by David Wayne
In the case of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. he was shot only once. Therefore, the trajectory of that bullet is crucial evidence.
Bullet trajectories do not tell lies. They reveal clear indications of bullet paths. They telegraph to us exactly where gunshots originated.
Dr. King was shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee while standing on the balcony of Room 306 which was actually located on the second story of the building. The 2hd floor bathroom window of the rooming house across the street is the site from which James Earl Ray allegedly fired the shot.
The bullet entered Dr. King’s right cheek and passed through from right- to-left in a sharp, downward trajectory, then severing the spinal column in his neck, continuing downward, and lodging, still lower, in his left shoulder.
Therefore, the trajectory tells us that the bullet was fired from a point high above the victim and to his right, which also happens to be precisely where three eyewitnesses on the balcony are pointing in the photographic evidence from immediately after the shot.
Dr. Jerry Thomas Francisco, the Medical Examiner, testified about the autopsy:
“The examination revealed a gunshot wound to the right side of the face, passing through the body into the neck, through the spinal cord at the base of the neck, with the bullet lodging beneath the skin near the shoulder blade on the left.”343
Yet we are told that the shot came from the bathroom window at Ray’s rooming house which is only slightly above the balcony of Dr. King—in fact, it’s almost what is called a flat trajectory.
In 1979, the U.S. Congress House Select Committee on Assassinations investigated the King assassination. They hired a review board headed by three noted forensic pathologists to examine the autopsy. One of the three was the famous Dr. Michael Baden, Chief Medical Examiner for New York City. Dr. Baden was the spokesperson for the panel. And they agreed with Dr. Francisco on the downward trajectory:
“Dr. Baden testified that Dr. King died as a result of a single gunshot wound caused by a bullet that entered the right side of the face approximately an inch to the right and a half inch below the mouth. The bullet fractured Dr. King’s jaw, exited the lower part of the face and reentered the body in the neck area. It then severed numerous vital arteries and fractured the spine in several places, causing severe damage to the spinal column and coming to rest on the left side of the back. The bullet traveled in a downward, and rearward from a medial direction.”344
Therefore, the shooter was above the victim; not parallel in the rooming house across the streetwhere the official U.S. governmentversion ofevents places James Earl Ray. If Dr. King had been struck from a shot fired from where the government states that he fired, then the bullet pathway through Dr. King’s body would, of scientific necessity, be almost level, parallel, or only slightly above, since Ray’s rooming house was on a slope; it was on the second floor of a building just like Dr. King was, but a slope on the terrain placed it slightly higher than Dr. King’s balcony. But the sharply downward trajectory of that bullet establishes unequivocally that the shot was fired from a point much higher than the victim. Therefore, it is physically impossible for the official version to be correct.
As author Michael Rivero states:
“If you go back to my article and look at the photo taken from the rooming house window, you will see it is almost a flat trajectory.”345
We also know that the rifle shot came from the victim’s right, because the bullet traversed his body right-to-left. It was up-and-to-the-right from the 2nd floor balcony upon which Dr. King stood; from a position that was about “two-o’clock-high” from the target. That’s not even close to the rooming house where the official version places the shot. The rooming house is directly across from the balcony; it’s not to the right and it is most certainly not sufficiently higher to have caused the sharply downward trajectory.
So where did the rifle shot come from? It came from above the victim, precisely where a professional assassin prefers to position. The shot also came from precisely where the eyewitnesses are pointing in the photographic evidence.
Below are the official findings of the House Assassinations Committee, 1979. This is direct from their report in the National Archives. Frankly, it is bureaucratic gobbledygook—but read it slowly and with the height and directional issues in mind and see if it makes any sense.
“From extrinsic evidence, the autopsy panel accepted that at the moment the bullet entered his body, Dr. King was at the balcony railing talking to someone on the pavement one story below. Accordingly, the panel found that the bullet pathway was consistent with the shot coming from his right and above. The autopsy panel concluded that the single bullet that struck Dr. King must have come from across Mulberry Street, because Dr. King’s body was facing in that direction and because a bullet coming from that direction would have traveled on a downward slope. The panel concluded, further, that the bullet was probably fired from the area of the rooming house at 422 1/2 South Main Street, but the panel could not determine, from the medical evidence alone, whether the shot was fired from the bathroom window on the second floor or from the shrubbery below the window.”346
There are big problems with the would-be logic of the above statement. If the bullet came from where he was facing then it could not have traversed sharply right-to-left through his face. Ray’s rooming house was directly across the street and only slightly to the right, from Dr. King’s perspective; think of the face of a clock right in front of the victim and the rooming house would be at about 12:30. So if Dr. King “was facing in that direction” then there is quite obviously no way that a bullet shot from slightly to his right could enter his right cheek and then travel right-to-left through his body (unless he was leaning sharply downward and to his very extreme left, in which case he wouldn’t be facing where they said he was!). Also above, they say that it may have been fired from street level, yet it somehow managed to go through someone on the second floor in a sharply downward direction! “The shrubbery below the window” is at street-level. So can somebody please tell us how a bullet from street level is going to have a downward trajectory when it goes through somebody on the second floor? The area is sloped a bit, but the second floor where Dr. King stood is higher than “the shrubbery below the window” not lower, as you can see in the photos below.
