The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II

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1:19Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. And this is part two of our two-parter on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. That's right, where we locked off with Part one was the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr., and we're going to pick up now with the investigation and the manhunt. And while we're talking about that, we might as well go ahead and say it's still perhaps the largest manhunt in FBI history, depending on who you ask. It cost a couple of million bucks in those dollars, 3 ,500 investigators. and it was all just a bit awkward because, as we all know, or maybe some people don't know this, but the FBI had been tracking Martin Luther King Jr.

2:04since 1956, so for 12 years under a program called Racial Matters. And I don't think they meant like matters, like race matters. No, I think they meant the other way, like the matters of race. Right. And then in 1963, they started tapping his phones under the communist infiltration program. And J. Edgar Hoover was still around at the time because it seems like he was there for 300 years. Yeah. And he didn't like Martin Luther King Jr. He called him the most notorious liar in the country publicly at a press conference because King had been criticizing the FBI because they, you know, weren't protecting the civil rights of black Americans.

2:44And so Hoover didn't like the guy, yet he was the guy kind of at the top of this huge investigation. I read Martin Luther King's cool response to J. Edgar Hoover calling the most notorious liar. Get bent? No. No. He said that J. Edgar Hoover must be under tremendous pressure to have said such a thing. Wow. Like he was sympathetic. Jeez. Let's talk about the high road, man. Yeah, for sure. All right. So the FBI gets a hold of that 30-out-6 rifle that was determined to be the murder weapon. They couldn't actually conclusively link that bullet to the gun because the shell had been fragmented. But it was the same caliber.

3:28And everybody was like, come on, it's the gun. Can we all just agree to that? How many rifles do you guys have just laying around in Memphis that day? Yeah, dumped minutes after by a guy who sped away in a Mustang. Right. Hundreds of just 100 feet or so away from the murder scene. So, yeah, they couldn't conclusively link that to the gun, but they were able to trace the serial number and they traced it back to a sporting goods store in Birmingham, Alabama called Arrow Marine Supply. And they confirmed that it had been purchased just a few days before MLK was assassinated. Yeah, along with a scope and a gentleman who said that he was going hunting on a hunting trip with his brother.

4:14Okay. Because, yeah, you have to be like, that's believable, right? Yeah. When you're buying a gun, you've got to have a cover story. Yeah, and under an alias under the name Harvey Lohmeyer. Right. Right. So two weeks after the killing, they figured out that the prints on the gun matched those of a guy named James Earl Ray. And at the time, James Earl Ray had been an escaped convict from a state prison in Missouri for basically a year. He'd been on the run. So now we had a suspect and we had photos and they started circulating it around to people who had putatively interacted with James Earl Ray, including the guy at the Arrow Marine Supply Store who sold him the gun.

5:01Yeah. So he was like, that's the guy. There were witnesses we mentioned earlier in part one at the Bessie Brewer boarding house. They also looked at pictures and they were like, yeah, that's the guy we saw running away. And they went to the hotel clerk or the boarding house clerk and they said, yeah, this guy signed in. That's him for sure under the name John Willard. So he had multiple aliases. and that portable radio that they found in the bundle had a scratched out ID number and they eventually figured out that that was his prison radio. It had his inmate number on it. So he escaped prison and was like, I'm taking my radio.

5:41It seems pretty conclusive that James Earl Ray would have been the shooter, right? Yeah. So they issued an indictment for his arrest for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. on May 7th, a couple months after, or no, a month after MLK was murdered, and an international manhunt began. I know the FBI was definitely concentrating on the United States, but they didn't rule out the possibility that he had started to go abroad, and so they issued it far and wide, a wanted poster with his data and his photos on it. So the FBI started tracking his movements. He's got all these aliases. in that year that he was on the lam after the shooting.

6:24He was into politics for a little while, supporting Alabama Governor George Wallace, his presidential campaign. He was in L.A. for a little while. He took dance lessons. He went to bartending school. He lived in Mexico for like a month or so trying to become a pornography director under the name Eric Salvo Galt. That didn't work out. So he left Mexico, came back to the States, and apparently in like the month or so before the assassination, he had been stalking King and had followed him from Atlanta to Memphis. Yeah, so it seemed like the month before he murdered Martin Luther King Jr., he suddenly got that idea in his head because none of his movements suggested that he had even focused on Martin Luther King at all up to that point.

