Cobb and the team leader denied not only that the Alpha 184 was in Memphis, but that it even existed in 1968. They insisted that the Alabama contingent of the Twentieth SFG never trained at Camp Shelby and was never in the city of Memphis. Cobb insisted the unit could not have been involved in such an operation without his knowledge.
I asked a Birmingham private investigator to check out certain details about the team leader’s activities in the city and was provided with a copy of his criminal record. He had a conviction for negligent homicide and served one year in prison in Alabama before leaving for Costa Rica. Turning Point did not reveal this to viewers.
During the course of the program, the idea that the Alpha 184 team was in Memphis to control riots was advanced. This explanation had eventually been raised by Warren in his sessions with Steve Tompkins, who came to believe it. Though I gradually came to have a different view, it made no sense to me in the context of events at the time. This was before I came to see the riot as a possible excuse for opening fire, and it seemed to me to be well-established that riot control planning involved the use of numbers of officers on the ground, not a couple of snipers perched above the fray. Snipers are used to kill people, not control surging masses. It was also inconceivable to me that a riot could have been anticipated late that afternoon when the only activity was to be Dr. King and some of his group leaving the motel to go to dinner at Reverend Samuel “Billy” Kyles’s house. This was before I realized the significance of the eviction of the Invaders from the motel just before the killing. The idea that this armed militant group might react violently to this insulting, unexpected rejection was not unreasonable.
I provided ABC with other documentary evidence of the presence of the team in Memphis and the identity of the team leader. Since I had given my word, it would not be made public at that time, I could not allow the material to be used in the program or even have any reference made to it.
The documentary was aired on June 19, 1997. It included the interview with the team leader, myself, and General Cobb. It did not include the interview with Terrell or the corroborative information he provided to confirm the presence of the team in Memphis and its mission to kill Martin Luther King Jr. The program did, however, consider a number of other issues which pointed to a conspiracy and the involvement of the government.
Soon after the program, Terrell left the country. He told me later that he had been threatened and had no doubt the government had somehow obtained a copy of his interview. He was furious but offered to help me in any way he could.
Steve Tompkins told me that a thick defamation file was on General Cobb at the offices of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith. Steve had seen the file and suggested that I review it. I attempted to locate the file but was not successful, meeting denials that it existed.
Chapter 13
A PATSY’S DEATH
Death loomed, all pervasive
The long road, now at an end
With executioners ever abrasive
To the helpless soul, they could not bend.
In December 1996, I learned that James was terminally ill with cirrhosis of the liver, apparently from long-term undiagnosed hepatitis C. It came as a great shock. On December 21, he was rushed to Nashville Memorial Hospital, where he lapsed into a coma and was listed as being in critical condition. Media reports began circulating that he was near death.
I immediately began to explore the range of treatment possibilities, speaking with traditional Chinese medicine specialists at hospitals in Changsha, China, and TCM Klinik in Kotzingen, Germany. I also conferred with Dr. Roy Calne at Cambridge, who is one of the Europe’s leading transplant surgeons. I concluded that only a liver transplant could save James’s life.
By December 28, James began to show a marked improvement, but his doctor stressed this was short-term. On New Year’s Eve James was sent back to the Lois DeBerry Special Needs Center where he’d been since his disease had become advanced earlier that year. When I received his medical file, it was clear that he had been diagnosed with hepatitis C as early as 1994. James had not been told and neither had his family.
News of the illness generated extensive media interest in the case. It was initially focused on James’s imminent death, but it gave me the opportunity to discuss the case, my long-term investigation, and James’s innocence.
On January 6, 1997, Jerry and I visited James again at Nashville Memorial Hospital where he had been taken after a relapse. There was some obvious short-term improvement but he was still disorientated.
In the midst of James’s health crisis, on January 19, I was saddened to learn that Wayne Chastain was having an operation for cancer and would need four months to recuperate; he had never mentioned having the disease. Memphis attorney Jack McNeil would sit in for Wayne as local counsel since he was taking over a number of Wayne’s files. During that period James was in and out of the hospital and lapsed into critical condition twice.
Meanwhile, I began to discuss the possibility of James being accepted as a candidate for a liver transplant at the University of Pittsburgh Hospital’s Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute. I discussed the criteria for James’s admission with Dr. John J. Fung, head of the Division for Transplantation. He was candid and compassionate. It was clear he believed inmates should not be denied equal access to medical care. His unit had carried out liver transplants on a number of prisoners. This was unheard of in Tennessee.
One of the criteria for admission to his program was that an out-of-state applicant had to be rejected by his or her state’s center. The relevant center in Tennessee was located in Vanderbilt Hospital. Dr. Rao, James’s doctor in Nashville Memorial Hospital, was convinced they would not accept James on their list. I asked him to make a formal application. He did, and on March 7, he was told that James did not meet the criteria. The road seemed clear to Pittsburgh.
