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- [00:02]
Vanessa Richardson
Hi listeners, it's Vanessa.
- [00:03]
Narrator / Crime House Promo Host
Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series the First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon
- [00:31]
Vanessa Richardson
Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [00:41]
Crime House Promo Voice
This is crime house.
- [00:47]
Narrator / Crime House Promo Host
On the evening of April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Walked out onto the second floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in in Memphis, Tennessee. He was just getting some fresh air before dinner. Nothing about the moment should have been historic. He leaned against the railing, relaxed, and called down to friends in the parking lot below. And then, at 6:01pm the world changed. A single shot tore through the evening. King's body snapped backward and crumpled onto the concrete. Within minutes, sirens filled the street. Within hours, cities across the country were burning with grief and rage. Eventually, investigators said they had their man, James Earl Ray, a fugitive with a rifle and a reason to hate King. But it didn't take long for the case to start coming apart. There were inconsistent ballistics tests, witnesses whose accounts didn't match, and one name that kept coming up again and again. A name that wasn't James Earl Ray, which left a lot of people asking the same question. Ray went to prison for killing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But was he really the man who pulled the trigger? From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations, and murderous doctors, these aren't just theories. They're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. A hi, I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. These cases are wild and I want to hear what you think at the end of each episode. Leave a comment wherever you listen. Be sure to rate, review and follow so we can continue building this community together. And if you want even more, subscribe to Crime House plus and get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes show Page. Today I'm digging into a murder that changed the course of American history. The the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On April 4, 1968, a single gunshot ended the life of the country's most famous civil rights leader. Within days, authorities were chasing an escaped convict named James Earl Ray across the world. Months later, Ray confessed. Then he turned around and insisted he'd been set up. For decades, King's family, investigators, journalists, and conspiracy theorists have all argued over what actually happened that day. Was it really just one man with a rifle? Or was it the biggest cover up in American history? All that and more coming up.
- [04:03]
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- [04:33]
Narrator / Crime House Promo Host
the night of April 3, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Stepped up to speak in Memphis, Tennessee. A heaviness hung over the room. You wouldn't have known it from his voice, but King was absolutely exhausted. He was only 39 years old, and he'd been carrying the civil rights movement for more than a decade. The work had taken him from the deep south to the nation's capital. Along the way, he'd been threatened, stabbed, arrested, and forced to watch police rain violence down on peaceful protesters who'd come out to support him. But he hadn't come to that Memphis church to dwell on the past. He'd come to keep fighting. The city's black sanitation workers had been pushed to their breaking point. Underpaid, overworked, and treated with contempt. And King was there to stand with them. That night, he gave what would become one of the most famous speeches of his life. As he talked about struggle, sacrifice, and the promised land, he sounded almost prophetic. No one in that room knew they were hearing his final public address. By the next evening, King would be dead. And while one man would eventually take the blame for pulling the trigger, plenty of people would come to believe the truth was a lot more complicated. But the story that ended in Memphis had begun almost 40 years earlier and hundreds of miles away. Martin Luther King, Jr. Was born on January 15, 19, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. From an early age, he had A front row seat to the fight for civil rights. His father was a pastor, and young King watched him push back against segregation in small, everyday moments. In 1936, the elder king led several hundred black Atlantans in a march to city hall to protest voting discrimination. For King, the lesson stuck. Faith and activism could go hand in hand, and by high school, he was finding his own voice. He joined the debate team and quickly built a reputation as a powerful