Did the FBI Murder Martin Luther King? (Author & Researcher William Klabber Interview... Part 1)

Author, researcher, journalist, radio and podcast host William Klabber is one of the world's leading experts on the three earth-shaking 1960's assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr, and Robert F. Kennedy.

In this amazing interview, Bill Klabber graciously gives his time to explain the truth behind who killed Martin Luther King, Jr, and why it's nothing like you've been led to believe. Bill takes an extremely detailed and fact-based approach to all of his work, and in regards to Martin Luther Kings' death the evidence will most likely shock and disturb you. It includes the involvement of the FBI, a group often referred to as the "Dixie Mafia," and court-proven facts refuting that James Earl Ray was responsible for MLK's death.

If you are intrigued by this interview, we highly encourage you to check out Bill's multi-part series on the reality of King's murder in the MLK Tapes in order to better understand the full picture. In this award-winning podcast published by Tenderfoot TV, Bill merges in detailed evidentiary explanations compiled by the late-great attorney William Pepper, and actual interviews with many of the central players involved in the plot to kill King, including members of the Dixie Mafia and eye-witnesses to the events.

Because of Bill Klabber's vast knowledge of not only MLK's death, but also JFK and RFK, we've broken his interview with us into two parts. This first part deals briefly with JFK, but then centers mostly on an explanation of the truth of MLK's murder. In part 2 of the interview (soon to be published) we will go into more detail about Bobby Kennedy's assassination. Please subscribe to the show to be automatically alerted when part 2 of the interview is released.

And again, if you are fascinated by the potentially hidden truths of these events, we strongly suggest checking out Bill Klabber's full podcast of The MLK Tapes, as well as his book "Shadow Play: The Unsolved Murder of Bobby Kennedy."

In the meantime, sit back and enjoy this excellent interview with expert William Klabber, and ponder why we still never hear any debate or discussion of these disturbing facts in mainstream media.

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Transcript

JD: Welcome back to the Independent Riot, everybody, where we're not trying to be left or right, just real. Today's episode could be one of my all-time favorites due to its fascinating and maybe even terrifying implications. The fact is Martin Luther King Jr. was not killed by James Earl Ray. And there's not only overwhelming evidence around this fact, but that evidence has actually already been presented and proven in a U.S. court of law in 1998. 

You didn't hear much about that, did you? James Earl Ray didn't do it, people, and it's already been proven. And today's courageous guest, William Klabber, is going to explain who probably did. And even if you don't know much about the Earth Shaking Trio of 1960s assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK, William Clapper is a lifelong expert with a near encyclopedic knowledge on these topics and is going to give you an amazing overview. 

William Clapper is an author, journalist, radio, and podcast host who has been studying and reporting on these events from when they occurred in the 1960s. In fact, because of Bill's deep knowledge on these subjects, we've gone ahead and broken his interview into two parts. Today's is briefly going to cover JFK's assassination and some historical context of the 1960s at the start. But then for the majority of today's episode, it's going to be a deep dive into that much overlooked evidence around MLK's death. Part two of our interview with William Clapper that will be released in the next couple of weeks is going to have Bill go into details around the inconsistencies of Robert Kennedy's murder. And that even includes Bill talking about his own interview with RFK's supposed killer, Sir Han Sir Han. So please remember to subscribe to the show so you'll automatically be notified as soon as that's released. And regarding today's main topic of MLK's killing, Bill is actually the host of his own incredible podcast on this subject called the MLK tapes, which goes into much greater detail on the fascinating subject of the cover up around Martin Luther King's assassination. 

And I can't tell you enough, you've absolutely got to check it out. Not only does Bill produce all the evidence and recorded interviews with eyewitnesses and key players from that time period around King's murder, but the great production value of the MLK tapes from Tenderfoot TV almost transports you back into that volatile time of the 1960s. So that's the MLK tapes by William Clapper. And there will definitely be a link in this episode show notes. 

So you can go and check that out. Last before we get to today's interview, I'd like to throw out a quick but sincere apology to Bill Clapper himself for the delay in getting this episode out. This was recorded with him months and months ago. 

And honestly, there's no real good excuse for the delay, except this is just a small production team. And sometimes the ball gets dropped. And we just took an extended break. But the time has finally come. And this episode today is one of the most fascinating discussions I've had in a long time, because it's with a tireless, dedicated warrior for truth, and a fact based questioner of the status quo in William Clapper. So I hope you enjoy this. And I hope you also start to wonder why no one ever talks about this. 

All right. So today we are extremely lucky to have Bill Clapper, who is the producer and co-host of the RFK tapes and also the producer and host of the MLK tapes, which is being released right now as an audio podcast. And I got to say, I did not know a tremendous amount about the MLK assassination. But once you start to learn about it, and the podcast is so incredibly well done and researched and produced, once you start to learn about it, it's very difficult to turn your brain off from wanting to know more because it seems so overwhelming that the story, official story we're given about MLK is not accurate. And there is a conspiracy and cover up going on with it. And we're going to get into all of that as well as your research on the RFK assassination. But to give people a little bit of background and bring them up to speed on you and your work, can you describe a little bit about what got you interested in these subjects and how long you have been researching it? 

WK: Sure. I got out of college and went to live in New York City and thought I had the soul of a writer or investigative journalist or something. And I wrote a few articles for The Village Voice, which was in the hip, cool newspaper in New York. And all the cool people were writing articles for The Voice. And I wanted to be one of them. 

And so I did a couple of stories for them and it took two or three months a story that, you know, make sure I had it all right and did all the investigation. And, you know, then I'd wait and then a check for $100 would come in the mail. And I started thinking, you know, you're not really going to make a living doing this. Or if you do, you're going to be poor the rest of your life. So maybe this isn't your path. Maybe this isn't what you really should be doing. And maybe try something else. 

And maybe later on, if things are working out, come back to this. And that's what I did. I went into business with some friends and we took, we started taking over abandoned buildings in New York City and rehabilitating them. And it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of work with stuff, stuff. And it turned out good in the end. 

And so midway through life, I found myself in a more stable situation where I could take time off and look at a story and actually work on it. And gosh, I was in my mid 40s, I guess, and I bumped into someone in New York City who said, you know, there's a group of people out there in Los Angeles who are looking into the newly open LAPD files of the Robert Kennedy assassination. And for your listeners who may not know, Robert Kennedy was shot. Sir Hans, Sir Han was caught with a gun in hand and said he did it and the whole thing. But for some reason, the police kept their files completely secret for 20 years. 

Now, if there wasn't any questions, if Sir Hans, Sir Han acting alone killed Robert Kennedy, why are the police files kept secret? And so this group was formed out in California to start going through the files that have been made public. And I wanted to be part of that group. And I just flew out there on a whim. I found out where they were meeting. I walked into that room and they said, who are you? 

And I said, well, I'm Bill Claver. But I want to join. I want to help you guys. Well, what can you do? 

I said, I don't know yet. But the thing I could do when I figured out is they were putting together this amazing request to the grand jury in LA, 800 pages of exhibits demonstrating the LAPD's willful and corrupt misconduct and their investigation of the murder of Robert Kennedy. And it was really serious stuff. It wasn't like Mickey Mouse stuff, little stuff. And they were putting together this amazing document. And our friend Dan Moldea was part of that group. That's when I first met Dan. 

