Orders to Kill

by William F Pepper Esq

  Betty told me that Jowers had remarried within the last year and moved to the country. He had forgotten all of his black friends. She currently had no contact with him but seemed relieved when I told her that we didn’t believe that Jowers had actually shot Dr. King. It was obvious that she still had some feelings for Jowers. She said that until he remarried earlier that year he had provided support for two of her children.

  I had instructed Ken Herman to interview Rosie Lee Dabney, another waitress from Jim’s Grill. A few days later he reported on his interview with her. Rosie Lee was off at the time of the shooting and knew nothing about the gun, but she was aware of the affair between Jowers and Betty. She confirmed serving eggs and sausage that afternoon to a stranger.

  In interviews, Bobbi told us that she went to work early on the day of the shooting. She remembered that a priest came into the grill early in the morning asking where a certain church was located. She thought that was strange since there were no churches in that downtown area. She also remembered seeing James Earl Ray come in for a cup of coffee during the afternoon.

  She was sure Jowers had gone out for a while in the morning because she remembered that Rosie Lee had to pay the beer man when he came in between 9:00 and 10:00. She said the beer man pulled into the spot where Jowers’s old station wagon had been parked.

  Bobbi also said that Jowers told her first thing that morning not to take breakfast up to Grace Walden, who lived in room 6-B on the second floor of the rooming house, as was her custom. He made it clear that he wanted no one to go upstairs into the rooming house on that day.

  Jowers drove Bobbi to work the next day, April 5, in his old brown and white station wagon and told her that he had found the gun out back that was used to kill Dr. King and had turned it over to the police. He told her to be careful when she spoke about these events. Other than being interviewed by two men in 1968 who asked her if she saw Ray (not wanting to get involved she said no), no one had ever talked to her about the case.

  James McCraw had stated that Jowers showed him a rifle in a box on a shelf under the cash register, contending that he had found it out back and later that he had turned it over to the police. Thus, if Betty ever raised a question, both Bobbi and McCraw would state that he’d told them about finding a gun and turning it in. It was a rudimentary cover-up at best, but Jowers probably thought it was better than nothing.

  As for the Oakview house, Bobbi believed that she and her sister Alda had bought the house. She paid $200 for the $9,000 property purchase. The whole family lived in the house, and Jowers stayed there many times. Bobbi recalled that Jowers fired her soon after April 4, 1968, but did not remember any wedding of Betty and Jowers.

  Bobbi confirmed that Jowers had also owned the Tremont Cafe on Calhoun, and MPD officer S. O. Blackburn disclosed that the cafe was a gambling den used by Jowers, both Frank Libertos and another member of the Liberto family. This information was the first indication that Jowers had any association with the Libertos.

  Betty’s other sister, Alda, refused to talk during this period.

  The indications were that Jowers had no facility with a rifle. It also seemed clear that there were other people in the brush area and that the large footprints in the alley couldn’t have belonged to the diminutive Jowers, who apparently usually had others do his dirty work. Jowers, then, seemed much more likely to be an accomplice than the shooter.

  ON DECEMBER 5, Dale Dougherty called me from Waco, very excited. The hospital postmortem report on the death of his friend Bill Sartor had finally been pried loose after twenty-one years. It showed that Sartor had a lethal dose of methaqualone in his system when he died. Since Sartor had no history of any such drug use, Dougherty believed that it had been administered to him—either in the drinks he had at the Hickory Stick bar before he arrived home, or forcibly later that evening as he lay in bed.

  Ken Abels, the Waco district attorney, officially declared the death a homicide. He assigned his chief investigator, J. C. Rappe, to work with Dougherty and coordinate the inquiry.

  Since much of Sartor’s work prior to and at the time of his death involved the killing of Dr. King and focused on Shelby County, Dougherty asked J. C. Rappe if he would formally request help from the Shelby County attorney general’s investigative staff. This he did, requesting help from Shelby County attorney general’s investigator Jim Smith who had been designated as that office’s liaison to our work on the King case. Smith went to his chief who in turn secured the attorney general’s permission for the cooperation.

