The Plot to Kill King

by William F. Pepper

  “He was in a real good mood. It may have been from what they accomplished in the staff meeting—when Dr. King’s relaxed, he’s relaxed. He’d put his shirt on. He couldn’t find his tie. And he thought that the staff was playing games with him, but we did find it in the drawer. When he put the shirt on, it was too tight. And I said, ‘Oh, Doctor, you’re getting fat!’

  “He said, ‘Yeah, I am doing that….’

  “I called to Ralph to come on. They were getting ready to load up. I said, ‘I’ll come down. Wait a minute. Somebody can ride with me.’ As I turned and got maybe five steps away this noise sounded. Like a firecracker.”

  As discussed elsewhere, based upon the surveillance notes from the police intelligence investigator, this account was a bold-faced lie, used by Kyles to disguise the role he was instructed to play: to get Dr. King on the balcony at 6:00 p.m.—a clean target—as Kyles had walked about sixty feet north out of the way, where he waited.

  Originally, we believed the photograph that was taken by Joseph Louw minutes after the shot. The picture flashed around the world and showed a group of SCLC staff, including Andy Young, standing on the balcony pointing toward the back of the rooming house. In the photograph a person is kneeling by the feet of the others, apparently checking Dr. King for life signs. At the time no one seemed to know who this person was.

  The first call for help to the police department’s dispatcher was recorded at 6:03 p.m. Calls went out from police dispatch and Fire Station No. 2 diagonally opposite the Lorraine, where police officer Willie B. Richmond had sounded the alert.

  Lieutenant Judson E. Ghormley of the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department commanded TACT Unit 10 (TACT 10) that afternoon. They were in place with three cars at Fire Station No. 2 on South Main Street and Butler Street.

  The TACT units each consisted of twelve officers from the MPD and the Shelby County Sheriff’s department. Except for officer Emmett Douglass, who was sitting in the unit’s station wagon monitoring the radio, the others were inside the fire station drinking coffee, playing ping-pong, making phone calls, or talking. Emmett would confirm that his station wagon, identified as the car that the fleeing James Earl Ray saw, caused him to panic and drop a bundle in Canipe’s Amusement Company doorway (near the second Mustang). In fact, the police station wagon was not pulled up to the curb in Ray’s sight, but in front of the side door of the firehouse, well out of Ray’s vision. When the shot rang out and Richmond called out, “Dr. King has been shot!” all of the officers ran out the north exit of the station and around to the rear of the building.

  Ghormley said he stopped at the concrete wall at the rear of the fire station, turned around, ran back to the front of the station, and headed north up South Main Street toward the rooming house, arriving in front of the recessed doorway of the Canipe Amusement Company at 424 South Main Street within two minutes of the shot.

  There he found a bundle that contained a gun and several other items, including nine 30.06 unfired rifle bullets inside a cardboard box. One of the two customers in the Canipe Amusement Company and Canipe himself described hearing a thump as the bundle was dropped, and said that they noticed a young man pass by and a white Mustang parked south of the shop pull away.

  Sheriff’s deputy Vernon Dollahite apparently arrived shortly after Ghormley from the opposite direction, having continued from the motel around the block up to South Main Street. He entered Jim’s Grill located directly beneath the rooming house where John Willard had rented a room. Dollahite ordered Loyd Jowers, the owner and manager of the Grill, to lock the door and let no one in or out.

  According to those present, Dr. King was lifted onto a stretcher and carried down the stairs to a waiting ambulance. Ralph Abernathy rode with him to St. Joseph’s Hospital. Bernard Lee, Andy Young, and Chauncey Eskridge, Dr. King’s personal lawyer, followed behind in a car driven by Solomon Jones, a driver for the R. S. Lewis & Sons Funeral Home who had been provided to Dr. King as his chauffeur when he was in Memphis.

  Around 6:30 p.m., a police dispatcher, William Tucker, received a call from a patrol car that supposedly was chasing a white Mustang across the northern part of the city.