John Fung said he would need James to be admitted as an in-patient for three days for tests and assessment. On April 23, I wrote to the Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Corrections. I asked Jerry and Dr. Fung to do likewise, requesting his permission for James to travel to Pittsburgh. Costs would be paid for privately. On May 13 the commissioner wrote back refusing our request, stating that he had no statutory authority to grant it.
I immediately began to prepare a motion and a proposed court order, and went to Pittsburgh to meet with Dr. Fung. I came away highly impressed with his sensitivity and willingness to help. It was clear that most people admitted to his program received a transplant. If we could arrange for James to be admitted, he could well survive. Finance could be a problem, but we agreed while in Pittsburgh that the funds would not bar the operation. I sent final documentation to a much-improved Wayne Chastain in Memphis. Dr. Fung, Dr. Rao, and James’s brother Jerry sent affidavits in support. Wayne filed the motion papers in the Court of Chancery in Nashville, Tennessee, which had jurisdiction, and a hearing was set for June 16.
The attorney general argued against our petition on the grounds that under Tennessee law our petitioner did not state a claim for which relief could be granted because the Commissioner for Corrections had discretion to decide requests for medical furloughs.
I maintained that James’s federal constitutional rights under the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment required that the state enable him to receive the medical care necessary for him to live. I thought that the issue had been settled twenty-one years earlier with the US Supreme Court case Estelle v. Gambel. Not for the first time in relation to James, a Tennessee court refused to follow the law of the land.
If James would not be allowed to go to the University of Pittsburgh Hospital for evaluation, the hospital would have to come to him.
As a consequence of their insurance restrictions, the Tennessee authorities were able to perform all but two of the tests required by the Pittsburgh hospital. I agreed to pay for the last two tests. They were completed in late September 1997. The Pittsburgh Hospita
l admissions committee reviewed the results the following month. In accordance with their criteria, James was declared eligible for a transplant and was placed on their list. The announcement of his admission was formally made at a press conference in November.
Enter the King Family
On January 15, 1997, I learned that Dr. King’s daughter Yolanda King had called Reverend Jim Lawson’s office wanting my telephone number. I left a message for her. Then on January 27, Dr. King’s nephew Isaac Ferris called. He worked with Martin’s son Dexter King at the King Center, had read my earlier work Orders to Kill, which set out the results of my investigation through 1994, and was moved to encourage the family to come forward. He had been particularly impressed by the image I had developed of his uncle that showed him to be a leader for social, economic, and political justice and change and not just a civil rights icon. It had, he said, become clear to the family that James Earl Ray’s days were numbered. The family feared that when he died, the possibility of a trial, at which witnesses could provide evidence of what really happened, would be lost forever.
They wanted to come forward with some impact, sooner rather than later, and were working on their own strategy.
In early February, Dexter confirmed to a New York Times reporter that the family was going to support a trial for James. I was elated; the significance of the family’s involvement cannot be overestimated. The Times story broke on February 4, 1997, and Isaac called and asked if I would meet members of the family as soon as possible. A meeting was set up for February 10 at Isaac’s house.
The meeting lasted from 7:30 p.m. until 4 a.m. I talked with Dexter, Isaac, and family friend and advisor Philip Jones through the evidence I had amassed over nearly twenty years. They were astounded at the results, and the meeting was highly emotional. It was clear they had already decided to help.
They called a press conference for February 13. All the family were present. In the glare of the national media, with impressive grace and with Dexter as primary spokesperson, they announced their support for a trial for James Earl Ray. The call was made not—as some of the media were to distort—for James to be given one last chance to tell all he knew, but in order for an opportunity for witnesses to testify under oath and be subjected to cross-examination.
Over the succeeding months, the family, Dexter in particular, came under attack. Incredibly, financial gain was put forward as the motive for wanting to learn the truth about how Dr. King was killed. Naiveté was also cited; it was alleged that I had manipulated or even hypnotized them into supporting James.
The media continually sought to undermine the strength of the family’s commitment to a trial. Distortions abounded. Take the New York Times coverage on February 21 of our motion to test the alleged murder weapon. Drummond Ayres Jr. reported Mrs. King’s testimony:
Mrs. King, speaking after years of silence about Mr. Ray’s legal maneuvering, took the stand this morning, and acknowledging the incongruity of her appearance on his behalf and behest, said, “We call for the trial that never happened.”
This was a gross distortion of what she actually said, which was: “We call for the trial that never happened…. If we fail to seize this fading opportunity for justice to be served, the tragedy will be compounded by the failure of the legal system.” Nowhere in her statement did she refer in any way to James being pressed to tell anything.
In the article, Ayers very clearly gave the same standing to his disinformation as he did to Mrs. King’s actual words. In the light of this article and the seemingly intractable position of The New York Times, we decided to meet their editorial board.
The deputy editor attended with two others. They were attentive and asked a number of questions, but we came away believing there would be no change in their position.