The fact is that the trajectory of the bullet contradicts the official version. That fact necessarily mandates that the shooter fired from a level substantially higher than the victim. Logic dictates that a shooting level lower, parallel, or slightly above Dr. King could not have resulted in the sharply downward trajectory of his wounds. Like we said: Trajectory does not tell lies ... the government does.
Below is the actual photograph taken as Dr. King lay dying, seconds after the gunshot. The witnesses on the balcony are looking and pointing at where they thought it came from:
Seconds after the shooting, aides of Dr. King are obviously pointing up-and-over (to a position about “two o’clock-high”) which was not even near the direction of the official version. Dr. King is laying shot, knees up, being comforted by a 4th aide, who is also looking up at approximately two o’clock-high.
The “A-B” line diagrams the direct angle of Ray’s rooming house, the “official” kill-angle. The “B-C” line diagrams where everyone on the balcony was looking and pointing, a dramatically different location. At the time of the assassination, it was a penthouse that provided the high- ground direct shot down at Martin Luther King, precisely what a professional shooter looks for: Positions are “2 o’clock-high” vs. “12:30-low.”
Now here is what they were pointing at. At the time, prior to the erection of a wall that blocked it from view, at the position of “two o’clock high” was a tower which would have been the perfect “higher ground” selection of a professional shooter:
As a landmark, use the fire extinguisher on the balcony; the A-B line is to the window which was the alleged location of James Earl Ray, but is nowhere near th
e B-C line of where the witnesses were actually looking and pointing.
Now here are the witnesses pointing again in the real photograph, but with the same angles diagrammed in:
Therefore, something is clearly amiss “officially” folks:
The yellow line diagrams where they are actually pointing: 2 o’clock-high. The red line diagrams where they would have been pointing, 12:30-low, had they thought it came from Ray’s rooming house across the street.
“The evidence in the photo taken just moments after the assassination is unequivocal. The claim that the witnesses are pointing to the rooming house where James Earl Ray was staying is a complete fabrication. The gunfire came from another direction high above the bathroom window.”347
The photographic evidence is day-one documentation from moments after the gunshot and it is unequivocal. In the newspapers that published that photo, the caption read that the men were pointing at the rooming house from where Ray allegedly fired. That was a bald-faced lie. That is not where they are pointing.
If you read the articles “Martin Luther King: The Fatal Shot Came From a Different Direction” and “Overlooked Evidence in the Murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” then you’ll see the common sense in their findings. They’re easily accessible at:http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/ARTICLE1/overlooked.html
Therefore, we have two direct substantiations that the gunshot—and there was only one—came not not from where the Official Version tells us it did, but from precisely where the autopsy report and the four witnesses in the photographic evidence were looking and/or pointing two o’clock-high. And it’s a distinctly different location.
Astoundingly, even though they were eyewitnesses to one of the most important crimes of the twentieth century, police never even interviewed Andrew Young and other key witnesses who were present:
“Young, Bevel, Jackson and Kiles told TIME that although they witnessed everything that happened, no authority from the Memphis Police, the Tennessee State Police or the FBI have ever asked them a single question.”348
Researcher Ted Wilburn took the matter a step further. He went into the second floor bathroom from where James Earl Ray supposedly shot, and photographed the second floor balcony where Dr. King had stood. He and fellow researcher Michael Rivero have diagrammed the supposed shot from that window:
“From this vantage point, we can confirm that the angle from the bathroom window to where Dr. King was killed is nearly level.”349
Therefore, the bullet could not have traversed its victim’s body in a downward trajectory:
“The bathroom window where police officers claimed the bullet was fired from obviously does not support the eyewitnesses’point- ing fingers or the doctor’s autopsy report.”350
And from that bathroom window, at the time of the assassination, whoever would have been clumsily standing on the bathtub ledge in order to see out that window, as the Official Version still goes, would not have had a clear shot at Dr. King on the second floor balcony:
“In the original rooming house bathroom where James Earl Ray supposedly shot MLK from, there was a wall right by the window that actually made it impossible to take the shot. As I understand it, the wall was “removed for clarity” when the rooming house was taken over for the museum.”351
The idea of an expert assassin standing on the ledge of the bathtub and trying to line up a shot with a rifle that’s too long to position there, is absolutely preposterous.
