Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups (43 page)

So now ask yourself
this:
Would a
professional
assassin seriously take the
extra time
required to commit the singularly
insane
act of leaving behind very incriminating evidence before fleeing the scene? It just
does not make sense.

And it apparently never even happened to begin with! Circuit Court Judge Arthur Hanes Jr. testified that the owner of the store was a credible witness— Guy Canipe. Mr. Canipe stated that the bundle of incriminating evidence was dropped off in front of his store before the assassination even took place. He remembered that and testified accordingly.
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Judge Hanes also testified that the firehouse near the assassination was already swarming with police prior to the shooting. Some were already watching Dr. King across the street. So “when they saw Dr. King go down, the fire house erupted like a beehive ... In addition to the time involved (if Ray had fired the weapon, returned to his room, boxed it, left the box in front, and then got into his car and drove away), it was circumstantially almost impossible to believe that somebody had been able to throw that (rifle) down and leave right in the face of that erupting fire station.”
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That’s crucial evidence that’s gone unreported, or at least
under-reported,
but speaks volumes about the impossibility of the official version.

Judge Hanes summarized how utterly preposterous the official version of events is, while referring to an official exhibit that depicted the crime:

With police swarming all around like angry bees, “James Earl Ray had fired the shot from the bathroom on that second floor, come down that hallway into his room and carefully packed that box, tied it up, then had proceeded across the walkway the length of the building to the back where that stair from that door came up, had come down the stairs out the door, placed the Browning box containing the rifle and the radio there in the Canipe entryway.”
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He then simply got into his car and left, unassisted, and simply drove the same car from Memphis, Tennessee all the way to Atlanta, Georgia, never once challenged by a police officer. Yeah,
right. Sure
he did ̾

Another witness stated “that right after the shot was fired he received a smoking rifle at the rear door of Jim’s Grill from Clark. He broke the rifle down into two pieces and wrapped it in a tablecloth. Raul picked it up the next day.”
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That obviously has to be a
different
rifle than the
throw-down
weapon that incriminated the Defendant—there had to be
two rifles;
we know that Ray’s rifle wasn’t the murder weapon—and there had to be another rifle that was.

And another witness testified that he was in the rooming house at the exact time of the shooting, was in the hall near the bathroom that Ray supposedly shot from, and that at that time the door to the bathroom was open and there was no one in there. That fits with another testimony which places James Earl Ray sitting in his car at the time of the gunshot—a reliable eyewitness saw him there and he was several blocks away at the time.
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Ray was also known to be a rather lousy shot with a rifle, making the alleged feat—one perfect shot at a very high-profile target—additionally difficult to fathom. One thing that’s crystal clear in all this is that there’s
no way
that our Defendant, the eighth-grade dropout, masterminded this crime. It quite simply is just not even possible.

“Ray’s skill with a rifle is dubious, and while he did commit armed robbery he had never harmed anyone previously during his criminal endeavors. And the man whose career one author described as “a record of bungled and ludicrously inept rob-beries and burglaries” purportedly managed to kill King with one perfect shot and then elude authorities for longer than any other American political assassin.”
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But we are told—instead of believing what is clear and obvious—to believe in our government’s Official Version of events, that:

•Just like Lee Harvey Oswald—James Earl Ray was a “loner” and “lone nut” and there were no conspirators ̾

•Just like they told us about Jack Ruby ̾

•And (a very short time later when Bobby Kennedy was murdered) just like they told us about Sirhan Bishara Sirhan .

•Even though the “Official Versions” are full of impossibilities and gaping holes so huge that you could drive a truck through them .

•And even though there was NO APPARENT MOTIVE for James Earl Ray, just like there was none for Oswald, none for Ruby, and none for Sirhan.

In Ray’s case, he was clearly a small-time criminal, with
no
motive for murder:

“A petty criminal, Ray seems unlikely to have committed the crime purely out of racial hatred, and anecdotes of his racism are thin. The idea that he killed King in order to achieve notoriety is implausible given the lengths to which he went to avoid capture (nearly succeeding).”
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He had no known motive for killing Martin Luther King, nor was one presented by the prosecution. To this day, there is
no known motive and no motive
has ever been given—its absence is very conspicuous:

“Prosecutors did not outline a motive for the killing or accuse Ray of being a racist. He repeatedly but unsuccessfully sought the trial that his guilty plea had forestalled.”
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Another huge factor is that James Earl Ray had
no
history of violence: His crimes were
thefts
—stealing money in order to
get
money—and he made a point of not hurting people in the process. His history backs that up. The defendant’s brother spelled it out plain and simple for all to see. He said:

