Authors: Lamar Waldron
Motel.” From the back of the fire station, they had to “climb down the
concrete wall and [run] across Mulberry Street to the Lorraine.” The
patrolmen quickly covered the Lorraine itself, but didn’t seal off a two-
block area around the Lorraine until five minutes later—four minutes
too late to stop James Earl Ray.21
On the balcony, Dr. King lay dying. Photographs show undercover
officer Marrell McCullough kneeling next to his body, along with Andrew
Young. An officer asked where the shot came from, and a famous photo
shows Young and the other aides standing as they all point in the direc-
tion of the rooming house across Mulberry Street.
Below the rooming house windows was a thicket-covered area,
fronted by bushes along the top of the retaining wall that ran along
Mulberry Street. After patrolmen climbed up the wall and searched the
area, the Justice Department says, “about 10 feet up the alley” that ran
between the two buildings of the rooming house, “they found two fresh
footprints in the mud . . . subsequently, a plaster cast was made of each
footprint. However, the footprints were never positively identified by
either the Memphis Police or the FBI.” According to William Pepper, the
shoe size was large, approximately “13 to 13 ½.”22
Ralph Abernathy said that by the time an ambulance arrived at 6:06
PM, police officers “cluttered the courtyard.” The mortally wounded
Dr. King lay unconscious as he clung to life, and Abernathy rode with
him to the hospital. They arrived at 6:15 PM.23
Martin Luther King was pronounced dead at 7:05 PM.
Chapter Fifty-one
For forty years, many have wondered if James Earl Ray fired the fatal
shot from the rooming house. Rep. Stokes and the HSCA concluded he
did, though they were careful to point out that the direction and source
of the shot could not be determined with scientific precision. No witness
actually saw the shot come from the bathroom window, and no one in
the rooming house watched Ray fire the rifle, or definitively identified
him fleeing with the weapon. The autopsy might have provided con-
clusive information about the bullet’s angle, and thus its origin, but the
doctor who performed the autopsy said he didn’t track the path of the
bullet, so as not to further disfigure Dr. King.1
The bullet recovered from Dr. King’s body could not be matched to, or
excluded from, the rifle Ray had purchased that was left on the sidewalk
in front of Canipe’s. That was true for tests done in 1968 and for the most
recent testing done in the 1990s. Apparently as a result of the first round
of tests, the bullet that was removed from Dr. King in one piece is now
in three pieces, further reducing the chance that authorities will ever be
able to prove it did, or did not, come from Ray’s rifle.2
A shot from the rooming house would not have been difficult for
an experienced shooter. The rooming house was about 205 feet away
from the bathroom window, but with the seven-power Redfield scope,
the distance would have seemed like less than thirty feet. That’s still a
good shot for someone like Ray, who had no documented practice. If
Ray acted alone and not as part of a conspiracy, the idea of his risking
target practice with the rifle in some random part of the Alabama woods
seems unlikely, given his chances of getting caught. The gun was loud,
the bullets powerful, and he would have had to practice in daylight,
increasing his chances of being seen. A simple arrest for trespassing
could have meant the fugitive Ray’s return to prison. On the other hand,
since we feel that Ray was acting for Milteer in the contract that Marcello
brokered, Ray could have had a safe place to practice either through
someone like Milteer’s associate Dr. Swift in California, or via one of
Marcello’s Mafia associates.
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
If the shot was fired from the bathroom window, as the HSCA con-
cluded, then King’s murder was simply a variation of two earlier assas-
sination efforts linked to Marcello and Milteer: the JFK attempt planned
for Tampa and his murder in Dallas, both of which involved a shooter
firing from an open window. In the rooming house bathroom that Ray
shared, the window screen was pushed out, further indicating that a
shot was fired from there. Though the window had jammed when some-
one tried to raise it, leaving only a five-inch gap, positioning the rifle
and scope, then firing, would not have been difficult.3
Could someone besides Ray have fired from the bathroom window?
Second-floor tenant Grace Walden would later claim to have seen a
man who did not fit Ray’s description in various ways, though, as we
noted earlier, she first told authorities she “did not see the man” at all.4
Her later descriptions didn’t match Ray, but varied considerably. Usu-
ally she said he was white, but on the
Today
show in 1978, she said, “I
think he was a nigger.” Grace Walden suffered from mental illness and
was institutionalized later in 1968, and some authors alleged that she
was committed because she wouldn’t accept a $100,000 bribe to say she
had seen Ray. However, Stokes and the HSCA investigated the matter
closely, even having their staff review her medical records and talk to
her doctors. They concluded that all of her treatment “was based on
medical considerations and was not related to her role as a possible
witness,” and that “because of the differences in Walden’s statements
about whether she saw anyone at all, and if so whether the man she
saw was white or black, the Committee found that her testimony was
virtually useless.”5
The HSCA was also cautious about the statements of Walden’s
common-law husband, Charles Stephens, whose identification of the
man he saw fleeing down the hall seemed to grow more like Ray as time
passed. All accounts say that Stephens had been drinking that day, and
most say he was intoxicated to some degree, with some stating he was
“drunk.” Keeping in mind that the rooming house was essentially a
flophouse, the reliability of the witnesses there was far from ideal.
It seems odd that a sniper would choose as his lair the shared bath-
room on a floor where tenants often drank beer for much of the day.