But Marilyn Barrett, Paul Schrey, Phil Molanson, there were some real heavy weights there, people who really knew their stuff. But the one thing that I was seeing was that this is all very nice bringing this to the grand jury. But I don't have a lot of faith in the grand jury system because basically it's all run by the prosecutor's office. And I said, what we got to do is take this and bring it to the American people, not to the grand jury. Not that I didn't want it to go to the grand jury. But so all of a sudden, I realized that was my mission. And in order for it to be a real story, someone had to get it in the talk to Sir Han. And I said, oh, I'm going to do that. And they said, oh, it's really hard to get to see him in the authority. 

So I need to see him as family doesn't want you in there. But I worked on it. I worked on it. And I got into Cesar Han. And I wrote a really terrific magazine. 

He was he was a strange fellow, a very sad person. And but I wrote this article, Vanity Fair Magazine, they loved it. The editor was just this is this is amazing stuff. This is powerful stuff. A lot of the da and then month before it was supposed to run, they told me they gave me a check paid me for it and fall and told me the story wasn't going to run. So there was an expression for that. 

It's called catch and kill. And so I had to go back up to upstate New York. I didn't have my story anymore, because I didn't own it. And it wasn't going to run. 

And I was really disappointed. And then I thought, you know, I've got all these audio tapes out of the police files of them, brow beating witnesses, coercing witnesses to change their stories about what they saw that night. And a bunch of other stuff that was just and I also had some great interviews with people who were there that night, who again saw things totally contrary to the official story, like FBI agent, William Bailey. 

But a bunch of those. And I thought, why don't I put them together in like a little one hour documentary, which is what I did. And this one horse radio station up here in Calico New York. And, you know, we put it together with razor blades and Scotch tape, which is how it was done back then in the olden day. 

And we put this thing together. And it was picked up by 160 public radio stations across the country. I didn't even know there were 160 radio stations in the country, you know. And it was it was dynamite because people for the first time could hear it. And when they could hear it with their own ears, all of a sudden they understood it in a different way. And Time magazine listened to it and wrote a full page review of this little radio documentary. And then St. Martin's Press called me and said, how would you like to write a book? And so that's basically how I got started in the assassination business. And I did did write a book called Shadowplay with yeah, co author Phil Molanson. And so that's that's how it started. I just kind of walked in. 

JD: Can you give for potentially younger listeners a little bit of historical context of why these events are so impactful, why they were so impactful at the time, but then why they're still historically important, not only RFK and MLK, but also JFK just the historical context for what happened in the 60s in regards to these three men. 

WK: Oh, it was pretty good. The 60s was an absolutely wild time. And John Kennedy came in as president. And the first thing that he ran into was the Bay of Pigs invasion, which had all been planned before he came on the scene. 

And they kind of sold it. Oh, this is all planned. We're going to go in there's a group going to go in knowing in Cuba likes Castro, it's going to be fine. And he let them talk them into it. And the Bay of Pigs thing just failed immediately. And the real ploy was that once the American president had some troops in the Cuba, that he would then send in the Navy and the army to rescue these guys. And then we would just take over Cuba. We just began an excuse to invade Cuba. 

Yeah. And Kennedy wasn't up for that. He hadn't been explained that. And so he refused to send in the army and the Navy. And so he was hated by the Cuban community and by the intelligence community for not doing what he was supposed to do in Cuba. And there were also he was opposed to getting further involved in the Vietnam War. A huge amount of money was made on the Vietnam War by Americans who were you know, providing the troops with the weapons that they needed, etc. 

It was very, very big business. And also he was in the Cuban Missile Crisis. He wanted a negotiated settlement out of Russia, which they did. And they agreed to take their missiles out of Cuba. And John Kennedy agreed secretly that that he would take US would take our missiles out of Turkey, because we were saying we don't like your missiles right on our borders with five minutes they can destroy our cities. And the Russians said to us, well, we don't like your your missiles on Turkey, where they can do the same to us. 

It was a fair trade. But there were elements in the security establishment that saw that as just traitorous. That you know, here's this guy selling us to the Russians, and he won't invade Cuba. 

He won't stand up for us in Vietnam. So he had a lot of powerful enemies. And he was murdered in 1963, November in Dallas. And I don't know, Jim, can you tell me why Lee Oswald shot John Kennedy? 

No. And no one else can eat it. Now, people don't do things for no reason. And, you know, he was painted to look like he was a Castro sympathizer, but he wasn't. And some people say, oh, we just want to be in history books. Well, no, when he was led down the hallway, and people asked him what was going on, he said, I'm just a Patsy. That's not somebody looking to be in the history books. Yeah. And then he's murdered while he's in police custody, he's murdered by a petty hoodlum. Jack Ruby. Do you remember why Jack Ruby said he killed Lee Oswald? 

JD: I cannot remember now, if I've ever heard, but yeah. 

WK: All right. Well, Jack Ruby says he walks in police station and kills Lee Oswald while he's in police custody. 

JD: Because he was a patriot or something? No. Revenge, John. 

WK: No, he said he did it because he wanted to sphere Jackie Kennedy the pain of coming to his tribe. He's a really considerate fellow. And the other thing about that is that Oswald was supposed to be killed that day, okay? But somehow he got arrested and he wasn't killed. 

Now they had him on his hands. And so they're interrogating him for 14 hours or something. There's no audio tapes of those interrogations. There's no transcript of what he was asked and what he said. 

Why would that be, do you think? And the answer is that Oswald was working for American intelligence in various capacities. And now he was arrested for murdering the president, which he didn't do. He was set up to look like he did it. But he knew everything else. And he's back in the office saying, well, call Lee Howard Hunt. 

He knows who I am. And, you know, I say, my God, this guy's got to die very soon. Or the whole gig is up. So they send a Jack Ruby who kills Oswald. That's a bit of a detour. 

JD: But if I can ask real quick, when this was going on in real time, did you or was it because the JFK conspiracy, I would say of the three, is more mainstream accepted or at least more a topic of discussion from Oliver Stone's film, a lot more attention. But when this was occurring in the mid 60s, were there people that were saying this, there's something wrong about this, like in real time, or was that developed over time? 

WK: There were a few people in the beginning, Mark Lane wrote a book, Rush the Judgment, and he was one of the first. But, you know, they held it all up. Oh, there's going to be the Warren Commission. 

So we're really going to look into all of this and make sure everything's on the up and off. And of course, that stalled everything for a year while they plodded through the ridiculous thing called the Warren Commission report, which was really run by Alan Dulles, who had been the head of the CIA and fired by John Kennedy. So someone who's not a friend of Kennedy is now in charge of the investigation. 

And I was a freshman in college when John Kennedy was murdered. I had, I wanted to go to Cuba and cut sugarcane with a Benz Ramos brigade. I was at an old voice, no Wesleyan, and I thought, Oh God, that would be a great pickup line. I mean, you're trying to pick up a girl, so I was down in Cuba with Che Guevara. 

And so, you know, I had a little bit of romance in me. So I wanted to go down there, cut sugarcane and see what the whole Castro revolution was about. And but I didn't want to screw up my whole life, which is what you would do if you went down there because you weren't supposed to go there. So I thought there was a compromise that could be made. And I wrote to the FBI, I said, I'd like to go down there. 

