The Conspiracy to Murder King, Pt. 2

Why Ray Never had a Trial

As we have seen in Part 1, Percy Foreman deprived his client of the right to a fair and full trial on the facts. Why Foreman did this is a question that has never been adequately answered. For a short period of time, he informed Jerry Ray that he was looking for a trial and he would win. As we have also seen, he told reporter Sidney Zion the same. We will never know with any accuracy why he did such a reversal on his client. But it was disastrous for James Earl Ray. Made all the worse by the death of Judge Preston Battle before he could grant Ray’s motion for a trial.

In his book, The Deep State Assassination of Martin Luther King, John Avery Emison spends a chapter summarizing what the evidence was, or was not, against Ray. He begins by saying there was no credible witness to a sniper in the building where the authorities said the shot came from. (Emison, p. 42) The only witness to indicate Ray was not credible, and he changed his story. This was Charles Stephens, an alcoholic who, according to no less than four witnesses, was in a drunken stupor at the time—one of the witnesses was his common law wife Grace Walden. (William Pepper, Orders to Kill, pp.94-97, p. 153) But further, on the evening of the murder, when asked by the Memphis Police if he could recognize the man rushing out of the Bessie Brewer’s communal bathroom with something wrapped in newspapers, Stephens’ signed a declaration that said, “I couldn’t because I didn’t get that good a look at him.” He further added that he did not see the man’s eyes. (Emison, p. 44) About a week after the murder he could not make a positive identification for the FBI either. (Philip Melanson, The Martin Luther King Assassination, p.95) In an inexplicably hidden interview that Stephens did with newsman Bill Stout shortly after the murder, he was shown a picture of Ray. Stout asked if that was the man he saw in the hall. Stephens replied no it was not. (Pepper, p. 97) Stephens clearly changed his story when, in 1974, he started a court proceeding to claim reward money for information leading to the killer of King. (Melanson, p. 95)

Once Charles Stephens is discounted—which the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) refused to do--these are the facts of the case: No one saw Ray with a rifle; no one could positively identify Ray going into the bathroom or leaving it; and no one saw Ray firing. Therefore, one has to rely upon other evidence to find a solution to the crime. The autopsy conducted by Dr. Jerry Francisco states that King was killed by a bullet that pierced his neck and severed his spine. He stated that the projectile was a .30 caliber metal jacketed soft point sporting type, manufactured by Remington-Peters. That projectile was recovered during the autopsy and was subjected to more than one test. (Emison, p. 45). As we shall see, the projectile could not be matched to the rifle in evidence, a Model 760 Game Master made by Remington with a magazine that held four rounds. That weapon was a smashing commercial success for the company. It sold over a million rifles and stayed in production until 1981.

The Memphis Police found a bundle of items in front of the neighboring Canipe’s novelty store almost immediately. That bundle included a Game Master rifle with a scope, with one spent shell casing in the chamber, and no rounds in the magazine. (Emison, p. 45) Which means that if this was the murder weapon, the shooter expected to get a kill with one shot. There were nine live rounds of .30-06 ammo in a box: five were sporting rounds and four were military type full metal jacketed rounds. There was also a front page of that day’s morning newspaper, a pair of binoculars, two cans of beer, maps, and toiletries like deodorant and toothpaste etc. (ibid)

As the late Philip Melanson noted, the fingerprint analysis on the rifle done by the HSCA is, to say the least, confusing. Some would go as far as to label it as misleading. (Melanson, pp. 97-99)

First of all, the original analyst was Vincent Scalice, who has fallen into disrepute due to his cooperation with the 1993 PBS charade about Lee Oswald’s fingerprints on his rifle.(Click here for why https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/a-presumption-of-innocence-lee-harvey-oswald-part-3) But further there was a disagreement about whether or not Ray’s prints were on the Game Master rifle, and that disagreement was amid the HSCA panel itself, which included three analysts. Two of the three experts disagreed with Scalice about Ray’s prints being on the rifle. Those two said that they could only find Ray’s prints on the telescopic sight and a bottle of after shave. There were also no prints of Ray in the bathroom where the official story says the shot was fired from. (Melanson, pp. 98-99; Emison, p. 63)

The ballistics evidence is also inconclusive. First of all, the military jacketed rounds found in the bundle are a mystery. No one knows where they came from. As they were not purchased by Ray at the gun shop in Birmingham where he bought the rifle. (Emison, p. 47)

Besides that mystery, neither the FBI nor the HSCA could positively match the death slug to the rifle. (Emison, p. 51) They also said there were no marks on the extra ammo to show that these were ever loaded into the magazine or chamber of the Game Master. (Emison, p. 54) But there was evidence that the military jacketed ammo had been in an eight round clip of a Garand M1 rifle. The problem with this is that Ray had never used that kind of rifle since his service in the military. And although Ray said he purchased the military jacketed ammo at Aeromarine Supply, with the rifle, the store said their receipt did not indicate this. So who did the Garand belong to and did Ray purchase the ammo for it or not? (Emison, p. 58)

Further, when Ray purchased that rifle, he never asked to have it properly sighted. And Ray did not know how to sight the rifle in by firing shots at a target and then adjusting the scope. It turns out that when the FBI got the rifle they discovered that it was misaligned. The scope was off three inches to the right. (Emison, p. 56) Would an assassin really use a rifle that was misaligned--especially if he was banking on doing the job with one shot?

