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ORDERS TO KILL -- THE TRUTH BEHIND THE MURDER OF MARTIN LUTHER KING |
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Chapter 19: Pretrial Investigations: September-October 1992 AT THE OUTSET we had no illusions about our task. It would not be enough to show reasonable doubt of James's guilt because the media had already convicted him. We would have to prove his innocence beyond a reasonable doubt. The strategy would be twofold. We would seek to introduce evidence that directly contravened each significant aspect of the state's case and then, to the extent possible, attempt to show how the killing actually occurred. We intended to go well beyond the actual murder to demonstrate the existence and extent of a cover-up. There was no shortage of material and leads, but how much could be turned into hard evidence to put before a jury? Hickman and his prosecution team had an opportunity to conduct a fresh investigation of the case. It was thus conceivable that he could come up with a theory different from that advanced by the state in 1969. Eventually, we came to believe that he would prosecute the case along the lines set out in the MPD/FBI reports, relying largely on circumstantial evidence. There were several outstanding leads from my previous investigatory work to follow up. Top of the list was Betty Spates. I had previously instructed Ken Herman to keep in touch with her from time to time, hoping that she would develop enough trust to reveal whatever it was that she knew. A number of other people had to be located, including: Randy Rosenson; Solomon Jones, who had been missing from Memphis for years; William Reed and Ray Hendrix Jim's Grill customers who left the grill shortly before 6:00 p.m.); and service station attendant Willie Green -- all of whom were potential alibi witnesses as to James's whereabouts at the time of the killing; and of course, rooming house manager Bessie Brewer. I wanted to interview each person we could identify as being in Jim's Grill that afternoon, as well as each person who was in the rooming house, each fireman on duty at fire station 2, each member of TACT 10 on rest break in the fire station at the time, and the employees of the Tayloe Paper and Seabrook Wallpaper companies across the street from the rooming house. It was obviously important to interview any police officers who were at the scene or involved in the investigation in any way, as well as members of Dr. King's entourage and the staff at the Lorraine, and a number of other persons who were in the area. Then there were the individual members of the Invaders, the local black civil rights leadership, and ordinary community people who had never previously been properly interviewed. Further afield, the stories of people like Morris Davis and Jules "Ricco" Kimbel needed to be further checked out, and James's movements in Montreal and Toronto would have to be looked at. It was obviously essential to obtain information about the role of organized crime. The conversation John McFerren accidentally overheard in Frank C. Liberto's office provided a rare insight into its potential involvement, but I knew it wasn't going to be easy to break into that closed community. Ultimately, of course, there was the question of where the conspiracy went and who provided the money. This would inevitably require that the investigation extend to organized crime's structure beyond Memphis and in particular Carlos Marcello's organization in New Orleans. I knew that we would have to "follow the money," because mob involvement would have been for money. *** SINCE JAMES HAD TRAVELED extensively in the year following his escape from Jefferson City, I had to organize an investigation that not only blanketed Memphis and rural Tennessee but extended to California in the west, Toronto and Montreal in the north, Texas in the southwest, and virtually every area of the South, though with a focus on New Orleans, Atlanta, Birmingham, and Miami. I would also need to obtain information from former prisoners and staff at Missouri State Penitentiary as well as selective others at Brushy Mountain. I had to assemble a team of investigators. Assignments would be given to each of them on a need-to-know basis, with most of them not knowing one another and no one else privy to the overall scope of the work. Most of them would be licensed private investigators in their particular areas. My team rapidly grew to twenty-two. Separating the relatively few valuable pieces of material in the attorney general's files from the overwhelming amount of irrelevant and false information and accusations was time-consuming. We made notes of leads that appeared to have possible significance. Frequently, these seemed not to have been followed up. Certain documents in the attorney general's files related to what Betty Spates might know about the murder. One was a report of a claim by Memphis bailbondsman Alexander Wright, who had come to know Betty Spates in 1969 when he was arranging bail for her brother, Eddie Lee Eldridge. The report was dated February 3, 1969, and issued by Detective J. C. Davis of the MPD intelligence division. Davis wrote that: Information from a reliable source has been received by the above and this information is that Mr. WRIGHT at State Surety Bonding Company was quoted as saying, "I know two women who were working in the building where the shot came from that killed King. They told me that RAY was across Main Street and not in the building when the shot was fired. The man who killed King is the owner of