I just don't want to mess up my whole life. So if with your permission, I'll go down there. And when I come back, I'll tell you what happened. I won't make any stories up. Oh, wow. To do bombs, you'll know about it. But I'm not going to, I'm not going to tell any, make anything up. And they said, okay. So all of a sudden, now I'm a freshman in college. 

Wow. Going down to New York to talk to the Fair Play for Cuba committee as one of their prospective sugarcane cutters. And but then this whole thing happens with, you know, Kennedy gets killed. And now they're trying to lay Oswald onto the Fair Play for Cuba committee, because he was out on the street handing out pro Castro leaflets, which was all a setup. 

It's called sheep dipping. But anyway, so I went down to have a meeting. This is about a week and a half after Kennedy is killed, I went down to have a meeting supposedly about my application to go to Cuba. And I walk into their offices, they were up on the 17th floor, tiny, tiny little offices. And I walked into the first room. And there was nobody there. But there were a bunch of people in the second room. And they were having a screaming fight, like they were fighting with each other. 

They were just really upset. They're trying to pin this murder on us. We knew Oswald was one of theirs. 

He was, you know, and they were going on and on Oswald. So that couple of days later, I'm back up in Connecticut. And, you know, I had these appointments that the I would stand on a particular street corner and his car would pull up, I get in the backseat of the car and two FBI guys from New Britain would be in the front seat and we'd go off for a drive and they'd ask me questions about whatever it was that was going on that particular weekend. And wow, you know, so they said, well, what did you learn down there? And I said, well, according according to them, this Oswald guy is one of yours. 

And there was a silence and they looked at each other and I'm thinking, why the hell did I say that? It was my first insight. And this isn't what totally got my head into this stuff that happened kind of later when I read a few books. 

But it was my first tip off that things really weren't what they were supposed to be. There was another story underneath this story. And I was 18 years old, the idea that a part of the American government rose up and murdered the president was really too big for me to fit in my head. There was this little inkling of it because of what I had heard and what I recorded to my handlers. 

JD: And then I've got to imagine that if there were those subtle questions, the seeds of doubt around JFK's murder, then in approximately five years, Martin Luther King is assassinated. And then a few short months later, Bobby Kennedy is assassinated, JFK's brother, as he's winning the nomination for the Democratic primary, I'd become the Democratic candidate for president. So what was that like when those occurred? 

WK: Well, I was in law school at that time. And because the murder of John Kennedy is like, you have an apartment in New York City and you walk and you come home and you walk in your apartment with burglarized. Well, there's just shit all over the floor, the doors are empty, underwears everywhere. Well, that's the JFK assassination. The evidence of conspiracy was everywhere. 

I mean, you have to be blind not to see it. That's not the case with MLK or Bobby. They learned a few things along the way. 

And one is to make it a lot neater because yeah. So with MLK, they have this guy, he shot two months later, they catch the guy, they have a rifle with his fingerprints on it. He eventually pleads guilty to the crime. 

There's not a lot to hit your wagon to there, especially if you're not following all the ins and outs of that evidence. And most people weren't because Ray was kept in Communicado, so nobody knew what he was like. So it seemed pretty much open and shut. And the same thing with Bobby Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy is shot down in the pantry of the hotel. He's captured right there a couple of feet away, gun in hand, he's shooting the gun. 

He's a bit of an odd fellow, that's for sure, but he does say he did it and that no one else helped him. And I mean, that's slam dunk a case as you can possibly get. It's slam dunk, except if you start looking at the evidence, and then the whole thing starts to fall apart. And that's the beauty of this thing is that what looks so, so I was taken in by the fact that, oh, well, I guess they got the guy and he was a crazy Palestinian and you know, Palestinians will do any old crazy thing. 

So it looked real good, it looked real tight until you look at the evidence. And so basically, I'm, you know, sometimes people say I'm a conspiracy guy. I'm not. I'm an evidence guy. Look at the evidence and see what the evidence tells you, because it's amazing. 

All three of these cases are solvable simply with the evidence we have today, that just take the time and look at it. And one of the problems we have in this country, and have had for a long time, is that the mainstream media will not, Bill Pepper wrote a great book on the murder of Martin Luther King. No one would review it. You know, I wrote a great book on the murder of Robert Kennedy, really careful book, it took me five years to put all the pieces together and make sure we hadn't said anything that wasn't true. 

A lot of the da, no one would review it. Yeah. Now, what is that about? You know, and that is a concerted effort on the part of American media to put these things in a closet and take, lock it up and throw the key away. 

So you have to overcome that. And to a certain extent, the documentary I did with WJFF on RFK and then the RFK tape podcast and the We're going to put it up there and that's going to be up there and people could hear the actual witnesses, people who were not allowed to testify at Sir James Earl Ray's trial, because he never had a trial. Yeah. And so that's, that's what we're doing. We're trying to end run the American media. 

JD: I can't emphasize enough to people how good the MLK tapes is from not only a just the sheer information and substance you're talking about and providing, but the production quality and just the way you lay out the story over many, many episodes. 

And I believe you've still got a couple more to go actually, before it's finalized. But it's just, it's so shocking once you start to learn about it because of the overwhelming evidence you're presenting that the official narrative is not accurate. And then to speak to what you just mentioned, then it starts to blow your mind like, I mean, I definitely believe the mainstream press on both sides is primarily propaganda and definitely controlled and orchestrated to a degree. But it's just like, you've got so much substance in the official story is so far off from the truth. It's just mind blowing to think that no mainstream media institutions have the balls to talk about it. And so for people that haven't listened to the MLK tapes yet, can you give a, you kind of mentioned what the official story is about James Earl Ray. Can you summarize that just a little bit more and then go into what the truth is most likely? Sure. 

WK: The official story is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed by James Earl Ray, acting alone. And turns out Ray had been in prison. And then a year before King was killed, Ray escaped from prison. And there's some evidence to suggest that he didn't just escape from prison, he was allowed to escape from prison, that they had their eye on this guy to be a stooge for someone somewhere that they had a number of these people. And so he might have thought he escaped the prison on his own smarts, but it appears that he had help and they may have been looking forward to this event or an event of his kind. In any case, he's out of prison and supposedly he's stalking MLK around the country. That's part of the official story. 

It's not true. There's a couple of times when he's in LA and King is in LA, but he's not stalking them. And then all of a something made, oh, King was supposed to be in Montgomery and Ray was driving in a snowstorm and ended up in someplace near Montgomery and they thought there was a great connection there. And Ray didn't have his rifle then or anything. 

So it's like, none of it made sense. And but in any case, official story is Ray pulls into Memphis the afternoon that Martin Luther King is shot. And he comes down Main Street, he gets a room in a rooming house, a Bessie Brewer's rooming house that does have a hallway that goes down to a tiny, tiny little bathroom at the end that has a tiny window that does in fact look out, not direct on very awkward, where supposedly he has the shot that kills Martin Luther King from that bathroom. 

And it's so the story is, oh, he goes out on a couple of errands, he rents a room and he goes out and couple errands which are well documented. So here he is, you know, just an hour or two before he's supposed to be killing this guy. And he's just wandering around buying things at the Five and Dime. But he comes, he supposedly comes comes back in and he gets his rifle. And he shoots Martin Luther King. Now, one of the great, great things here is, why does he shoot Martin Luther King? And the official explanation for that for 10 years for 10 years, the official explanation is James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King because he hated black people so much. And he particularly hated Martin Luther King so much that it just made him sick inside. 