  I saw the investigation of Bill Sartor’s death as being complementary to my inquiry into Dr. King’s murder. The Waco investigation would be assisted by the knowledge I had about the King case, and I would have access to witnesses not previously available.

  We went to see Robert Patrick Lyons, who Sartor had maintained was attacked by a Liberto hit man who held a knife to his throat and said he was ordered to kill him for helping Sartor learn things he had no business knowing. Lyons had earlier rebuffed Kenny and Dale Dougherty. Jim Smith and I, as a special counsel to the Sartor family, now would have several meetings with him. It was obvious that Lyons was still deathly afraid. He denied knowing any of the persons or the events concerning him described by Sartor.

  In a session a few months later he told Jim Smith that he remembered Sartor calling him just before he died, saying he was coming to Memphis. Lyons thought Sartor mentioned the name of a person in the Waco area called Sam Termine with whom he was going to meet. When Dougherty mentioned this name to J. C. Rappe, it rang a bell. Termine was a club owner and one of Carlos Marcello’s operatives in Waco. It was clear that Lyons knew far more than he was willing to admit.

  DURING THIS TIME WE SEARCHED for Gene Pearson Crawford, who we learned from the attorney general’s files was allegedly the “eggs and sausage” man who ate in Jim’s Grill on the afternoon of the fourth and the morning of the fifth. (Now it appeared that although Jack Youngblood could possibly have been the person who successively visited attorney Russell X. Thompson and Reverends Latimer and Baltensprager on the morning of April 11, it was unlikely that he was, as we had earlier suspected, the “eggs and sausage” man.) Crawford was picked up by the police after Loyd Jowers called them on April 5, only to be promptly released. He had vanished, but when we found out that he was a drifter from Jackson, Tennessee, whose father had been known by the woman who managed the Ambassador Hotel, his potential significance greatly diminished. There was, however, no indication that Crawford was a gun collector, as FBI special agent in charge Jensen had maintained to Wayne Chastain was the case with the man whom they arrested.

  KEN HERMAN CALLED former LL&L Produce Company vice president and Liberto partner James Latch, only to be told that he was under a doctor’s care and that he couldn’t discuss anything that happened in 1968. Besides, he said, he had suffered a heart attack and his memory was faulty.

  Latch obviously knew a good deal. An FBI 302 report (302 reports are not signed statements but rather an FBI agent’s summary of what a person allegedly said) on him in the attorney general’s file confirmed that he was working at LL&L on the afternoon of April 4 and that he had a long scar on his neck. John McFerren’s 302 report of the late-night interview the Sunday following the killing noted that McFerren had described the man who answered the phone and passed it over to “fat Frank” as “one of the bosses” and as having such a scar. He had to have been describing James Latch. I was determined to go to Mississippi to see Mr. Latch, but that would have to wait until after the trial.

  I WAS AFRAID that Hickman might introduce statements of questionable validity from some of James’s fellow prisoners. Under our rules, FBI 302 interview reports were admissable. When we asked James about particular individuals whose 302 interviews we had read, he genuinely seemed not to know them at all or only remotely. This included the informant Raymond Curtis, whose story, as previously noted, had been widely quoted by UPI in a wire service release. It would have taken UPI very
little checking to learn that, though they were both in Jefferson City prison at the time, Curtis never knew James and that certainly James never spoke to him about anything. UPI’s FBI contacts could have confirmed, however, that Curtis was well known to the bureau. Harold Weisberg obtained the FBI file on Curtis (C.A. 75-1996), and it revealed that he was determined to make a name for himself in this case. He apparently began his endeavors with an effort to defraud Ebony magazine by attempting to sell a false story of a “contract” offer to kill Dr. King. According to Weisberg, the FBI records even characterized Curtis as a “pathological liar,”10 but this didn’t deter the media from spreading his blatant lies about James, nor did it cause the bureau to reveal that it knew he was lying. Curtis’s account reinforced the image they wanted of the lone assassin.