speaker. He had a deep baritone, a huge vocabulary, and the kind of presence that made a room go quiet. He moved fast after that. At 15, he left high school early to enroll at Morehouse College in Atlanta. He graduated in 1948 with a degree in social media sociology, then followed his father into the ministry. He studied at a seminary in Pennsylvania before earning a doctorate in theology at Boston University. Boston changed his life in another way, too. While he was there, he met Coretta Scott, a student at the New England Conservatory of Music. They married, and once King finished his doctorate, the couple headed back south. At just 25, King became pastor of Doug Dexter Avenue Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama. And it was Montgomery that turned a young preacher into a national figure. In December 1955, an activist named Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. In response, black ministers and community leaders formed the Montgomery improvement association to run a citywide bus boycott. 26 year old K. King was chosen as president. The idea was to force change through protest alone. No riots, no violence. But make no mistake, the strategy wasn't passive. It took remarkable discipline and sacrifice from thousands of ordinary black residents who walked, carpooled and rearranged their whole lives. For more than a year, the city fought back hard. In February 1956, King was arrested, one of dozens of boycott leaders in the city hauled into court. But the sacrifice paid off. That November, the supreme Court ordered Montgomery to integrate its buses. It was a massive victory, and it made King one of the most visible leaders in the movement. In 1957, he helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC, and became its first president. The group preached nonviolent resistance to Jim Crow laws across the South. The boycott had proven King's methods could work. But what came next would show just how brutal the backlash could get. In 1963, King and the SCLC joined other civil rights groups in Birmingham, Alabama, to organize sit ins and challenge the city's segregation laws. The campaign drew national attention when TV cameras caught police police turning fire hoses and attack dogs on peaceful demonstrators. Suddenly, viewers across the country were forced to See what black Americans had been living with all along. King was arrested again, and from his cell, he wrote one of his most influential works, the Letter from Birmingham Jail. In it, he argued that, quote, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, and. And reminded his supporters that freedom is never simply handed over. It has to be demanded. The campaign worked. By the end of 1963, Birmingham's infamous police chief, Bull Connor, had been forced out of office, and the city began desegregating its public spaces. That same year, King helped organize the march on Washington for jobs and freedom. Around 250,000 people gathered in the capital to demand civil and economic rights for black Americans. It was there that King delivered his legendary I have a dream speech. By now, his voice was impossible to ignore. But the more visible King became, the more danger followed him. Even though King preached nonviolence, he'd been getting death threats for more than a decade. In 1950, a New Jersey tavern owner refused. Refused to serve him and his friends, then pulled out a gun and fired to drive them off. In 1956, during the bus boycott, someone bombed his home. Then, in 1958, the violence nearly killed him. On September 20th, King was in Harlem, New York, signing copies of his first book, stride toward freedom. In the middle of the signing, a woman walked up, asked if he was Martin Luther King, then plunged a letter opener deep into his chest. He was rushed to the hospital with the blade still lodged in his body. Doctors managed to save him, but just barely. The chief surgeon later explained how close it had been. The tip of the letter opener was resting right against his aorta. If King had so much as sneezed, the blade could have torn the artery and killed him. The attacker was isola Curry, a 442-year-old woman struggling with severe mental illness. Curry was black herself, but she'd come to believe the civil rights movement was conspiring against her, keeping her from holding a job. And as the face of that movement, King became the target of her rage. Even after the incident, King publicly forgave her. He said she needed help, not punishment. In the end, a grand jury indicted her for attempted murder, but she was found unfailing fit to stand trial. She was committed to a state psychiatric hospital. But King's message became part of how he understood his own mission. He knew he could be hurt. He knew he could be killed. And yet he still believed bloodshed had no place in the fight for equal rights. Over the next decade, King helped win some of the