WEBVTT

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Who was hiding in the bushes? Who led the
police on a wild goose chase? And what did

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the children of Martin Luther King Jr.
have to say? More than 50 years later

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there are a lot of unanswered questions
about the civil rights icon's assassination

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When Martin Luther King arrived in
Memphis the day before his assassination

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the city's police inspector, Don H. Smith, was
waiting for him with a four-man security detail

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in tow. This was unusual because King and
his associates hadn't requested a detail

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nor did they want one. Nevertheless, Smith
and his detail stuck to King like glue

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At the Lorraine Motel that evening, Smith called
the chief of detectives to ask if he really needed

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to be there. Smith was told that he could
stand down the detail, which he then did

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but then nobody bothered to tell King and his
people. In 1978, the House Select Committee on

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Assassinations reported that the detail's withdrawal was, quote, highly improper. They also
determined that it likely wasn't the result of a conspiracy, though it was still a dangerously

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incompetent decision. Well, I can't guarantee that there
will be no more violence after we leave and go to Washington

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After the security detail left, a detective
named Edward Reddick was posted to the firehouse

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across the road from the Lorraine Motel to keep an eye on King.
The only black member of the force working on King's security

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Reddick was about to become wrapped up in a mystery of his own. Just two hours
before the shot rang out, a phone call came into the firehouse from someone

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threatening to kill the detective. Reddit was
then immediately pulled from surveillance duties

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In the aftermath of the assassination, Reddit
falsely told everyone who would listen that

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he could have saved King if he'd still been there. Despite the
exaggeration, that doesn't change the fact that the mysterious death threat

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was apparently real and that we still don't know who called it in. Some experts
think the disruption it caused could have been a contributing factor to the

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confused police response. In 1968, there was ample reason
to believe that the FBI was not fit to investigate anything

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involving Martin Luther King. After all, the
Bureau had been trying to take him down for years

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They tried everything from blackmail, to
recording evidence of his extramarital affairs

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to trying to talk him into killing himself. King is
a tomcat with obsessive, degenerate sexual urges

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FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover hated King, and
he didn't care who knew it. As early as 1963

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the feds had been wiretapping King for evidence of communist sympathies. This may
have been retaliation against a 1962 interview in which King insinuated that white

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Southerners working at the FBI made the institution
untrustworthy. This is all to say that by the

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time of the assassination, the FBI harbored
a deep bias against King. There's no evidence

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that this means that the Bureau actively plotted to kill him though it may explain the extraordinary number of leads they refused to follow up after capturing James Earl Ray One
famous photo of King assassination features members of his entourage pointing up at the building that the bullet came from However not everyone is convinced that they pointing at

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the right spot. While the official account
says that Ray fired his rifle from a window

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some witnesses claimed to have seen him in the
bushes below. One of those witnesses was Lloyd

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Jowers, the owner of Jim's grill on the first
floor of the building. He was silent on the matter

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for about 25 years, but he eventually spoke up
in the early 1990s to say that he'd seen a white

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gunman fire from the bushes. He also claimed
that Ray was a scapegoat. And then there's Earl

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Caldwell's story. A reporter for the New York
Times, Caldwell was the only journalist to witness

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the assassination. He claimed to see a white man
leaving the bushes just after the shot rang out

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Alas, it was difficult to investigate any
of these claims because the very next day

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city workers cut all the bushes down, potentially destroying evidence. After
the gunshot rang out, Memphis Police Department radio operators didn't put out

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a request for a roadblock surrounding
the Lorraine Motel for five whole minutes

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That's plenty of time for an assassin to
escape, which is exactly what James Earl Ray did

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By the time the two blocks around the Lorraine
were cordoned off, he was already in his car

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on his way out of the city. Even after local police were
finally alerted to Ray's white Ford Mustang getaway car, no

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one bothered to tell police in neighboring states. This allowed Ray to
head south into Mississippi before driving all the way to Georgia, where

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his car was found abandoned. He wouldn't be apprehended
until two months later, when British police arrested him in

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London's Heathrow Airport. On top of all of this, MPD units
that could have helped in the manhunt were instead diverted

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to crackdown on protesters who flooded the streets
after the assassination. "...The city is under attack.

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Despite all the incompetence on display, law
enforcement eventually managed to catch a

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lucky break — or so it seemed. Three witnesses saw Ray's white
Ford Mustang leaving the scene and pursued him in their Pontiac

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One of them had a citizen's radio, and
they proceeded to broadcast their chase

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As they left the city, the Pontiac hit 110
miles per hour while the two cars barreled

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through red lights. Fifteen miles north of Memphis,
someone in the Mustang opened fire on the Pontiac

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Naturally, the MPD scrambled a fleet of squad
cars in pursuit of this high-speed chase

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If this all sounds impossible, there's a good
reason for that. It was complete fiction

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The supposed vigilante was making up the whole
story as he went along, and the geography

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wasn't even right. As the MPD raced north, Ray was heading
south, quietly slipping across the Mississippi border

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To this day, nobody's ever managed to identify
the broadcaster or determine their motive

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They could have been simply pranking the cops,
or perhaps they were deliberately diverting

