Orders to Kill Page 17

  Mr. Hurley told me that he remembered arriving that afternoon and having to park just behind a white Mustang. He also noticed a young man wearing a dark blue windbreaker sitting inside it and that it had Arkansas plates. Ray’s car, of course, had Alabama plates with white letters on a red background and Ray was dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and dark tie on that afternoon. This Mustang, Charles Hurley said, had red letters on a white background. He recalled noting this because someone at work also had a Mustang with Arkansas plates. When Peggy Hurley came out a few minutes later, and they left, the young man was still sitting in the Mustang.

  AT THE SUGGESTION of both Kay Black and Wayne Chastain, I met former Memphis Press Scimitar photographer/reporter Jim Reid. He told me that about three days before the assassination he’d seen a tree branch that could have obstructed a clear shot from the rooming house bathroom window being cut and had taken a photograph of it. He said he even mentioned it to a friend who was with the CIA and who exclaimed, “How the hell did you know about that?” I asked him to look for the photograph.

  Shortly after the killing, Reid interviewed Willie Green, who was working at an Esso station in the area of Linden and Third. In a front-page article that included Green’s photograph, Jim had described how the man reacted excitedly when he was shown a photo of Ray and asked if he remembered seeing him around 6:00 p.m. that evening. Green positively identified Ray as a man who had come into the gas station at that time. The gas station no longer existed by 1988.

  IT HAD BEEN TEN YEARS since I had last seen Loyd Jowers, the owner of Jim’s Grill in 1968. I visited him at his latest business, a slot-and-pinball machine arcade on Union Street. He talked to me while keeping an eye on business and also with a long barreled pistol not too far from his hand and ready for use, as he said was occasionally necessary.

  Jowers went over some familiar ground. He remembered the Mustang in front of the grill when he came to work around 4:00 that afternoon. He also remembered selling beer to Charlie and insisting that he take it to his room because he was so drunk. At the time of the shooting Jowers said he was in the front of the grill and when he heard the shot he thought that a pot had fallen in his kitchen. He said he went back there and peered in but saw nothing unusual, so he came back out to the front. A short time later a sheriff’s deputy came through the door and ordered everyone to stay inside.

  Jowers acknowledged that waitresses were on duty on the afternoon of April 4. I had long wanted to interview them, particularly Betty, having learned about her from Wayne Chastain back in 1978. Jowers said that she had had a number of husbands and used various names. He told me generally where he thought she lived, and Ken Herman and I set out to find her. I quickly became convinced that Loyd had deliberately led us astray.

  16

  More Leads, More Loose Ends: Spring–Summer 1989

  IN THE SPRING OF 1989 I changed the focus of my investigation, heading for Atlanta to visit with Ralph Abernathy and Hosea Williams, neither of whom I’d seen in several years. Hosea was pleased to hear that I was representing James Earl Ray on an appeal and looking again into some unanswered questions surrounding the case. He had never been satisfied with the result of the official investigations.

  We also discussed a particularly sensitive matter. I had learned from David Garrow’s research that the FBI’s paid informant on the SCLC’s executive staff was its comptroller, James Harrison, who had joined the organization in October 1964, working directly under Ralph Abernathy’s supervision.4 Harrison reported to agent Al Sentinella in the Atlanta field office from autumn of 1965, and was still doing so on the day of Dr. King’s killing. It was a bitter shock to Hosea when the story broke about Harrison, because they had been college fraternity brothers and were roommates in 1967–1968. He was also embarrassed and worried that others might believe that he was in league with Harrison and the government against Dr. King. He was chagrined that Harrison had managed to con him into tape recording some SCLC staff meetings, ostensibly so that Hosea could protect his job, which Harrison convinced him was in danger. In fact, Hosea had no idea about Harrison’s informant activities; he didn’t know, for example, that when Harrison traveled with them to Memphis on April 3, 1968, he had dutifully checked in with Memphis FBI SAC Jensen and then spent the rest of the day with the SCLC group before returning to Atlanta.