biggest civil rights victories in American history. In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. That same year, King received the Nobel Peace Prize. At 35 years old, he was the youngest recipient at the time. Then, in 1965, he marched from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights. Within months, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights act into law. But segregation and voting laws were only part of the picture. King had come to believe that real equality wasn't possible without economic justice justice, that legal rights didn't mean much to people who were still trapped in poverty. That belief brought him to Memphis in 1968. King's fight there grew out of a tragedy. On February 1, 1968, two black sanitation workers named Echel Cole and Robert Walker were crushed to death by a malfunctioning garbage truck. Four years earlier, two other black workers had died the exact same, exact same way. The city had done nothing to replace the faulty trucks in between, which meant Cole and Walker's deaths were completely preventable, and the dangerous equipment was only part of it. Black sanitation workers in Memphis made barely a dollar an hour, were routinely forced to work unpaid overtime, had no uniforms, no restrooms, and no union. Many of them had full time jobs and still relied on welfare and food stage stamps to feed their families. So on February 12, 1968, around 1,300 Memphis sanitation workers walked off the job. They wanted decent pay, safer conditions, and recognition of their union. At first, it looked like they'd win fast. On February 22, the city council voted to recognize the union and raise wages. But the decision wasn't the council's to make. Mayor Henry Loeb was the only one with the power to recognize the union, and he rejected the vote outright. The next day, the workers and their supporters marched to city hall in protest, and police met them with mace and tear gas. But instead of backing down, the workers got organized. Within days, a local minister named Reverend James Lawson formed a coalition called Community on the Move for equality. About 150 local ministers joined, pledging to go to jail if that's what it took. By early March, hundreds of high school and college students had joined the movement, too. King had been watching it all from afar and decided to lend his voice. On March 18, he spoke at a Memphis rally of 15,000 people. He told the strikers that, quote, nothing worthwhile is gained without sacrifice, and promised to come back and lead a march through the city. He kept that promise on March 28, when more than 22,000 people turned out. But King and the other organizers arrived late. And while the crowd was waiting, the mood started to turn. Then it boiled over. Some marchers started smashing windows and looting stores, and police moved in hard, hard and fast. The organizers called the whole march off. King slipped away to a nearby motel with his close friend and fellow civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy. At that point, there wasn't much they could do but watch the whole thing fall apart on tv. Before long, it turned deadly. Police shot and killed a 16 year old boy named Larry Payne, stormed a church where protesters had taken shelter and they filled it with tear gas. Then Governor Buford Ellington called in the National Guard at Mayor Loeb's request. The next day, King flew home to Atlanta. The local press blamed him for the violence and declared that the age of nonviolent protest was over. But King wasn't done with Memphis. He vowed to come back one more time to prove that nonviolence still had power. But this time he wouldn't just be risking his reputation, he'd be risking his life.
- [16:11]
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- [17:18]
Narrator / Crime House Promo Host
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- [17:19]
Vanessa Richardson
Please support our show and tell them our show sent you.
- [17:23]
Crime House Promo Voice
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- [18:18]
Narrator / Crime House Promo Host
No purchase necessary. VGW Group prohibited by law 21 terms and conditions apply. By the spring of 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Had gone from a pretty preacher's son to a young pastor to the face of the civil rights movement. He'd turned Rosa Parks arrest into the Montgomery bus boycott and carried non violence from Birmingham to Washington to Selma. He'd survived arrests, bombings and a stabbing that nearly killed him. And now, in Memphis, he was fighting for the city's sanitation workers. But the great champion of non violence was about to meet the most violent end imaginable. In his final days, King did something Coretta never forgot. Just before he flew out, he arranged for red carnations to be delivered to her. That wasn't unusual. King sent his wife flowers whenever