Post by Rob Caprio on Apr 8, 2020 20:23:58 GMT -5
All portions are ©️ Robert Caprio 2006-2024
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Many Americans believe that James Earl Ray (JER) shot and killed Dr. Martin Luther King (MLK) on April 4, 1968, but what are they basing this on?
Certainly not evidence. It is based on what the Media has told them repeatedly over the years. Ditto the public school system. It is the same systematic programming that we see with Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO) in regards to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (JFK).
JER, like LHO, maintained his innocence. He said that he was working with a “Raoul" who he had met in Memphis. He further stated that he was trying to sell guns with this “Raoul", and on April 4, 1968, “Raoul" had given him $200.00 and instructed him to go to a movie so he could talk more freely with an arms dealer. [This is similar to LHO's story as he said that he was being told what to do by a “Hidell"; Marina Oswald told the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) that LHO was under cover selling guns; and LHO would go to a movie theater.]
Here is some introductory detail provided by researcher Jim Marrs from his book "Diplomacy By Deception."
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Immediately following the [Martin Luther] King murder, the Memphis police had a golden opportunity to lift fingerprints from the rooming house where Ray was supposed to have stayed. The rooming house was on South Main Street, in a black neighborhood in Memphis; Ray arrived there at 3pm on April 4, 1968. Witnesses said they saw three men coming out or the building, one of whom was Ray. It would be interesting to know why no effort was ever made to locate the other two men seen with Ray.
There was no positive identification of Ray's fingerprints at the rooming house. According to Major Barney Ragsdale, of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Missouri State Penitentiary where Ray had been incarcerated sent the FBI a wrong set of fingerprints. For some reason, as yet unexplained, it took the FBI two weeks to announce that Ray was the killer.
This confounded the FBI's long-held claim that it can identify a person by print comparison within 10 minutes. The fingerprint comparison check was taken from Los Angeles records, a departure from normal procedure. Atlanta would have been the logical place to check records. The Los Angeles fingerprints were those of Eric Starvo Galt. A photograph accompanied the prints. Did the delay have anything to do with Eric Starvo Galt? Was "Galt" Ray?
When the Memphis police were shouldered out of the way by the FBI, AP reporter Don McKee wrote:
"Federal agents have scoured the city showing sketches of a man's face and asking about the name Eric Starvo Galt, the mysterious object of a hunt linked to the probe of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassin. What the agents have learned or what they want with Galt is a tightly kept secret".
Gaylord Shaw, also an AP reporter sent a dispatch which stated:
"The FBI is withholding nationwide distribution of a composite drawing of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassin. When the white Mustang, which Ray was said to have used to make his getaway after the shooting, was found in Atlanta, it was traced to Eric Starvo Galt.
The FBI issued a bulletin for the arrest of Galt for 'conspiring with another man he alleged was his brother to injure, oppress, threaten, intimidate Dr. King."
The bulletin was at first withdrawn, and then reinstated. Among other things, it stated that Galt had taken dancing lessons in New Orleans in 1964 and 1965. James Earl Ray was in the Missouri State Penitentiary at the time.
Two weeks after King's murder, J. Edgar Hoover announced that Galt was in fact James Earl Ray. Hoover did not say what became of Galt's brother. Why was no investigation conducted into the whereabouts of Galt's "brother?"
The mysterious removal of Detective Redditt of the Memphis Police Department from the area of the Lorraine Motel has yet to be explained. After Redditt was escorted home, Lieutenant Arkin of the Memphis Police Department received a message from the Secret Service that said "a mistake had been made" concerning the "contract" Redditt was actually accompanied on his surveillance detail by W.B. Richmond, a fellow detective.
Richmond testified that he was not on surveillance duty at the time that King was shot, but that he was at the Memphis Police Department headquarters and knew nothing of the actual murder. Later, Richmond did a complete about-face and admitted that he was at a fire station directly across the street from the Lorraine Motel at the exact time King was shot. Why the contradiction? Did Richmond testify to this fact under oath to the Justice Department and if so, why was he never indicted for perjury?
When Scotland Yard arrested Ray at London's Heathrow Airport, he told the officers that his name was "Ramon George Sneyd." Once again, the FBI did something strange; the Los Angeles fingerprints of Galt were sent to Scotland Yard, rather than the ones in FBI records in Washington.
The now-famous photograph of King lying dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel shows Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young pointing not at the window of the rooming house, but to the knoll where witnesses said they saw a man covered with a towel hiding behind some bushes. The directional track of the wound in King's body indicates beyond a reasonable doubt that this was most likely the area from where the shot was fired, rather than from the bathroom window of the rooming house.
