`The Hoovergate Scandal: Hoover's FBI and the King Assassination'--Part 2

(The following article appeared in the April 19, 1995 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper Downtown).

Frame-Up: The Martin Luther King/James Earl Ray Case by Harold Weisberg also argued that “conspicuously missing is any promise of fingerprints lifted from…the bathroom from which the crime, allegedly, was committed” and “in all the evidence, real or narrated, where the fingerprints are required to be to connect Ray with the crime rather than the locale, there are none.” According to Weisberg, there was no evidence “that Ray, in person, was at the scene of the crime, particularly at the moment it was committed,” since neither a “single credible eyewitness” nor any fingerprint evidence ever placed Ray at the alleged scene of the crime.

In Code Name `Zorro’, Mark Lane also asserted that prior to Ray’s agreement to plead guilty the State did not even allege that Ray “had left behind a fingerprint…in the bathroom from which the State alleged the shot had been fired”; and, according to Lane, the State couldn’t prove that the rifle Ray had purchased “fired the bullet that killed Dr. King.” Although Lane thought the prosecutor could prove that Ray had purchased the rifle that allegedly was used to murder King, he reminded his readers that “proof of ownership of a weapon employed in a murder case does not establish the owner as a criminal.”

The only witness who identified Ray as fleeing from the rooming house’s second floor bathroom after the shot which killed King was fired “was evidently too drunk to observe the culprit and could not have seen him from his position on the bed in one of the rooms of the rooming house,” according to Code Name `Zorro’. Ray, himself, claims that at the time King was assassinated he was getting air in the spare tire of his white Mustang car at a gas station and that, prior to King’s assassination, he “didn’t even know that the Lorraine Motel was behind the rooming house,” “didn’t know that King was staying there” and “didn’t even know that King was in town,” according to Code Name `Zorro’.

As Downtown (12/16/92) has previously observed, A Case Of Conspiracy by Michael Newton revealed that “Willie Green, a black attendant at some unspecified service station in the vicinity of the murder…recalled waiting on the driver of a white Mustang at approximately the time King was shot.”

According to Code Name `Zorro’, Ray pled guilty to King’s murder in 1969 for the following reason:

“Ray had purchased a rifle illegally, and transported it across state lines in order to participate in the illegal sale of arms abroad. If anyone died as a result of that effort, Ray was led to believe, he was legally guilty of murder. At least Ray began to believe he might be legally guilty even if he had not known of the conspiracy to kill Dr. King and even if he had not fired the fatal shot, as long as there actually was a conspiracy.”

The Yankee And Cowboy War: Conspiracies From Dallas To Watergate by Carl Oglesby also pointed out other reasons many analysts have never believed any theory of how Martin Luther King was assassinated which argues that Ray acted alone:

“The problems with the lone-Ray theory are much the same as the problems with the lone-Oswald. Four eyewitnesses to the April 4 (1968) killing, including two police detectives spying on King, said they saw the gunman in bushes on the ground, not in the second story window…The angle of the mortal wound is consistent with a shot fired from the ground, inconsistent with a shot fired from the second story. For the alleged murder weapon, a rifle, to be aimed at the correct angle from the bathroom window alleged to have been Ray’s nest, the butt would have had to project into the wall…”

(Downtown 4/19/95)

Next: The Hoovergate Scandal: Hoover’s FBI and the King Assassination—Part 3