he could. What was strange was that these flowers were artificial. When Coretta asked if there'd been a mistake, King said no. He'd wanted to give her something she could keep forever, almost as if he sensed it might be his last chance. Even getting to Memphis had been unsettling. King's flight out of Atlanta that morning sat on the Runway, delayed. There'd been a bomb threat against him, and the airline had guarded the plane overnight and rechecked every bag before it could take off. When he finally landed on April 3, the plan was for him to rest. He'd asked his friend Ralph Abernathy to speak in his place that night at Mason Texas Temple. But when Abernathy saw how big and electric the crowd was, he called King and urged him to come anyway. King agreed, and standing in front of that crowd, he sounded like a man staring straight at his own death. That speech is now remembered as one of the most haunting King ever gave. A thunderstorm was rolling through Memphis that night, rattling the windows of Mason Temple, and King opened by thanking the crowd for turning out in spite of a storm warning. As he spoke, thunder kept cracking outside, breaking over his words like punctuation. He talked about shattered dreams and reminded the crowd that Gandhi had been assassinated before the country. He fought for was ever truly free. Then King turned to his own brush with death. He told the story of the 1958 stabbing and the surgeon who said he'd been one sneeze away from dying. He remembered the letters that poured in afterward, especially one from a little girl who wrote that she was just glad he hadn't sneezed. By the end, he wasn't hiding from the possibility of dying at all. He told the crowd that, like anyone, he'd love to live a long life. But he might not get to. He said he'd been to the mountaintop and he'd seen the promised land. He said he might not make it there with them, but his people would. Then he finished. The room erupted. No one there could have imagined what was coming next. The next day, April 4th, King seemed lighter. The owner of the Lorraine Motel later said he was almost giddy. He went to a staff meeting, had lunch with Abernathy and visited his brother, A.D. king, who was staying at the motel, too. That evening, all three were supposed to have dinner with a local Minister. Just before 6pm they stepped out of room 306. On the balcony, King paused to tease his friend Jesse Jackson for not dressing properly for dinner. From the lot below, his driver called up to him to grab a coat since it was getting chilly. A musician named Ben Branch was standing nearby, set to play at an event that night. King leaned over the rail and asked him to play the song Take My Hand, Precious Lord. The mood on that balcony was easy and warm. At 6:01pm King leaned against the railing to take it all in. Then a single shot rang out. The bullet from a Remington rifle struck King in the right cheek, shattered his jaw and lodged in his shoulder. The force was so violent that it tore off his necktie as he fell. His friends rushed to him. Abernathy cradled King's head while they waited for the ambulance, trying to hold on to a man who'd spent his whole life holding so many other people together. At 6:15pm King reached St. Joseph's Hospital, unconscious but alive. As doctors fought to save him, his heart gave out. At 7:05pm Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Was pronounced dead back in Atlanta. Coretta had just gotten home from shopping with their oldest daughter when the phone rang. Her husband had been shot. She had a feeling right away that the wound was fatal, but she stayed calm for their four children. She rushed to catch a flight to Memphis, but before she could board, she got the worst call of her life. King was gone by then. The news was everywhere. The man who had preached non violence his whole life had been shot dead. For a lot of people it was unbearable. Riots erupted in more than 100 cities and more than 40 people died. But there was a flicker of hope inside the grief. In Memphis, the work King started kept going. Four days after his death on April 8, the sanitation march went ahead with Coretta walking in her husband's place. Eight days after that, the workers and the city finally reached a deal. King was gone. But his fight didn't die with him. King's funeral carried that same painful mix of grief and purpose. As the family planned the service, Coretta wondered who could possibly deliver the eulogy. Then someone had an idea use a recording of a sermon he'd preached just a few months earlier. It was perfect. In that sermon, King had talked about his own death and what he wanted save said at his funeral. He didn't want anyone dwelling on his Nobel Prize or his long list of awards. He wanted to be remembered as a man who gave his life serving others. After the service, King took part in one final march. A mule drawn wagon