America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (29 page)

It makes sense that any conspiracy involving Ray would use him in the stalker role, as he had no background as a professional killer
or sniper. But one could safely assume that as this secondary role was far less risky, it promised much less of the bounty. Whether that would sit well with Ray as he proceeded on through the mission is another matter.

Tarrants says he decided to leave Swift and visit his uncle in San Diego. After that, he and a cousin returned to Mobile. There, Tarrants says, he spotted FBI agents in round-the-clock surveillance of his residence. In going to California, Tarrants had jumped bond for his upcoming trial for the firearms charge. Already upset with the government, Tarrants decided to pursue an even more serious form of resistance against the enemies of white Christians. Robert DePugh, the hard-core leader of the Minutemen group, wanted on firearms and robbery charges, was then singlehandedly leading the FBI on a weeks-long manhunt. Inspired by this example, Tarrants decided that he, too, would become a lone-wolf terrorist. On March 28 he wrote a note that police discovered months later: “Please be advised that since 23, March, 1968, I . . . have been underground and operating guerrilla warfare.”
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Tarrants's story in March parallels that of another radical whose account only recently became available. Eugene Mansfield at one time was a Grand Dragon in the Texas KKK. For several years, his racist activity was dormant. At least in FBI files, his only recorded offense was an assault charge from 1966. Suddenly, on March 13, 1968, Mansfield left his job on an oil rig in Louisiana, forwarded his last check to L.E. Matthews's residence in Mississippi, and went to stay with Matthews. Documents show that Matthews, who would succeed Bowers as head of the WKKKKOM in 1969, wanted to use Mansfield in a hit or another job. Documents also indicate that in the last two weeks of March, Matthews was in and out of his normal residence, planning some kind of project out of state. Unable to account for his whereabouts in the immediate wake of King's assassination, Mansfield became one of the earliest persons of interest in the crime.
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Tarrants also spent part of his time living underground with Matthews, but he never gave Nelson specific dates. FBI records indicate that Matthews encouraged Tarrants to visit his next location, a remote site in North Carolina where white supremacists from across the nation perfected their paramilitary skills. According to
Tarrants, he stayed with Swift followers in this area for an unspecified period.

Although Tarrants was a fugitive from a weapons charge, the FBI did not yet know about his months-long bombing campaign in Mississippi, much less his promise to become a one-man guerrilla army waging war against the American government. The agency apparently did not know about his visit to Wesley Swift or the rifle purchase to “shoot King.” In short, at the end of March 1968, Tarrants should have raised none of the alarms that Mansfield raised in discussing hits with the soon-to-be Grand Wizard of the most dangerous racist organization in the country. Yet somehow Tarrants garnered just as much immediate interest from law enforcement in connection with the King murder. It seems entirely possible that as the calendar moved closer to April 4, someone was informing on Tarrants. The significance of this will be explored in the next chapter.

As Tarrants wrote his antigovernment screed, Martin Luther King Jr. returned to Memphis. His visit was originally intended for the week before, but scheduling problems forced King to come back on March 28, having promised to lead a nonviolent protest on behalf of the striking sanitation workers. Disappointed with fund-raising and mobilization efforts for the Poor People's Campaign, King saw the Memphis sanitation workers strike, with its national profile, as an opportunity to raise public awareness on issues of economic justice while demonstrating the viability of large-scale nonviolent protest.

