Killing King

by Stuart Wexler

  But a closer examination of Dowda’s statements suggest that he may have been outspoken to avoid having to answer follow-up questions that could expose his deeper knowledge of a conspiracy. In follow-up interviews with the FBI, Dowda developed a habit of admitting potentially incriminating information only after they pressed him for more information on Ray. Dowda, for instance, neglected to tell the FBI, until later interviews, that he made a suspicious trip to California at the same time Ray settled in Los Angeles in November of 1967, a matter that will be discussed in more depth in later chapters.24 Dowda also at first failed to mention to the FBI that he worked at a drugstore in Atlanta that was very near where Ray set up shop the month before King was assassinated. Dowda himself then raised the possibility that Ray may have been seeking him out when Ray briefly settled in Atlanta two weeks before King’s murder; he insisted they never met. Dowda correctly noted that he stopped working at the drug store months before Ray came to town, but that, of course, raised the question of where Dowda worked during the relevant period. It is on that issue that Dowda appeared to have the most to conceal, for reasons that will become obvious.

  Dowda told FBI agents that he worked at the Bonanza Sirloin Pit in Marietta, Georgia, during the relevant period. He then, quite randomly and without explanation, felt the need to tell the agents about one solitary long-distance phone call that came into his place of work in 1967. The timing of the call, in November, it is worth noting, dovetailed with Dowda’s trip to California.25 The origin of the call, as Dowda best remembered, was Oklahoma. Tulsa, Oklahoma, is the headquarters of the Dixie Mafia gang that included Sparks, McManaman, Rubie Jenkins, and others. But what made this revelation even odder is that Dowda did not even answer the call he randomly remembered for the FBI agents. The employee who did bears a familiar last name: Ayers.26

  Dan Ayers, the teenage employee, is, in fact, the nephew of Floyd Ayers, the courier of the bounty money. His father (Rev. John Ayers, Floyd’s brother) recently confirmed this to the authors, before he was made aware of the significance of the connection. It is unlikely, given Dan’s age at the time, that he had any direct connection to a King conspiracy (he has not contacted the authors, despite a request through his father). But he could have been used as an unwitting conduit to Floyd. It also should be noted that the owner and manager of the Bonanza Sirloin Pit acted suspiciously in the months following the King assassination.

  According to Dowda, the two men became oddly interested in Dowda’s problems with the criminal justice system. E. R. Collins, the owner, and Lloyd Jernigan, the manager of the Bonanza, went out of their way to provide Dowda with help after he was convicted for a larceny charge some time after King’s murder. Most striking to Dowda, Collins’s bail company not only fronted Dowda’s bond, it made full payment of the $1,400 in restitution the court required Dowda to pay to his victims. Jernigan then advised Dowda that he did not have to pay Collins back.

  Dowda told the FBI that he thought Collins and Jernigan were patronizing him because they believed Dowda had inside information about the King assassination. Dowda, as he always did, asserted that, if that were the case, his bosses were simply misinformed about what he did and did not know. But the FBI failed to press Dowda about why these men would be so concerned in the first place if they had nothing to hide. And even here, Dowda may have been coy with the FBI. He did not volunteer this information or in a timely manner. Rather, the FBI approached Dowda yet again in 1974 after a jailmate, whose name is redacted in FBI documents, provided the Bureau with details of a conversation he had with Dowda. Dowda, according to this source, told the jailmate that he never fully revealed all he knew about the King assassination to investigators. Specifically, Dowda, per the jailmate, claimed to know that the King murder resulted from a conspiracy funded by Atlanta-based businessmen. One of these sponsors, notably, was a senior officer for General Motors27 (who ran the Lakeland auto factory where union dues were secretly diverted for a King bounty). It was only when confronted with this story that Dowda told investigators his tales about his bosses at the Bonanza Sirloin Pit. While his story predictably minimized any involvement Dowda may have had in the King murder, it is worthwhile to note that he was implying guilty knowledge on the part of two other Atlanta-based businessmen, who happened to have employed the nephew of someone who, per Donald Nissen, helped transport bounty money from Atlanta to Jackson.

