by David Wayne
329 Waldron & Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice
330 Thomas P. O’Neill & William Novak, Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O’Neill (Random House, 1987).
The Reverend
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
April 4, 1968
Civil Rights Leader, Nobel Peace
Prize Laureate
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VICTIM:
DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
* * *
Cause of Death
SINGLE GUNSHOT
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Official Verdict:
James Earl Ray, acting alone, fired the rifle shot from the 2nd floor bathroom window (while standing on the ledge of the bathtub) in his rooming house, across the street from the motel where Dr. King was staying. He then (according to a state exhibit depicting the scene) came down the hallway into his room and carefully packed the rifle into a box along with other items that were easily identifiable as belonging to him, tied up the package, proceeded across the walkway (the entire length of the building), went out the back door, went down the stairs in back, placed the box right in a building entryway, Official Verdict then got into his car, a white Mustang, and drove that same car all the way from Memphis, Tennessee to Atlanta, Georgia, never challenged by police
Dr. King was killed by one bullet, traversing in a sharply downward direction, from right-to-left. The bullet entered his right cheek, then went down through the bottom of his throat where it severed the spinal cord, and then lodged, still lower, in his left shoulder. The trajectory was not even close to how the trajectory lines up from where the accused allegedly fired. A rifle was found across the street in a nice, convenient package of evidence that was just waiting for police, that clearly identified the alleged shooter. Two months later, James Earl Ray was arrested in London, extradited and charged with the murder.
Actual Circumstances:
The murder of Dr. King has never been satisfactorily adjudicated. There was no trial. The defendant never received “his day in court”—after his arrest, he was threatened with the certainty of a death sentence and coerced into pleading guilty. To avoid the electric chair, he pleaded Guilty and was immediately sentenced to life in prison. He quickly attempted to withdraw the guilty plea. He spent the remainder of his life—over 29 years—attempting, through legal counsel, to withdraw his guilty plea and secure a jury trial; those attempts were universally unsuccessful. Since he was never granted a trial, there was never a fair or even impartial adjudication of the actual evidence.
* * *
Inconsistencies:
1. The bullet taken from Dr. King’s body did not come from the rifle of James Earl Ray. That possibility was excluded by the Judge who presided over the trial.
2. Ballistics testing on Ray’s bullets determined that they did not match the crime.
3. Ballistics tests on Ray’s rifle were never able to match it to the crime.
4. Ballistics tests confirmed that any bullet fired from Ray’s rifle would have a very specific type of gauging on it, due to a manufacturing defect in that rifle. That gauging mark DOES NOT appear on the bullet that killed Dr. King.
5. Bullet trajectory clearly indicates that the gunshot was from a dramatically different location than the rooming house window from where the accused allegedly fired the rifle. The official version was that the shot came from directly across the street at a position that was virtually level with the victim. But:
Autopsy findings prove the bullet path was sharply downward and extreme right-to-left, not straight;
Ballistics evidence verifies a sharply right-to-left downward bullet trajectory;
The original Medical Examiner, the highly respected Thomas Noguchi, later called for a new official investigation, citing the strong possibility of murder:
Photographic evidence from immediately after the gunshot confirms four witnesses with victim all looking and/or pointing up and to the right to a position also consistent with a sharply downward right-to-left trajectory.
6. It was never proven that the rifle shot came from the bathroom window of the rooming house, as alleged by the Government.
7. The design of the bathroom from which the Government states that the Defendant fired the rifle is laid out in a way that would have made it impossible to have effectively fired a rifle from the window. Aside from the fact that the shooter would have had to stand balanced on the ledge of the bathtub, even more ridiculous is the fact that there was a wall that was so close to the window that it would have made the shot with a Remington 30.06 rifle impossible because the rifle was actually six inches too long to position for a shot out that window.
8. Ray’s rifle was not even “sighted”; the bullet would never have hit what was lined up in the sight.
9. New testimony has established evidence that there were two rifles at the crime scene: a “throw-down” rifle to set up the patsy and a “hot” rifle that was broken down and removed from the scene in conjunction with a coordinated plan of escape.
10. James Earl Ray consistently maintained that his rifle, the alleged murder weapon, was never fired at Martin Luther King, and he repeatedly requested advanced ballistics testing to prove it. Ballistics tests conducted by the FBI did not indicate that Ray’s rifle was the murder weapon. Ballistics tests conducted at the behest of a Congressional Committee did not indicate the rifle was the murder weapon. Advanced tests undertaken in 1997 at the behest of Ray’s counsel also could not link the rifle ballistically to the shot that was fired at Martin Luther King.
11. James Earl Ray, who served in the U.S. Army, was not known as being a very good shot with a rifle.
12. There was no eyewitness to the shooting. No eyewitness saw the shooter. There was only one eyewitness who placed James Earl Ray at the rooming house at the time of the shooting, and their reliability as a witness was seriously questioned (extremely inebriated and not in a position to have witnessed the exit). There is, however, a reliable witness (a manager of a gas station) who identified James Earl Ray as being in his car at the time of the shooting, which was several blocks away from the crime scene.