The day before King's arrival in Memphis on March 28, James Earl Ray drove his white Mustang from Atlanta to Birmingham and visited a sporting goods store called The Gun Rack, looking for a hunting rifle. He spent considerable time looking at potential weapons but ultimately left without making a purchase. Two days later, on March 29, 1968, Ray visited the Aeromarine Supply Company, a sporting goods retailer that also sold rifles. Dressed in a shirt and tie, Ray looked out of place to a young hunting enthusiast, John DeShazo. The questions Ray asked confirmed DeShazo's impressions; Ray knew nothing about rifles. But Ray purchased a .243-caliber rifle and ammunition using the alias Harvey Lowmeyer. On March 30, Ray reappeared at the Aeromarine to exchange his weapon. FBI experts later concluded that a preservative in the
rifle's breech had prevented its proper loading. But Ray made no reference to this problem, even though it would have provided him with a perfectly innocent reason to exchange the weapon. Instead, Ray said that his brother or brother-in-law had examined the .243 and concluded that they needed a better weapon to go “hunting in Wisconsin.” Ray said that his brother had told him to get a Remington GameMaster .760. One of the more highly regarded hunting weapons ever produced, it was also more expensive than the .243, meaning the normally frugal Ray was stepping out of character.
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That Ray had some guidance in choosing a weapon seems likely, not simply because he gratuitously referenced another person but also because he demonstrated little or no understanding of rifles.

Ray, of course, blamed it on Raul, claiming that he told Ray to return to the store and purchase the GameMaster. Under that scenario, Ray referred to Raul as his brother to protect his benefactor's identity. Others who harbor doubts about Raul's existence suggest that it was one of Ray's actual brothers who helped him with the rifle purchase.
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This cannot be discounted, but direct evidence is lacking.

An interesting possibility for someone who might have advised Ray on the gun purchase emerged from an examination of out-of-state phone calls made from the Sambo Amusement Company, Sam Bowers's business in Laurel, Mississippi. On March 29, 1968, the day of the original rifle purchase, someone at Sambo called a number in Birmingham. It was the only phone call to Birmingham from the fall of 1967 through the summer of 1968. Bowers and his partner, Robert Larson, operated the company with no other employees. The timing is certainly curious, but the phone record has no detail on who was called. Only recently, thanks to research by Charles Faulkner, the number has been traced to the Birmingham Army Reserve, specifically to the senior army advisor for the Army Reserve Advisor Group. Extensive research, including work done by military historians, has yet to generate an actual name for this army advisor, but both the timing and a call by Bowers or Larson to Birmingham are suggestive of a conspiratorial act.
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After the purchase of the gun, Ray returned to Atlanta. Ray always denied this, insisting instead that he was told by Raul to go straight to Memphis. The evidence to the contrary—that Ray
returned and left his laundry at a dry cleaner in Atlanta—is overwhelming, however. This fact was established not only by the recollection of the manager of the Piedmont Laundry but also by a dated receipt in her files. This is one of Ray's most important and revealing lies. Ray himself acknowledged that if investigations could confirm that he had returned to Atlanta before going to Memphis, the optics would greatly undermine his claims of innocence. This is not simply because King also returned to Atlanta at approximately the same time. Rather, it would be Ray's subsequent trip, from Atlanta to Memphis, that would seriously damage his contention that he was an oblivious dupe for Raul. Martin Luther King Jr. did not specify his date of return to Memphis until April 1, and for Ray to return to Atlanta on March 30 and then follow King to Memphis with a gun was too much for even Ray to pass off as a coincidence. Subsequently, Ray steadfastly insisted that he never took that route. Combining the “accidental” stay in Selma during King's visit and the Atlanta map with marks that “coincidentally” overlap King's home, a rational observer could not escape the conclusion that Ray was stalking King.
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Yet it remains unclear exactly what Ray envisioned as his role. To earn the full bounty, Ray would have to directly participate in King's killing. Simply handing a rifle to someone else would not be enough. Analyses of King's murder typically treat Ray as either an unwitting dupe or the driving force behind the crime. A better approach might be to view Ray as an individual with his own agenda, but one who was forced to work within the framework of a larger conspiracy in which he was, at least initially, a peripheral player.

Ray appeared to be performing the role of a stalker, one that presumably carried a lower payday. If Ray wanted a bigger piece of the action, it's possible that he had to create a racist profile that would allow him to directly engage the plot's sponsors. Such a record would have to be sufficiently controversial to earn the respect of the sponsors without looking outwardly radical to law enforcement investigators. But if Ray wanted to expand his role in hopes of making more money, he was running out of time. The purchase of the rifle would be a sure sign to Ray that whatever plan was in motion, King would be killed sooner rather than later.