  Reviewing the events of April 4, Hosea confirmed what I already knew—that Martin spent most of the afternoon in an executive staff meeting at the Lorraine. The meeting lasted until about ten to fifteen minutes before the shot. It was briefly interrupted between 4:00 and 4:30 when Andy Young returned from court to tell them about the judge’s ruling in favor of the march. He also remembered a brief “tussle” between Martin and Andy, before they resumed. Billy Kyles, who wasn’t at the meeting, knocked on the door sometime shortly before 6:00 P.M. and reminded them that they were already forty-five minutes late for supper at his home. Martin then told everybody to go to their rooms and quickly get ready to go. Hosea left, made one quick stop, and then went to his room on the ground level under Dr. King’s room. He remembers being right next to Solomon Jones’s limousine and hearing Solomon, who was standing by the driver’s side of the car with one foot inside and one foot outside, telling Dr. King to wear his coat since it was a cool evening.

  Hosea said that as he was putting the key in the lock of the door to his room he heard Dr. King say, “You’re right, Jonesey, I’ll get my coat.” Then he heard the shot and saw Martin’s leg dangling from the balcony.

  I then raised Kyles’s claim that he had been in Martin’s room for the better part of an hour before the shooting. Hosea said that was impossible because the executive staff meeting broke up only minutes before the shot. Kyles wasn’t a member of SCLC staff and wouldn’t have been present at such a meeting.

  The next day, following the Wednesday Holy Week service at West Hunter Street Baptist Church where Ralph Abernathy had been pastor for as long as I’d known him, Ralph and I discussed the last trip he and Martin made to Memphis.

  Ralph’s description of King’s last hour was virtually identical to Hosea’s. He and Martin began to get ready for dinner sometime around 5:30–5:45, after the staff meeting broke up. Martin was ready first and went outside. Ralph remembers hearing Solomon Jones tell Martin, just before the shot, that he might want his coat because it was cool that evening.

  Regarding Billy Kyles’s testimony Ralph said angrily, “If Billy Kyles said that, then Billy Kyles is a liar.” Ralph said Kyles had at no time been in the room with them. Ralph had just slapped some cologne on his face when he heard the shot and ran outside to cradle his friend in his arms. Kyles was on the balcony. Ralph told him to go inside and phone for an ambulance. He recalled that in the rush of events Andy Young knelt beside him and said, “Ralph, it’s all over, it’s all over.” He told Andy, “It’s not all over, Andy, don’t you say that.” Moments later he entered the room to find Kyles lying on the bed sobbing. Ralph told him this was no time for hysterics and to call an ambulance. Kyles said, “Ralph, the lines are all busy.”

  A few years later I gained access to the surveillance report of Memphis patrolman Willie Richmond, who was assigned to watch King’s party at the Lorraine. His report confirmed what Ralph and Hosea had told me.

  Why had Kyles lied? Was he simply trying to boost his stock as a civil rights leader by establishing himself as important enough to have been close to King just before his death? I had previously obtained a copy of the register of the Lorraine for the week through April 5, 1968, and found it curious that though he lived locally, Kyles had taken room 312 on April 3 and 4.

  Ralph died in 1992. That meeting was the last time I saw him.

  IN EARLY SUMMER 1989 I became involved in assisting the production of a BBC documentary on the assassination, Inside Story: Who Killed Martin Luther King? At Ray’s suggestion, English television producer John Edginton of Otmoor Productions had approached me earlier that year. He was horrified by the HSCA revel
ations of the COINTELPRO activity against Dr. King. I believed that such activity, including electronic surveillance, continued right up to his death but that we would probably never uncover any hard evidence of it. I shared with Edginton the results of my work to date and suggested that he might want to interview Myron Billet and John McFerren.

  I took Edginton and his team to see Billet. He found his story credible and set out to see if he could corroborate the details. He traveled to Apalachin, New York, and found the motel and the restaurant where Billet said they had dinner the night before the meeting. Both were just as Myron described them. Edginton was impressed, as was I. Billet was a dying old man who had embraced religion and become concerned with the afterlife—he had no reason to lie.

