 Was there a conspiracy to kill Martin Luther King, Jr.? An article recently published by New Times magazine suggests that James Earl Ray's brother, Jerry, may have been a part of the assassination conspiracy. It further accuses the FBI of, at best, laxity in the ensuing investigation and raises some astounding questions based on unreported evidence. We'll talk with the author of the article and the assassin's brother, Jerry Ray, on our next show from Atlanta. The area. Anybody from out of town? Oh, sure. Be happy to give it to me. Wait a minute. I'm all caught up. Donahue's show, number 04207, The King Assassination. Here it is. Maybe we should begin by taking a survey. Is this... Are we working here? We have no PA in the studio. There you go. Thank you. How many here believe that James Earl Ray acted alone in the killing of Martin Luther King? I'm sorry, but that's such a grim question, but it's an important one. He acted alone. I just see hands. How many believe there was a conspiracy in that he was not of my goodness? James Earl Ray's brother, Jerry Ray, his one of his two younger brothers, is at hand. You believe that too, don't you, Mr. Ray? Yes, yes, sir. You know anything more than we know? I know a little bit more. In space, I know the story here is a bunch of bull. Yeah. Okay. We'll talk about that because at hand is the man who wrote this story, which you say is a bunch of bull. But first I want to know... Co-authored. Are you co-authored the story? If somebody's going to accuse you of throwing bull, you want everybody involved to be equally accused. Oh, sure. No, it's not that. I want to share the credit. I believe the story is... Okay, of course you do. We're talking about the New Times story. At hand is the co-author of a cover story on New Times, a recent edition of which David Lifton is here to tell us about the information he gathered, which strongly suggests that the man to your right, Jerry Ray, was not uninvolved in what may have been a plot or a conspiracy to kill Martin Luther King. How am I doing? Do you agree with that observation? Yeah. Okay. Mr. Ray, tell me what we don't know about the assassination of Martin Luther King that you do know. Maybe you can give us a headline here. Well, a lot of things I don't know, but I know one thing that he was directed in that there was a lot of people involved in it, and but I wasn't involved in it in no way. You had nothing at all to do with the assassination of Martin Luther King? I hadn't talked to him about three months before the assassination took place. Yeah, do you think your brother pulled the trigger that killed the Civil Rights? No, sir, I don't think it, and they had experts that analyzed his voice and that he didn't assassinate King. You know that the famous attorney, Percy Foreman, quotes your brother as saying that you, Jerry, was with him at the time he bought the gun. But he didn't say that until after my brother filed a libel suit against him. Before that he wasn't talking that way, but then. Okay, but it's not likely that Percy Foreman, a man of wealth and reputation would make. And a professional crook, and a professional crook. You think he is? He was indicted in Texas for extortion, I think it was. Well, those charges have not been litigated, and I still don't know if I understand what would motivate Percy Foreman to lie about something that your brother said. Now let's make sure we all understand each other. Among other things, raised in the Lifton article in the New Times issue recently, is that your brother, James Earl Ray, now serving time for the killing of Martin Luther King, claims that you were with him when he bought the gun. I think the gun was purchased in Birmingham, was it not? Yes, sir. You were not with him, you're denying that now. If I was with him, I'd be doing 99 years in jail. Would you kind of develop that for us, Mr. Lifton? This is certainly one of the most damaging pieces of evidence. Well, what our article is about, I think the background you need to understand the situation, which is developed here, is that after the assassination, when the investigation began, the FBI did a rather exhaustive investigation, not as exhaustive as I would have liked to see, but it was pretty big. And newspaper reporters were swarming all over the different cities that James Earl Ray had lived in. You get together a patchwork quilt of statements of people who knew James Earl Ray at the time. And he would say that he was doing this or that with my brother, whether it was in Los Angeles or in Montreal or in Canada or at the gun shop where he said that he had to exchange the gun because he was gonna go hunting with his brother. After the fact, after James Earl Ray was captured in London, 64 days after the assassination of King, he sold his story for publication through William Bradford Huey. And one of the reasons was to help raise money for his attorney. And in that story, the one he told to William Bradford Huey and which appears in Huey's book, He Slew the Dreamer, he says that he was involved with a man he calls Raoul. And he relates this whole story, threaded through James Earl Ray's whole narrative is his interaction with Raoul. What we've done and the hypothesis that I came up with some years ago when I was researching this case for a movie company was the startling realization that references to my brother before the fact correlate with references to Raoul in the story that he sold, that is he being James Earl Ray sold to William Bradford Huey. Now, and then that's what our piece is built around. The idea that Raoul is Jerry Ray. However, that does not mean that Jerry Ray is involved in a plot that killed Martin Luther King. And I made it very clear in the article we wrote that there are several ways to interpret the evidence. And the evidence incidentally will not go away. The correlation will be there. It's there today. It was there in that record. It's gonna be there a hundred years from now. The question is how do you interpret this correlation between my brother before the fact and Raoul after the fact? And there are several interpretations. One is that Raoul is Jerry Ray and Raoul is the mastermind behind the King assassination. I do not believe that. The other is that two men got involved in something. What that something is we don't know. One got caught. He then calls the