So he had to escape prison. So he'd go and kill Martin Luther King because that's how deep his hatred went. And that was the official motive for 10 years until the House Select Committee on Assassinations did a little bit of honest investigating and discovered that the stories that were formed, the basis of that were almost all untrue or unreliable or exaggerated. And that James Earl Ray was not someone who was boiling with hatred inside. 

And then, and once they discovered that, they came up with another totally ridiculous motive that we can talk about later. But that's that was the story that he hated black people and he hated Martin Luther King and he escaped prison so he could kill King and he drove to Memphis and and he bought two different rifles when he was in Birmingham. And then for some reason he leaves his rifle, he shoots King and he runs downstairs to get his Mustang and drive away. But he decides to leave the rifle and a bunch of his artifacts on the street. Yeah. Before he runs away. Why he doesn't just throw them in the car with everything else. You know, so that's that's the official story. 

JD: Yeah. And then maybe before we get to what the likely true who the likely true killers of Martin Luther King are, maybe it would be helpful to go into some of those things about the official story that just don't match up in more detail. And I've made a few notes that I might just mention stuff to you and yeah, see what your thoughts are on it. Some of the stuff that jumped out to me that was fascinating is the aspect of the there's multiple eyewitnesses that saw people either coming from I believe a hedgerow near the Lorraine motel where MLK was shot. I this hedge either I believe somebody saw smoke coming up from it possibly. 

But there's multiple people that saw people suspiciously leaving or around that hedge the next day after the murder then wasn't that hedge removed completely ripped up by the city to basically destroy that as I mean we can't say that was a motive but it seems like a pretty strange time to do landscaping immediately after MLK is is killed. 

WK: Yeah, that that was totally strange and apparently that the phone call happened at something like six o'clock in the morning. The guy in charge got this call saying I want you to send a crew down there to clean up these yards here and take down all the brush. It wasn't just hedges it was it was a bunch of overgrown brush there and that was the brush that was we think well pretty positive that that was the brush that was hiding the actual sniper which was in the yard below the bathroom so when people are pointing the shot came from over there they're pointing to the yard and the bathroom there's no conflict there they're just pointing in a direction. But yeah so they they by noon time all the brush had been cut away there so the idea that there was someone hiding there is now gone you know anybody arriving later say oh no that couldn't have been there it had to be up there. Yeah and there was no reason you know on a murder scene of that importance you're going to send in a crew that's just going to cut everything down rake everything up and they were lucky to get a footprint. 

Yeah that's been clean so that that's just one of those things that adds to the like you know the pie but yeah you're right I mean that's just you don't do that in a real crime scene. 

JD: And then in regards to the gun and the what was found that James Earl Ray supposedly left on the sidewalk or close to that area just basically for anyone to find after he supposedly committed this assassination that did have his fingerprints on it but isn't there a lot of evidence that that gun was not ballistically the correct weapon? 

WK: Yeah there's a lot of evidence to that effect that it appears very much like the purpose of that weapon was to connect Ray for it not to be the murder weapon but to connect Ray to the murder. 

You may remember that Ray bought two rifles and he had to bring one of them back and which is to me utter proof that there are more people involved because he left the store the first time happy as a clam with a Springfield rifle and excuse me but all of a sudden he calls up an hour later said I have to change the rifle. Well the problem was the first rifle wasn't the caliber of the rifle that was going to kill King so it couldn't very well be throw down rifle if it can't fire a 30 caliber bullet so he had to go back and get a 30 caliber rifle which he did but Judge Joe Brown who had his own TV show for years was a real judge in Tennessee and had the case in front of him for a couple years and he kept trying to find a way to let Pepper introduce the elements of what they would introduce at a trial if Ray had a trial so that it could go to an appeals court and say this is what he would say if he had a chance to say it why don't you allow him to say it even though the statute's limitations had run. So Judge Brown was being very open to allow a proper of evidence is what it was called at the same time Brown was a ballistics expert and he started to look at the evidence and first of all he took the death slug and put it under an electron microscope and using high school algebra figured out that the rate of twist on the death bullet was 11 and a quarter inches and that the rate of twist on a standard 30 caliber rifle is 10 inches and so that his conclusion was that the death slug was fired by a rifle that had a specially made bore which are some rifles do come with that fancy rifles and that a caliber with 11 and a quarter rate of twist could not have been fired from from Ray's rifle. He also checked the metallurgy of the death slug and said that it did not match the metallurgy of the bullets found with the Ray's rifle that bullets are produced in matches and the batches I'm sorry to say. So in the batches the metallurgy is basically the same but from batch to batch it changes slightly and that Brown said that he could detect that the metallurgy in the death slug was not a match to the ones found with the rifle but he also finally got permission to test fire the rifle and they brought it to a lab in University of Rhode Island and they fired 18 test bullets from the Ray the supposed of murder weapon and 12 of those bullets had markings that absolutely tied those bullets to the gun that had fired them. 

Six of the bullets didn't have those markings so that was strong evidence that if the death slug didn't have those markings probably wasn't fired by Ray's rifle but it wasn't absolute because if six bullets could be fired and not have those markings. So it was inconclusive but it did show strongly and what they wanted to do they thought there was a certain fouling in the rifle barrel because there's some mishandling by the police and the FBI that if they could clean the barrel they could get a much more conclusive test but they wouldn't let them clean the barrel of the gun. So and Judge Brown was really kind of funny about that he said you know the big reason they didn't want us to clean the barrel because if we cleaned the barrel then it would jeopardize any future tests we want to do on it. And he said well wait a minute we want to do tests on it now and no no you can't do it because in the future they've not so they didn't allow them to clean the barrel but there was a lot of evidence and the other piece of bullet evidence that was really strange and I have no explanation for this is that at the HBO trial Lieutenant Hanby and Captain Tommy Smith both testified that the bullet taken from Martin Luther King's back came out in near pristine condition. I mean a bullet was just with minor alterations and Lieutenant Hanby saw it. I think he was the one that carried it at the Holloman's office but in any case these two guys both saw this bullet taken out of the back of Martin Luther King and yet the death slug we have today is in three mangled pieces of lead that don't look anything like a bullet. 

Now and there is no explanation as to how that happened you know they don't say well we did some tests and it came out they just said no that's the way it always was. Okay well then what did Lieutenant Hanby see and what did Captain Tommy Smith see because they all saw and there's a great moment in the HBO trial where Hickman Ewing who was the prosecutor has Hanby come down and draw a picture of the bullet as he saw it and it's a perfectly found bullet with a little flattening on the top and Hickman Ewing just doesn't know what to do with that I mean he's just baffled as everybody would be or everybody should be. 

JD: And this might be a good time to explain to anyone listening in so who William Pepper is and what that 1993 HBO trial was in a not an official trial but in 1993 Attorney William Pepper who was a friend of the Kings and was determined to make it more publicly known the discrepancies in the case and to present what he thought was the the truth he got HBO to basically allow him to put on a trial on their their channel and that had some pretty fascinating results but then also So from that then in 1998 or 1999, I think he led the civil trial against Lloyd Jowers, which was a real civil trial and they won that. And so maybe could you give a real quick kind of a summary of who William Pepper is and those two events? 

