Assassinations and Cover-up #4
"M.L. King Murder A Government Plot,"
Says Former CIA Participant. "I was part of it."
"Raoul" Identified as FBI Agent
by Pat Shannan - patshannan@bizland.com
http://www.patshannan.bizland.com/mlkgreen.html
New evidence has surfaced in the 1968 Martin Luther King murder case. It is supplied by an "insider" who claims to have been part of a "hit team" that had come out of the "Missouri Mafia" headquartered in the town of Caruthersville, a small town in the bootheel section of that state. In a yet-to-be-published book, former County Deputy Jim Green reveals his assigned role in the conspiracy, the name of the actual trigger man, and the long-suspected involvement of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Green also believes that he possesses the actual murder weapon, which he personally secreted away only hours after the murder.
"Jim Green is telling the truth," says Lyndon Barsten, an astute researcher of the case over the past decade. "I have no doubt whatsoever. The pieces he has supplied fit perfectly and could not have come from someone who was not there." Indeed they do fit, and it is all backed up by FBI documentation derived by Barsten through numerous FOIA requests.
On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was gunned down on the second floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee by a single shot from a high powered rifle. Several witnesses said the shot came from the bushes on a slope from across the street. The FBI concluded that it came from the rear bathroom window of a cheap hotel, also across the street and higher up the hill.
Two weeks later the name of James Earl Ray, a fugitive escapee from the Missouri State Penitentiary, was announced to the world as the man who had killed King, escaped to Canada, and was currently in hiding somewhere across the border. After Ray was identified as the killer and long before he was captured, the FBI spent little or no time pursuing any other leads. Two months later the fugitive was caught changing planes at Heathrow Airport in London, after having left Canada and spending ten days with persons unknown in Portugal. He was attempting to board a plane to Brussels.
On March 10, 1969, James Earl Ray, with his attorney Percy Foreman, pled guilty to the murder before the court of Judge Preston Battle. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison. He recanted almost immediately and filed a motion for a trial only three days later. But before the month was out, Judge Battle was found dead in his chambers, slumped over his desk. Beneath his head were the papers of the handwritten motion from James Earl Ray. The case was closed, and Ray began his sentence in the Tennessee State Penitentiary.
The "Official" Story
The scenario released by Memphis police and the FBI and later used by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was that in late March of 1968, James Earl Ray had purchased a Remington 30.06 rifle from the Aeromarine Supply Store in Birmingham and had traveled with it to Memphis in a white Mustang. Here he checked into Bessie Brewer's boarding house in the 400 block of South Main Street on the afternoon of April 4th. Directly behind it was the Lorraine Motel on Mulberry Street.
At 6:00 p.m. Martin L. King stepped out of room 306 and was joined by a group of followers with whom he had been in a meeting all afternoon. He was gunned down only a minute later by a single shot from the rear bathroom window across the street.
Not one witness saw the actual firing of the shot or claimed it had come from the window. Most believed it had come from the bushes on the slope, fifty feet closer.
Still according to the official story, Ray allegedly ran out of the bathroom and down the hall to his room. Here he stuffed the rifle back into its box and included it with a bundle containing his clothes, binoculars, ammunition, a beer can with his fingerprints; and perhaps the most incriminating of all, a portable radio with his inmate number from the Missouri State Penitentiary engraved in the back side.
He ran down the stairs and out onto the street where he then dumped the bundle in the doorway of Canipe's Amusement Company next door to the rooming house. He then zoomed away in the soon-to-be-infamous white Mustang. He stayed a few days in Atlanta before moving on to Canada.
James Earl's Version
In 1987, after being imprisoned for 19 years, Ray told his side of the story in Tennessee Waltz, a book that went out of print and was later published under the title of Who Killed Martin Luther King? (The biggest loss here was original publisher Tupper Saussy's brilliant epilogue, "The Politics of Witchcraft," which exposed certain secrets that the establishment publishers preferred not to discuss. Under the new title the epilogue was eliminated.) However, he appeared be avoiding "the whole truth and nothing but the truth" in certain areas, apparently out of fear of self-incrimination - not necessarily for the murder but for some lesser crimes. It also appears that James became aware too late that he had indeed been unwittingly involved in the conspiracy to assassinate Martin Luther King.
Ray tells of his prison escape via a bread truck in April of 1967. After laying low in East St. Louis for a couple of months, he made it to Chicago where he looked up some old contacts that enabled him to purchase an old Chrysler for $100. From there he went to Detroit and crossed the border into Canada. In July, he met a man he knew only as "Raoul," who quickly began to give James money in exchange for his help with importing some kind of contraband. James said he never knew if this was guns, drugs, or what, as he never actually participated in anything more than trial runs. Raoul always seemed to remain in the "planning" stages of a smuggling operation.
Ray had a contact phone number in the Area Code of "504," where he had phoned his contact, "Raoul," many times over the months prior to the murder. However, when he tried to dial this New Orleans number on the day after the assassination, it was already disconnected.
Through Raoul, James was kept supplied with money to go to Mexico to wait for instructions and to Los Angeles to see a plastic surgeon for a "nose job," effectuating a change in his appearance. He never worked at a job in any of this time frame prior to the assassination and was obviously under the financial control of Raoul. James was traveling in a 1966 pale yellow Mustang (not white as were the others), purchased with $2,000 supplied by Raoul.
James always claimed he had acquired the names of his aliases at random from a Toronto phone book. He bought the gun in Birmingham under the name of "Harvey Lowmeyer," checked into the Memphis flophouse as "John Willard," acquired an Alabama driver's license as "Eric S. Galt," and traveled to Europe on a passport as Ramon George Sneyd. However, all four, for which he [or someone] had created I.D., looked very much like Ray. The odds of these being a random choice were just short of impossible. It also is likely that the Los Angeles plastic surgery rounding out his previously pointed nose was designed to make him look more like these men, none of whom knew they were being impersonated.
In February of 1968, Raoul sent travel funds to James in Los Angeles and ordered him back to New Orleans. From there the two drove together to Atlanta. In late March, James says that Raoul was making plans for them to drive to Miami but these plans abruptly changed around March 29th. They were now going to Memphis.
It was on or about this date that MLK had cancelled a planned speaking engagement in Miami in order to fly to Memphis and tend to the problems with the garbage strike. It now seems that Raoul had this information before anyone else.
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