other one Raoul. I would, that's the one I tend to believe. The third is that it's all a coincidence that all the references to my brother before the fact are spurious references. The man was just making his way through his life and he constantly make his social entrances and exits into situations by saying I'm gonna meet my brother. And after the fact it happens to correlate with Raoul but it has nothing to do with my brother. That's possible. I don't think it's very probable. Did you talk to your brother James Earl Ray on the day before the killing of Martin Luther King? No, last time I talked to him I talked to him about three months before the assassination. Three months. Now there's another writer who claims that you had a phone conversation, at least a phone conversation with your brother on April 3rd, 1968, the day before the killing of Martin Luther King. You're denying that? He's got liable suit ball against him, it's in court now. All right. During that conversation it is alleged that James, your brother said to you, don't worry, Jerry, he said to you, Jerry, tomorrow it will be all over. Big nigger has had it. That's good for laugh, it's just some writer just trying to sell books. You didn't say that? I didn't tell him that, like that. And you had no conversation with him? We didn't have no conversation, like I said, about two and a half to three months before and he called me from a town in New Mexico. And it was under a three minute call because it wasn't no overtime charge. And he was in a bar drinking, I had a drink and I could hear the jukebox in behind him and I asked him, he told me where he was at. Now it should be easy for you to prove that you were not in Memphis on the day of the killing. And I'm found a label suit against the New Times and Jeff Cohen and Lipton and Percy Forman, all these guys that's involved in this story because I can prove I was working six nights a week in Chicago. Can you prove that you were in Chicago working, was it the Sportsman Club? I was working at Sportsman's Country Club, I worked there for three years, never missed a night or never took a night off. Okay, where is this club? It's in Wheeling, Illinois. In Wheeling. You're gonna be able to prove that you were at the Sportsman Club in Wheeling, Illinois throughout the entire day of the assassination. Yes sir, I got the employees to prove that people are working for it and plus every night they had a security guard to come by. Now one of the things you establish, Mr. Lipton in your article is that the FBI identified Jerry Ray as a prime suspect shortly after the slaying of, or at least after the information about his brother came to them. Well, I think that would be stating it a little bit too strongly. What they did is they issued a warrant for Eric Starville Gault and a man alleged to be his brother. At that time they didn't know Gault was James O'Ray. It took them a week approximately to find out through tedious fingerprint searching that the man who was known as Willard was really Gault and the man who was known as Gault is really James O'Ray. And what do you know, James O'Ray has two brothers. And at that point the FBI investigation goes haywire because they did not check out Jerry Ray's alibi. This is one of the most astonishing things we discovered in the investigation because obviously we were not about to print a story about this correlation and the Raoul Jerry Ray correlation without first checking out the alibi. And so I expected to find quite a few alibi witnesses. And Jerry told me the same story he's just told the audience that there's a security guard, for example, who would place him at the club. Well, Jerry, the security guard is not an alibi witness at all because he quit work there about a month before. And one of the things he said when we did interview him was that you would take trips, leaves of absence away from the club to visit your brother. And that was the most astonishing thing. I think that's what persuaded the editors to print the story. When we finally tracked down the security guard, and I don't want to say where he is, he's in some totally different place in America working at a totally different kind of job. And instead of turning out to be an alibi witness, he turned out to strengthen our case. So I must also emphasize to you and to the audience that I'm an analyst of the historic record. If you turn out to be the victim of a series of lies and coincidences, I think we've written our story non-libelously and I think that ought to be cleared up. And if that's also the case and you're also the victim of FBI sloppiness in not checking out your alibi at the time, because they didn't. And the Justice Department told us we never cleared anybody and we had a file check made through a friend over there and there's no interviews of anybody at the Sportsman's Club. So if it turns out you had an alibi, it's you're gonna have to develop it in 1977, which is unfortunate because it wasn't checked out at the time. I know you realize, you think going back that far that I can't check it out, but it can be checked out and I can prove I was there. But don't you agree though Mr. Lifton, it's unusual Mr. Ray that the FBI would not attempt to verify it. They checked me out, this is something made up. They did not. They was out there when it came over TV that Eric Stargold was actually James R. Ray, the FBI was out there in 10 minutes and they took me down to Chicago and kept me down there all night long and brought me back out. Each day they'd come and get me and bring me back and they was checking the club, they was opening my mail, they was checking everything. Who did they speak to at the club? They spoke to Ms. Walsh, you're running to the club. They did not speak to Ms. Walsh. They spoke to everybody. Jerry, I interviewed every one of these people for the article. If you had an alibi, if they were saying the FBI came out here right after Mr. Ray was identified as Jerry's, our employee's brother and we were able to show them the work records immediately. If there was anything like that, this article wouldn't have been printed because the editors would have said, I'm sorry, the correlation must be coincidental. But to the contrary, one of the most astonishing things that developed was Ms. Walsh, the owner of the club. Everybody said I was never interviewed by