carried his coffin through the streets of Atlanta and more than 150,000 people followed behind. But while the country mourned, investigators were racing to answer one urgent question. Who killed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The first big break came at the crime scene itself. Moments after the shooting, witnesses saw a white man drop a bundle in the doorway of a business next to the rooming house across from the motel, then speed off in a white Mustang. Inside that bundle was a room Remington rifle. The FBI dusted the rifle for fingerprints and went looking for a match. They scoured tens of thousands of prints from white fugitives until on April 19, one card finally stood out. A 40 year old escaped convict named James Earl Ray, who'd been on the run for almost a year. Ray was a drifter who'd spent most of his life bouncing between odd jobs and prison cells. He was born in Alton, Illinois in 1928 and by his 30s he'd racked up a string of charges across the country. He was paroled from one sentence in 1959, then went right back to robbing stores, which landed him a 20 year sentence at the Missouri State Penitentiary. Even that couldn't hold him. He tried to escape twice before finally pulling it off. In April 1967. He hid in a truck that was hauling bread out of the prison bakery. What he did the next year was strange. He bounced from Canada to Mexico to Los Angeles, where he took dance lessons, enrolled in bartending school and even tried to Reinvent himself as a director of pornographic films. About a month before the murder, he paid cash to have a surgeon reshape his nose. And somewhere along the way, this small time criminal came into as much as $30,000 money investigators were never able to fully explain. Then on April 4, 1968, he surfaced in Memphis. Under the alias John Willard. He rented a room in a boarding house just steps from the Lorraine Motel. Hours later, King was dead and Ray had vanished. For more than two months, Ray stayed a step ahead of the law with a strange winding escape. After hearing on the radio that police were hunting for a man with a white Ford Mustang like his, Ray ditched the car and made his way into Canada by bus and train. There he got hold of a stolen identity and used it to apply for a Canadian passport under the name Ramon George Sneed. But a clerical error nearly tripped him up. The passport came back misspelled, turning Sneed into Snea. Rather than risk it, Ray had a second passport made with the correct spelling. In early May, he used it to fly from Toronto to London. From there he hoped to reach Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, or possibly South Africa. Both countries were still ruled by a white minority and neither one had an extradition treaty with the United States. At the time, Ray thought they would be sympathetic to his case. But he never made it. On June 8, two months after the assassination, Ray tried to board a flight out of London when an airport officer noticed something odd. He wasn't carrying one Canadian passport, but two. One in each spelling of the name. That was all it took. Ray was arrested on the spot. And on July 19th he was flown back to the United States under FBI guard. But bringing Ray home didn't close the case. When Ray landed back on American soil, he was supposed to go straight to trial for King's murder. The trial never happened. On March 10, 1969, 41 year old Ray confessed and pleaded guilty. His attorney, Percy Foreman had negotiated the deal. In exchange for the plea, Ray avoided the death penalty and accepted a 99 year prison sentence that left one huge, huge question hanging over the why? On the surface, the answer seemed simple. Ray was a white man and he was a committed racist who didn't bother to hide it. He admired Adolf Hitler and he'd volunteered for George Wallace's presidential campaign. Wallace was a segregationist Alabama governor who stood for everything King fought against. But what Ray did next would keep this case open for the rest of the his life. Just three days after his guilty plea, Ray recanted. He now claimed there was another man behind the murder, a shadowy figure he knew only as Raul. For the next two decades, he fought to withdraw his plea and get the trial he'd never had. One of the lawyers who joined that effort was a notorious white supremacist named J.B. stoner. Then, in 1977, right in the middle of that long fight, Ray pulled off one more surprise. He broke out of prison. He spent three days on the run before he was recaptured and earned another year on his sentence for the trouble. On April 23, 1998, James Earl Ray died in prison at age 70. He'd contracted hepatitis C after being stabbed behind bars, which caused him to go into liver failure. But. But Ray's quick confession and his even quicker about face left behind a mystery that outlived him. And it's fueled decades of conspiracy theories.