  It is unlikely that Dowda, if he was directly involved in the King assassination, would have associated James Earl Ray with racism and a price tag on King’s life; but he may have been a conduit to Ray for information on the bounty if he heard about it in Atlanta. He may have hoped that by quickly condemning Ray, the FBI would not explore Dowda’s connection to the story any further. We are unfortunately left to speculate, as Dowda is now deceased.

  However, as this book went to print, brand-new information reached the authors that has the potential to fundamentally add to what we know about the King bounty’s origins in Atlanta, and it relates to Louis Dowda. The authors finally reached a relative of Dowda’s—his nephew—who confirmed what Dowda’s ex-wife had told us: Dowda had written down what he knew about the MLK assassination. Unlike Dowda’s ex-wife, who simply speculated on the matter, the nephew had actually read some of the material. The nephew had only a fuzzy memory of what it said, but he told the authors that it showed his uncle had been involved in scouting King’s movements in Atlanta in connection with the assassination, but that his uncle had nothing to do with what eventually transpired in Memphis on April 4. Again, the nephew did not remember much detail and may not have given the material a thorough reading. We are presently trying to acquire any material written by Dowda, but the nephew is not sure where it is currently stored.

  The nephew provides another very tantalizing connection to events related to a bounty’s genesis in Georgia. The authors had previously mentioned a jailer who became aware of a $100,000 bounty offer on MLK circulated by unnamed businessmen within the Atlanta prison system. This jailer happens to share the same last name as the nephew, and, more saliently, to his mother (and Louis Dowda’s sister), Ramona. She passed away as Ramona Price, but the mother was known as Ramona Wehunt in 1968. Some public-records searches suggest a relationship between Ramona Wehunt and Robert Wehunt Sr., the jailer in question. But we have not been able to fully uncover the nature of this relationship, and it is one that the nephew is not certain about—but does not dismiss. This raises the distinct possibility that Robert Wehunt had passed the bounty information on to his family and it reached Ramona’s brother and Ray’s friend Louis Dowda. If this information included the names of the businessmen who were floating King assassination offers in Atlanta’s prisons, and one or more happened to be connected to the Bonanza Sirloin Pit, Louis Dowda may have obtained a job there for the express purpose of learning more about the King bounty, information that he would later at least attempt to pass on to his former prison buddy, James Earl Ray. Hopefully, Dowda’s written material will be unearthed and can clarify this matter.

  Ray could have heard of the White Knights bounty in prison or in the bars he frequented while he evaded law enforcement—or from former prisoners who had their ears to the ground. In many ways, the particulars of which bounty reached Ray’s ears and how do not matter. In MSP, Ray himself did not appear to have a firm grasp of exactly who sponsored these bounties and why. Byers’s account suggests that the conspiracy itself had not yet fully formed by 1967. When he asked Sutherland how the racist intended to raise money for the crime, Sutherland said “a secret southern organization” would easily raise the money. Ray himself seemed to have only rough outlines of a plot when he discussed it with Britton. Pressed by Britton for details on the “businessman’s association” and the $100,000 bounty on King’s life, Ray insisted “I don’t know but I intend to find out.”

  6

  detour

  In the summer of 1967, the man who would one day be accused and convicted of kil
ling Martin Luther King Jr. was still focused on his primary goal of leaving North America. James Earl Ray finally had his opportunity to make a run for it. Having purchased yet another car under the John L. Rayns alias, Ray quit his job in Illinois and made his way to Montreal by way of Indianapolis and Detroit.