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police resources away from Ray real escape route Even though James Earl Ray lived for another 30 years after the assassination we never really learned his motive
which may have been only tangentially related to skin color For most of his life Ray maintained his innocence but that didn stop the speculation One clue was his

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ultimate destination, as he was headed to the
former African country of Rhodesia, which was

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then a white supremacist state. Thus, it was
assumed Ray was similarly obsessed with race

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However, the House Select Committee on Assassinations didn't buy this motive. Instead,
they uncovered evidence that a group of staffers for Alabama Governor George Wallace

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may have conspired to raise funds for King's assassination. They hypothesized
that the penniless Ray may have learned of the group and committed the

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killing in hopes of claiming the bounty.
Alas, this lead could not be followed up on

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By the time of the HSCA report, nearly
everyone on the Wallace campaign was dead

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One of the most intriguing things about the
House Select Committee report is how few of

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their potentially explosive conclusions were followed up on. In 1978, the committee
concluded that there was a decent chance that there was a conspiracy to kill King

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but it didn't involve the FBI. Instead, it was
likely between James Earl Ray and his family

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John and Jerry Ray both lied to investigations about their
dealings with their brother in the months before the shooting

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They claimed to have had no contact with him for years, despite evidence that they'd
planned and conducted bank robberies as a way of funding their fugitive sibling

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who had escaped from jail in 1967. Even more damningly, the
committee found evidence that Ray had contacted at least one of his

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brothers in the run-up to the shooting, and
may have even gone with them to buy his rifle

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What were you doing with a rifle that day? A project
with a guy named Raul for about eight or nine months

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HSEA also found evidence of Ray's brothers
working for the same George Wallace campaign

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where staffers allegedly raised a bounty to have King killed. James Earl
Ray confessed to killing King at trial, and he was sentenced to 99 years in

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prison. But Ray also famously protested that he
was innocent and went to his grave claiming that

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he'd been railroaded. When the time came to enter
his plea, he chose guilty, but it took less than

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three days for him to once again say the opposite.
Rather than the catharsis of evidence and

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testimony, the country had to settle for a
confession, only for that confession to immediately

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be retracted. Yet Ray's case never went to
retrial, despite all the committee hearings and

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reviews over the next three decades. Ray claimed
that he'd been tricked into his guilty plea by his

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lawyer, who wanted him to avoid the death penalty.
It's also possible that he was simply aware of what

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it would take to save himself. Considering that
James Earl Ray maintained his innocence for so

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long, it shouldn't be too surprising to learn that
some people actually believed him. But what is

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surprising is that the family of the man he was
convicted of murdering are among those who believed

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him Indeed by the 1990s the vast majority of King family believed that he was framed and even in the decades after
Ray death some of King children continued to advocate for his innocence In March 1997 as Ray lay in the hospital dying

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of liver disease, MLK's son Dexter King arranged
an on-camera meeting between the two of them

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When Dexter asked if Ray had killed his father and
Ray said no, Dexter replied that he believed him

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and so did his family. I believe him because there's so much
new evidence that has been presented to me and my family

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vis-a-vis his attorney, Bill Pepper. Then in 1999, King's
family filed a civil lawsuit seeking a symbolic $100 in damages

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This ended in a sensational trial
during which Ray was declared innocent

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and the government and others were declared liable
for King's death. Since this was just a civil trial

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the Department of Justice was quick to point out
that Ray was still officially considered guilty

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An 18-month DOJ investigation also concluded that no conspiracy existed.
On September 30, 1962, the town of Oxford, Mississippi exploded

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Angry at the enrollment of a black student named
James Meredith at the University of Mississippi

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white supremacists organized a riot that
killed two people and put 300 in the hospital

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In a subsequent investigation, a name that
made it onto the FBI's radar was J.C. Hardin

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an alias for a white supremacist named James Ashmore. Fast forward to
March 1968, when an angry James Earl Ray was at the St. Francis Hotel

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in Los Angeles a month before he would kill
Martin Luther King. It was at this point that

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he started being repeatedly contacted by
Hardin. In the aftermath of King's shooting

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the FBI interviewed St. Francis manager Alan O.
Thompson, who provided information that linked

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Ashmore to the mysterious Hardin. What's
especially puzzling is why the FBI failed

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to follow up on the connection between Hardin
and Ashmore. Despite Thompson's statement

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the Bureau decided that Ashmore and Hardin must
be different people since they had different

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haircuts. So the link was never investigated, and
Ashmore died in 1973. In 1977, just as the House

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Select Committee on Assassinations was getting
underway, a court order sealed the FBI's surveillance

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records on Martin Luther King Jr. for 50 years.
These sealed files include FBI wiretap transcripts

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It's been public knowledge for a long time that
the Bureau believed it had evidence of King's

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extramarital affairs, but other details will likely
be more embarrassing to the FBI than to King

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For example, a file declassified in 2017 was
full of paranoid ravings by agents claiming

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that every single thing King said was vetted by the Communist Party. And there's
always the chance that the files could contain even more explosive revelations

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Evidence of a grand conspiracy seems unlikely,
although documents relating to J.C. Harden

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or the alleged suitor in the bushes certainly
don't feel outside the realm of possibility