Killing King: Racial Terrorists, James Earl Ray, and the Plot to Assassinate Martin Luther King Jr.

116 Pages·2018·2.65 MB·English

by  Stuart Wexler

To our families,
who inspire us in our search for truth and answers
CONTENTS INTRODUCTION IX
part one
1. The Warning 3
2. The Sponsors 12
3. The Motive 25
4. The Target 46
5. The Money 60
part two
6. Detour 79
7. On Hold 90
8. Back in Business 100
9. In Waiting 114
10. Stalking 124
11. Zero Hour 144
part three
12. Manhunt 161
13. Misdirection 181
14. Aftermath 203
Acknowledgments 227
Appendix 229
Notes 255
Index 285
INTRODUCTION
O
ne of the first questions a homicide detective will ask in the wake
of a murder, in the absence of direct evidence, is “Did the victim
have any enemies?” A follow-up question, less apt to be answered,
is “Did those enemies attempt to harm the victim in the past?” Intuitively, in the
wake of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder on April 4, 1968, many Americans
answered that question the same way. Dr. King himself, in his last sermon the
night before his killing, foreshadowed the same culprit: “And then I got to
Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were
out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?”
“Sick white brothers”—entire groups of racists—tried repeatedly to kill
Martin Luther King Jr. Our work documents at least nine such attempts between
1958 and 1968. During that time, white supremacists killed civil rights icons like
Medgar Evers, Vernon Dahmer, Viola Liuzzo, and dozens of civil rights
activists. Dr. King enjoyed little more protection than these men and women. He
was not a head of state; he was not protected by the Secret Service, or by the
military. That he survived until 1968 is almost entirely a result of good luck and
his tendency to change his itinerary at the last minute; occasionally, a
government informant volunteered information that saved his life. In that sense,
the solution to King’s murder is simple: the same kind of racists who had been
trying to kill King for years finally succeeded that April 4.
Killing King is not simply the story of a murder; it is the investigation and
documentation of a conspiracy to murder Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that began
in 1964, and evolved month by month and year by year. The secrecy and
convoluted motives of the plotters and the network that bound them together
obscured that conspiracy from those investigating Martin Luther King Jr.’s
death. Only one man was charged and convicted of the crime.
The murder of Dr. King was not the act of a single man, certainly not one
whose motive was never made clear, even in his conviction. The murder was the
culmination of a conspiracy involving many characters, many strands, and many
twists.
James Earl Ray, the man convicted of King’s murder, remains the only person
historically associated with the crime. In Killing King, we will show that Ray’s
travels, plans, and contacts from the time of his escape from prison in 1967 to
his ultimate appearance in Memphis, in a boardinghouse across from the
Lorraine Motel where King and his aides were staying, are an important part of
the conspiracy story. But Ray was neither a rabid racist nor an ideological
fanatic. His entire criminal career was motivated solely by a desire to make
money. And while he asserted, behind prison bars, his absolute innocence for
decades until his death in 1997, his protests do not hold up to scrutiny. We will
demonstrate that Ray was only one of the people involved and his role is only
one strand in the web of the conspiracy. Building on research from the authors’
two previous works—The Awful Grace of God and America’s Secret Jihad—we
will show how two other men, one a criminal on parole, the other a right-wing
terrorist, connect the diverse strands of the conspiracy.
The heart of the conspiracy, which Ray only became aware of in 1967, was a
cash bounty on the life of Dr. King, first offered to contract killers in 1964. The
first person to take that offer belonged to the “Dixie Mafia,” a group we will be
exploring in detail. That man, and certain of his associates, first engaged the
bounty sponsors, violent white supremacists, in 1964. But these would-be
patrons struggled to come up with the cash to make good on the offer. We will
trace the connections between the Dixie mafia criminals and white supremacists
from the time of the bounty’s first appearance in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964
onward into federal prisons in 1967, then across the nation from California
through Mississippi and Georgia—and ultimately to Memphis, Tennessee, and
Dr. King’s death.
Beyond the King bounty, the Dixie Mafia, and James Earl Ray, we will also
follow two other major strands in the web of conspiracy. The first involves
members in the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, who pursued
King’s murder and committed other racial and religious terrorist acts over some
four years. Ultimately it would be members of this group, under intense FBI
pressure and with several members already scheduled to serve prison sentences,
who would reach out to career criminals to accomplish what they could not do
themselves.