  Billet died of a heart attack soon after the BBC program aired. His closest friend, Rev. Maurice McCracken of Cincinnati, insisted that he had died a happy man. At last he was able to get someone to listen to his story.

  At John McFerren’s general store/gas station one afternoon, Edginton’s production unit waited for three hours while I tried unsuccessfully to persuade McFerren to talk. His fear was still strong enough to prevent him from coming forward again.

  After the documentary aired, McFerren told me that even though he didn’t participate, an official of one of the major petroleum companies who supplied products to him called him aside one day and said that he had better be careful because “Old Pepper is stirring things up.”

  IN JUNE 1989, I received a report from T.J., my Southern reporter contact, on Raul Esquivel, Sr. and Raul Esquivel, Jr. T.J.’s New Orleans source told him that in 1968 Esquivel Sr. was a Louisiana state trooper based at the Troop B Barracks in Baton Rouge who was allegedly associated with Jules “Ricco” Kimbel and Sal Liberto. Kimbel’s name has frequently appeared on the periphery of both the John Kennedy and the King cases. His possible involvement had been discussed and dismissed by the HSCA, which became convinced that Kimbel wasn’t in Canada at the same time as Ray. The HSCA also noted his lack of cooperation with the committee. Sal Liberto was a relative of the Memphis produce company owner Frank Liberto whom McFerren had mentioned in his statement. Esquivel was of Spanish descent—originally from Belize—5'9", 175 lbs, and in 1968 he was forty-two years old. He also had served in both the army and the navy during World War II.

  Though he appeared to have some potentially relevant connections in New Orleans, there was no hard evidence of his involvement. Indeed when I eventually spoke with Charlie Stein in the autumn of 1994, he categorically denied seeing the telephone number James dialed in the course of their trip to New Orleans in December 1967.

  The Edginton team also made contact with Kimbel. Former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison told Edginton that everything Kimbel had told him about the Kennedy assassination turned out to be true. The BBC team visited Kimbel in the Three Rivers federal penitentiary in Texas.

  He told an extraordinary story. He had worked for the government as an FBI/CIA asset and for organized crime. His FBI handler was an agent named Clement Hood Sr. in New Orleans. He said that the mob and the agency worked together like one organization. The mob would handle contract work for the Agency, which could then plausibly deny any connection or knowledge of events should they become public. He was always paid in cash for his work, which he implied was strong-arm activity, including murder. He told the BBC team that Dr. King was hated by powerful wealthy individuals in the South, specifically Louisiana right-wing leader Leander Perez and Texas oilman H. L. Hunt. In this, he said, they were on common ground with the CIA and the FBI.

  Though he would later say he was mistaken, he originally stated that in the summer of 1967, on the instructions of Clement Hood, Sr., he flew James to Canada where he helped get James false identification. A former CIA agent told the BBC that the Agency did have an identities specialist based in Toronto who could have operated throughout Canada during this period. His name was Raul Maori.

  In subsequent interviews with the BBC team in December 1989, however, Kimbel told of a considerably greater involvement in the King case. He maintained that he flew two shooters from Montreal to Memphis and flew them back after the killing. He alluded to “dry runs” in the South Main Street area and an operational base just over the line in Mississippi, and even admitted to picking up sniper rifles for the assassins. James Earl Ray was not the killer, he maintained, but only a decoy. He said that Frank Liberto played a minor role in the assassination and that his brother Sal was more prominently involved. It would obviously take considerable effort to investigate Kimbel’s story.

  The BBC documentary also included an interview with New York Daily News columnist Earl Caldwell, who as a young reporter covering Dr. King for the New York Times in 1968 had been in room 215 of the Lorraine Motel on April 4. He said that immediately after the shot he came out of his room and saw the figure of a white man crouching in the bushes behind the grill and the rooming house. No one from the FBI, MPD, or HSCA had ever tried to talk to Caldwell, and his observations contradicted the official position of the state that the shot came from the bathroom window. The Edginton production also provided expert testimony further rebutting that possibility, including the discrediting of the theory that a dent in the bathroom windowsill could have been made by a rifle barrel (the HSCA had also discounted the windowsill evidence).