- [30:06]
Vanessa Richardson
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- [31:10]
Narrator / Crime House Promo Host
4, 1968, the civil rights movement was shattered when Dr. Martin Luther Luther King Jr. Was shot to death in Memphis. As the country erupted in grief and rage, investigators zeroed in on James Earl Ray, an escaped convict who fled all the way to London before he was caught. Ray was brought home and confessed, but within days he recanted, claiming a mysterious man named Raul had set him up. And even after Ray died in 1998, plenty of people still doubted that the right man had gone to prison. Those doubts weren't new. They'd first gone public decades earlier, in 1977, when Ray hired a new lawyer named Jack Kershaw. Kershaw appeared before a congressional panel, the House Select Committee on assassinations and laid out a very different story. He said the whole thing revolved around Raul, a gun runner who'd been hired by the real assassins to get hold of the murder weapon. Instead of doing the job himself, Raul paid Ray to buy the rifle, stash it at the boarding house, and then go kill time at a movie. In Kershaw's telling, Ray followed the plan, except he skipped the movie and went to get a tire fixed instead. And that's when the real shooter grabbed the stashed gun and killed King. According to Ray, he only realized he'd been used when Raul Van vanished into thin air. His fingerprints were on the rifle. The man who'd hired him was gone, and Ray was sure he'd been left holding the bag for a murder he didn't commit. So he ran. The problem was, there was no proof. No receipt from an auto shop, no fresh tire on his Mustang, no witnesses, nothing to back up the new story. So it was no surprise the committee didn't find grounds to clear him. In fact, when the committee issued its final report in 1979, it concluded that James Earl Ray fired the single shot that killed Dr. King. But it added a major caveat. There was a likelihood that Ray hadn't acted entirely alone and that the murder may have grown out of a conspiracy that was hatched in St. Louis. The committee found no evidence that any U.S. government agency was involved, and that St. Louis lead was more concrete than it sounded. Investigators focused on two local businessmen, A patent attorney named John Sutherland and his associate, John Kaufman, who had allegedly put up a $50,000 bounty to have King killed. A St. Louis car thief named Russell Byers testified that Sutherland made him the offer directly, and the committee traced the two men to a bar called the Grapevine Tavern, a gathering spot for a far right political party. The tavern's owner was James Earl Ray's own brother, John. The committee could never prove the bounty actually reached Ray. Both Sutherland and Kaufman were dead by the time investigators came looking. But the money, the politics, and that family tie were enough to keep the theory alive for decades. So the hearing didn't clear Ray, but it did something almost as important. It caught the attention of the King family. And over time, they began to believe Ray might be innocent after all. The family's doubts didn't rest on Ray's words alone. Other details in the case had never sat right with them. Start with the murder weapon. The rifle found near the scene, covered in Ray's prints. Experts could never quite agree that the bullet that killed King had Actually come from it. The FBI tested the rifle right after the assassination, and the house committee tested it again in 1977. Both times, the results were inconclusive. The markings on test fired bullets Couldn't be matched to the deformed slug recovered from King's body. That didn't prove Ray was innocent, but it left room for doubt. Then there were the witnesses near King when the shot was fired. Ray's window at the rooming house looked out on the left side of the motel, but several people on the scene were still certain. The shot had come from a tangle of thick brush down below, facing the right side. King's own driver, Solomon Jones, said that in the seconds after the shot, he caught a glimpse of a figure moving in that brush. A reporter staying at the Lorraine said he heard the blast and saw a man crouched in the bushes. And then the brush vanished. Early the next morning, a city sanitation crew showed up and cut it all down. On orders from the police. The exact spot those witnesses had been pointing to Was cleared away before anyone could examine it. Decades later, people who doubted the official story said that didn't look like a cleanup. It looked like a crime scene being erased. And those weren't the only questions hanging over the case, because by the 1970s, a disturbing picture had come into focus. For years, people had suspected the government saw King as a threat, and it wasn't hard to see why. He was speaking out against segregation, against the exploitation of workers, and against the war in Vietnam. He was challenging the country on every front at once, and that terrified some of the most powerful men in America. I dug into all of this in a recent episode on COINTELPRO, the FBI's secret war on the American left. But okay, here's the short version. In early 1962, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy Authorized a wiretap on Stanley Levinson. He was a New York lawyer and one of King's closest advisors. Officially, the goal was to check whether Levinson had ties to the communist party. In practice, it was an easy way to listen in on King. King always insisted he exposed communism, but Kennedy authorized wiretaps on his home anyway. Before long, the communism angle fell away