  By July 17, Ray arrived in Montreal and registered at the Motel La Bourgade under the Rayns alias. The following day, he rented an apartment using the name Eric Starvo Galt, telling the manager he was employed at Expo 67, the International and Universal Exposition being held in Montreal.1 While Ray insisted that he developed his aliases himself, his explanations suggest that his choices were not nearly as simple as he represented. Of course, the use of fake identities and aliases is common among criminals. Ray did drive past road signs for the Canadian town of Galt on his way to Montreal. The record suggests that if Ray did have help developing the Galt alias, it was from individuals who did not know how to work the Canadian passport system.2

  Investigation did locate an Eric S. Galt (the man’s full name was Eric St. Vincent Galt). He lived in Toronto and worked for Union Carbide as a manufacturing inspector for proximity fuses. The FBI further determined that Eric Galt was listed in the 1967 Toronto telephone directory. But there was no “Eric Starvo Galt” who was a legal Canadian citizen. Because of that, Ray could not steal the “real” identity of Eric Starvo Galt. Ray was not unfamiliar with the techniques involved in identity theft, as he would demonstrate after the King assassination.3 But in 1967, Ray would have had a problem if he had tried to steal the identity of the real Eric St. Vincent Galt to obtain a passport, as St. Vincent Galt traveled internationally and already had a passport. There is no evidence that Ray ever held any sort of Canadian identification for either Eric S. Galt or Eric Starvo Galt. Certainly he had none for Eric St. Vincent Galt. It seems logical to view Ray’s first use of the name “Eric S. Galt” or “Eric Starvo Galt” as a simple alias of convenience. It is noteworthy only because Ray would use that alias again back in the United States when obtaining a driver’s license in Alabama.

  It is clear that Ray’s first goal in Canada was simply to acquire what he needed to leave for a foreign country—according to various sources and Ray’s own inquiries, a country in Africa, most likely one whose practice of racial segregation fit his own prejudices. But Ray misunderstood the legal requirements for obtaining a Canadian passport, which he would need for international travel out of Canada. His understanding, as illustrated by his actions after the King murder, indicated that he believed that he would need a Canadian citizen to vouch for him to get the required paperwork. During his escape after the King murder (but only after taking considerable pains to steal a real identity), an employee at a Canadian travel agency informed him that a sponsor was not a requirement and that the travel agency could sign off on a form which, with a birth certificate, would be all he needed for a Canadian passport. If he had known that, it is highly likely that Ray would have been long gone back in 1967 and never returned to the United States at the time of the assassination.

  Because he thought he needed a Canadian sponsor, Ray spent most of his six weeks there in 1967 planning and looking for such a person, in particular, a female sponsor. Ray seems to have had no notable interest in women other than his routine use of prostitutes. At the time of his escape from prison, he had no women friends and his relationships with women were limited. But Ray had no problem using women for his own selfish ends.

  While in Canada in 1967, Ray went to great lengths to create a new and respectable image in what would be a failed effort to recruit a female patron. He spent hundreds of dollars on new clothes, including a tailored suit. The money for this and other expenses, he claimed, came from robbing a Montreal brothel; Ray refused to identify the establishment, and investigations failed to corroborate his claims, of this and other explanations he gave of his sources of money and the reasons for certain of his travels. Next, Ray (as Galt) booked a stay at a premier Canadian resort, Gray Rocks Inn. At Gray Rocks he met and impressed an attractive Canadian lady. She lived in Ottawa, but she and a girlfriend planned to go to Montreal to visit Expo 67, and so they followed him there, spending a couple of days. He told her he needed to talk to her about something very serious and would come to visit her in Ottawa. Ray would eventually admit that his interest in her was as a potential sponsor for the passport he would need to leave Canada, but for some reason Ray did not follow her to Ottawa for another eleven days.

  They maintained an ongoing romance while she commuted back and forth from Ottawa. But Ray became paranoid when the woman revealed that she was an employee for the Canadian government. He no longer wanted her as his potential sponsor and ended the relationship abruptly. From Ray’s future actions, he also appears to have changed his mind about finding a new country—instead he headed back into the United States, risking recapture.

  It is this change of mind that led many to think that Montreal represented Ray’s first “entry” into a conspiracy against Martin Luther King Jr. Ray claimed that while his lady friend was in Ottawa, he frequented bars in Montreal and came to know a man named “Raul.” According to Ray, it was Raul who became his guiding force, convincing Ray to become a courier in a drug- and gun-running operation back in the United States, first for money, but ultimately for the necessary papers to leave North America. In most renditions of the story, Ray and his attorneys imply that Raul worked, in some way, for the United States national security apparatus, although Raul never directly said this to Ray.

