Nov. 11. 2006 Updated March 12, 2007

Members of the Warren Commission present their report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  L-R: John McCloy, J. Lee Rankin (General Counsel), Senator Richard Russell, Representative Gerald Ford, Chief Justice Earl Warren, President Lyndon B. Johnson, Allen Dulles, Senator John Sherman Cooper, and Representative Hale Boggs. Credit: LBJ Library photo by Cecil Stoughton

Warren Commission member Congressman Gerald Ford pressed the panel to change its description of the bullet wound in President Kennedy's back and place it higher to make "the magic bullet" theory plausible, enabling the Warren Commission to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman. Ford was J. Edgar Hoover's informant on the commission and did the FBI director's bidding to squelch the investigation from naming other assassins. When a Dallas County deputy constable heard shots coming from the nearby grassy knoll, he rushed there to find veteran CIA asset Bernard Barker, posing as a Secret Service agent. No Secret Service agents had been assigned to cover the grassy knoll and all accompanied President Kennedy to the hospital.

by Don Fulsom

At approximately 12:30 p.m. on Nov. 22 1963, in Dallas's downtown Dealey Plaza, a large and friendly crowd lined the street, cheering and waving excitedly at the approaching presidential motorcade. Riding in the third car – an oversized Lincoln with its Plexiglas "bubble" top removed – were President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, and Texas Gov. John Connally and his wife, Nellie. As the limousine carrying the Connallys and the Kennedys wound its way through the hospitable crowds, Nellie Connally turned to President Kennedy, who was seated behind her, and said, "Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you." Then the shots rang out.

Today, more than four decades later, the details on specifically how and by whom President Kennedy was assassinated are still open to question.

According to the report of the Warren Commission, released in September 1964 after a full year investigation, one single shooter – Lee Harvey Oswald – killed Kennedy and wounded Gov. Connally by firing three bullets from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

October 16, 2006

President Kennedy and Jackie arriving at Love Field,
Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963. Photo courtesy NARA.

New Orleans godfather Carlos Marcello – with Jimmy Hoffa as his bagman – funded Richard Nixon's 1960 presidential bid with $500,000 in cash stuffed in a suitcase. Later Marcello – known as the Big Daddy of the Big Easy – would be named a key conspirator in President Kennedy's assassination.

by Don Fulsom

At the start of the 1920s, marijuana use in America was concentrated in New Orleans – and its intoxicating vapors were mainly inhaled by migrant workers from Mexico, by blacks, and by a growing number of "low-class" whites. Sailors and immigrants from the Caribbean brought this "new" (Its known uses go back to 7,000 B.C.) drug into major southern U.S. ports – above all into the Crescent City.

Along with jazz, pot traveled north to Chicago, and then east to Harlem – where it soon became an indispensable part of the music scene, even entering the language of the black hits of the day (Louis Armstrong's "Muggles," Cab Calloway's "That Funny Reefer Man" and Fats Waller's "Viper's Drag").

A squat but muscular fireplug of a man, rising New Orleans mobster Carlos Marcello was perfectly placed to make boatloads of money from illegal marijuana shipped into his territory. In 1938, though, Marcello sold 23 pounds of pot to an undercover agent. Convicted and sentenced to one year in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, Marcello was also fined more than $75,000. Using his political influence, that particular "Reefer Man" was able to get the fine reduced to just $400. And he was out of prison in nine months. With Louisiana Mafia boss Sam Carolla pulling the strings, Gov. O.K. Allen – a former stooge of assassinated Sen. Huey Long – provided the leniency. Legend has it that Marcello eventually had a tailor sew a foot-long pocket into the left leg of his trousers, "which he would stuff with cash as he made his rounds through (Jefferson) Parish paying off the police one by one."

From pot dealing, police-and politician-corrupting street thug, Marcello graduated to godfather of New Orleans (and Dallas), governing a vast and violent criminal empire that brought in an estimated $2 billion-a-year. He succeeded Sam Carolla, who was deported to Sicily in 1947. Marcello quickly became a generous financial supporter of Richard Nixon; and, eventually, a suspect in the murder of Nixon's nemesis: President John F. Kennedy.

November 25, 2005

Ruby shooting Oswald (Sunday, November 24)
– Warren Commission Exhibit #2636

Contrary to the claims of conspiracy writers, Jack Ruby died telling the truth. There is no credible evidence he was part of a conspiracy. Ruby murdered Oswald for personal reasons – he wanted to show that ''Jews had guts''; he felt emotionally distraught about the Kennedys, and he wanted to fulfil his life long dream of becoming a real hero.

by Mel Ayton

In March of 1964, 52-year-old Jack Ruby was found guilty of the murder of John F. Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, and sentenced to die.

For 32 months, since the time he shot Oswald, Ruby had been locked in a windowless cell on the Dallas County Jail's corridor 6-M. A ''suicide watch'' guard looked in on him around the clock – a single exposed light bulb glared over his bed. Several times Ruby would make attempts on his own life.

Ruby could not tell night from day. He read every newspaper he could lay his hands on, eagerly sifting them for his name. He read dozens of books, including Perry Mason novels and the Warren Report, played cards with his guards, did physical exercises – and seemed out of his mind most of the time, according to jail staff.

Ruby was clearly tipping over the edge in his psychosis and paranoia. He rammed his head against the plaster walls and raved over and over about the suffering Jews who were being killed as revenge for his crime. Near the end, Ruby screamed that his prison guards were piping mustard gas into his cell. Later, when his doctors discovered that he was suffering from brain tumors and adenocarcinoma – a cancer that had spread swiftly through most of the cavities, ducts and glands of his body, Ruby accused them of injecting him with the disease – a medical impossibility.

Updated 09/19/09

John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy

Despite a 1990s law mandating the release of all JFK assassination-related documents, an estimated one million such CIA records have yet to be declassified. Some of the most critical pertain to CIA agent George Joannides (a.k.a. Walter Newby) who violated the CIA’s pledge that no CIA operational officer from the time of the JFK assassination would work with U.S. House investigators.

byDon Fulsom

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his agents concealed critical evidence about the gruesome murder of President John F. Kennedy in the streets of Dallas in 1963.

A mid-70s conclusion by a Senate Committee headed by Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, found that the Warren Commission’s investigation of the assassination—conducted mainly by the FBI—“was deficient” and “impeaches the process whereby the intelligence agencies arrived at their own conclusions.”

In 1979, a special House investigating committee concurred—describing the FBI’s probe as “seriously flawed” and “insufficient to have uncovered a conspiracy.”

That committee’s own investigation showed a probable plot to kill the President, a plot likely involving the Mafia and certain anti-Castro groups.

These photos of whites torturing and lynching black men present a side of U.S. history that most history books ignore. They provide one of the many reasons why blacks (and Indians) hold a different view of U.S. history than whites. Notice the carnival atmosphere prevailing as these crowds of U.S. citizens watch the completely lawless and most inhumane executions imaginable.

In the U.S. we often pass judgment on people in other countries: Germany, for the Holocaust; Japan, for its war crimes in Asia; Stalin for his purges.

We conveniently forget our own past, however.  A past in which we enslaved hundreds of thousands of blacks -- beating them, working them in inhumane conditions, and killing them.

There are many photographs, showing crowds of U.S. citizens attending the most inhumane butchery imaginable, and getting away with it.  If you'll notice, they seem to be enjoying themselves.

This page is a reminder that the beast dwells within all of us -- Americans, Germans, Japanese, Russian and all other nationalities.  The urge to participate in butchery is not unique to any nation -- it is a universal affliction.

If we forget that fact, the beast may prevail.

Abraham Lincoln

Since 1865

Lincoln, Abraham (President of U.S.): Shot April 14, 1865, in Washington, D.C., by John Wilkes Booth; died April 15.

Seward, William H. (Secretary of State): Escaped assassination(though injured) April 14, 1865, in Washington, D.C., by Lewis Powell (or Paine), accomplice of John Wilkes Booth.

Garfield, James A. (President of U.S.): Shot July 2, 1881, inWashington, D.C., by Charles J. Guiteau; died Sept. 19.

McKinley, William (President of U.S.): Shot Sept. 6, 1901, in Buffalo by Leon Czolgosz; died Sept. 14.

Roosevelt, Theodore (ex-President of U.S.): Escaped assassination (though shot) Oct. 14, 1912, in Milwaukee while campaigning for President.

April 11, 2011

Frank Sturgis

Three years after he was arrested as a Watergate burglar, Frank Sturgis told Senate investigators he was a CIA agent who would do anything for the agency—even kill. To flaunt his expertise, Sturgis volunteered a grisly “How to Get Away with Murder” tutorial for the committee. He bragged that his reputation as a hit man led the FBI to grill him as a prime suspect in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.   

 by Don Fulsom

Best-known as one of President Richard Nixon’s five inept Watergate burglars, Frank Sturgis would undoubtedly prefer to be recalled as a swashbuckling CIA assassination specialist who would gladly bump off anyone for the agency.  In fact, in secret 1975 testimony before a Senate committee, Sturgis proudly described himself a “whore” who “would do anything” for the CIA.

Sturgis’s boast lies buried in his lengthy, closed-door testimony to a post-Watergate Senate investigation of alleged CIA and FBI crimes and abuses.  A bi-partisan committee chaired by Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, conducted the investigation.  Sturgis’s testimony was declassified—but mostly ignored—in the 1990s.

April 27, 2011

An excerpt from Mel Ayton recently published book Dark Soul of the South – The Life and Crimes of Racist Killer Joseph Paul Franklin

by Mel Ayton

In 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for executions to start again in Missouri when it refused to hear the Missouri lethal injection case, Clemons v. Crawford. In response, Missouri's attorney general stated executions would recommence. He also said he wanted Potosi Prison Death Row inmate and racist killer, Joseph Paul Franklin, to be the first to die.

In 1977 Franklin, a self-proclaimed racist and anti-Semite, began his murder spree after concluding the organizations he had joined – the American Nazi Party, the States Rights Party and the Ku Klux Klan – were not serious enough in putting their extremist and violent beliefs into practice. Between 1977 and 1980 Franklin acted as a “Lone Wolf” assassin, roaming the length and breadth of the United States in pursuit of Jews, African-Americans and especially interracial couples whom he believed were “beasts ready for the slaughter.” In a three-year period he bombed the home of a Jewish lobbyist in a Washington D.C. suburb and a synagogue in Chattanooga, Tennessee; used a sniper rifle to kill a congregant outside a St Louis synagogue; shot and wounded Civil Rights leader Vernon Jordan; shot and paralyzed magazine publisher Larry Flynt;  killed two African-American joggers in a sniper shooting in Salt Lake City; shot and killed two young African-American boys in Cincinnati, Ohio;  successfully targeted with his sniper rifle interracial couples in Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Georgia and Wisconsin; and shot and killed African- American men in Doraville, Georgia, Falls Church, Virginia and Indianapolis, Indiana. He also murdered four young women who had confessed to him they had had sexual relationships with black men.  Eventually, he was sentenced to numerous life sentences but received the death penalty only once for the 1977 murder of Gerald Gordon in Richmond Heights, St Louis. 

Despite the evil nature of his acts, Franklin became the poster boy for extremist groups around the world. His crimes were also immortalized by right wing Christian Identity fanatic William Pierce in his book Hunter, the fictional story of a “lone wolf” violent racist who targeted racially mixed couples. Internet sites proclaiming Franklin as a hero for the “cause” proliferated throughout the 1990s and beyond, promoting a message of violence and hatred towards Jews and African-Americans. It is a message which, to this day, is polluting the minds of vulnerable American youth.

The impending execution of Franklin occurs at a time when Americans are becoming especially fearful that with the election of an African-American president the country’s extreme right wing will begin a new campaign of violence and hatred and spur yet another young misfit into believing he is doing God’s work through murder, assassination and other violent acts. In April 2009 the Department of Homeland Security issued a new alert warning of the dangers posed by approximately 926 hate groups documented by Morris Dees’ Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The alert stated that “white supremacist lone wolves” and “small terrorist cells embracing violent right-wing extremist ideology” are currently the most significant domestic terrorism threat. The 2009 shooting of a security guard by an 88-year-old neo-Nazi Holocaust denier at the Washington D.C. Holocaust Museum persuaded some experts that it heralded a possible surge in hate crimes.

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Franklin grew up in Mobile, Alabama, as James Clayton Vaughn Jr., the son of an alcoholic father who was absent from the home for long periods, sometimes years at a time, and a stern disciplinarian mother. As a teenager he became a fan of Adolf Hitler and later became convinced Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Paul Goebbels was one of the great men in history. At the age of 26 he changed his name to Joseph Paul Franklin. He did this for three reasons. He hated his father whose name he inherited. He wanted to become a mercenary in Africa and feared his criminal record (he had maced an interracial couple in Maryland in 1972) would cause problems in obtaining a passport. Additionally, he wanted to honour his hero Goebbels and also American revolutionary hero Benjamin Franklin.

James Clayton Vaughn Sr. was physically abusive to his children, especially towards James Jr. There are, of course, some children who do not go on to commit criminal acts because they are fatherless or have an abusive background. In many of these cases a safety net system existed. Local social services or schools intervened or a strong wider family network helped to alleviate some of the more egregious conditions. Unfortunately, however, in Franklin’s case, the problems of his childhood and the abuse he suffered from his parents were exacerbated by neglect in school, indifference from the neighbourhood and an ineffective social services system. And his educational achievements only fit him for dead-end jobs.

Although Franklin’s murderous acts can undoubtedly be traced to years of abuse by his parents they were also the result of his indoctrination by extremist groups he joined – the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), the American Nazi Party and the National States Rights Party (NSRP). He killed again and again, remorseless and full of conviction he was saving America and doing God’s work. 

Franklin’s experiences growing up in a poor dysfunctional family in the South is a stark reminder of how hate groups can provoke young men and women into violent acts in the name of a “higher ideal.” In order to compensate for his shortcomings, Franklin identified with powerful yet dangerous elements in society that reflected the bigoted views he was tutored in by his parents. The American Nazi Party, the NSRP and the KKK were, in effect, facilitators and came to represent the family he never really had. Through the organizations he joined he achieved what was missing at home – a sense of belonging and a vague feeling of his own importance.

As Raphael Ezekiel noted, in his study of neo-Nazi youths, The Racist Mind, there is a common experience extremist organization members have which makes them particularly susceptible to indoctrination. The men are usually in their teens when they are recruited and they come under the influence of older leaders of the movement. Almost every member he studied was fatherless at a young age, most from divorce and only a few from the death of the father. Ezekiel said that a sense of abandonment and uncertainty followed the loss of the father if some support system was not present. As they grew up they became exceptionally vulnerable and the white supremacist movement was a way to deal with this sense of “orphan hood.” Its young members have “…a need to feel strong, masculine…tough guys.” The attraction to racism was about a “mood” and  a “lonely resentment….and several ideas – white specialness, the biological significance of ‘race’, and the primacy of power in human relations…people will find some way to make their lives meaningful, and if nothing richer is at hand, racism (or religious fanaticism or nationalism or gang membership) will do.”

Uneducated young men like Franklin were targeted by the KKK, the American Nazi Party and the NSRP in their membership drives. Writer Ralph McGill described the Southern racist as “uniformed (and) illiterate” and who had been, “…deceived and satisfied with this sort of narcotic (hate literature)” which the racist groups like the Klan were disseminating throughout the South. “They live on hate as a drug addict lives on his needle of heroin and morphine”, he wrote, “Each pamphlet is a shot in the arm for the hate fringe. Some are so crazed thereby as to dynamite churches and schools.” And, as Southern author Melissa Fay Greene observed, “These were crackpots; these were madmen. The extremity of their language was in inverse proportion to their numbers, in inverse proportion to the likelihood of their realizing their goal of purging America of all non-whites and non-Christians. But in many locales, the crackpots did the dirty work of the power structure. And the crackpots had access to dynamite.” 

However, there were other influences in his life that moulded Franklin’s character. During his childhood unspoken rules of the Jim Crow system existed in his hometown of Mobile, Alabama. In this cultural milieu there was no need for signs. African-Americans had to ride at the back of the bus and give up their seats for whites if the bus was full. African-Americans had to enter hotels, theatres, train stations and movie theatres by the back door. If they wanted to try a hat on in a store they would first have to put a handkerchief on their heads. If an African-American blocked the way of a white person on the sidewalk they were expected to stand aside. Black doctors could not treat white patients. Above all, African-Americans must not be “uppity” nor should the sexes of different races mix. Interracial marriages between black and white were illegal in many states until the 1960s and any person misrepresenting his or her race was guilty of a felony.

During Franklin’s adolescence, many whites were persuaded to channel their bitterness about the race issue into supporting extremist groups like the KKK and in committing acts of violence in furtherance of the white supremacist cause. And in many ways they were allowed to get away with it. State governments in the South turned a blind eye to brutalities against African-Americans and thus perpetuated a racial culture whereby white violent racists felt they could act with impunity. Franklin was only too aware that whites who committed hate crimes did not suffer the harsher sentencing that ordinary criminals were given – often they were acquitted. This idea was central to James Earl Ray’s beliefs about wanting to kill Martin Luther King Jr. in a Southern state. Ray believed that if he was caught he would suffer the same fate as other racist killers of the era. Ray knew that the murderers of the Civil Rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964 and the murderers of Medgar Evers and Viola Luizzo had escaped justice. Juries in Civil Rights cases would either acquit or judges would administer lenient sentences.

However, by the 1970s, as Franklin embarked on his “mission,” the South had essentially morphed into the “New South.”  Progressive state governors like Georgia’s Jimmy Carter had been elected and the majority of the population, while exhibiting a conservative philosophy through their voting choices, were abandoning their support for leaders who were overtly segregationist and discriminatory towards African-Americans. The majority of voters rejected the politics of hate but they also legitimately embraced social and political issues that they feared were being hijacked by right-wing organizations including preventing uncontrolled immigration, a ban on bussing, a ban on gay marriage and a ban on educational and work-related quota systems which, they said, were taking equal rights a step too far. Southern voters also gave their support to politicians who correctly identified Hollywood, the television media and the music industry as purveyors of pornography and violence and of how these cultural institutions were a danger to American and Christian family values and morality.

Franklin’s first targets in his “Lone Wolf” mission were Jews. As a young man Franklin was taken with the idea of a “Jewish conspiracy” which had been promoted by right-wing groups. The literature he read alleged the American government was controlled by a secret cabal of Jews who were bent on taking control of the world. Although there was no evidence to support these allegations, extremist groups used bogus statistics and false historical information like the Russian forgery,“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” to promote their bigoted philosophy. Like many young Americans today who use the Internet as the sole repose of acquired knowledge and are thus susceptible to outrageous conspiracy mongering, Franklin’s only world view was through extremist literature. Through the World Wide Web, talk shows, books and videos, conspiracists and extremists spread their fear, hatred and political paranoia – the forces of evil stalk the land led by the Jews, the Illuminati (a purported conspiratorial organization which acts as a shadowy “power behind the throne,” allegedly controlling world affairs through present day governments and corporations) and the U.S. Government which is purportedly controlled by Jews and communists. The Nazi ideology Franklin learned combined the delusions of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy with that of a notion that the Jews were a satanic people. And, if Franklin believed that Jews and African-Americans were subhuman, he would feel no guilt in exterminating them. The dehumanization of the Jews justified his acts of violence against them and that such acts could be committed without violating Biblical injunctions.

After bombing the home of a Jewish lobbyist in a quiet Washington suburb, dynamiting a Chattanooga synagogue and killing a Jewish congregant in St Louis, Franklin changed tack and sought out African-Americans as targets, especially African-American men who were associating with white women. Franklin’s targeting of mixed race couples originated in the long-held idea that interracial couples were “Godless.”

After the Civil War miscegenation and ‘black rape’ were so ingrained in the minds of Southerners some Southern states passed laws outlawing marriage between the races. In 1907 United States Senator Benjamin Ryan Tillman of South Carolina told the Senate that white women in the rural South were being attacked and raped by roaming “Negro beasts,” “…their breasts pulsating with the desire to sate their passions upon white maidens and wives” and that every Southerner was fearful of returning home to the sight of his wife or daughter “ravished.” By 1910 the governor of South Carolina, Cole Blease, was telling voters that, “Whenever the Constitution of my state steps between me and the defence of the virtue of the white woman then I say to hell with the Constitution.”

In 1941 Wilbur J. Cash had written about the fear Southerners had of racial mixing and the fear that free black men would “violate” their white women. Cash said that white women in the South had been exalted to an unusual degree and their susceptibility to the black man’s attention had always been monitored by the white male Southerner.

Poor rural whites like Franklin were especially prone to the fear of racial mixing. As writer Joel Williamson explained it, “If white men could not provide for their women materially…they could certainly protect them from a much more awful threat – the outrage of their purity…by black men…bread for their women was important, but it was nothing alongside their purity.”

Many newspapers in the South during Franklin’s boyhood promoted the idea that the stereotypical white Southern belle was in danger if African-Americans attained equal rights. Georgia State Attorney General Eugene Cook told reporters after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its 1954 Brown v Board Of Education ruling which outlawed segregation in the classroom, “As I view it the scope of (the Supreme Court decision) goes directly to our miscegenation laws…Once (our laws) are struck down, I foresee a (racial) amalgamation stampede.”

When Joseph Paul Franklin joined the KKK in Atlanta in the early 1970s his belief that the mixing of the races was an “abomination” was reinforced by the extremist organization. One of the Klan’s beliefs was the idea that if the black man was given equal rights with whites the white male population would suffer along with their wives and girlfriends who would become targets for sexually aggressive black men. The Klan also promoted the idea that racial mixing would forever be a stain on the honour of the Southern white population.

Franklin’s choice of “heroes” also informs us of how charismatic individuals who hold extremist views can influence young people. Franklin’s heroes were Joseph Paul Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party and J. B. Stoner, leader of the National States Rights Party. He was also heavily influenced by Klan leaders like Robert Shelton and David Duke. And the paranoid leaders Franklin hero-worshipped appealed to his discontented soul: “It is not you who are the problem. It is they.” 

The leader persuades that the present society is corrupt and worthless and he imbues in his members the idea they will be rewarded in the future. It is a powerful motivating force for misfits like Franklin. The leaders of the groups Franklin joined persuaded him that society was out to get him and counterattacks were justified for “self-protection.” The fantasy of a war between “us and them” became a reality for Franklin when he embarked on his “mission” to rid the world of Jews and African-Americans.