In fact, the paper subsequently published an op-ed piece by David Garrow viciously attacking Dexter and the family, alleging they had betrayed Dr. King’s legacy. For nearly a generation, Garrow has surfaced wherever there is a move to open up the case. Though a historian who has written extensively on the FBI COINTELPRO activities against Dr. King, he has never himself investigated the assassination, but is one of a long list of publicists who has vigorously supported the government’s position.
(This is covered extensively in the epilogue.)
On March 17, I met with Dexter and Philip Jones. They came to the conclusion they should now move to the next level. Dexter would continue to call for a trial, but also state his belief that James was innocent. I believed it was essential that Dexter become increasingly knowledgeable about the details of the case. If anything should happen to me, he would be in a position to supervise any succeeding lawyers, and the integrity of the process would be assured.
Dexter wanted to have a face-to-face meeting with James. It was set for March 27 and took place in the conference room of George McGhee, the Health Services Administrator.
I introduced James to Dexter and they sat down with the media present for nearly half an hour. At one point Dexter asked poignantly, “Did you kill my father?”
James answered, “No, I didn’t,” and then went on to urge Dexter to examine the files for himself.
Dexter replied that he believed him and so did his family and pledged that, “We will do everything in our power to see that justice prevails.”
The next two months were filled with media appearances. Dexter and I became convinced that whenever possible, we should do live interviews. Taped sessions could be distorted through editing.
On the evening of April 14, Dexter, Isaac, and I met with Andrew Young, who in 1968 was executive vice president of the SCLC and a close friend of Dr. King, and who had always believed James was the shooter. That evening, after detailed questioning about my investigation, he changed his mind and agreed to take part in a press conference and help in any feasible way.
On April 18, Dexter called to say he’d had a brief but good meeting with Walter Fauntroy, the former chairman of the congressional subcommittee responsible for the King investigation. Walter confirmed his continued belief in James’s innocence. He was prepared to say so in the most effective way.
Earlier that day we met with Congressman John Lewis—a leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee at the time of the killing. He tentatively agreed to join forces with the group of leaders we were putting together to press for a trial.
In just three short months, from early February to May, the King family’s involvement had boosted the profile of the fight for justice for James and the truth about Dr. King’s killing. We knew, however, that we had to prepare ourselves for further media attacks.
In succeeding months, negative pieces did appear against the family and Judge Brown, and, of course, me. The result was to stiffen the family’s resolve to get to the truth. Their support for a trial never wavered and neither did their commitment to support a grant of immunity for anyone involved in exchange for information about the assassination. This posture would eventually lead to one of the most historic and revealing meetings ever held in the thirty-year saga.
The Last Judicial Proceedings
Meanwhile, the effort to secure a trial for James, years after he was coerced into entering a plea by his lawyer Percy Foreman, continued in the courts.
The new Tennessee post-conviction relief statute made it even more difficult than before to set aside a guilty plea. Petitioners now had to submit scientific evidence of actual innocence. The restrictive requirements of the statute raised serious constitutional issues, but we did not have two or three years to test it.
On June 26 1996, I appeared in Division IX of the Shelby County Criminal Court before Judge Brown. I argued that since we were facing the burden of having to develop scientific evidence, we should be allowed to test the rifle. We had to demonstrate that new technology was available now that had not been available to us when the rifle was originally tested by the state.
Since then, there had been significant advances in forensic technology.
Electron microscopes could give vastly enhanced magnification of the particular individual markings that each rifle imposed on bullets fired through its barrel. This would enable us to closely compare the markings on the test-fired slugs with each other as well as to the markings on the death slug. With this new equipment, it might finally be possible to exclude the rifle in evidence from being the murder weapon.
We were, however, in a classic Catch-22 situation. The law required that we submit scientific evidence as proof Ray’s actual innocence, but we could not do so unless we were allowed to conduct firearms identification tests.
I asked Judge Brown to reconsider our motion and grant us the opportunity to meet our statutory burden.
After a highly contentious hearing, the judge ordered a continuance until September 6 so that we could provide a specific plan for a scientific testing of the weapon and the death slug.
The motion was finally heard in Judge Brown’s court on February 20, 1997. I put on two of the three firearms experts, Robert Hathaway and Marchal Robinson; Tony Owens of CamScan Inc., who supported the testing with new technology and described the scanning electron microscope, which, in the second and final stage, would allow for a vastly increased magnification of cosmetically designated individual markings on the test-fired slugs and the death slug.
Next, I called Coretta Scott King and her son Dexter. They wanted to address the court as members of the victim’s family. The motion before the court was, of course, directly related to the application for the guilty plea to be set aside and a trial ordered. Incredibly, Assistant Attorney General Campbell objected to their testifying. The judge, affirming the court’s growing respect for victim’s rights, overruled the objection. Coretta Scott King was first on the stand. Asked if she had anything to tell the court, she said she did, turning in the witness box to face the judge. Her statement was moving. At one point she said:
The Plot to Kill King Page 22