Death of a King [1]

Published Jan 10, 2022, 8:01 AM

Who killed Martin Luther King, and why? While some answers have emerged over the past 50 years, others have been hiding in plain sight.

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Welcome to the MLK Tapes, a production of I Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do not represent those of I Heart Media, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener discretion is advised. In August of nine sixty three, Dr Martin Luther King spoke from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a crowd of more than two hundred and fifty thousand in Washington, d C. So even though we faced the difficulties up today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. His iconic I have a Dream speech is one of the most famous speeches in history, and one you're probably familiar with. Nearly six decades later, a few hand pick sentences from that speech have come to define him in the popular mind. But King was not afraid to travel more dangerous roads. Four years later, at Riverside Church in New York, Martin Luther King would give a speech that wasn't about the fight for civil rights in America. It was about the horrific war in Vietnam, and it may have cost him his life. This business of burning human beings with napalm. Sending men home from dark and bloody battle fields, physically handicapped and psychologically derain cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. King's speech that night shook the country. Many thought he had crossed a line by speaking against the war he was supposed to stick to civil rights. Life magazine called a speech demogogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi, referring to the radio station in communist North Vietnam, and for some, King's speech was an act of treason. A year later, to the day, Martin Luther King, just thirty nine years old, would be dead. My name is Bill claybour On, an author and researcher, and most recently co creator of the RFK Tapes, a podcast about the assassination of Robert Kennedy. I was in law school when doctor King was shot. My first thought was that hidden forces, perhaps in our own government, were likely behind the murder. But then a man named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison. He was a lone gunman, we were told, brought to murder by racial hatred, and that spent the official narrative for over fifty years. It would be decades before I discovered the real story behind the murder of doctor King. It came to me in boxes, cardboard boxes with dozens of audio tapes. Just as he got to the door, shot rang up, and somebody came out of the bushes and handed him a smoking rifle, and he broke it down and wrapped it in a table ball and put it back in the door room. When I heard the shot, when I saw him get hit, and when I saw him go down. Now I'm no doctor, but there was no question to me that the man was hit hard. I mean he was hit hard. So I immediately turned around and go that direction. It was like once the shot went off, it was every dog for his own, every dog for his own. The voices on these tapes are from people who were there, people who, in the passing years have overcome their fear to speak about what they saw, what they heard, and in some cases, what they did when Martin Luther King was killed. Welcome to the MLK tapes. Doctor King's assassination is a critical moment in American history. Let's go back to March nine in his campaign to fight not only for civil rights but for economic justice. King had come to Memphis to support the sanitation workers in their request to form a union. Striking workers peacefully carrying signs that said I Am a Man was an image they hoped would penetrate the conscience of the nation. But this hope was shattered when the peaceful march King had wanted to lead was disrupted by rioting writing that may have been set off by people sent in to start trouble, and because of the awful images coming out of Memphis, King's critics were now saying that he had lost control of his movement, that he could no longer lead a peaceful protest. So we returned to Memphis to support the sanitation workers and prove his doubters wrong. Dr King, You're a march here on Monday has apparently been enjoyed the federal injunction. If that holds up, what are your plans? Will you march or not? We do feel that it would be a basic denial of First Amendment privileges to have an injunction take effect that would prevent us from marching. We stand on the First Amendment and in the past, we've on the basis of conscience had to break injunctions, and that may very well happen in this situation. But breaking an injunction was not King's only worry. By returning to Memphis, he was also putting his life on the line, and he knew it. It's the evening of April three, as thunderstorms rage outside Martin, Luther King speaks on behalf of the sanitation workers to several thousand followers in downtown Memphis. That's the question before you tonight. Not if I stopped to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job? The question is if I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them? That's the question. But there was something else that needed to be put into words. King's playing into Memphis had been delayed by a bomb scare, and threats on King himself were an increasing, almost daily occurrence. And then I got into Memphis and some began to say the threats I talk about what would happen to me from some of a sick white brothers. His words that night were a chilling foretelling of his own death. Like anybody I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place, but I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain and I've looked over and I've seen the promised land. King didn't look away. He could feel what was coming. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know the night and we as a people will get to the promised Land. So I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory on the coming of the Lord. The next morning, King's lieutenant Andrew Young went to court to challenge the injunction prohibiting the upcoming protest march. Well. King mostly stayed around the Lorraine Motel and met with people who came and went. Late in the day, Young returned to report that they had won. The march could go on. That was happy news because the soul food dinner was waiting at the Reverend Billy Kyle's house and everyone could now rely acts and have a good time. At six pm, Martin Luther King stepped out of Room three oh six onto the motel balcony. On his way to the dinner. As he waited for Ralph Abernathy to join him, he watched below as the diminutive Andrew Young shadow box with the Reverend James Orange, who was six ft four and near three hundred pounds. Don't hurt him, Andy King shouted. Then King spotted Ben Branch, a musician who was to play at the party after dinner. He asked Branch to be sure to play Precious Lord, take my hand, play it real, pretty, said King. There was a sudden sound like a firecracker, and Doctor King collapsed. Abernathy ran out of the room and knelt beside the fallen King. He cradled his wounded head and saw, as he put it, the understanding drain from his eyes. By the time Young arrived, blood was everywhere. Oh God, Ralph, he said, it's over. They said. They shoot an all points bulletin for a world rushed young white man scene running from the scene. Officers also reportedly chased and fired on a radio equipped car containing two white men. King was rushed to Saint Joseph's Hospital, where he died within the hour. Meanwhile, out on Main Street, the police would find a rifle in a box near a mysterious bag. In the bag were binoculars, nine bullets, a transistor radio, a pair of players, a couple of beers, and a copy of that day's newspaper. On this evidence, investigators would find the fingerprints of a man named James Earl Ray, a fugitive who would escape from prison the year before. They also discovered that a man fitting raised description had rented a room at a boarding house near the Lorraine and add access to a small bathroom with a line of sight to doctor King's position on the motel balcony. So the Memphis Police now had a suspect, but where was he? An enormously wide police hunt is now going on for an unidentified thirty year old white man who has been reported to be driving a large, fast, white sports car very recklessly. It took two months to find him, but finally on June eighth, Ray was arrested at London Heathrow Airport with a fake Canadian passport. The forty year old petty criminal and escaped convict was brought back to Memphis. At his arraignment, Ray was charged with the murder of Martin Luther King. He pleaded not guilty wishes of not guilty. Of course, criminals commonly plead not guilty, so Ray's initial plea doesn't mean a thing. It was rumored that Ray had Old King out of a vicious hatred, but no one knew for sure, because for the next eight months Ray was held in communicado. The only persons allowed to see him were his attorney and his brother. So what most people didn't know, and as a supposedly informed law student, I didn't know, was that, while admitting he was in Memphis that day, James Earl Ray always said that he did not shoot Martin Luther King. Ray wanted to go to trial, even though he knew that if he could not convince the jury, the penalty was likely to be the electric chair. He didn't care. He said he didn't do it, and he wanted his chance to prove it in court. Race famous criminal defense attorney Percy Foreman came on saying that Race case would be the easiest one he ever argued. But his Race trial date approached, Foreman suddenly changed his tune and pressured Ray to plead guilty, which he finally did. Are you play didn't did the murder in the plash degree in this case? Because you killed Dr Martin lived the King on the such circumstances that would make you legally guilty murder in the flash degree under the law is explained to you by your lawyers. Ray's answer was barely audible on the recording system used by the court. What he said was quote, yes, legally guilty. Uh huh. Three days after his guilty plea, James Earl Ray petition Judge Preston Battle to change his plea to not guilty. Often, in the interests of justice, such a petition is granted, and many observers expected Judge Battle to do that. But the day was to act, Battle was found slumped over his desk, dead from an apparent