Killing King

by Stuart Wexler

  Tarrants’s story in March parallels another radical’s, whose account only recently became available in new files. Eugene “Sunset” Mansfield at one time was a Grand Dragon in a Texas KKK. But for several years, his racist activity was dormant. At least in the FBI files, his only recorded offense was an assault charge from 1966. Suddenly, on March 13, 1968, Mansfield left his job on an oil rig, forwarded his last check to L. E. Matthews’s residence in Mississippi, and subsequently went to stay with him. Documents show that Matthews wanted to use Mansfield in a hit or a job. Indeed, documents indicate that in the last two weeks of March, Matthews was in and out of his usual residence, planning a “project” out of state. Matthews and Mansfield argued over the payment for this proposed hit or job. Unable to account for his whereabouts in the immediate wake of King’s assassination, Mansfield became one of the earliest persons of interest in the crime.14

  Tarrants also spent part of his time living underground with L. E. Matthews, but he never specified the dates to Nelson. The record indicates that Matthews encouraged Tarrants to visit a remote location in North Carolina known to be a national gathering place for white supremacists looking to perfect their paramilitary skills. According to Tarrants, he stayed with Swift followers in this area for an unspecified period.15 The FBI did not yet know about Tarrants’s months-long bombing campaign in Mississippi, much less his promise to become a one-man guerrilla army waging war against the American government. They apparently did not know about his visit to Wesley Swift, or the rifle purchase to “shoot King.” In short, at the end of March 1968, Tarrants would have raised none of the alarms that Mansfield raised in discussing “hits” with the soon-to-be Grand Wizard of the most dangerous racist organization in the country. Yet as we will see, somehow Tarrants attracted just as much immediate interest from law enforcement in connection with the King murder. It seems entirely possible that as the calendar moved closer to April 4, someone was informing on Tommy Tarrants to law enforcement.

  as tarrants wrote his antigovernment screed, Martin Luther King Jr. returned to Memphis. Originally intended for the week before, scheduling problems forced King to return to Memphis on March 28, having promised local leaders that he would lead a nonviolent protest on behalf of the striking sanitation workers. Disappointed with fund-raising and mobilization efforts for the Poor People’s Campaign, King saw the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike, with its national profile, as an opportunity to raise public awareness on issues of economic justice while demonstrating the viability of large-scale nonviolent protest.

  But, if anything, Dr. King’s experience leading the protest march undermined his future plans. A group of rowdy marchers at the rear of the procession began to break store windows, triggering a police response, and ultimately a riot. In the tumult, more than sixty people were injured and one demonstrator was killed. King himself had to be taken to the Holiday Inn Rivermont for protection, and he left Memphis unceremoniously early on March 29. Given the chaos of the prior two summers, and the shift toward militancy in parts of black America, King knew that outsiders would question the very possibility that the upcoming Poor People’s Campaign could remain nonviolent. If potential sponsors and marchers believed that the Washington, D.C., effort, scheduled to begin in April, could turn violent, if they doubted King’s ability to maintain discipline, it could seriously damage the credibility of this next project. King vowed to return to Memphis to demonstrate the efficacy of his entire philosophy.16 Activities by his enemies in the Southeast and Mississippi suggested that they were just as resolute as King.

  on march 27, James Earl Ray drove his white Mustang from Atlanta to Birmingham and visited the Gun Rack, looking for a hunting rifle. He spent considerable time looking at potential weapons, but ultimately left without making a purchase.

  Two days later, on March 29, 1968, James Earl Ray visited the Aeoromarine Supply Company, a sporting-goods retailer that also sold rifles. Dressed in a shirt and tie, Ray looked out of place to a young hunting enthusiast, John DeShazo. The questions Ray asked confirmed DeShazo’s impressions: Ray knew nothing about rifles. But Ray purchased a .243-caliber rifle and ammunition using the alias Harvey Lowmeyer.

  On March 30, 1968, Ray reappeared at Aeromarine Supply to exchange his weapon. FBI experts later concluded that a preservative in the rifle’s breech prevented its proper loading. But Ray made no reference to this, even though it would have provided him with a perfectly innocent reason to exchange the weapon. Instead, Ray said his “brother” or “brother-in-law” examined the .243 and concluded that they needed a better weapon if they were going to go “hunting in Wisconsin.” His adviser told him to get a Remington Model 760 Gamemaster rifle. One of the more highly regarded hunting weapons ever produced, it was also more expensive than the .243, meaning the normally frugal Ray was stepping out of character.17

  That Ray had some guidance in choosing a weapon seems likely, not simply because he gratuitously referenced another person, but because he demonstrated little or no understanding of rifles. Ray, of course, blamed it on Raul, claiming he was told to return to the store and purchase the Gamemaster. Under that scenario, Ray referred to Raul as his “brother” to protect his benefactor’s identity. Others who share the authors’ doubts about Raul’s existence suggest that it was one of Ray’s actual brothers who helped him with the rifle purchase. This cannot be discounted, but evidence is lacking.18