That Ray's trial was a mockery of justice cannot be doubted. Ray was not allowed to mention the word "conspiracy" which appeared in his original pleas a number of times. The judge also refused to let Ray discuss his conspiracy statement and his lawyer Percy Foreman, agreed with the judge. On Foreman's advice, Ray pleaded guilty, which doomed his chances of obtaining a full and fair trial.
In October of 1974, Ray was granted a retrial hearing in Memphis Federal District Court but after eight days of hearings, his plea was dismissed. Ray continued to proclaim his innocence and told his family he was determined to have the truth come out. Perhaps that is why in 1977, while in the Brushy Mountain State Prison, an attempt to murder him was made. Although he suffered serious stab wounds, Ray survived. There are just too many loose ends lying around for a convincing case to be made that Ray fired the shot that killed King. (Jim Marrs, "Diplomacy By Deception", Chapter 10)
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It is astounding that the FBI made no attempt to find the two men seen with JER. Also, JER had to know that he would stand out by taking a room in a black neighborhood so if he planned on getting away with the crime this is the worst thing to do as he stood out.
The fingerprint saga sounds eerily familiar with the JFK saga as well.
Let’s review JER's claim that he is the "fall guy" by examining the following things which when taken together would appear to support JER and weaken the official case.
1. Memphis police officers who were keeping a watch on MLK, stood under the balcony of the Lorraine Motel on which MLK was speaking. MLK's chauffeur, Solomon Jones, said he observed a man with his face covered by a white sheet in a clump of bushes opposite, and directly in front of the balcony. The man was also seen by Earl Caldwell, a New York Times (NYT) reporter. Caldwell stated:
"He was in a stooping position. I did not see a weapon in the man's hands..."
Neither Jones or Caldwell have ever been questioned by any police agency about what they witnessed. Why not?
2. Willy Green, a mechanic who JER asked to fix a low tire on his Mustang, clearly recalls talking with JER a few minutes before MLK was shot The gas station where the incident took place is four blocks from the apartment house on South Main in Memphis where JER stayed. JER could not possibly have been in two different locations at the same time.
3. The entry angle of the gunshot was consistent with a shot fired from the clump of bushes referred to by Jordan and Caldwell. It is inconsistent with a shot fired from the window JER supposedly fired from.
4. The alleged rifle used to kill MLK would have had to have been jammed into the bathroom wall if it was fired from the window. The bathroom was not wide enough otherwise, yet when the FBI examined the bathroom, there weren't any marks on the wall, let alone damage which would have been caused by the rifle butt.
5. When sheriff deputies ran to the apartment from where they thought the shot had come, there was nothing outside the entrance doorway. Deputy Vernon Dollohite was at the door in less than two minutes after the shot rang out. He told investigators there was nothing lying by the door. Yet, in the few seconds while Dollohite went into Jim's Grill, right next door to the apartment, someone left a bundle containing a pair of undershorts — the wrong size for JER — a pair of binoculars and the hunting rifle wiped clean of prints on the sidewalk near the door.
JER is supposed to have been able to jump out of the bath in which it is alleged he stood to fire the shot, clean the binoculars and the gun of finger and palm prints, drop them in a bag with some cans of beer (also clean) rush 85 feet down the hall, run down a stairway, get into his Mustang which was parked some distance away-all in the space of the less than the 20 seconds Deputy Dollohite was gone from the apartment door. [This sounds like the same tale we were given regarding LHO and his supposed trip from the sixth floor to the lunchroom of the TSBD.]
6. JER was somehow able to travel to Canada and England on only the $200.00 he says he got from “Raoul”, yet when apprehended, JER had $10,000 in cash on him. One of the names assumed by JER was Eric Starvo Galt, a Canadian citizen who bore an amazing resemblance to JER whose name came up in a top secret file. JER said he found Galt in Canada on his own; no one instructed him or gave him money. The other names that Ray used were the names of people also living in Canada; George Raymond Sneyd, and Paul Bridgman.
7. The register for the rooming house in Memphis vanished and has never been found. [In LHO's case the sign-in sheet used for Mary Bledsoe's roominghouse went missing.] The only witness who could connect JER to the MLK murder was a drunkard, Charles Q. Stephens, whose wife said her husband was in a drunken state at the time of the shooting and saw nothing whatsoever. At first, Stephens said he saw nothing, then later that evening, he switched to a second version:
"I saw who done it was a ni**er, I saw him run out of the bathroom..."
Cab driver James McGraw says Stephens was drunk on the afternoon of April 4. Bessie Brewer heard Stephens change his tune and said "he was so drunk he didn't see anything." A press photographer, Ernest Withers said Stephens told him that he hadn't seen anything.