the FBI. It's not just that in 1976 or seven, they couldn't remember where you were at. That's not what's significant. What was really significant and what we stressed in the article was that the FBI did not conduct a proper alibi investigation. Now, if they took you out there and got such records, then first of all, you have to explain the fact that none of these people remember being interviewed by the FBI and they're normal Americans. They remember if they were interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Secondly, you'd have to explain the fact that the FBI files don't have any such record of interviews. So there's two prompt criticisms I'm making. One is directed at the question of your alibi and the second is directed at the malfunctioning of the FBI's investigation, which is absolutely no fault of yours, I must emphasize, that when they finally find out that their suspect has a brother, a real one, and their warrant says, Eric Stavro-Gault and a man alleged to be his brother, they say, gee, Gault is Ray, Ray has two brothers, and they interview the brother and your older brother says, what's the matter? King's Justin Nigger, he should have been shot 10 years ago, and that's in the FBI report and I'm paraphrasing. Excuse me, Doctor, you're going real fast on us. We have another Ray, name is John. Yeah, John Larry. John is told of the killing of King. John responds by saying, what's the difference, it's just a nigger anyway. This is the third Ray brother. That's right, and they don't go and they don't investigate the alibis of the brothers. I'm astonished. Now, the issue of racism and feelings is certainly germane here, Mr. Ray. Mr. Lifton has copies of a letter which you are alleged to have written to an Atlanta radio station personality in which you talk about niggers and Jews. Do you want to share just a piece of that letter? I'm not going to get in all that kind of stuff. This is not a racial program we're talking on. But you'll agree, Mr. Ray, that this is important. I'll just say this, I'm not a liberal. But that has nothing to do with what he did or what I was involved in. Your feelings about black people certainly are not unrelated to the issues that Mr. Lifton raises. Well, they keep bringing that stuff up on James Earl, Ray, too, that he was a racist and he worked at Cleveland's restaurant and they tried every way in the world. In Wenetka, you're talking about. They had blacks and Spanish and everybody working there. And they tried everywhere in the world to prove he's a racist and they couldn't do it and they had to put something where he got the money from or if they couldn't prove the money then they had to prove he's a racist. And I didn't kill King. If I'd kill King, then my racial beliefs would be, what do you call it, should be known. Relevant. Relevant. Would you kind of just give us a... And his preface thing is by saying that I don't think he's involved in a plot to kill King is I made very clear in the article. In fact, the article says, lifting things both brothers were framed. My partner, Jeff Cohn, tends to take the state's case against James Earl, Ray, more seriously than I do. But anyway, Jerry had written some years ago, I guess you would call us a fan letter. This is to a Jewish, Atlanta radio personality, a Jewish lady here in Atlanta. Guess you would call us a fan letter is I usually wouldn't waste my time writing to a couple of Jew devils. But being you two are in mourning for them, 11 Jews that got it done in by the Arabs in Munich. I figured I owe you a letter. And this is right after the Munich massacre. The only reason the Jews have so much power is on account of their money. But eventually the Jews pushed their luck a little too far. As I'm sure you know, the Jews have been run out of every country they've ever been in and they will eventually burn around out of the US. It might take another 50 or 75 years, but the Jews are like the nigger beast. Give them a rope and they will hang themselves. I am sure when history is written, my brother James Earl Ray and the honorable Governor George Wallace will be heroes alongside of J.B. Stoner, who is head of the National States Rights Party. And for who Jerry will work? We should say that J.B. Stoner is a Georgia resident. Well, this is on the J.B. Stoner letterhead. Who heads the National States Rights Party. I just want to make sure we know who we're talking about here. Yeah, and he writes, and typed in at the top is the honorable Jerry Ray. And he talks about the fact that Sir Hans Sirhan will go down in history as a hero. Although Robert Kennedy wasn't a Jew, he is worse. He sold the Arabs out for the Jew dollar. I think that's enough. I just want to know. Did you write that? That's the second thing. He come on here. What he's going to try to do now is come up to get out his liable suit where he's going to get a jury and bring up this ratio issue and don't have nothing to do with what I was in Birmingham, or Memphis, or any place else, and he can bring these old letters up. Man, don't mean nothing to me. Did you write the letter? No. Look, I have to say one thing. Now, I talked to Mark Lane. Mark Lane is my attorney. Before I came down here, and he told me legal things, I shouldn't even been on the show, he said, because we're suing all these people. He said, but watch what you say. He said, well, I'm not getting involved in that kind of stuff. Don't come on court about that or not. The article which Mr. Lyfton co-authored is in this issue of New Times Magazine. I don't want to appear to be bully here. I do think you raise a point when you say that when you start reading people's mail, I think this is clearly very serious business, and Mr. Ray, it's not my intention to purposely embarrass you or raise issues which are not your main, but the article is an astonishing revelation of FBI ineptitude or is that the word? Was there purposeful laziness? I mean, you'd have to agree, you yourself would have to agree, the failure of the FBI to check your alibi is a monumental error of omission on the part of one of the most respected law enforcement investigative agencies in the world. Well, if you're trying to say that the FBI was just leave me run free and they had something to do with assassination, all of my friends in St. Louis and in Chicago and then even down in Florida has been