In the late 1960s the American Nazi Party was the first extremist organization Franklin joined. Its leader, George Lincoln Rockwell, founded the hate organization in 1958 and adopted as its emblem the swastika. Rockwell published the party’s manifesto, titled White Power, which included deporting all African-Americans to Africa, liquidating the Jews and hanging everyone Rockwell considered to be traitors including President Eisenhower, President Truman and Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. At public rallies he wore a brown uniform and boots, with a swastika arm band, greeting his followers with the Roman salute surrounded by “storm troopers” and American and Nazi flags. In his speeches Rockwell would rail against the promotion of racial integration and interbreeding with blacks. He called for resettling American blacks in Africa in a new African state. In response to the Civil Rights Freedom Rides of the early 1960s, Rockwell had his own “hate bus” which he and some of his members drove through the South. In the late 1950s and early 1960s much of Rockwell’s efforts were in organizing controversial demonstrations in Washington D.C. and other areas. His powerful sense of hatred and resentment coupled with his devotion to Nazi ideology and white supremacy made for a highly charged political personality. “I’m going to completely separate the black and white races and preserve white Christian domination of this country and I’m going to have the Jew communists and any other traitors gassed for treason,” he told his followers and anyone else who would listen. Without any hint of irony he also said, “That’s one great trouble with our movement. Ninety percent of the people in the movement are lunatics.”

Rockwell’s danger lay in the fact he was far from being a confused, poorly educated and illiterate thug like most of his supporters. His attractiveness to new recruits centered on his intelligence and charisma and the devotion his supporters gave to him. In time, Rockwell’s charisma, in conjunction with his followers’ fanaticism, became a lethal cocktail. The American Nazi Party taught against inter-racial mixing and the lesson was simple: unless white people prevented black men from marrying and dating white women there was going to be a downfall of the white race in the form of “mongrelization.”

Disillusioned with the American Nazi Party because its membership was more interested in talking about revolution than fomenting it, Franklin moved to Atlanta and joined the National States Rights Party, led by J.B. Stoner. Around this time he also joined a Georgia branch of the KKK. Through Stoner, Franklin met James Earl Ray’s brother Jerry who had been hired by the NSRP leader after the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The New York Times described the organization as, “….the ideal merger of Klan and Nazi philosophies”. Stoner’s NSRP became central to the white supremacist movement because it placed hatred of Jews as the force behind the integration of African-Americans and it was crucial in bringing together previously unknown fringe groups into a larger organization. Throughout the 1960s the group played a major role in racial strife throughout the South.

Stoner was born in 1924 and grew up on a Walker County, Georgia farm. Stoner remembered how he learned his racism on the knee of his grandfather who “…showed me the evils of racial mongrelization and he taught me how whites should fight it.”  He was orphaned by the time he was 16 and he suffered from polio which exempted him from military service. He walked with a limp. He was described by many who knew him as a “creepy” sort of man “nervous and leering.” Like Franklin, he also suffered uncontrollable rages especially where race was concerned. When it was pointed out to him that a Jew, Jonas Salk, had invented the polio vaccine he became livid.

At age 18, anti-Semitism became the center of Stoner’s life. He advocated killing Jews and said his neo-Nazi party would eliminate them with gas chambers, electric chairs and firing squads. “The only thing I find wrong with Hitler,” Stoner told his followers, “(is) that he didn’t exterminate all those six million Jews he’s credited with.” He also said that America had fought on the wrong side in the Second World War. In fact, the Chattanooga Klan found Stoner’s brand of anti-Semitism so extreme they cancelled his membership.

Stoner also had a history of violence against Jews. According to a police informant, a former KKK leader, Stoner would, “… do anything against the Jews and the Negroes, and especially against the Jews. He hates the Jews.”  In fact, like Franklin, Stoner acted on his beliefs in a violent way. In 1958 he participated in the bombing of Birmingham’s Bethel Baptist Church. In 1983 he was tried for the crime, found guilty, and sentenced to 10 years. He spent three and a half years in prison before he was released on parole.

                                       __________________________________

Prior to his three-year murder spree, Franklin had been well primed. Wishing to belong, he never questioned the group’s beliefs and once a paranoid belief system is established in a group, ergo the German people in the 1930s, it is nearly impossible to dislodge. Furthermore, immersing himself in these hate groups made it much more likely he would commit murder even if he was not predisposed to it. Franklin’s sense of mission, which he repeated to anyone who would listen in the early days of his murder spree, was constantly reinforced by his fellow Klansmen and Nazis and there was no one he came into contact with who could tell him his ideas were lunacy.

Following Franklin’s arrest in 1980, America witnessed an unprecedented level of racial hatred by white supremacists. In the 1980s the Posse Comitatus, National Alliance, Christian Identity, and the World Church of the Creator organizations became successful in promoting their white supremacist cause and recruited thousands of members to their ranks. Their recruitment drives were successful because hate substitutes for money and power and is a central emotion. And emotion is a very strong driving force especially to those who have never discovered the world through a decent education or been given a strong sense of morality passed on by caring parents or a religion that eschews violence.

Franklin was primed by the hate groups and told everything he thought and did was right and the government was wrong and that it was legitimate to use violence for a just cause and his tutors, the Nazis and the Klansmen, did it under the cloak of the First Amendment. Franklin responded to the call to arms by embracing violence as a form of “propaganda of the deed” and showed a real preference for spectacular and decisive action over the hard work of ideological contemplation. He could not assimilate with the groups he longed to be part of. But his desire to participate in their efforts remained with him. He still had his ideology which kept him going; it made him matter. He could now focus his whole personality around his own interpretations of “God’s mission.”

As Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Centre astutely observed, the Ku Klux Klan and American neo-Nazis undoubtedly share “moral responsibility” for Franklin’s killings.

                                 ___________________________________

Mel Ayton is the author of numerous books and articles including A Racial Crime (2003), the story of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassin and The Forgotten Terrorist: Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (2008). Ayton has a master’s degree in history from Durham University, is a former Fulbright teacher, deputy headmaster and college lecturer, and lives in County Durham, England. Ayton has appeared in documentaries produced by the National Geographic Channel (CIA Secret Experiments, 2008), the Discovery Channel (CIA - Mind Control, 2006, Conspiracy Test: The Robert Kennedy Assassination, 2008) and Fox News (How Did Marilyn Monroe Really Die?, 2009) and has worked as an historical consultant for the BBC. His latest book, Dark Soul of the South – The Life and Crimes of Racist Killer Joseph Paul Franklin, was published in May 2011.

Feb 1, 2009(rev. March 27, 2009)

Lee Harvey Oswald (center) Jack Ruby (right)

There's no hard evidence that he did, but numerous people say they saw Oswald at Ruby's club, The Carousel, weeks before the JFK assassination.

by Don Fulsom

Jack Ruby (born Jacob Rubenstein) was a vulgar, violent, lowlife. But a proud one. He had risen from the Mob-dominated slums of Chicago—where, growing up, he'd run errands for Al Capone. Now, in 1963, Ruby ran his own striptease club in Dallas—seedy to some, but to Jack "a f----ing classy joint."

The Carousel was a run-down walkup on Commerce Street where Jack (or "Sparky," as the easily ignitable owner was known) oversaw a master of ceremonies, four strippers and a five-piece bump-and-grind band. On Commerce, flashing neon signs and scores of eight-by-ten glossy stock photos of near-nude gals beckoned horny guys to ascend the stairs and enjoy "Dallas's only nonstop burlesque."

Soon after Ruby murdered JFK assassination suspect Lee Harvey Oswald, Carousel emcee Bill Demar (Bill Crowe in real life) publicly identified Oswald as a recent patron. The magician-ventriloquist said he distinctly recalled Oswald because, as an audience member, Oswald had actually taken part in Demar's "memory act."

Dec 14, 2009

Bryan de la Beckwith

It would take 31-years to bring white supremacist Bryan de la Beckwith to justice for the assassination of Medgar Evers.

by Randy Radic

His name was Byron de la Beckwith, but his friends called him “Delay.”  A descendant of Southern aristocracy, Byron de la Beckwith was born in Colusa, California in 1920.  Delay was only 5 when his father died.  The official cause of death was listed as “pneumonia and alcoholism.”  After the funeral, Delay’s mother took him back home to Greenwood, Mississippi. 

Delay’s mother was a Yerger, which meant she was a blue blood, descended from one of the South’s elite families.  Susan Southworth Yerger was her given name.  And in the glory days of the Confederacy, the Yergers moved only in the best social circles.  Jefferson Davis’s wife was counted among the closest friends of the Yerger family.

Unfortunately, Delay’s mother suffered from what were politely called mental ailments.  She was hospitalized frequently.  And in the end, when Delay was 12 years old, she died of lung cancer at age 47.

Delay moved in with his uncle, William Yerger, who occupied the family’s estate, which had seen better days and had had quite a few less good days since then.  And so had Uncle William, who was a little off-center.  He spent most of his time fishing for catfish.  According to Time magazine, more often than not, the catfish ended up in a dresser drawer, which was where Uncle William liked to put them.  The stench must have been abominable.

In 1942, Delay joined the U.S. Marine Corps and saw action as a machine gunner.  When he was discharged in 1946, he was heavily decorated, including the Purple Heart.  He got married to Mary Louise Williams, who was a Navy WAVE.  They moved to Rhode Island for a while, then back to Mississippi, where Delay sold tobacco. 

The marriage had its ups and downs – divorce, reconciliation and remarriage, then separation.  Which meant Delay’s life resembled the family estate – it had seen better days.  Reed Massengill, who was the nephew of Delay’s wife, later wrote a book called Portrait of a Racist.
In it, Delay was described as a brutal and violent husband.  

Somewhere in there, Delay joined the Ku Klux Klan.  No one really knew why, but Delay was a die-hard white supremacist.  Delay hated blacks, Jews and Roman Catholics.  As Time magazine later reported, “He tried to inject racism into everything.”  Delay composed and distributed racist pamphlets.  He also took part in anti-integration rallies, where he did things like obstructing non-whites from using public toilet facilities.

At that time – from 1954 until the mid-1960s – the Klan was engaged in open warfare against the Civil Rights movement.  The KKK not only bombed churches and homes, but also wreaked a series of ghastly murders.  One of those murdered was Medgar Evers.  As Leonard Zeskind wrote in Blood and Politics, “That same year [1963] a Klan sniper assassinated Mississippi state NAACP leader Medgar Evers on the doorstep of his home.”

Delay was that Klan sniper.

Medgar Evers

It happened like this:  In the evening hours of June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers attended a meeting of civil rights workers at a church in Jackson, Mississippi.  At the same time, his wife and children were at home, watching as President John F. Kennedy gave a televised speech on civil rights. 

When the meeting was over, Medgar Evers drove to his house.  He parked the car in his driveway.  As Evers got out of his car, Delay was waiting across the way, hidden in a clump of honeysuckle vines.  In his hands, Delay held an Enfield 1917 rifle, .303 caliber, as cited in court records.  Delay took aim and fired.  The bullet smashed into Evers’s back, tore through his chest and exited, leaving a gaping wound.  Evers dropped like a sack of potatoes. 

Subsequent police reports outlined the following scenario:  Mortally wounded, yet still alive, Evers dragged himself toward his house.  He never made it.  His ebbing strength failed him and he stopped just short of the steps to the door, which was where his wife found him a short while later.  Rushed to the hospital, Evers died approximately one hour after being shot.

Medgar Evers was a determined man, as his final crawl toward his house indicated.  For Evers wanted to be somebody and to make a difference.  Inducted into the Army in 1943, Evers saw action in France.  Discharged in 1945, Evers went home to Decatur, Mississippi.  In a way, Evers’s life mirrored that of Byron de la Beckwith.  Both were passionate.  Both served their country in WWII.  It’s after their discharges that their stories diverged.

While Delay was selling tobacco, Evers attended Alcorn College, where he majored in business administration.  After graduating, Evers got married and moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, where he went to work for Magnolia Life Insurance Company.  The company was owned by T.R.M. Howard, who was the president of a civil rights group called Regional Council of Negro Leadership.  Evers joined the group and worked as an activist.

Evers made application to the University of Mississippi Law School.  Because of his skin color, Evers was rejected.  The University of Mississippi’s enrollment policy did not admit black people as students.  Evers filed a lawsuit against the school.  At almost the same time, he was appointed first field secretary for the NAACP in Mississippi.  In this capacity, Evers participated in a boycott of white merchants and helped to desegregate the University of Mississippi. 

As a result of his activities, Evers became well known as a black leader in the civil rights movement.  His growing prominence made him a target for the white supremacists of the KKK.  On May 28, 1963, someone tossed a Molotov cocktail into his carport.  And on June 7, 1963, someone tried to run him down with a car.  Both incidents were duly reported to the local police.  No suspects were identified. 

Five days later, on June 12, Byron de la Beckwith – aka Delay – assassinated Medgar Evers.  Eleven days later, Delay was arrested.  Witnesses had reported seeing Delay near Evers’s house on the evening of the murder.  And Delay’s car – a white Plymouth Valiant – had been observed driving in the neighborhood.  Police had found the murder weapon secreted in the honeysuckle vines and traced it to Delay.  The Enfield’s telescopic sight had Delay’s fingerprints on it.

What most people didn’t know was that the rifle was found after the police received an anonymous phone call.  The “tipster” told police where the rifle could be found.  Many surmised that Delay himself was the tipster.  He wanted to be arrested and go on trail because he was confident he would never be convicted.  All this information and speculation came out after Delay’s 1994 trial, and was based on court records. 

After his arrest, the police questioned Delay.  He told them the rifle had been stolen and he had forgotten to report it.  Three police officers sympathetic to the KKK asserted they had seen Delay in Greenwood, which was 95 miles away, at the time of the murder.  In other words, Delay now had an alibi.

Nevertheless, a grand jury decided there was enough circumstantial evidence against Delay to indict him for murder.  Delay lawyered up.  He was tried for murder at two separate trials in 1964.  Both times the jury selection process resulted in all-male, all white juries.  And the judge at both trials was Russell Moore, who was a personal friend of Delay. 

At the second trial, the former governor of Mississippi – Ross Barnett – interrupted a witness’s testimony.  The witness was Myrlie Evers, the wife of Medgar Evers.  Governor Barnett walked into the courtroom, looked around, and then walked over to Delay and shook his hand. 

The implication of the governor’s act was clear to everyone:  White people in the state of Mississippi were rooting for Delay. 

In both trials, the all-white juries refused to convict a white man for the murder of a black man.  Delay’s alibi – that police officers had seen him at a gas station back home in Greenwood right after the ambush of Evers – gave the juries the excuse they needed.  Sufficient doubt, which resulted in deadlock.  Because there was no verdict in either trial, both trials ended in mistrials. 

After the second mistrial, Delay felt doubly confident, even arrogant.  He officially joined the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which was the most violent cadre of the Klan.  Delay became good friends with Sam Bowers, who was the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights.  Delay, along  with his Klansmen, agitated against the Jews and lobbied to have flouride removed from drinking water.  Delay believed flouridated water was a Jewish plot to weaken the white race.  He also held that The Holocaust was a giant hoax and urged carpet-bombing Israel.

He began bragging at KKK rallies about how he had killed Medgar Evers.  A fellow Klansman, whose name was Delmar Dennis, was one of those who overheard Delay crowing over the deed. 

Thirty years later, Delmar Dennis would remember Delay’s gloating words.  And when he did, the jury would not be all male and all white.  There would be no sympathetic judge sitting on the bench. 

Delay was now famous in Mississippi.  His fame went to his head and in 1967 Delay sought to capitalize on his notoriety.  He believed his celebrity would translate into votes for a white candidate.  So he sought the Democratic Party’s nomination for lieutenant governor.  A month before the primaries Delay agreed to an interview with the Review.  Among his “chief qualifications” Delay said was that he “was conscious of a diabolical international conspiracy against states’ rights and racial integrity.”

He didn’t get the nomination.  According to the New York Times, Delay “got more than 34,000 votes, finishing fifth in a field of six.”

By 1970, it became apparent that the murder of Medgar Evers had not hindered the struggle for civil rights in Mississippi.  In fact, Evers’ death probably accelerated integration.  According to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 26.4 percent of black students in Mississippi public schools attended integrated schools.  When Evers died in 1963, there were only 28,000 African Americans registered to vote in Mississippi.  By 1971, there were 250,000 and by 1982 over 500,000.

African Americans were being elected to public office in Mississippi.  In 1973, the state had 145 black elected officials.  And black applicants were accepted as students in the state’s public and private institutions of higher learning. 

Delay had not stopped integration.  And based on what he did next, it was fairly certain Delay did not understand what was going on, that the world was changing. 

In 1973, believing he was untouchable, Delay plotted to murder the New Orleans director of the Anti-Defamation League, A. I. Botnick, who had – according to Delay’s tangled way of thinking – made contemptuous remarks about Southerners and their attitude toward non-whites. 

Delay couldn’t keep his big mouth shut about what he was planning to do.  Delay had always had loose lips.  He had boasted about killing Medgar Evers at KKK rallies.  And way back in 1956, when making application to the pro-segregation Sovereignty Commission for a job as an operative, Delay had listed his qualifications:  “Expert with a pistol, good with a rifle and fair with a shotgun – RABID ON THE SUBJECT OF SEGREGATION!” 

So just like Chatty Cathy, he said too much at the wrong time to the wrong people about his plot to murder A. I. Botnick.  When they heard what Delay was up to they couldn’t wait to do their own imitation of Chatty Cathy, rapping with the FBI about what they knew.  Which was exactly what they did.

The FBI believed the informants and moved quickly.  They immediately put Delay under surveillance.  And after watching him for a few days, they decided it was time to shut him down.  And they did. 

Delay was driving his car across the Lake Ponchartrain Causeway Bridge, when – as if by magic – a police car slid in behind his vehicle.  Delay didn’t think anything of it until he noticed lights flashing in his rearview mirror.  Out of options, Delay pulled over and stopped.  New Orleans police officers approached Delay’s car with drawn weapons.  Searching Delay’s car, police found three loaded weapons, a map of New Orleans and written directions to the home of the director of the Anti-Defamation League.  In the trunk of the car, they discovered a bundle of dynamite with a timer and a detonator.

Delay was arrested and booked.  Once more, Delay lawyered up.  At his arraignment he was charged with conspiracy to commit murder.  It was a federal charge.  When the trial took place in federal court, the jury acquitted Delay of conspiracy to commit murder.  It is interesting to note that the jury was composed of 10 white men and two white women.  After the trial, jurors told newspaper reporters that the evidence against Delay was remote and inconclusive.  And once again it looked like Delay had gotten off. 

But not so fast this time.  The State of Louisiana charged Delay with transporting explosives without a permit.  Which meant Delay underwent another trial in a state court.  This time Delay lost.  The verdict was guilty and he was sentenced to three years in a Louisiana State Prison.  Delay described the five people on the jury as “five nigger bitches.” 

They shipped Delay off to Angola Prison, where he served his time in solitary confinement from May 1977 to January 1980.  He was placed in solitary confinement for a couple of reasons.  First, many of the black inmates would have enjoyed avenging Medgar Evers.  Second, Delay’s constant racial slurs would have gotten him killed in no time.  For he called blacks “apes” and “beasts of the fields.”  While there, Delay became ill and spent a few days in the prison infirmary, where a nurse’s aide, who just happened to be black, tried to provide Delay with treatment.  Delay refused to allow the aide to touch him.  According to The New York Times, Delay told the aide “If I could get rid of an uppity” Medgar Evers, it would be no problem at all to get rid of “a no-account” aide.

The Phineas Priesthood

After his release from prison, Delay went home to Greenwood, Mississippi, where he got a job selling fertilizer.  Delay continued to attend KKK rallies and also became active in the church of Christian Identity, which held frequent gatherings throughout the South.  It was at one of these gatherings that Delay met Richard Kelly Hoskins.  Hoskins was the author of Vigilantes of Christendom: The Story of the Phineas Priesthood.

In his book, Hoskins introduced the concept of the Phineas Priesthood, which was that “lone warriors” or vigilantes would appear in history every so often.  These warrior-priests were sent by God to punish “race traitors.”  This punishment was necessary to protect the honor of God and His chosen people, who were, of course, white.  

As Hoskins made very clear in his book, the Phineas Priesthood was an exclusive clergy.  The only way in was by annihilating the enemies of God.  God’s enemies were defined as blacks, race-mixers, Jews, homosexuals, and abortionists.  Any white supremacist who destroyed these enemies was automatically ordained into the Phineas Priesthood.

The book went on to provide historical examples of such lone-warriors:  John Wilkes Booth, the Waffen SS, the Ku Klux Klan and The Order, which was also known as The Silent Brotherhood.  According to Hoskins, the common dominant trait of these men was a passion to excel – to protect the Honor of God.  And in doing so, they had espoused the doctrine of the Phineas Priesthood.  A doctrine understood by a chosen few.

Obviously, Delay had read Hoskins’ book, because he now claimed – after the fact – that in murdering Medgar Evers, he had been functioning as a Phineas Priest.  In other words, Medgar Evers death was God’s Will. And when Delay – acting as a Phineas Priest – killed Evers, he was removing one of God’s enemies.  Anyway, that’s what Delay wanted people to think.  In reality, it was nothing more than a lame and abject attempt to justify murder. 

Delay and Hoskins were kindred souls and began corresponding with each other. 

Hoskins published a regular newsletter called “The Hoskins Report.”  Supposedly, the newsletter provided financial and investment advice.  In reality, it trumpeted racist propaganda.  In a 1991 issue of the newsletter, Hoskins printed a letter he had received from Delay, who was still famous in white supremacist circles.  At the end of the letter, Delay had written “Phineas for president!”

The letter would come back to haunt Delay.

Mississippi had changed since 1963.  Things were different.  African-Americans no longer sat in the back of the bus or drank from separate drinking fountains.  Segregation was a relic of the past.  There were no more all-white juries that looked the other way.  A new generation of prosecutors with new attitudes began reviewing old cases in which there had been a miscarriage of justice.  One of those cases was the murder of Medgar Evers.

The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi, published a series of articles detailing how the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission – which no longer existed – had helped in screening potential jurors in the 1964 trials of Byron de la Beckwith.  Back in 1964, the Sovereignty Commission was rabidly pro-segregation and believed in the Great White Way, which meant no white man should ever be put on trial for the murder of a black man.

The articles caused a scandal.  Most of Southern society was outraged.  And public opinion demanded justice.  The case was reopened and an investigation was begun.  Some whites didn’t want to open that can of worms again.  They didn’t want to air once again Mississippi’s dirty laundry to the national media.  Delay told a reporter, “Country-club Mississippi is tired of this crap the Jews, niggers, and Orientals are stirring up.”   