No notice was taken of Stephens by any of the investigating agencies, until he suddenly had his memory refreshed after being shown a photograph of JER by the police. At that point, Stephens said Ray was the man he had seen running from the rooming house. The FBI put Stephens in a hotel at the cost of $31,000 in order to "protect" him, but did not say from whom. However, Grace Walden, the common law wife of Stephens was mysteriously and forcibly taken to a mental institution in Memphis, by an unidentified employee of the Memphis city government Could it be that Walden could have wrecked the testimony of the government's only witness against JER?
Walden was held in the institution and her attorney filed a suit against the FBI, the Memphis police and the county prosecutor charging a conspiracy to deprive Walden of her civil rights. Walden has stuck to her story, even under intense pressure to change it; she says Stephens was about to pass out from drinking when the shot rang out. She says she saw a white man without any weapon in his hands leave the bathroom in the rooming house soon after she heard the shot
8. That JER's trial was a mockery cannot be disputed. His attorney, Percy Foreman, in the opinion of many expert lawyers turned Judas and got JER to plead guilty. Foreman had defended 1500 people charged with murder and won nearly all of these cases. Experts say that had Foreman not coerced JER into pleading guilty, due to the lack of evidence, JER would have been found not guilty.
By getting JER to plead guilty, Forman accomplished the unthinkable, JER forfeited his right of appeal for a motion for a new trial; appeals to the Tennessee Court of Appeals, appeals to the Tennessee Supreme Court and finally, a review of the case by the Supreme Court. No thinking person would disagree with the verdict of Foreman's peers, viz., Foreman did JER a total disservice.
The whole truth about who murdered MLK will probably never be told, and in this, it has powerful similarities to the murder of JFK. There is just too much doubt surrounding the death of MLK, and even the late Jim Garrison, former New Orleans district attorney said he believed there is a connection between the MLK and Kennedy murders, based on what he learned from Rocco Kimball, who made many phone calls to David Ferrie. Kimball says he flew JER from the U.S. to Montreal. JER denies this. The other similarity between the Kennedy and MLK murders is that both were covert operations, most likely sanctioned by very high-level government officials.
9. JER says he met “Raoul” in Montreal, Canada after escaping from the Missouri State Penitentiary. (How the escape was accomplished is also something of a mystery.) Apparently “Raoul” induced JER to work for him in a number of areas and then enticed him back to Alabama. While in Montreal, JER was looking for false identity papers, and was introduced to “Raoul” who claimed to be able to meet JER's need,
After several cross-border trips (one such trip was to Mexico), JER says “Raoul” wanted him to go to Alabama. After a long discussion, in which JER says he expressed grave reservations about going to that state, JER eventually went to Birmingham. JER did several jobs; delivering packages of unknown content and phoned “Raoul” from Birmingham quite frequently to get new assignments.
According to JER, “Raoul” then told him that his last job was coming up, for which he would be paid $12,000. Again, according to JER, he was instructed to buy a high-powered deer rifle with a telescopic sight.
10. JER says “Raoul” accompanied him to buy a hunting rifle at Aeromarine Supply, and JER says “Raoul” later returned alone to the store to exchange the rifle for a Remington 30.06. [30.06 was a much mentioned caliber in the JFK assassination.]
11. The Memphis Police mysteriously withdrew MLK's protection. About 24 hours before he was shot the seven-man unit stood down. Memphis Police Director Frank Holloman denies ever having given the order for this, and claimed that he wasn't even aware that such an order had been issued. On the morning of April 4,1968, four of the Memphis Police special units were ordered to stand down. No one in the Memphis Police Department knows where the order came from. [This again sounds like JFK assassination as the 112th military detachment was told to stand down; a car full of detectives was done away with; and the number of motorcycles were reduced.]
12. In one of the most mystifying episodes in this unsolved mystery, Edward Redditt working as a detective in the Memphis Police Department, was lured away from his post by a series of radio messages that subsequently turned out to be false. According to Redditt, he was watching the Lorraine Motel from a vantage point across the street from the Lorraine Motel, where MLK was staying, when he was contacted on his radio by E.H. Arkin, a lieutenant in the Memphis Police Department. Arkin told Redditt to stop his surveillance and return to headquarters.
On arrival, Secret Service (SS) agents ordered Reditt to go home. He said that he was supposed to be doing surveillance at the Lorraine Motel, but he was overruled by Memphis Police Chief Frank Holloman. He was ordered home. He was accompanied by two police officers and Redditt was driven home to collect his clothes and toilet articles. In a most unusual departure from police procedure, the two officers sat in the front room of Reddit’s house, instead of in the car outside. Redditt had not been home for more than 10 minutes when a special emergency radio broadcast announced the murder of MLK.