heart attack, and James El Ray was led off to prison no trial. Years passed and the vast majority of Americans didn't give the case much thought King had been killed and Ray was in prison because he was the one who shot him. But if you lived in Memphis, you might have been aware of strange stories and odd bits of evidence that didn't fit with the official count of the crime. People who heard things, people who saw things, things that didn't fit with the story of a loane drifter killing King. Also in nineteen seventy six, during congressional hearings, it came to light that the federal government had been wire tapping King's office and home and bugging his every hotel room. Why was the government so concerned with surveilling King? Was this in any way connected to his death? A man named William Pepper thinks it was. Pepper was a friend of Doctor King, and he spent many years gathering evidence that tells a very different story than the one we've all been told, Evidence about who really killed Martin Luther King and why he was murdered. In April nineteen seven, I traveled to New York City to join a massive anti war rally. There were more people marching than I had ever seen. As we approached the United Nations Plaza, we were too far away to see Dr King, but we could hear his unmistakable voice, stop the bombing, Let us save our national honor, stop the bombing, and stop the war. Sharing the stage with Dr King was a journalist named Bill Pepper. Pepper had been a friend of Dr King, and he had been an important influence on King's position against the war in Vietnam. I because of my writings on the war had been asked to introduce Martin King, which I did. It was a very significant movement because Dr King went against the advice of most of the civil rights leaders, who believed that he was going to cost them a great deal of money for their movements with his anti war position. But that was that was the nature of Dr King. He was amount of conscience. He spoke courageously on that day as well. Fifty years after that rally in New York, I would interview Bill Pepper while working on the RFK Tapes podcast. I wanted his take on the Robert Kennedy murder, and he had a lot to say about that, but he had even more to say about the killing of Martin Luther King because he had spent the last forty years of his life investigating the murder of his friend. There was more to tell than time would allow. So we agreed to meet again, and one warm afternoon in May, I traveled to Bill Pepper's home in South Harlem, where told me the remarkable story of how he had come to know Martin Luther King and the stunning things he had discovered about the assassination. I got my credentials as a journalist, and I went to Vietnam in nineteen sixties six. I was seeing whole villages raised and burned. I was seeing children badly injured by the napalm and the white fosphors, and I was seeing total devastation among the civilian population. So it was clear to me that war crimes are being committed by the Americans in massive amounts. I had heard about things like that, but I'd never seen anything like that in my life. I took photographs as much as I could. Pepper returned to the United States determined to tell about what he had seen, but his photographs were rejected by mainstream and progressive publications. He finally found a taker in Ramparts magazine, so the Ramparts piece came out in January of nineteen sixties. Heaven Martin King noticed as he was going on a trip to photographs. I think caught his attention that he read the article and asked to meet with me. I showed him whatever additional material that I had at that time, and I talked to him about what was going on there, and he wept. He saw all of this horror that was being done by his government. He couldn't believe it. And that was how I became involved with Doctor King, and I became close to him during the last year, but only the last year of his life. Pepper's article and photos helped Dr King come to grips with the harsh connection between poverty, race, and war. Then on April four seven, King delivered his famous speech on Vietnam at Riverside Church in New York. When machines and computers, profit motives, and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A year later, Doctor King was dead and Bill Pepper was devastated. But in the midst of the pain and heartbreak, his skills as a campaigner were still being courted, notably by Robert Kennedy, who had just recently announced he was running for president. We went from Memphis to Atlanta, where we buried Martin, and Bobby asked me and others to come up to his hotel to discuss his presidential campaign, and I said, no, I'm through his politics. After King was laid to rest, Bill Pepper went to work in education and at the same time earned a law degree. Ten years after King's murder. Pepper was pursuing a legal career in New York City. One afternoon, the phone rang. It was Ralph Abernathi, King's former number two. Abernati asked me in sev to go up to the prison Brushing Mountain Penitentiary and interrogate James Earl Ray, and I told Ralph I didn't know anything about the case. I thought James el Ray had been guilty, and I had not done any intensive