Theories persist 40 years after King death

WASHINGTON — Thirty years after the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded its exhaustive review of the shooting of Martin Luther King, its chairman, Louis Stokes, stands by its findings.

"No one to my knowledge has come forth with any factual evidence of any kind that would in any way controvert the findings of our committee," Stokes, now a retired lawyer in both Cleveland and Washington, said in a recent interview with The Memphis (Tenn.) Commercial Appeal.

"I don't know of one single piece of evidence that anyone has brought forth that has tainted our findings."

But some have looked at the evidence and drawn different conclusions.

The committee found it "ironic" that the FBI's ongoing surveillance and harassment campaign against King helped prove that the bureau did not have prior knowledge of his 1968 assassination in Memphis.

It found that James Earl Ray did not harbor "deep-seated racial animosity" sufficient to motivate the killing but that he might have been lured by a potential financial reward.

And it found evidence that others — including a now-dead lawyer in St. Louis — were offering a payoff to kill King, which proved there was a conspiracy, and that Ray, a Missouri prison escapee, might have been aware of it.

But it also determined that Ray was the lone assassin and that neither the FBI nor the Memphis police were complicit in the killing. It made that finding despite concluding that indefensibly "substandard" Memphis police work may have aided Ray's escape.

Perhaps most notably, the committee found plausible a strange explanation for the removal of a black Memphis police detective from his post outside the Lorraine Motel just hours before the killing.

Some say the committee ignored evidence or drew the wrong conclusions. John Judge, founder of the Coalition on Political Assassinations and one who believes, like some in King's family, that Ray did not pull the trigger, scoffs at the panel's work.

"Look at what they call conclusions," said Judge. "They can't determine anything except that Ray did it."

Others, like Ray lawyer William F. Pepper, in his 2003 book, "An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King," suggest the committee overlooked evidence it collected that "frequently conflicts with conclusions of the (committee's) report itself."

Ray pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 99 years but recanted and spent the remainder of his life trying to clear his name. He died in prison in 1998.