The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and this is part two of our two-parter on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Speaker 3 That's right. Where we left off with part one was the

Speaker 3 funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. And we're going to pick up now with the investigation and the manhunt.

Speaker 3 And while we're talking about that, we might as well go ahead and say it's still perhaps the largest manhunt in FBI history, depending on who you ask.

Speaker 3 Cost a couple of million bucks in those dollars, 3,500 investigators.

Speaker 3 And it was all just a bit awkward because, as we all know, or maybe some people don't know this, but the FBI had been tracking tracking Martin Luther King Jr. since 1956.

Speaker 3 So for 12 years under a program called

Speaker 3 Racial Matters.

Speaker 2 And I don't think they meant like matters, like race matters.

Speaker 3 No, I think they meant the other way, like the matters of race. Right.

Speaker 3 And then in 1963, they started tapping his phones under the communist infiltration program. And J.
Edgar Hoover was still around at the time because it seems like he was there for 300 years. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And he didn't like Martin Luther King Jr.

Speaker 3 He called him the most notorious liar in the country publicly at a press conference because King had been criticizing the FBI because they, you know, weren't protecting the civil rights of black Americans.

Speaker 3 And so Hoover didn't like the guy, yet he was the guy kind of at the top of this huge investigation.

Speaker 2 I read Martin Luther King's cool response to J. Edgar Hoover calling him the most notorious liar.
Get bent.

Speaker 4 No?

Speaker 2 No, he said

Speaker 2 that J. Edgar Hoover must be under tremendous pressure to have said such a thing.

Speaker 2 Like he was sympathetic.

Speaker 3 Jeez. Let's talk about the high road, man.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3 All right. So the FBI gets a hold of that 30 out 6 rifle that was determined to be the murder weapon.

Speaker 3 They couldn't actually conclusively link that bullet to the gun because the shell had been fragmented, but it was the same caliber. And everybody was like, come on, it's the gun.

Speaker 2 Can we all just agree to that how many rifles do you guys have just laying around in memphis that day yeah dumped minutes after by a guy who sped away in a mustang right hundreds of just a hundred feet or so away from the murder scene So, yeah, they couldn't conclusively link that to the gun, but they were able to trace the serial number and they traced it back to a sporting goods store in Birmingham, Alabama called Aero Marine Supply.

Speaker 2 And they confirmed that it had been purchased just just a few days before MLK was assassinated.

Speaker 3 Yeah, along with a scope and a gentleman who said that he was going hunting on a hunting trip with his brother.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 Because, yeah, you have to be like, that's believable, right? When you're buying a gun, you got to have a cover story.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and under an alias under the name Harvey Lohmeyer.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 two weeks after the killing,

Speaker 2 they figured out that the prints on the gun matched those of a guy named James Earl Ray.

Speaker 2 And at the time, James Earl Ray had been an escaped convict from a state prison in Missouri for basically a year. He'd been on the run.

Speaker 2 So now we had a suspect and we had photos, and they started circulating it around to people who had

Speaker 2 putatively interacted with James Earl Ray, including the guy at the Aero Marine Supply store who sold him the gun.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So

Speaker 3 he was like, that's the guy. There were witnesses.
We mentioned earlier in part one at the Bessie Brewer boarding house.

Speaker 3 They also looked at pictures and they were like, yeah, that's the guy we saw running away. And they went to the hotel clerk and or the boarding house clerk and they said, yeah, this guy signed in.

Speaker 3 That's him for sure under the name John Willard.

Speaker 3 So he had multiple aliases. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 they, that portable radio that they found in the bundle had a scratched out ID number. and they eventually figured out that that was

Speaker 3 his prison radio. It had

Speaker 3 his inmate number on it. So he escaped prison and was like, I'm taking my radio.

Speaker 2 It seems pretty conclusive that James Earl Ray would have been the shooter, right? Yeah. So they issued an indictment for his arrest for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

Speaker 2 on May 7th, a couple months after, or no, a month after MLK was murdered. And an international manhunt began.

Speaker 2 I know the FBI was definitely concentrating on the United States, but they didn't rule out the possibility that he had started to go abroad. And so they issued it far and wide, a wanted poster with

Speaker 2 his data and his photos on it.

Speaker 3 So the FBI started tracking his movements. He's got all these aliases in that year that he was on the lamb after the shooting.

Speaker 3 He was into politics for a little while, supporting Alabama Governor George Wallace, his presidential campaign. He was in L.A.
for a little while. He took dance lessons.
He went to bartending school.