  Upon hearing about the shooting, Lorraine Bailey had screamed (exclaiming “What have I/we done”), ran to her room, and collapsed on her bed. She suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and was rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital. She never regained consciousness and died the following Tuesday, just as the funeral for Dr. King began in Atlanta.

  Reverend A. D. King had been in the shower when the shooting occurred. He was dressing when the ambulance left, and he remained at the motel, waiting for word from the hospital and keeping in touch with his parents in Atlanta.

  At St. Joseph’s, Dr. King was worked on feverishly by a team of five or six doctors in the emergency room while police sealed off the hospital. Early on, it became apparent to the medical team that the high-velocity bullet had entered the right lower facial area around the chin, penetrated downward, and severed the spinal cord in the lower neck, upper chest, and back regions.

  Andy Young and Chauncey Eskridge waited in a small anteroom. Ralph Abernathy and Bernard Lee stood against the wall of the small emergency room, waiting while the doctors worked until they were ordered out of the room.

  Finally, neurosurgeon Frederick Gioia approached Abernathy and told him that there was no hope. The only life function that remained was Dr. King’s heartbeat. His breathing was facilitated by a catheter in his throat. Finally, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. The hospital chaplain, Faith Coleman Bergard, reached the emergency room shortly afterward. While Dr. King’s aides prayed in the anteroom, Bergard bent over the body, prayed, and closed the dead man’s eyes.

  Having heard about the shooting, Dr. King’s wife, Coretta, was on her way to board a plane for Memphis when the news of his death reached her. She returned home to be with their four children.

  Around this time I was pulling into the driveway of my parents’ home in Yonkers, New York. A bulletin announcing Dr. King’s shooting came over the radio. Stunned, I sat immobile for several minutes.

  For one bright moment back in the late 1960s, we actually believed that we could change our country. We had identified the enemy. We saw it up close, we had its measure, and we were very hopeful that we would prevail. The enemy was hollow where we had substance. All of that substance was destroyed by an assassin’s bullet.

  Shortly afterward I called Ben Spock. We arranged to travel together to Memphis for the memorial march the following Monday, and then on to Atlanta for the funeral.

  Fear and uncertainty prevailed in Memphis that evening. Telephone communications broke down in the central city. Though a curfew had been imposed and the meeting at the Masonic Temple at which Dr. King was to speak had been called off, masses of blacks, some unknowingly, some in defiance, converged on the Temple. By 8:15 p.m., window-breaking and rock-throwing incidents were increasing. By 9:00 p.m., sniper fire was reported in northern Memphis, and by 10:00 p.m., a building-supplies company north of downtown was the scene of a major fire. Rioting and looting became rampant, with liquor stores the main target. The first contingent of a four-thousand-strong National Guard force moved into the streets, joining the police, sheriff’s deputies, state highway patrol, and fifty Arkansas highway patrolmen.

  Eventually, Ralph Abernathy, Andy Young, Hosea Williams, and the other SCLC staff members regrouped at the motel and met into the early hours of Friday, April 5. All pledged loyalty to Ralph Abernathy as Dr. King’s appointed successor.

  By Friday morning, the autopsy by Shelby County’s Medical Examiner, Dr. Francisco, had been completed at John Gaston Hospital. Dr. King’s body was then taken to R. S. Lewis & Sons Funeral Home, where people came to pay their respects.

  Coretta King was on her way from Atlanta to escort the body home. The SCLC staff gathered at the funeral home to take the body to the airport when she arrived. She and her children never left the private jet that Senator Rober
t Kennedy had chartered for her. Attorney General Ramsey Clark visited her on board and publicity announced, “All of our evidence at this time indicates that it was a single person who committed this criminal act.”

  A lie that would prevail until now, when the truth is finally being told in this book.

  On the morning of Friday, April 5, President Johnson met with twenty-one civil rights leaders called to Washington from across the country. He then went to the Wahington National Cathedral and attended a memorial service for Dr. King in the midst of the ongoing insurrection and civil disorder in the capitol.

  Compared with the spontaneous violence of the night before, Friday in Memphis was relatively calm, as though the city had spent all of its anger in one short burst. The situation across the country was very different. By evening at least forty cities were in trouble; states of emergency were declared in Washington, DC; Chicago; Detroit; Pittsburgh; Baltimore; Wilmington, Delaware; and Newark.

