Martin Luther King’s Murder Shrouded in Conspiracy Theories

The latest chapter in the mystery that still clings to the 28-year-old murder case unfolds like this:

“I was here one day and a man called me,” says lawyer Lewis Garrison. “He said, ‘My wife has some information you’d probably be interested in. I’ve been trying to get her to come forward for 25 years. But she’s scared.’

“They came in the next day or two. They never asked for any money. She said she had known ‘Raul’ down in Texas. . . . She had a photograph of this Raul’s cousin. She gave the investigators names of people who knew him.”

Garrison pauses, recalling his apprehensiveness when he first heard all of this--especially that name, Raul.

Then, he says: “Everything has checked, just like the sun rising and setting.” But his quiet voice carries a kind of weariness.

Many considered the case solved decades ago, and yet it has never seemed to rest. Perhaps because of all the sleuths and die-hards drawn to its heroic victim. Perhaps because of its taciturn villain. Or perhaps because of the tragic irony of a single lead slug stopping history.

The murder victim those 28 years ago: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

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As the nation marked a day of remembrance last Monday for King, the spellbinding preacher whose nonviolent crusade for civil rights won him the Nobel Peace Prize, there were many speeches about his life.

But King’s death on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, looms in the background, along with an extraordinary new round of claims about who caused it.

There’s the claim of Glenda Grabow, who told Garrison about “Raul,” leading some to believe they finally had found the shadowy, Latin-accented gunrunner long suggested as a conspirator but dismissed as imaginary by prosecutors.

And then there’s the Memphis restaurant owner who sought immunity from prosecution if he detailed the assassination plot in which his former waitress implicated him. And the man identified as an ex-Special Forces soldier who tied military intelligence to the murder, a charge the Pentagon dismisses as laughable.

These purported leads and many others are detailed in a new book by William F. Pepper, a lawyer who marched with King but today represents James Earl Ray, now serving a 99-year sentence as King’s killer.

In “Orders to Kill: The Truth About the Murder of Martin Luther King,” Pepper quotes several people--some by name and others with pseudonyms--who say they were personally involved in, or privy to, a complex plot to kill King.

Associated Press contacted many of Pepper’s sources and investigators who worked with him on the case and, with minor exceptions, they say he wrote accurately about them. Some even tried to show they had more to lose than to gain by coming forward.

Still, it is difficult to determine just who is telling the truth; there are too many sealed documents and fictitious names, and 28 years have passed.

Pepper asserts: “The body of new evidence, if formally considered, would compel any independent grand jury . . . to issue indictments against perpetrators who are still alive.”

But prosecutors in Memphis continue to reject any notion of reopening the case, and discount Pepper’s leads.

“He wrote 500 pages of suppositions--and extrapolations on suppositions,” District Attorney General John Pierotti said.

Pierotti said some witnesses Pepper quotes have given conflicting statements to prosecution investigators. In other cases, he said, those cited as witnesses are impossible to find.

“They’re either dead, or people who wish to remain anonymous,” Pierotti scoffed. “That’s pretty difficult to take to court.”

Pepper’s book, released at the end of 1995, was preceded by a televised mock trial for Ray on HBO in 1993, in which Pepper was joined by television producers who continue to press for a review of the case.

“The whole thing was gone into as a commercial venture,” Pierotti charged. “It has not succeeded, and now it just drags on.”

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The mystery might have ended in a Memphis courtroom about a year after King’s assassination when Ray pleaded guilty. He was then a hapless thief who had been on the run following a prison escape.

His fingerprint was found on a rifle dropped near the shooting scene; officials called it an open-and-shut case.

Many, including then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, insisted Ray had acted alone, that there were no other plotters. But even as he pleaded guilty, Ray dissented.

“I don’t agree,” he told the judge, “. . . about the conspiracy.”

Ray’s cryptic comment planted a seed of doubt, and many others followed.

Historians later revealed that Hoover’s FBI had directed a years-long campaign of bugging and harassment against King. In 1978, a special congressional investigation concluded that indeed a conspiracy had been behind King’s death, but that the government was not involved. Then came reports of Army intelligence units shadowing King all the way to Memphis. Some members of the House probe said it should be reopened.

For years, Ray has sought to retract his guilty plea, saying it was coerced.

Still pending in court are his bid for a new hearing and, separately, a civil lawsuit seeking damages against alleged conspirators, both named and unnamed.

After fleeing prison, Ray has always said, he made his way to Montreal, where he met a mysterious man named Raul, a gunrunner who engaged Ray in his contraband smuggling and then set him up as a patsy, directing his movements until the day of King’s killing.

Investigators working for Pepper and Garrison have learned much about the man they identify as Raul, who lives in the Northeast. An intelligence agency document, they say, shows he learned gun-exporting while working for a large weapons manufacturing company in his native Portugal.

Portugal was one of the first places Ray headed after the assassination.

Said private investigator Kenneth Herman, who has worked for Pepper and the TV producers: “I don’t believe in coincidences.”

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“It’s him,” Glenda Grabow said, sitting with her husband, Roy, in their rural home a couple hours from Memphis. She told the AP she had identified the man she knew as Raul from a photograph Pepper showed her and by talking with him twice on the telephone at investigators’ request.

She said she first met the man in the early 1960s when she lived in Houston; she was about 14 then, and the man was in his 30s.

A few years later, Grabow said, she became involved with a group that conducted various illegal activities, including producing false ID cards and pornography. They also received shipments of weapons from ships that docked at the huge Houston port, she said. Sometimes, Raul himself joined members of the group, including Grabow, as they off-loaded weapon parts and later assembled them, she said.