stopped and questioned about me. If I talk about robbing the banks or talk about any crime where they get me for conspiracy and they've been to people in St. Louis, can I name names? I can name the names. They've been to people in St. Louis for what purpose? Trying to get them to say that I've talked about robbing the bank and so they get me for conspiracy robbing the bank and which I didn't do. Well, there are other issues which we'll delve into in this program. We're already have to break here, but issues of where did your brother, for example, get $10,000 to spend prior to the assassination? Where did he get the money that allowed him to have passports, phony IDs? And how did he get to London where he was finally captured? Where did a man of his means get all of this money? We'll ask you to explain that. He explained all that. All right, hang on just a moment. I do have to break here. Mr. Lifton has other questions which are raised in this article which I'd like to raise with this audience as well. We're in Atlanta, Georgia, and we hope you'll join us. ["Pomp and Circumstance"] David Lifton is co-author of an article in New Times Magazine which strongly suggests that the case, the investigative report on the killing of Martin Luther King should be reopened. We're with the brother of the man who is now serving life for that killing. James Earl Ray's brother, Jerry, has accepted our invitation to appear because you are featured prominently in this article. It is suggested, among other things, that you had several phone conversations with your brother prior to the killing of Martin Luther King, that we have one of the country's leading and most highly esteemed lawyers claiming that your brother said that you were with him when he bought the gun. We have another man referring to a conversation you had with your brother on the day before the killing of Martin Luther King and which racial slurs were used to describe him. We have an FBI investigation which was at least, at the very least, lacks in its vigor given the nature of this crime. And we also have in this article from Mr. Lifton some astonishing information regarding the behavior of the man who headed the FBI office in Atlanta at the time of the killing. Would you share that with us, please? Yeah, well, I thought you were gonna quote it, but it's at the end of our article, we interviewed Arthur Murtaugh, one of the agents who told us of the behavior of the man connected with the intelligence squad, the people who were keeping track of King and keeping him under surveillance. And they said that upon hearing that Dr. King had been wounded, Agent Murtaugh, who we interviewed said that the agent in charge of the surveillance unit cried out, I hope the son of a bitch dies. And they had codenamed Dr. King Zorro in their surveillance operation. And they kept jumping up and down and yelling, they got Zorro, they got Zorro, they finally got that son of a bitch. That was the attitude in the Atlanta office among some of the agents. When J.B. Stoner, the head of the state's rights party, defended your brother, he defended your brother. He came into his case after Foreman pleaded him guilty. Yeah, you claim not to have known Mr. Stoner prior to the time you met him when he was serving as counsel for your brother, is that right? I met him and first time I met him was in about June of 69. Which would have been a whole, more than a year following the killing of Dr. King. It was after Foreman pleaded him guilty, then when he came in on the case, then that's when I met him. Your brother escaped from prison in 1967 in Missouri, where he was serving time for armed robbery. That is your brother James. Following his escape from prison, when did you first meet him? After he escaped, about two weeks after he escaped. Now, you once lied to the FBI, didn't you, on this matter? Oh yeah, I wasn't going to tell them or they can put you in jail for, you know, meeting with somebody without turning them in and I'm not going to turn in your brother. Right, so you did lie and now the statute of limitations is up and you can acknowledge that you had met with your brother. Yeah, we met in Chicago, he worked about 10 miles away from where I was working at. He worked at a restaurant in Winnettka. He worked at a restaurant in Winnettka and I was working at the country club in Lake Zurich. I mean in the land of Wheeling. Right, did you meet him at the back door at all? No, I never was over in Winnettka in my life. You understand that the frequency of your meetings with your brother following his escape from prison is germane to all the probables or possible questions raised by this article. You are presenting yourself here as a man who really didn't meet his brother very often at all. We met, I think, three times, three times from the time he escaped until the time he got caught. How do you think Martin Luther King was killed? Did your brother pull the trigger? No, there's some truth in his article and Mark Lane's got a book out coming out in a week called Code Named Zorro. It tells the actual truth, there was nothing pulled ahead but the only thing is Mark Lane don't blame me for being involved in it. So if you read his book, then you'll find out and the people had already reviewed his book that thought before that there wasn't no conspiracy now they changed their mind. It's mostly about the FBI. Where do you think James got his money? From Raul. Do you know who Raul is? No, I don't know who he is. You realize Mr. Lifton is suggesting strongly that you are Raul. Yeah, well, that's what is in his book, but it's not true. Who do you think Raul is? Just like he says, he's a French-Canadian. I mean, not a French-Spanish-Canadian, or he met him at home in Canada. In Montreal. Yes. Why would Raul want King killed? I have no idea. Why would your brother consent to be part of this kind of horror story? No, it wasn't like it's made out, but he was scapey from the Missouri prison and he went to Canada to get a new idea on that. And that's where he met Raul. Okay. When your brother registered at the rooming house from which the shot was fired to kill King, he registered as John Willard, right? That's what he claimed, yes. The rooming house person who engaged in that transaction described a man who looks more like you than James. You understand that? Well, I read that in a