Delay was arrested and – for a third time – charged with the murder of Medgar Evers.  His bail was set at $100,000.  A “stranger” gave him $12,000 so he could get out of jail.  It later came out that the stranger was a Jewish lawyer named Harry Rosenthal.  As Maryanne Vollers wrote in Ghosts of Mississippi, Rosenthal “said he couldn’t stand to see Beckwith’s rights violated.”  Even though he hated Jews, Delay took the money.

Rosenthal – and a lot of other legal experts – believed Delay’s right to a speedy trial was being violated.  And, that since Delay’s indictment had been open and on the books from 1964 to 1969, he could have been retried during that period, while his previous lawyers were alive and well, memories were fresh, and witnesses were at hand.  But the state had failed to do so. 

In essence, the issue was whether Delay could be tried again or not.  The matter was placed before the Mississippi Supreme Court.  Most of the legal experts and most of the media felt the case against Delay would be dismissed.  Delay would get off scot-free again.

Delay’s luck finally ran out.

The Mississippi Supreme Court decided not to decide whether Delay could be tried again or not until after he was tried.  The decision was a stroke of genius.  For if Delay was acquitted, there was nothing to decide.  If he was convicted, he could appeal.  If Delay appealed, the court would merely say a murder case that has been dismissed could be retried in good faith, because there was no statute of limitations on murder. 

Delay spent a lot of time shopping for a lawyer.  In the end, he decided on Buddy Coxwell and Jim Kitchens as his defense team.  The prosecutors were Bobby Delaughter and Ed Peters.

The prosecution introduced new evidence, which was that Delay had boasted of killing Medgar Evers to many people over the course of the last three decades.  Klansman Delmar Dennis took the stand and told the jury how Delay had bragged about killing Evers thirty years before.  They also introduced Delay’s admission to the nurse’s aide in prison, that he had killed Evers.  And they linked Delay to the letter published in “The Hoskins Report.”

Déjà vu.  The letter was back.

The background page of the Anti-Defamation League’s website states that “Hoskins’s writings drew public attention in October 1991, when prosecutors in Mississippi linked white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith to the Phineas Priesthood.”

In other words, for the first time, the general public became aware of the existence of a cluster of violent religious bigots, who killed “for God’s sake.”  

The murder weapon – the 1917 Enfield – was still available as evidence.  For Delay – at the conclusion of the second trial in 1964 – had simply picked it up and walked away with it.  He had given the rifle to Russell Moore, who was a friend and the presiding judge at the 1964 mistrials, as a “souvenir.”  Everyone who knew Moore knew he had the rifle.  It was in the closet of his house.  One of the prosecutors, Bobby Delaughter, just went over to Moore’s house and got it.

As the trial unfolded, Delay sat in the courtroom wearing a Confederate flag on his lapel.  He still didn’t believe he would ever be convicted.  However, this time there was no all-male, all white jury.  This time the jury was composed of 8 African-Americans and 4 white people.  And because of the pre-trial publicity, the jurors were not from Jackson, Mississippi.  They were from Panola County and arrived on a specially chartered bus. 

In his book – The Ghosts of Medgar Evers, author Willie Morris described the atmosphere of the trial as full of hate.  Delay’s supporters sat in the courtroom, glaring.  They were “Klansmen, hate-mail publishers, and homegrown Mississippi neo-Nazis.”  Delay’s second and current wife was there too.  Thelma de la Beckwith.  She wore a blond wig and “told reporters it was Lee Harvey Oswald who really shot Evers.”

On February 5, 1994, the jury returned a verdict of guilty.  When the verdict was announced, Delay looked as if dazed and confused.  This was more than he had ever bargained for. 

The sentence was life in prison without the possibility of parole.  Byron de la Beckwith was 74 years old.  Normally, they would have shipped him off to Mississippi State Penitentiary, which was Mississippi’s only maximum security prison.  Once upon a time it had been called Parchman Farm.  But because of who he was and what he had done, Delay would have been dead in no time at all.  So they didn’t send him there.  Instead, he would be held in the Hinds County Jail for the rest of his life.   

Delay filed an appeal.  The basis of the appeal was that he had been denied his right to a speedy trial.  The contention was that undergoing a third trial for the same murder – thirty-one years later – could in no way be interpreted as speedy.  The appeal was overturned, as there was no statute of limitations for the crime of murder.

Seven years later, on January 21, 2001, Delay died.  At the time of his death, he was in the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi.  He was being treated for heart disease and high blood pressure. 

The only legacy Delay left behind was the exaltation of hate.

Medgar Evers left behind a different kind of legacy – one of compassion, tolerance and service.

After the second mistrial, Myrlie Evers – the widow of Medgar Evers – moved her family to Claremont, California, which was just south of Los Angeles.  She enrolled in Claremont College.  In 1967, she published her memoir For Us, The Living.  The title came from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.  Then in 1968, Myrlie Evers graduated with a BA in sociology.

Myrlie Evers with her children at Medgar Evers' grave, Arlington National cemetery, 1964.

She became the Democratic candidate for a congressional seat from southern California in 1970.  Losing heavily in the Republican districts, she still managed to gain 38 percent of the vote.  It was not enough to win.  She took a job in public relations and later became vice president for advertising and publicity at Atlantic Richfield. 

In 1987, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley appointed her to the position of commissioner on the Los Angeles Board of Public Works, where she helped supervise 6000 employees and administered half a billion dollars.  She served as a commissioner for five years. 

She married Walter Williams, who was a union organizer and civil rights activist.  Eventually, the couple moved to Oregon.  Several months after Byron de la Beckwith was finally convicted and sentenced to life in prison, Myrlie was elected chair of the board of the NAACP.

Medgar Evers’ children grew up in southern California and went on to lead triumphant lives.  Darrell became a successful artist.  Reena married, had children and worked for an airline.  Van became a noted photographer.

June 12, 2005

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Obfuscation, manipulation, lies, greed, and distortion of the facts have characterized this case, allowing James Earl Ray to escape full blame. The truth of the matter is that Ray murdered King and he acted alone when he shot him. One or both of Ray's brothers -- before and/or after the fact -- may have aided him.

by Mel Ayton

More than 35 years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. polls continue to indicate that the truth about the murder is still unclear for the majority of Americans. Despite government investigations and extensive research by writers who have concluded that no evidence is available to support the claims made by the conspiracy advocates, the case remains one of America's great whodunits.

Doubts about James Earl Ray, Dr. King's lone assassin, arose almost immediately after the civil rights leader was fatally shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. From the start, during King's funeral, his aides voiced suspicions that a conspiracy was responsible for their leader's death.

The political culture of America in the late 1960s and 1970s was very favorable to any theory that gave credence to government- oriented murder plots against public figures who challenged the authority of the establishment. The U.S. public, confronted with a litany of stories about the Kennedy assassinations, CIA plots against foreign leaders, and the scandalous reports about J. Edgar Hoover's FBI domestic spying activities, were ready to believe that a pathetic individual like James Earl Ray must have received some kind of assistance from sophisticated plotters -- most likely in the pay of the government.

There were no witnesses who saw Ray kill King. The government relied on circumstantial evidence, albeit evidence that strongly indicated Ray's guilt. Scrutinizing the King murder case carefully, citizens on both sides of the conspiracy debate found many puzzling anomalies that were hard to explain. This is typical of most murder cases that are based entirely on circumstantial evidence where the accused denies guilt. There are loose ends that are never tied up. This was true of the Kennedy assassinations no less than the King assassination. Law enforcement officials know that all the pieces of evidence will not always tie up. There will always be mysteries and even after a murder is "solved" there will be evidence that just doesn't fit.

That Ray did not go to trial was, in some part, his own fault. On Nov. 10, 1968, two days before his trial was originally scheduled, Ray fired his first defense lawyer, Arthur Haynes, who had already plead Ray not guilty to the charge of murdering King. Ray, convinced by his brother Jerry that famous Houston lawyer Percy Foreman could provide him with a better defense, fired Haynes and took on Foreman.

Soon after Foreman took over the case, the state's prosecutors made Ray an offer: in exchange for a guilty plea, the state would not ask for the death penalty. After considering the case against his client, Foreman spelled it out to Ray: He did not stand a chance of being found not guilty and in Tennessee stiff penalties were given even for men with previously spotless records -- and for accomplices as well as killers. Furthermore, Foreman told Ray, Memphis juries had been hard on first-degree murder defendants. Foreman told him he would probably receive a long sentence -- 99 years -- if he pled guilty, but this would not be a real problem for Ray. If Ray had received the minimum sentence for murder, 20 years for the State of Tennessee, this would effectively have meant that Ray would serve the rest of his life in prison. Once that sentence was over, he would be arrested immediately and extradited to Missouri to complete his original 20-year sentence. On the March 6, 1969, Ray signed a 55-paragraph confession.

As a result of Ray's guilty plea, the trial became a simple procedure to present the evidence of Ray's guilt to the court. The jury was provided with information of a deal between the defense and the prosecution and the prosecution provided the court with the brief and essential elements of the case against Ray. The judge, W. Preston Battle, then issued the agreed upon sentence. There was nothing sinister in the arrangement. Similar agreements had been made thousands of times in courts across the nation. Prosecution and defense deals were designed to save the state the costs of a trial and to save the time of court officials. In addition, guilty pleas guaranteed the prosecution a conviction.

After Ray was sentenced, he retracted his confession, claiming he was forced to plead guilty by Foreman. There developed a feeling that the American people had been robbed of a proper trial in which all issues surrounding the tragedy had been thoroughly examined. There were some witnesses who were not consistent with their stories. The bullet that killed King could not be matched to the Remington rifle found at the scene of the crime. And the circumstantial and ballistics evidence provided opportunities for Ray's defenders to claim that there was reasonable doubt as to the alleged assassin's guilt. Enough unanswered questions existed to allow conspiracy theorists to present doubt about the prosecution's case.

The U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations Investigation

In the mid-1970s, the U.S. House of Representatives initiated a Congressional investigation (HSCA) into the assassination of Dr. King and concluded, in 1979, that Ray had been the assassin but there was a likelihood he had been part of a conspiracy that had been planned by a group of right-wing Southerners.

Justice Department officials, responding to the HSCA's investigation, could find no solid evidence with which to charge any suspects. The two suspects who were named by the HSCA, St. Louis businessmen John Sutherland and John Kauffmann, who the HSCA said were racially inspired to offer a bounty on King's head, had died of natural causes in the early 1970s.

The HSCA investigation found that Kauffmann had numerous links to the Missouri State Penitentiary where Ray had been incarcerated before his 1967 escape. Kauffmann was a friend of the prison doctor, Hugh Maxey, who had treated Ray at the prison. It was also believed that Kauffman, who would later be tried for drug dealing, supplied illegal drugs to the prison through an accomplice. However, it was the 1968 Wallace presidential campaign that provided the likely conduit for the bounty offer. Kauffmann's associate, wealthy businessman John Sutherland, helped finance the campaign and Kauffman was actively involved as a campaign worker.

The HSCA was unable to establish conclusively the truth about the St. Louis-based conspiracy. In 1998 the chief counsel for the HSCA, G. Robert Blakey, said, "What we came up with was the possibility of a race-based conspiracy in St. Louis where a $50,000 bounty had been offered on Dr. King's life involving two men, Sutherland and Kauffman. It was only a possibility; we couldn't prove it and both of them were dead before our investigation started. But we were able to trace Kauffman to the Grapevine Tavern in St. Louis, where he used to hold meetings of the American Party. James Earl Ray's brother, John, owned the tavern. Was it possible that the $50,000 bounty was discussed in the tavern and heard by John Ray, and that John Ray then conveyed it to James Earl? Yes. Were we ever able to say definitively that John Ray was the conduit from the Kauffman group to James Earl? No."

Credible and substantial evidence that would confirm any direct link between Ray and individuals or groups who had offered a bounty has never been found. Nonetheless, the strands of various witness statements gathered by government investigations and independent researchers have provided a likely scenario of how Ray had been inspired by offers of a bounty on King.

From the evidence provided by the FBI files and the HSCA report, it appears likely that Ray did have specific knowledge of money being offered by one or more groups to anyone who would kill King. There is no evidence to suggest an offer was made to Ray personally or that promises were made to deliver any money to him. There is credible evidence that one or both of Ray's brothers aided him in the assassination, and the three of them had discussed the murder of King.

Both Jerry and John Ray were in communication with their brother James before and following his escape from Missouri State Penitentiary in April 1967. John Ray was operating the Grapevine Tavern in St. Louis during this period and, like every habitual criminal, James Earl Ray was looking for the big score.

John Ray was in continual association with workers for George Wallace's presidential campaign. They often frequented his establishment because their headquarters were in the same block as the Grapevine Tavern. Sutherland, a committed racist who often dressed in Confederate regalia, participated actively in the White Citizens Council of St. Louis and began holding meetings in a building not far from the Grapevine. When the meetings finished, some members would go over to the Grapevine and socialize with campaign workers. Others would engage John Ray in conversation. Given the nature of John and Jerry Ray's extremist right-wing politics, it is plausible that the subject of Martin Luther King had been discussed. It is also possible individuals in Kauffman's group discussed the idea of a bounty. During John's prison visits he may have told James about his conversations at the Grapevine and that an offer of a bounty had been discussed.

If a bounty was offered and taken up by the Ray brothers, it was never collected. The source of James Earl Ray's traveling money, following his 1967 escape from Missouri State Penitentiary, was probably his prison savings -- money accrued through his "merchant" activities in prison and, as the HSCA suspected, the proceeds from the robbery of an Alton, Ill., bank.

Author George McMillan provided some evidence to support the idea that no money had been collected from alleged conspirators. McMillan said that some time following Ray's capture and extradition to Memphis, Jerry Ray approached Kent Courtney, leader of a right-wing political organization in New Orleans. James Earl Ray had read about the conservative lawyer in a newspaper, The American Independent. Jerry wanted help for his brother but was unable to pay for it. Courtney had recorded the conversation with Jerry and a copy of the tape was handed over to the HSCA in the late 1970's. As McMillan argued, if James Earl Ray had been paid for killing King, the solicitation of funds would have been unnecessary.

The HSCA suspected that Ray's mysterious co-conspirator Raoul was, in fact, Jerry Ray (James Earl Ray has never provided any concrete proof that Raoul actually existed). Although the HSCA could never prove it, there were many signs that Jerry Ray had assisted his brother prior to and following the assassination. The HSCA did not believe there was sufficient evidence to profer any charges against either of Ray's brothers, even though G. Robert Blakey thought John Ray should have been at least charged with perjury for falsely testifying at the committee hearings.

Before his trial James Earl Ray spoke to Dr. McCarthy DeMere, who examined him in the Shelby County Jail. DeMere asked Ray, "Did you really do it"? Instead of denying guilt or relating how he was an innocent patsy, Ray said, "Well, let's put it this way, I wasn't in it by myself." Conspiracy advocates would naturally point to this story to show how Ray admitted a widespread conspiracy, yet there is another interpretation: One or both of his brothers had assisted Ray. At the very least, DeMere's testimony eliminates the possibility Ray was a patsy. And, according to Ray's lawyer, Percy Foreman, in sworn testimony before the HSCA, the lawyer "…cross-examined James Earl Ray for hours and the only name that he ever mentioned other than his own at any phase of his preparation for the killing…was his brother Jerry…Jerry was with him when he bought the rifle in Birmingham, the one he did not use because it was low caliber. He took it back…and Jerry was not with him…but he was with him the day before at the same place where he bought another rifle for (the purposes of killing King)."

Although Ray's fingerprints were on the rifle, the HSCA could not determine whether or not the slug found in King's body could be matched directly with the Remington found at the scene of the crime. Conspiracy buffs pointed to this fact as proof that another weapon was used to kill King. (There is a common misperception that if a bullet is fired from a gun it can always be matched to the weapon to the exclusion of all other weapons. Some guns do not leave distinctive marks on bullets. Furthermore, it had always been Ray's contention that Raoul shot King with the rifle found in Canipe's doorway; in other words if the 1997 tests had indeed been correct in establishing it was not the rifle that killed King, Raoul planted the wrong rifle.)

What the 1997 tests did establish was that the rifle found at the scene of the King assassination cannot be excluded as the murder weapon. Its barrel does not possess any consistent distinguishing marks and it has the same general characteristics as the markings left on the death slug. General rifling characteristics are the consistent features inside the barrel of all rifles of the same make and model. All tests carried out on the rifle, including those experts retained by Ray's attorney, found that the bullet and the test fires shared the same rifling characteristics.

The 1999 Conspiracy Trial

In 1995 Ray's London-based attorney, William Pepper, asserted that his client was innocent. The conspiracy to kill King, Pepper claimed, was organized by the U.S. government. Pepper alleged that government agents gave the contract to the head of organized crime in New Orleans who, in turn, solicited the assistance of a Mafia member in Memphis to handle the arrangements. The Memphis Mafia boss then hired Loyd Jowers, owner/operator of Jim's Grill beneath Ray's rooming house, to handle the payoff and dispose of the murder weapon. A U.S. Army sniper squad was in place to shoot King if the Mafia hit failed. Pepper alleged that the FBI, CIA, the media, Army Intelligence, and state and city officials helped cover up the assassination. In the late '90s Pepper claimed to have found Ray's handler, the mysterious Raoul (now re-named Raul by Pepper). Raul was allegedly a Portuguese immigrant living in New York State.

During the period when the Justice Department had been investigating these new allegations of conspiracy, the King family, represented by Pepper, sued Loyd Jowers in a wrongful-death lawsuit. They believed Jowers's 1993 televised admission that he had participated in a "conspiracy" to kill King gave King's family sufficient grounds to initiate a private law suit. During the 1999 four-week civil trial, which was held in a Shelby County Court House in Memphis, Pepper repeated the claims he had made in his 1995 book, Orders To Kill. Pepper had no interest in seeing Loyd Jowers go to jail. The whole thrust of Pepper's efforts was in trying to prove that Jowers was merely a tool in a larger conspiracy involving the FBI, the Military, the CIA, and the Mafia. Pepper's thesis centered on the reasons why the government wanted to eliminate the civil rights leader.

From the start, Pepper's courtroom allegations were viewed by many commentators as ludicrous, dependent as they were on the stories of many discredited witnesses who did not reveal their far-fetched tales until many years after the assassination. The jury, which consisted of six blacks and six whites, took three hours to reach its verdict of conspiracy involving Jowers. The King family received a token $100 award. The guilty verdict was hardly surprising, considering that Jowers's lawyer never disputed the contentions of the King lawyers. As the jury heard no evidence to rebut the conspiracy theory, it was inevitable it would return a verdict favorable to Pepper and the King family. The trial was, effectively, bogus.

The DOJ team of investigators (appointed by U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and which had no connection to the FBI) released its report in June 2000. The report rejected all of Pepper's conspiracy claims that had been made during the conspiracy trial, and provided evidentiary proof to support the team's conclusions.

Pepper never presented any credible evidence that would have supported his allegations, especially those of FBI involvement in the murder, or the allegation that the bureau never looked for a conspiracy in the first place. Contrary to the claims made by conspiracy advocates, it is clear that FBI senior officials kept an open mind during their assassination investigation. An FBI memo written by FBI Supervisor John S. Temple supports this conclusion. Temple wrote, "Supervisor Long also advised that Assistant Director DeLoach told Assistant Director Rosen that Los Angeles should keep in mind that King may have been killed by a hired assassin."

Another memo, written by J. Edgar Hoover, corroborates this finding. The memo states, "I said (to Atty. Gen. Ramsay Clark)...there will be efforts to kill (Ray) if there is a conspiracy and if there is no conspiracy, the supporters of Dr. King will do everything in their power to kill him...I said I think he acted entirely alone but we are not closing our minds that others might be associated with him and we have to run down every lead."

Historian Gerald McKnight believes there is no evidence to support the allegations the FBI was involved in King's killing and, furthermore, such ideas were far-fetched and illogical. McKnight wrote, "...there is nothing in the released documents to support, and persuasive evidence to reject, assertions that the FBI and Memphis Police Department conspired to assassinate King."

Additionally, if Hoover had planned to neutralize King by killing him he would have first destroyed the COINTELPRO records that contained evidence of the FBI's illegal surveillance of the civil rights leader. It is also rational to conclude that the bureau would never conspire with organizations or individuals outside the bureau for such a risky undertaking. After all, the FBI maintained its power by acting as a state within a state. Any knowledge of its activities by outsiders would have left the bureau extremely vulnerable. As FBI profiler John Douglas wrote, "...anyone who's worked in the government, even in the intelligence community, will tell you that NOTHING that big or well publicized stays secret for long. The big bureaucracy is fundamentally incapable of carrying out a conspiracy and keeping it under wraps."

Conveniently, much of the evidence Pepper presented at the 1999 conspiracy trial was curiously absent -- including the real rifle alleged to shoot King (at the bottom of the Mississippi River), the Memphis Police Department shooter (dead before his accusers went public), the Mafia organizer of the conspiracy (dead before his accusers "found" evidence of his role in the crime), photographs showing Ray did not shoot King (they have never surfaced), members of an Army sniper team (anonymous and "living in another country"), and their purported leader, whom Pepper mistakenly named.

Innocent events -- the so-called "second Mustang" (it was likely another white car of a different make, parked nearby or witnesses became confused when Ray left the rooming house then parked in a different spot when he returned), the damaged scope on the rifle found at the scene of the crime, policemen dropping from the wall opposite the Lorraine Motel, Rev. Kyles's poor choice of words to describe his actions shortly before King was killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel ("Only as I moved away so he could have a clear shot…"), the innocent statements made by the Portuguese immigrant's daughter that the "government" had helped her family -- all became part of Pepper's malevolent conspiracy jigsaw puzzle that distorted the truth about the assassination.

As visiting scholar at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, David Greenburg, wrote, "Despite multiple debunking these (conspiracy) fantasies endure…a crackpot named William F. Pepper has convinced King's entire family that the U.S. Government, including President Lyndon Johnson, was responsible for his death…Conspiracists adopt the trappings of scholarship, touting irrelevant titles and credentials. They burrow into the arcana of their topics and inundate potential acolytes with a barrage of pedantic detail. Rather than build a case from evidence, conspiracists deny the available evidence, maintaining that appearances deceive. Rather than admit to inconvenient facts, they dismiss them as lies, making their own theories irrefutable."

