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Tuesday, April 28, 1998 By Tony Norman
Grief is such a powerful emotion it can blind judgment 30 years after a loved one has been snatched violently away. Such seems to be the case with Martin Luther King Jr.'s family and their curious embrace of James Earl Ray.
Last week, Ray left this world after serving roughly 29 years of a 99-year sentence for murdering the civil rights leader on April 4, 1968, in Memphis.
Shooting King from the bathroom window of a nearby rooming house presented no logistical difficulties for a marksman as skilled as Ray. Even if the 66 yards separating killer from victim had increased by a factor of 10, Ray would've found a way to shorten the distance.
He was relentless and an all-too-patient killer who believed time was on his side.
After downing King with a single shot from a Remington 370 as he stood at the balcony railing of the Lorraine Motel, Ray was immediately thrust into the ranks of the most notorious cowards to ever derive status from the barrel of a gun.
But little was known of the extent of Ray's cleverness in those days. After staying several steps ahead of the police on several continents for six months, he was eventually caught in London and extradited to the U.S. to stand trial for the murder of MLK.
Confronted with overwhelming forensic and circumstantial evidence, Ray confessed to the murder and forfeited his right to a trial by a jury of his peers. Later, he would claim his lawyer was incompetent and that his guilty plea was merely a gambit to avoid the death penalty. Like most people, Ray assumed that even an all-white jury in Memphis would find him guilty after weighing the evidence.
But three days after confessing to the murder, Ray was deep into his role as just another redneck patsy flung into the same kind of "conspiracy" Lee Harvey Oswald claimed to have become a fall guy for in the wake of the JFK assassination.
Ray's claim to have been a victim of a conspiracy has always found fertile ground. After all, shadowy plots have always appealed to our demo-cratic sensibilities. The popularity of "The X-Files" attests to the public's belief that malevolent forces within the government are always ready to clamp down on ideas or people that threaten the status quo.
Two years ago, "The X-Files" aired an episode that could've been ghostwritten by Ray himself. It featured one of the show's villains, the ubiquitous Cigarette Smoking Man, in a series of flashbacks that placed him on the scene of both JFK and MLK's murders.
In fact, the Cigarette Smoking Man, also known as Cancer Man, is revealed as the "real" trigger man in both cases. After setting Oswald and Ray up to take the heat for the murders, he retreats to the shadows to orchestrate events as diverse as the Bosnian civil war, the first Rodney King trial and the Buffalo Bills' doomed Super Bowl prospects.
Though clearly over the top, the episode was consistent with the beliefs of a growing number of Americans, including King's family, who find Ray's tale of clandestine meetings with a shadowy figure named "Raoul" at least plausible.
But the spectacle of King's youngest son, Dexter, shaking hands with his father's murderer last year while pronouncing him innocent of his blood was sentimentality and brazen opportunism at its goofiest. It was an "X-Files" moment the most hardcore conspiracy buff would never have dreamed possible.
And how did Ray convince the King family to put its considerable prestige behind his petition for a trial and a liver transplant? They even sent condolences to Ray's survivors, calling his death a "tragedy," a word that should be reserved for assassinations.
But lingering grief can cause the strongest family to fall down Alice's proverbial rabbit hole if conditions are right. I wonder what the King family's attitude would be today if Ray had gone on trial in 1969 and been found not guilty? Would anyone be remotely tempted to exonerate him given the same evidence?
Is it conceivable that Ray was part of a vast conspiracy to bring down the civil-rights movement? Yeah, I suppose so, but I don't think that's likely. Someone of Ray's ilk could've been motivated by racial animus, hard drinking and a vague notion of a payoff somewhere down the road. Sometimes a killer is just a killer and not the tip of a cabal.
Yet, Ray managed to leave this world in a cloud of sympathy and lies even thicker than the smoke that issued from his high-powered rifle the day he shot King; thicker even than a plume from Cancer Man's cigarette.
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