investigation, so I would need some time in order to do that. In August of v I interrogated James for five torturous hours to put him under enormous stress, and James remained as calm as he could be, and he answered the questions as best as he could. For ten years, Bill Pepper had thought that James Earl Ray had murdered his friend Martin King, and he entered his interview with Ray still believing that. But the quiet understated Wray he met wasn't the man he expected to meet. Ray admitted that he had been in Memphis that day, had rented a room in Bessy Brewer's boarding house, and had bought the rifle in Birmingham. But he also calmly insisted that he did not shoot doctor King and didn't know the King was going to be shot. The men spent hours going over and over how it was he came to Memphis and what he was doing when King was killed. Each one of us, in our everyday lives has our own ways of deciding whether a person is telling the truth or not. It may be how they meet our eyes or the sound of their voice. But after five hours of questions and answers, both Bill Pepper and Ralph Abernathy came away with the same judgment. We left the room believing that he was not the shooter, but we didn't know what role he might have played. But he raised enough questions so that from that time on in night I began to go into Memphis and examine specific issues related to the case. As he went deeper into the evidence, Pepper came to believe that James Earl Ray was not only not the shooter, but was himself a victim of manipulation. Eventually, in an incredible twist of fate, Bill Pepper would become the attorney representing James Earl Ray, the man convicted of murdering his friend Martin King. Pepper was determined to get ready the trial he never had, and in so doing revealed to the world the evidence he was uncovering. I came to represent James in nine. He had been denied relief in the state courts, so we followed the abeous proceeding in the federal district court. We were denied in the Federal District Court. Then we went to the six Circuit Court of Appeal. We were denied there. Then we filed for a rit of sircir I with the Supreme Court. When we lost our appeal to the final appeal to the Supreme Court, we thought that was pretty much going to be the end of it. Though the legal avenues were seemingly close to them, there was one last recourse open to Bill Pepper and James Earl Ray, the court of public opinion. I talked to a producer whom I new, and HBO agreed, and so we worked on a plan to do an HBO special tonight in an effort to probe the mystery of Dr King's death. James Earl Ray will finally have his day in court. The defense team will be led by William Pepper, an American lawyer who practices in London. Pepper has been raised unpaid counsel for the past five years. It would be a formal trial with a randomly selected jury from all of the country, a and impartial judge. They asked Hickman Ewing, who was a former U S attorney for the Memphis area, and asked Hickman if he would be lead prosecutor. Hickman agreed, and so we tried the case three. The trial was a full knockdown, drag out trial. Prosecution maintains that the truck came from a bathroom, the bathroom in the rooming house, the defense suggests, and the proof and the evidence indicates the shot came from the brush from the bushes down below, from the backyard. Totally unscripted. We got James to testify by camera and he was subject to cross examination. I want to show you the chart of the ins out of the rooming house. You went up the south stairs. You went and saw Mrs Brewer said you wanted a room. It's a fact, is it not. She showed you room eight first, did she not? She showed me one room first. She said it was a lighthouse keeper room. And you looked at that room and then y'all walked down over here. She showed you that room, and you said you'd take five beat? Is that correct? Yes? I told her I wanted to sleeping room. That's great. This room right here, you can't see anything out of ken ken you, Mr Ray, you could have had room eight or you could have had room five B, and you chose room five beat. Is that right? Yes? There was two rooms there and I picked out that one. Is The HBO trial gave Bill Pepper an opportunity to call into question every aspect of the official story. If there is no significance of the brush in the back of the rooming house, why was it cut? Was this the police to find evidence? No, The defense suggests the brush was cut so that it could never be suggested that there was enough brush there to conceal a sniper. Could James Earl Ray cause the scene of a crime to be tampered with in this way? Reverend Jose Williams, who was one of Dr King's closest aids, testified for the defense that Martin's hotel room and the hotel itself, the reservations itself, were changed. Could James el Rey arranged this? Could James el Ray do this. We didn't know the verdict. They kept the verdict as secret as they could. The jury took seven hours plus and eventually it aired on April four. I guess, and we've sat up at the at the prison. James was there. Hickman and his team were on the left, and Jeanie and I were on the on the right, and the whole trial played on HBO and verdict came out. We the