CHAPTER 2

By the time I had digested these and other books on the JFK assassination, I knew that the reality I lived was vastly more complicated than I could ever have imagined. I was set on figuring out what was going on. Obviously there had been a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. Was the same true for the other momentous assassinations of the '60's? Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis on April 4, 1968 under suspicious circumstances. The local police quickly found a bundle thrown next to a store, which among other things contained a rifle. Whoever shot MLK Jr. seemed to be a very careless person to say the least, or the bundle had been planted there to draw the attention away from the real assassin. A few months later, James Earl Ray was arrested in England and brought back to the U.S. to stand trial for the murder. His first lawyer was all set to go to trial contesting the accusation when Ray suddenly was approached by a Texas attorney, Percy Foreman, who told him that his present attorney was no good and that if he stuck with him "he would fry". Ray, in a somewhat fateful decision, decided to throw his lot in with Foreman instead. When trial approached, Ray was talked into pleading guilty, after a "full court press" from Foreman. He was promised that he would get a pardon after two, three years if he went along with the scheme, a promise which was reneged on quickly after he was locked in to his guilty plea. He tried for the rest of his life to get a new trial, without success, claiming he had been framed for the MLK murder and that Foreman was part of the framing cabal. During Ray's fight for a new trial, Mark Lane became his attorney and quickly zeroed in on the weak points in the case built by the Memphis police, vividly described in his book "Murder in Memphis". During his stay in Memphis, Ray had rented a room at a local flop-house, across the street from MLK's hotel. The police desperately needed an eye-witness to identify Ray as the suspect running from the scene shortly after the deed was done,, and they zeroed in on a married couple, Grace and Charles Stephens, who lived in a room at the flop-house.

Charles Stephens agreed that the suspect was indeed James Earl Ray and the police now had their corroboration. The only problem was that his wife claimed, that her husband had been drunk at the time. Lane found her in 1977 at a state mental institution in Bolivar, Tennessee, where she had been living since 1968 under the name of Grace Walden. She looked like she had been at a mental hospital for a decade but was remarkably alert and far from being a mental case. She was lucid and quite certain of the events of April 4, 1968. During Lane's interview with her, she again reiterated that her husband could not have identified Ray, since he was both drunk and furthermore didn't have his eye-glasses on at the time. As they were talking, a woman employee of the institution approached and told Lane he could not talk to Grace. Another employee agreed. They both demanded the tape of the interview. The switch board operator was the next one on the scene. She said: "You are not allowed to talk to Grace. No one is. At my switch board I have a note from the administrator, she is not to receive any visitors or any telephone calls without being cleared by the administrator."

When asked whether this rule applied to any person at the institution other than Grace , she acknowledged that the rule indeed was valid only for Grace Walden. Lane escaped with his tape and later was able to help Mrs. Stephens out of the mental institution with the help of the local religious community.

At the time of the HSCA congressional inquiry of 1978, Ray was invited to address the committee. After having done so, he was faced with a transcript of an interview with Alexander Anthony Eist, a veteran English police officer, who claimed to have been assigned to guard James Earl Ray at the Canon Row Police Station in London. He revealed how he had gained Ray's confidence and had been told that Ray hated blacks, especially MLK, and that Ray had personally shot King. While questions and answers from the transcript were read into the record at the inquiry, Lane got a phone call from an English barrister, then visiting his cousin in California. Lane asked for permission to leave the session for a moment and was so granted. Over the phone, he was told by the barrister: "Mr. Eist has been dismissed from the Metropolitan Police force in London in disgrace under charges of theft and perjury. He was investigated by A-10 of the Internal Police Branch of the Corruption Department of Scotland Yard, and they concluded, that he was guilty of corruption. The prosecutor, Henry Pownell, recently has charged in open court, that the witness was "a corrupt police official, a disgrace to the English police force".

Lane managed to torpedo this HSCA hoax with the testimony so timely delivered, but the committee pretended to have nothing to do with the dastardly deed.

When Lane had to abandon the case, he was replaced by William F. Pepper, an American attorney based in London, who spent decades securing new testimony and evidence. He tried hard to get a new trial for James Earl Ray, all ably described in his book "Orders to kill". His every move was blocked by local and federal authorities, and finally he was moved to try to get the new evidence before the public in a television trial of no legal consequence. Thames Television of London in 1993 picked up the production of the trial with real witnesses and real evidence. Pepper was defending Ray while the prosecution was handled by Hickman Ewing, an attorney from Memphis, later to reach considerable fame in the Clinton impeachment drama. During the trial Pepper managed to show, that there had been surveillance of MLK during every second of his visit to Memphis. This was performed by federal authorities hoping to "pick up dirt" on MLK. The Memphis police man, who testified to this effect, was later frozen out of the police force. African- American cops and firefighters were surreptitiously ordered away from the area surrounding MLK's hotel. Agent provocateurs were shown to have caused the violence during the first march in Memphis, which caused MLK to want to return for a more peaceful march. Pepper also developed evidence that a Special Forces Alpha 184 team was in Memphis on April 4, 1968, placed on rooftops surrounding MLK's hotel, ready to take action should the contracted civilian team not succeed in killing MLK. A jury found for Pepper and against the prosecution, but Pepper could still not budge the court system in Memphis. James Earl Ray died without ever having gotten a new trial.

Philip H. Melanson. Ph.D., investigated in depth the circumstances surrounding the Robert F. Kennedy assassination on June 4, 1968, exactly two months after MLK was murdered. Sirhan Sirhan had been caught red-handed shooting at RFK, it seemed to be an easily solved case. Sirhan was the assassin and he was motivated by hatred of Kennedy because of RFK bias in favor of the Israelis in the Arab-Israeli conflict. But like the other assassinations of the '60s, a close look at the evidence produced disturbing evidence. According to the coroner, Kennedy had been hit by three bullets, all fired from within an inch of his body. Sirhan could be shown to never have been closer than three feet from the Senator. Sirhan's gun contained eight bullets but nine bullets were found. Witnesses related meeting a fleeing girl in a polka-dot dress saying: "We shot him"! Asked who was shot, the answer was "Senator Kennedy"!

When Sirhan was apprehended, he acted like he was in trance. He has to this day not been able to recall his actions during the melee that produced Kennedy's death. In custody Sirhan was checked by an eminent psychiatrist who concluded that he was easily hypnotizable. Sirhan was made to behave like a monkey swinging from the bars of the cell. Kennedy was known to reject body guards, but when he had completed his victory speech at Ambassador Hotel, he was approached by a guard, Thane Eugene Cesar, a late substitute for the regular guard. Cesar's political persuasion was later shown to be of right wing character. The guard guided him through the pantry, falling in behind the senator. Needless to say, Cesar was armed with a gun of the same caliber as Sirhan's gun. In 1988 Melanson compelled LAPD to release old files regarding the Kennedy controversy, only to find that 2,400 photos and other precious evidence had been destroyed by the department, evidence that would have revealed a conspiracy behind the murder of Senator Kennedy.