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By Root 710 0

civil rights movement involved “attempts to discredit him with churches, universities, and the press,”3 the Senate’s Church Committee concluded a decade later. Walter Fauntroy was a colleague of Dr. King’s who served 20 years in Congress and, between 1976 and 1978, was chairman of the House subcommittee looking into the assassination. Their report concluded that Ray did assassinate King, but that he probably had assistance. “It was apparent that we were dealing with very sophisticated forces,” Fauntroy testified at the civil trial, saying he’d found electronic bugs on his TV set and phone. Fauntroy later said that, after he left Congress, he found information from Hoover’s logs, showing that the FBI director had a series of meetings with persons involved with the CIA and military intelligence (MI) in the three weeks before King’s assassination; also that there were MI agents as well as Green Berets in Memphis the night he was shot.4

So was James Earl Ray, a petty crook who escaped from a Missouri prison a year before the murder, a patsy like Oswald? Supposedly, he fired from the bathroom window of a rooming house a little more than 200 feet away. A tenant on the second floor said he heard a shot “and saw a man fleeing down the hallway from the direction of the bathroom,” according to the House committee report. Ray went down some outside stairs and jumped into his white Mustang in an alley. Along the way he allegedly dropped a bundle that happened to include a Remington 30.06 rifle, some binoculars, and a sales receipt for ammunition. Ray’s prints were on the rifle, which had one spent shell in the chamber.

Isn’t it interesting how these lone-nut assassins seem to incriminate themselves in advance with dumb moves? I suppose they wouldn’t want to be seen walking with the weapon, which could draw attention, but why on earth leave a weapon behind with your fingerprints all over it? Wouldn’t you have a predetermined place where you’re going to ditch it? Certainly not out in the open where anyone could find it! Or, in the case of Oswald, taking the rifle to the other side of the floor and tossing it behind some book boxes. What gets me is, the assassins are so “successful” in accomplishing the mission, but then utterly inept in the evacuation from the mission. They leave clues that point straight to themselves, and seem to always get caught fairly easily. Here they supposedly did all this sophisticated stuff up until it came time to pull off the killing. Yet it’s like they never planned for the escape. I guess we’re supposed to believe their minds are so focused on delivering the death blow that escape never enters into the plan. Then after they shoot, it’s “oh, well what do I do now?” In the case of Oswald, it’s run home and then go to the movies!

Later, Ray claimed that somebody else had left behind the bundle so as to incriminate him. In fact, one witness, Guy Canipe, said the package was actually dropped in the doorway to his store about ten minutes before the shot was fired. Makes a little more sense, doesn’t it? Another witness, Olivia Catling, saw a fellow in a checkered shirt running out of the alley beside a building across from the Lorraine soon after the killing, who went screaming off in a green ’65 Chevy. Ray, though, fled the scene in a white Mustang.

Judge Joe Brown, the first judge on the King family’s civil case, spent two years examining technical questions about the murder weapon, and said that “67% of the bullets from my tests did not match the Ray rifle.” When he called for more tests, he was taken off the case for showing “bias” by a Tennessee appeals court. “What you’ve got in terms of the physical evidence relative to ballistics is frightening,” he said later. “First, it’s not the right type of rifle. It’s never been sighted in. It’s the wrong kind of scope. With a 30.06, it makes a particularly difficult shot firing at a downward trajectory in that circumstance.” Above all, according to Brown, “Metallurgical analysis excludes the bullet taken from the body of Dr. King from coming from the cartridge