  In his BBC interview, Inspector Sam Evans—in direct contradiction of his admission to me and apparent admission to writer Philip Melanson—denied that TACT units had been withdrawn or pulled back. He said they could have been removed only if he gave the order, which he never did. I marveled.

  My investigation in Memphis continued sporadically. In the summer of 1989 Herman and I eventually found Betty (whose last name we learned was Spates), the former waitress in Jim’s Grill whom I had especially wanted to see. Betty was an attractive black woman in her late thirties, with fearful eyes and a soft voice. Coming out of her house to meet with us, she appeared nervous. She admitted being at work in the grill on the day of the assassination but didn’t want to talk about it. When I told her I was Ray’s lawyer she declared, “There is no doubt that man [Ray] did not kill Dr. King. I know that for a fact.” She refused to discuss how she knew. She told me that every time she changed her job, she was visited by a man who “just came by to let me know that he knew where I was.” Once she said she was offered money and a new identity if she would agree to leave the area. She refused because all her family and her children were in Memphis. She could not be persuaded to talk more, so we left, saying we would keep in touch.

  Had Loyd Jowers been unhelpful in our effort to find Betty in order to protect her? That seemed out of character for Jowers who appeared coldhearted. When we discussed the case he always appeared to be on edge. The word was that he had become a very heavy drinker over the last ten years. By his own admission he had not seen Betty for a long time, and he pretended to have no interest in or knowledge about her. Why, then, would he be protective?

  My concern about Jowers deepened when I discovered that he had told the Edginton team that no waitresses were on duty on the afternoon of April 4—that he was all alone in the grill. He had previously acknowledged to me, as he had to Chastain on various occasions, that, in fact, there were waitresses working that afternoon. However, at other times he had insisted to Chastain that he was alone. There was also his change of position back and forth over the years as to whether or not Jack Youngblood was the “eggs and sausage man.” The man was not senile. He had all of his faculties. I became more convinced than ever that this wasn’t a memory problem, and he hadn’t been drinking when he admitted to me, a short while before the BBC interview, that waitresses had been working on the day of the assassination. What was going on?

  In a conversation with one of Edginton’s researchers, James McCraw had offhandedly referred to a gun being in Jim’s Grill around the time of the murder. I visited with McCraw and he told me that late in the morning the day after the shooting Jowers showed him a
rifle that was in a box on a shelf under the counter in the grill. Jowers told him that he had found it “out back” after the killing. He said he was going to turn it over to the police and later Jowers confirmed to McCraw that he had done so.

  I found this new disclosure startling. Was this second gun in fact the murder weapon? If Jowers had been telling him the truth, it was clear that the shot came from the brush area behind the rooming house and not from inside. But the police were all over the area within minutes of the shooting. Why had they not found the gun or mentioned it? Why had Jowers never raised it in any of our numerous conversations, and why was there no indication of it in the HSCA report? What had happened to it? Had Jowers in fact turned it over?

  Could this be why Betty Spates was frightened? Had she also seen the gun, or did she know something about it?

  17

  James Earl Ray’s Legal Representation Reexamined

  TO MOST EFFECTIVELY PREPARE JAMES’S APPEAL I had to understand the entire history of his representation, including the circumstances surrounding the guilty plea. I began at the beginning.

  Arthur Hanes, Sr., had told me that he believed James sought him out because he had tried a similar case, the defense of Alabama residents charged with the killing of a Detroit woman, Mrs. Viola Liuzzo. Mrs. Liuzzo had been gunned down from a side window of an overtaking car, on a dark road outside of Selma during the time of the historic Selma-to-Montgomery march. She was driving black marchers (as was I) out of Montgomery on that night. Hanes said that it was not unusual for him to be approached in such matters, for as mayor of Birmingham he had proved to be a conservative on racial issues. (Recall, however, that James’s other choice was F. Lee Bailey, a Boston lawyer strongly identified with liberal politics.)