Gerald Posner looked into the background of Pepper's Raul and discovered that the Portuguese immigrant had nothing to do with the assassination. In 2000, the DOJ investigators found proof within the FBI files that the car radio in Ray's Mustang did not work at the time of the assassination, thereby putting to lie Ray's story that he first heard about King's assassination when he drove away from the scene of the crime. The DOJ investigators also proved that many of the Jowers's trial witnesses were motivated by financial gain, documents provided by an ex-FBI agent, allegedly proving the existence of Ray's handler, Raoul, were bogus and the allegations of U.S. Army involvement in the murder were fabricated lies. During my own research I discovered that Ray was an occasional smoker. It is an issue that addresses the myth, propagated over the years, that Ray had an accomplice who left cigarette butts in the Mustang's ashtray.

What became unfortunate about this case was the way in which Pepper stopped at nothing to malign innocent participants who had been caught up in his quest to prove a non-existent and far-fetched conspiracy organized by the U.S. government. He disgracefully pointed the finger of guilt at not only Rev. Kyles but also accused the widow of a Memphis Police Department "conspirator" of having lied about her husband's role in the conspiracy. Raul, the innocent Portuguese immigrant, had his life turned upside down by Pepper's desire to implicate him in a plot. Pepper displayed no guilt in accusing each of his targets of criminal acts, perjury in the first instance and murder in the second. He also accused King assassination authors Gerold Frank and George McMillan of having sinister ties to the FBI and/or CIA, implying they conspired with the government to hide the truth or simply were duped when they investigated the King murder. He even gave credence to one of his star witnesses, Glenda Grabow, a JFK conspiracy fantasist who maligned the character of LBJ aide Jack Valenti by describing him as a pornographer. Instead of showing her the door, he enlisted her as a Jowers trial witness. As Pepper's former investigator, Ken Herman, told BBC documentary makers, "Pepper is the most gullible person I have ever met in my life".

Pepper's thesis is manifestly absurd. The idea that the U.S. government had King executed means that high officials of the Johnson administration were prepared to risk riot and arson in order to attain the elimination of a single individual. It is inconceivable that Johnson officials would have failed to see that the murder of a prominent African-American leader would have led to this inevitable outcome. Considering all that had happened in the previous four years, including the terrible destruction and rioting that occurred in major cities across the United States, his allegations become preposterous.

The true facts about the assassination are far removed from the exaggerations and speculative accounts of the conspiracy-minded. Ray made every decision and took every action leading up to the assassination. No credible evidence exists that would indicate he was used as a patsy or was instructed to participate in the crime. Ray researched the rifle, the ammunition, and the telescopic sight. Ray bought the Mustang, had it serviced, rented the rooms on his journeys, made his own telephone calls, bought his own clothes, and had them laundered.

Ray was identified by landlady Bessie Brewer as the person who rented Room 5B of the South Main Street rooming house, and he was also identified by lodger Charles Q. Stephens, as the man who left the bathroom of the rooming house following the shooting. (Despite attempts by conspiracy advocates to claim Stephens was drunk at the time Ray left the bathroom and therefore could not be a credible witness, police officers have testified under oath that Stephens was "intoxicated but in full control of himself.")

Ray's fingerprints proved that he owned the bundle that was dropped in the doorway of Canipe's Amusement store shortly after the shooting. The bundle contained the rifle used to shoot King. Ray had expressed hatred for African-Americans. Ray lied time and time again about his movements when he fled the scene of the crime. Incontrovertible and overwhelming evidence exists to prove these facts.

The Motive

Many investigators and researchers have provided proof of Ray's underlying motive for the crime, but conspiracy advocates refuse to accept the results of their research. George McMillan's interviews with Jerry and John Ray in the early 1970s and Gerald Posner's excellent research in the 1990s proved that Ray did indeed harbor racist sentiments. During the FBI's 1968 investigation of the assassination, agents interviewed practically everyone who had known James Earl Ray from the time he was a young boy. It had over 3,000 agents at one time or another working on the case. They asked those who had known Ray if the assassin had ever expressed racial hatred towards African-Americans and Martin Luther King Jr. in particular. Literally dozens of people, who lived far apart from one another, testified that Ray harbored a deep hatred for African-Americans and had expressed that hatred frequently up to the time he committed his deadly act.

Typical of the associates of Ray who were interviewed was Ray's uncle, William E. Maher. Maher told FBI agents that, prior to Ray's entry into the Army, Ray worked at a shoe tannery in Hartford, Ill., where he became associated with an individual who had pro-Nazi leanings; Ray became anti-Negro and anti-Jewish as a result. Maher also said that, while in military service, Ray was stationed in Germany where his anti-Negro and anti-Jewish opinions crystallized.

Another close associate of Ray's was Walter Rife. Ex-convict Rife had known Ray since he was a teenager in Quincy, Ill. They were close friends in the 1950s, and Ray and Rife were also colleagues in crime. Rife said, "Yeah, Jimmy was a little outraged about Negroes. He didn't care for them at all. There was nothing particular he had against them, nothing they had done to him. He said once they ought to be put out of the country. Once he said, 'Well, we ought to kill them, kill them all...He was unreasonable in his hatred for niggers. He hated to see them breathe. If you pressed it, he'd get violent in a conversation about it. He hated them! I never did know why..."

Following Ray's April 1967 escape from the Missouri State Penitentiary, he spent time in Chicago (April/June 1967), Canada (July/August 1967), Birmingham, Ala., (September/October 1967), Mexico (October/November 1967) and Los Angeles (November 1967- March 1968). Many people who crossed paths with Ray during his post-prison escape travels corroborate his hatred of African-Americans.

Ray first fled to Canada where he spent some time at a ski resort, Grey Rocks. There he met a woman he liked but he may have been using her to secure a passport. The divorced woman, Claire Keating, was a Canadian civil servant. She told author, William Bradford Huie, "I can't remember how the subject came up but he said something like, 'You got to live near niggers to know 'em.' He meant that he had no patience with the racial views of people like me who don't 'know niggers' and that all people who 'know niggers' hate them."

During Ray's stay in Mexico he became acquainted with a number of bar girls, one of whom related a telling example of Ray's anger towards African-Americans. Manuela Aguirre Medrano (known as "Irma La Douce") worked at the Casa Susana, a brothel in Peurto Vallarta. She said that Ray told her he "hated niggers" and he said many insulting things about African-Americans. Medrano observed how Ray's personality changed as the conversation turned to the issue of civil rights and that, during one date with Medrano, Ray grew angry at four African-Americans sailors who had been sitting at the bar. Medrano could not understand why Ray became angry with them but did say that at one point Ray went to his car to get his pistol. According to Medrano he wanted to follow them out of the bar with his pistol but she stopped him. Ten years later Medrano was interviewed by the HSCA and denied Ray's reactions to the African-American sailor's remarks was "racist." However, as Gerald Posner concluded, "…it is…likely that the sailor's race incited (Ray), more so than someone accidentally touching his $8-a-day prostitute."

Another racial incident involving Ray occurred in Los Angeles where the fugitive went following his short stay in Mexico. Bob Del Monte, a bartender at the Rabbit's Foot Club, said Ray became involved in a heated discussion about race with one of the bar's women patrons, Pat Goodsell. Evidently, Goodsell had spotted Ray's Mustang that was always parked outside the club when Ray visited the establishment. The car showed Alabama license plates. Goodsell berated Ray for the way people in Alabama treated African-Americans. Ray ended up dragging Goodsell to the bar's door saying, "I'll drop you off in Watts and we'll see how you like it there." Del Monte also recalled that shortly after this incident an African-American patron of the Rabbit's Foot was struck on the head by a rock or brick while in the nearby parking lot. He suspected Ray threw the rock.

Deputy Sheriff William DuFour guarded Ray following the assassin's capture and extradition to Memphis. DuFour had been one of the TACT force officers near the Lorraine Motel when King was shot. He reached King as he lay dying. DuFour helped to carry King down to the ambulance, drenching himself with King's blood. DuFour would play card games and watch television with Ray during his shifts and developed a close relationship with the accused assassin. DuFour said that Ray had pet names for people including the man he was accused of murdering. Ray often referred to Martin Luther King as "Martin Lucifer King".

On the evening following Ray's guilty plea his brothers said, "All his life Jimmy has been wild on two subjects. He's been wild against niggers, and he's wild on politics. He's wild against any politician who's for niggers, and he's wild for any politician who's against niggers. Nobody can reason with Jimmy on the two subjects of niggers and politics."

James Earl Ray told his lawyer Percy Foreman that he did not have to be afraid of a death sentence for killing King, "(because) no white man has ever been executed in Tennessee for killing a nigger." It was only later that Ray realized that prosecutors would indeed push for the death sentence. Foreman persuaded Ray that the case was too big to rely on local prejudices and that he would be found guilty and executed.

Ray's racist sentiments were confirmed when his papers, including 400 letters to his brothers written between 1969 and 1997, were acquired by Boston University in 2000. In none of the letters did Ray confess to the murder of King. However, the letters reveal a startling lack of empathy with the slain civil-rights leader. It was the central event in Ray's life, yet whenever he mentioned King it was only in the context of his attempts to get a new trial. The letters revealed his bigotry and hatred for African-Americans. They also show how he became a fan of an all-night "Whitepower" radio station. Among his papers is a newspaper clip that chronicles the rise of racist politicians David Duke and J.B Stoner, who figure prominently in the letters. Stoner's letters to Ray conclude "With Best Racist Wishes." In one letter Ray gave Stoner legal advice on how to escape culpability for a racist bombing. It didn't prevent the rabid racist from finally being brought to justice for his crimes.

The "Illogical" Conspiracy

Conspiracy buffs have, for years, pointed to the fact that Ray secured false passports to enable him to flee the country. They have determined that the assassin must have received assistance in obtaining the passports from a sophisticated group of conspirators, most likely the government. However, the process of obtaining false identity documentation in the 1960s was not difficult.

Following the abandonment of the getaway car in Atlanta, Ray made his way to Toronto where he easily obtained a passport – in much the same way many U.S. fugitives obtained their false passports. Canadian bureaucracy at the time made it easy to obtain a false birth certificate and the travel agencies there did all the work in obtaining passports for their customers. An appearance before a government official was not a requirement.

Ray's movements following the assassination also leave no room for sinister interpretation. He flew to London's Heathrow Airport, then immediately caught a flight to Lisbon. It was an attempt to find a mercenary organization and safe passage to southern Africa. But he was running out of money and thought it would be easier to commit robberies in London where he could speak the language, so he returned. A phone call to a London reporter gave him the information that mercenary groups were established in Brussels. He made his way to the airport but the FBI had, by now, discovered the truth about Ray's movements and the issue of a false Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd. The FBI tipped off Scotland Yard, which issued an all-points-bulletin for police and customs officers to be on the alert for Ray. Ray was arrested before he could board his flight to Brussels.

From the start Ray adopted an improvisational approach to his alibi. When researchers discovered new information that purportedly supported Ray, he would change his story to accommodate the new possibilities. There is no evidence that Ray met with a mysterious Raoul or had any conspiratorial contact with anyone except his family following his escape from the Missouri State Penitentiary.

It was evident that Ray was able to convince himself that he had a plausible case to make. In 1959 Ray had told an arresting police officer, "I cannot deny it and I won't admit it." During the late 1970s his lawyer, Mark Lane, had put in Ray's mind the difference between "truth" and "legal truth." Ray could therefore persuade himself that he was really innocent because the courts had not established the full circumstances of the crime. He knew that the assistance given to him by his brothers established, to his own satisfaction, a case for conspiracy. The state had not proven a conspiracy had existed therefore he had been telling the "truth." In fact Ray had been manipulating reality to suit his own version of the truth. This was the reason why the polygraph results were inconclusive when Ray answered questions about a conspiracy. The same polygraph examiner determined Ray had been lying when he denied killing King.

It is likely Ray's resolve in sticking to his story would have dissipated had it not been for the support he was given by conspiracy writers. According to Douglas and Anne Brinkley, who examined the prison letters Ray wrote over a period of 30 years, "Ray exploited the fact that foreign journalists with an anti-American sensibility had no trouble accepting his story that the White House and the FBI had ordered King's assassination."

For each and every fact about the King case that provides some suspicion, conspiracy writers are prone to deliver their own biased interpretation. Conspiracy writers who investigated Ray's finances, for example, concluded that Ray must have received funds from conspirators. They did not consider the possibility that Ray committed robberies during his time on the run or that he had made money in prison as a drug dealer. As his brother John told FBI agents, "(James never had) any real need for money as he was always able to pick it up by ways of burglaries or robberies during his travels." In all the states Ray traveled, following his escape from prison, the FBI carried out inquiries. There were numerous unsolved robberies of banks, stores, gas stations, and liquor stores. The FBI assassination investigation, however, did not consider robberies that had a value of less than $5,000.

There is a wealth of evidence, never presented by conspiracy advocates, that Ray was an habitual user of drugs and sold them to fellow inmates. From defenders and adversaries alike, Ray emerges from the FBI reports as a loner with few friends; a prisoner who was always devising some scheme to break out of prison; a schemer who was involved in various money-making ventures, including buying and selling amphetamines, and lending money to other prisoners. Ray's drug use was confirmed by a family friend of the Rays, his uncle, Jack Gawron. He told agents that he supplied Ray with inhalers, and that he believed Ray trafficked in amphetamines while in prison. Ray's fluctuating weight in prison added to the suspicions of investigators. Additional support that Ray was a drug user was discovered in the Scotland Yard files. In one of Ray's London rooming houses a hypodermic needle had been found.

Because Ray had proclaimed the existence of a conspiracy during his trial, it is far-fetched that conspirators would have allowed him to remain alive during the three decades he spent in prison prior to his death. There were simply too many risks attached to this scenario. If conspirators, especially government-led killers, could successfully murder America's foremost civil-rights leader and then cover up the circumstances surrounding the act, they would assuredly have had little problem in eliminating Ray. If Ray had indeed been aided by co-conspirators, they would have spirited him away and placed him in hiding as soon as the murder had been carried out. They would not have allowed him to be exposed so many times during his two months on the run. Conspirators would not have put themselves in jeopardy by allowing Ray the opportunity to identify fellow conspirators. And, if Ray had been an unwilling patsy, conspirators could not have been certain that Ray would flee the scene of the crime. Under these circumstances, had Ray stayed put, the whole conspiracy may have collapsed.

Why would the government employ so many people in the conspiracy when the risk of leakage would have been so much greater? Had President Johnson wanted to eliminate King all that was required was for him to request the CIA Director or private parties to arrange a contract and that would have been the end of it.

This was no sophisticated murder, as conspiracy advocates maintain. King was an easy target for any killer bent on eliminating him. King did not have an armed guard; he frequently left his home on foot; and his travel arrangements were well publicized. The government could also have destroyed King by simply arranging for all the scandal-filled surveillance tapes to be released to a friendly journalist to publicize them. This would not have been at all unusual. In the 1960s, the CIA enlisted the assistance of journalists and student groups to promote the government's policies.

What Really Happened?

When Ray escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1967 he knew that if he continued with his lifetime career of robbing banks it would guarantee a return to prison sooner or later. The porno business or drug smuggling he discussed with his brothers seemed to offer great financial rewards. Ray abandoned the idea, likely realizing he didn't have the skills or contacts required for those criminal enterprises. He would also risk exposure. Feeling trapped and nowhere else to go, he decided to return to his long held idea of the big score.

From the accumulated evidence in the case it can be concluded that Ray believed the bounty on King was genuine, although there is no credible evidence that he made arrangements to collect it prior to or following the assassination. It is reasonable to assume that Ray may have wanted to collect whatever money was on offer through his brothers, at some future date. It is also plausible Ray took photographs of the crime scene as proof he had murdered King. However, as Ray admitted, he threw the camera equipment away, probably in a state of panic, as he fled Memphis. Ray's plan was to go to a country that did not have extradition arrangements with the United States. Perhaps at some date in the future a President George Wallace would pardon him.

It is also clear that Ray's actions were not predicated on the provision of a bounty. Ray knew that his crime was of such overwhelming proportions that publicity generated by the murder would never die, especially in a country like the United States that makes celebrities of famous murderers. He was also fully aware that the killers of civil-rights workers Medgar Evers and Viola Liuzzo had been treated leniently by Southern courts. Book, magazine, and television contracts would always be on offer to pay for defense lawyers and financial provision for his brothers. If he had been lucky enough to escape to a foreign country, he could have sold his story. He would also have been aware that racist right-wing organizations and a large body of American public opinion would be behind him.

He told fellow inmates about the big score, aware that his burglaries, bank robberies, and petty crimes had amounted to little. Psychologically, James Earl Ray wanted to become what his parents had always known -- he was the child who was smarter and more resourceful than the rest. But he had chosen a life where success is not measured by conventional standards. Success to Ray was attaining respect from his peers, the criminal fraternity, making the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. And, contrary to ideas held by some conspiracy advocates, Ray had nerves of steel, especially when amphetamines hyped him up. According to his brother John, "(James has) steel nerves -- he just walks in (to the bank) like it's an everyday thing, gets the money, and walks out."

Stalking and then killing King would give him the status he craved and, if caught, he could enjoy the high esteem that goes with this type of crime. Believing that if he killed King in the Deep South a white jury would acquit him, Ray knew that in time he would be able to collect his reward if not as a free man then certainly through his brothers.

Ray had practiced deception all his life. A psychiatrist employed by the Missouri State prison system had been convinced that Ray was capable of murder. Rather than the bumbling crook he is portrayed by his defenders, Ray was instead, cunning, crafty, and manipulative. Ray's ex-wife, Anna Sandhu, recognized these qualities. Some of his lawyers have spoken of how Ray would manipulate them. He was an astute jailhouse lawyer who had spent years learning the fine points of the law, especially with respect to appeals procedure and how the law applied to the lawyer/client relationship. He knew how to keep his hopes for freedom alive. These realities are consistent with Ray's cryptic reply to Dexter King in 1997 when the civil rights leader's son asked him if he had killed his father - "No, I didn't, no, no, but sometimes you have to make your own evaluation and maybe come to that conclusion. I think that could be done today, but not 30 years ago."

In the real world accusation without confirmation is worthless. During his trial, Ray knew he had introduced enough doubt as to stimulate future public examinations of his case. He knew the idea of conspiracy would keep his case alive in the public eye. Had there not been a climate of conspiratorial thinking engendered by the public doubt about Lee Harvey Oswald's guilt, it is unlikely the King case would have been intensely scrutinized for the past 30 years. And keeping the real truth about the assassination hidden would not have been difficult for a man like Ray. He had always been a loner who never fully revealed himself to anyone -- not his brothers, his family, his fellow prisoners, his acquaintances or his lawyers.

It is unlikely the factual evidence about the King murder case will persuade the American public of Ray's guilt. American society has been influenced too much by the conspiracy theorists' world-view and the sub-text that underlies the promotion of conspiracy stories that are predicated on disillusionment with the institutions of American government. In 1963, 75 percent of the American population trusted the federal government. Today that figure has diminished to 25 percent.

Ray served his sentence in Tennessee prisons, mixing with the inmate population, working on his appeals, and staying in contact with his brothers. The end came nearly 30 years after the King murder when he succumbed to liver disease. He had been admitted to Columbia Nashville Memorial Hospital, his 16th hospitalisation since December 1996. Ray was stabbed more than 20 times by four inmates at Brushy Mountain Prison in 1981, and he may have developed hepatitis from a blood transfusion.

The death of James Earl Ray in 1998 added to the discontent and dissatisfaction many people felt at the many attempts to establish the whole truth about the King killing. Ray left no deathbed confession nor did he retract the numerous claims he made about the mysterious Raoul. By keeping silent, Ray was effectively thumbing his nose at a society that had relegated him to the bottom of the heap.

Government files on the King slaying are sealed until 2029. Opening these documents will only reveal why investigators have been so convinced of Ray's guilt and why they have always rejected a wider conspiracy. Obfuscation, manipulation, lies, greed, and distortion of the facts have characterized this case, allowing Ray to escape blame. The truth of the matter is that Ray murdered King and he acted alone when he shot him, but one or both of his brothers before and/or after the fact possibly aided him. As Anna Ray, the assassin's wife, told television talk-show host Geraldo Rivera in the 1990s, "(James told me) 'Yeah I did it, so what'?…James will never admit to the killing again – he'll carry his secret to the grave. He's created a mystique by recanting his original confession. He doesn't want to go down in history as the killer of Martin Luther King Jr., so he'll deny it to his death."

The New York Times did carry one story on April 4 about Martin Luther King - sort of. Buried deep in the paper, the Times reported the following "news": the autopsy videotape of King's assassin, James Earl Ray, is for sale.

Ray's brother, Jerry Ray, is selling the taped autopsy of his brother - some two hours long - for $400,000. With an eye to gruesome irony, Jerry Ray even made his sales pitch for the tape on the anniversary of King's death - while standing near the site of King's assassination.

Mel Ayton is the author of The JFK Assassination: Dispelling The Myths (Woodfield Publishing 2002) and Questions Of Controversy: The Kennedy Brothers (University of Sunderland Press 2001).

His latest book, A Racial Crime – James Earl Ray And The Murder Of Dr Martin Luther King Jr., was published in the United States by ArcheBooks in February 2005.

In 2003 he acted as the historical adviser for the BBC's television documentary "The Kennedy Dynasty" broadcast in November of that year. He has written articles for Ireland's leading history magazine History Ireland, David Horowitz's Frontpage magazine and History News Network.

Nov. 11. 2006 Updated March 12, 2007

Members of the Warren Commission present their report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  L-R: John McCloy, J. Lee Rankin (General Counsel), Senator Richard Russell, Representative Gerald Ford, Chief Justice Earl Warren, President Lyndon B. Johnson, Allen Dulles, Senator John Sherman Cooper, and Representative Hale Boggs. Credit: LBJ Library photo by Cecil Stoughton

Warren Commission member Congressman Gerald Ford pressed the panel to change its description of the bullet wound in President Kennedy's back and place it higher to make "the magic bullet" theory plausible, enabling the Warren Commission to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman. Ford was J. Edgar Hoover's informant on the commission and did the FBI director's bidding to squelch the investigation from naming other assassins. When a Dallas County deputy constable heard shots coming from the nearby grassy knoll, he rushed there to find veteran CIA asset Bernard Barker, posing as a Secret Service agent. No Secret Service agents had been assigned to cover the grassy knoll and all accompanied President Kennedy to the hospital.

by Don Fulsom

At approximately 12:30 p.m. on Nov. 22 1963, in Dallas's downtown Dealey Plaza, a large and friendly crowd lined the street, cheering and waving excitedly at the approaching presidential motorcade. Riding in the third car – an oversized Lincoln with its Plexiglas "bubble" top removed – were President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, and Texas Gov. John Connally and his wife, Nellie. As the limousine carrying the Connallys and the Kennedys wound its way through the hospitable crowds, Nellie Connally turned to President Kennedy, who was seated behind her, and said, "Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you." Then the shots rang out.

Today, more than four decades later, the details on specifically how and by whom President Kennedy was assassinated are still open to question.

According to the report of the Warren Commission, released in September 1964 after a full year investigation, one single shooter – Lee Harvey Oswald – killed Kennedy and wounded Gov. Connally by firing three bullets from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

Oct. 24, 2013

 Count Anton Graff von Arco auf Valley

by David Robb

“Wach auf!” the prison guard shouted in German – the language best for shouting orders. “Wake up!”

It was November 11, 1923, and Count Anton Graff von Arco auf Valley was sound asleep in his comfortable jail cell at Landsberg Prison in Bavaria. Arco-Valley was the prison’s most famous inmate – but not for long. A new prisoner was coming that day and the warden wanted Arco-Valley moved to another cell to accommodate his new prisoner – Adolf Hitler, who’d just been arrested for treason for leading an attempted overthrow of the Bavarian government.

Arco-Valley rubbed the sleep from his eyes and got out of bed. The jailer threw a box on his bed and told him to put all his belongings in it. That done, he was taken down the hall to a new, less-comfortable cell.

Arco-Valley was an assassin whose dastardly crime would shape the course of the 20^th century. Today he is all but forgotten.

Four years before being moved from his cell to make room for Hitler, Arco-Valley, then a handsome 22-year-old student, former lieutenant in the German Army during World War I, and member of a noble German family, had assassinated Kurt Eisner, the Jewish premier of Bavaria. Young Arco-Valley, a virulent anti-Semite – despite the fact that he himself was half-Jewish – had shot Eisner in the hope of restoring the monarchy that Eisner had overthrown.

“Eisner is a Bolshevist,” Arco-Valley proclaimed. “He isn’t German, he doesn’t feel German, he subverts all patriotic thoughts and feelings. He is a traitor to this land.”

In fact, Eisner was a German, and he was not a Communist. He was a journalist, socialist, pacifist and patriot who, on November 7, 1918 – four days before the end of World War I – had led a revolt that overthrew the corrupt and militaristic Wittelsbach monarchy that had ruled Bavaria for 700 years.

A few months later, however, Eisner would be soundly defeated in state elections by Johannes Hoffmann, his former minister of education and a member of the Bavarian People’s Party – a group aligned with Bavaria’s deposed monarchy. Eisner received less than 3 percent of the vote.  

On February 21, 1919, Eisner was on his way to the Bavarian Parliament in Munich to tender his resignation. As he was walking along the bustling Prannerstrasse on his way to the opening day of Parliament, Arco-Valley snuck up from behind him and fired two bullets into the back of his head. Eisner crumpled to the sidewalk and his bodyguards returned fire, severely wounding Arco-Valley, who was dragged away from the scene, presumed to be dead.

Arco-Valley, however, was not dead, but his cowardly act would destroy any hope of Bavaria becoming a democratic state. It was the spark that sent Munich spiraling into chaos, instability and madness, making it the perfect cradle for the birth of the Nazi Party.

Less than an hour after Eisner was killed, the Bavarian Minister of the Interior announced the news of the assassination to Parliament. As he was speaking, right-wing fanatics opened fire from the public gallery, showering the majestic hall with bullets. The Minister was wounded in the fusillade, his deputy was killed and two other officials were seriously wounded. Hell was coming to Munich. But Hitler was already there.

Hitler was still in the army – now the Reichswehr (the National Defense) – and he was stationed in Munich that day, working as a Verbindungsmann (police spy), informing on Communists within the military ranks. His testimony would send several of his fellow soldiers to the gallows.

Hitler, in military uniform, even attended Eisner’s funeral a few days later, as seen in this rare photo.

Adolf Hitler, far right, at the funeral of Kurt Eisner, Feb. 26, 1919

After Eisner’s assassination, riots and looting broke out all over the city, and within days, radical anarchists and Communists staged a series of revolts in an attempt to install a Soviet-style government in Bavaria. Aristocrats were arrested and wealthy businessmen were taken hostage, 10 of whom were massacred at a local Munich high school.

But reactionary paramilitary groups, called the Freikorps, fought back, and after more than 600 people were killed in brutal street fights, wrested control of the city from the Bolsheviks. Munich, the Bavarian capital, would be a right-wing bastion for the next quarter-century.

Amid this chaos, newspapers around the world report that an angry mob had broken into the hospital where Count Arco-Valley was recovering and lynched him. “Munich Mob Slays Eisner Assassin,” The New York Times reported on April 27, 1919. But it wasn’t true. History had more in store for this anti-Semitic assassin.

Arco-Valley was put on trial, and in January 1920 was found guilty and sentenced to death. At the end of his trial, he told the court: “I hate Bolshevism. I love my Bavarians and hate the Jews. I am a faithful monarchist and a good Catholic.”

There was, however, widespread sympathy in the courtroom – and throughout Bavaria – for Arco-Valley. Even the prosecutor in his trial said of him: “If the whole German youth were imbued with such a glowing enthusiasm we could face the future with confidence.”

The next day, the Bavarian cabinet commuted Arco-Valley’s death sentence to life imprisonment, and he was hauled off to the Landsberg Prison. During his confinement, students and right-wing patriotic groups were allowed to visit him in prison, where he had become something of a national hero.

And it was there, in cell # 7 – which was more like a nicely appointed room with a view than a prison cell – that Count Arco-Valley was awakened on the morning of November 11, 1923, and moved to another cell to make way for Hitler, who had been sent to Landsberg after his failed putsch in Munich the year before. And it was here in cell # 7 that Hitler would write Mein Kampf, his hate-filled screed and blueprint for the Third Reich.

The prison cell would later become a shrine and place of pilgrimage for Hitler Youth organizations from all over Germany. In the 1930s, they would trek there by the thousands to see where their Fuehrer had been “unjustly” imprisoned. Upon entering, they would see a plaque that read: “Here a dishonorable system imprisoned Germany’s greatest son from November 11, 1923, to December 20, 1924.” And upon leaving, each of the visiting children would be given a copy of Mein Kampf– “My Struggle” – written in this room, which contained such anti-Semitic observations as these:

• · In his vileness he becomes so gigantic that no one need be surprised if among our people the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.

• · …by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.

• · If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity.

• · With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate.

A month after he was moved from this cell to make way for Hitler, Count Arco-Valley’s life sentence was commuted by a right-wing judge, George Neithardt, to five years – to time served – and he was released from Landsberg. He had assassinated a head of state, the premier of Bavaria – a Jew – and now he was a free man.

In June of 1933 – just a few months after Hitler took power in Germany – the city council of Munich ordered that the ashes of Kurt Eisner be exhumed and that the monument erected over his grave be destroyed. And so it was.

That same year, the Nazi regime declared Arco-Valley a “hero of the movement.” But within a few weeks, the Count was arrested for plotting to assassinate Hitler. German newspapers reported that Arco-Valley had told a friend: “I wouldn’t mind removing Hitler as I once did Eisner.”

The charges were eventually dropped, and the Count was once again a free man. The next year, he married a distant cousin and together they had four daughters. He would survive World War II, but on June 29, 1945 – less than two months after the war’s end – he was killed in a traffic accident in Salzburg, Austria.

Nov. 17, 2013

Lee Harvey Oswald posing with the murder weapon he bought from an ad in American Rifleman.

An advertisement in the NRA’s American Rifleman led Lee Harvey Oswald to purchase the rifle and scope used in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

by David Robb

If not for the National Rifle Association, November 22, 1963, might today be remembered as the day that Aldus Huxley, author of Brave New World, died in Los Angeles; or the day that C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, died in Oxford, England.

Instead, that date will forever be remembered as the day, 50 years ago, that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

And the NRA played a key supporting role in the President’s murder.

The NRA’s connection to the President’s assassination began one day in early March of 1963 as Lee Harvey Oswald sat at the kitchen table in his little upstairs apartment on West Neely Street in Dallas, browsing through the February issue of American Rifleman, the NRA’s official publication.

He was looking to buy a gun – a high-powered rifle.

Flipping through the magazine’s pages, he came upon a full-page ad placed by Klein’s Sporting Goods Company in Chicago, featuring 10 different rifles for sale. Oswald carefully looked over the small print detailing the specifications of each weapon, and then, always short of cash, decided on the cheapest one – a high-powered, “fast firing,” “ready for shooting,” Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, with scope, for only $19.95, plus $1.50 return postage.

Above is the full-page ad taken out in the February 1963 issue of American Rifleman. The ad for the gun Oswald bought is in the left column, third from the top.

“LATE ISSUE! 6.5 ITALIAN CARBINE,” the ad stated in block letters. “Only 36" overall, weighs only 5 ½ pounds. Shows only slight use, lightly oiled, test fired and head spaced, ready for shooting. Turned down bolt, thumb safety, 6-shot, clip fed. Rear down sight. Fast loading and fast firing. Specially priced…with brand new good quality 4X scope.”

On March 12, Oswald, under the assumed name A. Hidell, mailed the ad’s coupon to Klein’s, along with a money order for $21.45. The rifle – serial number C2766 – was shipped to his post office box – #2915 – in Dallas on March 20, and arrived a few days later. (Oswald had rented the post office box under his own name the previous October.)

Three weeks later, Oswald used the rifle in an attempt to kill General Edwin Walker, a disgraced right-wing Army general who President Kennedy had sacked two years earlier. On the evening of April 10, 1963, as Walker sat in his study, Oswald fired a single shot through Walker’s window, narrowly missing his head. The shooting went unsolved until after the Kennedy assassination, when the bullet was compared to the bullets that killed President Kennedy. Tests showed that it was “extremely likely” that the bullets had been manufactured by the same company, and had been fired by the same weapon. In addition, Oswald’s wife Marina told the Warren Commission that her husband had told her that he and he alone had tried to shoot General Walker that night.

Seven months later, Oswald used that same rifle to shoot President Kennedy.

The 6.5 mm Italian carbine Oswald ordered, its serial number matching the one sold by Klein’s, and found on the sixth floor of the Dallas School Book Depository, with Oswald’s palm print on it.

Ironically, the NRA would also play a supporting role in helping to establish that the rifle sold through its magazine had been the one used by Oswald to assassinate President Kennedy. During the investigation of the assassination, the Warren Commission employed three sharpshooters to determine if Oswald’s rifle could have hit the President at a range of 175-275 feet. In test firings, all but one of the 21 shots fired hit their target. All three sharpshooters had been rated “Master” by the National Rifle Association.

If not for the NRA magazine, Oswald would have certainly never bought that particular rifle, and although he probably would have bought one elsewhere, its aim might not have been as true, its scope as good, and its results as tragic.

Milt Klein, the owner of Klein’s Sporting Goods, sold the company a few years later, and was haunted for the rest of his life by his connection to the crime of the century.

Milt Klein never, ever talked about the gun that killed the President, but his son John wrote a screenplay about his father that tells how his dad felt about it. In the script, the Milt character says: “If I didn’t sell that gun, the assassination wouldn’t have happened.”

And if Oswald hadn’t been leafing through American Rifleman, he wouldn’t have bought that gun.

The NRA and its American Rifleman magazine never expressed any regret about their involvement in the chain of events that led to the assassination of President Kennedy, and they are both still very much in business.

Nov. 18, 2013

U.S. President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas Nov. 22, 1963

A mellinial generation  member weighs in on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

by Kristen Pulkstenis

I turned to my younger sister.  “Hey, Lauren?”
“Yeah?”
“What do you know about JFK’s assassination?”
“Not much.”
“How did he die?”
She thought a moment.  “He was shot.”
“Who did it?”
“Lee Harvey Oswald.”
“Where was Kennedy?”
“Outside?  I think it was outside.”
“What city, what state?”
“I think it was DC, right?”
“Where was Oswald?”
“He was outside too … was it some kind of parade?  There were a lot of people there.”
“A motorcade.  In Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.”
“So I was kind of right.  And nobody really is sure about what Oswald did?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”

This is a conversation I had with my 18-year-old sister as she watched me draft this article. I am 20. Our parents were’t even born when President John F. Kennedy was gunned down. Lauren and I, and our peers, are two generations removed from that tragic day.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy was one of the most significant events of the 20^th century.  Documents pertaining to the assassination and its ensuing investigations number in the tens of millions. The physical evidence – bullet casings, the infamous Mannlicher-Carcano rifle Oswald owned and the paper bag in which it was allegedly carried, fingerprints, autopsy photos and notes, the President’s vehicle, diaries, and much more – has been reviewed and argued over for decades. Many assassination-related items have been lost or destroyed. 

Despite the Warren Commission finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, surveys conducted between 1966 and 2003 showed that 80 percent of Americans believed that more than one person was involved in the Preisent’s assassination. In 2013, the Associated Press found that 59 percent of U.S. citizens still believe that to be true. And yet today, it seems the millennial generation is aware of nothing more than, “He was shot.”

I was lucky. In the spring of 2013, I enrolled in a class at American University in Washington, D.C. taught by journalist and longtime United Press International White House reporter Don Fulsom. The class on my transcript is titled, “Who Killed JFK?”  And in the very first class, I learned more about the assassination of our 35^th president than I had in all my years of public school history classes.

Under Professor Fulsom’s study, we heard from the leading experts in the field:  the single-bullet believers, the Mafia analyst, the Cuban and Soviet historians, the transparency advocates, and the police researchers. We read every scrap and letter exchanged between possible suspects, the logs of Oswald’s trip to the Soviet Union, post office registries, historical and personal records in Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, Dallas, New York, and Houston, and every allegation ever officially made for responsibility in the murder. We logged it all in a Web site we built ourselves: www.whokilledjfk.org.

No theory was left unexamined. They ranged from the ludicrous – Israeli intelligence agents killed Kennedy over nuclear weapons, a notion boasting the support of Colonel Gaddafi of Libya to the more ludicrous that Kennedy found out that the CIA was in contact with extraterrestrials and the CIA silenced him – to the far better supported and rational theory that the Mafia, which hated the Kennedys’ crackdown on organized crime, used mob henchmen like Oswald and Ruby to assassinate the President as well as the plausible theory that Oswald was simply a madman who acted alone.

When we began the class in January, 64 percent of us believed Oswald acted alone; 18 percent believed Oswald had been conspiring with some other individuals.  By April, 44 percent believed Oswald and the Mafia were collaborating, 19 percent believed it was Oswald working with both the CIA and the Mafia, and only 12 percent still believed Oswald had acted alone.  The change was dramatic, but after those months, I was shocked more by this than anything else: We still couldn’t, with any definitiveness, answer the single question posed by the course title. 

For a group of university students, the unavoidable determination that we may never know was infuriating. We learned we may never receive a fully satisfactory answer, just as older folk whose eyes witnessed the assassination 50 years ago never did. But that shouldn’t stop us from trying.

The obvious follow-up question, of course, is, why should we care? Why, as we mark this milestone, do scholars, researchers, and students like me pore over fuzzy scans of testimony from the House Select Committee on Assassinations?

The answer can be seen when the millennial generation, and Generation X before us, turn on our television sets. We don’t see assassinated presidents, gunned down in the street. But we see politics, a massive trove of leaked documents, espionage. We see a web of secrecy and politicians we believe we can’t trust. We see political inefficiency and buzzwords like honesty and transparency.  And we look at glossy photos of our representatives, the executives of the CIA, FBI, and NSA, our President and our courts and wonder, is our power where we think it is? Is it the open and public image, riding high on the streets of Dallas in a public motorcade for spectators to greet?  Or is there a gunman, some hidden command, lurking in the shadows and aiming to determine our fate?

I asked my sister why she cared who killed President Kennedy, why anyone should be interested in the death of a man that happened 50 years ago. She thought a moment, and said, “Because it’s justice. It’s like, why do we care who killed anyone? It’s because it’s someone’s kid, or parent.  And it’s uncertain. People hate uncertainty.”

I agree. And as we continue through a tumultuous period in our governance, uncertainty seems ubiquitous.  To cope, we cling to the belief that, in the United States, the people control the government, and the nation’s future. We cling to the hope that our ideal of democratic power didn’t die on the street with Kennedy that day. And we reach in vain for more information and trust from our leaders. But as we are left without answers, five decades later, uncertainty continues to burn.We’re left to wonder, on the streets of our democratic process, who’s holding the power, and who’s holding the gun?

Jan. 13, 2014

Countess Erzsébet Báthory

by David Robb

Lady Macbeth is perhaps the most famous fictional female villainess in all of literature, but in 1606, while William Shakespeare was creating her bloodthirsty character, one of the world’s worst real life villainess was on a serial murder spree like no other.

All but forgotten today, Countess Erzsébet Báthory was descended from one of the noblest families in the Hungarian region of Transylvania. But Erzsébet wasn’t like other girls – she liked to torture and murder them. All told, she may have murdered more than 650 young girls and virgins. The exact number won’t be known until the government of Hungary makes public her diary, which reportedly contains the names of all her victims – a diary so shocking that Hungarian authorities have kept it under lock and key for over 400 years.

Testimony from the ensuing trial revealed that she bit hunks of flesh from the bodies of her victims while they were still alive. Legend has it that she bathed in their blood, believing that this would preserve her youth. No one knows for sure why she did it. What is known is that she murdered at least three-times more young women than did Jack the Ripper – and possibly 100-times more. She was the most prolific female mass murderer of all time, and perhaps the most prolific serial killer – male or female – ever to live. 

Born in 1560, Erzsébet Báthory was a strikingly beautiful 15-year-old girl when she married Count Ferenc Nadasdy, whose wedding gift to her was Cachtice Castle, a majestic, medieval palace set atop a hill overlooking a beautiful valley.  It was here that she would commit a series of ghastly murders. It was, without a doubt, the most picturesque mass murder site of all time.

 Cachtice Castle

Initially, Erzsébet’s husband took part in her sadistic sex games, which she practiced on her servants. Together, they would pierce the servants’ lips and nipples with pins and needles, stick sharp objects under their fingernails, whip them, stab them and bite them – but not to the point of death. They would cover them in honey and let insects bite away at them, or stand them in the freezing snow and douse them with water.

But when her husband left to fight in one of Hungary’s many wars with the Turks, Erzsébet’s thirst to inflict pain and suffering became unquenchable.

Testimony from the hair-raising trial would uncover a catalogue of depravity, mayhem and mass murder.

Erzsébet set up a torture chamber in the castle’s basement where no one could hear her vicitims’ screams. Young girls would be abducted from the nearby village or lured to the castle with the promise of work, and then Erzsébet would tear into them. 

Assisted by her majordomo, her childrens’ nanny, a washerwoman and several other servants, Erzsébet would beat the girls with boards, burn them with hot pokers, freeze them, drown them or starve them to death – all the while ravaging them sexually. Cutting, stabbing, poking and piercing were her favorite pastimes. Their hands were cut off, their eyes gouged out, their breasts and vaginas mutilated. She particularly enjoyed burning the girls’ noses and lips off with a red-hot flatiron, or ripping their jaws off with her bare hands. Erzsébet would bite pieces of flesh off their faces, attack them with knives, and set their pubic hair on fire with a burning candle. Once, a servant testified at trial, while torturing two girls, Erzsébet stuck needles under their fingernails and scowled, “If it hurts, you whores, then simply pull them out!” And when the girls pulled the needles out, Erzsébet cut their fingers off. Then they were killed.

This went on for decades.

But what to do with all the dead bodies? They were dumped in pits and canals, or buried in shallow graves in the surrounding fields or on the castle grounds.

Rumors began circulating about atrocities going on at the castle in 1604, but it wasn’t until 1610 that King Matthias sent someone to look into it. When the king’s envoy finally arrived at the castle, he and his men found one girl dead, another one dying, and many more locked up and hysterical.

The king wanted Báthory beheaded, but his advisors cautioned that this would reflect badly on the other nobles. Instead, Báthory was locked up and her four accomplices were put on trial, during which one testified that 36 young girls had been murdered; another said that the number was 37, and the other two claimed it was more than 50. Local townspeople claimed that as many as 200 bodies had been removed from the castle, and a witness who saw her book said it contained the names of 650 victims.

In the end, three of her accomplices were found guilty and executed. The other defendant was acquitted. Báthory herself was never tried, and was found dead in her cell on Aug. 21, 1614.

Updated 09/19/09

John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy

Despite a 1990s law mandating the release of all JFK assassination-related documents, an estimated one million such CIA records have yet to be declassified. Some of the most critical pertain to CIA agent George Joannides (a.k.a. Walter Newby) who violated the CIA’s pledge that no CIA operational officer from the time of the JFK assassination would work with U.S. House investigators.

byDon Fulsom

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his agents concealed critical evidence about the gruesome murder of President John F. Kennedy in the streets of Dallas in 1963.

A mid-70s conclusion by a Senate Committee headed by Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, found that the Warren Commission’s investigation of the assassination—conducted mainly by the FBI—“was deficient” and “impeaches the process whereby the intelligence agencies arrived at their own conclusions.”

In 1979, a special House investigating committee concurred—describing the FBI’s probe as “seriously flawed” and “insufficient to have uncovered a conspiracy.”

That committee’s own investigation showed a probable plot to kill the President, a plot likely involving the Mafia and certain anti-Castro groups.

Later, the House panel’s top investigator, Robert Blakey, flatly concluded that organized crime bosses orchestrated the JFK assassination.  Blakey identified the key plotters as Mob godfathers Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante and Sam Giancana—as well as Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa.

Early in this century, Blakey was astonished to learn that his committee’s work was compromised by the official who served as its chief CIA go-between. That particular spook—George Joannides (a.k.a. Walter Newby)—violated the CIA’s pledge that no operational officer from the time of the JFK assassination would work with House investigators.

Yet newly declassified documents show that, in 1963, Joannides was involved with a CIA-funded Cuban exile group known as the DRE, which had various interactions with Lee Harvey Oswald—Kennedy’s alleged assassin.

This disclosure was so upsetting to Blakey that, in 2003, he blasted his own committee’s finding that there was no CIA relationship with Oswald.  He also asserted, "I now no longer believe anything the agency told the committee any further than I can obtain substantial corroboration for it from outside the agency for its veracity."