Speaker 3 He lived in Mexico for like a month or so, trying to become a pornography director under the name Eric Salvo Galt.

Speaker 3 That didn't work out.

Speaker 3 So he left Mexico, came back to the States, and apparently in like the month or so before the assassination, he had been stalking King and had followed him from Atlanta to Memphis.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so it seemed like the month before he murdered Martin Luther King Jr., he suddenly got that idea in his head because none of his movements suggested that he

Speaker 2 had even focused on Martin Luther King at all up to that point.

Speaker 2 After the assassination,

Speaker 2 James E. O.
Ray fled to Toronto. It's eventually where he landed first.
I think you mean Toronto. Sorry.
I'm sorry, Toronto. I know that too.
I know.

Speaker 2 Thanks, Chuck.

Speaker 2 So at the the time, apparently, if you were an American criminal

Speaker 2 in Canada, they were very, very trusting at the time. They basically said, if you swear that you're a Canadian citizen, you give us your name, we'll send you a passport.

Speaker 2 And that's what crooks would do. They would go to Canada when they were on the run.

Speaker 2 They would look up old newspapers at like the library and find birth announcements from about the same time that they were born, finding people who were their age. And they would get their name.

Speaker 2 They would get their mother's maiden name sometimes. And apparently you didn't even need that.

Speaker 2 You just fill out this form, say your name, say, yes, I swear I'm a Canadian citizen, and mail off for a passport, which would be mailed back to you, toot sweet. And now you had a

Speaker 2 fraudulent but official and legitimate passport that you could use to travel the world with under a new alias.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and this time his alias was

Speaker 3 because, you know, it was a real dude. In fact, the guy was a cop.
Pretty ironic. But his name was Raymond George, I guess, Sneed, S-N-E-Y-D.

Speaker 2 I heard Snead from somebody once, but I don't know if that was definitive.

Speaker 3 Okay, well, it's good that we spelled it out because that'll come into play in a minute here.

Speaker 3 But from Tirana, he went to London.

Speaker 3 He was actually in London a couple of times. He passed through London on his way to Lisbon after that first flight from Canada.

Speaker 3 And he was going to Lisbon because he was hoping to go to Africa before the murder.

Speaker 3 And then afterward, his long-term plan was to go to Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, because in 1965, a 5% white minority there had assumed independence from the UK.

Speaker 3 And he was like, I'm going to go to Rhodesia and I'm going to

Speaker 3 integrate into this small white minority and become a paid mercenary. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, he went to Lisbon hoping to secure passage to Africa.

Speaker 2 And while he was there, he's like, I got a great idea. Surely that people are on my trail, the feds are on my trail now, and they might even know my alias.
So I need a new alias.

Speaker 2 I'm going to go to the Canadian Consulate here in Lisbon. I'm going to tell them that they misspelled my name on my passport.

Speaker 2 So he went there and he told the Canadian Consulate there that his last name actually is spelled with an A, not a D. And they were like, okay, whatever.

Speaker 2 Here's your new passport with your last name spelled correctly. And he had a new alias, Ramon George Sneya, instead of Snead.
So there was one letter change.

Speaker 2 And apparently that satisfied James Earl Ray that he had a new alias now.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we'll get to who Ray was a little bit, but

Speaker 3 the one takeaway from everything that I've read is he was not a very smart person.

Speaker 2 Not a criminal mastermind. He was no brain from Pinky in the Brain.

Speaker 3 No. Also, because he did not throw that first passport away, and that would be his undoing.

Speaker 3 He,

Speaker 3 like we said, he could not secure that passage to Africa. So he went back to London to figure out what his next move was.

Speaker 3 He called, this is sort of a weird part of the story. He called a reporter named Ian Colvin at the Daily Mail's Foreign Desk.

Speaker 3 And I don't know if this guy had written articles about it, mercenaries, or something.

Speaker 2 I don't know either.

Speaker 3 That's the only thing I can figure out because he called this random reporter and said, hey, you got any contacts for these mercenaries?

Speaker 3 Colvin was like, no, but if you're, I guess if you're looking to get into that kind of thing, check into Brussels because that's where you might have better luck.

Speaker 3 It's a very strange little side part of this story, for sure.

Speaker 2 It really is. So James O.
Ray was like, thank you much, and starts booking a flight to Brussels from London.

Speaker 2 And it was in London on his way to Brussels that he finally got nabbed, but not because somebody noticed his mug shot or wanted poster and saw that he was him, But because he had those two Canadian passports and he had them in the same wallet.

Speaker 3 Yeah, two different names.