13. The Galt wanted poster said that he (Galt) had taken dancing lessons in New Orleans in 1964 and 1965, when in fact JER was in the Missouri State Penitentiary at the time. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, arriving on the scene after the FBI had pushed all other law enforcement agencies off the case, declared "all the evidence we have is that it is the work of one man." Why the unseemly haste to announce such a far-reaching conclusion, when the investigation was still in its infancy? Doesn’t this sound like the JFK assassination and the rush to pronounce LHO guilty?
Immediately following the MLK murder, the Memphis police had a golden opportunity to lift fingerprints from the rooming house where JER was supposed to have stayed. The rooming house was on South Main Street, in a black neighborhood in Memphis; JER arrived there at 3 pm on April 4, 1968. Witnesses said they saw three men coming out of the building, one of whom was JER. It would be interesting to know why no effort was ever made to locate the other two men seen with JER. This is similar to the WC not being interested in who the companions seen with LHO were on multiple occasions.
There was no positive identification of JER's fingerprints at the rooming house. According to Major Barney Ragsdale, of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Missouri State Penitentiary where JER had been incarcerated sent the FBI a wrong set of fingerprints. For some reason, as yet unexplained, it took the FBI two weeks to announce that JER was the killer.
This confounded the FBI's long-held claim that it can identify a person by print comparison within 10 minutes. The fingerprint comparison check was taken from Los Angeles records, a departure from normal procedure. Atlanta would have been the logical place to check records. The Los Angeles fingerprints were those of Eric Starvo Galt. A photograph accompanied the prints. Did the delay have anything to do with Eric Starvo Galt? Was "Galt" JER?
When the Memphis police were shouldered out of the way by the FBI, AP reporter Don McKee wrote:
"Federal agents have scoured the city showing sketches of a man's face and asking about the name Eric Starvo Galt, the mysterious object of a hunt linked to the probe of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassin. What the agents have learned or what they want with Galt is a tightly kept secret".
Gaylord Shaw, also an AP reporter sent a dispatch which stated:
"the FBI is withholding nationwide distribution of a composite drawing of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassin. When the white Mustang, which Ray was said to have used to make his getaway after the shooting, was found in Atlanta, it was traced to Eric Starvo Galt.
The FBI issued a bulletin for the arrest of Galt for 'conspiring with another man he alleged was his brother to injure, oppress, threaten, intimidate Dr. King."
The bulletin was at first withdrawn, and then reinstated. Among other things, it stated that Galt had taken dancing lessons in New Orleans in 1964 and 1965. JER was in the Missouri State Penitentiary at the time.
Two weeks after MLK's murder, J. Edgar Hoover (JEH) announced that Galt was in fact JER. JEH did not say what became of Galt's brother. Why was no investigation conducted into the whereabouts of Galt's "brother?"
The mysterious removal of Detective Redditt of the Memphis Police Department from the area of the Lorraine Motel has yet to be explained. After Redditt was escorted home, Lieutenant Arkin of the Memphis Police Department received a message from the Secret Service that said "a mistake had been made" concerning the "contract" Redditt was actually accompanied on his surveillance detail by W.B. Richmond, a fellow detective.
Richmond testified that he was not on surveillance duty at the time that MLK was shot, but that he was at the Memphis Police Department headquarters and knew nothing of the actual murder. Later, Richmond did a complete about-face and admitted that he was at a fire station directly across the street from the Lorraine Motel at the exact time MLK was shot. Why the contradiction? Did Richmond testify to this fact under oath to the Justice Department, and if so, why was he never indicted for perjury?
When Scotland Yard arrested JER at London's Heathrow Airport, he told the officers that his name was "Ramon George Sneyd." Once again, the FBI did something strange; the Los Angeles fingerprints of Galt were sent to Scotland Yard, rather than the ones in FBI records in Washington.
The now-famous photograph of MLK lying dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel shows Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young pointing not at the window of the rooming house, but to the knoll where witnesses said they saw a man covered with a towel hiding behind some bushes. The directional track of the wound in MLK's body indicates beyond a reasonable doubt that this was most likely the area from where the shot was fired, rather than from the bathroom window of the rooming house.
That JER's trial was a mockery of justice cannot be doubted. JER was not allowed to mention the word "conspiracy" which appeared in his original pleas a number of times. The judge also refused to let JER discuss his conspiracy statement and his lawyer Percy Foreman, agreed with the judge. On Foreman's advice, JER pleaded guilty, which doomed his chances of obtaining a full and fair trial.
In October of 1974, JER was granted a retrial hearing in Memphis Federal District Court but after eight days of hearings, his plea was dismissed. JER continued to proclaim his innocence and told his family he was determined to have the truth come out. Perhaps that is why in 1977, while in the Brushy Mountain State Prison, an attempt to murder him was made. Although he suffered serious stab wounds, JER survived. There are just too many loose ends lying around for a convincing case to be made that JER fired the shot that killed MLK.
