During my cross-examination he admitted that he had no idea about where the rear stairway of the rooming house led and whether the back door at the foot of these stairs was locked or open. He also said he never entered Charlie Stephens’s and Grace Walden’s room 6-B, which overlooked the Lorraine and adjoined the room James rented as well as the bathroom. Papia was thus unable to offer any opinion on the sobriety of the state’s main witness, Charlie Stephens.
The prosecution introduced statements of Willie Anschutz, a now deceased tenant of the rooming house, which said that after hearing the shot he saw a man run from room 5-B down the hall toward the front of the building, carrying some sort of package.
This was followed by former MPD homicide detective and FBI Academy graduate Glynn King, another one of the first police officers on the scene. He confirmed the presence of scuff marks in the bathtub and told of interviewing the landlady, Bessie Brewer, and Charlie Stephens, who he insisted did not appear to be even slightly intoxicated.
On cross-examination he said he remembered seeing the register for the rooming house. Since that book was not in the evidence in the clerk’s office, I asked why he had not taken possession of it. His reply was simply, “You know, I don’t know why.”
Next, since Charlie Stephens was dead, the prosecution introduced his 1968 statement, for which I had ample refutation.
Homicide inspector N. E. Zachary detailed the items found in the bundle he took away from Canipe’s door. Included were a number of personal effects belonging to James and, of course, the 30.06 Remington rifle he purchased in Birmingham. All of this physical evidence was, he said, turned over to the FBI for forensic analysis by their laboratory in Washington. Also sent to the bureau’s lab, according to Zachary, was the death slug in three fragments.
Ewing read a statement of the now deceased Lt. J. D. Hamby in which he asserted that he turned over to Zachary “one battered lead slug” he received from the coroner, Dr. Jerry Francisco, after Francisco removed it from Dr. King’s body.
James’s purchase of the gun from Aeromarine Supply, his rental of a room at the new Rebel Motel on April 3, and his rental of the “sleeping room” in the South Main Street rooming house the next day were established, as was his purchase of the binoculars found in the bundle. We had offered to stipulate to these facts, which were not at issue, but the prosecutor refused, wanting to lay his proof before the jury.
Former Memphis field office special agent Joe Hester headed up the FBI’s investigation of Dr. King’s murder, and in the witness chair he said he would have hated to be known as the man who couldn’t find the murderer of Martin Luther King. He discussed the extent of the search for the killer, and the resources expended. Under cross-examination he conceded that there were two white Mustangs in front of the rooming house on the afternoon of the assassination but called it a “coincidence.” He contended that the bureau’s COINTELPRO program was directed against communists, not Dr. King. He said there was no organized crime in Memphis, and he categorically asserted that there was no electronic surveillance of Dr. King in Memphis; without a doubt, he said, if there was he would have known about it.
The prosecution called Donald Champagne. He had been the head of the HSCA’s ballistics panel and was well respected. He testified to the process followed by the panel.
On cross-examination he conceded that the results of the panel’s analysis were inconclusive. They couldn’t match the death slug to the evidence rifle. Champagne confirmed that the death slug provided to them was in three fragments.
The prosecution’s next witness, New York forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden (who headed the HSCA’s forensic panel), volunteered on direct examination that the bullet extracted from Dr. King was originally in one piece. Here again, the prosecutor was impeaching one of his own witnesses: Zachary.
Ewing closed his case with statements and testimony on a series of issues. One involved the date on which James put in his laundry when he was in Atlanta (James saying March 27 or thereabouts, and the state contending April 1). We had difficulty with this point because James had always insisted that he wasn’t in Atlanta on April 1, and the tangible evidence of the laundry receipt seemed to indicate that he was. We felt that the date itself wasn’t really important, but it had become an issue.
As to the circles drawn on the Atlanta map found in James’s room in the Atlanta rooming house, which the prosecution contended were near Dr. King’s house, the SCLC offices, and around James’s own current location on 14th Street at the time, the prosecution witness had to admit that the circles didn’t enclose or pinpoint the areas at all.