In addition to not being able to demonstrate that Ray was in the communal bathroom at the time of the shot, there is not any proof of where the shot originated from. The main reason being that there was not enough photographic or eyewitness testimony to determine the actual trajectory of the rifle shot. Especially since there was no photo of King at or near the time of impact. Therefore the HSCA analysts could not determine how he was standing at that instant. (Emison, pp. 74-75)

The HSCA stated that it was Ray who dropped the bundle in front of Canipe’s. As both Emison and the late Mark Lane have stated--Lane more colorfully than Emison--this would have been utterly goofy. Because, if Ray had shot King, there was nothing to link him to the crime except what was in the bundle. In other words, Ray needlessly incriminated himself. The pretext given is that there were police cars in the area already. But as has been shown, these cars were stationary and empty at the time. (Melanson, p. 111)

There is also this question: if Ray dropped the bundle, when did he prepare it? It only makes sense that he prepared it before he took the shot. Because it would take too long to go back in his room and bundle everything up. Did he bring it into the bathroom with him? Or did he prepare the bundle first, take the shot, and then run back into his room? All of this denotes a preparation that would not seem to be upset by the sighting of empty police cars.

But, to me, this is all rendered moot by the evidence from Mr. Canipe that the bundle was dropped before the shot was fired. (Emison, pp. 68-69). Again, as with Stephens, the HSCA tried to blur this point. And, as Emison notes, that committee classified their interview with Canipe until 2029. (Emison, p. 69)

There is also this problem in mounting a case against Ray: it was the first time he had ever been to Memphis. And to make matters worse, as Emison proves conclusively:

“It was not until the later afternoon of April 4^th that the Memphis Press-Scimitar, the afternoon daily newspaper, mentioned that Dr. King had spent the night before at the Lorraine. Even then, there was no mention of a room number.” (Emison, p. 78)

Emison further notes that this newspaper edition had almost certainly been on the street only after Ray had checked into Bessie Brewer’s rooming house. As Ray’s first attorney, Arthur Hanes, commented: You cannot just drive down the street and figure out the line of fire from the windows to the Lorraine Motel. How on earth could Ray figure such a thing out if he did not know King’s room and location? As we have noted, this is the question that Judge Battle asked, only he asked it too late--after the sentencing.

But there is something very interesting about this aspect of the case. And its something that James Earl Ray could not have known, and which suggests a conspiracy in and of itself. Someone changed King’s room at the Lorraine just before he arrived. Walter Bailey owned the Lorraine. Wayne Chastain was a local reporter at the time of the assassination. Bailey told him that on April 2^nd, which was the day before King arrived, someone changed the room reservation. King had originally been placed in a ground level courtyard room. The man who switched the reservation to a second story balcony presented himself as an advance man for the King entourage. (Pepper, pp. 97-98). This is a key issue for the simple reason that if the room had not been changed, the assassination could not have happened as it did. And again, how on earth could Ray have either accomplished this—the description of the ‘advance man’ does not indicate it was Ray-- or known about it?

In this section, concerning the case against Ray, we should close with the issue that almost all the writers who back the state’s case adopt: Ray killed King because he was a racist. Both of the earliest writers on this case, William Bradford Huie and George McMillan, relied on this as a motive for Ray’s crime. Later on, both Gerald Posner and Hampton Sides recycled McMillan’s work on this. (Emison, p. 88) But as Emison points out, the FBI talked to dozens of inmates or former prison inmates of Ray from Missouri. They even interviewed his former warden. They could not turn up any evidence that “Ray was involved in any race-related disturbances at the prison.” (Emison, p. 79). Emison spends over twenty pages going through each and every racist accusation that Huie and McMillan wrote about, and which Sides and Posner then noted. He shows each one to be either false on its face or distorted in its attribution. (Pp. 96-119)

For an example: one accusation was that Ray was interested in fleeing to Rhodesia after the shooting. This was interpreted as racist since whites ruled the country at the time and it was an apartheid state. The HSCA looked into this issue to determine if this betrayed a racist angle to the crime. They themselves said, “No such evidence was found.” The committee found that Rhodesia would have been a safe haven,

…and not because of an interest in the country’s politics. This interpretation is supported by Ray’s post-assassination conduct. His frantic efforts to reach a variety of African countries probably reflected a simple desire to elude his pursuers. (HSCA quoted in Emison, p. 115)

As with the instance above, Emison quietly undermines every such claim made in the literature against Ray on this racial ground. Ray was not a racist. So in addition to the weak circumstances against Ray, Emison’s intricate demonstration goes a long way to stripping the case against him of any motive.