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introduction

One of the first questions a homicide detective will ask in the wake of a murder, in the absence of direct evidence, is “Did the victim have any enemies?” A follow-up question, less apt to be answered, is “Did those enemies attempt to harm the victim in the past?” Intuitively, in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder on April 4, 1968, many Americans answered that question the same way. Dr. King himself, in his last sermon the night before his killing, foreshadowed the same culprit: “And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?”

“Sick white brothers”—entire groups of racists—tried repeatedly to kill Martin Luther King Jr. Our work documents at least nine such attempts between 1958 and 1968. During that time, white supremacists killed civil rights icons like Medgar Evers, Vernon Dahmer, Viola Liuzzo, and dozens of civil rights activists. Dr. King enjoyed little more protection than these men and women. He was not a head of state; he was not protected by the Secret Service, or by the military. That he survived until 1968 is almost entirely a result of good luck and his tendency to change his itinerary at the last minute; occasionally, a government informant volunteered information that saved his life. In that sense, the solution to King’s murder is simple: the same kind of racists who had been trying to kill King for years finally succeeded that April 4.

Killing King is not simply the story of a murder; it is the investigation and documentation of a conspiracy to murder Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that began in 1964, and evolved month by month and year by year. The secrecy and convoluted motives of the plotters and the network that bound them together obscured that conspiracy from those investigating Martin Luther King Jr.’s death. Only one man was charged and convicted of the crime.

The murder of Dr. King was not the act of a single man, certainly not one whose motive was never made clear, even in his conviction. The murder was the culmination of a conspiracy involving many characters, many strands, and many twists.

James Earl Ray, the man convicted of King’s murder, remains the only person historically associated with the crime. In Killing King, we will show that Ray’s travels, plans, and contacts from the time of his escape from prison in 1967 to his ultimate appearance in Memphis, in a boardinghouse across from the Lorraine Motel where King and his aides were staying, are an important part of the conspiracy story. But Ray was neither a rabid racist nor an ideological fanatic. His entire criminal career was motivated solely by a desire to make money. And while he asserted, behind prison bars, his absolute innocence for decades until his death in 1997, his protests do not hold up to scrutiny. We will demonstrate that Ray was only one of the people involved and his role is only one strand in the web of the conspiracy. Building on research from the authors’ two previous works—The Awful Grace of God and America’s Secret Jihad—we will show how two other men, one a criminal on parole, the other a right-wing terrorist, connect the diverse strands of the conspiracy.

The heart of the conspiracy, which Ray only became aware of in 1967, was a cash bounty on the life of Dr. King, first offered to contract killers in 1964. The first person to take that offer belonged to the “Dixie Mafia,” a group we will be exploring in detail. That man, and certain of his associates, first engaged the bounty sponsors, violent white supremacists, in 1964. But these would-be patrons struggled to come up with the cash to make good on the offer. We will trace the connections between the Dixie mafia criminals and white supremacists from the time of the bounty’s first appearance in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964 onward into federal prisons in 1967, then across the nation from California through Mississippi and Georgia—and ultimately to Memphis, Tennessee, and Dr. King’s death.

Beyond the King bounty, the Dixie Mafia, and James Earl Ray, we will also follow two other major strands in the web of conspiracy. The first involves members in the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, who pursued King’s murder and committed other racial and religious terrorist acts over some four years. Ultimately it would be members of this group, under intense FBI pressure and with several members already scheduled to serve prison sentences, who would reach out to career criminals to accomplish what they could not do themselves.

A new ideology came to unite a small subset of the most devoted and influential members of these groups in ways that have not been adequately explored by historians. We explore a set of unsettling apocalyptic religious beliefs, known as Christian Identity, which linked the leaders of the White Knights with fellow religious radicals across the nation, from the home of Christian Identity in Los Angeles through a social network of its followers in the deep South. That racist network enabled the conspiracy in several ways, and ultimately raised and helped transport the money that was needed to draw career criminals into the plot against King. To fully comprehend the King conspiracy, it is necessary to understand the motives, characters, and abilities of the people within that network. That particularly applies to the Christian Identity leaders who used the White Knights for their own covert purpose, one unknown to many within the White Knights and fully understood and appreciated only by a handful within its inner circle.

Congress came close to identifying King’s killers in the late 1970s when it formed the House Select Committee on Assassinations (the HSCA) to uncover and reassess new leads. In 1968 the FBI had asserted that James Earl Ray had acted entirely on his own; the HSCA concluded that the “official version” was insufficient and that Ray likely worked with conspirators. They even investigated several of the key players discussed in this book. But they never fully resolved the crime, in part because they never considered the lead that would have pointed them to the middlemen who recruited the killers, or to the religious fanatics who put the plan in motion. The conspiracy could have been unraveled in 1968. As we will demonstrate, it should have been prevented in 1967.