the flop house, and not RAY." Mr. Wright also stated that policemen were in the building when the shot was fired that killed King and that they had been coming there prior to the day that King was killed. After these two women were questioned by the police and FBI they were fired by their boss, the man who killed Dr. King. They are willing to take the witness stand in court. A handwritten note under the typed report initialed by the attorney general's chief investigator John Carlisle stated: We have a tape in our offices that was taken from a tape that O'Neil [Wright's boss, who recorded Betty's comments] brought to this office on January 30. The second document relating to Betty Spates was Mr. Car lisle's report of an interview he conducted with James Alexander Wright on February 10, 1969. Mr. Wright confirmed that Betty told him Ray was not guilty because she knew about his movements that afternoon and that her "boss man" [Loyd Jowers] was out in the back and was the only one who could have killed Dr. King. The third document purports to be an interview with Betty Spates on February 12, 1969, in which she appears to deny ever making the statement alleged by Wright. It is curious that this statement is unsigned, although a space was left for the signature of "Mrs. Betty Spates." Wright's description of Spates's account of James's movements on the afternoon of April 4 didn't agree with what I knew about the case, but I remembered that when I spoke with her some four years earlier she was adamant about James's innocence, though she refused to provide details. It appeared to me that, however clumsy her effort, she had tried back in 1969 to provide James with an alibi because she knew he was innocent. As I suspected, she had indeed seen the gun and now I better understood her fear. I wondered what else she knew. Wright confirmed his story to me, adding that Betty had told him that a number of MPD plainclothes and uniformed policemen came to the grill, apparently to inspect the place, during the week leading up to the killing. After the killing she spoke to him again and said that she knew Ray couldn't have done it because he was upstairs drunk and that they had found the gun within fifteen feet of the killing out in the back by the corner of the building. (It occurred to me that this was the area where the footprints leading into the alley were found.) *** CHARLES CABBAGE, one of the founding leaders of the Invaders and the BOP back in the 1960s, agreed to contact each available former member of the Invaders and try to arrange a session with me. Former firemen Floyd Newsom and Norvell Wallace agreed to testify about their unexpected transfer from fire station 2 on April 4. Though it was likely that the prosecution would attempt to dismiss it as a coincidence, I believed it was one of a number of inexplicable official actions indicative of a conspiracy. Olivia Hayes, who worked at the Lorraine as a receptionist during 1968, reluctantly told me that Dr. King was supposed to be in room 202 on the ground level but somehow was switched to the balcony room, 306. She didn't admit to knowing why. Here was further confirmation of the room change. When I pressed her, perhaps too insistently, she clammed up. *** THE TAYLOE PAPER COMPANY was located across the street from Jim's Grill in 1968. A number of its employees used to stop in the grill after work for a beer and a game of shuffleboard or pinball. Two of those persons, Kenneth Foster and David Wood, gave statements at the time confirming that they ob served a white Mustang parked in front of Jim's Grill, but they were not available in 1992. Steve Cupples, who had worked at Tayloe Paper back in 1968 and had been in Jim's Grill on the evening of April 4, agreed to be interviewed. He remembered leaving work on April 4 sometime between 5:00 and 5:20, parking his car across the street from Jim's Grill. "Sure, I remember a Mustang in front of the bar," he said. "I got dust on my new blue suit squeezing between its rear and the front bumper of the car parked tightly behind it." He said he was certain that the Mustang was there at 5:15 or 5:20 and that its back bumper was "virtually even" with the north entrance door of the rooming house. (See chart 4 for the lineup of cars in the rooming house area on South Main at 5:30 on April 4.) Cupples recalled that the FBI visited him on four occasions, twice at home and twice at work. They asked him the same questions every time, showed him photographs of the same person, whom he didn't recognize, and he believes they asked him not to speak with anyone about what he saw. When asked about other persons who "hung out" in the area, he commented that there was a black street artist who used to "hang out" in the grill. This artist was almost a "fixture" but Cupples didn't remember the familiar figure being there that day. He agreed to help us in any way he could. Jimmy Walker, deputy coroner for the city of Atlanta in 1992, had also worked at Tayloe. He vaguely recalled that on the afternoon of April 4 he had to park just behind the fire hydrant, in front of Canipe's, and he periodically opened the door of the grill to check his car. He noticed the white Mustang in front of the grill because it was in the area where he usually tried to park. He agreed to come to Memphis and undergo hypnosis in an effort to sharpen his memory. When he did so in early 1993, he confirmed his story. Another Tayloe employee, Franklin Ray, also remembered the Mustang being parked in front of the grill. So then, there were four available Tayloe employees and statements by two others who said they saw a white Mustang parked in front of the grill, at the same time that the state and other independent witnesses (McCraw and the Hurleys) confirmed that a similar white Mustang was parked in front of Canipe's. The facts pointed to the presence of two identical white Mustangs, parked within seventy-five to one hundred feet of each other, around the time of the shooting. Here was another "coincidence" for the prosecution to address.