WK: Yeah, Bill Pepper is a wonderful person and a fascinating, fascinating character in this story and a great deal of what I'm presenting in the MLK podcast is not my work. It has to do with 40 years of work that Bill Pepper put in. 

So I'm just taking it and putting it into a different form and that's my contribution here. But Bill Pepper knew Martin Luther King in the last year of his life and he knew Martin Luther King in the last year of his life because Bill Pepper took himself to Vietnam and took pictures and tape recordings of the horror that was going on there, the horrible children being burned, just awful and came back with that. And virtually the first time that the horror of that war and what we were doing over there was brought back to the American people, except no one wanted to deal with his photographs or his story. We finally got Ramparts Magazine to publish the pictures and he wrote an article, The Children of Vietnam. And those photographs caught Martin Luther King's eye and King called them up and said, I'd like to talk to you. And King and Pepper met in Providence and then rode together in a car to Boston and Pepper showed him all the other photos he had. King wept in the car seeing that and he couldn't believe that his government was killing people. And Pepper in his article was just like saying, you can't see this and walk away the same person you were before you saw that and you'd want to reach out and try to touch the flesh of these grotesquely burned children and you were afraid to touch them because their skin would just fall off. 

It was the most horrible thing. And in any case, King and Pepper started work together and Pepper was a major influence and King coming out against the war in, well exactly April 4th, 1967 at the Riverside Church when King got up and said, this war is wrong and we have to stop it. And it's not just about civil rights, it's not just about sitting, going to the lunch counter and having a place for yourself or even voting. It's about stopping this country from doing things that are just horribly immoral. 

And that is probably the nail in this coffin. That was probably why I was finally decided that, you know, because otherwise he's not a challenge to the establishment, he's preaching love, he's preaching brotherhood, he's preaching non-violence, he's kind of a leader that you should want. Even if you don't agree with a lot of things he stands for, you should want that kind of leadership. But when he crosses over and starts to challenge the war in Vietnam, then he's dangerous. And then he must be prepared. 

JD: And wasn't even leading up to that though, there was some animosity between J. Edgar Hoover and like he didn't like Martin Luther King and had already started surveilling him, wiretapping him illegally. And I believe had even sent a some sort of evidence about an extramarital affair that King was having to try to pressure him into taking his own life. So the history was there that even before the Vietnam speech, the FBI definitely didn't Yeah, that's a great point. 

WK: Hoover and some of it's inexplicable. I mean, why Hoover hated King so much, but he did. And he badgered Bobby Kennedy into giving him permission for some limited permission to wiretap King at his home and his place of business or something. 

On a one month trial basis. And the claim was that there were these communist advisors that the King had these advisors who had communist connections and they were somehow manipulating King into doing these things for the communists. None of that was true. I mean, it was true that King had a few advisors who at one time earlier on in their lives had been involved with the American Communist Party, which was a legal political organization. And now they'd moved on to helping King and they were very excited. 

They wrote speeches for him and helped him in fundraising. And but that was the excuse, oh, we have to get these wiretaps and make sure the communists aren't running King around. And Bobby Kennedy, who was attorney general, had already turned Hoover down several times, do that. But then there was this little problem with John Kennedy, he had trouble keeping his fly zipped. 

And he had gotten into another affair with Ellen Ramesh, who people think was an East German spy. And that was about to blow sky high. And as happened at other times when JFK was in trouble for sexual affairs that he had, they called in Hoover to help clean up the mess. And Hoover loved it because it put them in debt to him. So he loved cleaning up messes for John Kennedy. 

And he did it. He managed to talk to, I think Mike Mansfield, who was head of the Senate, they were going to have some high level meetings, and they were going to have hearings on this. And Hoover got to them and said, you really don't want to do this because a lot of the he had stuff on everybody. 

So yeah, Hoover's Hoover said, you don't want to do this. People listened. So he had just bailed out JFK again. And then he goes to Bobby and say, Yeah, now you can give me permission to do the wiretapping. And Bobby was in no position to say no to him at that point. 

So he said yes. And so then there were these wiretaps that went out. But a month later, John Kennedy is murdered. And now Bobby Kennedy has no control over Hoover at all because Lyndon Johnson is president now. So he doesn't have to worry about the Kennedy's firing him or anything. And Lyndon Johnson, you know, loves that Hoover doesn't like the Kennedy. So it's as soon as John is dead, even though Bobby is still attorney general, he has no control over Hoover. And then Hoover goes hog wild. Every, every hotel room that King stays in every place he's going, he's wiretapped about everywhere. And yes, and they put this horrible tape together using excerpts. 

Some may be real, some may be phonies, maybe improved. But to try to get King to kill himself and try to get him not to go and accept the Nobel Peace Prize. It was dirty, dirty stuff. And they had a whole office in Atlanta that was devoted to nothing but dirty tricks on MLK. 

JD: Wow. So you're right about that. Yeah, it definitely seems like the little bit I've read and listened to about Hoover's obsession with MLK, it definitely seems like it's a kind of a bizarre combination of potentially the just good old fashioned racism, or the fear of his rising power, but then also coupled with that directive they had to basically try to stamp out communism anywhere and everywhere that more often than not seems like it was creating a paranoid kind of decision making on the federal government part in some areas. But yeah, it's just it, yeah, there's definitely a clear dislike of Martin Luther King by the FBI and Hoover. And then maybe this is a good point to sort of segue into, can you explain who the Dixie mafia is? And maybe we can sort of start to connect a little bit of the threads of the truth of what might be going on. 

WK: Boy, I am not. Yeah. The Dixie mafia is a term applied to gangsters in the South who were not of Italian extraction and not Catholic. So that was the real mafia. 

If you were Catholic and Italian, you were the real mafia, if you were just a gangster and doing illegal and mean things on your own with your good old boy friends, you were the Dixie mafia. And they work together. Ronnie Liacan is one of our witnesses. Oh, you know, oh, my daddy, my daddy called them all wops and his daddy was head of the Dixie mafia in Memphis by all reports. He called them wops, but you know, he had had Marcello up, you know, they worked together, you know, they, there was somebody to be made. 

JD: His testimony, I think it's in episode seven of the MLK tapes where you have the most lengthy account from Ronnie Liacan's about those meetings from the Dixie mafia. That is so like, I mean, that that really starts to summarize the bigger picture of what was going on. And it's just paints a picture of the Dixie mafia basically being a combination of corrupt business people, but also law enforcement, the Klan potentially ties to the FBI. They helped each other out. So it really gets when you hear Ronnie Lee Atkins talk starts to really tie a lot of those parts together. And what do you know about the that connection between the FBI and those people that would be considered the Dixie mafia? 

WK: Well, from Ronnie Lee Atkins, we know that going way back that a couple times a year, this fellow would arrive from Washington, he'd drive in at and land at the small airport, and his father and Ronnie would go out and pick him up and bring him back to the house. And, and they he had a satchel and he had money in the satchel and it was in envelopes and part of it was to go to here, part of it was go to there. And oh, who was the guy? The guy was Clyde Tulson, who was number two at the FBI and Hoover's Lever by all accounts. And he came often enough four or five times a year, and he was friends with Ronnie Lee's father, good friends, they traveled together at times. 