Just like the JFK assassination, the evidence in this case supports a conspiracy more then the claimed lone gunman claim.
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Many Americans believe that James Earl Ray (JER) shot and killed Dr. Martin Luther King (MLK) on April 4, 1968, but what are they basing this on?
Certainly not evidence. It is based on what the Media has told them repeatedly over the years. Ditto the public school system. It is the same systematic programming that we see with Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO) in regards to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (JFK).
JER, like LHO, maintained his innocence. He said that he was working with a “Raoul" who he had met in Memphis. He further stated that he was trying to sell guns with this “Raoul", and on April 4, 1968, “Raoul" had given him $200.00 and instructed him to go to a movie so he could talk more freely with an arms dealer. [This is similar to LHO's story as he said that he was being told what to do by a “Hidell"; Marina Oswald told the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) that LHO was under cover selling guns; and LHO would go to a movie theater.]
Here is some introductory detail provided by researcher Jim Marrs from his book "Diplomacy By Deception."
Quote on
Immediately following the [Martin Luther] King murder, the Memphis police had a golden opportunity to lift fingerprints from the rooming house where Ray was supposed to have stayed. The rooming house was on South Main Street, in a black neighborhood in Memphis; Ray arrived there at 3pm on April 4, 1968. Witnesses said they saw three men coming out or the building, one of whom was Ray. It would be interesting to know why no effort was ever made to locate the other two men seen with Ray.
There was no positive identification of Ray's fingerprints at the rooming house. According to Major Barney Ragsdale, of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Missouri State Penitentiary where Ray had been incarcerated sent the FBI a wrong set of fingerprints. For some reason, as yet unexplained, it took the FBI two weeks to announce that Ray was the killer.
This confounded the FBI's long-held claim that it can identify a person by print comparison within 10 minutes. The fingerprint comparison check was taken from Los Angeles records, a departure from normal procedure. Atlanta would have been the logical place to check records. The Los Angeles fingerprints were those of Eric Starvo Galt. A photograph accompanied the prints. Did the delay have anything to do with Eric Starvo Galt? Was "Galt" Ray?
When the Memphis police were shouldered out of the way by the FBI, AP reporter Don McKee wrote:
"Federal agents have scoured the city showing sketches of a man's face and asking about the name Eric Starvo Galt, the mysterious object of a hunt linked to the probe of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassin. What the agents have learned or what they want with Galt is a tightly kept secret".
Gaylord Shaw, also an AP reporter sent a dispatch which stated:
"The FBI is withholding nationwide distribution of a composite drawing of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassin. When the white Mustang, which Ray was said to have used to make his getaway after the shooting, was found in Atlanta, it was traced to Eric Starvo Galt.
The FBI issued a bulletin for the arrest of Galt for 'conspiring with another man he alleged was his brother to injure, oppress, threaten, intimidate Dr. King."
The bulletin was at first withdrawn, and then reinstated. Among other things, it stated that Galt had taken dancing lessons in New Orleans in 1964 and 1965. James Earl Ray was in the Missouri State Penitentiary at the time.
Two weeks after King's murder, J. Edgar Hoover announced that Galt was in fact James Earl Ray. Hoover did not say what became of Galt's brother. Why was no investigation conducted into the whereabouts of Galt's "brother?"
The mysterious removal of Detective Redditt of the Memphis Police Department from the area of the Lorraine Motel has yet to be explained. After Redditt was escorted home, Lieutenant Arkin of the Memphis Police Department received a message from the Secret Service that said "a mistake had been made" concerning the "contract" Redditt was actually accompanied on his surveillance detail by W.B. Richmond, a fellow detective.
Richmond testified that he was not on surveillance duty at the time that King was shot, but that he was at the Memphis Police Department headquarters and knew nothing of the actual murder. Later, Richmond did a complete about-face and admitted that he was at a fire station directly across the street from the Lorraine Motel at the exact time King was shot. Why the contradiction? Did Richmond testify to this fact under oath to the Justice Department and if so, why was he never indicted for perjury?
When Scotland Yard arrested Ray at London's Heathrow Airport, he told the officers that his name was "Ramon George Sneyd." Once again, the FBI did something strange; the Los Angeles fingerprints of Galt were sent to Scotland Yard, rather than the ones in FBI records in Washington.
The now-famous photograph of King lying dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel shows Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young pointing not at the window of the rooming house, but to the knoll where witnesses said they saw a man covered with a towel hiding behind some bushes. The directional track of the wound in King's body indicates beyond a reasonable doubt that this was most likely the area from where the shot was fired, rather than from the bathroom window of the rooming house.
That Ray's trial was a mockery of justice cannot be doubted. Ray was not allowed to mention the word "conspiracy" which appeared in his original pleas a number of times. The judge also refused to let Ray discuss his conspiracy statement and his lawyer Percy Foreman, agreed with the judge. On Foreman's advice, Ray pleaded guilty, which doomed his chances of obtaining a full and fair trial.
