THANATOS

And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: --Behold! human beings living in a underground cave, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the cave; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.

                                                                                             

                                                                                                         Plato's Republic

 

I viewed a documentary on an extra PBS channel I recently acquired. Its subject was James Earl Ray.  On April 4, 1968, Ray shot down Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee setting off race riots all over the country. Millions of people all over the world went into mourning.

I watched the entire 90 minute presentation without commercial break probably due to seeing coverage of the most recent terrorist attempt in Times Square. I mean groups all over the world always claim 'credit' for these attempts at group murder but I never really hear of groups attempting to get credit for assassinations in this country.

First, I never understood why JER would do such a thing. Why does this lonely and unaffiliated nobody track down a Civil Rights leader, one of many, and shoot him dead?

Second, why does it always seem to be the 'lone' assassin who kills our heroes or attempts to do so?

Third, why do so many people just seek out the most complicated of conspiracy theories to the point where they almost form a political movement?

The mystery of James Earl Ray to me had always been connected to his denial of guilt. I mean he confesses to the crime and three days later recants his confession. Then he goes to his death in prison without again admitting his guilt.

James Earl Ray was born dirt poor. His father had abandoned this rather large family early on and his mother had to become a prostitute just to make ends meet. The documentary tells us that things had gotten so bad for the Rays that during one winter in Alabama, they actually began dismantling their home to provide kindling for the fire place--their only source of heat.

James is actually written up by his teachers as early as the first grade in an almost obscene manner. He is described as being disgusting. Can you imagine denoting a six year old as disgusting rather than attempting to see what could be done to save his young soul?

He ends up a soldier during WWII and has a flawed military record. Evidently he likes to get drunk and fight people in bars. But he learns how to use a gun.

He ends up shop lifting, burglarizing shops and committing armed robbery. Eventually he is caught and imprisoned or jailed several times. Wiki confirms all of this.

James Earl Ray came from a poor family in Alton, Illinois, and left school at age fifteen. He joined the US Army during World War II and served in Germany. He was convicted of his first crime, a burglary in California, in 1949.

In 1952 he served two years for armed robbery of a taxi driver in Illinois. In 1955, he was convicted of mail fraud. After an armed robbery in Missouri in 1959, Ray was sentenced to twenty years in prison for repeated offenses. He escaped from prison in 1967 by hiding in a truck transporting bread from the prison bakery.

But he is clever. He is no idiot. He actually escapes from a maximum security prison in 1967.

But he may have been a bit on the psychotic side:

At his own request, in 1966 Ray began psychological counseling to quiet the voices in his

head.

The documentary cannot help but get into the psychoanalysis of this nobody. He is actually upset that he does not end up on some top ten list for criminals. He ends up number 357 on some silly "wanted' list and has a bounty of 50 bucks on his  head.

It is almost as if he is so unremarkable that following his 1967 grand escape from prison, no one misses him. This fact is almost humorous.

Dan Rather shows up from time to during the documentary;  since he had been one of the reporter/journalists who covered the story at the time. Rather posits that the poorest whites in the South had only one thing going for them. They were in a caste one step above the 'unwashed' almost in the tradition of Hindu Religion. And leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. threatened that social hierarchy; that fixed universe that somehow made life bearable.

I was really taken by the ability of Ray to survive. He travels all over the country following his magical escape from Missouri State Prison at Jefferson City. He manages through a series of robberies (I guess) to always have the means to eke out more than just a living. He purchases a car and keeps himself fed and manages to pay rent at cheap motels and 'flop houses'.  There appears to be some involvement in drug smuggling across the Canadian Border as well as the Mexican Border. And like many other stories involving conspiracy some shady fellow called Raul is involved

So with money from Raul, some savings from work as a dishwasher (that would have been a buck an hour at the most) and a robbery here and there, he comes up with a couple grand to purchase the famous Mustang and has some extra cash in his pocket and in some alias account in a Montgomery, Alabama bank.

Ray even ends up working as a volunteer for the Wallace Campaign of 1968; he hands out flyers and attends political events. George Wallace becomes an important figure in his life.

Now it appears that Ray began to focus upon MLK because the leader was the subject of stories on TV and radio constantly.   And so this dirt poor felon who despised the Black Race decided that he could finally reach some sort of notoriety

So Ray begins studying King's movements and tracks him down and follows him to Memphis where King is supporting a strike for garbage workers. Ray rents a room in a flop house across the street from the motel King is staying at. Ray has a scope rifle and finds a good clean shot from the bathroom across from the motel.

Ray runs to his car following the assassination after dropping his personal belongings wrapped in a blanket next door to the flop house. The gun is among the articles found in the wrapping and his finger prints are all over the place. Supposedly only his prints are discovered.

