Requiem for William Pepper

He fought the good fight in two cases.

William Pepper died in New York on April 7, 2024.  The information is that he was ill but then suffered a serious fall.  He was born in New York City and educated at Columbia, where he achieved a BA and MA.  He then attained a law degree from Boston College.

Pepper was an opponent of the Vietnam War.  This came from a visit he had made there in early 1966 as a freelance journalist. He was shocked by the indiscriminate American carpet bombing, which was destroying the rural basis of agricultural life and killing or maiming peasants, many of them children, particularly through napalm. He visited hospitals and refugee camps and saw and interviewed the victims of the carnage. (Pepper, Orders to Kill, p. 3)  Pepper’s objections were uncovered by the military and he was ordered out of theater.

Returning to the USA, he began to prepare a photo essay about what he had seen. This ended up being published in Ramparts in January of 1967. It was entitled “The Children of Vietnam”. This photo essay was viewed by Martin Luther King and was part of the reason for his decision to break publicly with the Lyndon Johnson administration on Vietnam.  It was part of the impetus for his famous Riverside  Church speech in April where he condemned the Vietnam War in no uncertain terms. (Ibid, pp. 5,6)

That speech was upsetting  to other civil rights leaders who were relying on Johnson for things like the War on Poverty and the Great Society to complete a civil rights program. It was also unpopular in the press. But King decided the Rubicon had been crossed and he was going to continue to press forward with a program that went beyond civil rights and included the end of the Vietnam War and economic redistribution of wealth. The latter centered on the beginnings of organizing what became the Poor People’s Campaign.

In 1968, Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for president. Eugene McCarthy was the early frontrunner. But King told his advisors he did not want to endorse McCarthy; he wanted to wait to see what Robert Kennedy would do. When Bobby declared his candidacy, King was elated. But, as we know, those two men did not get to see the attainment of their twin goals; the end of the Vietnam War, and a program centered on wealth redistribution. King was killed in Memphis in April of 1968. Bobby Kennedy was then killed in Los Angeles two months later.  To say the least, both deaths occurred under rather suspicious circumstances.

Pepper was directly involved in trying to solve both of those cases. During the proceedings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), he advised Ralph Abernathy—King’s successor at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—about the true facts of the King killing.  This is when Pepper began to understand the complexities of that case, and the fact that accused assassin James Earl Ray’s lawyer, Percy Foreman, had sold him out. Which is how Ray ended up in prison, due to Foreman’s plea bargain. (Pepper, p. 53; pp. 168-71) Pepper also saw how the HSCA had changed dramatically when the first Chief Counsel, Richard Sprague, resigned and was replaced by Robert Blakey. This included an attempt to publicly discredit Ray’s current lawyer, Mark Lane, using an undercover agent in tandem with the New York Times. (Ibid, pp. 64-65). This strongly influenced Pepper not to accept the conclusion of the HSCA. Namely that Ray, in loose confederation with his brothers John and Jerry, had killed King to collect some kind of bounty from St. Louis racists. (HSCA, Final Report, King Section, pp. 354-74; Pepper, pp. 124-25)

That 1979 report publicly dismissed the existence of a mysterious CIA associated handler of Ray, namely Raul.  Ray said he had met him at the Neptune Bar in Montreal. He was a key figure who Ray said was giving him money for doing missions for him in the last months leading up to King’s murder. The HSCA said that if such a person did exist, it was really one of the brothers.

Pepper moved to London, and continued investigating the matter. To put it mildly, he came to a different conclusion than the HSCA had. After many years of inquiry he decided that King was killed by a high level plot including the CIA, Pentagon and the Mafia. He succeeded in finding a  broadcast producer in England, Jack Saltman of Thames Television. Saltman arranged for HBO to be the American broadcaster. (Pepper, p. 181). This mock trial was head and shoulders above  the one produced by Thames on the JFK case. For one, they actually had access to the evidence in Memphis and it also had a live defendant in Ray, who both sides could question.  

Since Pepper had been on the case for years, he was much better prepared than the defense attorney in the JFK case, Gerry Spence. For the  mock trial, he reviewed the local DA’s files, the state Attorney General’s files and the films of ABC, NBC and CBS. (Pepper, pp. 207-08) In his book Orders to Kill, Pepper spends six chapters going over his preparations for the mock trial and his uncovering of new evidence in the case.