In October of 1974, Ray was granted a retrial hearing in Memphis Federal District Court but after eight days of hearings, his plea was dismissed. Ray continued to proclaim his innocence and told his family he was determined to have the truth come out. Perhaps that is why in 1977, while in the Brushy Mountain State Prison, an attempt to murder him was made. Although he suffered serious stab wounds, Ray survived. There are just too many loose ends lying around for a convincing case to be made that Ray fired the shot that killed King. (Jim Marrs, "Diplomacy By Deception", Chapter 10)
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It is astounding that the FBI made no attempt to find the two men seen with JER. Also, JER had to know that he would stand out by taking a room in a black neighborhood so if he planned on getting away with the crime this is the worst thing to do as he stood out.
The fingerprint saga sounds eerily familiar with the JFK saga as well.
Let’s review JER's claim that he is the "fall guy" by examining the following things which when taken together would appear to support JER and weaken the official case.
1. Memphis police officers who were keeping a watch on MLK, stood under the balcony of the Lorraine Motel on which MLK was speaking. MLK's chauffeur, Solomon Jones, said he observed a man with his face covered by a white sheet in a clump of bushes opposite, and directly in front of the balcony. The man was also seen by Earl Caldwell, a New York Times (NYT) reporter. Caldwell stated:
"He was in a stooping position. I did not see a weapon in the man's hands..."
Neither Jones or Caldwell have ever been questioned by any police agency about what they witnessed. Why not?
2. Willy Green, a mechanic who JER asked to fix a low tire on his Mustang, clearly recalls talking with JER a few minutes before MLK was shot The gas station where the incident took place is four blocks from the apartment house on South Main in Memphis where JER stayed. JER could not possibly have been in two different locations at the same time.
3. The entry angle of the gunshot was consistent with a shot fired from the clump of bushes referred to by Jordan and Caldwell. It is inconsistent with a shot fired from the window JER supposedly fired from.
4. The alleged rifle used to kill MLK would have had to have been jammed into the bathroom wall if it was fired from the window. The bathroom was not wide enough otherwise, yet when the FBI examined the bathroom, there weren't any marks on the wall, let alone damage which would have been caused by the rifle butt.
5. When sheriff deputies ran to the apartment from where they thought the shot had come, there was nothing outside the entrance doorway. Deputy Vernon Dollohite was at the door in less than two minutes after the shot rang out. He told investigators there was nothing lying by the door. Yet, in the few seconds while Dollohite went into Jim's Grill, right next door to the apartment, someone left a bundle containing a pair of undershorts — the wrong size for JER — a pair of binoculars and the hunting rifle wiped clean of prints on the sidewalk near the door.
JER is supposed to have been able to jump out of the bath in which it is alleged he stood to fire the shot, clean the binoculars and the gun of finger and palm prints, drop them in a bag with some cans of beer (also clean) rush 85 feet down the hall, run down a stairway, get into his Mustang which was parked some distance away-all in the space of the less than the 20 seconds Deputy Dollohite was gone from the apartment door. [This sounds like the same tale we were given regarding LHO and his supposed trip from the sixth floor to the lunchroom of the TSBD.]
6. JER was somehow able to travel to Canada and England on only the $200.00 he says he got from “Raoul”, yet when apprehended, JER had $10,000 in cash on him. One of the names assumed by JER was Eric Starvo Galt, a Canadian citizen who bore an amazing resemblance to JER whose name came up in a top secret file. JER said he found Galt in Canada on his own; no one instructed him or gave him money. The other names that Ray used were the names of people also living in Canada; George Raymond Sneyd, and Paul Bridgman.
7. The register for the rooming house in Memphis vanished and has never been found. [In LHO's case the sign-in sheet used for Mary Bledsoe's roominghouse went missing.] The only witness who could connect JER to the MLK murder was a drunkard, Charles Q. Stephens, whose wife said her husband was in a drunken state at the time of the shooting and saw nothing whatsoever. At first, Stephens said he saw nothing, then later that evening, he switched to a second version:
"I saw who done it was a ni**er, I saw him run out of the bathroom..."
Cab driver James McGraw says Stephens was drunk on the afternoon of April 4. Bessie Brewer heard Stephens change his tune and said "he was so drunk he didn't see anything." A press photographer, Ernest Withers said Stephens told him that he hadn't seen anything.