jury find the defendant not guilty. When the verdict came out, Hickman was startled. I was gonna have a heart attack. Even though it wasn't a real court proceeding, this mock trial demonstrated that the case against James Earl Ray didn't pass the test of reasonable doubt. A jury, when presented with the evidence that Pepper and others had uncovered, decided that Ray was not guilty. This should have been big news, but it got almost no mention in the American press. But it did shake the tree a little, and a few new people came forward with what they knew. At the same time, Bill Pepper published his book Orders to Kill, where he laid out the case for Ray's innocence and alleged that elements of the government may have been involved in Dr King's assassination, but most outlets in the mainstream media didn't review it, considering the importance of the man who was murdered and the evidence laid out for the reader. The question is why wasn't it reviewed the York Times reviewer and was told to pull it. This was the first time in twenty five years that he was told to pull book preview, and so it was pretty clear the story was going to be buried. But the book did reach the hands of an important person who would come forward and change the trajectory of the case. In his years searching for the truth, Bill Pepper had carefully stayed away from the King family, feeling that they had suffered enough. But once his book Orders to Kill was published, his work was out there for anyone to see, and one person who bought and read the book was Martin King's nephew, Isaac Farris, who recently sat down with us in Atlanta. I knew that uncle and may all maybe was a little different because one thing I would notice that the Thanksgiving dinners is that he would always be the last to get there, and most times he would, you know, start out by taking a nap, you know. I took an old of that, but I really didn't get a sense of of who he was till after he died. And that started the night he was assassinated. We were at home and the announcement came across the TV. Just based on my mother's reaction, I could tell something was up. Faris was just a boy when his uncle m l as he was called, was murdered. He saw the pain and the devastation it wrought, but he also saw strength in the family. The older generation, including his mother and his aunt Caretta, dealt with their pain by immersing themselves in the creation of the King Center and working towards a national holiday honoring Dr. King. What doubts they had they kept to themselves, but the younger generation felt less constrained. I would constantly have conversations, theoretical conversations with my other cousins, particularly his kids, about what might have happened, who might have been involved. To be told that an escape criminal followed my uncle across the country never sounded right to us. I mean, generally, an escape criminal is trying to keep a low profile, and escape criminal is not following a high profile individual around. So high profiled that law enforcement is probably in the area. So Isaac Farris brought a book on the murder of his uncle, and he was stunned by what it contained. But who's Bill Pepper? I personally did a little investigating about Bill Pepper the man, because at that point I did not realize that there was even a relationship between Bill Pepper and my uncle. And the more and more I looked into the man, and the more and more I read his story, things checked out. In January of nine, Farrest decided to call a meeting and put the story in front of the family. I said, look, we've all known that, you know this is not right. You know, we've all said that, we've all admitted that, but we've just kind of stopped there. Here's an opportunity, I think for us, at least if we don't find out every little detail, we can at least kind of put it together. The next step was to bring Bill Pepper to Atlanta to meet everyone and answer questions. According to Faris, it was a tense first hour. First, I guess we were challenging him on his personal integrity. Why are you, you know, doing this? What's your angle here? What what's your purpose, I mean that you're just trying to sell a best seller. And in a nutshell, we determined that Bill was since here that that he felt a sense of responsibility for what happened to my uncle, because Bill, uh doing my uncle's lifetime, was one of the people around my uncle who was actually trying to really push him to run for president. You know, I think Bill felt like, you know, whoever assassinated him knew of his plans, and so he felt a responsibility and we accepted that. So once we've got comfortable with him the man personally, and then it was like, Okay, well let's really look at your case and what you're talking about, and how did you come to this and and what's all it is based on. Bill Pepper didn't mind the questions. His friendship with Dr King had been real, and so was the work he's done on the case a great personal cost to himself, and he understood that just by being there, he was picking out a scab that covered a deep wound. I think it was very traumatic and devastating for the um to come to grips with the fact that this this good and peaceful man who had the