article. I don't know if it's true or not. Okay. When they found the car, a Mustang, that was used by the alleged assassin to depart from the scene, the ashtrays were filled with viceroy cigarette stubs. James does not smoke. You do smoke. I've noticed that you smoke Winston's, not rice rice. And I just started smoking Winston a month ago. I was always smoked camels up until a month ago. I see. Is there, Mr. Lifton, would you put this in focus for us? I don't wanna, I feel like I'm badgering the witness. Would you kindly tell us your feelings about this evidence? Well, okay. The situation is that, and Jeff and I discussed this many times before we actually sat down at the typewriter. The question is, we had all these correlations between before the fact references to my brother and after the fact to Raoul. And then the question was, well, can this theory be extrapolated right out to Memphis? Can you actually say that Jerry Ray was not in Chicago, but in Memphis? And we realized, certainly, that we couldn't say that, because we can't prove that. The fact that you have some cigarettes in a car is interesting, but that's not strong. The fact that the ID wasn't, they didn't really ID James Rae correctly that day. That's interesting too. There were a lot of interesting things. One of the things we had to leave out of the article, which was also interesting on my head, was that the FBI investigation turned up a Birmingham, Alabama to Chicago plane ticket from Delta Airlines, which had been, they'd gone from Birmingham to Memphis to Chicago, but only the Birmingham to Memphis part had been used. Who had gone? No, we don't know, because the FBI, I just wanted things, I'd like to see the House Committee get that file. It was in the New York Times at the time. There's quite a few articles on it. Birmingham to Memphis, but the Memphis to Chicago part isn't used. Well, whose name is on the ticket? We don't know. Well, then how do you know that the ticket is your name? Because the ticket was written, it was part of the FBI investigation as reported by the New York Times. It's featured in their stories. And what was the date of the ticket? Oh, the day of the assassination. Day of the assassination. Someone traveled in to Memphis and then didn't go all the way to Chicago, and we noted that Jerry's works in Chicago. We put all this together, hold it, and we said, well, no, wait a second. We put it all together, and we say, well, look, we have a House Select Committee and assassinations. They've got to go over to the Justice Department, get the FBI file and find out the name of the ticket. Okay, that's the sort of thing that has to be done. We have to go back, for example, to the laundromat in Atlanta. You want me to hold for a minute? And find out when the lady I said the man came in on Monday at a drop off his clothes, what was the description? Those people did their interviewing right away. Was it a shorter man? Was it, you know, was it a taller, thinner man? We have to get this kind of work done. Well, I don't have access to those files. All we could do is raise the question. All right, one more question, and I break. I promise. Briefly. Sure. Wasn't that King guarded? I mean, wasn't there significant FBI protection supposed to be afforded to this controversial figure in the late 60s in the gift? That's right. They had him under surveillance all the time. He goes, it seems they were trying to, you know, see where he was going and who he was meeting with. And I think they were more interested in his sex life than whether he was, as they said, whether he was infiltrated with communists. But anyway, on April 4th, he was not under the proper surveillance. The FBI apparently had, for some reason, had lifted their surveillance. We don't know why. And there were certain weird movements. Black police guard were removed and some people at the firehouse. I'm sure Elaine is gonna discuss this thoroughly in his book. It's certainly discussed, although they don't make much of it, in the Justice Department report, they acknowledged these strange transfers took place. So on the day of his killing, he had less protection than was normally afforded to him? Oh, there are definitely odd things going on there, which means that if there's anything to the conspiracy theory, it would appear to have to involve authorities in Memphis because you cannot explain this in terms of some minor little conspiracy. We'll be back in Atlanta in a moment. I want you to call me Lee Majors, after this. This is Atlanta, Georgia with a lot of enthusiastic people who would like to ask questions, may be confused, offer opinions. So we're gonna do our best now. I'm sorry about the fact that this is so complicated. Oh, that's all right. You had a point. Yes, I would like to ask Mr. Ray a question. It goes back to the earlier part of the program. But he wrote this letter about the Jewish people who had been killed in the war. He wrote this letter about the Jewish people who had been killed in the war. About the Jewish people and the blacks. I would like to ask you, are you a Christian? I'm a Catholic. You're a Catholic? That's well, it's supposed to be Christian. How, as a Christian, could you write such a letter as he just read? You ever listen to Ring Radio? I listen to Ring, yes. You listen to Mick and Teddy? To who? Mick and Teddy was two girls named? No. They're no longer with the station, we should say. No. They had a kind of virtual show on, but, and whatever was popular, they would always take the other side, so I used to call them up and write them a letter of ribbon a little bit. You stated you were not racist exactly, but you weren't liberal either. No, I didn't say that I was, I didn't say that I wasn't one way or the other, I'm just saying that I'm not no liberal. Well, you kind of evaded it. Well, I don't raise peanuts or nothing like that. To ask Mr. Ray, I don't think he answers the question while I go to my satisfaction. Who does he think is responsible for the killing and if he thinks the FBI or the CIA had anything to do with it? Everything, the story is not false. I believe the FBI was behind the killing of King. I'd like to know if the FBI has made any reply to these charges. I'm wondering why there isn't some representative from the FBI up there. I'm more worried about them than Mr. Ray. Well, yeah. I think you