7:15Right. After the assassination, James Earl Ray fled to Toronto. It's eventually where he landed first. I think you mean Toronto. Sorry. I'm sorry, Toronto. I know that too. I know. Thanks, Chuck. So at the time, apparently, if you were an American criminal in Canada, they were very, very trusting at the time. And they basically said, if you swear that you're a Canadian citizen, you give us your name, we'll send you a passport. And that's what crooks would do. They would go to Canada when they were on the run. They would look up old newspapers at like the library and find birth announcements from about the same time that they were born, finding people who were their age.

7:59And they would get their name. They would get their mother's maiden name sometimes. And apparently you didn't even need that. You just fill out this form, say your name, say, yes, I swear I'm a Canadian citizen and mail off for a passport, which would be mailed back to you to sweet. And now you had a fraudulent but official and legitimate passport that you could use to travel the world with under a new alias. Yeah. And this time his alias was because, you know, it was a real dude. In fact, the guy was a cop. Pretty ironic. But his name was Raymond George, I guess, Sneed, S-N-E-Y-D. I heard Sneed from somebody once, but I don't know if that was definitive.

8:42Okay. Well, it's good that we spelled it out because that'll come into play in a minute here. But from Toronto, he went to London. He was actually in London a couple of times. He passed through London on his way to Lisbon after that first flight from Canada. and he was going to Lisbon because he was hoping to go to Africa before the murder. And then afterward, his long-term plan was to go to Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, because in 1965, a 5 % white minority there had assumed independence from the UK. And he was like, I'm going to go to Rhodesia, and I'm going to integrate into this small white minority and become a paid mercenary.

9:24Yeah. So, I mean, he went to Lisbon hoping to secure passage to Africa. And while he was there, he's like, I've got a great idea. Surely that people are on my trail, that feds are on my trail now, and they might even know my alias. So I need a new alias. I'm going to go to the Canadian consulate here in Lisbon. I'm going to tell them that they misspelled my name on my passport. So he went there and he told the Canadian consulate there that his last name actually is spelled with an A, not a D. And they're like, OK, whatever. Here's your new passport with your last name spelled correctly. And he had a new alias, Ramon George Sneya instead of Snade.

10:05So there was one letter change. And apparently that satisfied James Earl Ray that he had a new alias now. Yeah, we'll get to who Ray was a little bit. But the one takeaway from everything that I've read is he was not a very smart person. Not a criminal mastermind. He was no brain from Pinky and the Brain. No. Also because he did not throw that first passport away, and that would be his undoing. Like we said, he could not secure that passage to Africa, so he went back to London to figure out what his next move was. This is sort of a weird part of the story. He called a reporter named Ian Colvin at the Daily Mail's foreign desk, and I don't know if this guy had written articles about it, mercenaries or something.

10:51I don't know either. That's the only thing I can figure out because he called this random reporter and said, hey, you got any contacts for these mercenaries? Colvin was like, no, but if you're I guess if you're looking to get into that kind of thing, check into Brussels because that's where you might have better luck. It's a very strange little side part of this story, for sure. It really is. So James Earl Ray was like, thank you. Thank you much. And starts booking a flight to Brussels from London. And it was in London on his way to Brussels that he finally got nabbed. But not because somebody noticed his mugshot or wanted poster and saw that he was him, but because he had those two Canadian passports and he had them in the same wallet.

11:37Yeah, two different names. Yes. And the passport checker noticed that he had two passports and asked him about it. And I guess a cop was standing nearby and stepped over and was like, hey, why don't you join us in the back room? we've got some questions for you. And that was it for Ramon George Snade Snaya. Yeah. He was quickly identified as James Earl Ray. He had a.38 caliber pistol tucked in the back of his pants going to board a plane. You could do that back then because they didn't even have metal detectors. Yeah. As long as you didn't shoot it off because you were excited during takeoff in the plane, then they didn't really care.

12:16Yeah. So he was confirmed as James Earl Ray. He was taken into custody and on July 19th was flown back to the U.S. to stand trial. And that seems like a great place for our first break.

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15:25Okay, so James Earl Ray's been taken into custody, and he's flown back to the United States on July 19th to stand trial. And the whole world is watching. They want to know why the man who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. did that, why he murdered MLK. What was the point? What was the reason? They also wanted to know if he had been working with other people. Because from the outset, the public was just openly skeptical that there was some conspiracy that had resulted in MLK's murder. And the world got none of that because James Earl Ray pled guilty instead of going to trial. And there was a paper reporting on the case who was at this hearing where he pled guilty and said that it brought a shockingly swift ending to the case.