13. James Earl Ray did not have a motive. Prosecutors did not even bother to outline his motive for the killing or to accuse him of being a racist.
14. The defendant had no prior history of violent crime. He was basically just a petty thief. The murder of anyone, let alone a prominent figure, was dramatically out-of-character with his past history.
15. FBI Deputy Director William Sullivan, who led the FBI investigation of James Earl Ray, was convinced that an 8th grade dropout like Ray could not possibly have managed everything that was alleged. Sullivan wrote:
“Someone, I feel sure, taught Ray how to get a false Canadian passport, how to get out of the country, and how to travel to Europe because he could never have managed it alone. And how did Ray pay for the passport and the airline tickets?”331
16. A package of evidence was intentionally left outside Ray’s rooming house that clearly indicated it belonged to James Earl Ray. Ray was a professional criminal and would have known that leaving a bundle of incriminating evidence was like leaving a calling card that he had committed the crime. Judge Hanes cited “terrific evidence” that Ray was set up: A witness stated that “the package was dropped in his doorway by a man headed south down Main Street on foot and that this happened at about ten minutes before the shot was fired.”332
17. The entire area of grass and bushes outside the alleged “sniper’s nest” were immediately cut back by a landscaping crew soon after the shooting, obliterating evidence. At best, it was direct violation of standard crime scene procedures—at worst; it was actually criminal destruction of evidence at an active crime scene.
18. Ray alleged that he had been coerced into pleading guilty to avoid an imminent death sentence that he was being threatened with, and that he was told that the only way he could keep his brother and father out of prison was to plead guilty. He stated that he was
framed as part of a larger plot (the existence of the man whose involvement he alleged, “Raul” from Montreal, has been acknowledged by authorities).
19. The family of Dr. Martin Luther King has consistently believed that James Earl Ray was not the killer and gregariously supported efforts to clear his name.
20. Ray appealed his conviction seven times, continually seeking an expansion of facts in evidence and the right to present evidence at trial.
21. Martin Luther King’s family filed a wrongful death civil lawsuit, presenting ballistics evidence that Ray’s rifle could not have fired the gunshot.
22. In a court decision that would be earth-shattering, but for the fact that few are aware of it, a jury returned a verdict that Martin Luther King was killed by a conspiracy “including governmental agencies.”
* * *
“The jury was clearly convinced by the extensive evidence that was presented during the trial that, in addition to Mr. Jowers, the conspiracy of the Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies, were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband. The jury also affirmed overwhelming evidence that identified someone else, not James Earl Ray, as the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame.”
—Coretta Scott King
Most Americans are completely unaware that a Tennessee jury in 1999 reached the verdict that a conspiracy involving agencies of the U.S. government was responsible for the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Circuit Court Judge James E. Swearengen read back the jury’s verdict in open court:
“In answer to the question did Loyd Jowers participate in a conspiracy to do harm to Martin Luther King, your answer is yes. Do you also find that others, including governmental agencies, were parties to this conspiracy as alleged by the defendant? Your answer to that one is also yes.”333
In some of the most important court testimony in contemporary American history (completely ignored by mainstream U.S. media), and in one of the most important trials in American history (also completely ignored by major media)—the extent of media manipulation in the United States was clearly laid out by an expert in that field.
William Schaap was a Professor of Criminal Justice, attorney, publisher of Covert Action Quarterly and Court-Certified Expert on intelligence matters and the governmental use of media, specifically the use of sophisticated disinformation techniques on the American public. He has testified as an expert witness on such matters in many proceedings, including in the civil trial brought by the family of Martin Luther King.
Mr. Schaap testified that, from analysis of the documentation, it was quite clear from a historical standpoint that the CIA and FBI had both intentionally attempted to destroy Martin Luther King, even to the point of trying to drive him to commit suicide—especially after he came out publicly against the Vietnam War. They also planted stories they knew were untrue, in newspapers across the country, in a vicious media campaign against him.