raised a good point and I think the responsibility is clearly mine to give them that opportunity. You have my guarantee that I'll make that effort. Should I say something about that? Sure. When we were interviewing up at the Justice Department and these interviews were all, we couldn't attribute to names. One guy told me, in fact, this one, I think Inspector Boynton, I was allowed to use his name. He was at the press office. He was explaining certain deficiencies in the investigation. He said, look, we were only assisting the state of Tennessee in a local homicide. Now, if you go back in that afternoon, I was riding back on the plane from Washington. I was looking through my old clipping files in the New York Times and story after story, the FBI has taken over the case from the members authorities. It's too important to be left in local police hands. And yet, you know, in 1977, this fellow in the FBI's Public Information Office was just saying, oh, no, it was just, listen, we just assisted the locals. I mean. And the attitude of J. Edgar Hoover regarding minorities is well documented. Finally, the attitude of J. Edgar Hoover regarding Martin Luther King is more significant, even more relevant than that because he was, we now know of the scurrilous letters that were being penned right at the top level of the FBI and being anonymously mailed to Hoover, one of which suggested that he, I'm sorry, to King, one of which suggested that he commit suicide and they were mailing tapes, recordings made in Dr. King's bedroom to his wife, anonymously. That's all in the church report. It's in the New York Times. There's nothing not known about that anymore. I'd just like to ask you a way if you'd make a very brief statement as to how this has affected his lifestyle. Well, it's, I got another brother, John, John Ray, who's in the Marionville noise prison right now, because he came up like me and spoke up in James' behalf that he was innocent and was framed. And the FBI had a harassment out on him any time a crime is committed to stop him and hold him for the FBI. And in which a bank was robbed and they did stop him and they put him on trial with some guy who was supposed to rob the bank and he convicted them both because he used evidence against this other guy. Then he gave the other guy a new trial and turned him loose. And my brother's in there for a bank robbery that he didn't commit during 18 years in Marionville noise prison. And I personally have been all my friends, close friends, this is up until 1972. Of course, my brother's been in since 1970. Until 1972, everybody that I would associate with would be stopped and ask if I talked about robbing banks. Of course, I'm working every day, like I've been for the last four years where I'm working that now, six nights a week. And they could never get nobody to say that I even talked about it. And of course, if they could, then that would have been a conspiracy to rob a bank and I would be doing 10 years in federal prison. I do believe there was a conspiracy. I have a question to ask to the author. How long have you known? I haven't read that article either. Why is this information just being printed? Why haven't we known about this beforehand? I don't know why the, well, first of all, the information that's printed in the article germinated is a hypothesis that germinated in my head in a library at UCLA when I was doing research for a movie company in 1974. And I had set up a filing system the way you do when you do research. And I had different series of names files. And one of them was for this fellow Raul, which James O'Rea constantly tells William Bradford Huey about. And I had all these Raul incidents and I was making little charts and tables. And I had another file because in all these stories, the brother was coming up. So I had a whole series of references to the brother. And one day I was sorting my clippings and looking at this thing and I'd only been working on this 10 weeks. And I said, my God, look at this. They match. Look at this correlation. Is this a coincidence? And at that time, I started writing a manuscript about it and doing some more research. And it wasn't until I was in New York City because I'm there in connection with some other business, I met people at New Times and they thought it was worthwhile writing up publishing. We should say that New Times Magazine is the magazine which identified the cabinet member who made the racial slur aboard the airplane that subsequently cost Earl Butz's job. I believe so, yeah. And we'll be back in a moment. We're with David Lifton who co-authored an article for New Times Magazine on the assassination of Martin Luther King. Also here is Jerry Ray, the younger brother of the accused assassin, James Earl Ray. I like this, Mr. Ray. How did you feel about Mr. King's death? Were you glad to hear about that? What were your feelings on it? I actually had too much on my mind. I was working, I had been working in Chicago for a long time and I wasn't a follower of King's or nobody else as far as that goes. Surely you had some thoughts. I mean, everyone all with slinking. Well, I'm glad that finally got rid of him. People down south had more of an opinion than did up where I was at because I never had seen a man before and he didn't have no effect on me one way or the other. I'd like to ask the author if he thinks after doing this extensive investigation that we'll ever know the true facts, I personally do not think we'll ever know. Well, I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question. I think that we can know much more than we know now and I think that if the House Select Committee on Assassinations can make available to us at least the 6,000 pages of FBI files, just the way we have the Warren Commission and the Kennedy assassination we have at the archives, I think there'll be a much more accurate reconstruction of what took place available. We can actually analyze the materials and see what these people when they were interviewed in 68 said without, that's the prime source material that's locked up at the FBI. I first like to share my opinion and then ask a question. My opinion is that I don't only believe that it was a conspiracy but the conspiracy is still going on. But my question is this, has there been any investigation on the part of the author or the FBI to try