And, you know, Ronnie would be in the room when they be counting this money out and saying who is going to go to. But, and also he came often enough that his father told him that he had to call him Uncle Clyde. So Uncle Clyde was Tulson. And so, and it's my theory that Hoover, Hoover liked dealing with the real mafia, Hoover liked dealing with, well, I think he was probably being blackmailed by the real mafia. He liked dealing with the Dixie mafia, because it gave, excuse me, let me check a little water here. 

It gave him players on the board that didn't have to write reports. So, very rarely did Hoover use his own people in these, these schemes that he would use mafia or, or Dixie mafia, you know, and they were his soldiers that he could move around the chessboard, and they wouldn't have to write reports about what they had done and lot of the dot, he kept his own guys a little cleaner than that, although the whole Atlanta office was just devoted to, to bringing King down. But otherwise, he didn't like using real mafia man, real FBI men, you know, getting mixed up with organized crime. It was, it was a funny thing there, but he really, and he had a thing with organized crime to the extent that he denied it even existed. And we go into, we go into that, and one part of the podcast, all that's coming up. 

That's the fun part to listen to. But the organized crime had some sort of hold on Jay Guguver. I mean, he was going after communist and got here, but never against organized crime. 

No, no. And the thing was, he was vacationing with Clyde Tolson, summer after summer after summer in very high price mafia run hotels in La Jolla, California and down in Florida. And then he was set up at racetracks and given tips on what horses were going to win and stuff. And he never, he never paid for a lunch or a dinner in any of the restaurants he went to in DC. It was corrupt. It was extremely, extremely corrupt. And we think, I think that the mob had a hold on him, kind of the same thing he was trying to do to Martin Luther King, since he was staying at these mob controlled hotels every year, they knew when he was coming, what rooms he'd be staying in, how hard it had been to get him having pictures of him having sex with Tolson or some other man. And the theory is that they had those pictures. And as long as they had those pictures, they owned the director of the FBI. And there's nothing that Hoover does to dispel that theory. 

JD: So it's a weird story. And that's the where it all kind of comes together on what the probable truth looks like with Martin Luther King's killing is that it was this sort of combination effort, and correct me if I'm wrong on this, but between the white supremacy influences of the Dixie mafia and the FBI, both sort of joining forces, it seems like in hatred of MLK, that they actually sort of fabricated potentially or not fabricated but instigated the event that brought MLK to Memphis, the sanitation strike, or they helped to get him there with this entire assassination planned out. And maybe we can, if that's all correct, or you want to add anything, but then maybe we can get into a little bit about like who Frank Strausser, Captain Earl Clark and Lloyd Jowers actually are, maybe. Sure. 

WK: Oh, fine. Yeah, let's do that. Because one of the strongest pieces of evidence that the official story is not true, that James Jilray, just a little sidebar, if you have a picture of that bathroom where he's supposed to have fired the shot, it's a tiny narrow little room. It's got a tiny narrow little tub that goes right up to the window, and it's one of these tubs of the sloped sides, and it's real, and the window is right next to the wall, and there's the angle of the shot is fairly severe. It's almost impossible to imagine yourself in that position, standing in this tub, because you have no place to get your legs set apart, and to get, you know, you're balancing yourself awkwardly. And it's really, it's not impossible. Also, the window is only open to like three and a half inches. 

So if you got the point of the rifle out the window, the scope is blocked by the lower sill of the window. It's just, it's really, really unlikely. And it would be a very difficult shot for a guy who was good with a gun, and James Jilray was not good with a gun. 

JD: And not to mention probably stand in that awkward position for untold amount of time waiting for King to leave the hotel or step out on the balcony. 

WK: Yeah, except that the evidence we have is that the bathroom was empty 10 minutes before the murder because the cab driver was going to get Charlie Stevens. So he wasn't in there waiting, and he was running these crazy errands. 

So it would be almost one of these, he'd have to go down to the bathroom and all of a sudden half, I mean, it's very unlikely that that's how it happened. That he just went down there, and he happened to bring his rifle and, you know, all those pieces came together. And then after he shot him, he came back to his room and wrapped up the rifle and then wrapped up all the other stuff he was going to bring and then go downstairs. By this time, the street would be loaded with police who had exploded out of the firehouse, and then put the rifle and all that stuff down on the road where he's going to leave it and then leave in his car. 

It's nuts. But what we have as an alternative is that Betty Spates, who's working at the Jim's Grill, goes back in the kitchen looking for Lloyd Jowers, doesn't see him, but the back door is open, and then she hears what she then recognizes as a shot. And a few seconds later, here comes her boss, Lloyd Jowers, running in the door with a smoking rifle. And Betty Spates, I love her as a witness. 

Her story is so convincing and she's a terrific person. But she says Lloyd Jowers came running in the door with the smoking rifle. You know who else says Lloyd Jowers came running through the door with the smoking rifle? 

Lloyd Jowers. He admits it. He says, yeah, and he's told the story several different times, but he totally confesses that he was part of this assassination and that his job was to take the rifle and hide it because his store backed up to the yard in the face of the rain and they needed that store and that access. And someone else who says that Jowers did this, his attorney, Lewis Garrison, his very attorney says, yeah, Lloyd was out there. And somebody else who says that Lloyd was out there is Ronnie Lee Atkins, who was on his motorcycle at the time, says, yeah, he called him the old man. 

JD: And a lot of that was what was confirmed in that 1998 civil suit, which was against Lloyd Jowers by the King family, right? Which it was found, all of this was deemed accurate, basically, by the verdict in the civil suit. Yeah. 

WK: And so, but you have, and then you have Lloyd Jowers identifying Earl Clark as the other man out in the yard. And you also have, who was a police officer, the captain, the captain Clark, a police officer and a police sharpshooter. And he spent a lot of time down at the rifle range. And he was reputed to be the best shot in the police force. And if there was somebody who was any better than he was, it was Frank Strauser. And they were friends. 

But Clark is reliably put out in the backyard. And there were supposed to be three men out there. And there's been various candidates put forward. And Jowers put forward, oh, God, a guy named Frank Holt, a big black man. And Peppers finally goes and finds Holt down in Florida. 

And Holt is totally mystified. And, and Peppers said, why would he say that about you? And he said, I think he said it because he thought I was dead. So, which was a really good explanation, I thought. And the reason we believe that most probably the third man there was Frank Strauser. Also, Ronnie Liatkin's brother, Jr. says he was the one up on there shooting the rifle. 

And we don't believe him. We think he was trying to protect his brother or maybe bragging to his brother. Because we had some very strong evidence that it was Frank Strauser, who was really the man with the gun up there. And that evidence came to us, came to Bill Pepper, by a man named Lenny Lee Curtis, who was the custodian at the police rice range. And he had seen very strange things the day of the murder, including Frank Strauser working with his gun that had just arrived at the police range two days before and it was presented to him as well. This is the special baby. And it was a special rifle, all right. And it might have been an 11 and a quarter rate of twist in that rifle. 

I don't know. But he saw Strauser practicing with this gun all morning. And he just knew what he was seeing. And as soon as Strauser left, he tried to warn King, call the ministry, knew he only had two calls. And he made two calls and couldn't get through anybody. And by the time he got home, found out that King was dead. And then his children, everybody was afraid for him. And Strauser believed that Curtis had figured things out and threatened Curtis several times. 