Speaker 2 Yes. And the passport checker noticed that he had two passports and asked him about it.

Speaker 2 And I guess a cop was standing nearby and stepped over and was like, hey, why don't you join us in the back room? We've got some questions for you. And that was it for Ramon George Snead Sneya.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 He was quickly identified as James Earl Ray. He had a.38 caliber pistol tucked in the back of his pants going to board a plane.

Speaker 3 You could do that back then because they didn't even have metal detectors.

Speaker 2 Yeah, as long as you didn't shoot it off because you were excited during takeoff

Speaker 2 in the plane, then they didn't really care.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So he was confirmed as James O'Reilly.
He was taken into custody and on July 19th, he was flown back to the U.S. to stand trial.
And that seems like a great place for our first break.

Speaker 3 Support for the show today comes from Public.com. You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 3 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side. The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and Public gets that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

Speaker 2 Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's all there. Plus an industry-leading 3.6% APY high-yield cash account.

Speaker 3 Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously. Go to public.com slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.
That's public.com slash SYSK.

Speaker 6 Paid for by Public Investing. All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal.

Speaker 6 Brokerage services for U.S.-listed registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA, and SIPC.

Speaker 6 Crypto trading provided by ZeroHash. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures.

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Take the covers off, throw them in the machine, boom, clean.

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Speaker 2 Okay, so James Earl Ray's taken into custody, and he's flown back to the United States on July 19th to stand trial. And the whole world is watching.

Speaker 2 They want to know why the man who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr.

Speaker 2 did that, why he murdered MLK. What was the point? What was the reason? They also wanted to know if he had been working with other people because from the outset,

Speaker 2 people were, the public was just openly skeptical that there was some conspiracy that had resulted in MLK's murder. And the world got none of that because

Speaker 2 James Earl Ray pled guilty instead of going to trial.

Speaker 2 And there was a paper reporting on the case who was at this hearing where he pled guilty and said that it brought a shockingly swift ending to the case. And everybody was like, what just happened?

Speaker 2 And that was essentially that. There was no trial ever, and there were no facts presented.
So it was just like, yep, I did it. Send me to jail.

Speaker 3 Yeah. His attorney at the time, Percy Foreman, said, well, you know, if you go to a jury trial, you're probably going to get a death sentence because

Speaker 3 of the murder and its impact on the country, basically. Like, you're not going to avoid the electric chair.
So

Speaker 3 if you plead guilty, you can get the maximum

Speaker 3 life sentence, which is 99 years in prison

Speaker 3 in Tennessee. And he said

Speaker 3 that's probably the the right route to take. So Ray took it.
It was a two-hour affair in court. No one got the satisfaction of hearing any of the evidence.

Speaker 3 It also meant he wouldn't be eligible for parole for 30 years. Whereas if he had gotten a life sentence and not the 99, he could have gotten out in 12 and a half.

Speaker 3 But just three days after he pleaded guilty, he recanted and tried for the rest of his life to get a new trial.

Speaker 3 Tried to escape. He did escape.
In fact, if you listen to our Barclay Marathon episode, he escaped successfully for three days in 1977 and was picked up in Brushy Mountain where that race takes place.

Speaker 3 But he would eventually die in prison in 1998 at the age of 70, which would also have been the year he was first eligible for parole.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 And you said earlier that we were going to talk a little bit about James Earl Ray and his criminal career.

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 2 So he was born in Illinois, but mostly grew up in Missouri. And he was the oldest of nine kids.
And his family was impoverished. His father was a convict himself who didn't work very often.

Speaker 2 His mother was, as James E. O.
Ray put it, a woman of very limited intelligence, barely able to communicate, and she also drank very heavily.

Speaker 2 And there was a report card from grade school that said his attitude toward regulations was that he violates all of them.

Speaker 2 This was him as a kid, and he didn't improve very much as an adult. He dropped out of high school at 16, worked for a while, and then he joined the army.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he joined the army.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he dropped out of high school at 16. King was in college at 15.

Speaker 3 So just contrast the two situations.

Speaker 3 In 46, he joined the army after being laid off from his civilian job in the army. He was charged with drunkenness, with breaking arrest.
He served three months in the army clink, hard labor for that.