  I obtained the testimony of one or more prisoners who actually knew James well. One was J. J. Maloney, a former multiple murderer and armed robber who had rehabilitated himself, becoming a published author and poet and a reporter for the Kansas City Star. He confirmed James’s story about his escape in the bread box from Missouri State Penitentiary on April 23, and said positively that James was not a racist, that he kept to himself in prison, didn’t use drugs, and had no problem with black inmates. When we asked him what he knew about particular prisoners who had made negative statements about James, he commented that those inmates didn’t know James nor did they have contact with him. He questioned why prisoners who knew James well and moved in his circle weren’t interviewed by the FBI.

  Maloney was a find. He had been sent by the Star to cover the story of James’s 1977 escape from Brushy Mountain. When he arrived, he saw upwards of fifty flack-jacketed, heavily armed FBI agents already on the scene. They had established a base camp, and some of them had gone into the hills where the escapees had fled. Maloney didn’t know why they were there. James and the others were, after all, state prisoners, and there had been no call for federal assistance. He recalled that a highly vexed Tennessee governor Ray Blanton showed up and ordered the FBI out. When they didn’t leave, he threatened to put them in the cell vacated by James.

  Maloney agreed to testify.

  Ken Herman and I met with another former inmate, Don Wolverton, at his automobile garage. Wolverton had shared a cell with James at Brushy Mountain off and on for three and a half years. He knew him well and liked him. He also confirmed that James wasn’t a racist, didn’t use drugs, and had no difficulty with blacks. After he and James were thrown in the hole for eighteen months following a botched escape attempt, they celled alongside each other.

  In 1981 James had been the victim of a stabbing at Brushy Mountain Penitentiary, allegedly by some members of a militant black organization—the Akabulon group. Wolverton remembered that three or four days before the stabbing, Doc Walker, one of the assailants, was moved next to James. Two days before the incident, Wolverton (who had put in for a transfer nearer home one and a half years earlier) was suddenly transferred to Nashville. Wolverton said this was ominous because he always looked out for James.

  Wolverton agreed to take the stand.

  IN CONVERSATIONS WITH ONE OF MY INVESTIGATORS Jim Johnson, Jules Ricco Kimbel, expanding on the story he had earlier told English producer John Edginton’s researchers, said that he had piloted a Cessna owned by a company controlled by Carlos Marcello and flown two shooters in and out of Memphis on April 4. He provided specific details of his route—Three Rivers, Detroit, Atlanta, New Orleans, and west Memphis. I had doubts about Kimbel’s truthfulness. When Canadian investigator Alec Lomonosof checked on the street where Kimbel originally said he took James to get identification documents, it was clear that he was mistaken or fabricating. Later, after viewing photographs of James, he decided that James was not the person he took to get identification. Further, in his story about flying in the shooters from Canada, he said he took off from an airport near Three Rivers, an area he said the CIA used for training operations. Eventually we learned that apparently no such training activity was conducted there.

  However, some of Kimbel’s information seemed to have the ring of truth, because certain aspects dovetailed with information we had obtained from other sources.

  Kimbel continually referred to the Liberto family, and in particular, Sal Liberto of New Orleans, whom we knew to be one of Frank Camille Liberto’s brothers. He stated that Sal was connected to Carlos Marcello. Kimbel took “assignments” from H. L. Hunt’s Placid Oil Company over a period of twenty years, and he referred to Hunt as an implacable foe of Dr. King who, with Leander Perez, the powerful Louisiana racist, wanted King out of the way.

  Kimbel described Marcello as having extensive business operations in Texas. He said that in all likelihood Marcello and Hunt were in business together in Louisiana and possibly elsewhere. Kimbel confirmed knowing Sal Liberto and said he was aware that Hunt’s chief of staff, John Curington, posing as a Dallas private investigator, handled the contracts for a variety of unpleasant tasks the old man required.

  Of great interest was Kimbel’s description of a hunting camp where he said H. L. Hunt would occasionally meet and play cards with Carlos Marcello. Investigator Jim Johnson had once told me that he remembered being taken by his uncle to an east Texas ranch in the 1950s where he and his uncle and the owner of the ranch, Monroe Walridge, went dove hunting and where he saw Hunt and Hoover playing poker.