On November 18, 1964, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in a press conference, called Dr. King (a man who was about to receive the Nobel Peace Prize) “the most notorious liar in the country.” Three weeks later, on December 10, 1964, Dr. King was awarded the Peace Prize for 1964 with the praise that:
“He is the first person in the Western world to have shown us that a struggle can be waged without violence. He is the first to make the message of brotherly love a reality in the course of his struggle, and he has brought this message to all men, to all nations and races.”334
But that hadn’t stopped the FBI from trying to destroy him:
“They—one of the most outrageous was a doctored tape recording that was prepared that purported to—to be a recording of Dr. King engaging in raucous and possibly sexual activities with various people. It turned out to be—most of it was totally fraudulent. And what wasn’t fraudulent did not have to do with anything torrid going on. It was all put together. And the tape—in fact, the tape was originally used—and this is one of the things that the House Committee found the most outrageous—in an attempt to try and drive Dr. King to commit suicide. Shortly before he went to get the Nobel Prize, the tape was mailed to him with a long letter basically saying, if you don’t kill yourself, we’re going to make this public.”335
Professor Schaap further testified that such U.S. governmental misuse of information was and still is prevalent in the United States and that Americans are particularly vulnerable to it as a result of the way that the notion of conspiracy has been publicly maligned by the press:
“I mean, after all, “conspiracy” just means, you know, more than one person being involved in something. And if you stop and think about it, almost everything significant that happens anywhere involves more than one person. Yet here there is a—not a myth really, but there’s just an underlying assumption that most things are not conspiracies. And when you have that, it enables a government which has a propaganda program, has a disinformation program, to be relatively successful in—in having its disinformation accepted.”336
We are intentionally including a lot of this testimony for one very simple reason: until now, very few Americans were aware of it. Mr. Schaap also testified that:
•About a third of the CIA’s budget is for its media operations, which includes domestic use of propaganda, such as solidifying and continuing the public perception that there were no conspiracies in the murders of President Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King. Their budget is secret (it’s kept “classified” because you don’t tell people that they are being intentionally misinformed); but at least a billion dollars per year goes to media propaganda operations, much of that in the U.S.;
•There is still an active focus on media propaganda in the U.S. by Intelligence agencies to discredit conspiracy theories and solidify the official version of historical events;
•The reason that there was virtually no media coverage of the civil trial in 1999 resulting in a conspiracy verdict in the King assassination is directly linked to governmental control of the media in the United States.337
At this point, misinformation has been so imprinted in the minds of Americans that “James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King”—that even certain proof to the contrary would not be accepted, because that’s the way that disinformation works.
“Disinformation is not only getting certain things to appear in print, it’s also getting certain things not to appear in print. I mean, the first—the first thing I would say as a way of explanation is the incredibly powerful effect of disinformation over a long period of time that I mentioned before. For 30 years the official line has been that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King and he did it all by himself ... And when that is imprinted in the minds of the general public for 30 years, if somebody stood up and confessed and said: I did it. Ray didn’t do it, I did it. Here’s a movie. Here’s a video showing me do it. 99 percent of the people wouldn’t believe him because it just—it just wouldn’t click in the mind. It would just go right to—it couldn’t be. It’s just a powerful psychological effect over 30 years of disinformation that’s been imprinted on the brains of the—the public.”338
FORENSIC, BALLISTICS & MEDICAL EVIDENCE
There is a total ballistics mismatch with the evidence of this case. Judge Joe Brown was the main trial judge during proceedings where new evidence was introduced. After spending two years examining technical points about the murder weapon, Judge Brown concluded that:
The bullet that killed Dr. King could not have been fired from Ray’s rifle; the scientific testing excluded it as having come from that cartridge case.339
The entire set of ballistics just doesn’t match up. As Judge Brown put it:
•“What you’ve got in terms of the physical evidence relative to ballistics is frightening.”
•“First, it’s not the right type of rifle.”
•The Remington Gamemaster 30.06 is a pump-action rifle and would be extremely difficult to fire from a position of resting it on a window sill;
&
nbsp; •“It’s never been sighted in.”
•Test-firing the rifle verified that the alignment of the rifle was off, by several feet, at about 100 yards;
•“It’s the wrong kind of scope.”
•“With a 30.06, it makes a particularly difficult shot firing at a downward trajectory in that circumstance.”
•“Metallurgical analysis excludes the bullet taken from the body of Dr. King from coming from the cartridge case they say was fired in that rifle.”
•The bullet that killed Dr. King did not come from the rifle found at the crime scene.340
During the time period that he was presiding over James Earl Ray’s appeal, Judge Brown informed the Black Congressional Caucus that it was not possible that Ray’s rifle, the alleged murder weapon, had fired the shot that killed Dr. King. After that comment, Judge Brown was removed from presiding over that trial for alleged bias.
U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney wrote that Judge Brown told her and the rest of the Congressional Black Caucus that, unequivocally, Ray’s rifle was not the weapon that killed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Here are her words, exactly as she recorded them:
“Yesterday, Judge Joe Brown told us unequivocally that the so- called murder rifle was NOT the weapon that killed Dr. King.”341
As veteran researcher Michael Rivero noted:
“Ballistics tests are an either/or situation. Either the bullet matches or it doesn’t. Either the James Earl Ray rifle fired that bullet or it didn’t. Legally, if it cannot be proven, it didn’t happen. A report leaked from the court confirms that the second set of ballistics tests showed that there is a manufacturing defect in the James Earl Ray rifle that gouges any bullet it fires. That mark does NOT appear on the bullet that killed Martin Luther King. When the judge ordered one more set of tests to make sure, the Federal gov-ernment, instead of complying with the court order, had the judge removed from the case March 7th, 1998!”342