values of not only his faith, but of a representative democracy was actually taken away from them and from all of us by governmental action. It's a very traumatic piece of information to digest. But we decided that night, Okay, now you know, we need to take this to the world, and how do we do that. We agreed to kind of get involved and help him and do whatever we could, and as a result of that, we found out further information. The family's first effort was to aid Bill Pepper's attempt to get ready the trial he never had. There was an urgency now because just a few months earlier Ray had almost died in the hospital from complications arising from cirosis of the liver. He had recovered from that crisis, but the clock was clearly ticking. So in March, in an effort to get a trial for Ray, Dexter King sat down with James el Ray with media present. The meeting lasted about half an hour, and at one point King asked Ray the question, did you kill my father? No? No, I didn't know. I want you to know that I believe you, and my family believes you, and we are going to do everything in our power to try and make sure that justice will prevail. Isaac Ferris also met with Ray, but without the cameras. I have met James el Ray. I want to be careful how to say this, but James el Ray is not the smartest cookie on the block. Okay. In fact, every crime did he committed, he bungled. I mean, he was just a bungler as a criminal. I mean, if you look at his history, I mean, and he would get caught doing dumb things. One time he robbed a place and apparently he was bare footed or something, and and took high heeled shoes from there, and then he tried to run in high heeled shoes away from the cops. But I go back and forth on whether or not you know, James knew okay I'm part of a plan to kill Dr King, or you know, whether or not he just was a person that was taking advantage of but his level of intelligence, it's possible that he could have been duped. It's possible he could have been a part of this and never known that this is a plan to kill Dr King. For a while, it seemed as though the effort to get ready of trial was going to bear fruit, as Bill Pepper got the case in front of Judge Joe Brown, who appeared ready to let them present their evidence. And Memphis, Joe Brown was a criminal court judge who was on the verge of giving us a trial, a new trial for James all right. We had made a strong presentation to Joe Brown. He was very skeptical of the official story. He was and is an expert in ballistics. Had determined for himself that the rifle, the throwdown rifle, could not have been the murder weapon, was not the murder weapon. He was on the verge of ruling for a new trial, and I was shortly after that that he was simply removed from the case by the administrative judge and a new judge was put in who would be more compliant, but on equal time ran out for James Errol Ray, James ol Ray, as we just heard his dead, and there are fears that the truth about Martin Luther King's assassination may have died with him. Ray died of kidney failure and come locations or liver disease on Thursday. With Ray gone, it may have seemed like the end, but it wasn't. Because Bill Pepper had one more idea. As new evidence emerged after the HBO trial, it had become clear that one man, Lloyd Jowers, had played some role in the murder. The back door to his bar and grille opened unto the brush covered yard just opposite King's room at the Lorraine, and a few people who worked for Jowers had come forward with what they had seen the day of the murder, and Jowers himself had made what seemed to be self incriminating statements. So Pepper went back to the King family. What if they sued this man and various unnamed government agencies for wrongful death. It would be a civil suit, not a criminal trial, but it would represent an opportunity to get the evidence as it then existed, recorded under oath in a court of law. The downside said it would open old wounds. Would the family be up for such an ordeal? Once we became comfortable, and then the family felt that they should share this with the world because we knew even if it was ignored, it's still there in history. So even if fifty years from now people have a different look on this and are prepared to accept the facts, is there for them. And the family agreed that we would bring a civil action, and since we had so much on this man, has been Jowers, we would name him as a defendant and his lawyer cooperative. His lawyer, Lewis Garrison, a very good and solid, decent man, said his client was just a pawn used by powerful forces. It was, you know, a long trial. Was thirty days or so and seventy witnesses. Was a very very long trial. But it did give us an opportunity to put forwards what evidence that we had at that point in time. For over thirty years, Creti Scott King had borne the grief of her husband's death with grace and dignity. She never expressed a doubt that James ol Ray had pulled the trigger, although she did sometimes wonder aloud if other hands had helped him do it. But for three weeks in November, Mrs King went to a courtroom in downtown Memphis, took her seat and listened as witness after witness gave their testimony. On the final