No notice was taken of Stephens by any of the investigating agencies, until he suddenly had his memory refreshed after being shown a photograph of JER by the police. At that point, Stephens said Ray was the man he had seen running from the rooming house. The FBI put Stephens in a hotel at the cost of $31,000 in order to "protect" him, but did not say from whom. However, Grace Walden, the common law wife of Stephens was mysteriously and forcibly taken to a mental institution in Memphis, by an unidentified employee of the Memphis city government Could it be that Walden could have wrecked the testimony of the government's only witness against JER?
Walden was held in the institution and her attorney filed a suit against the FBI, the Memphis police and the county prosecutor charging a conspiracy to deprive Walden of her civil rights. Walden has stuck to her story, even under intense pressure to change it; she says Stephens was about to pass out from drinking when the shot rang out. She says she saw a white man without any weapon in his hands leave the bathroom in the rooming house soon after she heard the shot
8. That JER's trial was a mockery cannot be disputed. His attorney, Percy Foreman, in the opinion of many expert lawyers turned Judas and got JER to plead guilty. Foreman had defended 1500 people charged with murder and won nearly all of these cases. Experts say that had Foreman not coerced JER into pleading guilty, due to the lack of evidence, JER would have been found not guilty.
By getting JER to plead guilty, Forman accomplished the unthinkable, JER forfeited his right of appeal for a motion for a new trial; appeals to the Tennessee Court of Appeals, appeals to the Tennessee Supreme Court and finally, a review of the case by the Supreme Court. No thinking person would disagree with the verdict of Foreman's peers, viz., Foreman did JER a total disservice.
The whole truth about who murdered MLK will probably never be told, and in this, it has powerful similarities to the murder of JFK. There is just too much doubt surrounding the death of MLK, and even the late Jim Garrison, former New Orleans district attorney said he believed there is a connection between the MLK and Kennedy murders, based on what he learned from Rocco Kimball, who made many phone calls to David Ferrie. Kimball says he flew JER from the U.S. to Montreal. JER denies this. The other similarity between the Kennedy and MLK murders is that both were covert operations, most likely sanctioned by very high-level government officials.
9. JER says he met “Raoul” in Montreal, Canada after escaping from the Missouri State Penitentiary. (How the escape was accomplished is also something of a mystery.) Apparently “Raoul” induced JER to work for him in a number of areas and then enticed him back to Alabama. While in Montreal, JER was looking for false identity papers, and was introduced to “Raoul” who claimed to be able to meet JER's need,
After several cross-border trips (one such trip was to Mexico), JER says “Raoul” wanted him to go to Alabama. After a long discussion, in which JER says he expressed grave reservations about going to that state, JER eventually went to Birmingham. JER did several jobs; delivering packages of unknown content and phoned “Raoul” from Birmingham quite frequently to get new assignments.
According to JER, “Raoul” then told him that his last job was coming up, for which he would be paid $12,000. Again, according to JER, he was instructed to buy a high-powered deer rifle with a telescopic sight.
10. JER says “Raoul” accompanied him to buy a hunting rifle at Aeromarine Supply, and JER says “Raoul” later returned alone to the store to exchange the rifle for a Remington 30.06. [30.06 was a much mentioned caliber in the JFK assassination.]
11. The Memphis Police mysteriously withdrew MLK's protection. About 24 hours before he was shot the seven-man unit stood down. Memphis Police Director Frank Holloman denies ever having given the order for this, and claimed that he wasn't even aware that such an order had been issued. On the morning of April 4,1968, four of the Memphis Police special units were ordered to stand down. No one in the Memphis Police Department knows where the order came from. [This again sounds like JFK assassination as the 112th military detachment was told to stand down; a car full of detectives was done away with; and the number of motorcycles were reduced.]
12. In one of the most mystifying episodes in this unsolved mystery, Edward Redditt working as a detective in the Memphis Police Department, was lured away from his post by a series of radio messages that subsequently turned out to be false. According to Redditt, he was watching the Lorraine Motel from a vantage point across the street from the Lorraine Motel, where MLK was staying, when he was contacted on his radio by E.H. Arkin, a lieutenant in the Memphis Police Department. Arkin told Redditt to stop his surveillance and return to headquarters.
On arrival, Secret Service (SS) agents ordered Reditt to go home. He said that he was supposed to be doing surveillance at the Lorraine Motel, but he was overruled by Memphis Police Chief Frank Holloman. He was ordered home. He was accompanied by two police officers and Redditt was driven home to collect his clothes and toilet articles. In a most unusual departure from police procedure, the two officers sat in the front room of Reddit’s house, instead of in the car outside. Redditt had not been home for more than 10 minutes when a special emergency radio broadcast announced the murder of MLK.
13. The Galt wanted poster said that he (Galt) had taken dancing lessons in New Orleans in 1964 and 1965, when in fact JER was in the Missouri State Penitentiary at the time. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, arriving on the scene after the FBI had pushed all other law enforcement agencies off the case, declared "all the evidence we have is that it is the work of one man." Why the unseemly haste to announce such a far-reaching conclusion, when the investigation was still in its infancy? Doesn’t this sound like the JFK assassination and the rush to pronounce LHO guilty?