  From the time of his conviction for King’s murder, until the day that he died, Ray maintained that this Raul figure manipulated him into the movements and activities that would incriminate him, unwittingly, as the perpetrator of King’s murder. Raul thus became the centerpiece in Ray’s efforts to paint himself as a complete (and innocent) dupe in the King murder. But each time Ray inserted Raul into his self-serving counternarrative, he raised doubts about his claim. Ray, for instance, could not keep his descriptions of Raul straight, depicting Raul as a “blond Latin,” a “red haired French Canadian,” an “auburn-haired Latin,” and a “sandy haired Latin.”4 In the 1990s, Ray finally made a positive identification of Raul from a passport photo of a Portuguese immigrant. But there was a big problem with that identification. In the early 1970s, Ray asserted that another picture bore a “striking resemblance” to Raul, and this person looked nothing like the Portuguese immigrant Ray insisted was Raul in the 1990s.5 In addition, the immigrant was still alive, and his employment records conclusively showed that he could not have been at the places where Ray and Raul allegedly met.

  Ray’s claims about Raul have engendered two camps: those who believe Raul was a complete fiction, invented by Ray after the fact to hide his guilt in the King murder, and those who contend that Raul was a composite character, reflecting separate individuals who pushed Ray into a conspiracy to kill King. They speculate that Ray used this ruse to protect the real culprits from law enforcement scrutiny, possibly to avoid retaliation in prison, and many who embrace this scenario still believe these separate individuals framed Ray for King’s murder. The authors do not dismiss this possibility that Raul is a composite of some sort, but we ultimately believe that no one person named Raul ever existed, that Ray used the fictional gunrunner mainly to hide his own complicity in a King murder conspiracy. In fact, Ray had done this in a previous crime, fabricating, with his partner in crime Walter Terry Rife, an individual named Walter McBride, whom Ray blamed for the various offenses. Ray did not convince a jury, but the FBI nonetheless went searching for McBride after King’s murder with no success (obviously). Ray’s actual one-time partner in crime told the FBI that they had “fabricated” McBride (and others) to pass blame and mitigate charges.

  But Raul may also be a composite of real people who helped Ray identify would-be conspirators and who, eventually, helped him join the plot and escape from authorities in the immediate wake of King’s murder. Ray, in this scenario, u
sed one fictional character to explain away a series of incriminating movements and interactions with different individuals.

  While the character of Raul is most likely a fictional creation of Ray’s, there is one figure associated with Ray’s time in Canada whom Ray may have used to derive his Raul character.

  In investigating Ray’s movements in Montreal in the summer of 1967, Canadian reporter Andre Salwyn made a diligent search for potential Ray associates near the Neptune Bar, a hangout in the neighborhood of Ray’s Montreal apartment. Ray claimed he met “Raul” there. Salwyn located a young lady who said that during that summer she had a boyfriend who hung out at that bar. He was from New Orleans (a place Ray later visited twice) and he used the names Rollie and Rolland—and the alias Max Lindsay. The girlfriend told Salwyn that Rollie was an interesting fellow. He had a special radio in his ivory Camaro (which he used to monitor police calls), carried guns in the car’s trunk, and made a lot of long-distance calls from her apartment. Salwyn’s investigation would show those calls were to New Orleans and Texas.6 A second Canadian girlfriend told Salwyn that Rollie had been working at Montreal General Hospital and that she had also telephoned him at a hospital in New Orleans.7

  “Rollie” was Jules Ricco Kimble, a native of Louisiana who had contacts in the criminal underworld and to the Ku Klux Klan. Kimble led a very colorful life, beyond having a wife in New Orleans and two concurrent girlfriends in Montreal. Kimble’s background included Klan activities, suspected drug dealing, and assault. He was also under investigation for attacking black labor leaders targeted by the Klan. The HSCA confirmed that Royal Canadian Mounted Police files showed Kimble had called New Orleans daily, listened to police broadcasts, carried guns, and made racist comments.8 Kimble had told one of his Canadian girlfriends that he had been involved with narcotics, and she stated that he would sometime disappear for an hour and return with plenty of cash.