Speaker 3 He was discharged less than honorably for, quote, ineptness and lack of adaptability to military service in 1948. So just a couple of years in the Army.
And then was a drifter and a petty criminal

Speaker 3 who was in and out of jail over and over.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And he was serving a 20-year sentence for robbery in Missouri.
He started it in 1960 when he broke out in 1967 and began that year on the lamb that culminated in the assassination of MLK.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and you know, it was it was really a 20-year prison sentence for everything

Speaker 3 because it was a pretty small like robbery at Kroger that wouldn't have gotten a 20-year, but he had other armed robbery convictions. He had mail fraud convictions

Speaker 3 and escape attempts. So it was like, hey, we're just going to try and put you away for a while.
Right.

Speaker 3 And if you're curious how he escaped, he hid in a bread delivery truck that was leaving the the prison.

Speaker 2 I heard that too. Yeah.
You would have found me eating loaves of bread, too.

Speaker 3 With your little portable radio, prison radio.

Speaker 2 That's right. Just snapping my fingers with a mouthful of bread.

Speaker 2 So his criminal history,

Speaker 2 just because you're a lifetime criminal doesn't mean you're good at it.

Speaker 2 And James Earl Ray is an excellent example of that.

Speaker 2 Time magazine described him back in 1977 as a bungling petty gunman and burglar whose life life of crime has mostly been one fizzle after another.

Speaker 2 And they weren't lying because some of his greatest hits that they went on to site was that at one

Speaker 2 crime scene, he dropped identification. He dropped his ID.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 One holdup in a neighborhood, he got lost

Speaker 2 as he was making his getaway, ended up back, driving back into the neighborhood where he'd just robbed somebody and was caught by the police who'd arrived on the scene by then.

Speaker 3 Yeah, who are apparently surprised. I imagine they were like, oh, wait a minute.
Is that him coming back?

Speaker 2 Yeah, get a load of this guy.

Speaker 3 Another time he came back

Speaker 3 to

Speaker 3 re-rob a place he had already robbed, re-entered the window to get more stuff.

Speaker 2 That is a no-no. That is crime 101.

Speaker 3 Yeah, like get out of there. I'm not a criminal, but I would get out of there.

Speaker 2 So even when he was in London, too, when he was on the run

Speaker 2 after assassinating MLK, he carried out not one, but two bungled robberies. It's crazy.
One was a bank, and he managed to only get £100 from a bank.

Speaker 2 The other was a jewelry store where he got nothing because the owner knocked the gun out of his hand and pressed the alarm. So James O'Reilly ran away.

Speaker 3 And these are Londoners. They're not used to knocking guns out of hands, and this guy still managed to do it.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he just was not a very good criminal, even though he tried it over and and over again. And he was successful.
I mean, like, he did successfully rob people and break into places and all that.

Speaker 2 But if you put it all together,

Speaker 2 he didn't have like a violent criminal rap sheet. He was just kind of this petty criminal.

Speaker 2 That's how he supported himself in life as a criminal who went from that to murdering one of the most important Americans in history in one single action, seemingly overnight.

Speaker 2 And a lot of people say that just doesn't add up.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And, you know, we don't lend our show and ourselves to conspiracy.
We're not conspiracy-minded generally. No.
But you don't have to be to

Speaker 3 look at this and say, he probably didn't act alone. It just doesn't add up, like you said.
So there have been congressional committees over the years. There have been

Speaker 3 family members of Martin Luther King Jr.

Speaker 3 that said, yeah,

Speaker 3 this was part of a conspiracy.

Speaker 3 There's never been any solid agreement on what kind of conspiracy and who else was behind it.

Speaker 3 And we're not going to get into the nitty-gritty of all the,

Speaker 3 there's a lot of discounted stuff and stuff that rabbit holes you shouldn't even go down.

Speaker 3 So we're not going to get into those, but we are going to talk about

Speaker 3 the legit idea of a conspiracy and who could have been involved, like for real.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because again, how did this petty criminal plan an assassination that he successfully carried out and then also panic in a panic, like dropped the murder weapon and ran off in a place where it would be found within a minute or two?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Where did he get the funding that he would need to support himself for a year on the lamb and then to travel abroad to flee after the assassination?

Speaker 2 These are just a few of the questions people have come up with. And the obvious solution is that he had help in some way, shape, or form.

Speaker 2 But another really big question that I think a lot of people overlook is why?

Speaker 2 Like, why did he murder Martin Luther King Jr.? He wasn't known as a fanatic. He was a racist.

Speaker 2 And like we said, he supported George Wallace for his segregationist presidential bid, but he wasn't like a fanatic.

Speaker 2 And also, like, he didn't have any particularly deep emotions one way or another for MLK.

Speaker 2 He just was his murderer. And it just does not make a lot of sense.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So after he retracted that confession, just days after his conviction, he started saying, I was set up.
And I was set up by a guy named Raul.

