on oath that he was Kennedy’s killer. William Turner and John Christian, in
The Manchurian Candidate theory also explains the enigmatic girl in the polka-dot dress. Under hypnosis by prosecution psychiatrist Dr Seymour Pollack, Sirhan answered the question, “Who was with you when you shot Kennedy?” as follows: “Girl the girl the girl…” A year later, when he was interviewed by NBC, Sirhan recalled having coffee with a girl immediately before the shooting. Of the shooting itself he could recall nothing; the incident was a complete blank. The temptation is to conclude that the polka-dot girl was Sirhan’s handler. She has never been traced. But then the LAPD has never looked for her.
Today, Sirhan Sirhan protests his innocence. The official version remains that he alone killed RFK. Few believe it.
Donald Freed,
Robert Blair Kaiser,
Gerald Kurlan,
Philip H. Melanson,
Dan E. Moldea,
William Turner and John G. Christian,
Martin Luther King
Dr Martin Luther King Jr had a dream, a dream of black and white Americans living in harmony. For some, however, King’s dream was a nightmare.
King was only too aware of the forces arrayed against him. On 3 April 1968, while visiting Memphis to mediate in a strike, King told the euphoric congregation of the Mason Temple:
It really doesn’t matter what happens now… some began to… talk about the threats that were out—what would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers… Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place, but I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s
The next day at 6.01 p.m., as he lounged on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, King was fatally shot. Colleagues inside the motel room from King’s civil rights organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, on hearing shots ran out on to the balcony to find him severely wounded in the neck. The world’s youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize was pronounced dead at St Joseph’s Hospital at 7.05 p.m. The murder led to riots in more than 60 American cities.
The shot which killed King was quickly traced to a flophouse opposite the motel, where police discovered a sniper’s eyrie, complete with binoculars and rifle with telescopic sights. The fingerprints of one James Earl Ray were found on the rifle and other equipment. Two months later, after a massive manhunt, Ray was captured at London’s Heathrow Airport while trying to leave Britain on a false Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd. Ray was quickly extradited to Tennessee, where on 10 March 1969 he confessed to the assassination of King and was sentenced to a 99–year prison term.
Only days after his conviction, Ray began protesting his innocence, saying he had made a guilty plea on the advice of his attorney, Percy Foreman, to avoid a trial conviction and the possibility of execution. Ray declared he had been framed by a gun-smuggler called “Raul” or “Raoul”.
Ray was not alone in protesting his innocence. For many observers, aspects of the King assassination simply didn’t stack up. Ray was a two-bit petty criminal who somehow had found the financial wherewithal to fund an elaborate escape, complete with false passport, to Britain, whence he was intending to fly to South Africa. It beggared belief, too, that he could be so incompetent as to drop his private papers fleeing from the sniper den, not to mention leave his fingerprints behind. Ray was not a trained sniper, yet King’s assailant pulled off a flawless single-shot kill. The drunk who supposedly identified Ray in the flophouse just after the shooting, Charles Stephens, repudiated his own identification when sober and shown a picture of Ray on camera in a CBS special report. (Stephen’s uncooperative wife was put in a mental institution after disputing her husband’s initial identification of Ray.) The bullet from King’s body was never matched to the gun, despite a retesting of the rifle in 1997. Moreover, witnesses surrounding King at the moment of his death say the shot came from another location, from behind thick shrubbery near the flophouse, not from the flophouse itself.
In 1977 Ray testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he did not shoot Martin Luther King Jr. The committee disbelieved him—although it allowed the “likelihood” that he did not act alone. Evidence was examined that the CIA supplied him with fake ID found on him at the time of his arrest. One alias belonged to a Canadian called Gait, who was known to be a trained rifleman.
The CIA was not the only party under suspicion for assisting the MLK assassination. In 1993 Loyd Jowers, the owner of the grill opposite the Lorraine Motel, informed ABC Television that he had hosted meetings between the Memphis police, the Mob and government agents at which King’s killing had been planned. Ray’s lawyer, William Pepper, in his book
By now King’s own family was convinced that Ray was not MLK’s assassin, and in 1999 in Memphis won a wrongful death civil trial against Loyd Jowers and “other unknown coconspirators”. The jury of six whites and six blacks found Jowers guilty and that “governmental agencies were parties” to the assassination.
Such was the cascade of allegations against government agencies that Attorney General Janet Reno felt obliged to order a probe by the Department of Justice. This concluded in 2000:
After original investigation and analysis of the historical record, we have concluded that neither the Jowers nor the Wilson allegations are substantiated or credible. We likewise have determined that the allegations relating to Raoul’s participation in the assassination, which originated with James Earl Ray, have no merit. Finally, we find that there is no reliable evidence to support the allegations presented in King