This included the testimony of waitress Betty Spates, who worked at Jim’s Grill, a block from the Lorraine Motel where King was staying. She said her boss and owner, Loyd Jowers, had been handling a rifle that day around noon.  Later on, about six, the time King was killed, he  came in from the back with a rifle and mud on his pants. He appeared scared and she asked him what he was doing. He asked her if she would ever do anything to hurt him. (The Lorraine was almost directly behind Jim’s Grill.) James McCraw, a local cab driver, also saw a rifle at Jowers’ place. The police found fresh footprints behind Jowers’ restaurant. Pepper came to think that Jowers was an accomplice who handed off and then disposed of the actual assassin’s rifle. He also found out that although the slug removed from King was intact and whole, that exhibit was now fragmented into three sections. John McFerren, a local business owner, said that hours before the shooting, he heard a mob connected produce supplier of his, Frank Liberto say, “Kill the SOB on the balcony and get the job done.”  Jowers’ version of his story was that he was only asked by a friend to hire a gunman to kill King, nothing else.  Was Liberto that friend? (LA Times, story by Eric Harrison, 9/24/1994)

Further, although it was denied at first, it was later discovered that the Memphis authorities had an undercover officer as part of King’s entourage.  Also that the police and FBI were using the firehouse across the street from the Lorraine as a spying station.  Further, an all African-American detail assigned to guard King had been withdrawn the day before. Finally, the local director of fire and safety, Frank Holloman, had been administrative assistant to FBI Director  J. Edgar Hoover for years prior. (Ibid, Harrison.)

The televised trial started in January of 1993. But Pepper found out something weird just before the jury was to arrive at its hotel for sequestering.  The Director of the FBI, William Sessions, had booked five rooms on the same floor as the jury at the same hotel. (Pepper, p. 267). Pepper complained to Saltman and he changed the hotel the jury was staying at.

Pepper had planned to present over 50 witnesses and/or statements, one which concluded that the HSCA actually believed  there was a person named Raul involved in the case. (ibid, p. 288).  Unfortunately some of his witnesses backed out at the last minute,  like Betty Spates. But during the trial, the state’s prime witness against Ray, Charles Stephens--who said he saw him leaving a room in the boarding house across the street from the hotel after the shooting--was discredited as being stone drunk at the time. And testimony came in from New York Times reporter Earl Caldwell that the shot did not come from the boarding house Ray was staying at, but from bushes next to it. Those bushes were then cut down within 24 hours. Pepper also managed to enter the important fact that King’s room was changed from the interior courtyard to one facing the street, and no one knew who made the change. (Pepper, p. 300)

Before the program aired a long article was published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal detailing how Army intelligence, particularly the 111^th MIG,  shadowed King in Memphis.  This was met with much hostility but the military intelligence angle was later supported by journalist Marc Perrusquia in the same newspaper in 1997. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 520) The subject of military surveillance on the civil rights movement and King  in the sixties was given a good summary treatment by John Avery Emison in his fine book The Martin Luther King Congressional Cover up. (See pgs. 113-29)

Pepper ended up getting an acquittal for Ray in this mock trial. Unfortunately it was all but ignored in the media except for NBC’s Today Show. (Pepper, p. 306) At the end of the trial Pepper applied to Governor Ned McWherter’s office for a pardon of his client.  It was not enacted. But on December 16, 1993 Sam Donaldson ran a segment on ABC’s Primetime Live about the case.  Jowers appeared and said that Liberto had paid him $100,000 to facilitate the murder of King.  He also said that Raul had visited him and given him the rifle. A second hit man was in Jowers’ employ to polish off the sniper, but the killer disappeared before he could do the job. Incredibly, this story was also virtually ignored.

