Some Cases Never Close

The assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 30 years ago today, like the assassinations of Lincoln and the Kennedys, indelibly marked the nation’s consciousness with doubts and distrust in government. The weight of unanswered questions is a continuing burden.

King’s widow and his adult children still seek the whole truth about what happened on April 4, 1968, in Memphis. They have called for a meeting with President Clinton and a new national commission to provide amnesty for anyone who has information. They also seek a trial for James Earl Ray, who confessed to the murder of the civil rights leader but recanted after he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

Ray’s denials, and long-held suspicions that he did not act alone, now have received support from some old civil rights soldiers. One is the Rev. James Lawson, the prominent minister who had invited King to address striking sanitation workers in Memphis on that fateful day.

Ray, 70 and perhaps dying, is not expected to get a trial. After a long reinvestigation of the assassination, Memphis Dist. Atty. Bill Gibbons said a week ago that no credible evidence supported a trial or the theory that Ray had an accomplice. The results of Gibbons’ investigation mirror the results of an exhaustive congressional inquiry. Yet doubts linger.

The truth seekers need not be conspiracy theorists to question how King, constantly under surveillance by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI as described in historian Taylor Branch’s new book, “Pillar of Fire,” could be murdered on a balcony of the Lorraine Hotel without someone in the government having a hint of the imminent danger or witnessing the crime.

Some Americans will always believe that John Wilkes Booth escaped after being cornered in a burning barn by federal troops after the shooting of President Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theater in Washington on April 14, 1865. Requests to exhume what’s presumed to be Booth’s body were rejected two years ago, and the historical controversy lives on.

The fascination with President Kennedy’s assassination, on Nov. 22, 1963, has led to a conspiracy cottage industry, and Oliver Stone’s film “JFK” gave new life to old theories. As with King’s death, no federal inquiry could silence the doubts that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Indeed, a House investigation concluded in 1979 that Oswald did not act alone.

Even the most open-and-shut of these cases will not stay shut. Sirhan Sirhan, now 54, continues to insist from his California prison cell that he is innocent of assassinating Sen. Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968, in Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel after his victory in the California Democratic presidential primary. Sirhan was captured moments after the fatal shooting, yet many times over the years fingers of accusation have pointed elsewhere. Why?

Americans come from a long tradition of questioning authority. It is part of our history, and the nature of democracy. But some questions stemming from some of these assassinations go beyond ideological challenges. King’s children may never get the answers they seek. For them and many other Americans, this murder case, and this defining chapter in American history, may never be closed.