  Our examination of out-of-state phone calls made from Sam Bowers’s Sambo Amusement Company in Laurel, Mississippi, produced another possibility. On March 29, 1968, the day of the original rifle purchase, someone at Sambo called a number in Birmingham. It was the only phone call to Birmingham from the fall of 1967 through the summer of 1968. Bowers and his partner, Robert Larson, operated the company with no other employees. The timing is certainly curious, but the phone record does not identify who was called. Only recently, thanks to research by Charles Faulkner, the number was traced to the Birmingham Army Reserve, specifically to the senior army advisor for the Army Reserve Advisor Group. Extensive research, including by military historians, has not yet been able to generate a name, but both the timing and a call by Bowers or Larson to an army officer are suggestive.19

  Following the purchase of the gun, Ray returned to Atlanta. Ray always denied this, and insisted instead that he was told by Raul to go straight to Memphis. The evidence to the contrary is overwhelming, however; that Ray returned and left his laundry at a dry cleaner in Atlanta was established not only by the recollection of the manager of the Piedmont Laundry, but by a dated receipt in her files. This is one of Ray’s most important and revealing lies. Ray himself acknowledged that establishing a return trip to Atlanta would be highly incriminating. This is not simply because King also returned to Atlanta at approximately the same time. Rather, it would be Ray’s subsequent trip, from Atlanta to Memphis, that would seriously damage his contention that he was an oblivious dupe for Raul. Martin Luther King Jr. did not specify his return date to Memphis until April 1, and for Ray to return to Atlanta on March 30, and then follow King to Memphis with a gun, was too much for even Ray to pass off on the public. Subsequently, Ray steadfastly insisted that he never took that route. Combined with the “accidental” stay in Selma during King’s visit, and the Atlanta map with marks that “coincidentally” overlap King’s home and church, a rational observer could not escape the conclusion that Ray was stalking King.20

  Ray claims to have stopped and stayed at the DeSoto Motel in Corinth, Mississippi, on April 2. Weisberg did find motel help, albeit many months after the assassination, who claimed Ray stayed at the motel. The motel is right near a Mississippi drug store where beer cans, later discovered among a collection of Ray’s belongings at the Memphis crime scene on April 4, were found to have been purchased. Weisberg did not get access to motel records that could positively confirm or deny this. Assuming Ray did make the stop, the trip raises more questions than it answers. It does not, as some researchers have
implied, create any kind of timing problem or in any way preclude Ray’s trip from Atlanta to Memphis. The fastest route from Atlanta to Corinth to Memphis traces the same path as the fastest route from Birmingham to Corinth to Memphis and would add less than two hours to what was, in all accounts, a multiday trip. But Weisberg, Ray’s investigator, could not reconcile two issues with this Mississippi motel stay. For one thing, a trip to Corinth takes one off the straightest path to Memphis regardless of whether someone is coming from Atlanta or Birmingham. Secondly, Weisberg discovered the motel was a “hot-sheet joint,” essentially doubling (discreetly) as a pseudo-brothel. Such places, as Weisberg noted, are convenient for all kinds of illicit activities, including meeting people to plan such activities. Weisberg became convinced that Ray met someone connected with the King assassination at the DeSoto.

  But Weisberg could never get Ray to admit this, and therein lies a problem for anyone sympathetic to Ray’s claims of innocence. Ray would not even claim to have met the ubiquitous “Raul” at the DeSoto. He denied even purchasing the beer. Weisberg, quite possibly correctly, believed that Ray was covering up for whomever it was he met at the DeSoto. Privately, he even confronted Ray with this fact (years later), only to have Ray snap back that Weisberg should not do the FBI’s work for them. Weisberg, as he often did when Ray frustrated the investigator’s ability to try to exculpate the accused assassin, chalked this up to some informal “code of omerta” among criminals.21 Ray knew who the real conspirators were, under this thinking, but chose to protect people that Weisberg, in letters to Ray, insisted had completely framed him. The authors think it is far more likely that Ray was covering up for individuals who could implicate him in the King assassination, not for individuals who, by his and Weisberg’s account, completely betrayed him. “Hot-sheet joints” are exactly the kind of place where the type of Dixie Mafia gangsters the White Knights approached with a King assassination bounty would meet to plan their various criminal activities.

  Yet it remains unclear exactly what Ray envisioned as his role. To earn the full bounty, Ray would have to directly participate in King’s killing. Simply handing a rifle to someone else would not be enough. Analyses of King’s murder typically treat Ray as either an unwitting dupe or the driving force. A better approach might be to view Ray as someone with his own agenda, but one who was forced to work within the framework of a larger conspiracy in which he was, at least initially, a peripheral player. Recent evidence, discovered by researcher Charles Faulkner, indicates that at the time of the rifle purchase, Ray was acting in his own interests, possibly with an eye toward scoring a larger payment.