•“If my brother did kill King he did it for a lot of money—he never did anything if it wasn’t for money .. .”
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•Ray’s other brother echoed the same sentiment:

“I said if he had done it there had to be a lot of money involved because he wouldn’t do it for hatred or just because he didn’t like somebody, because that, is not his line of work.”
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But he
was
the perfect “patsy”; he was enough of a crook to follow the scent of making some money, but not smart enough to realize that he was in the process of being set up.
That
is why many serious researchers “have interpreted the evidence as a sophisticated operation which brought Ray into an assassination plot and then left him holding the bag at the scene of King’s murder.”
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That scenario certainly makes a
lot
more sense than the “official version” of events, which is not only preposterous, but literally impossible.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Rioting in over 100 American cities was the immediate response to the assassination of Martin Luther King. A man of peace and reason had been gunned down in broad daylight and nothing less than rioting in the streets should have been expected.

The period of the 1960’s was known for hippies and the politics of peace and love, but the hard realities of contemporary events sent it rapidly freefalling from the
Summer of Love
in 1967 to the upheaval, one year later, of tanks and armored personnel carriers moving National Guard soldiers in to “protect” American streets from their own people. We were a nation in turmoil toward the end of the decade. And it was the assassination of Martin Luther King that precipitated that social descent:

•The bloody
Battle of Khe Sanh
and then the relentless onslaught of the
Tet Offensive,
reveal the real horrors of the Vietnam War to a shocked American public closely following its hopelessness at home on their televisions;

•North Korea captures the crew of the
USS Pueblo,
a Naval Intelligence vessel, and holds the ship and its eighty-three-man crew hostage, for violating Korea’s territorial waters;

•Anti-war protesters take over many of the nation’s college campuses, openly defying police and National Guard soldiers who are called in to “maintain order”;

•Huge Civil Rights protests take place in many major cities and universities;

•In response to his broad public disapproval, President Johnson announces that he will not seek re-election;

•Martin Luther King and his Civil Rights marches gain momentum in leading the nation in a new direction, away from the commitment to an un-winnable war;

•Then Dr. King is cut down in his prime;

•Burning cities are on the television news every night, as rioters react to their new sense of hopelessness and frustration;

•Senator Robert F. Kennedy declares his candidacy for President and quickly looks like he is on his way to winning the nomination and becoming President. And then
he too
is cut down in his prime on June 6 by what they officially tell us is
another
lone nut, in
another
non-conspiracy;

•It seems like every time you turn on your television and begin watching a T.V. show, you are suddenly hearing, “We interrupt this program for a
Special News Bulletin”;

•The Democratic Convention in August 1968 turns into a bloodbath right on the streets of Chicago, with police beating peaceful protesters and newscasters alike—filmed live and watched around the world;

•
ALL
of the above happened in an eight-month period between January- August 1968.

Martin Luther King had interrupted his plans and come to Memphis, Tennessee to lead a workers’ strike by sanitation workers there. Martin had been worried that the strike was showing signs of violence, and his purpose in going was to lead a peaceful march and because he knew that his presence there would help to
keep
it peaceful.

James Earl Ray appealed his conviction seven times, continually seeking permission to introduce new evidence. Those requests were summarily denied.

Ray’s last legal effort concentrated on tests he wanted conducted on the rifle that prosecutors say was the murder weapon. It had been purchased by Ray and was found near the murder scene moments after King was shot, with Ray’s fingerprints on it. But Ray claimed it was placed there to frame him.

Martin Luther King’s family filed a wrongful death civil lawsuit presenting ballistics evidence that the rifle of James Earl Ray could not have fired the gunshot.

In a 1999 court decision that would be earth-shattering but for the fact that few are aware of it, the jury found that Martin Luther King was killed by a conspiracy that involved Jowers and “others, including governmental agencies.” James Earl Ray was not alive to hear that he; died in prison the year before.

As important as the arrest of James Earl Ray had supposedly been, it didn’t stop politics from rearing its ugly head. Get a load of this little nugget, direct from the Deputy Director of the FBI:

“Ray was in custody in London for two days before Hoover released the story to the press. He waited until the day of Bobby Kennedy’s funeral to break the news so that the FBI could steal the headline from Kennedy one last time. I told Hoover that we should give the credit for Ray’s capture to the RCMP (Royal Cana-dian Mounted Police). Hoover said no and the FBI falsely got the credit.”
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