  Within twenty-four hours of the killing, the 30.06 Remington 760 Gamemaster rifle found in the bundle near the scene was traced by its serial number to the Aeromarine Supply Company in Birmingham, Alabama. The manager, Donald Wood, told investigators that a person named Harvey Lowmeyer had first bought a .243 Winchester on March 29 and then, strangely enough, exchanged it for the Remington the next day. On the rifle was a Redfield 2x7 telescopic sight, which had been mounted at Lowmeyer’s request.

  A pair of binoculars also found in the bundle in front of the Canipe Amusement Company was traced by Memphis police to the York Arms Company, located a few blocks north of the rooming house on South Main Street.

  The rifle was packed in a Browning rifle box, along with a Remington Peters cartridge box containing nine 30.06 cartridges: four military type and five Remington Peter’s soft points. The rifle box had been wrapped in a bedspread, along with a zippered plastic overnight bag containing toiletries, a pair of pliers, a tack hammer, a portable radio, two cans of beer, and a section of the April 4 edition of the Memphis Commercial Appeal. In the rifle was an unejected cartridge case.

  The Memphis city council passed a resolution expressing condolences to Dr. King’s family and issued a reward of $50,000 for information leading to the capture and conviction of the assassin. Since the Commercial Appeal and the Memphis Press-Scimitar had also each pledged $25,000, the total reward offer came to $100,000.

  The march scheduled for Monday, April 8, was to proceed as a memorial to Dr. King, with a rally in front of city hall, subject to the restrictions previously agreed upon and handed down by Judge Bailey Brown. On that cloudy Monday, Dr. Spock and I joined some forty thousand people, mostly local blacks, and slowly marched between the ranks of the five thousand National Guardsmen who lined the route from Hernando Street to city hall.

  Eventually Dr. Spock and I mounted the specially erected platform and joined the family, Ralph Abernathy, and others who would address the large outpouring of mourners.

  We were particularly impressed with the commitment expressed by Harry Belafonte, but in succeeding years as we struggled against the government on behalf of the truth, Harry was usually not available. This did not sit well with either the family or me. Years later, at his daughter’s request, I agreed to be interviewed by him in a documentary he was developing on his life. The session took several hours; not a minute of my interview was included as being acceptable to the image being put forward. None of this is to deny his earlier closeness to Dr. King and the support and comfort he provided at critical times. I thought that the family members who elected to exclude him from their inner circle, particularly after Coretta’s death, may have been unduly unfair, but that was their decision.

  We went to Atlanta the next day for the funeral. There were about one hundred thousand mourners, including Vice President Hubert Humphrey, walking slowly behind a mule-drawn carriage to the Morehouse College campus for a service and then on to the burial in South View Cemetery.

  Prominent individuals who had increasingly turned their backs on Dr. King during his last year when he most needed them turned up at his funeral. The hypocrisy sickened me.

  That evening, Robert Kennedy invited a number of us to a gathering in his hotel suite. I did not go; I regarded the senator’s politically motivated actions as distasteful. I had long ago come to expect that from the Kennedys as a result of my previous experience as Robert Kennedy’s Westchester County, New York, citizens’ chairman during his senatorial campaign in 1964. (We would learn years later that in the early 1960s, a less-mature Attorney General Kennedy had given in to FBI Director Hoover’s pressure to permit the wiretapping of Dr. King.)

  Having said that, I have subsequently come to appreciate that the Robert Kennedy who I knew in 1964 was not the same man who was running for president in 1968. The latter Bobby Kennedy had become aware of the disparity in wealth and the suffering of millions of his fellow citizens who were barely able to survive. He never knew that American children were sleeping on dirt floors and going shoeless to school until he traveled to West Virginia and Appalachia. He was, I was told, moved to tears. I have regrets that I did not know this formidable human being—as he emerged—and now am left with the task of unearthing the truth of how he, too, was taken from us. I am seeking as lead counsel a full evidentiary hearing for the man falsely accused of his assassination.

