At the time of the Baldwin contract James was about to testify in public before the HSCA for the first time. I am certain there was considerable fear in some quarters about what he might say. In 1981, however, there was no indication that James had any intention or opportunity to come forward with any revelations. It had been characterized as racially motivated by a small, well-known group of black militants, determined to gain public attention. The result was that two of them, Partee and Doc Walker, each received an additional sentence of sixty-six years while one of their number, Ransom, received a considerably smaller term. James had refused to testify against them, insisting that he couldn’t identify any of his assailants.
Until I spoke with Doc Walker, the incident made no sense at all. Walker admitted that he was moved next to James just before the assault. It was, he said, an administrative decision. (Recall that James’s “protector,” Don Wolverton, had been transferred to Nashville just before this event.) At the time of the attack James had been allowed to enter the library, even though it had somehow been stripped of security.
Walker maintained that the attack took place behind a partition. He wasn’t in that area but two of his friends, Partee and Ransom, were there, as were a couple of white prisoners who testified against them. The result of the attack on James was that their group was effectively destroyed—they were split up and the leadership received long sentences.
The assault enabled the prison authorities to deal harshly with a small group of black militants who were a constant source of unrest inside the walls of Brushy Mountain. Although it’s true that James had some twenty-two knife wounds, not one was life-threatening. If they had really wanted to kill James, they could have done so easily. The role of the white prisoners, except as informants to provide evidence against the three blacks, wasn’t clear. Neither was it understandable why one member of the group received only a fraction of the sentence that was meted out to Walker, who wasn’t even directly present at the attack.
BACK IN MEMPHIS, Ken Herman met me with a chilling story. The security officer hired by the HBO/Thames producers was Jim Nichols, an MPD officer Herman knew and trusted. Since the jury was arriving in Memphis on January 24 and being taken directly to their hotel—the Hilton—he did a routine check on the upcoming reservations. No one connected with the defense or the prosecution was to know where the jury was being housed. These arrangements were made by the producers with maximum secrecy. The Hilton was definitely not regarded as among Memphis’s first-class hotels. The producers believed that its out-of-the-way location near the airport would best ensure the jury’s sequestration.
When Nichols examined the reservation list he realized that on the seventh floor, where the entire jury was to be housed, five rooms had been reserved for the same week in the name of William Sessions, the director of the FBI. Nichols was dumbfounded. When he commented on the illustrious guest, the hotel security officer was clearly proud. He said that an electronics team had come in from Washington earlier that week and had gone through every room on that floor in preparation for the visit by the director and his four agents.
Never had I expected this. The potential for tampering with the jury or some of its members was considerable, and it was likely that at least their private conversations and possibly their formal deliberations would be monitored.
Nichols had reported the FBI reservations to producer Saltman, who canceled the Hilton reservations and put the jury elsewhere. Nichols had checked the schedule of the Memphis director of police and fire, Melvin Burgess, to see if there was any note or indication of the Sessions visit, since it would be unprecedented for the director of the FBI to come to a city and not notify the local police chief. Nichols said he found nothing indicating the visit during the week of January 24, nor did Burgess know anything about it.
Saltman confirmed the story but asked me not to mention it until he had the opportunity to bring it up at our final pretrial meeting scheduled for Sunday, January 24. Nichols reported that the FBI reservations were canceled shortly after the jury was scheduled to stay at another hotel.
BALLISTICS EXPERT CHUCK MORTON arrived from California to examine and photograph the death-slug fragments and the other evidence bullets found in the bundle left in Canipe’s doorway. The latter, he agreed, had been subjected to neutron activation tests, indicated by the uniform slicing open of cartridge jackets and the removal of lead samples. Morton’s initial reaction, refuting the FBI’s story, was that there were enough individual stria or markings on the remains of the death slug for a determination to be made as to whether it came from the Remington Gamemaster 760 30.06 evidence rifle. (The FBI had stated in their report that: “the bullet, Q64, from the victim … has been distorted due to mutilation and insufficient marks of value for identification remain on this bullet. Therefore, it was not possible to determine whether or not Q64 was fired from the Q2 rifle.”)
I FLEW TO NASHVILLE TO finally prepare James for his testimony. He was basically in good spirits, anticipating what would effectively be, at long last, his trial on the charge of the murder of Dr. King.
I explained that one of our Memphis investigators, John Billings, would be at his side throughout the proceedings. James would have a direct communications link to the defense table via a one-way earpiece that my assistant Jean would wear throughout the trial, and would have direct two-way contact by portable telephone with me during the court breaks.
While at the prison I also visited Tim Kirk and got his answers to the prosecution’s queries about his original affidavit. Since Kirk wouldn’t be on the stand, this was the closest they would get to cross-examining him. The session was stressful. One of my aides, Ray Kohlman, accompanied me. Certain information prosecutor Ewing sought would have identified Kirk as its source and put him in serious danger inside the walls. We followed a tenuous line.