The prosecution’s last live witness was former FBI fingerprint expert George Bonebrake, who had worked on the evidence back in 1968. As expected, he identified one print of James on the evidence rifle and one on the scope, as well as others on some of the personal items in the bundle. He admitted on cross-examination that no prints of James were found in the rented room 5-B, the bathroom or anywhere else in the rooming house. He also had to admit that there were numerous other fingerprints found in the rooming house and lifted from the Mustang itself that he never identified and wasn’t asked to identify.
The prosecution’s case of circumstantial evidence was completed in three days, following the testimony of eighteen live witnesses and the introduction of twenty-two statements from unavailable witnesses.
WE OPENED THE DEFENSE CASE ON THURSDAY, January 28. Before we had even started, we lost one witness—our CB expert, Carroll Carroll, who refused to testify because of the publicity surrounding the trial. Much more worrisome was that we were also dangerously close to losing Betty Spates, whose nervousness was also compounded by the publicity.
After the testimony of J. J. Maloney and Don Wolverton, two former inmates who had known James quite well and attested that he was neither a racist nor a violent person, the trial was preoccupied for two days with the direct and cross-examination of James, conducted by satellite from the prison in Nashville. He was able to view the entire trial on a monitor in the prison and appeared on a monitor in the courtroom throughout the proceedings.
Immediately following James’s testimony I explained how and why he had originally agreed to the guilty plea only to withdraw it and request a trial three days later. In his rebuttal, Hickman Ewing basically said that the plea was freely and intelligently given.
There were scheduled to be forty-nine live defense witnesses and nine statements from unavailable witnesses following James. (At the outset when Ewing’s assistant Glenn Wright, a former prosecutor on the attorney general’s staff, learned about the large number of proposed witnesses, he was incredulous. He asked Jean, “How can you get anyone to testify for James Earl Ray?” She replied, “It’s called conducting an investigation.”)
In an effort to give credibility to our contention that Raul existed, Knoxville attorney and former assistant U.S. attorney for eastern Tennessee Gene Stanley was put on the stand. The judge was furious about Stanley’s attempt to narrate his representation of Randy Rosenson during his interrogation by the HSCA which included particular hearsay statements by committee staffers who confirmed the existence of Raul. We thought the statements should be admitted because they were against the interests of the speaker and therefore admissable, even though hearsay.
Our sworn statement from Rosenson dated January 20, 1993, confirmed his questioning by the HSCA staff, his involvement in smuggling activity in 1967–1968 across the Mexican border, and his travels with an American Indian who had both mob and FBI connections and who owned a white Mustang. Over our objections, the judge excluded the following part of the statement, which dealt with his HSCA interviews: “During these sessions the HSCA staff were primarily interested in having me identify an associate of James Earl Ray whose existence they acknowledged and whom they called Raul.
SHOCK WAVES WENT THROUGH THE COURTROOM when our witness Barry Neal Linville, the former MPD homicide detective, looked at the photograph I showed him of the three
fragments of the bullet alleged to be the death slug and stated, “That’s not the bullet I saw.” He said that he had seen thousands of bullets in his career and that except for some flattening of the lead at the top, the bullet he and his partner saw the coroner take from Dr. King’s body was a near-perfect evidence bullet.
Ewing tried to discredit Linville and failed. When asked if anyone else saw the bullet, Linville reeled off a list of MPD officers. The homicide office had been full of FBI officers, and there had been numerous photographs depicting the slug. “We felt that we found a piece of gold,” he added.
Our ballistics expert, Chuck Morton, confirmed prosecution expert Champagne’s statement that it was not possible to conclude that the death slug was fired from the rifle found in front of Canipe’s.
Prosecutor Ewing asked about the degree of intactness of the bullet. Morton testified that according to the HSCA report the total weight of the three fragments was roughly half of a fully intact slug. Ewing used this to imply that the slug couldn’t have been in such a pristine condition as Linville had stated. This really could only be explained by an inaccurate measurement taken by Hamby or as a result of the breaking off on impact and dispersal in the victim’s body of most of the lead from the soft nose of the bullet that Linville admitted had been flattened.