On April 1, 1968, having delivered his sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., King publicly announced his return to Memphis, at the same time Ray was leaving laundry at the Piedmont Laundry under the name Eric Galt. The following day, as Ray drove his Mustang from Atlanta to Memphis, something strange happened at John's Restaurant in Laurel, Mississippi. The restaurant–bar, owned by Deavours Nix, one of Sam Bowers's closest aides in the WKKKKOM, was a place where senior Klan leaders frequently met. According to a report filed by Myrtis Ruth Hendricks, a black waitress at the bar, Nix received an odd phone call that evening. “I got a call on the King,” Hendricks recalled Nix saying when she was interviewed by FBI agents on April 22. But she was unable to hear the rest of the conversation. Hendricks recalled additional suspicious activity on April 3, 1968. According to her report, “two men, neatly dressed, with short stocky builds, came to Nix's place where she started to work the evening shift at three
P.M.
While going to the bathroom, she observed a rifle with a telescopic sight, in a case in Nix's office. Later, the two men took the rifle and a long box, which took three men to carry out, and put them in a sixty four maroon Dodge with a fake ‘continental kit' on the back.”
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As we shall see, Hendricks's story did not end there.

Despite a bomb threat delaying his flight, Martin Luther King Jr. returned to Memphis on April 3. With the Poor People's march to Washington, D.C., less than three weeks away, King returned with the goal of proving that nonviolent protest could still work. The bad blood that had developed between civil rights activists and the local police department boiled over as King's entourage, mindful of police informants infiltrating the ranks of the sanitation protesters, refused the security detail usually provided to the minister.

King settled at the Lorraine Motel but not at first in his usual room, 306, where he and his close friend the Reverend Ralph Abernathy often stayed. Someone was temporarily staying in Room 306, so King and Abernathy waited in a second-floor room until they got a call to reclaim 306, which they called the King–Abernathy Suite. At noon that day, King attended a meeting at the Centenary Methodist Church, where he announced a plan for a mass march on April 8. But upon his return to the Lorraine that afternoon, federal
marshals served him and his aides with a district court injunction, temporarily preventing them from engaging in future marches.

James Earl Ray also arrived in Memphis on April 3. He checked into the New Rebel Motor Hotel, roughly fifteen minutes from the Lorraine, using the Galt alias. He brought the newly purchased rifle and other gear. In the years that followed, Ray again attributed a number of his actions to the elusive Raul, but he could not keep his stories straight. It is possible that he was in Memphis to meet someone, perhaps to provide the newly purchased rifle to would-be conspirators. More than likely, he was debating his own next move. Would he continue to provide reconnaissance within a prearranged bounty plot against King's life? Or would he try for a greater share of the bounty himself? Anyone wanting to observe Dr. King's movements in Memphis did not have to work very hard—his stay there was widely covered on television and in local newspapers. Ray, who voraciously followed the news while in prison, claims he was all but oblivious to anything having to do with Martin Luther King Jr. while in Memphis.

On the evening of April 3, King delivered his last sermon, at the Mason Temple Church. Referencing both the particulars of the Memphis sanitation workers strike and the general condition of the civil rights movement on the eve of the Poor People's Campaign, King struck an optimistic note, in what history now refers to as “The Mountaintop” speech. He described the wide arc of history from the Exodus of Egypt to the Emancipation Proclamation, marked by the common theme of mankind's saying, “We want to be free.” Referring to the challenges to nonviolence, he reminded the crowd of the successes it had brought in places like Birmingham. King ended by extending the theme of the Exodus to its final denouement, when the liberator Moses, having led the Hebrews to the outskirts of Israel, climbed to the peak of Mount Nebo and stood in awe of the Promised Land, which he himself would never visit. King reminded the audience of the bomb threat that had delayed his flight to Memphis and of a 1957 assassination attempt in which a deranged woman had nearly murdered King with a knife. But for a sneeze, King reminded the audience, he would not be alive; but for a sneeze, he would not have seen the triumphs of the civil rights movement. Prophetically, he ended his speech with the following words: