Transcription
Hello everybody. Today we are going to be talking about the true story of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., along with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This is one of the most highlighted examples of state corruption and conspiracy in all of American history. So I thought that we would take a look at the information today, and I can tell you why I, myself, as well as the family of Martin Luther King, do not believe that James Earl Ray was the shooter.
And furthermore, why in 1999 the King family sued the government for wrongful death and conspiracy to kill Martin Luther King Jr., and won. Which let me highlight now to cover all of my bases: these are all jokes. Everything that I'm saying is a joke. This is all irony and satire, and in Minecraft. And if I ever—I'm alive myself—uh, no, I didn't. But before we get into that big pile of awful, let's talk about something not awful: like saving money, specifically saving money when it comes to online shopping.
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Thank you all so much for watching the ad. I really do appreciate it. Thank you so much to Honey for sponsoring the video; it really does mean the most. I hope that you check them out; it helps me. Again, link in the description, and we are back to the video. We are going to go ahead and get into all of that, but first, and as always, thank you for watching. To make sure we're all on the same page, I'm going to start by giving the FBI's official account of what happened, and then after that I'll explain why it's all a lie—as a joke, of course.
For starters, Martin Luther King Jr. was a civil rights leader who was not only an effective speaker and leader within the civil rights movement but was also no stranger to death threats. As a matter of fact, in 1958 he was stabbed in the chest and was nearly killed. And in 1963, after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, he told his wife, Coretta King, "This is what's going to happen to me. Also, I keep telling you this is a sick society." King would also travel with other members of his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and go to different cities across the U.S. where King would speak at different rallies and protests.
In 1968, King, along with a group of members from that association, came to Memphis, Tennessee, as part of a sanitation workers' rally. Now, there have been a long history of Black city workers within Memphis, Tennessee, being underpaid and put into harsh labor conditions. However, the event that sparked this particular rally was the death of two sanitation workers who died while on the job, and their family was not given any insurance payout for their death. So King led a march in Memphis on March 28th and then planned to lead another march after that during the following week. On April 3rd, King stood in front of the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, and gave his famous "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech: "To do God's will, and he has allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the promised land." [Applause] [Laughter]
The next day, on April 4th, 1968, King was staying in room 306 of the Lorraine Motel. Another pastor who traveled with King, a man by the name of Ralph Abernathy, said that they stayed in that specific room so often whenever they visited Memphis that it was nicknamed the "King Abernathy Suite." The group was getting ready to go to dinner before King was set to deliver another speech that night, and his final words, officially at least, were to the musician Ben Branch, in which King said, "Ben, make sure you play 'Take My Hand, Precious Lord' in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty." King then leaned over the balcony on the second floor of the Lorraine Motel to speak to Jesse Jackson, who was standing in the parking lot beneath. At that moment, at 6:01 PM, a shot rang out, which struck King in the right cheek. It immediately broke his jaw and several vertebrae while severing the veins and arteries in his neck. King was immediately knocked out; however, one of his colleagues, who was holding his head as he was bleeding, found that he had a pulse, and he was immediately taken to the St. Joseph's Hospital. However, there Martin Luther King was officially declared dead at 7:05 PM on April 4th, 1968.
The police were quick to arrive on scene and concluded that the shot had been fired from the bathroom window of a boarding house across the street from the Lorraine Motel. Immediately next to the boarding house, the police found a bed sheet which contained someone's personal clothing and a sort of overnight bag, as well as a Remington 760 Game Master rifle. Within the pump-action 30.06 was an empty rifle casing, indicating that someone had fired the gun and not ejected the old casing. The rifle, as well as the belongings in the bed sheet, were covered in the fingerprints of someone identified as James Earl Ray. James Earl Ray was an escaped convict from Jackson City, Missouri, who was arrested and serving 20 years for robbing a grocery store before he broke out of jail. Not only that, but in the aforementioned boarding house, one of the rooms was being rented by James Earl Ray. He was on the run for two months before he was caught in London at the Heathrow Airport as he was trying to board a plane to Rhodesia.
After his arrest on March 10th, 1969, Ray, in order to avoid the death penalty, pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder of MLK. The FBI concluded that the reason for this murder was that James Earl Ray was poor, and there was a bounty put out by racist southerners for the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. In a book titled *He Slew the Dreamer*, which came out shortly after the death of MLK, the author says that James Earl Ray was a very racist and hateful person who was trying to collect a bounty from members of the KKK for the murder of MLK. So this all sounds pretty cut and dry, right? A civil rights leader was killed by a racist person trying to collect a bounty, and his fingerprints were found on all the stuff, and he pleaded guilty to it, right? No. And here's why.
Three days after he confessed to first-degree murder, Ray fired his attorney and said that his attorney told him that if he does not immediately confess to killing MLK, they'll either give him the death penalty or someone will kill him quicker. I mean, with the paper—one thing, signing that you know we, in our guilty plea—he gave me a list of reasons why we should enter a plea. He also said the newspaper was done convicting me by pre-trial publicity, and so I told him I didn't think that was the grounds for entering the guilty plea because I thought we could overcome some of this adverse publicity during the trial. His next uh, game was that uh, if I didn't enter a guilty plea, they might uh, put my brother, Jerry Ray, in prison for as a co-conspirator. He also indicated that if I forced him to trial, he wouldn't put in his best efforts. Through his new attorney, William Pepper, Ray said that he believes he accidentally assisted with the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., and he believes that he himself was a victim in a larger conspiracy.
In the following years, there were several requests for Ray to have a retrial, although, for reasons we'll get into in a bit, none of those really panned out, and there was no significant headway made in the case until the King family themselves, who had been doing their own research to the side, came to the conclusion that James Earl Ray was an innocent man—or at least innocent for killing King. He still robbed a grocery store, but I don't really think that matters at this point. In 1997, Dexter King, the son of Martin Luther King, went to the Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in order to meet James Earl Ray. Whenever the two met, Dexter said, "I just want to know, for the record, did you kill my father?" To which James Earl Ray replied, "No, no, I didn't." And Dexter said, "I know, and my whole family knows."
Over the next few years, the King family fought vehemently for James Earl Ray to get a retrial, and in 1999, Coretta King, the wife of Martin Luther King, along with her family, sued Lloyd Jowers (which I'll explain who he is in a little bit), along with the entirety of the federal government for committing a conspiracy to murder MLK, to which, as I mentioned earlier, they won the case. The case took place in Shelby County, Tennessee, and the lawyer that represented the King family was William Pepper, the aforementioned second attorney for James Earl Ray. During the case, Pepper brought in over 70 witnesses and 4,000 pages of transcripts, to which, according to him, in those transcripts, those who were a part of the conspiracy were the FBI, the CIA, the US Army, the Memphis Police Department, and the Mafia. The jury unanimously ruled in the King's family favor and awarded them $100. The reason it was $100 is because the Kings were very adamant that it was not about the money; it was just about proving that the government had something to do with Martin's murder. However, if this was justice for the King family, it didn't come soon enough for James Earl Ray, who died a year earlier, in 1998, in prison due to an injury he received during a prison fight.
So it seems like there's two completely different stories happening here. On one hand, you have the pretty straightforward story of some racist whack job getting a rifle, killing Martin Luther King, and then getting arrested for it. But on the other side, you have the King family trying to get this guy out of jail, and then you have a lawyer who was an expert on both sides of the case who then comes into court, brings all this evidence, and ends up winning with a jury saying that, yeah, the government definitely did it. So how are there two completely different things happening here? Well, ya boy went through some of the records from that lawsuit, and for reasons I'll get into, I 100% agree with the King family, as well as the civil court ruling—of course, as a joke. This is all satire. So in order to break all this down, let's look at the specific moments leading up to and during the shooting itself.
The night before Martin Luther King was shot, James Earl Ray rented a room above a place known as Jim's Grill in a boarding house owned by a Bessie Brewer. The official story is that he stayed in the room that night, and then the next day he took his rifle down the hall to a communal bathroom that had a good view of the Lorraine Motel. He stood in the bathtub and fired the shot, and then jumped out, didn't eject the shell casing, ran back to his room, and threw the rifle, as well as his bag of clothes, into the bed sheet, threw it all together with the bed sheet, put it on his back, and then ran out into the hall. He was then spotted by a man named Charles Quitman Stevens, who was the state's lead witness in this entire case. Charles said that he saw a man running out of the hotel, and he later ID'd it as James Earl Ray. Again, according to official reports, James Earl Ray was then walking down the street whenever he saw a cop car parked across the street, to which he panicked and dropped the bed sheet in front of the aforementioned department store. He then hopped into his white Mustang and sped away down the street.
So to give a little illustration of it—this is not remotely drawn to scale or whatever, so I'm sorry, I promise I'm trying—the distance from the bathroom window, which is right here, to the spot King was at the motel was about 70 or 80 yards. According to that story, Ray was sitting in the bathroom window and fired his shot across the street at the motel balcony where King was staying. Everything here is taking place on the second floor of the building. So then Ray goes down the hallway into his room, gathers his stuff, puts it in the bed sheet, goes back out and down the staircase by Jim's Grill. That's when he begins walking down the street, and here at Cana—can up—have you pronounce it?—amusement, he sees the cop, supposedly drops his bag right here, ducks the other direction to get into his vehicle, parked somewhere over here, and then speeds off down the street going that direction.
So let's talk about the first big issue in this entire case, and the one that should have been a red flag to the investigators but wasn't—again, for reasons we'll talk about. The rifle that was in the bed sheet was never matched to the bullet that hit Martin Luther King. That Remington 760 Game Master they've got in the Civil Rights Museum is not the murder weapon. The thing the state relied upon was the rifle, but modern scientific methodology excluded that rifle from being the murder weapon. The bullet they pull out of King's body has a rate rifling twist of one turn in every 11 and a quarter inches. The rifle that Ray had had a rate of rifling twist of one turn in every 10 inches—a bad manufacturing defect that is not apparent on the death slug. For those that don't know, the way that a rifle works is within the barrel itself; there is a series of grooves that spin the bullet and allow it to have a spiral and more accurate trajectory after it comes out of the barrel. While rifling is always similar on similar models of guns, the exact combination of what happens between the chamber and the bolt and the rifling and everything else is entirely unique to every single gun. The most conclusive evidence they could say is that both the bullet that hit King, as well as Ray's gun, were probably the same model of rifle—which, yeah, there were literally millions of Remington 760s in the United States. That doesn't prove anything.
The other hiccup in the story is that James Earl Ray's fingerprints were never found in his room or the bathroom that the shot was taken from. The bathroom detail can almost be looked over if the window was already open; I could see him walking in there, standing in the tub, taking the shot, and then leaving. However, if he stayed in the room overnight, and as we're going to see in a bit, this guy was no criminal mastermind, he would have left a fingerprint or a hair or something in his wake. Furthermore, police were on the scene of the shooting within two minutes of whenever the shot was fired, and none of them reported ever having seen a white Mustang. This would mean that Ray would have to take the shot, run back to his room, pack his stuff, load it up, walk out of the hallway, go downstairs, go across the block, see the police, drop his bag, go the other direction, get in his car, and speed off—all within two minutes.
And to cast another shadow on that whole theory of what happened, Guy Kanep, the guy who owned this store that James Earl Ray supposedly dropped his bag in front of, said that what happened, according to him, is someone walked up, dropped the bag in front of the store, calmly walked away, and then a couple minutes later he heard the gunshot—meaning that that bag with the rifle that did not match the round that hit MLK, as well as James Earl Ray's personal belongings, were set up there before a shot was ever fired. He was one of the first people to cast doubts on the state's case against Ray in his book, *Cover Up*. That's ridiculous. He's required of going to his room in the flop house and picked up the widest collection of junk: bobby pins, bobby pins, uh, cans of beer that hadn't been opened, uh, you know, a guy has been in a crime like that and he's fleeing for his life, you're going to pick up a couple cans of beer or a bobby pin? Uh, the box didn't hold the rifle; he had to put the rifle in with all sorts of other junk—a ridiculous collection of it. The one thing that that bundle served to do was to point a finger at Ray.
Another issue with that story is the logistics of the shot itself. As you can see from these pictures—wherever I decide to put them—Martin Luther King was standing on the balcony where you see the white reef. He was leaned over it, talking to someone in the parking lot below. And then, as you can see, the boarding house located across the street has several windows; one of those believed to be the one where Ray took the shot. However, for the logistics of that shot to have worked out in the angle that the bullet trajectory says it did, Ray would have had to be standing on top of the bathtub and in a very awkward position. Even more so, at the time the shot would have been taken, there was a large tree just outside of the window that would have made it near impossible to see across the street to the motel, let alone get a shot through it. I did talk to a Captain Tommy Smith, who retired as head of homicide for the Memphis Police Department, who was the first detective on the scene. He said the shot couldn't have been from the flop house; there was a limb about this stick growing diagonally through the window, and you couldn't even see the Lorraine Motel from that. Don't worry, we'll talk about what happened to that tree in just a minute.
So remember that guy, Charles Stevens, the state's lead witness, who said he saw Ray run out of the bathroom and then down the street? Well, Charles Stevens had been arrested 155 times, most of them due to alcoholism. He was known for getting drunk in public and causing a wreck, and the police would have to bring him back home. At the time of the shooting, Stevens was drunk in a stupor, and as a matter of fact, he didn't come forward to police saying that he saw Ray until a bounty was put forward for $100,000 to anyone who can give police information. The police had already found the fingerprints on the gun, which were connected to the escaped convict, and said they were looking for James Earl Ray. So Stevens comes to the police and says, "Yeah, that Ray guy, I saw him." During an interview with a CBS journalist, the journalist held up a picture of James Earl Ray, and Stevens said, "Who is that?" And the journalist said, "This is the shooter, James Earl Ray." And Stevens said, "Oh, that wasn't the guy who was running out of the hotel." "Look at that picture; does that look like the man?" "Well, excuse me, from the glimpse that I got of his profile, it doesn't. It doesn't. No sir, certainly doesn't. For one thing, he's too heavy; his face is too full; he has too much hair, and his nose is too wide." Again, remember this was the state's lead witness. Not only that, he was the only witness who claimed to have seen James Earl Ray at the time of the shooting. And you may be thinking, "Well, shouldn't have there been more people around that saw someone do something during this time?" Oh, there were; they just didn't see James Earl Ray. One of those people was Stevens' wife, who said that she heard a shot—not from inside of the building but from just outside the building's window. She said that she heard a shot from outside, looked out, and saw, quote, "a short man with salt and pepper hair in an army jacket and plaid shorts." At the same time this was happening, a cab driver who lived in that building said he was walking in after work for the day, and as he passed the hallway he looked into the communal bathroom where the shot supposedly was taken. He walked a few more feet into his room, heard a gunshot from outside, and then sprinted outside to see what had happened. Considering that he looked into the bathroom possibly seconds before the shot went off, that completely clears the idea of James Earl Ray standing in the bathtub.
Now, it was true that Ray owned a white Mustang; however, what that same cab driver reported as being weird is that whenever he pulled up to the house, there were two white Mustangs parked a couple hundred feet from each other. At first, Ray was trying to remove himself from any sort of guilt and said that during the actual shooting he was at a nearby service station. However, in later stories, it seemed that he was serving as the getaway driver for a man known as Raul. Now we'll get into the whole mess of Raul in a second, but for now let's keep talking about James Earl Ray. After the shooting, Ray realized that he was on the run for the murder of MLK; however, he was being financed by someone only known to him as "Fat Man." For those close to the case, it was no secret that James Earl Ray wasn't exactly the most dedicated of assassins, and the only reason he was able to escape from prison is he was loading shipment boxes onto a truck, and one of the boxes was empty, so he just got inside, and then they just put the lid and never checked, and that's how he got out. But according to those who knew Ray, the stories about him were wildly untrue. As a matter of fact, according to his family, Ray had a Black girlfriend for some time, which greatly contradicts the stories of a racist Southern KKK member that the media afterwards portrayed him as. Not only that, but Ray knew comedically little about guns. Whenever Ray went to the gun shop because he was told by somebody that I'll explain later to buy a 30-ought-6 Remington 760, he bought a .243 instead because he didn't understand how calibers worked. He then had to return the gun and get the same model of rifle chambered in 30-ought-6. Everyone in the gun store said he had absolutely no idea what he was talking about when it came to the scope he wanted on the rifle or what he was looking for in a rifle or anything like that. And while James Earl Ray was in the military, he had the lowest possible marksmanship score that someone can have and still qualify. Keep in mind, this is the same guy that the FBI would later state was able to give himself several fake IDs and passports and include the largest investigation in the United States history for two months straight. We'll talk about James Earl Ray's full story in a moment, but for now I want to ask the question you're probably thinking: If not Ray, then who took the shot?
Well, there were two people who were staring at Martin Luther King the exact moment he was shot; they were his chauffeur and his attorney who were talking to him. They were each watching him as he was leaned over the balcony the moment the shot was taken, and both of them said that as soon as he was hit his entire body shot upwards. As a matter of fact, they each said that from the angle of the…
Bathroom window. There was no way that they could have hit him in the lower right jaw, considering he was facing like this. Remember how I said Steven's wife, who was staying in the boarding house, heard the shot from outside and then saw a man running by in the bushes? Well, she wasn't the only one. Reverend James Orange, who was with King at the moment of the shooting, said he looked over and saw, in the bushes in front of the boarding house, there was a plume of smoke that came up through the branches. Several other witnesses, who were all walking the street at the time of the shooting, said that they all heard a shot coming from the branches, and a couple of people even reported seeing a man in a white shirt sprint around the back of the building.