In light of Linville’s startling testimony, Ewing did the best he could with what he had, but he wasn’t able to deal with the fact that the bullet when removed had been in one piece and was now in three fragments.
Linville’s observations were supported by MPD captain Tommy Smith, who described how upon pinching the lump of skin below the shoulder blade covering the bullet and rolling the slug between his fingers, he had no doubt that it was in one piece. He went on to testify that Charlie Stephens was so drunk that he could hardly stand up when he tried to interview him shortly after the killing. He further confirmed the presence of thick bushes at the rear of the rooming house.
My co-counsel, April Ferguson, read into the record the affidavits of William Reed and Ray Hendrix, which confirmed their observation of the white Mustang leaving the scene minutes before the shooting.
We had next planned to show, through the testimony of former taxi driver James McCraw, that the shot couldn’t have come from the bathroom window because the bathroom was empty just before 6:00 p.m. However, McCraw had a heart attack in the witness room and had to be rushed to intensive care. We had taken an extensive statement from him, but we held off introducing it at this point, hoping that he might recover sufficiently to testify before the trial ended.
We put Capt. Emmett Douglass on the stand to counter the prosecution’s contention that the person who dropped the bundle in front of Canipe’s did so in panic upon seeing a police cruiser pulled up to the sidewalk. Douglass was adamant that his car wasn’t pulled up to the sidewalk and wouldn’t have been visible to anyone looking along the street in the position of the person fleeing the scene.
In his cross-examination, Ewing confronted Douglass with a previous statement in which he had said he thought he saw more than one gun when he looked at the bundle. Douglass himself readily admitted that his mind had been “playing tricks” on him.
The judge refused to allow the testimony of Jim Reid regarding his interview of gas station attendant Willie Green. It was hearsay, he ruled, refusing to accept our argument that the testimony was covered by the excited utterance exception to the hearsay rule. On balance, however, the ruling by the judge in this instance probably served to keep untrustworthy evidence from the jury.
He also refused to allow testimony of Wayne Chastain and Leon Cohen relating to their separate conversations with Walter Bailey, the owner of the Lorraine Motel, concerning the change in King’s room. Again the judge considered it hearsay, and denied our argument that an exception applied.
We proceeded with testimony from Charles and Peggy Hurley and later Jimmy Walker showing that there were in fact two Mustangs parked in front of the rooming house on the afternoon of the shooting. By establishing the presence of two Mustangs and that the Mustang in front of Canipe’s was not James’s, it followed that James had in fact parked in front of the grill as he maintained. As further evidence that it was the Mustang in front of Jim’s Grill that belonged to James, we later called Frances Thompson to the stand. She had worked at Seabrook Wallpaper in 1968. The FBI 302 report of her interview at the time stated that she said she had seen a man sitting in the Mustang parked just south of Canipe’s, at around 4:30-5:00 on the afternoon of April 4. When our investigators interviewed her she said that that was wrong and that in fact, she saw the man sitting in the Mustang parked in front of Jim’s Grill. I was concerned about this apparent discrepancy.
When I raised the FBI report of her interview with her, she said it was incorrect and was quite definite that the car was in fact in front of Jim’s Grill.
On cross-examination she confused Ewing with the prosecutor who had taken her statement originally. Ewing sought to discredit her with this and she became flustered, but she unwaveringly stood by her testimony that she saw a man in the car in front of Jim’s Grill.
WE MOVED ON TO ESTABLISH OUR affirmative defense—that the assassination was the result of an elaborate conspiracy. The testimony of former policeman Jim Smith, the Rev. James Lawson, Emmanuel White, and Dr. Coby Smith all combined to show that provocateurs were at work in causing the sanitation workers’ march to break up in violence. This was considerably bolstered by the previous testimony of Reverend Kyles.
Wayne Chastain testified about Stephens’s intoxicated condition and his observation of the dense bushes, which he viewed from the Stephens’s kitchen window just after the killing.