In addition, Blakey publicly accused the spy agency of failing to cooperate with the Warren Commission’s 1964 investigation into Kennedy’s slaying:

We now know that the agency withheld from the Warren Commission the CIA-Mafia plots to kill (Cuban leader Fidel) Castro. Had the commission known of the plots, it would have followed a different path in its investigation. The agency unilaterally deprived the commission of a chance to obtain the full truth, which will now never be known.

Significantly, the Warren Commission's conclusion that the agencies of the government co-operated with it is, in retrospect, not the truth.

We also now know that the agency set up a process that could only have been designed to frustrate the ability of the committee in 1976-79 to obtain any information that might adversely affect the agency.

Many have told me that the culture of the agency is one of prevarication and dissimulation and that you cannot trust it or its people. Period. End of story.

I am now in that camp.

George Joannides died in 1990, without ever having been quizzed about his knowledge of Oswald's contacts with the CIA-dependent DRE he supervised.

Washington journalist Jefferson Morley has a pending six-year-old lawsuit against the CIA seeking the release of its records about Joannides.  But the CIA maintains the release of those files would harm “national security.”

In his latest legal filing, Morley explains why the agency’s Joannides files are so important:

Joannides's duties (in 1963), accordingto my declaration and declassified CIA records, included guiding and monitoring an anti-Castro student exile group which was harshly critical of JFK's Cuba policy.

The group made headlines within hours of JFK's murder by denouncing accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as a Castro supporter. The Warren Commission was not told of Joannides's involvement with the group.

Fifteen years later, Joannides served as the agency's liaison to the congressional committee re-investigating JFK's assassination. Congress was not told of Joannides's actions in 1963.

Morley is not the only JFK assassination researcher who has called on the CIA to come clean on Joannides.  A group of two-dozen experts of differing opinions about the President’s murder has called on the CIA to stop it’s “stonewalling” on the Joannides files.  This group describes the agency’s position as “spurious and untenable.”

In a 2005 letter published in the New York Review of Books, the group maintains, “(The CIA’s) continuing non-compliance with the JFK Records Act does no service to the public. It defies the will of Congress. It obscures the public record on a subject of enduring national interest. It encourages conspiracy mongering. And it undermines public confidence in the intelligence community at a time when collective security requires the opposite.”

The group—which includes Blakey, Oliver Stone and Vincent Bugliosi—adds:  “We insist the CIA observe the spirit of the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Act by immediately releasing all relevant records on the activities of George Joannides and any records at all that include his name or relate in any way to the assassination story—as prescribed by the JFK Records Act. The law and common sense require it.”

And the Chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board, federal Judge John Tunheim, bluntly opines that the Joannides case now “shows that the CIA wasn't interested in the truth about the assassination.”

Despite a 1990s law mandating the release of all JFK assassination-related documents, an estimated one million such CIA records have yet to be declassified. When Tunheim’s ARRB— created by that law — went out of business in 1998, it expressed worries that "critical records may have been withheld" from its scrutiny. The board said it clearly did not secure "all that was 'out there.'"

Perhaps President Obama’s 2009 directive aimed at reforming classification and declassification practices will hasten our knowledge of key JFK assassination secrets.  But don’t bet on it.

Obama’s order would establish a “National Declassification Center” to streamline the process of clearing previously sensitive national security information.  Politico observes that, “Democratic presidents have generally had orders calling for lower or no classification in cases of ‘significant doubt,’ while Republicans have held to a stricter standard.”

In an interview with Politico’s Josh Gerstein, declassification expert Steven Aftergood says that when “such a provision was in place in the past, it has not made a difference because classifiers do not suffer from doubt.  That’s empty rhetoric, but it shows (the Obama team’s) intentions are good.”

Good intentions frequently fail to meet their goals.  So it could still be a long time before we learn the complete truth about America’s greatest political murder mystery.

--------------------------

Sources:  “Frontline,” PBS.com; History-Matters.com; MaryFerrell.org; TPM.com; The FIOA Blog; Spartacus Educational Web site; Politico.com; WashingtonPost.com; Ultimate Sacrifice by Lamar Waldron

Examining some of the more recent theories of the crime, including allegations that there was a St. Louis conspiracy.

by J. J. Maloney

As 69-year-old James Earl Ray wasted away in a Tennessee prison - suffering from terminal liver disease - even the family of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. argued that he should be allowed a trial on whether he killed the Nobel Prize winning civil-rights leader.

Shelby County, Tennessee, Judge Joe Brown had ruled that 12 of 18 test bullets fired recently through the rifle long thought to be the murder weapon had markings different from the markings on the bullet that killed Dr. King. The rifle tested was the rifle that was found near the murder scene, within minutes of the shooting, with Ray's fingerprint on it. It has long been alleged, by Ray and many others, that the rifle was planted and that Ray was just a "patsy" in the conspiracy to kill Dr. King. These test results support that contention.

One expert argued that the defense should be allowed to clean the rifle's bore, because there was evidence of "bubbling" on the test bullets - which could be caused by a buildup of lead or copper from previous test firings. The government argues that cleaning the rifle's bore could destroy evidence - even though no expert has ever been able to say that the fatal bullet was fired from this rifle.

In those proceeding the fatal bullet was described as fragmented and deformed to such a degree that no ballistic comparison is possible. However, in the late 1970s, when I interviewed Arthur Hanes and Bernard Fensterward, former attorneys for James Earl Ray (Hanes is also a former FBI agent), they both said they had held the fatal bullet, that it was in good shape and should be more than suitable for ballistics comparison. In fact, when Ray entered his guilty plea, in 1969, the prosecutor told the jury that, had the case gone to trial, he would have introduced ballistics evidence linking the fatal bullet to the 30.06 rifle with Ray's fingerprint on it.

Even that fingerprint is in question, however. The first book on the King case, The Strange Case of James Earl Ray, by Clay Blair, said it took the FBI's fingerprint section two weeks to identify the fingerprint - even though it was comparing the print against only 720 sets of prints. That would indicate a fingerprint of dubious quality.

These types of questions are more troubling because the House Select Committee on Assassinations, after releasing its report on the case in 1979, immediately sealed all of the evidence it had, including all of the test bullets, for 50 years.

Ray had purchased the rifle days before the killing. If only one bullet had ever been fired through it, then the test bullets fired in 1968 would be the best bullets for use in comparison. We do not know how many bullets were fired in 1978. The more times a rifle is fired, however, the more wear and tear there will be inside the barrel, and this can change the markings left on a bullet.

HSCA didn't seal the evidence for the benefit of the King family - they've been after the truth since the day King was murdered. Nor was it sealed for the benefit of Ray - he's been denying his guilt since March 13, 1969, three days after he pled guilty to the murder. Ray claims he was coerced into pleading guilty by his lawyer, Percy Foreman, who convinced him it would be suicide to go to trial. (Ray had also signed a contract with Foreman, giving him a piece of any book by Ray, as a way of paying legal fees - he had the same arrangement with Arthur Hanes, whom he fired after four months. Such a book was obviously worth more if Ray were convicted.)

Ray's plea of guilty was a bitter disappointment to many people, who felt that without a trial - where witnesses could be subpoenaed to testify - that the truth of who and what was behind the assassination would never be known. In fact, the day after Ray pled guilty, The New York Times wrote a blistering editorial denouncing the plea, and the fact that there would be no public trial where the facts could be brought out.

The 1978 HSCA investigation was supposed to answer the countless questions surrounding the death of Dr. King - not the least of which was whether FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, or anyone else in the federal government, had a hand in his killing. While at first this suggestion might seem ludicrous, Hoover in fact developed a deep hatred for King. Hoover was certainly not alone.

J. Edgar Hoover

J. Edgar Hoover was director of the FBI for 48 years until his death in 1972. In the years following his death, Hoover has been widely demonized - to the point of being characterized as a closet drag queen who sold his soul to the Mafia because it had photographs of him in drag.

These efforts to turn Hoover into a cartoon character trivialize him, and make him seem less formidable than he really was. Hoover was the most powerful man in America for decades. He built the modern FBI. And, while social activists dwell on COINTELPRO, and the other evils perpetrated by Hoover, it was his FBI that prevented even one act of sabotage from being perpetrated on American soil during World War II (even though the Germans landed a dozen saboteurs on the East Coast). To millions of people Hoover was a hero - still is.

Hoover at all times was Machiavellian. For decades he outmaneuvered his political enemies, which included more than one president of the United States. (Nixon is on tape saying that if he fired Hoover, Hoover would " bring down the temple," including the presidency.) The source of Hoover's power was information. He compiled dossiers on the drinking, sex and gambling habits of many thousands of prominent Americans. Writers, actors, musicians, ministers, politicians - anyone with a public following was fair game. Hoover's agents not only cultivated armies of informers, but used illegal wiretapping to gather information on the more prominent targets.

From the end of World War II until Hoover's death his great crusade was fighting communism. In fact it was during World War II - when America's intelligence focus was on Germany and Japan - that Hoover received an anonymous letter, warning him that a particular Soviet official was a double-agent. On no more than that, Hoover turned the guns of intelligence on Russia. History proves that was the right decision (although it was later determined the Russian official in question was not a double agent).

After World War II, Russia developed an atom bomb. The Rosenbergs were charged with divulging top atomic secrets to the Soviets, tried for treason, convicted and executed. Communism was a real threat, and hundreds of prominent Americans were willingly feeding information to Hoover, including the head of the Screen Actors Guild by the name of Ronald Reagan.

Among those prominent Americans was Thurgood Marshall, general counsel of the NAACP. Marshall, who in 1967 became the first African-American member of the U.S. Supreme Court, first came to FBI attention in the 1940s when he was a lawyer with the National Lawyers Guild, a group suspected by some of being a communist front. Marshall often complained that the FBI failed to investigate attacks on blacks, including lynchings.

However, in 1952, Marshall contacted Louis B. Nichols, assistant to Hoover, saying he was worried that the Communist Party was trying to infiltrate the NAACP and "forge to the forefront."

This dovetailed with a fear of Hoover and many others that the millions of blacks in America were ripe for recruitment by foreign agents, who would then use them to foment unrest and civil disorder across the United States.

It was not an unreasonable fear. In the early 1950s, blacks were strictly segregated across the nation. They were called "niggers" and they were treated as such. They could not eat in white restaurants, use white restrooms or public drinking fountains. Merely looking at a white woman could - and sometimes did - get a black man killed.

Even the bigots, and Hoover was one, understood that a lifetime of humiliation, being forced into ghettos, and exploitation at every level, left the black population of America a bit cynical about the attainability of The American Dream. Racism in the Northern states was bad, but in the South it was virulent. Although downplayed by the FBI, the KKK was still a powerful force in the deep South (along with even more extreme white supremacist groups, such as J.B. Stoner's National State's Rights Party, which was so extreme it was publicly disavowed by the KKK).

Into this picture, then, burst the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was the right man in the right place at the right time. General unrest over the Vietnam War created a social climate conducive to change.

Army Intelligence

The U.S. military buildup in Vietnam began in 1961. In early 1963 King led the month-long demonstrations in Birmingham, establishing himself as a national leader among the black population. His preparations for Birmingham were monitored by Army Intelligence.

On Aug. 2, 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the U.S. Destroyer Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin, resulting in a Congressional resolution allowing President Johnson to provide military assistance to Vietnam. A second attack by North Vietnam allegedly occurred on Aug. 4, resulting in U.S. bombing of North Vietnam.

In 1965 the first U.S. combat troops shipped out to Vietnam. By early 1967 we were a nation divided on the war, but coming together on many other fronts. There was widespread resistance to the draft. Children from affluent families - or families with an influential friend (ala Bill Clinton) frequently avoided the draft, but the poor were in the front of the line, and no one was poorer or more disenfranchised than black youths. The issue wasn't cowardice, as so many conservatives wish to pretend - the issue was fighting in and dying in a war that had no moral underpinning.

In 1993 the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, following a 16-month investigation, revealed that by 1963 Army Intelligence considered King a threat to the country's security. Dr. King wasn't the first member of his family to bear such scrutiny. The Army began watching King's maternal grandfather, Rev. A.D. Williams, pastor of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, in September, 1917. When King's father, Rev. M.L. King, Sr., became pastor of the same church, the Army started watching him, too. In 1947, while still a college student, King himself became the target of government spies and informers. The Army, beginning in 1917, feared that the black population was ripe for subversion by foreign interests, so they tried to keep its pulse on that community. A lot of the spying was done by black informers.

In the case of King, however, the Army (and the FBI) went high-tech. In early 1963 King led a march in Birmingham that resulted in widespread arrests of marchers over a month-long period. Maj. Gen. Charles Billingslea, commander of the 2nd Division, sent a plea for help to his superiors, saying he feared a full-scale revolt in Birmingham. President John F. Kennedy ordered an additional 3,000 troops into the area.

It was with the Birmingham disturbances that the Army began to use a U-2 spy plane to keep tabs on Dr. King. By 1967 Maj. Gen. William P. Yarborough, of Army intelligence, was convinced the communists were bankrolling Dr. King. Yarborough was relying on information from the Mexican minister of national defense, to the effect that black militants were receiving training and funding from the Havana-based Organization of Latin American Solidarity.

By 1967, the U.S. government feared King. His speeches in the United States were affecting black troop morale in Vietnam. He had announced he would lead a massive march on Washington the following spring. The government's ultimate fear was that King, the apostle of non-violence, would ask the black soldiers in Vietnam to lay down their arms.

Once college students became galvanized against the war, they reached out to black people, Native-Americans, Mexican-Americans, even convicts.

In that context Martin Luther King loomed large as a moral figure. As a recent recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (1964), he also had international stature.

Counter Intelligence

The FBI's answer to this cauldron of dissent, widely perceived as endangering America's ability to effectively wage war, was COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program). The purpose of COINTELPRO was to destabilize radical groups, which included the American-Indian Movement, Black Panthers, white hate groups (however they also enlisted the aid of white supremacists in countering black activists), the New Left, etc. The FBI generated a large file on Cesar Chavez, head of the National Farm Workers Association. The FBI shadowed Chavez, because of unfounded rumors that he may be a communist, and enlisted the aid of military intelligence, local police and the Secret Service - without ever finding a shred of proof to substantiate its suspicions. (In 1994 Clinton awarded Chavez the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously and described him as a "Moses figure.") While Chavez was viewed with deep suspicion by the FBI, Dr. King was viewed as the enemy. Under COINTELPRO, the FBI used a wide variety of methods to discredit people - including forged documents, false arrests, pamphlets - and it is known that white supremacists were enlisted in the fight against black organizations. COINTELPRO was approved in Washington but operated at the local FBI office level. The FBI was itself a racist organization. (Just a few years ago, African-Americans accounted for only 5 percent of FBI agents, an underrepresentation that caused them to file a class-action discrimination suit against the Bureau, which included allegations of pernicious discrimination in promotions, assignments, etc.)

By late 1967, at FBI field offices in the South, there were white agents enlisting the aid of white supremacists to try to neutralize black activists. The key target was Dr. King. It is common knowledge that the FBI used wiretaps on King (approved by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who would later express regret for signing the wiretap authorization). The most infamous recording involves King making love to a woman in a hotel room - a tape that Hoover enjoyed sharing.

James Earl Ray

I first met James Earl Ray in early 1960. I had arrived at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City on February 8, 1960, and Ray arrived shortly afterward. We didn't have much in common: I was 19 years old, and serving four life sentences for murder and armed robbery, and Ray was 32 and serving 20 years for armed robbery.

We knew some of the same people. I was born and raised in South St. Louis, an ethnic neighborhood that Ray had moved to from a small town. In September, 1961, I tried to escape from Jefferson City, and Ray tried to escape several months later. We spent approximately four months in E-Hall (solitary) together without ever speaking to each other.

Ray was a low-key guy. He was considered a solid convict. He minded his own business and kept his mouth shut. For a while he ran a magazine stand on the yard (renting out magazines like Argosy, True Detective, etc.), from which he made enough money to get by, since he didn't smoke, drink or do drugs.

In 1963 I became friends with Jerry Davis, and through him with Rollie Laster and Ronnie Westberg. Those three had taken some guards hostage in 1959, in a failed escape attempt, and Laster and Davis were shot.

At that time, there were only a dozen men in the prison who had ever tried to escape from inside the walls, so it created a small fraternity. Ray didn't run around with us, but he and Westberg liked each other, and Westberg would talk about him from time to time.

In late 1966 Westberg discovered a way to escape from Jefferson City. The prison bakery also baked bread for Renz Farm and Church Farm, delivering the bread via pickup truck to these nearby satellite institutions in a four-foot square box. Westberg's problem, however, was that he was viewed as such an extreme security risk by the guards that it was impossible for him to be absent for more than a few minutes without the guards looking for him. Had he disappeared for 15 or 20 minutes, the guards would have shut the prison down.

Ray, although having tried to escape twice, had a generally good conduct record except for the escapes. The guards did not view him as a dangerous convict - nor did they take him very seriously as an escape risk (the first time he fell off the wall and knocked himself out, the second time, in March of 1966, he was found hiding in a ventilation shaft in one of the factories).

On April 23, 1967, Ray climbed into the bread box, another convict covered him with a tray of bread, and he successfully escaped from Jefferson City. The prison officials were so convinced that he was hiding in the prison that they did not turn in a general alarm until several days later.

Ray's brother, John Larry Ray, was waiting in a car, picked Ray up and drove him to South St. Louis. John Ray owned a tavern in South St. Louis that faced Benton Park. The tavern was a local gathering place for George Wallace supporters. From St. Louis, Ray went to Chicago, where his other brother, Jerry Ray, was living. Jerry Ray is known to have assisted James Earl Ray during this Chicago period.

The Ray brothers have frequently lied since the assassination of Dr. King. At one point Jerry Ray was accusing author Harold McMillan of lying, and McMillan was accusing Jerry Ray of lying. McMillan had been paying Jerry Ray for information and apparently got burned. In fact, McMillan quoted Jerry Ray in his book as saying, "What surprised me even tho you are a liberal how I with a limited education could get a fee from you without telling you anything and making up all that bull." On the other hand, it is McMillan who is mostly responsible for portraying Ray as a rabid racist. In his book, The Making Of An Assassin, published in 1976, McMillan wrote: "In 1963 and 1964, Martin Luther King was on TV almost every day talking defiantly about how black people were going to get their rights, insisting they would accept with nonviolence all the terrible violence that white people were inflicting on them until the day of victory arrived, until they did overcome. . . . Ray watched it all avidly on the cellblock TV at Jeff City. He reacted as if King's remarks were directed at him personally. He boiled when King came on the tube; he began to call him Martin 'Lucifer' King and Martin Luther 'Coon.' It got so that the very sight of King would galvanize Ray." That is utterly untrue. There were no cellblock TVs in Jefferson City while Ray was there. Three years after Ray escaped, they finally began to sell televisions to the convicts. I knew a lot of racists in Jefferson City, but James Earl Ray wasn't one of them. Although McMillan's book was gravely flawed, Time promoted the book heavily, and what McMillan wrote later permeated much of what was written about Ray.

The Assassination

On April 3, 1968, Dr. King arrived in Memphis to support a strike by 1,300 sanitation workers. He would stay at the Lorraine Motel. Someone - it' s never been determined who - identified himself as an advance man for King, and had the motel manager switch King's room from the ground floor to the upper level. Everyone in King's group later said there was no such advance man.

The following day, at 6:01 p.m., King stepped out on the balcony. He was speaking to a friend below him when a shot rang out and he fell mortally wounded. A famous photograph shows several persons pointing toward a rooming house about 80 yards away. The FBI would later say the fatal shot was fired from a second-floor bathroom window at the rear of the rooming house. Several minutes after the shooting, a bundle was discovered in a doorway at the front of the rooming house. It contained a Remington Gamemaster 30.06 rifle, with a fingerprint on it that would later be attributed to James Earl Ray, and a small plastic radio that was said to be purchased by Ray while he was in the Missouri State Penitentiary.

Earl Caldwell, then a reporter for The New York Times, was in his room on the ground floor of the Lorraine Motel when the shot was fired. He ran out of his room and saw a man crouching at ground level near the base of the apartment house. Caldwell was never interviewed by the FBI. Harold "Cornbread" Carter, a wino, said a man with a rifle walked right past him, to the edge of an embankment (exactly where Caldwell said he saw a man crouching), and that the man fired at the motel. The FBI dismissed Carter's account. Two community-relations agents from the Justice Department were staying on the same level of the motel with King, and rushed out of their room when they heard the shot. They, also, were never interviewed by the FBI (even though these agents didn't see anything, the fact they weren't interviewed speaks volumes about the FBI's "investigation." )

The following day Roger Wilkins, then head of the Community Relations Service of the Justice Department, flew from Washington to Memphis with Attorney General Ramsey Clark and Cartha D. "Deke" DeLoach, assistant director of the FBI. DeLoach was already pushing the lone-gunman theory, although the FBI had no clue yet as to whom that lone gunman would be, or why Dr. King was killed.

The murder of Dr. King set off nationwide rioting, including Kansas City. It is likely that Hoover was pushing a lone-gunman to avoid the even more intense rioting that a white conspiracy might generate.

It would later be determined that Ray traveled from Memphis to Atlanta, then to Montreal, Canada, then to London, then to Portugal, then back to London where he was arrested at Heathrow Airport by Scotland Yard.

Shortly after Ray's arrest, J.B. Stoner, head of the National States Rights Party, volunteered his services as Ray's attorney. Several years later Jerry Ray served as Stoner's campaign manager when Stoner ran unsuccessfully for governor of Georgia against Jimmy Carter. Jerry Ray shot a 17-year-old boy who broke into Stoner's office, and served as Stoner's bodyguard and chauffeur.

Conspiracy

The federal government, and Tennessee authorities, aggressively pushed the lone-gunman theory - although this explanation was rejected out of hand by millions of Americans. At Ray's sentencing, as the state was telling the jury what the evidence would have been at a trial, Ray interrupted the proceedings to say he did not agree with the statement of Ramsey Clark, U.S. attorney general, that there was no conspiracy. Three days later Ray tried to withdraw his plea of guilty, even though that would subject him to a possible death sentence. The court refused.

From that day forward there has been a tug-of-war between conspiracy believers and lone-gunman advocates. In 1979 the House Select Committee on Assassinations issued a report saying there probably was a conspiracy, and that it originated in St. Louis, with a reward being offered for King's death by two racists, one of whom was a patent lawyer. Both of these men were conveniently dead by 1978.