CHART 4: Diagram depicting the lineup of cars in the rooming house area of South Main Street at 5:30 P.M. on April 4. Yet another coincidence was the hoax CB radio broadcast on the evening of the assassination. On Saturday morning, October 24, 1992 I met Carroll Satchfield who had legally changed his name to Carroll Carroll. On April 4, while in his electronics and communications shop on Union Avenue near Cooper, he had turned on channel seventeen of his CB radio and heard "We are now at the corner of Summer and East Parkway." It was, he thought, a police chase, and as he listened he noticed that although the broadcast was reporting the cars going ever farther away from him, the signal remained constant throughout the thirty-five-minute broadcast, as though coming from a fixed location. "Phoney," he thought -- a practical joke. Eventually he learned that he was listening to the voice of a hoaxer whose account was being picked up by William Austein, who had flagged down MPD car number 160, driven by officer Rufus Bradshaw. Austein proceeded to relay the account of the "chase" to officer Bradshaw, who in turn passed it on verbatim to MPD dispatcher Willie Tucker. I knew that if we could develop the details surrounding this event -- which diverted all police attention immediately after the shooting to the northern end of the city, away from the scene of the crime and the logical escape route to the south combined with the MPD's failure to follow their standard emergency procedures (no all points bulletin or Signal Y). I might be able to convince the jury it was one more indication of a conspiracy. *** THE NEXT DAY, October 25, I had my first opportunity to examine the physical evidence in clerk Minerva Johnican's criminal court clerk's office. Certain key items of evidence were not as described. The bullets found in the bundle, which were described in the clerk's inventory as having been test-fired, were clearly never fired. The casings of the unfired bullets were sliced, and thus it was obvious to me that neutron activation or other trace element analysis tests had been performed on them, which was consistent with the HSCA forensic report that the FBI conducted such an examination back in 1968. In that test a sample of lead would have been taken from each bullet to compare with lead from the death slug to determine whether the bullets and the death slug came from the same batch. If they did, this would mean that the bullets in the evidence bundle (which contained other personal items belonging to Ray) likely had been bought at the same time and place as the actual death slug itself. Yet there was no report of the results to be found anywhere. Neither was there any mention of the test, nor any report in the attorney general's files. What happened to the report? Other forensic test reports were turned over to the attorney general. Why not this one? A number of maps had been found among James's belongings recovered in Atlanta, either in the Mustang or in his room at the Garner rooming house. He had obviously acquired them as he entered a new state or city. As James told us was his practice, he had made markings on virtually every one of them, including the Atlanta map. However, the markings on the Atlanta map seemed to have little bearing on Dr. King's home or church, focusing primarily on the 14th Street area near the rooming house. Cigarette butts and ashes collected by the FBI from the Mustang after it was found in the Capitol Homes parking lot in Atlanta were missing. James didn't smoke, so the presence of cigarette butts pointed to someone else having been in the car at some time. Eyewitness reports in the attorney general's file taken at the time the abandoned white Mustang was found in Atlanta described the ashtray as overflowing, yet the evidence from the Mustang contained only one butt and a minuscule amount of ash. I asked Johnican to raise the question of the tampered-with and missing evidence with the attorney general. The deliberate or negligent destruction of the evidence had most likely occurred before Johnican took office, and I hoped that she might raise the issue of her predecessor's custodial responsibility. I also hoped she would consider undertaking some forensic tests on her own account and authority, but such was not to be. I interviewed fireman William B. King. He remembered being in the back of fire station 2 looking out of the window in the door when the shot was fired. Dr. King was standing straight up, he said, though he had been bent over a few seconds earlier. He said that fireman Charles Stone was lying on top of the lockers looking out the window at the moment of the shooting. William King believed that only he and Stone actually saw the shooting. He recalled MPD detective Redditt leaving earlier. After the shot, William King called his wife and went outside to the rear of the firehouse and looked over toward the brush area behind the rooming house which was about one hundred feet north of where he was standing. He said that he noticed freshly cut white wood. As mentioned earlier, the terrain of the rooming house backyard