking and had his defenses down. In that story, McCraw said that Loyd Jowers (the owner of Jim’s Grill in Memphis) had given him the rifle right after the shooting. According to Hamblin, “Jowers told him to get the [rifle] and get it out of here now. (McCraw) said that he grabbed his beer and snatched it out. He had the rifle rolled up in an oil cloth, and he leapt out the door and did away with it.” McCraw told Hamblin that he threw the rifle off a bridge into the Mississippi River.

Did you know…

In 1993, Lloyd Jowers told his story to Sam Donaldson on Prime Time Live. He said he had been asked to help in the murder of MLK and was told there would be a decoy (Ray) in the plot. He was also told that the police “wouldn’t be there that night.” Jowers said the man who asked him to help in the murder was a Mafia-connected produce dealer named Frank Liberto (now deceased) who had a courier deliver $100,000 for Jowers to hold at his restaurant (Jim’s Grill), the back door of which opened onto the dense bushes across from the Lorraine Motel. Jowers said he was visited the day before the murder by a man named Raul, who brought a rifle in a box.

Other witnesses also testified to their knowledge of Liberto’s involvement in MLK’s murder.

Store-owner John McFerren said he arrived around 5:15 pm, April 4, 1968, for a produce pick-up at Frank Liberto’s warehouse in Memphis. When he approached the warehouse office, McFerren overheard Liberto on the phone inside saying, “Shoot the son-of-a-bitch on the balcony.” Café-owner, Lavada Addison, a friend of Liberto’s in the late 1970s, testified that Liberto had told her he “had Martin Luther King killed.” Addison’s son, Nathan Whitlock, when he learned of this conversation, asked Liberto point-blank if he had killed MLK. According to Whitlock, “(Liberto) said, ‘I didn’t kill the n****r but I had it done.’ I said, ‘What about that other son-of-a-bitch taking credit for it?’ He says, ‘Ahh, he wasn’t nothing but a troublemaker from Missouri. He was a front man … a setup man.’”

Did you know…

In 1999, in Shelby County, Tennessee, Lloyd Jowers was tried before a jury of his peers (made up equally of white and black citizens, if it matters) on the charge of conspiring to kill MLK. The jury heard testimony for a full month. On the last day of the trial, the attorney for the MLK family (which brought suit against Lloyd Jowers) concluded by saying: “We’re dealing in conspiracy with agents of the City of Memphis and the governments of the State of Tennessee and the United States of America. We ask you to find that conspiracy existed.”

It took the jury only 2½ hours to reach the verdict: Jowers and “others, including governmental agencies, were parties to this conspiracy.”

Of course, with a few minor exceptions, the 1999 trial was not covered by the mainstream media. As a matter of fact, you’ve probably never even heard of it. But there was a narrow window of about 12 hours where there was some minor reporting. And then it just all went away and has never been heard of again. Except wherever it was raised, critics would start attacking, even though none of them had actually been there at the trial. In typical fashion, the critics attacked the judge. They attacked the defense counsel. They attacked the jury. They attacked the King family. They name-called. They mocked. They buried the story.

Perhaps the lesson of the MLK assassination is that our government understands the power of nonviolence better than we do, or better than we want to. In the spring of 1968, when MLK was marching, he was determined that massive, nonviolent civil disobedience would end the domination of democracy by corporate and military power. The “powers that be” took MLK seriously. They dealt with him in Memphis.

In Summary

Based on the 1999 court decision, the following is a factual statement (according to U.S. Civil Law):  The U.S. government was found guilty of being a part of the conspiracy to assassinate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

At the time of his death, MLK was considered to be the leading figure of the Civil Rights Movement, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and widely recognized as one of the world’s greatest speakers for what it means to be human. So why would the government want him dead? The King family’s conclusion as to motive was to prevent MLK from ending the Vietnam War because the government wanted to continue its ongoing covert and overt military operations to control foreign governments and their resources.

By the way, Jim Douglass was one of only two reporters who attended the 1999 trial in Memphis from start to finish. Writing in the spring of 2000, he stated, “Thirty-two years after Memphis, we know that the government that now honors Dr. King with a national holiday also killed him.”