day, Bill Pepper rose and addressed the jury. Let me close by saying to you that long after people, yet, what has been said in this courtroom? Are you going to remember the verdict of the student because you have heard evidence that has never before been put on in Soivan would have been put on Mr Ray's trial if he had ever been granted the trunk. No one has heard detailed evidence that you have behalf of the family at Martin Wood became junior. We asked you to find that conspiracy existed once and for all. Give this plaintive found justice, and let's plans the city and this nation of the ignorance who has pervaded this case for so long. After Bill Pepper sat down, the judge gave his instructions, and the jury retired to consider the case. But only a few hours later they returned with the verdict in favor of the King family, finding that the murder of Dr Martin Luther King in Memphis had been a planned event and that multiple people have been involved. After the trial, Mrs King returned to Atlanta. The following day, she called a press conference. This is what she had to say. This verdict is not only a great victory for my family, but also a great victory for America and a great victory or truth itself. The jury was clearly convinced that, in addition to Mr Jawa's a conspiracy of the mafia, local, state and federal government agencies were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband. The jury also affirmed overwhelming evidence that identified someone else, not James L. Ray, as the shooter in Memphis, and that Mr Ray was set up to take the blame. So what did Coretta Scott King here in that courtroom that made this reserved, careful woman speak in such a definite fashion. That's what we'll be looking at and talking about in the next eleven episodes. The trial, in its verdict should have been a huge doory, but the American press did not see fit to report on it in any meaningful way. What came instead were the op ed pieces by men already invested in the official story attacking Mrs King and her family for being dupes or in it for the money, as if there were any I was disgusted by the coverage and lack of coverage of the media. The King family was greatly abused. In fact, there was some editorials that were related to them as aiding and abetting treason and terrorism and all of that. The anger over how the King family was treated was still evident on Bill Pepper's face as he showed me the photographs of Mrs King bravely standing beside him in the courtroom, and photos of him with the rest of the King family at a dinner they put on as a thank you for his efforts, and there was a lot to thank him for. Over the years, each time someone stepped forward with new information, Bill would sit them down own and record what they had to say. In most cases, they were just common people who finally overcame their fear and answered their conscience. In the end, there were dozens and dozens of audio tapes in boxes in different places and attic here, a closet there, and some down at the King Center in Atlanta. Many of the people on those tapes are dead now, but their stories aren't, and you're going to hear them. It's not every day that one gets the shadow a lie as big as this one. I called the Union Hall as says a matter of life and death. I said, I think these people are planning to kill Dr King. The authorities were parade at all. We found a gun that James L. Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Dr King, Except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr King. James L. Ray was a pond for the official radio from My Heart Radio and tender Foot TV. The plan was to get King to the city because they wanted it handled in Memphis for Dad and nam Cad handle it. And I've lived with it so long, my sear and they they scared for me. The Lord told me to not the world. I've been wanting to tell it all my life. I'm Bill Claiburg and this is d MLK Tapes. Thanks for listening to the m l K Tapes, a production of I Heart Radio and tended for TV. This podcast is not specifically endorsed by the King Family or the King of State. Dmail K Tapes is written and hosted by Bill Claiper. Matt Frederick and Alex Williams are executive producers on behalf of I Heart Radio with producers Trevor Young and ben Keebrick. Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay are executive producers on half of tender Foot TV with produces Jamie Albright and Meredith Steadman. Original music by Makeup and Vanity Set. Cover art by Mr soul to six with photography by Artemus Jenkins. Special thanks to Owen Rosenbaum and Grace Royer at u t A, The Nord Group, back Median Marketing envisioned Business Management and Station sixteen. If you have questions, you can visit our website, the email k Tapes dot com. We posted photos and videos related to the podcast on our social media accounts. You can check them out at the Email k Tapes. From our podcasts from I Heart Radio and tender Foot TV, please visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,

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According to the official story, on April 4th, 1968, a lone gunman assassinated Dr. Martin Luther Ki 
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