  Writer Anthony Summers had earlier shown me his research on J. Edgar Hoover, which included evidence of Hoover’s connections to the Texas oil barons, even to the point of them making gifts to him of shares in a number of their companies. He provided a copy of Hoover’s last will and testament, which showed his oil company shareholdings. Summers also documented Hoover’s closeness to senior mob leaders and their control over him. Among those figures exerting power over the nation’s top law enforcement officer was Carlos Marcello.

  In late October I had instructed Johnson to make initial contact with John Curington, who lived on a ranch in Big Sandy, Texas. Curington, along with Paul Rothermel, Hunt’s chief of security, left the Hunts in 1969, falling into disfavor with the family (in particular, with sons Bunker and Herbert) over alleged managerial improprieties of the subsidiary HLH Foods. Rothermel had been seconded to H. L. Hunt by Hoover in 1954, leaving the bureau to take over security for the Hunt organization. In the course of the dispute, Bunker and Herbert had resorted to wiretapping Rothermel. When Rothermel discovered this he brought criminal proceedings against them. One of the lawyers the Hunt brothers hired in 1969 (to represent one of their investigators charged) was none other than James’s second attorney, Percy Foreman, who had often represented the Hunts.

  Curington, a native Texan, had attempted to trade in information at various times and on one occasion provided material for a National Enquirer article on the Kennedy assassination linking Hunt financing to that event. Jim Johnson was unable to make contact with him because he was serving a sentence for a white-collar crime and was unable or unwilling to meet until he was released. Any discussions with Curington would have to take place after the trial.

  AT ERNESTINE AND HAZEL’S RESTAURANT, a longstanding black-owned cafe on South Main Street about three hundred yards from the rooming house, I spoke with patron William L. Ross, who told me that he was around the Lorraine at the time of the killing. He had gotten off work and taken the bus to Butler and South Main, arriving around 5:45. He began to walk down Butler to Mulberry, then turned left on Mulberry, crossed the street to the Lorraine side, and walked alongside the wall. There were a lot of people in the parking lot below the balcony. He heard the shot, ducked down, then straightened up and ran the fifty or so feet back to the driveway, where he saw Dr. King down on the balcony and people milling everywhere. Ross recalled seeing uniformed police coming up Mulberry.

  Ross remembered talking with a woman who told him of a conversation that took place in the lobby of the Lorraine at the time of the shooting. A phone call allegedly had been put through to room 306 just before Dr. King we
nt out on the balcony for the last time. This was the first I had heard about this message being relayed to Dr. King’s room.

  Since Ross was closer to the brush area than anyone else I had found, I wanted him to undergo hypnosis in order to learn if he saw anything or anyone right after the shooting. He agreed to try it. Ross also pointed me to Ernestine Campbell, whom I would interview soon afterward.

  In 1968 Ernestine Campbell and her husband owned the Trumpet Hotel which abutted the Lorraine. No one had ever talked to her or asked her about what she saw on that fateful afternoon. Ernestine said she left the hotel and started for home just before 6:00 p.m., driving her gold-bronze Cadillac up Butler and turning right on Mulberry. As she passed the Lorraine driveway on Butler, she saw Dr. King standing on the balcony. She didn’t hear anything because she had the car windows up and the radio on. As she turned the corner onto Mulberry she looked up and saw Dr. King lying on the balcony. She thought he’d had a heart attack. She stopped for a minute or two at the driveway, wondering why people weren’t racing to the balcony. Possibly she had arrived at the driveway when everyone was still in a state of shock.

  Her attention was in particular drawn to Jesse Jackson whom she said had one foot on the first step of the stairway looking up to the balcony while bent over “… putting something into a suit bag.” Her pause was brief, and she drove on without seeing any policemen or really noticing anyone at all.

  JIM LAWSON TOLD ME THAT WALTER FAUNTROY, the former HSCA head of the King investigation, wanted to cooperate, and we set up a meeting. I had not seen Fauntroy for fifteen years, and I was surprised and encouraged by his friendliness and receptivity. We were joined by his personal lawyer, Harley Daniels, who had been examining a wide range of HSCA “sealed” raw files that Walter had secured following the completion of the committee’s work. It appeared to me that Daniels had been trying, for the better part of a year, to investigate the King case solely through files and documentation. (They were planning to write a book based on this research.)