Triumphant in death

James Earl Ray is laughing all the way to hell, thanks to the King family's preposterous belief that he didn't kill Martin Luther King Jr.

By David J. Garrow

Apr 28, 1998 | ATLANTA -- Very few people mourned the death last Thursday of James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr. Ray's brother Jerry, who for years worked for convicted church-bomber and professional anti-Semite J.B. Stoner, was one of the few. But Jerry had reasons to be thankful, too. His brother had never implicated him -- or their other brother John -- in any discussions or arrangements that preceded King's April 4, 1968, murder. What's more, James Earl's notoriety had allowed Jerry to garner considerable public attention as his imprisoned brother's primary spokesman. Rarely did any of the eager journalists raise the matter of Jerry's long, intimate relationship with the once-infamous Stoner.

But those who seemed to mourn Ray's death even more than Jerry were the widow and children of King himself. Coretta Scott King asserted that her family was "deeply saddened" by Ray's death, and proclaimed that it was "a tragedy not only for Mr. Ray and his family, but also for the entire nation."

Readers who recalled the awkwardly staged 1997 scene in which Dexter Scott King, King's younger son, shook Ray's very trigger hand and proclaimed the King family's belief in Ray's complete innocence should not have been shocked by Coretta King's peculiar expression of grief.

Coretta King declared that it was "regrettable that Mr. Ray was denied his day in court." King -- or her press agent -- had conveniently forgotten how Tennessee prosecutors in 1969 agreed to accept Ray's guilty plea, and forego a trial, only after receiving the King family's personal approval.

Since then, a bizarre susceptibility to outlandish claims of Ray's innocence has slowly spread throughout Martin Luther King's circle of aides and associates. The first to succumb was the mercurial and once-brilliant James Bevel, who began championing Ray in 1969 before moving on to subsequent alliances with Lyndon LaRouche, Rev. Sun Myung Moon and Louis Farrakhan.

Next came James M. Lawson, the Methodist minister who had invited King to Memphis in the spring of 1968 to help rally support for a city sanitation workers' strike. Lawson became Ray's pastor, and officiated at Ray's in-prison wedding to a media sketch artist, Anna Sandhu, who likewise believed in Ray's innocence. The couple later divorced after an argument during which, Sandhu reports, Ray angrily declared that of course he had killed King.

The most prominent and recent recruit to Ray's side has been former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young, whose credulity is perhaps the most puzzling and disappointing of all. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with any actual search for the truth. Young and the Kings have never taken the time to familiarize themselves with the rich portrait of the Ray brothers and their vituperative racism that was provided in George McMillan's landmark 1976 biography, "The Making of an Assassin," nor is it likely that any of them have sat down and read Gerald Posner's impressive new book on the King assassination, "Killing the Dream."

More importantly, neither Dexter King nor his mother has ever responded to the repeated offers that Memphis prosecutors have made in recent months to come to Atlanta to brief the King family in detail about the prosecutors' latest review of the overwhelming evidence against Ray. What that review demonstrated was the extent to which all of the supposedly "new" evidence cited by Ray's lawyer, William Pepper, amounts to nothing more than fabricated stories told by people motivated by the expectation of Hollywood movie riches and, in some instances, actual up-front cash payments.

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