The defense found itself in an unusual situation. While virtually all the live witnesses for the prosecution were former policemen or FBI agents, the defense witnesses were from both sides and included a considerable number of policemen on duty during the time. This was particularly evident in the testimony concerning the disruption of the march. Dr. Coby Smith, while waiting to testify, told Jean how the Invaders were constantly under surveillance by the MPD and how young black men who had gone into the army were also used to spy on them. Meanwhile Jim Smith, who was also waiting to testify, was surreptitiously tugging at Jean’s sleeve and trying to tell her that the practice Coby Smith described was true because Jim himself had been assigned to spy on the Invaders.
With one notable exception, all the policemen whom I had interviewed in preparation for the trial either believed that James was innocent or had serious doubts about his guilt. The exception, ironically, was Detective J. C. Davis, who at the time was an officer assigned to the intelligence bureau and who drafted the memo I found in the attorney general’s office which referred to Betty Spates’s statement contending James’s innocence and her boss’s culpability.
Jim Smith was later recalled to testify about his assignment to assist a team of federal agents conducting electronic surveillance on Dr. King in his suite at the Holiday Inn Rivermont Hotel on the evening of March 18. Smith stated that while he was assisting the agents he came to learn that they were hoping to pick up personal dirt on the civil rights leader. They were receiving in a van not far from the hotel. He referred to them only as “federal agents” until I inquired if they were FBI and he said they were. The basis of his knowledge was hearsay, and I felt sure that if Ewing had objected the judge would have sustained. Afterward, outside the courtroom, Ewing’s assistant Glenn Wright attacked Smith, saying, “I thought you were supposed to be on our side.”
The two men working in the area on the afternoon of April 4—Hasel Huckaby and Robert Hagerty—testified to their observations, which helped establish that surveillance activities were conducted on the streets immediately north and south of the Lorraine.
The jury could see a pattern of intelligence activity directed against Dr. King up to the moment of his death. I hoped that they would contrast this evidence of unofficial presence with the testimony we were to int
roduce of the stripping away of any official protective security presence around Dr. King and the Lorraine. Jerry Williams would testify about the absence of the special security unit of black homicide detectives usually provided to Dr. King in Memphis, and John Smith would recall that any remaining security/police around the motel disappeared within twenty minutes of the shooting.
Black firemen Floyd Newsom and Norvell Wallace, and black MPD officer Ed Redditt later testified that they were transferred and removed from duty assignments at fire station 2 during the last twenty-four hours of Dr. King’s life.
Former chief William O. Crumby, who was going to testify about the pull back of the TACT units, was unable to do so at the last minute. He was not well.
BY THE THIRD DAY OF THE defense, we were experiencing major setbacks. McCraw was still in intensive care, so his statement was read into the record. The judge refused to allow the part describing the rifle Jowers kept in a box under the cash register. I have never understood this ruling. This hurt, but far worse was to come. John McFerren fled in fear and couldn’t be persuaded to return to give evidence. Fear had also silenced Betty and Bobbi, who were due to testify that day. Betty had refused to answer the phone and wouldn’t come to the door.
We had Loyd Jowers waiting to testify and had to put him on. He lived some distance away, and if we didn’t call him now he would leave and we would miss the chance. We hoped against hope that somehow Betty and Bobbi could be persuaded to testify or at least give sworn statements so that Jowers would be impeached. If necessary, we could even recall him. As he had previously requested, he insisted on having his lawyer present in the courtroom for the duration of his testimony. His attorney, Lewis Garrison, had represented Jowers for years on his various civil matters. Jowers made the most of a hearing problem, which gave him ample time to reflect on the questions. It was interesting that Jowers lied about a number of matters—some seemingly insignificant but some clearly of importance. For example, at one point he denied that there was a rear exit at the foot of the back stairs. At another point he said he always kept the door leading from the kitchen to the rear stairs locked and barred. He said he had no staff at all working on the afternoon of April 4. Not wanting him to become aware of the degree of communication I had had with the waitresses who were in fact working that day, I didn’t press him.
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