Speaker 3 So supposedly he had a lot of interactions with this Raul guy, but he went from describing him as a Latino with blonde hair to a French Canadian with red hair.

Speaker 3 Nobody ever witnessed him with anyone that looked like either one of those people.

Speaker 3 A lot of people think there is no Raul at all, but he still could have had help, you know, from someone else.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So you mentioned congressional committees that concluded that there was some sort of conspiracy.
One of them was the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978.

Speaker 2 And they said that there was a likelihood of conspiracy in the assassination of Dr. King, but they didn't think it like Raul was involved or anything like that.

Speaker 2 It was much more pedestrian and mundane, and in my opinion, then much more likely as far as the conspiracy theories go. But they put it on two

Speaker 2 prominent but shady St. Louisans.
I'm pretty sure that's what you call people from St. Louis.
One was a former stockbroker who became a motel owner. His name was John R.
Kaufman.

Speaker 2 The other was a patent lawyer in town named John H. Sutherland.
And both of them were dead by the time the committee hearings were held in 1978.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 they supposedly put a bounty on MLK's head. And James Earl Ray, whose brother was a tavern owner in St.

Speaker 2 Louis at the time, heard about this bounty and decided that he would go ahead and murder MLK and collect on the bounty.

Speaker 2 And I also saw that he probably believed that as a white man, he would never be convicted of murdering a black man in the South.

Speaker 2 And even if he did, George Wallace was definitely going to win the 1968 election, and George Wallace would pardon him.

Speaker 2 So if you put all that together, it really seems like a pretty legitimate explanation for the whole thing.

Speaker 3 Yeah. As far as Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow, Coretta Scott King,

Speaker 3 she always thought the FBI might have had something to do with it. She knew that they had been surveilled and their phones had been tapped.

Speaker 3 She thought they were a possible.

Speaker 3 you know, bad actors.

Speaker 3 They even, you know, this is sort of startling. And in fact, it startled the country in the late 90s.

Speaker 3 But they came around to believing James Earl Ray, Dexter Scott King, one of his sons, visited James Olray in prison. They pushed for him to get an appeal.

Speaker 3 He apparently asked him point blank, like, did you kill my father? And James Earl Ray said, no, I didn't. No.

Speaker 3 And then apparently he also said, but like I say, sometimes these questions are difficult to answer. Sometimes you have to make your own evaluation and maybe come to the conclusion.

Speaker 3 I think that could be done today, but not 30 years ago.

Speaker 3 None of that makes any sense.

Speaker 2 No, because it isn't difficult to say you either did or you did not commit murder.

Speaker 3 Yeah. But as shocking as this meeting was,

Speaker 3 they got on board and said, I don't think you did this. I think you were Patsy.
I think you were set up.

Speaker 3 And a lot of Americans were confused and a lot were offended.

Speaker 3 Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Martin Luther King Jr., David Garrow, said that Dexter King's support of Ray was egregious and embarrassing.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I say we take a break and we come back and kind of get stick with the late 90s because they were kind of the 90s were a big decade for conspiracy theories and the MLK assassination. How about that?

Speaker 3 Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker 3 Support for the show today comes from public.com. You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 3 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side. The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and public gets that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

Speaker 2 Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's all there. Plus, an industry-leading 3.6% APY high-yield cash account.

Speaker 3 Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously. Go to public.com slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.
That's public.com slash SYSK.

Speaker 6 Paid for by Public Investing. All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal.
Brokerage services for U.S.

Speaker 6 listed registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash.

Speaker 6 Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

Speaker 7 Let's talk about something you probably haven't thought about. Your couch.

Speaker 8 Yeah, that thing you nap on, eat on, cry on.

Speaker 7 Turns out that most silfas are basically bacteria playgrounds.

Speaker 8 It's true. We looked it up.
It's not good.

Speaker 7 But Anibay changes that. It's washable, like fully washable.
Take the covers off, throw them in the machine, boom, clean.

Speaker 8 Also, it's actually affordable, which is surprisingly rare.

Speaker 7 So yeah, if you're going to sit on something every day, maybe don't make it a biohazard. And here's the kicker.
It's not just practical, it's affordable.

Speaker 7 Starting at just $699, you can make your sofa as clean as it is comfy.

Speaker 8 Plus, with their Black Friday sale, you can even get up to 60% off your Anibay sofa right now.

Speaker 7 Because let's be real, you deserve better than a germ factory for a place to rest your head. Check out washable sofas.com now and give your couch the upgrade it's begging for.