Immediately following the MLK murder, the Memphis police had a golden opportunity to lift fingerprints from the rooming house where JER was supposed to have stayed. The rooming house was on South Main Street, in a black neighborhood in Memphis; JER arrived there at 3 pm on April 4, 1968. Witnesses said they saw three men coming out of the building, one of whom was JER. It would be interesting to know why no effort was ever made to locate the other two men seen with JER. This is similar to the WC not being interested in who the companions seen with LHO were on multiple occasions.
There was no positive identification of JER's fingerprints at the rooming house. According to Major Barney Ragsdale, of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Missouri State Penitentiary where JER had been incarcerated sent the FBI a wrong set of fingerprints. For some reason, as yet unexplained, it took the FBI two weeks to announce that JER was the killer.
This confounded the FBI's long-held claim that it can identify a person by print comparison within 10 minutes. The fingerprint comparison check was taken from Los Angeles records, a departure from normal procedure. Atlanta would have been the logical place to check records. The Los Angeles fingerprints were those of Eric Starvo Galt. A photograph accompanied the prints. Did the delay have anything to do with Eric Starvo Galt? Was "Galt" JER?
When the Memphis police were shouldered out of the way by the FBI, AP reporter Don McKee wrote:
"Federal agents have scoured the city showing sketches of a man's face and asking about the name Eric Starvo Galt, the mysterious object of a hunt linked to the probe of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassin. What the agents have learned or what they want with Galt is a tightly kept secret".
Gaylord Shaw, also an AP reporter sent a dispatch which stated:
"the FBI is withholding nationwide distribution of a composite drawing of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassin. When the white Mustang, which Ray was said to have used to make his getaway after the shooting, was found in Atlanta, it was traced to Eric Starvo Galt.
The FBI issued a bulletin for the arrest of Galt for 'conspiring with another man he alleged was his brother to injure, oppress, threaten, intimidate Dr. King."
The bulletin was at first withdrawn, and then reinstated. Among other things, it stated that Galt had taken dancing lessons in New Orleans in 1964 and 1965. JER was in the Missouri State Penitentiary at the time.
Two weeks after MLK's murder, J. Edgar Hoover (JEH) announced that Galt was in fact JER. JEH did not say what became of Galt's brother. Why was no investigation conducted into the whereabouts of Galt's "brother?"
The mysterious removal of Detective Redditt of the Memphis Police Department from the area of the Lorraine Motel has yet to be explained. After Redditt was escorted home, Lieutenant Arkin of the Memphis Police Department received a message from the Secret Service that said "a mistake had been made" concerning the "contract" Redditt was actually accompanied on his surveillance detail by W.B. Richmond, a fellow detective.
Richmond testified that he was not on surveillance duty at the time that MLK was shot, but that he was at the Memphis Police Department headquarters and knew nothing of the actual murder. Later, Richmond did a complete about-face and admitted that he was at a fire station directly across the street from the Lorraine Motel at the exact time MLK was shot. Why the contradiction? Did Richmond testify to this fact under oath to the Justice Department, and if so, why was he never indicted for perjury?
When Scotland Yard arrested JER at London's Heathrow Airport, he told the officers that his name was "Ramon George Sneyd." Once again, the FBI did something strange; the Los Angeles fingerprints of Galt were sent to Scotland Yard, rather than the ones in FBI records in Washington.
The now-famous photograph of MLK lying dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel shows Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young pointing not at the window of the rooming house, but to the knoll where witnesses said they saw a man covered with a towel hiding behind some bushes. The directional track of the wound in MLK's body indicates beyond a reasonable doubt that this was most likely the area from where the shot was fired, rather than from the bathroom window of the rooming house.
That JER's trial was a mockery of justice cannot be doubted. JER was not allowed to mention the word "conspiracy" which appeared in his original pleas a number of times. The judge also refused to let JER discuss his conspiracy statement and his lawyer Percy Foreman, agreed with the judge. On Foreman's advice, JER pleaded guilty, which doomed his chances of obtaining a full and fair trial.
In October of 1974, JER was granted a retrial hearing in Memphis Federal District Court but after eight days of hearings, his plea was dismissed. JER continued to proclaim his innocence and told his family he was determined to have the truth come out. Perhaps that is why in 1977, while in the Brushy Mountain State Prison, an attempt to murder him was made. Although he suffered serious stab wounds, JER survived. There are just too many loose ends lying around for a convincing case to be made that JER fired the shot that killed MLK.
Just like the JFK assassination, the evidence in this case supports a conspiracy more then the claimed lone gunman claim.