At one question, concerning the killing of a Memphis club owner who was a rival of Art Baldwin, he blurted out, “This son of a bitch is trying to get me killed.” I explained to him that nothing would please Ewing more than his failure to provide this evidence. I continued to believe that his testimony about the contract offer on James’s life, which was communicated to him by Baldwin in 1978 just before James’s scheduled HSCA testimony, was a striking example of the ongoing cover-up of the existence of a conspiracy in this case.
BACK IN MEMPHIS I was debriefed on the discovery meeting, which had been conducted by Jean in my absence, during the course of which each side had an opportunity to examine the documentary evidence of the other.
I learned that in the prosecution’s bundle of evidence was a photograph that showed a police car in the forecourt of the fire station, pulled right up to and facing the curb of South Main Street. The photograph had been taken after the assassination, and it was taken from the area of sidewalk near Canipe’s. (See photograph #23) Its presence told us that the prosecution was considering introducing it as a true representation of Emmett Douglass’s cruiser, which we had determined was parked way back by the north side door, out of the line of sight of anyone leaving the rooming house. The thought that the prosecution might infer that the photograph was taken shortly after the shooting was alarming. I had to wonder whether they really believed this evidence.
IT HAD BEEN NEARLY FOUR YEARS since I had seen Hosea Williams. Now he agreed to try to convince his former roommate, SCLC chief accountant and FBI informant Jim Harrison, to testify at the trial. Recalling Dr. King’s last visit to Memphis, Hosea said he was surprised to learn that they weren’t going to stay at the Rivermont but that their reservations had been changed to a motel called the Lorraine. Though in pain from a back injury, he would testify “come hell or high water,” and later he would thank me for the “privilege.”
DURING THE LAST WEEK BEFORE THE TRIAL, we broadcast an appeal on a popular local radio talk show for anyone with any information about the case to come forward. It resulted in one new witness. Emmanuel White remembered attending the sanitation workers’ marc
h on March 28. He said that he and his family pushed toward the front of the line to get closer to Dr. King, wanting to touch him. Near the front of the line, White saw some young men between the marchers and the police begin to break store windows. The person who started the vandalism was white, but blacks quickly followed suit. He subsequently observed mass looting, with the stolen goods being loaded into cars and vans, with Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, and other out-of-state license plates. He had heard that a number of these people came from Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis. Emmanuel White was eager to testify.
White’s observations fitted in with comments of former senior Invader leader Dr. Coby Smith, who in an interview on January 9 had said that the Invaders leadership left participation in the march up to their members’ discretion but deliberately stayed away themselves. They were fearful that disruption was going to take place and that they would be blamed. Afterward, the Invaders conducted their own investigation, which established the presence in the area that day of a number of cars with Illinois license plates and a number of youths who weren’t known to any of the Invaders. When Smith told me this in 1992, I recalled the 1967 Labor Day weekend in Chicago, the NCNP convention, the Black Caucus, and the Blackstone Rangers’ participation in the government-sponsored provocation.
AS WE NEARED THE END OF OUR INVESTIGATION, We couldn’t help being struck by the absence of any reference in the attorney general’s files, including the MPD and FBI investigation reports, to certain issues, events, and persons of significance:
The changing of Dr. King’s motel room.
Taxi driver James McCraw’s observations.
The observations of New York Times reporter Earl Caldwell.
The complete story of Solomon Jones.
The observations of Kay Black or Maynard Stiles, or indeed any reference to the brush having been cut.
The observations of Rev. James Orange.
Charlie Stephens’s intoxication that evening.
The strange visits to attorney Russell X. Thompson and Rev. James Latimer.
AS THE INVESTIGATION ALMOST completely gave way to the trial itself, it was apparent that much was yet to be done. The four-month intensive investigative period had seemingly disappeared in an instant. Had we another three months and the necessary resources to follow through on the plethora of loose ends and newly generated leads, I believed that it might have been possible to pull off a “Perry Mason” courtroom performance, as a result of which James’s innocence would be established. But at this point, only Betty Spates’s testimony could provide this result.
We tried every way to convince Betty and Bobbi to testify. Betty said she would come forward if Bobbi agreed. Bobbi was reluctant. We offered to have their faces blocked out or to provide a screen. They thought about it. Finally, Betty said she would testify if we blocked out her face. But I still sensed uncertainty.
Jowers could not know that Betty was testifying. The plan was to bring Jowers and his wife up from the country and put them up at a hotel the night before. Betty would take the stand just before lunch and then leave the court. Jowers would be the first witness after lunch, being brought to the waiting room for defense witnesses and then straight into court.
Jowers would be told that he would be testifying generally about the events of the day. He had been approached in a very nonthreatening way. Initially we had hoped that the prosecution could convince him to testify. They did indeed want him as a witness, knowing nothing about the real course of events, but when Hickman Ewing approached him, Ken Herman said that Jowers apparently told him to “go fuck himself.”
The jury, having already heard Betty’s and possibly Bobbi’s, and McCraw’s testimony about Jowers’s actions and involvement in the killing, would be primed for Jowers’s testimony. I planned to end up treating Jowers as a hostile witness and to break him down, step by step. But it all depended on the participation of Betty and Bobbi.
Even knowing that so much was left to be done, as we approached the trial I believed that we had advanced the defense case to a point it had never reached before. My concerns now were to hold on to witnesses, to expand that list by convincing others to testify, and to get the judge to allow various aspects of evidence before the jury.
