They Have a Scheme

By Jack E. White

Somewhere in hell, James Earl Ray must be laughing his fool head off. The U.S. Department of Justice is completing its review of the "new evidence" that Martin Luther King Jr.'s family claimed would prove that a government conspiracy--and not Ray--plotted the murder of the great civil rights leader. Its report, due out in a few weeks, concludes that the Kings' allegations are not "credible" and provide no basis for new criminal charges. In other words, they are hogwash. Considering that these lurid fantasies sprang from the fertile imagination of Ray's former lawyer William Pepper, the conclusion is no surprise.

If ever there was a case of the Justice Department embarking on a wild-goose chase to satisfy a tragically deluded family, this is it. The farce began when King's family came under Pepper's bamboozling spell. He convinced them that Ray, the convicted assassin, was just a fall guy set up to take the blame for an intricate plot that encompassed, among others, Lyndon Johnson's White House, the Pentagon, the Mafia, the Memphis police and a mysterious figure named Raoul. Key parts of the story soon collapsed--for example, the leader of an Army sharpshooting team who Pepper said had been killed to keep him from talking about the "conspiracy" is still very much alive--but the Kings' faith in Pepper never wavered. They even hired Pepper as their lawyer after Ray died.

In 1998, 30 years after the murder, the Kings implored the President to investigate Pepper's wild story. Clinton passed the buck to Attorney General Janet Reno. She appointed a team led by Barry Kowalski--a tough Justice Department veteran who prosecuted the Los Angeles cops who beat Rodney King--to examine two of Pepper's more checkable allegations: former Memphis bar owner Loyd Jowers' claim that he set up the shooting and ex-FBI agent Donald Wilson's claim that he found a scrap of paper in Ray's getaway car with the phone number of a Dallas nightclub once owned by Jack Ruby, the killer of Lee Harvey Oswald.

At some point, it may have dawned on the Kings that Justice was mounting a serious investigation that would demolish their conspiracy theory. But late last year a wrongful-death suit that Pepper had filed on their behalf against Jowers came to trial in Memphis, providing a chance for a verdict that would shore up at least part of Pepper's tall tale. The proceeding was a fiasco. Jowers--who has changed his story so many times it ought to come with a version number like computer software--never took the stand in his own defense. Ballistics testimony was provided by Judge Joe Brown, the TV judge, who has no expertise in the field. The jury, some of whose members dozed during the testimony, ordered Jowers to pay the Kings $100 in damages for his supposed part in a murder plot that was never clearly spelled out. King's younger son Dexter exulted that the verdict was "the period at the end of the sentence." As far as the King family is concerned, it's their story and they're sticking to it no matter what the DOJ says.

That's why Ray gets the last laugh. The Memphis verdict notwithstanding, Jowers' story is a fairy tale that leads away from the truth about King's murder and Ray's complicity in it. The real mystery is why King's heirs, who more than anyone else should want the truth, prefer to believe a lie.