entirely, and the taps became a tool for digging into King's private life. The FBI used them to gather information to wreck his reputation, weaken his leadership, and pressure him into silence. Then, in 1964, King ran headfirst into FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who publicly branded him the most notorious liar in the country. Soon after, King received an anonymous letter that threatened to expose his alleged affairs and all but told him to take his own life. None of that proved the government had a hand in King's murder. But it proved something else. The federal government saw King as an enemy, One it was willing to spy on, threaten, and try to destroy. For anyone who already doubted the official story, all of this only deepened the suspicion. Then, in 1993, a man named Lloyd Jowers came forward with a story that seemed to blow the case wide open. Back in 1968, Jowers owned Jim's Grill, a tavern right below the boarding house where Ray rented his room in Memphis. For 25 years, Jowers told the same story. He was serving customers when King was shot. He didn't know much about the assassination, and he definitely wasn't involved. Then in December 1993, he went on national television and changed everything. Jowers now claimed that a Memphis produce dealer with mafia ties had paid him $100,000 to arrange King's murder. He said he used some of that money to hire a police officer as a trigger man, then pocketed the rest. In his version, a man named Raul tracked down the murder weapon, just like Ray had always said. And the hired hitman fired the fatal shot from the brush behind Jim's Grill. Jowers story left some glaring holes. Why would the Mafia bring in a Memphis tavern owner with no criminal record? Why would a police officer be the one to pull the trigger? But on one point, Jowers was clear. Ray didn't do it. And for the King family, that lined up with everything they'd come to suspect. In 1997, King's son Dexter visited Ray in prison and asked him point blank and on the record whether he'd killed his father. Ray said no, and Dexter told him the family believed him. So in 1999, the Kings took the next step. They filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Grant Lloyd Jowers. King v. Jowers went to trial in Memphis in November 1999. The King family presented more than 4,000 pages of evidence and called over 70 witnesses. They argued that the FBI, the mafia, and the Memphis police department had all taken part in an elaborate plot to kill King. And Jowers own attorneys basically agreed. They also argued that King had been the victim of a government conspiracy, with both sides telling more or less the same story. The jury took barely an hour to rule in the family's favor, finding that a conspiracy including government agencies had been behind King's death. The award, just $100. That was the token sum the family had asked for, and they gave it to Charity. They were never in it for the money. They wanted the record to say conspiracy. To the Kings, it was a breakthrough. Afterward, Dexter and Coretta told reporters the federal government had helped plan the assassination, then framed Ray as the shooter. When a reporter asked Dexter who the real killer was, he pointed to a Memphis police officer named Earl Clark. That accusation slotted Clark into the fight, final spot in an intricate conspiracy. According to the theory, Mafia figures paid Jowers to arrange the hit and put Raul in charge of the gun. Jowers, in turn, picked Officer Clark to fire the shot. The only thing Ray was guilty of was being an unwitting middleman in Raul's gun deal. Clark was never charged with anything. But the case was still far from settled, because by now, Jowers wasn't the only person claiming to know more than the official story led on. This second claim had actually surfaced a year before the Memphis trial. In March 1998, a former FBI agent named Donald Wilson went public, saying he'd been sitting on evidence for 30 years and that he was finally ready to talk. According to Wilson, back in April 1968, he was a brand new agent who happened to pass upon Ray's abandoned Mustang. He said that when he opened the passenger door, a small envelope of papers fell out. He claimed he grabbed them and kept them secret for three decades, afraid he'd get in trouble for opening the door in the first place. Wilson said that one of those papers was a torn page from a 1963 Dallas phone book with a handwritten entry for Jack Ruby. That's the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President Kennedy. The other was just two columns of handwritten words and numbers. Neither one seemed directly connected to King's death, but Wilson said that both carried the same name. Raul. There it was again. Ray and Jowers had both insisted a man named Raul was the gun runner. Now Wilson's papers had the same name on them. To conspiracy theorists, it felt like proof that Raul was real. By August 1998, the claims were getting too loud to ignore. So the Attorney General ordered the Department of Justice to take a fresh look at the assassination and decide whether any of the conspiracy theories held up. Investigators spent the next two years on it, even as King v. Jowers played out in civil court. When the DOJ released its findings, they were not kind to Lloyd Jowers. The report found that he had contradicted himself on nearly every major detail over the years. He'd named at least four different people as the assassin and described the shooter at Various times as black, white, and as a race he couldn't place. There were physical problems, too. If Jower's