16:19And everybody was like, what just happened? And that was essentially that. There was no trial ever and there were no facts presented. So it was just like, yep, I did it. Send me to jail. Yeah. His attorney at the time, Percy Foreman, said, well, you know, if you go to a jury trial, you're probably going to get a death sentence because of, you know, because of the murder and its impact on the country, basically. Like, you're not going to avoid the electric chair. So if you plead guilty, you can get the maximum life sentence, which is 99 years in prison in Tennessee. And he said that's probably the right route to take.

17:04So Ray took it. It was a two-hour affair in court. No one got the satisfaction of hearing any of the evidence. It also meant he wouldn't be eligible for parole for 30 years, whereas if he had gotten a life sentence and not the 99, He could have gotten out in 12 and a half. Right. But just three days after he pleaded guilty, he recanted and tried for the rest of his life to get a new trial, tried to escape. He did escape. In fact, if you listen to our Barkley Marathon episode, he escaped successfully for three days in 1977 and was picked up in Brushy Mountain where that race takes place. But he would eventually die in prison in 1998 at the age of 70, which would also been the year he was first eligible for parole.

17:49Yes. And you said earlier that we were going to talk a little bit about James Earl Ray and his criminal career. That's right. So he was born in Illinois, but mostly grew up in Missouri. And he was the oldest of nine kids and his family was impoverished. His father was a convict himself who didn't work very often. His mother was, as James Earl Ray put it, a woman of very limited intelligence, barely able to communicate. And she also drank very heavily. And there was a report card from grade school that said his attitude toward regulations was that he violates all of them. This was him as a kid, and he didn't improve very much as an adult.

18:31He dropped out of high school at 16, worked for a while, and then he joined the Army. Yeah, he joined the Army. Yeah, he dropped out of high school at 16. King was in college at 15. So just contrast the two situations. In 46, he joined the Army after being laid off from his civilian job. In the Army, he was charged with drunkenness, with breaking arrest. He served three months in the Army clink, hard labor for that. He was discharged less than honorably for, quote, ineptness and lack of adaptability to military service in 1948. So just a couple of years in the Army and then was a drifter and a petty criminal who was in and out of jail over and over.

19:17Yeah. And he was serving a 20 year sentence for robbery in Missouri. He started in 1960 when he broke out in 1967 and began that year on the lam that culminated in the assassination of MLK. Yeah. And, you know, it was it was really a 20 year prison sentence for everything. Because it was a pretty small robbery at Kroger that wouldn't have gotten a 20-year. But he had other armed robbery convictions. He had mail fraud convictions and escape attempts. So it was like, hey, we're just going to try and put you away for a while. And if you're curious how he escaped, he hid in a bread delivery truck that was leaving the prison.

19:58I heard that, too. Yeah. You would have found me eating loaves of bread, too. With your little portable radio, prison radio. That's right. Just snapping my fingers with a mouthful of bread. So his criminal history, just because you're a lifetime criminal doesn't mean you're good at it. Yeah. And James Earl Ray is an excellent example of that. Time Magazine described him back in 1977 as a bungling petty gunman and burglar whose life of crime has mostly been one fizzle after another. And they weren't lying because some of his greatest hits that they went on to cite was that at one crime scene, he dropped identification, dropped his ID.

20:43One hold up in a neighborhood, he got lost as he was making his getaway, ended up driving back into the neighborhood where he just robbed somebody and was caught by the police who'd arrived on the scene by then. Yeah, who were apparently surprised. I imagine they were like, oh, wait a minute. Is that him coming back? Get a load of this guy. Another time he came back to re-rob a place he had already robbed, re-entered the window to get more stuff. That is a no-no. That is crime 101. Yeah. Like, get out of there. I'm not a criminal, but I would get out of there. So even when he was in London, too, when he was on the run after assassinating MLK, he carried out not one but two bungled robberies.

21:33That's crazy. One was a bank, and he managed to only get 100 pounds from a bank. Yeah. The other was a jewelry store where he got nothing because the owner knocked the gun out of his hand and pressed the alarm. So James Earl Ray ran away. And these are the Londoners. They're not used to knocking guns out of hands, and this guy still managed to do it. That's right. You know? Yeah. He just was not a very good criminal, even though he tried it over and over again. And he was successful. I mean, like, he did successfully rob people and break into places and all that. But if you put it all together, he didn't have, like, a violent criminal rap sheet.