There was nothing to prevent an irate tenant like Stephens or Anschutz
from banging on the locked bathroom door while—or just after—the
shot was fired, then getting a good look at whoever came out of the
bathroom, and what he was carrying. Then again, Ray wasn’t an expe-
rienced hit man, and if Sartor’s sources in the Justice Department memo
were accurate, a schedule change scarcely an hour earlier had sped up
the hit’s timing, putting additional pressure on the shooter.
Some of Ray’s defense attorneys have said the shot came from the
bushes below the rooming house windows. Such a shot would have
been closer to the Lorraine, and therefore easier. But debates have raged
for years about how thick the foliage was, and whether a shooter there
would have been spotted easily by tenants looking out of their windows
(police noticed several women peeking through those windows not long
after the shots). Also, aside from the two footprints mentioned earlier, no
other prints were found, as would have been expected if someone had
gone through the area, especially given the recent very wet weather.6
Aside from Andrew Young’s brief statement at the time, three other
witnesses indicated seeing something in the area of the bushes, but there
are issues with each of their stories. Volunteer driver Solomon Jones
later testified to the HSCA that after he got up off the ground, where
Young had pushed him when the shot rang out, “he saw a movement
of something white and ‘as tall as a human being’ in the brush beneath
the rooming house,” but “for only a brief time. He did not see a head or
arms; he could not tell whether the object was black or white, male or
female.” Since Jones didn’t look at the brushy area until after he got up
off the ground, as the police were starting to enter the area, the HSCA
concluded that he likely saw one of the officers in the brush.7
On the day of the shooting, Jones gave varying accounts of what he
saw: He told a reporter within minutes that “the shot came from the
bushes ‘over there,’ pointing across Mulberry Street to the thick brush
behind the rooming house.” According to William Pepper, Jones told
the Memphis Police “he saw a man heading back toward the rooming
house,” but “in a statement given to the media [that] evening [Jones] said
he saw a man come down over the wall and onto or near the Lorraine
property, only to drift away.” At that point, Jones said he was “desperate
to follow [the man, so] he tried to find a way out of the Lorraine Motel
parking area, becoming hysterical when he couldn’t find a clear path
to drive out.”8
Earl Caldwell, covering King’s Memphis trip for the
New York Times
,
later said he was standing in the doorway of his first-floor room at the
Lorraine when he heard what sounded like an explosion. As William
Pepper recounted, Caldwell “was looking at the brush area at the rear of
the rooming house on the other side of Mulberry Street and saw a figure
in the bushes, a white male wearing what appeared to be coveralls. The
man was crouched or semi-crouched in the midst of the high bushes and
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
was staring at the balcony . . . he didn’t see a gun in the hands of the man,
and he was quickly distracted by Solomon Jones, who began driving
the car back and forth frantically in the driveway of the motel. When
Caldwell looked back to the brush area, the man had disappeared.”
However, critics of his account point out that Caldwell didn’t go pub-
lic with his story for years, and that he didn’t mention it when author
Gerold Frank interviewed him a year after Dr. King’s murder.9
A minister with Dr. King said he saw “a puff of white smoke” com-
ing from the bushes—but critics point out that the gunpowder in use at
the time didn’t generate smoke, and no other witnesses reported see-
ing the “puff.”10 Those are the only reports of activity in the bushes that
have emerged after forty years that are even close to being credible. A
few other stories surfaced at various times, but have been discredited.
Ray’s many defense attorneys tried to do their job, which was to cast
reasonable doubt on their client’s possible guilt, by using any testimony
available. (Ray said he fired one of his attorneys because the lawyer was
more interested in finding out the truth than in defending him.)
None of our work is based in any way on the claims of Lloyd Jowers,
the owner of Jim’s Grill on the first floor of Ray’s rooming house. In the
early 1990s, Jowers began telling stories about his involvement with
another shooter and rifle, though his accounts varied greatly over time.
A Tennessee civil jury found Jowers liable for the death of Dr. King in
1999, a case in which he essentially offered no defense and paid dam-
ages of $1. Jowers’ and his associates’ claims changed so much over
the years, and lacked corroborating evidence, that even his supporters
acknowledge that their stories are problematic. One of Jowers’ biggest
supporters, Ray’s last attorney, William Pepper, wrote that “Jowers’s
impetuousness, often combined with his drinking, resulted in behavior
which is used to undermine his credibility.” Of another key witness
involved in Jowers’ story, Pepper wrote that her “credibility has been
hurt as much by some of those working for me as it has by the agents of
the state who wish to discredit her.” The only thing that can be said with
certainty about Jowers is that he was a gambling associate of Frank C.
Liberto, so he may have heard about part of the plan or had some role in
it. Jowers seemed motivated by a desire for financial gain, and started to
go public with his story only in the wake of the success of Oliver Stone’s
JFK
, when Carlos Marcello was near death.11
One alternate theory holds that Ray was doing only surveillance for
the hit, an option mentioned in one of the earlier cited prison-bounty
stories. In that scenario, either the real shooter set Ray up to take the fall,
or Ray himself suddenly decided to make additional money by shooting
Dr. King, as well as doing the surveillance. However, the fact that Ray
had to buy binoculars just an hour before the shooting indicates that he
was poorly prepared if his main job was merely surveillance.12
After weighing all the evidence from the past forty years, it does
appear that the shot came from the second-floor bathroom. However,
it can’t be stated with absolute certainty. We don’t rule out the possibil-
ity that someone else tied to the contract was in the immediate vicinity,
either helping Ray or ensuring that he was tied to the crime—or both.
The HSCA also looked closely at the Memphis Police Department’s