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Speaker 3 So there's an attorney named William Pepper, who is a very conspiracy theory-minded attorney. He became James O'Reilly's attorney eventually.

Speaker 3 And he's not someone that a lot of people thought a lot of in his career. He'd been described as disgraceful by some, the most gullible person I've ever met by someone else.

Speaker 3 He was

Speaker 3 readily and willing to just malign innocent people to get his theories out there.

Speaker 3 And I remember this happening. I didn't watch it, but on the 25th anniversary of King's murder, so I guess somewhere in the

Speaker 3 he sold HBO

Speaker 3 on producing and broadcasting a mock trial TV special of James Earl Ray, in which Ray was acquitted by the mock jury.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 and so that was, you know, oh, that's crazy, but it's a mock trial on HBO and it's a mock jury. It doesn't mean anything, it just basically promoted William Pepper and his theories.

Speaker 2 But after that special was aired, conspiracy theories about the MLK assassination got a real boost because a guy named Lloyd Jowers came forward.

Speaker 2 He said he was inspired to come forward, buy the series, and

Speaker 2 come clean, essentially, after all of these years.

Speaker 2 And he owned a tavern in Memphis called Jim's Grill, which just happened to be located beneath Bessie Brewer's boarding house, where the fatal shot that killed MLK was fired from.

Speaker 2 And Lloyd Jowers said that he was part of a big,

Speaker 2 giant conspiracy to murder MLK that included the Memphis police, the FBI, the mafia,

Speaker 2 himself, and some other just tangential players who were all coming together to kill King in order to collect on a bunch of money.

Speaker 2 Lloyd Jowers said that he was, him, just him alone, was offered $100,000 to basically project to manage the contract killing.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I feel like if you're floating a

Speaker 3 conspiracy about an assassination, if you just throw out like local cops and mafia,

Speaker 3 then you're probably halfway there.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure. Yeah, oh, definitely.
That'll get everybody's attention.

Speaker 3 So Martin Luther King Jr.'s family sued him for wrongful death in civil court. Again, this is not a criminal trial or anything.
They didn't want money. They wanted $100.

Speaker 3 They basically wanted to get all these claims heard in court and have it published, you know, out in public. And

Speaker 3 they, this is sort of shocking as well.

Speaker 3 The family was represented by that attorney, William Pepper, who had represented James O'Reilly the jury did decide that Jowers and others, including government agencies, had been responsible for King's death.

Speaker 3 So they actually won that civil trial.

Speaker 2 They did. And I read two things.
I read that Dexter King basically said, like, we did this so that, you know, to prove that the investigation needed to be reopened.

Speaker 2 And then he also said, regardless of whether it gets reopened or not, this is like the period on the sentence for us. Like this, this just basically supports everything we've always said.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 2 The Justice Department, their civil rights division, had simultaneously launched an investigation into Lloyd Jowers' claims. I guess they seemed legitimate enough.

Speaker 2 But also, this investigation entailed claims made by a former FBI agent named Donald Wilson.

Speaker 2 And Wilson said that he had been, I guess he had been, one of the people who had searched through the Mustang that James O'Reilly in, and that he had found some papers in this Mustang that had info about the JFK assassination.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 I think Donald Wilson's like, how can I get people to listen? JFK.

Speaker 2 He also said that the name Raul was mentioned in it as well in these papers.

Speaker 2 And so the Justice Department starts looking into it and they concluded in a report in 2000 that this is all just kind of BS to paraphrase.

Speaker 3 Yeah, basically.

Speaker 3 He's out for a book deal is what they concluded.

Speaker 3 Percy Foreman, the original attorney for James Orray,

Speaker 3 as far as he was concerned, he thought Ray acted alone.

Speaker 3 His biographer, William Bradford Huey, also said, yeah, I think he acted alone and he was trying to just become become a bigger criminal and like impress larger criminals that he was a valuable guy to work with.

Speaker 3 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 There was an investigative reporter, too, who investigated James Errol Ray, as investigative reporters do. His name was George McMillan.

Speaker 2 He interviewed a bunch of Ray's fellow prisoners from the Missouri prison that he broke out of in 1967. And they were like, yeah, he was a huge drug dealer in prison.
Like he was rolling in it.