and find out how Willard or either Galt was able to determine that King would be living in the Lorraine Hotel when he had previously lived in the Holiday Inn and the change of the move to the Lorraine Hotel was a last minute thing. Well, he had to have had some information to know that. Well, I'm really not an expert in that area but I know that in Lane's new book he implies that perhaps FBI surveillance data was being fed back or leaked to people who wanted to be in a position who would know that he was going to the Lorraine Hotel. I mean, what you'd have to do to really investigate this properly is get the entire FBI surveillance operation and find out what they knew, when they knew it and find out who was in charge of it and consider those people for the purposes of investigation, perhaps suspects. We should also say that the aliases that your brother is alleged to have used when he was on the lam. Our names of real white males who live in the Toronto. They all lived in the same, okay, that's right. He used the four names and all of the names come from the same Canadian suburb of Toronto, namely Scarborough and three of the four bear a marked resemblance to James Orray. That is, if you made a verbal profile, height, weight, et cetera, there is this remarkable correlation. So I call them lookalike aliases. Everybody's known about this and it's one of the things that would appear to indicate that there was more of this than meets the eye that he was dealing with some kind of an alias ring. By the way, when you get into this case, the fact that he had these sophisticated aliases does not necessarily mean that the alias ring is part of the king plot, but whoever was running James Orray, if he was the unwitting agent of a conspiracy, which I tend to believe, by the way, because I can't believe if he was witting, he'd run out of alias. Excuse me, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I want to make sure they're... The three pictures here, the picture in the lower right-hand corner is James Orray. The other three are the alias, the real men whose names he used. Yeah, I was just gonna say that whoever was running James Orray and giving him instructions where to go and giving him money, apparently had new enough to direct him to Canada where he got these aliases. Okay, I'd like to ask what in your investigation cows you to link to this brother instead of the other brother? That's a very good question. It largely boils down to the fact that the FBI investigation that was conducted, for example, and Jerry's denials notwithstanding, established that when he was in Wenetka, Illinois, and this is according to New York Times reports on the FBI investigation, that Jerry visited his brother at the back door. So the correlation... On the restaurant where his brother worked. That's where his brother worked. Yes, okay. And secondly, the Percy Foreman affidavit, which is not just about Jerry Ray, it's a long deposition which happens to mention this in passing, which makes it all the more unlikely that he would deliberately and sinisterly stick in this one false fact just to implicate Jerry. Mentioned that it was Jerry at the gun shop. And so the correlation's correlated to Jerry, I think in two of the instances. And in fact, Jerry is much closer to James and John Larry was. That's the closer relationship. But all these guys, all these guys, Foreman, Huey, and all these guys didn't start making up these stories until after James sued them and we started filing libel suits against them. That's Jerry Ray, not to be confused with his brother. And I guess that's the problem that at least in this article he often is confused with his brother, at least the whereabouts of the two and how close were you and how often did you meet prior to the killing of Martin Luther King and when you did meet about what did you speak? You know, if I could first interject this, one of the things that's intrigued me about after we publish a story is we've made, you might say certain enemies and quotes in the movement of researchers on this case because there are some people that want to believe in a huge conspiracy in Raul while he's just got to be this reddish-haired French Canadian up in Canada. And on the other hand, at the other extreme, you have people that believe James Ray did it alone, like Arthur George McMillan. And in his view, Raul has to be a total figment of the imagination. We just took the evidence as a look. It may not be as big a conspiracy as you'd like, but we at least have this little link here to a brother. And my interest in this and my motive is not to put someone behind bars at all, but my motive is to find out what happened. I'm not interested in punishing anyone. I think most people just want to know what lay behind the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. And if Lee Harvey Oswell was alive today and we could ask him a question, he started telling us a Raul story that he met somebody in some city and he had red hair and he was in Canada. I mean, and yet the evidence indicated there was a real person. You'd go to that real person and realize that locked up in his head and possibly in your head is a piece of the history of this case. You told me for a couple of hours up in Chicago and what's nothing that I've told you is anything like in that story. That story is completely opposite of what we talked about. And we'll be back in just a moment. We're with Jerry Ray, the brother of James Earl who's now serving life for the killing of Martin Luther King. David Lifton is here, a co-author of an article in New Times Magazine recently which wonders aloud about whether James Earl Ray acted alone and the Raul to whom James refers may in fact be his own brother, Jerry. Let me, you know, we've been talking about you now for an hour and let me just, I don't wanna libel you, but here's the speculation. You and your brother were in a kind of racist brotherhood conspiracy to kill the moral leader of the civil rights movement. And he takes their app and he invents Raul because he does not want to implicate his own brother. Now his brother who is free has this moral responsibility to his brother to attempt to free him. So he engages talk show hosts and anybody who listen, radio personalities and the idea is to spin the conspiracy wheel out in public in order to get public opinion