  Back to the Dr. King assassination and Memphis. Negotiations aimed at settling the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike would soon resume under intense presidential pressure for a settlement. An agreement was reached on April 16; the union was recognized and a pay raise was agreed to, as were the procedures for a dues checkoff through the Public Workers Federal Credit Union. The strike had lasted for sixty-five days.

  On April 10, Mrs. John Riley, in apartment 492 of the Capitol Homes Housing Project in Atlanta, telephoned the local FBI field office to report that a Mustang had been left in a small parking space near her building. She described it as white with a 1968 Alabama plate in the back and two Mexican tourist stickers on the windshield. She had heard that the police were looking for a man driving a white Mustang in connection with the killing of Dr. King. The Mustang, she reported, had been parked in that space since April 5.

  A quick check showed that the car was registered in the name of Eric S. Galt, 2608 South Highland Avenue, Birmingham. The ashtray was overflowing with cigarette butts and ashes.

  On April 12, the Miami FBI office issued and then immediately withdrew a statewide police bulletin calling for the location—though not the apprehension—of one Eric Starvo Galt.

  A handwriting comparison indicated that Galt was also the man calling himself Harvey Lowmeyer—the man who bought the rifle at the Aeromarine Supply Company in Birmingham. An analysis of fibers found in the trunk of the Mustang matched those on the pillow and sheets in room 5-B of the rooming house rented by John Willard on April 4.

  From interviews with acquaintances of Galt, the FBI learned that he had attended the International School of Bartending on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Tomas Reyes Lau, its director, provided a photograph of the man. Money orders cashed in the Los Angeles area, found to have been purchased at the Bank of America by Eric S. Galt, were made out to the Locksmithing Institute of Bloomfield, New Jersey. The records of that institute showed that Galt had been receiving lessons in Montreal by mail beginning on July 17, 1967, with the latest lesson sent to 113 Fourteenth Street in Atlanta.

  Local FBI agents descended on those premises on April 16. Learning that Galt still had his ground-floor room number 2, they established a physical surveillance for twenty-four hours. Author Gerold Frank maintained that when no one appeared, two agents acting under instructions from Cartha DeLoach, the FBI’s assistant director in Washington, disguised themselves as hippies and rented a room (from landlord James Garner) adjoining room number 2. The connecting door was padlocked from the other side, so, according to Gerold Frank, DeLoach gave instructions to remove the door from its hinges in order to get in (DeLoach has denied th
is). Thus, they obtained—possibly illegally because no warrant had been issued—a variety of items from the room, including a map of Atlanta with a clear left thumbprint. Someone—apparently, J. Edgar Hoover himself—suggested that the available fingerprints be compared against the prints of white men under fifty wanted by the police—the fugitive file. Reportedly fifty-three thousand sets of prints were in this category.

  On April 17, the Birmingham FBI office sought a federal fugitive warrant for Eric Starvo Galt pursuant to an indictment charging a conspiracy to violate Dr. King’s civil rights.

  Beginning on the morning of April 18, FBI specialists undertook the task of fingerprint comparison; by the next morning, the seven hundredth card matched. It belonged to a fugitive from a Missouri penitentiary. His name was James Earl Ray.

  It was clear; Galt and Ray (escaped convict) were the same man.

  Chapter 3

  THE PATSY RITUAL

  Patsy hunted, patsy found

  Now remains a trial or plea.

  Then with lawyers, round and round,

  A guilt arranged for all to see.

  With the death of Dr. King, the media quite naturally turned their attention to the FBI-led search for the killer. The manhunt officially started on April 17 with the Birmingham indictment, beginning with the FBI (the Bureau) purporting to mount an all-out campaign to search for Dr. King’s murderer.

  During this time, the Bureau selectively leaked information to the media. One such leak was noted very early on by Martin Waldron of The New York Times. In his article entitled “The Search” published on April 20, 1968, he stated:

  “Earlier there had been information leaks from the FBI that the fingerprints found on the rifle dropped on the Memphis street had been tested and had been found to be those of Ray.”