sloped slightly downward toward the wall. The eastern area, closest to the wall, was engulfed with a mixture of untamed mulberry bushes and small trees. Most of the small trees were between ten and fifteen feet tall, but at least one extended to a height of about twenty-five feet, and there was one sycamore tree which was much taller. The thicket of mulberry bushes extended for some distance from the wall back into the yard, eventually giving way to high grass and weeds. He added that, at the time, the FBI and the attorney general's office told him not to discuss what he had seen with anyone. He was never questioned by the HSCA, and no defense counselor investigator had talked to him in the intervening years. William King said that a few days later he walked down Mulberry Street to the Lorraine driveway and confirmed that the freshly cut wood was still there. How would the prosecution explain this? I believed William King may have been talking about a sizable branch, which I recalled seeing depicted in various photographs over the years and more recently in an 8" X 10" glossy in the attorney general's file. (See photograph #13.) Whether cut before or after the shooting, in its original upright position the branch could have come between the bathroom window of the rooming house and the balcony on which Dr. King was standing when he was shot. (Even from the official photographs we examined, there is serious question as to whether a clear shot existed.) William King would take the stand. Retired fire lieutenant George Loenneke also told me how he had seen Dr. King at the moment he was shot. He said that Richmond had been away from the window at the time and that he, Loenneke, had raised the alarm. Loenneke then surprised me. He said that some days after the shooting, he talked with a sales girl who worked on the ground floor in Seabrook's offices directly opposite the rooming house. She told him that around 5:30 on the afternoon of the shooting she saw a man pull up in a white Mustang and park it just south of Canipe's. She observed the man leave the car soon after and go upstairs, entering the rooming house through the northernmost door adjacent to Jim's Grill. She was certain that the man was not James Earl Ray. Loenneke didn't know the girl's name. Could she be found? If so there might be further evidence not only of the second Mustang but of another person (apparently the same person seen by the Hurleys) driving and parking it just south of Canipe's. Fireman Charles Stone was in the rear of fire station 2 at the time of the shooting. He was on top of the lockers, looking out through the small windows located between the lockers and the ceiling. Only he and William King actually saw Dr. King hit by the bullet, he said. George Loenneke was "messing about with his locker" and probably didn't see anything. On October 29, Ken Herman and I went to Central Church, where Rev. James Latimer was pastor. I had wanted to meet with him for some time, having heard years earlier about his strange visitor a week after the killing who supposedly needed "spiritual guidance" in the matter of the King killing or he would "commit suicide." Latimer confirmed the account Russell Thompson had given me of the incident and said that he had told his story to Inspector N. E. Zachary of the MPD, and to the FBI. They promised to "check it out." He heard nothing. In August he was visited by two men who showed him credentials and emphasized that they were from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI), not the FBI. They showed him photographs that closely resembled the man who visited him, but that was the last Latimer heard about it. I showed him a mug shot of jack Young blood and he said that this did not appear to be the man. Subsequently I visited him with Wayne Chastain and showed him a proper photograph of Youngblood and he hesitated but still could not positively identify him. Wayne reminded him that he had previously identified Youngblood closer to the time. Latimer shrugged and said, "It's been twenty-five years." No one familiar with TBI procedures could explain the TBI involvement. They wouldn't usually become involved in a Shelby County/Memphis investigation, being used as a rule in smaller towns without the facilities available in Shelby County. *** I INTERVIEWED RETIRED NEW YORK CITY POLICEMAN LEON COHEN, who was a private investigator in Memphis in 1968. In the course of his work he had befriended the owner of the Lorraine, Walter Bailey. On April 5, he saw Bailey at the Lorraine and found him deeply distressed. His wife had suffered a stroke immediately after the shooting of Dr. King and was near death in St. Joseph's Hospital. Bailey told Cohen that he had arranged for Dr. King to be placed in room 202 on the ground floor when a call from Atlanta came through with a request that he be moved to room 306. Bailey protested, maintaining that the ground- floor room facing an inner courtyard was more secure, but the caller insisted on the change. Cohen's conversation with Walter Bailey substantiated Olivia Hayes's recollection that Dr. King was to have been housed on the ground floor and then was moved. However, it differed from Wayne Chastain's account of a conversation with Bailey in 1970 or 1971 when Bailey told him that his wife had been visited by a dark-skinned advance man with an Indian appearance who insisted on the change. Why the different stories? Since Walter Bailey has been dead for a number of years, it is only possible to speculate. If an advance man actually organized the switch, Mrs. Bailey would