I interviewed Solomon Jones in the lobby of the Saint Joseph Hospital, approximately about 7:05. This was a story he told all of us. As soon as a shot was fired, he looked out over the limousine; he saw a sniper with a white sheet on his face ducked back down into the bushes. A few seconds later, he rose out of the bushes without the sheet, walked to the wall, jumped down from the wall, and you must understand that other people were coming out of the fire station at the same time, jumping from the wall. Solomon said this person he saw in the bushes joined in with the people jumping from the wall, jumped from the wall, walked on the premises, and he said he was scary. There was a firehouse located in the general vicinity of all of this, and one woman said that she saw a fireman trying to show police the bushes where he saw someone fire a gun and then run away, but the police ignored him and ran his side. As a matter of fact, all of the witnesses who told police that they heard a gunshot come from outside were told that they were simply mistaken and it came from the bathroom window instead.
New York Times reporter Earl Caldwell was staying in motel room 215 when he heard the shot. "What I saw: this man just very clearly rise out of these bushes," he was in sort of a crouched, stooping position. I did not see a weapon in this man's hands, but I saw this figure directly across from the motel, and also, of course, uh, the man in the bushes was a white man. From the day of the assassination until this day, no police, no FBI agent has ever come to me and said, "What did you see?" And every single account that I've given you up until this point is either corroborated by several different witnesses or was in the official transcripts, or what have you. But there's this one witness that isn't that reliable, but I have to mention: a hobo by the name of Harold Cornbread Carter—yes, his name was Cornbread—was drinking wine in the same bushes when he said he heard a shot, rolled over, and a man in a white shirt ran by him and then sprinted around the back of the building. I don't know how much I can put my faith in the man named Cornbread, but I wasn't going to not mention that.
Speaking of the police misleading people, remember how I said there was a really big tree in the way of the bathroom? That wouldn't have made any sense for someone to like shoot directly through the tree to get to the Lorraine Motel. Well, the Memphis Police Department were up all night after the shooting, cutting down the trees in front of the boarding house to, quote, "help with the investigation," growing diagonally through the window, and you couldn't even see the Lorraine Motel from that location. He said, "I came back with crime scene in about an hour, and the whole tree had been cut down, and I found out there was a cut-down order sent out to the sanitation department." So there's this entire active crime scene, and for some reason, the police decide to go out at four in the morning and just start cutting stuff with a chainsaw. As a matter of fact, the only report that day that a shot ever came from the bathroom of the boarding house was the drunk Stevens that I mentioned earlier. Every other person who was there that day reported the gunshot coming from outside, in the bushes in front of the boarding house. So we've established that the official narrative is incredibly biased for some reason, and that James Earl Ray seems to be an incompetent patsy who just kind of stooped into this whole thing. Furthermore, it's the opinion of the King family, the attorneys, and everyone who was there that the official account is not what happened. So why so much cover-up, and why all of this hoopla over what could have been a simple, dry and cut assassination?
And this is the part of the video where I want to emphasize that this is a joke, and if any of the names that I say correspond to real people, that I made the names up, and it is purely coincidental. So that being said, the FBI—the FBI murdered Martin Luther King Jr. Like, they murdered him so hard. I tried to go as long as I possibly could in this video without saying it, and it made me want to die. So let's fix that. During the time of a shooting, there was a Black detective who was put on task of protecting Martin Luther King during his stay in Memphis, who was currently at home hiding. The reason he was hiding is because two hours before the shooting, someone called saying they were planning to murder him. It turns out that this report was entirely made up and came from no other than the FBI. Lieutenant can arrive and stated, "I was warned at the headquarters." I said, "For what?" He said, "I don't know, just getting the car, let's go. I was going to bring you back." Director Frank Holland stated that the man standing across from me was a Secret Service from Washington, stating that there was a contract out on my life at that time. He told an organ to take me home and wait until someone arrived to guard me. Once we arrived at my house, while seated in the car awaiting the security for me being there, I imagine no more than five or ten minutes, the radio blasts down: Dr. King had been shot. This departmental communication reveals that by 4:15 that afternoon, Lieutenant Arkhan of the Memphis Police Department had been alerted by a phone call from the FBI that the assassination threat attributed to Reddit was a mistake. So the FBI made up a completely false story that this head detective that was protecting Martin Luther King needed to go home in order to avoid not only that, but a few minutes before King was shot, there was a bomb threat called in downtown Memphis that made the police focus their attention there instead of on MLK.
Now, most often with events this large or assassinations that would cause this much noise, it is very rare that an actual member of a government party will carry out the assassination themselves. They almost always get fall guys to do it, and that's not even a conspiracy; just look at historical cases like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, where they got a bunch of like teenage freedom fighters to carry out the work of politicians. So let's take a look at who some of those fall guys might have been, one of which being the guy I mentioned earlier as being sued by the King family: Lloyd Jowers. Remember how I said that the boarding house was located above a place called Jim's Grill? While Lloyd Jowers was the owner of Jim's Grill, the day after the shooting, a cab driver said that he was setting in Jim's Grill whenever Lloyd told him to come look at what he has under the counter, to which he slid out a 30-odd 6 rifle. Not only that, but whenever an investigator followed up on that lead, a waitress said that she was working the day of the shooting, heard a gunshot, and then Lloyd ran in the back room holding a rifle and had mud on the knees of his pants, implying that he was kneeled in the grass outside, to which he then took his rifle, wrapped it in a white sheet, set it under the counter, and when the police came by said he didn't hear anything. Jowers' business partner, by the name of Willie Adkins, said years later that Jowers had confided in him and told him that he had a part in the King's shooting, and his job was to get rid of the rifle. And according to Atkins, Jowers passed the gun off to someone else who threw it off a bridge into a river. Jowers himself was a former member of the Memphis Police Department and still very close to several of the leading members of the department itself. He told Atkins that the reason he was given that job is because they trusted him, and his business was directly across the street from the Lorraine Motel, which, if you'll remember I mentioned earlier, was so popular for having King stay there that they even named one of the rooms after him. Over the years, Jowers was pressured to come forward about his involvement in the murder, and finally, in 1993, he went on ABC television and told them that he was paid $100,000 to help with the murder of Martin Luther King. More specifically, he said he was paid by known mob man Frank Liberto. Jowers ran Jim's Grill across from the Lorraine Motel and claimed another Memphis businessman, Frank Luberto, paid him $100,000 to contract the killer. "What did Frank Liberto ask you to do?" "He asked me to handle uh somebody's transaction; hire someone to assassinate Dr. Martin's team." See, Frank Liberto openly despised King. He had several different produce factories and manufacturing plants around the city of Memphis and said that King was making things harder because, you know, those pesky workers, them and their human rights. The day of the shooting, John McFerrin was working at one of Liberto's produce plants when he heard Liberto answer the phone and say, quote, "I told you not to call me here; shoot the son of a [ __ ] when he comes on the balcony." Years later, a woman known as Lovato Attenson was at a restaurant whenever Liberto got drunk and was trying to impress her and eventually said, "You know, I'm the one who had MLK killed."
Remember James Earl Ray's first lawyer, the one who pressured him to confess to killing MLK? Well, that lawyer, Percy Foreman, was a known affiliate of the Mafia and was very close to Frank Liberto. "I don't give a continental dam whether there was a conspiracy." Well, Mr. Former, did you ever ask your client whether he was a part of a conspiracy, whether he'd been hired? "No, I never asked him uh that, but I asked him enough other questions to convince me that he was not." Lloyd Jowers was also asked, well, if you were just the guy who got rid of the gun, then who actually shot Martin Luther King? To which Jowers said it was Memphis Police Department Lieutenant Earl Clark. Earl Clark had several accusations of taking bribes from gang members and was publicly a friend of Frank Liberto. Not only that, but he was the highest-rated marksman on the Memphis Police Department. According to Jowers, as soon as the shot was taken, Clark sprinted down the hill, handed him the rifle so that he could then dispose of it, which, as I mentioned earlier, he brought it to the back door of the restaurant while Clark jumped over a nearby wall and escaped in, you guessed it, a white Mustang. According to a janitor who worked at the Memphis Police Department, the night before the shooting, there was a meeting in the police chief's office between the police chief, the mayor of Memphis, Earl Clark, and another man by the name of Lieutenant Strausser. According to that same janitor, Strausser spent the entire day at the rifle range shooting his 30-odd 6 over and over. Around the bushes of the boarding house, there were footprints of a size 13 shoe, and lo and behold, Strausser had a size 13 shoe. All of these assassinations, there's always a grassy knoll or some—what is this, a bringably bush—that the actual killers hid in for some reason. I don't know what their aversion to buildings is.
So, to kind of summarize all of that, it seems that as part of this conspiracy involving the Memphis Police Department, two shooters—one most likely being the primary shooter and the other being a backup—of Clark and Strausser hid themselves in the bushes in front of the boarding house, took the shot whenever King walked out before having someone else ditch the guns as they got away in nearby getaway vehicles. So going off of all of that, one or two shooters placed in these bushes in between the boarding house and the motel went down, split, most likely into two separate directions. One of them handed their weapon to Jowers, who then took it around this direction before carrying it into the back of the building that was connected to Jim's Grill and eventually disposing of the rifle. The shooter went this direction before interacting with a wall that was located over here, jumped over it, got into a getaway car, and then made his way down the street. Anyone else—a backup shooter or someone else set to get rid of the weapons—most likely followed a similar route, either getting into a getaway vehicle here or, as the cab driver reported, getting into one of the two white Mustangs that were located on a street between these two buildings. Either way, everyone in the investigation was focused on Ray leaving the window, going out of this building, and then getting away on this street, whereas there were several different avenues of escape left open to whoever the other conspirators might have been.
So that's all well and good, but what's with this rifle that has James Earl Ray's fingerprints and him having rented the room in the house right above them, and all of this so perfectly falling in line for him to be the fall guy? Well, now that I've given you the official telling of the assassination as well as the unofficial but more widely believed telling of the assassination, let's get into James Earl Ray's story of what happened, and to do that, let's talk about James Earl Ray himself. At the end of World War II, James Earl Ray was part of the Office of Strategic Services, also known as the OSS. That organization then became the Central Intelligence Agency, or the CIA, after the war ended. James's brother said that he would never really talk about what happened while he was in the OSS and would only say cryptic things like, "They're kind of like the Mafia; once you join, you're never really allowed to leave." Specifically, James said that he was haunted by events that took place while he was in the OSS and later the CIA and said that they would drug him and did other things to, quote, "mess with my mind." This is kind of out of the scope for this video since I'm trying to talk about the specifics of King's assassination itself, but there are several that believe James Earl Ray was a part of the early MK Ultra experiments. Also, further on his backstory, his escape from the Jefferson City prison was weird, but this wasn't his first escape attempt; he had tried several times before, and every time he would just be administered medicine and then allowed to do it again. It's believed that Ray was one of many people kept on a leash by the government that they would let off if they ever needed them to commit whatever act that they couldn't have their hands directly tied to. Not only that, but shortly after completing this escape attempt that he definitely shouldn't have been able to get away with, his cellmate, who had told him to try to escape, was found hanging in his cell with his arms and legs broken, the official story being that he hung himself and then broke his arms and legs. I don't even know how to tie that back into the whole conspiracy; that was what it was. Shortly after escaping jail, that he met the figure known as Raoul. Despite the name and every description that was given of him, Raoul was not Spanish, and it's not uncommon for operatives to have names that intentionally mislead those trying to look for them. This Raoul seemed to be very generous to the escaped convict and began supplying Ray with money as well as fake IDs and passports so he could move from the United States to Canada. It was even Raoul who gave Ray money and told him to go to Birmingham, Alabama, and buy himself a nice car, to which Ray bought the white Mustang. According to Ray, Raoul was a weapons dealer who was selling guns to Cuban militants who were hiding in the United States. Ray was sort of working as Raoul's pseudo business partner for a while, and then one day Raoul told him that, "We're going to need about 200 rifles to sell to a group of these Cubans." He then asked Ray if he could go to Alabama and buy a rifle to show the Cubans as a preview of what the other 200 rifles are going to be like. That is when Raoul told Ray to specifically purchase a Remington 760 in 30 ought 6, to which, as I mentioned earlier, Ray went there, bought it in the wrong caliber, and then after showing Raoul, Raoul told him he had to take it back and get it exchanged for the right one.
The day before Martin Luther King was assassinated, James Earl Ray said that Raoul met him at Jim's Grill and said, "Tomorrow I'm meeting the Cubans in order to make this weapons deal. I need you to rent a room in the boarding house above this restaurant so that I can make the deal, and if anything goes wrong, I need you to be waiting outside to be my getaway driver so that I can get out of here if we need to." This is why there was an identical Remington 760 that had his fingerprints on it while wrapped in the bed sheet. This is the reason that, despite renting the room in his name, James did not have any fingerprints on the bathroom or the room itself, and why he was waiting outside when, according to him, he heard a gunshot and Raoul runs out, jumps in the back of the car, and he drives away. Ray, believing that the deal went bad, someone got shot, and now he's trying to get out of there. According to Ray, he was on his way out of Memphis whenever he began to slow down the car; Raoul jumped and rolled out of the back seat and ran away, and James never saw him again. From there, James drove all night till he hit Atlanta, where he said he met the before-mentioned fat man who gave him a bunch of money and new passports so that he could be on the run for two months before being caught in England. And it wasn't until turning on his radio on the way to Atlanta that he found out that he had actually taken part in the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. "After a while, I got on a main street; I was gonna call this telephone number in New Orleans and find out if they contact Ronald, see if anything happened there because I thought maybe beans with guns around there uh some type of raid or something. When I was driving out there, they said something about the—I had radio and said something about Martin Luther King and been shot. I didn't think too much about that, and then when I about 10 minutes later I was on the outskirts of Memphis, or maybe I was actually Mississippi, it said that they looked for a white man, the white Mustang in connection with the shooting, so I decided then that that bird, you know, move on out there; I'd go one and cut off and went to Atlanta. From Atlanta I, you know, when I went, went to Canada, quite a bus."