aroused to the point where maybe most of America believes that James Earl Ray did not act alone. Maybe James Earl Ray didn't even pull the trigger and we get another trial for your brother or at least a release on bond and to give him his freedom. No, he's, in fact he's never had trials had at guilty play and he's had a hearing spur trial where he should have had one, they turn him down each time. And the talk shows actually don't do that much good because it takes an honest judge to give him a trial and they won't give him a trial. And I would like to get on this FBI thing. See, a lot of people's FBI supporters, anything they do, that's okay. And they tap bones to very kill somebody that's okay. And like they got 300 up in protest in New York because they got an FBI on trial for tapping phones and opening people mail. Everybody likes that until it happens to them. And I know personally how it is when they get on your back and because I got a brother doing 18 years on a frame of charge and they tried to get me on a frame of charge and the FBI had cleared me, why would they clear me if they're still trying to put me in jail? Would you take a lie detector test on these issues? I wrote to the Spray Committee, I wrote to the Libby Committee came out, I offered to take a lie detector test to both of them committees. But Jerry, when you take the die detector test and they ask you when you spoke to your brother last and you talk about the phone call, try to get it straight, whether it was in Mexico, in Albuquerque, as you told us just now in New Mexico or in Texas as you told me in the interview. Yeah, you know what, let me tell you the reason. Now, two weeks ago, what am I telling you? Two weeks ago, I was visiting my brother at the Petros prison with attorney. And so he had it written out. And so I said, where do you call me from? That time, you know, you call him about three months. He said, it called from New Mexico. And I've been telling everybody Texas because I thought it was Texas, but he told me it's New Mexico. So I'm just taking this word for it. Oh, okay. I wanted to ask a question which had been led to earlier in the hour. One, about your brother, what led him to want to kill Martin Luther King? Was it money? Was it that he didn't like Martin Luther King or do you have any idea of what led him to do this? Let's see what can be proved. If he could ever get in court, we got witnesses, about 20 minutes before King got killed, he went to a service station for this Raul guy to fix the flat tar because he had a tar and Raul was gonna use his car that night. And he wasn't even in that rooming house. He was at a service station, about four blocks from there when the shot was fired. And he's got, went to testify that but he can't get in court. Then why did he say to William Bradford Huey in the first account in August 68 when he was first telling the story that he was sitting out in the white Mustang right in front of the rooming house and then Raul came bounding down the stairs with the rifle, put, you know, got into the car, they dropped that evidence right there and then they roaring off in the Mustang. Why is he now at the service station if in the first account he was sitting in the car right in front of the rooming house? Well, everything, everything. That's in writing, in James Verwey's writing. Everything he would tell, everything he would tell his attorney Arthur Haynes. Arthur Haynes was getting paid by William Bradford Huey. Everything he would tell Haynes, Haynes would tell the Huey and Huey would write it in this look magazine. And that's the reason Arthur Haynes finally got barred because how is he gonna have a defense when your attorney's telling the book writer or magazine writer your whole case? James contracted to do that. He contracted with the writer. But it's not Haynes' fault. James contracted to raise money for his lawyer to write him a story. You're not, that's true to a point, but you don't tell him your whole case in the paper, the newspaper, because anyway, if you do, you don't have a case. But if he was at the service station, why didn't he put that in the first version of the story? Why didn't he say, I was at the service station, why is there first in the Mustang and now he's at the service station? Well, I tell you, if you know anything about criminal law then you know you don't tell everything to book writers and newspapers. But why is he changing the alibi? And we'll be back in just a moment. In this article from New Times, among other things, the authors, one of whom is with us says, in any serious probe of the King homicide, members of the FBI's Atlanta Intelligence Unit would have been suspects, not investigators. There's a couple of things that we would like to get in and this is so frustrating and so complicated. Does Jerry Ray, here present, have a police record? Yes, it dates back to the time he was a teenager, I think there were two arrests for robbery. Nothing since then. Mr. Ray is currently employed by a country club in suburban Chicago, which ironically, given the nature of our earlier conversation, is a predominantly Jewish country club and has been employed there for four years. So clearly you're a reliable study employee who has met your responsibilities at this job. Why doesn't James Earl Ray tell us who Raul is and get himself out of jail tonight? See, the only thing is, this is what confuses a lot of people, the only thing is, is describe the person and Raul, nationally, probably wasn't his name. He worked under LA, James doesn't know who he is or who he is or where he is now. James had an LA, he's used to the name of Willard. And he was in a criminal activities, running dope and all this other stuff. So the only thing he did, just describe him and he's always been there. Truly I'm sorry. You know I thank you for your presence here. I thank you, David Lifton. Hope that more of you will take a look at this most fascinating article and perhaps a useful dialogue will ensue. I thank you for joining us. Goodbye from Atlanta, Georgia. While in Atlanta, the Donahue staff and guests are staying at the Peachtree Plaza, the world's tallest hotel. The Peachtree Plaza is a Western international hotel. Air travel for the staff of the Donahue show provided by Eastern Airlines, Atlanta's biggest airline with over 250 flights a day to 96 cities.