J. Edgar Hoover, a dyed in the wool racist, is scared following the killing of this great leader whom he has castigated and investigated for years

So he mounts an intense investigation to find the assassin. As part of that investigation he has hundreds of Gmen search thousands of pages of fingerprints of felons and escaped prisoners. And they hit on Ray after only reviewing several hundred of these pages. This is no easy feat since Ray has many aliases and several passports and other forms of ID's.

There is the issue of money. Ray is found in Heathrow Airport in London attempting to fly to some white African regime.

That always bothered me. Supposedly there was evidence leading to the conclusion that Ray had accomplished several robberies while on his journey of escape through back roads in the U.S. on his way to Canada; which is where he caught a plane to Europe.

In the background of all this are rumors of a bounty or several bounties offered to anyone who assassinated MLK. A bounty would be a more plausible explanation for how Ray managed to meet his expenses while escaping from this country.

Prison inmates familiar with Ray were questioned with little success; they told of bounties put on King's head, but agents were not able to track down leads on the source of these bounties

Supposedly, Jesse Jackson as well as Andrew Young believe there was a complex conspiracy to kill Reverend King and that the government might well have been involved.  http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/terrorists_spies/assassins/ray/1.html

In comparison to the earlier assassination of President Kennedy, the questions surrounding the murder of Dr. King are a little more clear cut. Witnesses (for the most part) do not quibble on the number of shots fired, or from the originating area. There are few credible conspiracies that claim multiple gunmen, and no evidence that more than one person was on hand in Memphis that day who planned to kill King. Conspiracy theorists must base their accusations on the word of Ray, who pled guilty to the murder in return for a guarantee from Tennessee authorities not to seek the death penalty. Once sentenced to 99 years, Ray immediately began retracting and changing his story that he acted alone.

But:

Ten years after the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy, the U.S. Congress appointed a select committee to investigate the murders of King and the two Kennedy brothers. Ray was interviewed at length by private investigators, lawyers for the committee and journalists. He took two lie detector tests and failed both of them; the polygraph operators -- one hired by the government, the other by Ray's lawyer -- each found that Ray lied when he was asked if he killed King.

The committee examined each of the conspiracy theories and in turn dismissed them, but was severely hampered in its investigation by being unable to examine top-secret FBI files. Walter Fauntroy, a member of The House Select Committee on Assassins, which reopened the investigation of King's assassination in the 1970s, has repeatedly said that he was unsatisfied with the investigation because he felt it ended too quickly and failed to fully explore the conspiracy allegations.

"We didn't have the time to investigate leads we had established but could not follow," Fauntroy said.

The committee "found that (Ray's attorney) was willing to advocate conspiracy theories without having checked the factual basis for them." Furthermore, the report concluded, James Earl Ray "fired one shot at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The shot killed Dr. King." The report was not a total loss for conspiracy theorists, however. After extensive investigation both publicly and privately, the Congressional committee concluded that although "no federal, state or local government agency was involved in the assassination of Dr. King...on the basis of circumstantial evidence...there is a likelihood of a conspiracy."

The case will never be resolved to a moral certainty. Some restaurateur claimed that he killed the Civil Rights Leader and the King family even sued him in civil court. And that was as late as 1999.

My own conclusions?

James Earl Ray was a life long felon involved in armed robberies and burglaries and all sorts of sordid things.

James Earl Ray by the 1960's was all but a lifer serving a 20 year sentence and those in charge at the prison were never advocating any sort of parole.

James Earl Ray was a life long racist; all part and parcel of a culture of poor Southern Whites.

James Earl Ray was not an idiot. He may have had fits of psychosis but he was not stupid. He had been a veteran in the World War and certainly knew how to use a rifle. He knew something about guns because he kept getting arrested for using one.

After escaping from a maximum security prison, Ray always seems to have funds. He always has money. And he could not have earned enough funds gallivanting around the country doing things like washing dishes for less than a buck an hour.

James Earl Ray was a liar. A compulsive liar as far as I can tell. He always seemed to flunk lie detector tests. He never told a consistent story to the man who was paying him some 40 grand for his story following the assassination.

James Earl Ray was traveling all over the Western map. He is in Mexico, he is in Canada, his is ultimately discovered in London.

I was more or less convinced by the PBS special that Ray was a lone gunman. I feel that he received monies as a result of some bounty. He may even have received funds leading up to the assassination.

I do not think the government, Federal, state or local, had anything to do with the assassination; at least directly. Certainly state and local officials all over the South were involved in right wing racist organizations that wished to see people like King dead.

Am I convinced of these things have been proved beyond any moral certainty? Probably not but I am not convinced of the proof of many things beyond a moral certainty.

And as that great philosopher Donald Rumsfeld once put it:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don`t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don`t know we don`t know.