  Faulkner found FBI documents detailing the investigation of the Lowmeyer alias, specifically the address Ray provided for Lowmeyer when he purchased the rifle in Birmingham: 1907 South 11th Street in Birmingham. This address belonged to a widow whose husband had died years before, and whose son had moved out not long after. In 1968, the son, William Arthur Jenkins Jr., worked as an attorney, but for years prior he was an Alabama state circuit judge. As a judge, Jenkins issued an injunction against King’s protest marches in Birmingham in 1963, which King promptly violated, leading to his imprisonment. It was then that King wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” defending civil disobedience as a moral response to violations of higher law.22

  Nothing indicates that Jenkins had anything to do with Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, but by associating himself with Jenkins, Ray was once again building a legend, suggesting his potential knowledge of figures involved in Southern anti-integration activities. We can only speculate that such “markers” were not intended for law enforcement. Nor does it make sense that the White Knights would want Ray to leave evidence that pointed in the direction of an obscure judge with no obvious radical connections. The use of that address, like the visit to American Independent Party headquarters, appears to have been a unilateral action on the part of Ray, one with an obscure future purpose.

  The answer may be, as it always was with Ray, about money. Ray appeared to be performing the role of a stalker, one that presumably carried a lower payday. If Ray wanted “a bigger piece of the action,” it’s possible he had to create a racist “résumé” that would allow him to directly engage the plot’s sponsors. Such a record would have to be sufficiently controversial to earn the respect of the sponsors without looking outwardly radical to law enforcement investigators. But if Ray wanted to expand his role in hopes of making more money, he was running out of time. The purchase of the rifle would be a sure sign to Ray that whatever plan was in motion, King would be killed sooner rather than later.

  on march 31, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech in Washington, D.C. The biblical theme was the Book of Revelation, and the promise of a new world, as he re-emphasized the transformative power of the upcoming Poor People’s Campaign set for the next month. Entitled “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” King told the crowd:

  We are going to bring the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. We are going to bring those who have known long years of hurt and neglect. We are going to bring those who have come to feel that life is a long and desolate corridor with no exit signs . . . We are not coming to tear up Washington. We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty . . . We do it this way because . . . the nation doesn’t move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action.23

  Recognizing the price he paid for openly arguing against the Vietnam War (alienating him from his one-time ally, President Lyndon Johnson) and challenging the economic status quo in America, King said: “There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.”24 Within a few days King would return to Memphis.

  on that same day in California, Rev. Wesley Swift delivered his final sermon of the spring, one that also featured the Book of Revelation. He told the audience:

  The word of God is for you the sons and daughters to use. This word of God is for your protection in the hour of emergency. The word of God shall see America through . . . This does not eliminate you from defending your home and battling the enemy. But it gives you the capacity to know that those of your household with you will come through this battle. For God did not stop the enemy from battling Israel, but he gave them the victory. He brought forth victory by the hands of his household for this is the very word of God . . . And the children—you and I—shall participate. And we shall have absolute victory.25

  This Swift sermon is notable for two reasons. First, according to extensive research by Dennis Dunn, among officially transcribed Swift sermons, it is the only sermon that was not fully transcribed from the audio. An entire section on “current events” is not available to analyze and Dunn has been unable to obtain the tape. Just as noteworthy: Swift would not deliver another sermon for three months. This is one of the two longest gaps in Swift’s career. Swift does not address his followers again until June 8, the day James Earl Ray is arrested. He called it “Ye That Have Killed for Gold.” He then goes on his second, and only other notable hiatus from public preaching.

  on april 1, 1968, King publicly announced his return to Memphis, as James Earl Ray was leaving dry cleaning at the Piedmont Laundry in Atlanta under the name Eric Galt.

  The following day, as James Earl Ray drove his Mustang from Atlanta to Memphis, something strange happened at John’s Café in Laurel, Mississippi. Senior Klan leaders frequently met at the restaurant, owned by one of Sam Bowers’s closest aides in the White Knights, Deavours Nix. According to a report filed by Myrtis Ruth Hendricks, a black waitress at the bar, Deavours Nix received an odd phone call that evening. “I got a call on the King,” she recalled him saying when FBI agents interviewed her on April 22; but she was unable to hear the rest of the conversation.

  Hendricks recal
led additional suspicious activity on April 3, 1968. According to her report, “two men, neatly dressed, with short stocky builds, came to Nix’s place where she started to work at three p.m., and worked nights. While going to the bathroom, she observed a rifle with a telescopic sight, in a case in Nix’s office. Later, the two men took the rifle and a long box, which took three men to carry out, and put them in a sixty four maroon Dodge with a fake ‘continental kit’ on the back.”26

  despite a bomb threat delaying his flight, Martin Luther King Jr. returned to Memphis, Tennessee, on April 3. With the march to Washington, D.C., less than three weeks away, King returned with the goal of proving that nonviolent protest could still work. The bad blood that developed between civil rights activists and the local police department boiled over as King’s entourage, mindful of police informants infiltrating the ranks of sanitation protestors, refused the security detail usually provided.

  King settled at the Lorraine Motel but not, at first, in his usual room, 306, where he often roomed and met with his close friend, Rev. Ralph Abernathy. As the two leading members of the SCLC, King and Abernathy traveled the nation together, forming a one-two punch, with King delivering eloquent sermons that appealed to middle-class and educated audiences, and Abernathy offering the same message in a “country” style. Someone, however, was temporarily staying in Room 306, and they waited until they got a call to reclaim their “suite” on the second floor.