Speaker 2 One of them claimed that he was able to smuggle smuggle out sixty five hundred dollars from the prison yeah and in today's money that's about sixty thousand dollars yeah so that alone if true satisfies that really big question about how could he this petty criminal support himself for a year on the lamb 60k can go a long way especially if you're committing other crimes um

Speaker 2 but yeah it sounds like he blew a lot of it on bartending school and dance lessons still you could live for a year on 60k no problem yeah And he had to buy some of that camera equipment because he tried to be a porn director in Mexico.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 so I guess we're at the point now where we can kind of talk a little bit about, you know, had the sliding doors gone another way and had that march gone forward on April 4th and maybe James Lorray doesn't get that shot,

Speaker 3 what would have happened had King been around?

Speaker 3 I guess we'll talk at first about what happened since that did occur was that he was an instant martyr.

Speaker 3 You know, for all practical purposes, he was sainted in that moment. It was just so sudden and it was so violent.
And

Speaker 3 the polling, you know, we talked about polling in episode one about how white Americans felt about him.

Speaker 3 In 1966, people polled 36% of all Americans had a favorable opinion of King, 27% of white America. And in 2011,

Speaker 3 that number had gone to 93% of white Americans had a favorable view of King, and 81% of all-American adults said he had a positive impact on the U.S. So that's from 66 to 2011.

Speaker 3 But that was also happening at the time, like in the days and months before and after. There was a stark difference, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, there was an almost immediate change in opinion of him after he died.

Speaker 2 It was like the band Cinderella said, you don't know what you got till it's gone.

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 2 There was this just complete happenstance study that had been carried out in February and March of 1968, where they sent 10,000 surveys to college and university trustees, I guess to take a pulse on the university and college trustee subculture

Speaker 2 that asked, among other things, how they felt about Martin Luther King, how they felt about his views, how much they aligned with their own views. And after MLK was assassinated,

Speaker 2 they went through and they separated the surveys that they'd received before his death and after his death. And there was a stark difference.

Speaker 2 Before he was assassinated, 36% of the respondents said that they held similar views to King. After the assassination, that rose to 50%.

Speaker 2 This is within a couple weeks.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Before the assassination, 30%...

Speaker 2 more than 30% said that King's views were very unlike theirs. Afterward, it dropped down to 19%.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 it was happening in in real time, and we know that thanks to that poll.

Speaker 2 And it's really hard to overstate the effect, the immediate effect that his assassination had on the conscience of the United States.

Speaker 2 I think it really made a lot of probably everyday racist Americans really rethink themselves. You know, that at the time you could dislike Martin Luther King Jr.
He was alive.

Speaker 2 He was railing against Vietnam and going on about poor people and everything, but now he's gone, murdered. And just something like that can really shock people into

Speaker 2 focusing more on themselves and on their viewpoints than otherwise you would.

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3 I mean, one thing that definitely came out of this was Lyndon Johnson kind of used this to get the Fair Housing Act of 1968 passed. It had failed in 66 and 67.

Speaker 3 So it wasn't a bill that looked like it had an immediate future. So he kind of did the same thing with the Civil Rights Act of 64, right after JFK was assassinated.

Speaker 3 So, you know, very politically savvy to kind of get these things passed through when the nation would have been more on board with that and politicians would have been more on board.

Speaker 3 Maybe wouldn't have been able to get it passed through in 68. And then he had already announced that he wasn't running

Speaker 3 for re-election before the assassination.

Speaker 3 So given what happened with Nixon and then Reagan coming in, if King had lived, it's doubtful that he would have had the kind of relationship that he had with Johnson, with those two guys.

Speaker 2 Yeah. But remember also that he and Johnson had already had a rift because of MLK's more open vocal stance against Vietnam.
Yeah. And, you know, he would have definitely kept railing against Vietnam.

Speaker 2 So that rift would have widened even further.

Speaker 2 And also general Americans' opinions of him probably would have declined even further because remember after that 1967 Vietnam speech, his popularity, especially among white Americans, just plummeted, in part because he called the U.S.

Speaker 2 government the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. That's a pretty direct shot against

Speaker 2 the government. And if you are all about the government and this

Speaker 2 black civil rights leader saying stuff like that, you're going to take your angst out on the black civil rights leader who's saying it rather than stopping and questioning whether he's right.

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure. A lot of people people point out that like the the uh he would have continued to work for civil rights for black

Speaker 3 Americans, but um also may have started um championing the cause of the LGBTQ rights as a community. Um Coretta Scott King vocally supported this stuff, you know, after his passing.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 Martin Luther King Jr. worked very closely with a gentleman named Bayard Rustin.