An “FBI ballistics expert testified that not even the most skilled gunman could have accurately fired a rifle in the manner claimed by the government prosecution. According to the expert, to effectively line up the rifle for such a shot, the butt of the rifle would have had to stick six inches into the wall. The prosecution countered that Ray had contorted himself into position around the bathtub in order to make the kill shot, which seems equally incredulous.”352
Exculpatory Evidence in the Case of James Earl Ray
1.The bullet taken from Dr. King’s body (and there was only one bullet) did not come from the rifle of the Defendant.
2.The bullets did not match. Metallurgical testing determined that the bullet that struck Dr. King did not match the bullets of the defendant.
3.Ray’s rifle was not the murder weapon. It was never matched to the bullet that struck Dr. King. That was a crystal clear evidentiary finding: None of the many ballistics tests that were performed on the rifle that James Earl Ray allegedly used, were able to link that rifle to the bullet that struck Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Judge Joe Brown, who presided over two years of hearings on the rifle evidence, held up the defendant’s rifle and told the jury: “It is my opinion that this is not the murder weapon.”
4.Ray’s rifle was not even “sighted in”; the scope had not been sighted properly, meaning that the shooter would not hit what he was looking at through the site (a mistake that an assassin would not and could not make). Judge Brown said: “This weapon literally could not have hit the broad side of a barn.”
5.The trajectory of the bullet reveals that the shot did not come from where the prosecution said it did. It literally had to be from a dramatically different location.
6.The government prosecution team obviously tried everything within their substantial powers to prove that Ray’s rifle was the murder weapon and to attempt to link the rifle ballistically with the bullet that hit MLK. They couldn’t do it.
7.Ray (through his legal counsel) continuously sought advanced testing on the rifle, via the new methods that crime labs had developed and advances in ballistics, to prove conclusively that he could not have done the shooting. Those efforts were continuously denied. What was the government afraid of? Why wouldn’t they allow advanced methods of testing? *
8.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.
9.Ray could not have committed the crime. The man had an eighth-grade education. Even FBI Deputy Director William Sullivan, who led the FBI investigation of James Earl Ray, was convinced that an eighth-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?”
10.The government was self-convinced that Ray should be convicted, but the victim’s family certainly wasn’t. They defended the accused killer straight down the line and even worked with attorneys for his release because they were that sure that he wasn’t the man who killed Martin. “The Kings also presented evidence suggesting that Ray’s gun could not have fired the fatal shot.”
* Various reports substantiate years of efforts by the defendant’s legal counsel to allow the rifle to be re-tested with advanced methods that had become available and scientifically acknowledged as more accurate. The fact that it was the defendant who actually sought the ballistics testing and it was the prosecution which forestalled those efforts speaks volumes about who was seeking the truth in this case and who wasn’t (Ray appealed his conviction seven times, continually seeking the expansion of facts in evidence).
Source material for the above chart was derived primarily from the following:
A King-Sized Conspiracy, Dick Russell, 1999; American Conspiracies, Jesse Ventura & Dick Russell, 2010; “Overlooked evidence in the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” Ted Wilburn, 1999; “Martin Luther King - The Fatal Shot Came From a Different Direction”, “The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis’, Jim Douglass, Spring 2000, Probe Magazine; “Who Killed Martin Luther King?”, Matt Alsdorf, Slate Magazine, December 15, 1999.
But even stronger exculpatory evidence exists that should have exonerated falsely accused James Earl Ray: His bullets didn’t m
atch the crime scene and neither did his rifle! That’s right, folks; the top crime labs in the country were never able to match Ray’s rifle to the murder evidence, and Ray’s bullets were found to actually be different than the one that killed Dr. King.
Gary Revel was Special Investigator to the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigating the King assassination in 1977. He immediately realized that things were dramatically amiss:
“OK, it’s like this. Just pretend for a moment that you are an investigator and are asked to help investigate a high profile murder. You agree to take the assignment and begin your investigation. One of the first things you do is meet the convicted murderer. During your first interview you find he is far from being the cunning killer that the police and the press have made him out to be.This is exactly what happened in my attempt to investigate the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. After the interview and a few days of researching legal documents I was shocked to find the case had little merit. Still today very little evidence is available to convict the man if the case went to court, which it didn’t- James Earl Ray was railroaded into a guilty plea.”353