And may have tried to organize an accidental killing of him. But he makes a deal with Pepper that I'll sit down and tell you what I know, and what I saw, and what I believe. And you can record it. And I'd like Martin Luther King, the third be there in the room if you could, because I'd like for him to hear it. And the only thing I ask is that none of this be made public, this recording, until after I'm dead. Now, that's not your everyday kind of deal. And that's, yeah, that's the kind of deal that you make, because you really are afraid, and you've been afraid all your life, and you're afraid for your children. 

And but there's something in your conscience that says, this story has to, this story has to go out. And that was the same kind of thing that happened with Ronnie Lyak. And so his whole family was involved. 

And I think he had a bit of a religious conversion, we've switched stories here a little bit. But it was the same thing that you get a little closer to death. And all of a sudden, some things that seem really important aren't that important. 

And other things, other things become important. And so, so Lenny Curtis's story, you know, Lenny Curtis died in 2013, or something like that. And then Bill Pepper could then pay attention to Frank Strausser. And they went out and had lunch together, which are fearless Bill Pepper, you know, called on Strausser, so they'd like to talk to you. I don't know if I'd have the balls to do that. Yeah, pepper did. 

JD: So yeah, that's one of the things. Yeah, that's one of the incredible interviews that you actually do. People can listen to in the MLK tapes, like you have it. Yeah, it's so yeah, definitely is worthwhile, even if during this summary, we're giving definitely if this is an intriguing conversation to you, you've got to actually listen to the MLK tapes to hear all of these people say these things for themselves. 

WK: Ronnie Leakins told about stealing grain stamps and that there was a green, you know, I don't know, you may not be that old, but when I was growing up, when you went to the grocery store, and you bought so much food, then you got so many green stamps to go in a book. 

Oh, yeah. So, and they had that going on in Memphis, and they had a lot of people who were like, oh, I'm going to buy a new one. And they'd go to this and a big green stamp store for the whole area. And, you know, they'd collect all the books and they give the people the toasters and then they threw the books out to go to the incinerator. 

And Ronnie Lee's father was in charge of the dump as well as a lot of other things. So they would just wait till these things would get deposited, they'd go rescue them from the dump. And they'd start, they had two washing machines going full time and washing these things so they would detach from the books and then they'd go out and dry them, then they'd reglue them and then put them back into new books and they would go back and get toaster ovens, they'd get baby cribs. He said that they had so much stuff in the house, they couldn't store it anywhere. 

His father had a store, they couldn't unload it enough. But finally, they called up Carlos Marchello, the head of the mafia in the Southern United States. Marchello came up and looked at all the stuff and said, okay, I'll take it off your hands. And he started a green stamp operation down in his, but I just, I don't know, there was something the way he told this story, it was so funny. You know, just, you know, mom is running the washing machine and somebody else is, you know, trying the stamps. And, but, you know, they said, well, that doesn't have anything to do with our MLK. 

It's a guy that does. It just, you know, a corn ball, you know, and this whole crime thing, you know, you think of the mafia and you think of Lufthansa crime, you know, the deal at JFK and, you know, but down in the South, those times, there wasn't a lot of money laying around to be stolen. You know, it was all just very small streams of money, but a lot of them, and that's how it worked. 

JD: But now that that seems like a, a perfect racket for something called the Dixie mafia to be doing green stamps to toasters. Yeah. 

WK: Yeah. So I'm with you. I could listen to Ronnie Lee Atkins all day. He was just such a seven hours, seven hours of Ronnie Lee Atkins. Oh, wow. Yeah. And he's an iron horse biker. I mean, it looks like Hulk Hogan. He, you know, and just, and the way he just tell the story, he just laid it out there. Is he still alive? 

No, unfortunately not. Because I was really, really, really looking forward to sitting down with you, even though I had seven hours of him. There were some things I really wanted to ask him. Yeah. 

JD: I was thinking if he was still alive, I was going to try and reach out and see if you wanted to explain what the Dixie mafia was because yeah, just for entertainment sake, what um, would you mind uh, going okay, so the, the most likely real events were there at least two or three people that were a shooter team in that brush hedges area, none of which were James Earl Ray, but probably Lloyd Jowers, Captain Earl Clark and someone else, most likely Frank Strausser. Can you kind of give a little bit of the story of the taxi cab situation that provides eyewitness evidence to these guys? Yeah. 

WK: This is, this is a strange and wonderful story. Again, it's people who saw things and uh, at the time of the murder and then got frightened and then once their children have grown and they're approaching, you know, the end and uh, so this taxi driver witnessed some things and held this piece and then, oh gosh, when did he come forward? Well, at least 30 years later, I think he's 71 years old now and uh, he had been a guard for many, many years at a federal security uh, place, so he was a federal security guard, but he drove a cab part-time uh, and he was driving a cab the night Kennedy was murdered and he's in another part of town, but he's listening to dispatcher and car 58 who was after Lorraine talking to each other and he overhears and the dispatcher is kind of repeating what he's saying because he can't hear car 58, but he can hear the dispatcher what he says and the dispatcher repeats a lot of what car 58 said, but uh, you know, he says, you know, Martin Luther King's been shot and and the dispatcher says, I'm, you know, well, I will send an ambulance and and he says, I don't think an ambulance is going to do any good. 

Um, I'll send one anyway. I'll send the police and uh, then the cab driver says there's something about the guy who shot King jumped the wall and was running up the street and and and this cab driver is here and the guy says the guy who shot King is running up the street and said, oh, shit. And then the then the dispatcher tells tells the guy he's got a fare in the cab to tell the guy to take his fare to the airport and he he the dispatcher would call the police and tell them what he had told them. Uh, so that's was the plan and Louis Ward says, fuck, I'm going to the airport and find out what this is all about. So he drives to the airport and sure enough, he he gets there and there's the driver car 58 and there are two other cabbies standing around and he tells him what he saw and he he was loading, um, bags for this large black man into the truck and into the cab and and that's crazy story. 

JD: And then even crazier that guy was murdered that night, wasn't he? Or shortly there? 

WK: Yeah, yeah. And, um, by somebody that Ronnie Liacke ins new. Um, but yeah, yeah, so it's seems like a pretty big coincidence. 

JD: Yeah. 

WK: And and that and Louis Ward was out there when the police showed up at the airport and took, uh, the cab drivers statement down and what he saw and what happened. So they, it was a police report on it. And then he was interrogated again at the cab company because Louis Ward drove past the cab company a little later and there were like five police cars out there. 

So he assumes that they were doing it again, taking again his story. And he didn't live out the didn't live out the night. And which is why Louis Ward was real, real scared. So, um, and then Ronnie Lee Atkins comes along and tells the story and he's on his motorcycle then he almost catches up to Captain Clark, who was the guy running up the street after jumping the wall. And then he's a little later down at the Quonset hut where a lot of these guys met. 

Clark is complaining that this taxid guys got a good look at him and he could identify him. And then, um, Chess Butler, who was kind of Ronnie Lee Atkins father's enforcer, goes out and kills him. And then Ronnie Lee is in, in Atkins house, which is just down the street from his house. When Chess comes back and says that he did away with the cab driver, the cab driver is no longer among us. And he describes that scene. He's sitting on the bed with Linda Butler and his mother is out in the other room. And, you know, he hears Chess Butler say he killed the cab. 