Speaker 3 an openly gay civil rights

Speaker 3 advocate who

Speaker 3 could have kept himself in the closet, but very much was out. And so people think that, yeah, King probably would have taken up that cause as well later on.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we did an episode from 2015 on the March on Washington. We talked about Bayard Rustin a lot.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 He's also often compared to Nelson Mandela. Had MLK lived,

Speaker 2 people say like he might have followed some sort of trajectory similar to Nelson Mandela's.

Speaker 2 But Mandela became president of South Africa. Would MLK have ever run for president? From what I saw, most historians say probably not.
That was never an aspiration of his.

Speaker 2 And in fact, he actually turned down an offer to run on a third-party ticket, the People's Party ticket, for the 1968 election with a pediatrician, the author of the very famous baby book, Dr.

Speaker 2 Benjamin Spock, who had turned anti-war activist as his vice president.

Speaker 2 So he probably would not have ever run for president, but he still would have remained a very potent, powerful voice for civil rights for everybody. But

Speaker 2 had he not been assassinated, I don't think his legacy would be anything like it is today.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 How great, though, would it have been to be able to source a King Spock 68 t-shirt or bumper sticker?

Speaker 2 I guess somebody

Speaker 2 like dummied that up or else

Speaker 2 it got far enough that somebody made buttons because I saw some

Speaker 2 image of that on the internet.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I don't know if it was made up or not. You can't tell these days, you know.

Speaker 3 You can't.

Speaker 3 And then this all culminated finally with Martin Luther King Jr., the national holiday. The campaign for that federal holiday began just a few days after he was killed in 1968.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 it would be

Speaker 3 installed. in 1983.
It took a little while.

Speaker 3 Representative John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan, reintroduced that legislation every single year with the backing of the Congressional Black Caucus, which he helped found, and it was denied every single year until 15 years later when President Ronald Reagan signed that bill, making the third Monday in January a federal holiday.

Speaker 3 And then it was first observed in 1986 by everybody very famously except for Arizona.

Speaker 3 They were the last holdout. I remember this happening very well.

Speaker 2 Oh, me too.

Speaker 3 Mainly because of the great, great song, By the Time I Get to Arizona by Public Enemy that came out. So we got that out of it, which is pretty great.
But the NFL was like, you know what?

Speaker 3 You're not getting the Super Bowl in 1993.

Speaker 3 And then after that, they said, all right, we'll get on board.

Speaker 3 So we can have a Super Bowl.

Speaker 2 Whatever it takes. Buy anything that's necessary.

Speaker 3 Arizona, get it together.

Speaker 2 They did. That was way back in 1993.

Speaker 2 Those policymakers are all dead and gone by now.

Speaker 3 I know. I lived in Arizona.

Speaker 2 i love that place oh yeah that's right yuma right yeah do you ever take the 310

Speaker 3 uh

Speaker 2 no no trains uh okay well since i made chuck laugh i think that we should end on a high note here and uh say that it's time for listener mail

Speaker 3 that's right by pointing out a josh mass error oh great so sorry let's do it uh hey guys always laugh when hearing when you quickly correct yourselves before the emails start I didn't hear that one today though, and I'm sure you'll get more than just this email.

Speaker 3 Actually, Andrew, we didn't. You were the only one that caught this.

Speaker 2 Oh, nice.

Speaker 3 Way to go, Andrew. This was in the

Speaker 3 what would this have been?

Speaker 3 GPS, I guess. Okay.
Oh, by the way, I never posted that,

Speaker 3 what do you call it when things intersect? The Venn diagram that I sent you that said bingo. I need to put that on our Instagram.
Yeah, please do. I'll do it.

Speaker 3 Hey, guys, when Josh was describing the 2D trilateration

Speaker 3 circles circles and distance from Denver, he said to draw a circle around the named city with a diameter of distance described, but that would be a circle half too small.

Speaker 3 You need a circle with a radius for that distance or a diameter of twice that radius.

Speaker 3 Your compass would be set to the width of the distance you are from the city, and you draw that circle, which would give you a circle around a city where every point on that circle is that described distance from city center point.

Speaker 2 That makes sense.

Speaker 3 And this is from an electrical engineer in Knoxville, Tennessee, Andrew White, who said it makes me happy to listen and learn from you all each day.

Speaker 3 So I trust you, Andrew, because you're an electrical engineer.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Andrew White, the fastest compass in Tennessee.

Speaker 2 Thanks a lot, Andrew. I totally get that.
That was very well explained. Better than I explained it, for sure.

Speaker 2 And if you want to be like Andrew and correct my math, there's not really much sport in it, but you can still do it anyway by sending us an email to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com.

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