In 1994, Pepper applied for a grand jury hearing based on new evidence in the King case. His petition landed in the court of Judge Joe Brown.  These two men almost performed an impossible task.  They nearly got the King case reopened. The struggle to get a criminal trial went on until 1997. In the meantime, Pepper believed he had found that Raul was still alive and living in Detroit. (Pepper, pp. 405-07) He also discovered that Marrell McCollough, a member of a black militant group, the Invaders, was in all likelihood an intelligence plant inside that group. This was important because it was the Invaders who had disrupted a Memphis demonstration previously which caused King’s return to the city. (Wall Street Journal, 4/5/2023, story by Jonathan Eig)  In the interim, the FBI had planted stories in the press about King staying at white owned hotels. That is how he ended up at the Lorraine, where, as we have seen, his room was changed. Which allowed him to be hit from across the street.

As part of Pepper’s attempt to secure a new trial, on March 27, 1997, he achieved a media coup.  He got King’s son Dexter to meet with Ray at Lois DeBerry Special Needs Facility in Nashville, a maximum-security prison. On live television Dexter asked Ray if he had killed his father and Ray replied “No, I didn’t.” Dexter replied that he and his family believed the denial and his family was going to make sure that justice prevailed. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 433) The King family was backing the effort for a new trial.

Because this meeting got so much attention, the MSM and the Tennessee authorities now began to make a concerted effort to stop Pepper’s attempt to get a reopening. The networks, and newspapers, like the Washington Post, began to go after, first Pepper, then Brown. This effort included the reluctance of the local District Attorney to allow for a testing of the rifle in evidence to see if the bullet marks matched. If they did not, then that would be cause for a new trial. Brown suggested a cleaning out of the barrel of the  rifle to eliminate any possibility of a particle build-up that would foul the tests. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 450). With that, the local newspaper, the Commercial Appeal, now joined in the protest.

By August of 1997, it was successful. In an extraordinary effort, executed while Brown was on vacation, he was removed from the case before the rifle tests could be performed.  Eight months later, James Earl Ray  died of kidney and liver ailments. He had not been allowed to leave the state to get a transplant. A few weeks earlier Gerald Posner had published his version of Ray’s guilt in his book Killing the Dream for the same publisher that brought out Case Closed, Random House.

But Pepper fought on and in December of 1999 he accomplished something remarkable, he won a civil suit against Jowers.  After a 3 1/2 week trial, with 70 witnesses, the jury decided that  a conspiracy had taken King’s life. This  proceeding was all but ignored by the MSM.  In fact, the outfit that was going to broadcast it, Court TV, pulled out a few days before the trial started. Only Probe Magazine’s Jim Douglass, plus one other reporter, was in attendance each day. But after 2 1/2 hours of deliberations the jury came back with a verdict that Jowers was part of a conspiracy to kill King. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 508) Pepper had now won two  cases that proved conspiracy in the murder of Martin Luther King. (The transcript of this trial is contained in the book, The 13^th Juror.)

Later on, Pepper got involved in the Robert Kennedy case, assisted by New York attorney Laurie Dusek. As he did in the King case, Pepper  prepared a petition for a reopening of the RFK case based on new evidence. This included a new witness—Nina Rhodes— as proof of a second gunman in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel the night Kennedy was killed, and also proof that Sirhan Sirhan, the convicted assassin, was hypno-programmed that night. Having read that petition, I can say it was quite precise, accurate, and compelling.  If it had been used during a trial, I believe Pepper would have achieved the same result as he did in the King case.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris, today’s Vice-President, had the case dismissed. She said that even if Pepper could show that 13 shots were fired and two guns were involved, this did not prove Sirhan’s innocence. (CNN report  by Michael Martinez and Brad Johnson, 2/4/2012) With Harris’ disapproval, the Pepper/Dusek petition for a new trial was dismissed in 2015 by District Judge Beverly O’Connell. (Reuters, story by Jonathan Stempel, 1/6/2015) As Lisa Pease notes in her excellent book, A Lie too Big to Fail, Harris was so determined to get that petition dismissed and not have a new trial, she actually used the work of Mel Ayton. Ayton calls Sirhan the first Palestinian terrorist. That is how desperate Harris was since she likely knew that she would lose at trial.(Pease, p. 501)

We salute Pepper for fighting the good fight in two essential cases.  He won two cases for King and he would have won a third for Bobby Kennedy if he had been allowed to proceed.  That’s high cotton.