JD: And, and there was also a guy named Jim Green who claims, and I guess there's different people believe different parts of his story, it seems like, but there's a gentleman named Jim Green that claims he was hired to actually kill James Earl Ray to basically, so it looks like there was definitely a plan to tie up the loose ends that didn't happen. 

WK: Yeah, that's, that's an amazing story. And you know, when we, when I first ran, I first ran across this tape, I was down the King Center going through tapes that built peppered stash down there. And there was a bunch of them that weren't labeled. And, you know, I was just plugging them in and trying to figure out if there's anything worth. And there was one of just a bunch of phone calls, just a bunch of phone calls, I'm about to take it. 

And, you know, I was doing triage, I think, well, okay, maybe someday all this is this. And all of a sudden, this, this lawyer comes on and says, I have a client who I think can prove that James Earl Ray didn't shoot Martin Luther King. And I think he can prove who did and what? And, and I start following the story. 

And it's, it's, it's an amazing story. And he was 21 years old, hired to be the backup shooter to shoot James Earl Ray. After, after six o'clock, he claimed that he didn't know that Martin Luther King was to be killed. I don't know if I believe him about that. 

It's a perfectly reasonable lie to tell. But in any case, he, he didn't, he didn't shoot Ray because Ray left earlier. And he was not to have been shot until after six o'clock. 

And, you know, 10 to six or quarter of six, Ray comes down, gets into his Mustang and drives away to go get a tire fixed. And so he's not there when he's supposed to be. And so Jim Green doesn't, doesn't shoot him. But what's interesting is the whole, the whole idea that of course, Ray would be shot. 

You know, somehow he, you know, he like Oswald got away without being killed on day one. Yeah. So, but yeah, it's, and I, Rusty Larson, his attorney was an incredible guy. 

I really like him. He's still practicing law in Jackson, Tennessee. And he was kind enough to photocopy and send me the book Jim Green was writing, never published on all the things he was in the underworld. But then he moved over into law enforcement and then he owned a series of topless bars. 

And really interesting guy. And, and you know, it's just not all the pieces fit as, as cleanly as I would like them to fit. But it's 50 years after the crime. And you're just not going to get a perfect fit all the time. 

JD: And then, as far as other parts of that sort of indicating or giving the framework for this orchestrated conspiracy on the other end of this is somebody that James Earl Ray has always said was giving him orders who was named Raul that is potentially it sounds like an FBI undercover person or somehow affiliated. I mean, there's Glinda Gabo, I believe that or Grebo that yeah, that confirmed that Raul is a real person and she had interaction with them. 

WK: Yeah, that's an incredible story. And it's so incredible. It's easy not to believe it. But, you know, and they were a product of the HBO trial. Each time you had one of these trials, the HBO trial, shift the tree and brought a few people out and Glenda and Roy Grebo were one of those. The civil trial brought other people out and cooling Ronnie Lee Atkins and Lenny Curtis and other people. 

Because each time you have one of these events, there are people that hear about and say, Oh, well, I know something too. But Glenda Grebo came forward. And she knew a guy who she first knew was Diego, but then knew him as Raul. And this guy claimed to have had played some role in the murder of Martin Luther King. And then so several investigators went down to check out our story and it in a checked out that and they were able to find the immigration papers of this guy Raul. And when he came in and they got a picture and then James Ol Ray looked at the picture and said that was the guy. But for me, the most incredible part of this story and I think the most valuable part of this story is that at one point she's down in Houston. At one point, her husband's brother is in trouble because he murdered somebody and they heard the best best lawyer to murder. 

Excuse me. They heard the best lawyer to get an murder case was this guy, Percy Foreman. So they went to Foreman. And he took on his brother's case. But what he really wanted was Glenda Grebo, who was quite a looker at that time. And so he was offering her make work jobs around his office. So he would have access to her. And then she thinks he's she doesn't even know that he's related to the King case, but she sees these things up on the on the wall. 

And then one day when he wants to really impress her, you know, about what a really amazing guy he is. He he said, you know, I was I was the I was the lawyer in the King case, I represented James O Ray. And she's rather shocked. 

And he said, Well, you know, someday the white race is going to have to thank him for being the sacrifice, something like that. And then she thinks he's somebody he can talk to. He's a lawyer, he's educated. He's a man of presumed good character. So she tells him that she knows this Raul guy who was says he was connected to the murder, and who was also involved in illegal activities in Houston, gun running, etc. And it turns out that Percy Foreman knows this Raul guy. And of course, why wouldn't he because he was a criminal defense attorney in Houston, Raul was in Houston. For sure, he probably defended him or some of his cohorts when they got into trouble. And being on good speaking terms with gangsters is really good business, if you're a criminal defense attorney. 

Yeah. And so Percy Foreman starts to freak out because now he had just been before the House Select Committee on assassinations, saying the whole Raul story was all made up and that Ray had told them it was all made up. And Ray told him it was him it was all made up because he respected his intelligence, and that he knew that Percy Foreman would never fall for the phony Raul story. So that's why he told him, I mean, it's all bullshit. 

And so, but he just told the HSCA that story. And meanwhile, he's got a woman now working in his office, who knows the real Raul guy is living just on the other side of town. And this is threatening both Raul and threatening Percy Foreman. And Percy Foreman suggests that she leave town as soon as possible, or she'll be killed. Yeah, for what she knows. 

JD: And that just add a little more context and connect the threads for people. Raul is who James Earl Ray consistently said it was sending him to get the gun that got him to get the particular hotel room, I believe, like Raul is basically the person that's guiding him into all of this according to James Earl Ray and James Earl Ray only briefly ever said he was guilty at Percy Foreman's insistence when he was an attorney. Yeah. And recanted that very quickly. 

And then I believe, are am I getting confused with the RFK then wasn't a judge that was about to issue an order about James Earl Ray recanting the guilty that guy was potentially killed. Yeah. Yeah, just crazy how like, um, yeah, we've been going for like almost an hour and a half. And I wanted if you had the time to discuss a little bit of the RFK, do you have enough time to get into that? Sure. Come on, this is fun. 

We'll do it. So there was everybody part one of our fascinating interview with Bill Clapper about MLK's death and the lies and truth around that. I really, really encourage you to go check out his podcast, the MLK tapes by Tenderfoot TV, because it just does such a great job into going into all the details and evidence and putting it together into a cohesive narrative that you can follow to really understand that James Earl Ray is most likely not the person that killed Martin Luther King and to understand all the players involved in reality. And so, also remember to subscribe to this show so you can be notified automatically when our part two interview with Bill Clapper comes out in a couple of weeks, most likely, where he goes into a lot of interesting facts around RFK's death and what adds up on that, what doesn't. 

You definitely don't want to miss that episode. And also, if you didn't catch it in the middle of the episode, the notification we put in, please consider subscribing to our new podcast, Your Best True Story. And it's going to be a fun, kind of more lighthearted podcast than this one that just takes any listeners true stories submitted in, and we play it on the air and discuss it, and then we allow you guys to vote on whoever's true story is the best. 

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