It began with an informant telling the FBI in 1974 that Russell G. Byers claimed to have been offered $50,000 to kill King, but had turned the offer down. The FBI put that information in a memo and filed it away. Byers, a high-profile thief, was the brother-in-law of John Paul Spica, who was convicted in the early 1960s of a hired killing in St. Louis County. For about a year, Spica was my cellmate, and we worked in the hospital together.

Of the contact killing, Spica always denied doing it. He told me that the victim's wife had approached him, offering him $5,000 to kill her husband, and Spica turned it down. However, when the man was killed, Spica went to the wife and said, "Well, I took care of that matter for you - where' s my $5,000." The woman, however, was smarter than Spica thought. She went to Capt. Pete Vasil, chief of detectives in St. Louis County, and told Vasil that she had approached Spica, but that she had later told him she changed her mind, but that Spica had ignored her wishes and killed the husband anyway. Spica, on the basis of her testimony, and a tape-recording of him asking her for $5,000, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. The wife was acquitted and collected approximately $200,000 in insurance. Spica kept his sense of humor however, by complaining that, "I asked the bitch to send me the $5,000, and she won't do it."

In prison, Spica eventually got involved in selling drugs and other scams. One scam was to run off extra license plate stickers and smuggle them out of prison. Byers was involved in that. The prison officials finally caught on to it, but were unable to make a case against Spica.

By 1978 Spica had made parole. That year Russell Byers was one of the key suspects in burglarizing the St. Louis Art Museum and stealing several valuable statuettes. Another suspect was Sam E. White. On June 6, 1978, White walked out of the FBI office in St. Louis and was found five days later shot to death in Madison County, Ill. Byers was never convicted of the art museum burglary, because two witnesses were murdered and another refused to testify. During this period, however, the FBI turned the memo about Byers being offered a bribe to kill King over to the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

Conrad "Pete" Baetz, a deputy sheriff from Madison County, Ill., was serving as an investigator for HSCA. At the time of King's death, Baetz had been in an Army intelligence unit that specialized in electronic surveillance. Baetz, and HSCA, latched onto the Byer's story as though it were the holy grail.

HSCA also subpoenaed Judge Murry Randall, who had been Byer's attorney before being appointed to the St. Louis Circuit Court. Randall (whose brother, Alvin Randall, is retired from the Jackson County Circuit Court) desperately sought to evade appearing before HSCA. Randall sent a letter to U.S. Rep. Louis Stokes, D-Ohio, chairman of the committee, saying Byers was "one of the most dangerous criminals in this city."

However, once Randall began testifying, he made it clear that he thought Byers was lying, and that the "St. Louis Connection" to the King assassination lacked credibility. Randall was certainly in a position to keep his finger on the pulse of the St. Louis underworld. As a lawyer Randall had been affiliated with the law firm of Morris Shenker, the most influential criminal lawyer in St. Louis history. A number of circuit and federal prosecutors, along with circuit and federal judges, were former members of the Shenker firm. Shenker had represented many gangsters, and was Jimmy Hoffa's lawyer. Shenker would later borrow more than $100-million from the Teamsters, and bought the Dunes Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. After six years with the Shenker firm, Randall went into practice with Lawrence Lee, then a state senator from St. Louis. Lee, himself, was one of the more highly regarded criminal lawyers in St. Louis. Randall was also a good friend of Mark Hennelly, regarded as probably the best criminal trial lawyer in the city's history. By the late 1970s, Hennelly was president of Missouri-Pacific Railroad. In a conversation I had with Hennelly in 1977 he admitted to me that he was still friends with Tony Giardano, head of the St. Louis Mafia, and Jimmy Michaels, head of the Syrian mob in South St. Louis.

All of this is to say that, once he'd been subpoenaed to testify, Randall had the contacts to find out whether a $50,000 reward to kill King had been floating around the St. Louis underworld.

Randall told the committee that Byers had concocted the story about the bounty on King as a way of trying to pinpoint whether Richard O'Hara was an FBI snitch. Byers told that story to O'Hara - knowing that, if the FBI later asked him about the story, the only place it could have heard it would be from O'Hara. The FBI, however, figured out what Byers was doing, and never questioned him (until the memo was turned over to HSCA four years later).

Baetz, and HSCA, however, chose to believe Byers over Randall. Baetz later told The Riverfront Times in St. Louis: "Honestly, we believed Byers, and so did the committee. I think he told the truth. I don't think he would have lied to us once he got to Washington." That has to stand as either one of the most naive, or most disingenuous statements I've ever heard.

The Riverfront Times The Riverfront Times questioned Baetz concerning his knowledge of Sam White, who was killed in Madison County - and Baetz said he'd never heard of White until The Riverfront Times brought up the name (even though White was allegedly killed by Byers, the witness on whom Baetz and HSCA based their findings. When The Riverfront Times filed a Freedom of Information request with the FBI, asking for the file on Sam White, the FBI said it had destroyed the file.

The New York Times The New York Times bought into the Byers story, also. It published a story implying a Spica-Byers-Ray connection (strongly implying that Byers had told Spica about the reward, and that Spica then set it up for Ray to meet the money men). The Times reporters had sought me out, and I told them that it was an untenable proposition. Spica and Ray ran in completely different circles in Jefferson City. Had someone offered Spica $50,000 to kill King, he would have asked for half the money up front, then he would have told you to go sit on a fire hydrant. (Spica was killed by a car-bomb some years ago, over a union dispute.)

The statement by John Larry Ray, that James Earl Ray, after escaping, had hidden in East St. Louis, at a gambling joint owned by Frank "Buster" Wortman, is the fuel for current speculation that organized crime was involved in the King assassination. Buster Wortman ruled East St. Louis from the early 1940s to his death in 1968. My stepfather, Julius "Dutch" Gruender, was a close friend of Wortman's. They had served time together in Leavenworth (before Wortman was transferred to Alcatraz), and Dutch had done time with Elmer Dowling, Wortman's chief lieutenant (until he was murdered in the early 60s).

I had known Wortman most of my life. His brother, Ted Wortman, had married my mother's cousin. As I was growing up my stepfather often took me to the Paddock, a tavern that served as Wortman's headquarters. After I was locked up, Wortman tried to help me in whatever way he could. Had James Earl Ray gone to Wortman for help - and had Wortman actually hidden him out - I would have learned of it through my stepfather.

John Ray also said his brother had tried to get help from the Egan's Rats, an Irish gang in St. Louis. The Egan's Rats went out of existence decades before James Earl Ray escaped. The Ray brothers were as penny ante as criminals get in St. Louis. Wortman would never have gotten involved with them. Buster Wortman was under constant investigation by the FBI. He would never have risked hiding an escaped convict, particularly a petty thief who could do him no good, and to whom he owed nothing.

The Present

When Jerry Ray appeared before HSCA in 1978 he was represented by a lawyer named William Pepper. Originally from New York, Pepper has worn a variety of hats: freelance journalist (in Vietnam), operator of a group home in Rhode Island, school consultant, civil-rights activist, author and lawyer.

At the time of his appearance in front of HSCA, Pepper was in serious trouble in Rhode Island. Charges had been filed against him alleging he had solicited teenagers: "transporting boys for immoral purposes", the charges read. Those charges arose out of a federal investigation into a state-funded foster care program that Pepper operated. In 1975 he'd been fired by the mayor of Providence, who questioned his close personal relationship with the superintendent of Providence schools.

After the HSCA investigation, Pepper moved to London, to pursue international law, he says. He began to represent James Earl Ray. Pepper eventually convinced the BBC to produce a mock trial of Ray. With that money he hired investigators and began to prepare the two-hour show (because of a need for additional financing, HBO later got involved and it aired on HBO in 1993). One of the investigators met with me in 1992 and his holy grail was George Ben Edmonson.

I'd first met Edmonson at the Algoa reformatory near Jefferson City, where he'd taught me how to type. At that time I was 15 (although the minimum age for inmates at Algoa was 17, I'd been transferred to Algoa after four escapes from Boonville Training School) and Edmondson was about 22.

The next time I saw Edmondson was in Jefferson City. He arrived several years after I got there. In 1966 he was assigned to L-Hall, an honor unit just outside the walls, and was working at the State Capitol as a computer programmer (he'd completed about two years of civil engineering in college before robbing a savings and loan). One day Edmondson walked away from his job and disappeared - along with about $5,000 in state funds. About a year later, after being put on the FBI's 10 most wanted list, Edmondson was captured in Canada. It was learned that he'd been the project engineer for the West German Pavilion at Expo-67 in Montreal.

Because James Earl Ray claimed to have been recruited by a mysterious "Raoul" in Montreal, William Bradford Huie, author of They Slew The Dreamer, tried to find a way to connect Edmondson to the assassination. However, Edmondson had been captured before Ray went to Montreal.

When I met with William Pepper in Memphis, in 1993, during filming of The Trial of James Earl Ray, I quickly discovered that he was impervious to logic. He was already launched on his theory that King was killed by the FBI and the military and the Mafia. My suggestion that King was murdered by white supremacists, possibly including J.B. Stoner, didn't persuade him. There is even the possibility that FBI agents in the South deliberately deflected the investigation away from the white supremacists. No matter how much one would like to believe it, I just can't see Hoover getting involved in a murder plot involving dozens of people. The man was simply too smart for that. Now, once the murder was committed, I could see Hoover limiting the damage to James Earl Ray. There is proof that the FBI had three witnesses who saw suspects near the Birmingham church in which four young girls were killed by a bomb in 1964, and Hoover withheld that information from Alabama authorities, on the ground he didn't think anyone would be convicted anyway. And there is always the possibility that some FBI agents in the South were deeply sympathetic to, if not actual members of, white supremacist groups.

In any event, Pepper stuck to his guns and The HBO special ran, and Ray was, of course, cinematically acquitted. In 1995 Pepper published a book, Orders To Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King. He was recently sued by Billy Ray Eidson, a former green beret. In his book Pepper claimed Eidson had been murdered to keep him quiet (about military involvement in the conspiracy to kill King). Pepper said he welcomes the suit because it allows him to have discovery against the Army.

Conclusion

As a journalist I've been following the Ray case for a quarter-century. The more I study it, the more convinced I become that Ray did not personally shoot Martin Luther King. I am also firmly convinced he was involved in the assassination. I believe Ray was covering up for white supremacists. Too many people, however, think of Bubba when they hear that phrase - some Cro-Magnon foreheaded, tobacco-spitting redneck. In the South, when you speak of white supremacists, you are often speaking of lawyers, police officers, businessmen.

After Ray escaped from prison, as he was hiding from the law, how did he come in contact with these people? I'm sure these people weren't walking around, asking strangers, "Hey, are you an escaped convict who'd like to shoot an internationally known man?" The theory that Ray acted alone is ludicrous. Ray was simply too unsophisticated to have arranged by himself the elaborate escape to Canada, London and Portugal and back to London, with multiple false IDs and passports.

Someone who was in contact with Ray, was also in contact with the people who wanted Martin Luther King, Jr. dead.

Several members of the first HSAC have suggested a new committee be formed. That may be the only hope for getting at the truth. Janet Reno has announced that the Justice Department will undertake a limited review of the King assassination. That seems destined to lead nowhere.

This article is adapted from Mel Ayton’s latest book, Hunting the President, an examination of plots, threats and assassination attempts against American presidents. The book was published by Regnery Publishing in April 2014.

by Mel Ayton

The history of the American presidency has witnessed a variety of incidents of actual and potential harm to the president. These situations have included four assassinations, near assassinations, illegal entries to the White House, incidents of violence and conflict near the presidential residence or where the president was visiting, unauthorized aircraft flying near the White House, plots to use airplanes to attack the executive mansion and other threats of attack including bombings, armed assaults, feared kidnapping and assassination plots.

Political scientists and psychologists specializing in political violence blame the level of threats a modern American president faces on political heritage, on the ready availability of firearms and on a system that requires politicians to mix with the public. In recent years violence in general has increased, some experts aver, because of poorly implemented “care-in-the-community” mental health programs and an increase in addiction to violent Internet video games. Assassination attempts and assassination threats have also increased, they argue, because American society has become more violent, presidents have become a personal symbol of authority and modern mass communications has assured attackers the notoriety many of them seek.

Additionally, the Secret Service has been faced with a new phenomenon in modern times (although its origins date back to the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries) – the “Copycat Effect.” It involves the mimicking behaviour of potential assassins – unstable individuals who look to assassins of the past for inspiration – and an increase in assassination threats following any well-publicised attempts to harm the president. Each assassination or assassination attempt has produced a domino effect – their echoes playing on delusional minds leading to another threat or planned attack. This has been especially true since Giuseppe Zangara attempted to assassinate President-Elect Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The phenomenon can be seen in a wider context by the way the  number of homicides increases significantly after publicized prize-fights “in which violence is rewarded” and drops significantly after publicized murder trials, death sentences, life sentences, and executions in which violence is punished. Additionally, suicides have increased after the deaths of famous celebrities. (1)

Following incidents of mass murder, law enforcement agencies have been on alert for incidents of copycat behaviour. In July 2012 at least three people were arrested at the U.S. showings of the new Batman film amid fears following the Colorado cinema massacre in where a gunman shot and killed 12 people and injured scores of others. In November 2012 police arrested 20-year-old Blaec Lammers whose mother turned him in after he had bought two rifles and 400 rounds of ammunition. He confessed to police he had purchased tickets to see the new Twilight movie and intended to shoot people attending the screening. (2)

In modern times copycat incidents of assassination attempts or threats to assassinate have occurred after nearly every serious presidential threat or attack and it has had a disconcerting effect on the Secret Service. Following assassination attempts or ‘near-lethal approaches’ the possibility of contagion has been only too real. After the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., the number of threats against prominent government figures jumped more than fivefold.

The assassination of President Kennedy provoked a host of copycat threats to JFK’s successor. For example, in December 1963, a month after the Kennedy assassination, James Francis Burns was arrested for threatening to, “...go to Washington and pull an Oswald and get satisfaction one way or another.” (3) During the same month the Secret Service arrested a 19-year-old Cuban immigrant, Omar Padilla, in New York City for threatening to assassinate President Johnson. . Padilla had told co-workers that President Kennedy had been “asking for it” when he was assassinated. He then told them he was “going to shoot LBJ.” (4)

Ex-convict Walter Daniel Hendrickson mailed a letter in April 1965 threatening Johnson’s life. He wrote that Johnson’s “… turn will come. I will do a better job than Oswald and will succeed in escaping.” (5) In November 1965 Billy Ray Pursley purchased the same type of rifle used in the Kennedy assassination from a discount store in Charlotte, Virginia and told the store clerk he was going to kill President Johnson. (6) In March 1966 Oswald S. Pick made two telephone calls to the FBI and said he was going to kill the president and that “two Cubans had put him up to it.” FBI agents thought Pick’s first and last name may in some bizarre way have connected the would-be assassin to JFK’s killer. (Author’s Note: Pick was the surname of Lee Harvey Oswald’s half-brother) Pick was tracked down and arrested as he was about to board a Washington,  D.C.-bound train. (7)

In 1968 the man who would become the “second Kennedy assassin” wrote in his diary of his “hatred” for Johnson and his desire to kill him. Although Sirhan Sirhan denied at his trial that he wanted to kill the president, he lied. Sirhan had written in his diary/journal, “Must begin work on…solving the problems and difficulties of assassinating the 36th president of the glorious United States…the so-called president of the United States must be advised of their punishments for their treasonable crimes against the state more over we believe that the glorious United States of America will eventually be felled by a blow of an assassin’s bullet…” (8)

In the years following the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy reporters who were assigned to cover Edward Kennedy campaign tours called it the “death watch.” The threat of a copycat assassination was partially responsible for his decisions to eschew presidential candidacies in 1968, 1972 and 1976. When he eventually threw his hat into the ring for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination threats to his life increased. On November 28, 1979, after he had declared his candidacy, it was only by chance a deranged woman armed with a knife was prevented from killing him in his Senate office. A Secret Service agent, Joseph Meusberger, managed to wrest the knife from the deranged woman. The agent was stabbed in the process. (9) Kennedy was also the target of future President Reagan attacker John Hinckley who waited in the hallway outside the Senator’s office for a chance to shoot him, giving up only when he ran out of patience. (10)

After attempts were made on the life of President Ford, the number of threats escalated to an alarming rate. In the six month period following the attempt on Reagan’s life the average number of threats increased by over 150% from a similar period the previous year. Following Hinckley’s assassination attempt against President Reagan in 1981 the Secret Service was on high alert investigating threats to “finish the job” by unconnected individuals all across the United States.  Accordingly, the agency expressed fears that, “...publicity over the…threat to President Reagan’s life could prompt a string of “copycat assassination attempts.” (11)

From Anonymity and Failure to Notoriety and Fame

Many presidential assassins had a variety of motives, including bringing attention to a personal or public problem, or avenging a perceived wrong, ending personal pain, saving the country or the world, or developing a special relationship with the target. Because many presidential attackers had multiple motives, the Secret Service has concluded that it is impossible to stereotype or identify potential assassins. (12)

However, numerous cases investigated by independent researchers and the Secret Service have confirmed that one of the central motivating forces has been ‘notoriety and fame’ following a life of ‘anonymity and failure’. (13)

Although some would-be assassins had genuine political motives – especially Islamists, domestic militia-type terrorists and members of racist organizations and black power groups – most presidential threateners were engaged in psychodrama rather than political drama and they valued the act more than the victim. They were basically murderers in search of a cause and their feelings towards the target were, in fact, irrelevant. According to one unnamed researcher hired for a Secret Service study of assassins, longing for fame turned out to be a more important factor than a particular ideology. “It was very, very rare for the primary motive to be political,” he said, “though there were a number of attackers who appeared to clothe their motives with some political rhetoric.” (14)

Throughout American history most presidential threateners, potential attackers or assassins have possessed commonly shared traits of previous presidential assassins. The recurring theme in their life histories is that of isolation, loneliness and unfulfilled dreams of success. In 1964 David Rothstein examined cases of JFK threateners who had been incarcerated. He concluded, “The first thing one notices in reviewing these histories is the number of striking similarities between them and the fragmentary outline of the life history of Lee Oswald….” (15)

James Garfield’s assassin, Charles Guiteau, “had failed at everything he had tried” according to author Candice Millard, “and he had tried nearly everything…” (16) President McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, despaired of his lowly position in life and had an alias – “Fred C. Nieman,” (literally, “Fred Nobody”). JFK’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Bishara Sirhan (who first targeted President Johnson before he set his sights on presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy) had been fired from jobs because of their disagreeable personalities. And they turned to radical politics for the purpose of ego-building. According to Lee Harvey Oswald’s wife Marina, learning Russian gave her husband a reputation for being intelligent, making up for the fact that he had a reading disability which gave him feelings of inadequacy. He believed he was an important man and Marina often ridiculed him for this “unfounded” belief. “At least his imagination,” Marina said, “his fantasy, which was quite unfounded, as to the fact that he was an outstanding man. [I] always tried to point out to him that he was a man like any others who were around us. But he simply could not understand that.” (17) Sirhan Sirhan believed he had the makings of a UN diplomat and was resentful of the wealthy and successful. He admired the Black Panthers believing they were just like him — underdogs within American society. His identification with the Arab cause bolstered his self-esteem. (18)

Unemployed car tire salesman Samuel Byck, who wanted to fly a plane into the White House to kill President Nixon, failed at everything he tried, blaming political corruption and the president in particular for his marital and financial problems. (19)

Arthur Bremer, who stalked Richard Nixon before he turned his attention to Presidential candidate George C. Wallace, was a disgruntled bus boy and janitor and a failure in his personal relationships. He had no friends and girls avoided him because he was ‘”strange,” “angry” and “erratic.” “Life has been only an enemy to me,” he wrote in his diary. Mark Chapman, who killed former Beatle John Lennon in December 1980, said he initially planned to target President Reagan (amongst many other celebrities). (20) He lamented, “I was an acute nobody. I had to usurp someone else’s importance, someone else’s success. I was ‘Mr Nobody’ until I killed the biggest somebody on earth (John Lennon)”. (21)

Would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley, a failure at everything he tried, lived in the shadow of his successful father. He failed to hold down jobs and was an unsuccessful student. Hinckley said, “I was desperate in some bold way to get...attention.” (22)

President Ford’s would-be assassins, Sara Jane Moore and Lynette Fromme, were also failures in life. By 1975 Moore had suffered five broken marriages and borne four children, three of whom had been adopted by her parents. (23) Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme was a high school drop-out who never worked a day in her life except to labor hard to persuade the authorities to release her hero, cult leader Charles Manson, from prison. (24) Gary Steven DeSure and Preston Mayo, who plotted to kill President Ford on the very day he visited Sacramento where he was attacked by Lynette Fromme, were two jobless ex-convicts and armed robbers who had lived a life of criminality and failure. (25)

“These are lonely, alienated people who suddenly see an opportunity to become celebrities,” Dr. Judd Marmor, president of the American Psychiatric Association, said following the attacks on President Ford in 1975, “Publicity gives them an ego massage.”(26)  However, the pathology was perhaps best expressed by an Australian would-be assassin who attempted to kill political leader Arthur Caldwell. “I realized that unless I did something out of the ordinary, I would remain a nobody” he told reporters. (27)

Most presidential assassins had a desire to be someone special – what some psychologists have described as “pathological narcissism.” For them, killing a prominent politician would remove any feeling of failure and bring success. The assassin wins his place in history, becomes a somebody instead of a nobody. And no symbol of the United States is more potent than the presidency, especially since the aggrandizement of the office from the time of FDR. The political leader, especially the president, is also always “on show,” especially during election campaigns. Additionally, in the modern era, would-be assassins are supplied with a large stage by the means of television and the Internet. They know their attempts to assassinate the president will be witnessed by millions.

John Wilkes Booth, whose career was taking a downturn when he shot Lincoln, and who coveted celebrity said, “I must have fame, fame!...what a glorious opportunity for a man to immortalize himself by killing Abraham Lincoln” (28) Charles Guiteau became excited at the attention he was about to receive when he assassinated President Garfield. “I thought just what people would talk” he said, “and thought what a tremendous excitement it would create and I kept thinking about it all week.” (29)

FDR’s would-be assassin, Giuseppe Zangara, failed at everything he attempted including his efforts to shoot the president-elect. He missed Roosevelt but hit Chicago Mayor Anthony Cermak killing him. Zangara went quietly to the electric chair after he was convicted of murder and only lost his composure when he discovered there were no photographers present to witness his execution. Sirhan Sirhan made up for his failures in life by seeking fame as a Palestinian assassin. “They can gas me, but I am famous” he said, “I have achieved in one day what it took Robert Kennedy all his life to do.” (30) Arthur Bremer said at his trial that his motive was to become a celebrity. Edward Falvey, who threatened to kill President Carter, said he felt like a “movie star” after his arrest.