story were true, there should have been footprints in the mud behind Jim's grill. But the ground was clean, and the ballistic evidence suggested the shot couldn't have come from that spot at all. Worst of all, in private conversations without his lawyer present, Jowers walked back his own story. In one recorded talk with a state investigator, he called the whole conspiracy quote, bullshit. In the end, the DOJ saw Jowers not as a whistleblower, but as a fraud with a financial motive. And he wasn't the only one whose story collapsed under scrutiny. The Department of Justice found just as many problems with Donald Trump Wilson's account. Wilson kept changing his story. He gave different answers about when he first looked at the papers and when he realized they mattered. He also went back and forth on whether the documents had ever been stolen from him. And when investigators pulled the old crime scene photos of the Mustang, the passenger door Wilson said he'd opened so easily appeared to have been locked the whole time. The strangest part, even Ray didn't. By Wilson's story, you'd expect him to embrace it. Wilson's papers seemed to back up Ray's claim that Raul was real. But Ray flatly said the papers weren't his and never came from his car. The one person with the most to gain from Wilson being right didn't believe a word of it. The two men couldn't even agree on the name. Wilson's paper spelled it R A U, L. Ray always insisted it was spelled R A O. And that confusion ran through the entire search. For decades, Ray's team tried to track Raul down, and they could never pin down a single detail about him. Not his last name, his nationality, his address, his appearance. It all kept changing. In the end, the DOJ concluded that neither Jowers nor Wilson's claims held up and that there was no solid evidence a man named Raoul had ever played a part in King's assassination. But even that wasn't enough to put the doubts to rest. The DOJ report ran into skepticism the moment it landed. A lot of people found it strange that the Department of Justice, a federal agency, was the one deciding whether King had been killed by a federal agency. That looked like a glaring conflict of interest. And in the same report, the DOJ finally admitted what so many had long that King and other civil rights leaders had been the targets of intense government surveillance throughout the 1960s. On top of that, the ballistics still hadn't conclusively tied Ray's rifle to the shot that killed King. Even when Ray's own lawyers had the weapon retested with newer technology, their expert still couldn't say for certain whether it fired the fatal round. It's tempting to want a clean answer here. One man, one rifle. Case closed. But this case has never given anyone that kind of comfort. It's true that Jowers contradicted himself, that Wilson's story was full of holes, and that no one ever produced a credible Raoul. It's also true that King was watched, wiretapped and treated as as an enemy by powerful institutions in the very months before he was killed. Both of those things are real. And that's what makes this case so hard to close. So what do you think? Did one racist drifter act alone? Or did James Earl Ray have help, maybe from people who were supposed to be protecting the country? Head to the comments wherever you're listening and and tell me where you land. I'd love to hear it. Whatever you think. There's no doubt the King gave his life for equality, dignity and non violence. And yet so much of the conversation about him still circles back to the question of who ended it. But his legacy hasn't faded. Kids of every race still learn his words in school. His ideas are studied all over the world. And he's the only black American with his own federal holiday. And there may be more answers coming. After King's death, a Court sealed the FBI's surveillance records on him for 50 years, locking them away until 2027. But in July 2025, the federal government released more than 230,000 pages of those files early. King's own children didn't want that to happen. They wanted the records to be read carefully and in their full historical context. Historians who combed through them said the documents didn't reveal much about the assassination itself. And the most sensitive material, the actual FBI wiretap tapes and transcripts, is still sealed, set to stay that way until 2027. So until then, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Stays what it's always been solved, but never settled. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Come back next time. We'll hear another story about the real people at the center the of of the world's most notorious cults, conspiracies and criminal acts. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, Rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes wherever you get your podcasts. Your your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus. You'll get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes Crimes show page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson and is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios, this episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes team Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Pertzofsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Elena Johnson, Kaylee Pine and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening.
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Vanessa Richardson
Hi listeners, it's Vanessa.
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Vanessa Richardson
Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.