have realized what role she had unwittingly played at the time of the shooting. It would have been natural at the time for her husband to try to protect her by mentioning a call. Another explanation, of course, is that later on Bailey may have shifted the blame from himself at a time when he couldn't be contradicted. This occurred to me sometime later, when William Ross, who used to drive Walter Bailey, told me that at one point Bailey told him that he regarded his wife's death as a sort of sacrifice, explaining that he had come to associate her death with Dr. King's own passing. He said Dr. King had to die be- cause he was taking on forces, including government, he couldn't overcome. If he hadn't been killed in Memphis at the Lorraine on April 4, 1968, it would have been somewhere else and some other time. But it was a pity, Bailey said, that his wife became so closely involved. When I later interviewed the Baileys' daughter, Carolyn Champion, and her husband, they were adamant that Mrs. Bailey had been declared in excellent health by their family doctor around the time of the stroke. They were convinced that for some reason she had taken a measure of personal responsibility for the assassination. They didn't know why. *** WE WERE UNABLE TO FIND WILLIE GREEN, the black service station attendant who might have seen James around 6:00 on April 4 when, as James claimed, he had gone to a gas station to get a spare tire repaired. This was supported by an FBI report on the examination of the Mustang that confirmed the spare tire was indeed flat. Memphis investigator Cliff Dates eventually convinced us that Green was dead. Around this time I became immersed in the mysteries surrounding the work and death of William Sartor. As mentioned earlier, Sartor became deeply involved with the case after following up on John McFerren's story. Until his death he increasingly believed organized crime was involved in the murder -- in particular the Carlos Marcello organization in New Orleans. He spent considerable time in New Orleans meeting with Marcello contacts, including the man's nephew, Little Joe. In 1971, suddenly and unexpectedly, Bill Sartor died, ostensibly from an overdose, though he wasn't a drug user. Dale Dougherty, who had been a boyhood friend of Sartor, and Bill Sartor's mother had long considered the death suspicious. The night before he died, he told Dougherty that someone had agreed to talk to him in Memphis, and he was looking forward to the meeting. In recent days he had been acting fearfully, often sitting in his mother's home watching the road with a shotgun at the ready. But that last evening when he stopped off where she worked, he was in good spirits. He told her that he was going to stop at the Hickory Stick bar for a couple of drinks and then go to bed. He asked her to wake him early. She couldn't rouse him the next morning. He was rushed to the hospital but never regained consciousness. She had never been able to obtain a postmortem report. The death certificate stated the cause was undetermined. Try as she might, no one would cooperate. Even her family physician, after making a few phone calls, told her to leave it alone. There it rested until I spoke with Dougherty, who had become the trustee of Bill Sartor's notes and manuscript, a copy of which had been provided to the HSCA. I began to explore what appeared to be the more relevant of Sartor's leads. He noted that produce man Frank Liberto flew to Detroit the night that James Earl Ray was extradited from London. He learned this following a telephone conversation between Sartor's girlfriend (and future wife) who placed the call, and Liberto's partner, James Latch, who told her that since Ray was being brought back that night Frank would be nowhere around. I found this interesting because it showed apprehension on Liberto's part and also revealed that he had some family or contacts in Detroit, a city near the Canadian border. I also agreed to help Dougherty and Mrs. Sartor get some answers about Sartor's death. Dougherty, in turn, agreed to come to Memphis and attempt to interview one Pat Lyons, a former friend of Sartor's wife, who had assisted them in their work on the case. Pat Lyons was one of the last persons to speak with Bill Sartor, who had called him from Waco the evening before his death about his visit to Memphis. When Dougherty went to Memphis in November, Lyons flat-out refused to speak with him. Later one of our local investigators surveilled the house in which Lyons lived with his mother, which appeared to be permanently sealed, with all the windows closed and the blinds drawn. This man was frightened. Sartor had written that at one point in 1969-1970 a local hood held a knife to Lyons's throat and told him that he was under instructions to kill him. The order, according to Sartor, resulted from Lyons's help in his King investigation. Lyons told Sartor the order came from an associate of Frank C. Liberto, and he was only able to get out of the immediate danger by pleading with his assailant to put him on the phone with Liberto's associate or even Frank Liberto himself and then convincing him that he was not helping Sartor but just trying to find out what he knew so that he could relay the information. By 1992 Liberto had been dead for fourteen years. Yet Lyons was still terrified. Meanwhile Dougherty worked at full speed in his effort to get an autopsy report on Sartor. He enlisted the assistance of the Waco district attorney, Ken Abels, and one of his investigators, J. C. Rappe.
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