Jack Saltman, a British television producer also investigating the King case, said an independent source he declined to name recalled that Raul was considered a major gunrunner in Houston at the time.

At Raul’s direction, Ray has said, he ferried contraband across the Canadian and Mexican borders.

Raul, he said, sent him to a gun shop to purchase a hunting rifle, purportedly to show a client, and later took it from him after directing Ray to meet him in Memphis. That rifle, bearing Ray’s fingerprint, was dropped near the scene of the shooting, Ray has said.

What else ties Raul to the King assassination?

Two men in the Houston criminal group told Grabow he was involved, she said. Grabow also told of a time in the early 1970s when Raul himself claimed a role in the assassination. She happened to be carrying a souvenir-type key ring that bore a small picture of King. When Raul saw it, she said, he exploded in anger.

“I killed that black SOB once and it looks like I’ll have to do it again,” she quoted him as saying in Pepper’s account, which she repeated to the AP. Raul then stomped the plastic key rings to bits, dragged her into another room and raped her, she said.

She denied that she made up the story for revenge. In fact, she expressed mixed feelings about her identification of Raul.

“He’s got family. I’ve got family. But there’s somebody sitting in prison. I feel like I’ve been in prison all these years too,” Grabow said.

“I wish it was somebody else and not me. . . . It’s brought up a lot of my past. It’s just made me miserable,” she added. “That’s all I want, is the truth.”

Pepper named the man--only as “Raul”--as a defendant-conspirator in Ray’s civil suit. “We want to depose this guy,” he said. “We think that’s the case right there.”

Prosecutors disagree.

Of Grabow, Pierotti said, “She may be sincere.” But he said she is not credible in the face of other information he has seen about the purported Raul, which he declined to describe.

An assistant district attorney general, John Campbell, characterized the alleged Raul as “a run-of-the-mill citizen,” and added, “It’s just a mistake.”

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While the new Raul chapter in the King mystery may be the latest, it is only one of many in recent years.

There’s the saga of Loyd Jowers, who at the time of the assassination owned Jim’s Grill, a Memphis greasy-spoon whose backyard faced the Lorraine Motel balcony where King was shot.

In 1993, Jowers was under pressure because a former waitress at the restaurant, Betty Spates, implicated him in the killing.

“I remember hearing a sound like a firecracker going off and within seconds Loyd came running through the back door carrying [a] rifle. . . . He looked like a wild man,” Spates said in one sworn statement.

Jowers went to his lawyer, Garrison, in hopes of arranging immunity from prosecution in exchange for what he knew. When he did not get it, he went public with parts of his story on ABC’s “Prime Time Live,” saying he was part of a conspiracy that involved organized crime.

Is Jowers’ story true? Garrison said the man has lost his business and his wife since speaking out. “He has gained nothing,” said the Memphis lawyer, declining an AP request for an interview with Jowers, who lives in an undisclosed location.

Is Spates’ story true? No, say prosecutors, contending that she gave them a conflicting statement.

Interviewed by the AP, Spates seemed eager to get off the phone. Before hanging up, she said: “I’ve forgotten that whole year. It’s gotten me into a lot of trouble.”

Pepper, whose book detailed Spates’ on-again, off-again willingness to tell her story, acknowledged in an interview: “This woman is very nervous, very shaky. But she is telling the truth.”

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Even Pepper’s admirers say the overlapping layers of plot he lays out are hard to follow--and prosecutor Pierotti jokes that Pepper’s approach is, “If you don’t buy this, try this.”

Most complicated of all is his last puzzle piece: Pepper quotes with pseudonyms two men he says were members of an Army Special Forces unit who claim they received instructions to prepare to shoot King and his then-aide, Andrew Young, who later became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and mayor of Atlanta.

Though they had weapons aimed, no order to fire ever came, he quotes them as saying. Instead, a civilian fired the fatal shot from another location, they say.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Mike Wood, dismissed the claim. “I sent it down to Special Ops [Operations] Command--and, after they got done laughing a lot, they said it never happened. . . . The military going out and murdering citizens--that’s not what we do.”

Pepper contacted the purported sniper team members, now living outside the United States, through former investigative reporter Steve Tompkins, who spent nearly two years preparing a story about Army intelligence operatives’ intensive surveillance of King during the turbulent civil rights era.

In the story he wrote for The Commercial-Appeal in Memphis in 1993, he said he found no evidence the Army had a direct role in King’s death.

But Pepper sketches such a role by supplementing the paper’s findings with information from other sources--among them, government and military officials he quotes anonymously. He also paid for Tompkins to travel to pose a series of prepared questions to the alleged snipers.

Tompkins said the men emphasized their primary mission was reconnaissance, with a “contingency plan” to shoot.

“They were observing. The place was bubbling,” he said, recalling there had been violence in connection with a sanitation-workers strike that King was in Memphis to support--and race riots in other cities just months before.

“They were given verbal instructions that if all hell broke loose, and they were involved in a Detroit-type riot, they had orders to take out King and Young,” Tompkins said.

When contacted about the new allegations in the 28-year-old case, Young, now co-chairman of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, said he did not doubt Pepper’s assertion, but voiced no alarm.

“I never got involved in this,” Young said, “because I thought it was important to carry on Martin’s work. And you didn’t do that by finding out who pulled the trigger. . . . You don’t get bogged down in the sickness of society.”