It wouldn’t be long before I was informed that Jowers was insisting on having his lawyer present in the courtroom for the entirety of his testimony.
23
The Eve of the Trial: January 24, 1993
THOUGH THE INVESTIGATION CONTINUED, twenty-four hours before the trial was to begin we believed that our case contained a few surprises for the prosecution.
We intended to show, through his own testimony and that of others, that James Earl Ray, a fugitive on the run with few options, was a patsy. At some point he was targeted by persons involved in a conspiracy to kill Martin Luther King and kept on a string with the unfulfilled promise of travel documents and the ongoing payment of relatively small sums of money for the performance of routine tasks as requested. He was moved around the country by a handler he knew only as Raul. An affidavit sworn by Randy Rosenson and the testimony of his former lawyer, Gene Stanley, would not only confirm the existence of Raul but indicate that the HSCA had known of his existence.
Finally, when it was decided that the assassination would be carried out in Memphis, James was given specific instructions to buy a particular rifle within a few days of the killing, and to rent a room in the rooming house on the day itself.
We would attack head-on the conclusions of the prosecution’s case and the HSCA report by introducing available evidence. We would show that there was no ballistics evidence to establish that the death slug was fired from the rifle purchased by James and found with the dropped bundle. In addition, although the death slug had frequently been described as being fragmented, or in three pieces, we had evidence that the bullet taken from Dr. King’s body was in one piece when it was sent to the FBI laboratory in Washington.
We had developed substantial evidence to cast doubt on the prosecution’s contention that the shot came from the bathroom. There was no fingerprint evidence in the room and, most important, an eyewitness—taxi driver James McCraw—would testify that the bathroom was empty and the door was open a few minutes before 6:00 p.m. McCraw would also testify that on the morning of April 5 Jowers showed him a rifle in a box under the cash register in Jim’s Grill. We believed that the prosecution was going to rely on the affidavit statement of Charlie Stephens, which purported to identify a profile of James. Since Stephens had made contradictory statements and was drunk at the time, we would destroy his credibility. Our evidence would include testimony from reporter Wayne Chastain, McCraw, and police detective Tommy Smith, who saw Charlie Stephens drunk within minutes of the shooting.
We intended to assert that James Earl Ray was gone from the area by the time of the shooting. Eyewitnesses William Reed and Ray Hendrix would testify through their statements that his Mustang came up South Main Street and turned onto Vance sometime before 6:00.
Through the testimony of former Press Scimitar photographer/reporter Jim Reid we would seek to introduce evidence of gas station attendant Willie Green, who allegedly saw James and who we had come to believe had died. Reid told me that Green had excitedly identified James from a photo Reid showed him, saying that he was the man at his gas station around 6:00 p.m. on the day of the murder. (We had some reservations about this identification because we had finally been able to view the NBC/Earl Wells interview of Willie Green. Even though Green had clearly identified a photograph of James as the person he saw, he also said that the man had used the telephone, which didn’t jive with James’s recollections.)
We knew that the prosecution was going to maintain that the Mustang which was seen leaving from just south of Canipe’s, after the bundle was dropped, was driven by James. We would produce evidence that it was another virtually identical vehicle to that of James, which arrived in the area shortly after 4:30 that afternoon and which had Arkansas plates.
/> WE WERE PREPARED to introduce evidence to show that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy that orchestrated a number of significant events leading up to the slaying.
Eyewitnesses would confirm that the demonstration of March 28 was sabotaged by provocateurs. Evidence would be advanced that in preparation for his return to Memphis Dr. King was manipulated into staying at the Lorraine Motel and that the room originally reserved for him in a protected, ground-level area was changed to a highly exposed, second-floor balcony room.
MPD surveillance logs indicated that Rev. Billy Kyles had not been truthful about his movements within the last hour of Dr. King’s life, and this was confirmed by Ralph Abernathy and Hosea Williams. Kyles had, in fact, however innocent it may have been, called Dr. King out of his room minutes before the shooting and then concocted a story about talking to him in the room. There was some indication from MPD inspector Sam Evans that it was Kyles who requested the TACT units be pulled back (although I questioned whether there was any such request and Kyles has denied making it). We also knew that Reverend Kyles had taken a room (312) at the Lorraine on April 3 and 4, even though he lived in Memphis. We knew that Reverend Kyles was to be the prosecution’s first witness, and I was eager to have an opportunity to raise these issues with him.
The defense would show that the shot actually came from the brush area behind the rooming house, with witnesses testifying that they had seen a person or persons there. Smoke was seen rising from the bushes right after the shooting. There were also the fresh footprints found at the beginning of the alleyway; we planned to introduce photographs of the plaster casts through the testimony of MPD dog officer J. B. Hodges, who discovered them.
Most explosive of all would be the testimony of Betty Spates, if she would actually come forward. She believed that her life had been in jeopardy ever since April 4, 1968, because of what she saw that day. She could positively identify a conspirator to the killing, if not the shooter himself, who appeared to take immediate possession of the murder rifle, break it down, and carry it away.
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