22:08He was just kind of this petty criminal. That's how he supported himself in life as as a criminal who went from that to murdering one of the most important Americans in history in one single action, seemingly overnight. And a lot of people say that just doesn't add up. Yeah. And, you know, we don't lend our show and ourselves to conspiracy. We're not conspiracy minded generally. No. But you don't have to be to to look at this and say he probably didn't act alone. It just doesn't add up, like you said. So there have been congressional committees over the years. There have been family members of Martin Luther King Jr.

22:52that said, yeah, this was what this was part of a conspiracy. There's never been any solid agreement on what kind of conspiracy and who else was behind it. and we're not going to get into the nitty-gritty of all the, there's a lot of discounted stuff and stuff that rabbit holes shouldn't even go down. So we're not going to get into those, but we are going to talk about the legit idea of a conspiracy and who could have been involved, like, for real. Yeah, because, again, how did this petty criminal plan an assassination that he successfully carried out and then also panicked in a panic, like dropped the murder weapon and ran off in a place where it would be found within a minute or two?

23:37Where did he get the funding that he would need to support himself for a year on the lam and then to travel abroad to flee after the assassination? These are just a few of the questions people have come up with. And the obvious solution is that he had help in some way, shape, or form. But another really big question that I think that a lot of people overlook is why? Like, why did he murder Martin Luther King Jr.? He wasn't known as a fanatic. He was a racist. And like we said, he supported George Wallace for his segregationist presidential bid. But he wasn't like a fanatic. And also, like, he didn't have any particularly deep emotions one way or another for MLK.

24:22He just was his murderer. And it just does not make a lot of sense. Yeah, so after he retracted that confession, just days after his conviction, he started saying, I was set up, and I was set up by a guy named Raul. So supposedly he had a lot of interactions with this Raul guy, but he went from describing him as a Latino with blonde hair to a French-Canadian with red hair. Nobody ever witnessed him with anyone that looked like either one of those people. A lot of people think there is no Raul at all, but he still could have had help from someone else. Yeah. So you mentioned congressional committees that concluded that there was some sort of conspiracy.

25:07One of them was House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978. They said that there was a likelihood of conspiracy in the assassination of Dr. King, but they didn't think Raul was involved or anything like that. But it was much more pedestrian and mundane and, in my opinion, then much more likely as far as the conspiracy theories go. But they put it on two prominent but shady St. Louisans. I'm pretty sure that's what you call people from St. Louis. One was a former stockbroker who became a motel owner. His name was John R. Kaufman. The other was a patent lawyer in town named John H. Sutherland.

25:48Both of them were dead by the time the committee hearings were held in 1978. But they supposedly put a bounty on MLK's head. And James Earl Ray, whose brother was a tavern owner in St. Louis at the time, heard about this bounty and decided that he would go ahead and murder MLK and collect on the bounty. And I also saw that he probably believed that as a white man, he would never be convicted of murdering a black man in the South. And even if he did, George Wallace was definitely going to win the 1968 election and George Wallace would pardon him. So if you put all that together, it really seems like a pretty legitimate explanation for the whole thing.

26:33Yeah. As far as Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow, Coretta Scott King, she was she always thought the FBI might have had something to do with it. She knew that they had been surveilled and their phones had been tapped. She thought they were possible bad actors. This is sort of startling, and in fact it startled the country in the late 90s, but they came around to believing James Earl Ray, Dexter Scott King, one of his sons, visited James Earl Ray in prison. They pushed for him to get an appeal. He apparently asked him point blank, like, did you kill my father? And James Earl Ray said, no, I didn't, no.

27:14And then apparently he also said, but like I say, sometimes these questions are difficult to answer. Sometimes you have to make your own evaluation and maybe come to the conclusion. I think that could be done today, but not 30 years ago. None of that makes any sense. No, because it isn't difficult to say you either did or you did not commit murder. Yeah. But as shocking as this meeting was, they got on board and said, I don't think you did this. I think you were patsy. I think you were set up. And a lot of Americans were confused and a lot were offended. Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of Martin Luther King Jr., David Garrow, said that Dexter King's support of Ray was egregious and embarrassing.