During his police interrogation John Hinckley asked Secret Service agent Steve Colo whether his assassination attempt had been taped for television broadcast. He also asked if the broadcasts of his assassination attempt would pre-empt the Academy Award presentations. (31) Francisco Martin Duran who tried to assassinate President Clinton in 1994 was examined by a doctor following his arrest. He said, “Doc, are we going to be on (current affairs television show) “Hard Copy?’”Before leaving his home state of Colorado to travel to Washington, D.C. he told several people of his intent to commit assassination and gave one colleague a card bearing his signature. Duran said the card would become “valuable” one day. (32)In recent years a would-be unnamed assassin was fixated on a state governor until he heard that the vice president was coming to his area. He knew that no one had attempted to assassinate a sitting vice president so his choice of target would propel him into the history books. (33)

Copycat Assassins

Most, if not all, presidential assassins or would-be assassins were also enamoured with past assassinations and assassins. Much of their behavior was copycat in nature. Samuel Byck was fascinated by Mark “Jimmy” Essex who in 1973 used a high powered sniper rifle to kill six people before he was gunned down by New Orleans police. Essex’s slogan “Kill Pig Nixon” had great meaning for Byck.  Before he assassinated President McKinley in 1901 Leon Czolgosz was obsessed with Gaetano Bresci who assassinated the king of Italy several years before. He kept a newspaper cutting about the assassination in his wallet and would frequently take it out and read it.  Giuseppe Zangara had a newspaper clipping of the Lincoln assassination in his hotel room. It was discovered after he tried to shoot Roosevelt. Roger Hines, who stalked President Bush (41) armed with a .357 magnum revolver and 50 rounds of ammunition, sent postcards of the Lincoln assassination to relatives. He said he wanted “to become famous.” (34)

Lee Harvey Oswald read books about the assassination of Louisiana Governor Huey Long. Sirhan Sirhan read books about Oswald and European assassinations. Arthur Bremer read books about Oswald and Sirhan. John Hinckley not only visited Ford’s Theater, the scene of Lincoln’s assassination but read extensively about Oswald, Sirhan and Bremer. The character in the movie Taxi Driver, would-be assassin Travis Bickle, was his role-model. Bickle’s character was modelled on Arthur Bremer.

Shortly before he attempted to shoot President Clinton, Francisco Martin Duran visited the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, scene of the sniper killing of JFK and checked into the same hotel in Washington, D.C. where Hinckley shot Reagan. He also visited the Austin Clock Tower where, in 1966, Texas sniper Charles Whitman shot dead 13 people and wounded many more. Shawn Robert Adolf, Nathan Dwaine Johnson and Tharin Robert Gartrell, the neo-Nazis who allegedly plotted to assassinate President Obama, talked about killing him by shooting from a “grassy knoll,” an allusion to conspiracy theories about a sniper who purportedly assisted Lee Harvey Oswald. (35)

Profile of an Assassin

Although previous studies of presidential assassins have sounded a note of caution in identifying future attackers they have at least allowed a profile of the next typical American presidential assassin, would-be assassin or serious threatener to be ventured. He is likely to be a young man, these studies indicate, slight of build that comes from a dysfunctional family.* He will likely have experienced an absent father or the father has been unresponsive to the child. The assassin will be a loner although he may some kind of link to a domestic or foreign terrorist group. He will be unmarried or divorced, with no steady female friends. He will have a history of moodiness, irascibility and anger which has had some effect in his workplace. He will also be suffering from “status incongruence” – where the achievement level of a person is inconsistent with his expectations due to the fact he has been unsuccessful in his life goals. He is also likely to be narcissistic and have some delusions of grandeur blaming his failures on others, particularly the community in which he lives.

He will also lust for infamy and will look to assassins of the past for inspiration.

*Although many threateners and would-be assassins have been women the vast majority are male.

Notes

1 Leo Bogart, Commercial Culture, 1995, 171

See also: TIME, Is Copycat Behaviour Driving Murder-Suicides? By Maia Szalavitz 23 April 2009, http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893273,00.html

2 The Daily Mirror, “Twilight Massacre Plans foiled after Man accused of plot Is Turned In by His Mum”, UK, http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/twilight-massacre-foiled-blaec-lammers-1442200

3 The News and Courier, “Man Arrested After Threat To President”, 28 December 1963, 2A

4 Reading Eagle, “Cuban Held For Threat”, 9 December 1963, 5

5 St Petersburg Times, “Man Said To Have Written Threatening Note To LBJ”, 11 July 1965, 14A

6 Rome News- Tribune, “Chattanooga Man Sentenced On Threat Charge”, 15 April 1966, 9

7 New York Times, “Jerseyan Is Given 5 Years In Threat To Kill Johnson”, 12 May 1966, 22

8 The Forgotten Terrorist – Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F Kennedy by Mel Ayton, (Potomac Books 2008), 260

9 Toledo Blade, “Alleged Knife Attack At Office Of Kennedy Brings Indictment”, 22 January 1980, 4

10. Defining Danger by James W. Clarke, 216

11 Baltimore Sun, “Threats To Ford Triple – Simon Blames Publicity For Rise In Danger” by Dean Mills, 1/10/1975, page A1, The Modesto Bee, “Secret Service Worried About ‘Copycat’ Threats”, 7 April 1981,  A6

12 US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice, Protective Intelligence and Threat Assessment Investigations – A Guide For State and Local Law Enforcement Officials by Robert A. Fein and Bryan Vossekuil  -  National Institute of Justice http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij and Office of Justice Programs http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov  July 1998

13. Journal of Forensic Sciences, “Assassination in the United States: An Operational Study of Recent Assassins, Attackers, and Near Lethal Approachers” by Robert A. Fein, and Bryan Vossekuil, Volume 44, Number 2, March 1999, 324. The Secret Service believe that assassins are recognizable, not by who they are, but by what they do. Though assassins fit no particular physical or psychological profile, most share a pattern of behaviour. Assassination is not a spontaneous event, but a trail of action that can lead to discovery.

14. National Public Radio, “Author Sees Parallel In Gifford’s Shooting And JFK Assassination” by Scott Hensley, 14 November 2011, http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/01/14/132937650/author-sees-parallel-in-giffords-shooting-and-jfk-assassination

Criminologist Stephen Schafer, in his book The Political Criminal: The Problem of Morality and Crime, identified some offenders as “pseudo-convictional,” that is, common criminals who use political grievances to mask a motivation centered around their own sense of thrill or adventure, who live beyond and outside the law to share in popular fame and adulation. According to Schafer these offenders’ claims of political motive, however strenuously asserted, are mere excuses. (Stephen Schafer, The Political Criminal: The Problem of Morality and Crime, New York: Free Press, 1974, 156)

15. Archives of General Psychiatry, “Presidential Assassination Syndrome” by David A. Rothstein MS, MD, 26 March 1964, www.archgenpsychiatry.com )

16. Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard, Anchor, 2012, 1

17. The Report of the U.S. President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1964, commonly referred to as the Warren Report, 418

18. Kaiser, Robert Blair,  RFK Must Die,. RFK Must Die: A History of the Robert Kennedy Assassination and Its Aftermath. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970, 209

19. Clarke, James W. Defining Danger – American Assassins and the New Domestic Terrorists Transaction Publishers 2007, 128

20 National Enquirer, “Lennon’s Killer – Hollywood Hit List!” 4^th October 2012, 31

21. Gallagher R, “I’ll Be Watching You – True Stories of Stalkers and Their Victims” London Virgin 2001, 38 

22. Clarke, James W. On Being Mad Or Merely Angry: John W. Hinckley Jr. and Other Dangerous People Princeton University Press 1990, 97

23. Spieler, Geri   Taking Aim at the President – The Remarkable Story of the Woman Who Shot At Gerald Ford Palgrave Macmillan 2009, 29

24. The Deseret News, “I Wanted Attention, ‘Squeaky Tells Jailer”, 8 September 1975, 1

25. The Milwaukee Journal, “Two Accused Of Plot Against Ford”, 21 October 1975, 2

26. Time, Those Dangerous Loners, 13 April 1981, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,954701,00.html

27. Ellis, Albert and Gullo, John Murder and Assassination, Lyle Stuart Inc, New York, 1971, 221

28 Time, Those Dangerous Loners, 13 April 1981, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,954701,00.html)

29. Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard, 135

30Knol – A Unit of Knowledge, 2011, Understanding Assassination by Randy Borum, http://knol.google.com/k/randy-borum/understandingassassination/1tgrw19q7jfhp/4#Exceptional_Case_Study_Project_(28)ECSP(29)

31 Defining Danger, xvii

32 Stalking, Threatening, and Attacking Public Figures – A Psychological and Behavioural Analysis Edited by J. Reid Meloy, Lorraine Sheridan and Jens Hoffman, Oxford University Press 2008, 377

33 Knol – A Unit of Knowledge, 2011, Understanding Assassination by Randy Borum, http://knol.google.com/k/randy-borum/understandingassassination/1tgrw19q7jfhp/4#Exceptional_Case_Study_Project_(28)ECSP(29)

34. United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, United States of America v. Roger Leroy Hines, 26 F.3d 1469,. - 26 F.3d 1469, Argued and Submitted 3/1/1994. Decided  20/6/1994, http://cases.justia.com/us-court-of-appeals/F3/26/1469/619449/

35 Daily Mail, “White supremacists cleared of gun plot to assassinate Barack Obama” by David Gardner, 28/8/2008,  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1049169/White-supremacists-cleared-gun-plot-assassinate-Barack-Obama.html#

Mel Ayton is the author of numerous books and articles. He has an MA postgraduate degree in History from Durham University and is a former Fulbright Teacher in the United States. Ayton, who lives in County Durham, England, has appeared in documentaries produced by the National Geographic Channel and the Discovery Channel and has worked as a historical consultant for the BBC. His latest book, Hunting the President, an examination of plots, threats and assassination attempts against American presidents, was published by Regnery in April 2014.

The death of former White House Press Secretary James Brady on August 4, 2014, -- grievously wounded during John Hinckley's attempted assassination of President Reagan in 1981 -- was ruled a murder by the Virginia Medical Examiner.

by Robert Walsh

“Honey, I forgot to duck…”– President Reagan after his attempted assassination by John Hinckley, Jr. on March 30, 1981.

“Guns are neat little things, aren’t they? They can kill extraordinary people with very little effort…” – John Hinckley Jr., President Reagan’s would-be assassin.

On August 4, 2014, former White House Press Secretary and gun-control advocate James Brady died as a result of injuries sustained when John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981. Brady’s death has since been ruled a homicide by the Virginia Medical Examiner’s office, raising questions about whether Hinckley could be tried for murder if he is ever officially considered fit to stand trial. Brady, 73, died at his home. He had been partially paralyzed and in a wheelchair since the assassination attempt, and his speech was slurred.

Hinckley had attempted to assassinate the President to impress actress Jodie Foster, with whom he’d become obsessed after seeing the Robert de Niro film Taxi Driver. Hinckley had also been inspired by the case of Arthur Bremer, who attempted to assassinate Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1972.

The two cases have much in common. Both Hinckley and Bremer were unbalanced, obsessive individuals. Both men were insignificant nobodies, the very antithesis of their targets. Both were able to stalk their intended victims for some time without being stopped and to attack before being rendered harmless by the bodyguards. Both were able to easily obtain the firearms to commit their crimes and both were regarded as insignificant and posing no threat until they proved otherwise.

Hinckley's Background

John Hinckley Jr.

Born on May 29, 1955 in Ardmore, Oklahoma, Hinckley came from a wealthy Oklahoma oil family. His obsessive tendencies began at an early age and continued as he grew. In early adulthood he developed an obsession with John Lennon (himself murdered by obsessive fan Mark Chapman, recently refused parole once again.)

Like many stalkers Hinckley’s home life was troubled. He came from money but, due to his increasingly bitter relationship with his father, seldom saw much from the family coffers. John Hinckley Sr. was increasingly frustrated by his son’s tendency to not settle on anything or to apply himself. His son had seemingly failed at or dropped out of several careers and managed to show similarly disappointing results at college. His existence seemed to consist of trying and failing at one grand scheme after another while occasionally scrounging money from his parents when they were prepared to give him any.

He also obsessively collected books on true crime, especially books covering serial killers, spree killers, hijackers and assassins. He was a perennial underachiever, intelligent, but simply disinclined to become his own person and take full responsibility for his own life.

Life Imitating Art

Robert De Nero in Taxi Driver

Art imitated life, as the character Travis Bickle so ably portrayed by Robert de Niro was in part based on Arthur Bremer. John Hinckley was about to make life imitate art. To Foster he made unsolicited phone calls and mailed her letters and poems. Hinckley went so far as to make unwanted visits to her dorm at Yale University, even signing up for a course there himself to be near her.

His attempts to gain Jodie Foster’s attention had come to nothing. Foster wanted nothing to do with him but, Hinckley’s deluded mind thought that, by becoming nationally known himself, he would somehow become her equal and therefore she would change her mind. The fact that the campus police at Yale had been warned to keep a close eye out for him, that the dean of Yale had been forwarded some of the letters Hinckley had sent to Foster and that she simply wanted him to stay away from her didn’t enter his thinking.

Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver

Hinckley first chose President Carter as his target but switched to Reagan when the former actor defeated Carter in November of 1980. He chose a president as his target simply because he wanted the maximum possible public profile.

In a diary he kept until several months before his attempt he noted that Arthur Bremer had shot George Wallace after giving up on his attempts to assassinate President Richard Nixon. He told authorities he wrote that he had no desire to "do a Bremer" and settle for less than the most high-profile target possible, especially as Bremer had disappeared into obscurity while Hinckley wanted to be remembered. Ironically, for someone who seems to have looked down on Arthur Bremer for settling for a lesser target, it was Bremer’s keeping a diary that inspired Hinckley to keep his own.

In late-1980 he began to actively stalk President Carter with the full intention of assassinating him.

It didn’t run smoothly. On October 2, 1980 Hinckley stood within pistol range of President Carter, but decided not to shoot

One week later he was arrested at Nashville International Airport in possession of three handguns and spare ammunition in his carryon bag. The guns were confiscated and Hinckley, inexplicably, was released. One of the first things he did was to destroy his diary and commit its contents to memory, knowing fully that if any police officer had flicked through it he would have been instantly held and probably spent years in prison. Not only was Hinckley released, but he was able to replace his lost guns with a .22-caliber Rohm RG-14 revolver and ammunition, bought over the counter within hours of his release. The ammunition included a number of "Devastator" bullets made by Bingham, Ltd of Atlanta, Georgia.

Devastator Bullets

Devastators are effectively explosive bullets, consisting of a standard .22-caliber long cartridge containing small aluminium and lead azide explosive charges designed to explode on contact. When fired the lead azide slams back into the canister and comes forward as the bullet hits and slows down. This basic law of physics causes the bullet to shatter, massively increasing the kinetic energy transferred from the bullet to its target. Even a round as small as a .22 can do enormous damage when made in such a way.

The revolver was of the type commonly known as a "Saturday Night Special." It was small, easily concealed, with a short barrel and a small calibre but, using expanding bullets, the small .22-caliber bullets could inflict damage out of all proportion to their size. If the weapon had a longer barrel (Hinckley’s gun had a barrel of less than two inches) then the velocity of the bullet would have been faster and its effect almost certainly fatal.

The Washington Hilton

Washington Hilton

Hinckley arrived by Greyhound bus in Washington on March 28, 1981 and checked into Room 312 of the Park Central Hotel, only two blocks from the White House and across the street from the Secret Service headquarters. In his pocket was the RG-14 loaded with the six Devastator expanding bullets. The following morning he read in the newspaper that Reagan was scheduled to give a luncheon address to the AFL-CIO at the Washington Hilton the next day.

On March 30, Hinckley positioned himself at the rear entrance of the Washington Hilton in the roped off area for spectators 15 feet from the presidential limo and waited for his chance. He got it at 2:25 p.m. when the President emerged and waived to the crowd with a broad smile on his face. Raising his gun as the President approached the limo, Hinckley fired all six rounds in less than two seconds.

The result was instant chaos. His first bullet hit Press Secretary James Brady in the head, leaving Brady face-down on the sidewalk. As he turned to protect the President, the second bullet hit Washington, D.C. Police Officer Thomas Delahanty in the back of his neck . With his last clear shot at Reagan, Hinckley fired the third bullet over his head while Special Secret Service Agent in charge Jerry Parr pushed Reagan into the backseat of the limosine. The fourth bullet struck Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy in the abdomen as he spread himself over Reagan to shield him. The fifth bullet was repelled by the limosine's  bulletproof glass. The final bullet ricocheted off the limosine and pierced Reagan's underarm, grazing a rib and lodging in his lung, an inch from his heart. The wound was potentially fatal. Had Hinckley’s bullet travelled a fraction of an inch to one side then President Reagan would have joined Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy on the list of U.S. presidents assassinated while in office.

Amid the chaos Hinckley was swiftly pinned down and disarmed before being thrown into a police car and driven away at high speed.

George Washington University Hospital

Ronald Reagan recovers at GW Hospital

Reagan did not know he had been shot. His ribs hurt but he thought it was from being shoved face down in the back of the limosine. The initial plan to take him back to the White House was aborted when Secret Service agent Jerry Parr, inside the limousine, was first to realize that the President had been shot. The 70-year-old was complaining of chest pains, breathing difficulties, and coughing up blood. President Reagan was rushed to George Washington University Hospital, two miles from the scene of the crime.

The President spent nearly four hours in surgery and several weeks recovering before being anywhere near healthy again. The bullet in his lung had failed to explode. The only bullet that did was the one that hit James Brady. (Surgeons wearing bulletproof vests removed the bullet from Officer Delahanty's neck on April 2.) Delahanty and Agent McCarthy also made full recoveries.

Insanity Defense

The consequences of Hinckley’s actions were far-reaching and long-lasting. On June 21, 1982 he successfully pled insanity under the laws of the time, enraging the American public in the process. This collective outrage led to the Insanity Defense Reform Act, passed into law in 1984. The act reversed the burden of proof in insanity defense, making it the responsibility of defenders to prove their clients were legally insane where it had always been the responsibility of the prosecution to prove that they were not.

 Expert witnesses were now barred from directly testifying as to the sanity (or otherwise) of a defendant. The act was challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court, but was ruled constitutional in the case of United States vs Freeman. Three states, Utah, Montana and Idaho, abolished the insanity defense.

Hinckley Confined to St. Elizabeth's

And what of John Hinckley Jr.? He was sent to the St. Elizabeth psychiatric hospital for compulsory treatment and remains there today. He’s been granted a number of short stays at the family home and his lawyers regularly petition for greater freedoms and eventual release. The most recent ruling allowing him greater liberty came in December, 2013 despite ongoing doubts in some quarters. It seems as though the doubters do have some strong reasons for wanting to keep him where he is.

Hinckley at one point told psychiatrists, when asked if he was still a danger to Jodie Foster, that:

“Not now. If released I would go the other way but in one or two years if things go on the same, no response from her, then I’ll kill her.”

In 1983, Hinckley made an unsuccessful suicide attempt. In 1988 the Washington Post ran a story that Hinckley had written to serial killer Ted Bundy, then awaiting execution. In his letters Hinckley was reported to have expressed sympathy for Bundy’s plight. He had also written to Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, herself jailed for attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford and had also asked for Charles Manson’s prison mailing address. A search of his room at St. Elizabeth’s also uncovered more than 20 photographs of Jodie Foster.

In 2011, further doubts emerged as a result of one of Hinckley’s furloughs. His mother had driven him to see a movie and left him outside the theater before driving home. Instead, Hinckley went straight to a nearby bookstore where he spent a couple of hours flicking through books on true crime, especially books on assassins and particularly looking for references to his own crime. He didn’t know that he was under the covert surveillance of the Secret Service, the agency charged with protecting current and former presidents from assassination. What particularly disturbed them when Hinckley was questioned about this unauthorized absence was his having thoroughly studied the movies so he could try and convince anyone questioning him that he’d actually seen the films in question. Had investigators not had solid evidence that he hadn’t been to the movies as he claimed, Hinckley might well have fooled them.

Hinckley’s attempts to prove himself sane enough to be fully released might prove counter-productive. Given that James Brady’s death has recently been ruled a homicide, there exists a question of whether a sane Hinckley might face murder charges. There are also the cases of Delahanty, McCarthy and President Reagan to consider as all were seriously injured in the attack. If Hinckley is sane enough to release, is he by default sane enough to prosecute? If so, three charges of attempted murder and one of murder might await him. That particular legal controversy looks set to run for some time before a definitive answer is reached in the courts.

The Brady Act

James Brady with Bill Clinton as he signs the Brady Act into law.

James Brady became an advocate of gun control, successfully lobbying for what became known as the Brady Act. The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (to give it its full name) passed into law on November 11, 1993 during the tenure of President Clinton. It came into effect on February 28, 1994.

From then on, gun buyers had to pass stricter background checks when buying from federally licensed dealers, makers or importers. The act was, however, subject to certain exceptions. Firearms defined as curios or relics by a municipal, state or federal museum curator are exempt, meaning that you could buy a handgun used by John Dillinger without such checks, but not an exactly similar weapon of the same brand and calibre. If a curator certifies a firearm as being of historic interest or that a large part of their monetary value comes from its association with an historical event, period or individual then it is exempt. At the bill’s signing, Brady expressed his attitude in honest and pungent terms:

“Twelve years ago my life was changed forever by a disturbed young man with a gun. Until that time I hadn’t thought much about gun control or the need for gun control. Maybe if I had I wouldn’t have been stuck with these damn wheels.”

James Brady was strongly supported by his wife, Sarah, in his gun control campaigning. He was also heavily opposed by pro-gun organizations such as the National Rifle Association (NRA). In a landmark court case, Printz v. United States, the NRA argued that the entire Brady Act was unconstitutional and demanded it be voided. The NRA lost, but not without one significant gain. The act itself was upheld, but the clause making it mandatory for state and local law enforcement to carry out the background checks was ruled unconstitutional. It became non-mandatory, so background checks would now be carried out at the discretion of the agencies concerned.