So while that does tie up all the loose ends of why there was a bed sheet that some stranger supposedly dropped off that had Ray's fingerprints on it, and while that makes sense that he never touched the rooms that he rented even though he did rent them, and while he was a getaway driver in the white Mustang at the time of it, and why there would have been two Mustangs and blah blah, it makes everything make sense; that's still just the word of one escaped convict over what the entirety of the FBI's investigation. While it does line up everything cut and dry, we can't just take his word as being the truth. And the cool thing is we don't have to. Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, swore on an affidavit that Agent Brady Tyson told him in confidence that it was J. Edgar Hoover who had Martin Luther King killed. If J. Edgar Hoover sounds familiar, that's because he was the director of the FBI during this time. More specifically, that Hoover had a right-hand man by the name of Clyde Tolson, who was known in the agency for carrying out Hoover's dirty work, that included getting mob members to carry out killings that the FBI couldn't handle themselves or, more specifically, didn't want to be associated with handling themselves. According to this testimony of Agent Brady Tyson, it was Tolson who paid several informants to monitor Memphis at the time and figure out exactly where King would be staying. Not only that, but according to Ellsberg, Tolson paid off the warden at the Jackson City prison so that Ray would be able to escape. This makes sense as to why immediately after escaping he met this really kind guy who just seemed to love him and gave him a bunch of money and fake passports. So several former agents, as well as James Earl Ray and those closely connected to the killings like the King family themselves, all believe the FBI to be the main culprit in this entire plot. And considering that it's believed Frank Liberto had many associations with the FBI in which he would carry out favors for them and they would look the other way on his operations, so it seems like the FBI, perhaps Tolson, had Liberto carry out the on-ground operations that it would take in order to have King killed. Also, this Raoul guy, as well as Liberto and everyone else, connects to like the JFK assassination and also the Robert Kennedy assassination, but I won't get into that right now.
In December of 1963, one month after JFK was killed, there was supposedly a meeting between Hoover and other high-ranking members of the FBI as to how they will have MLK taken care of. See, the FBI hated him for a whole slew of reasons. For one, people weren't exactly accepting of new ideologies at the time, and furthermore, King was causing issues for the established rule of how businesses and agencies were set up. Not only that, but this was at the height of the Russian panic or Red Scare thing where everyone was super afraid of communism, and while King's ideas by today's standards are fairly moderate, his ideas of a sort of universal income or guaranteed health coverage and things like that were seen as super evil commie at the time. So the FBI wanted him out of a picture. As a matter of fact, they were so determined to find dirt on him that they began bugging his hotel rooms with hidden microphones. How did they do that? Well, they had the help of people like Morel McCola, a former CIA operative who worked in South America, who was then moved into their early surveillance or COINTELPRO operations. Mikola was a close friend and member of King's inner circle, and it's believed that he was one of the people who began bugging his hotel rooms wherever he went. As a matter of fact, it's believed by many that he is the figure kneeling over the body of MLK right after he was shot in the famous Lao photograph of the associates of Dr. King pointing away from the motel and toward the rooming house. There was, for a long time, a mystery about the person who was kneeling over Dr. King, checking him for life signs. That person was Meryl McCullough, who somehow, when hearing the shot, instantly streaked up the stairs to the balcony and checked Dr. King. He was an undercover operative for the Memphis Police Department but reporting directly to an intelligence officer of the Memphis Police Department. Remember Lloyd Jowers that I mentioned earlier, the owner of Jim's Grill? Well, according to him, the day before the shooting, there was a meeting of conspirators in Jim's Grill that all had a part in the assassination. The meeting consisted of five men, and only two of them Jowers could identify. One of them was the aforementioned police Lieutenant Earl Clark, the supposed shooter, and unbeknownst to Jowers at the time, one of those men was Morel McCola. If all this is true, that would mean that Mikola was not only a close associate of Kings who was actually a government agent and bugging his hotel room, but that he was also part of the direct conspiracy to murder him and was at the meeting for it the day before. Using these hidden mics that were placed in King's hotel rooms, the FBI got information that they believe showed him as having extramarital affairs, believing this to be a good
One way to hurt King's image as the reverend and civil rights leader? They wrote him an, at the time, anonymous letter that has come out several years later to have originated directly from the FBI.
In this letter from the FBI, where the writer pretended to be a former supporter and fellow Black man of King, they say in the intro: "King, in view of your low-grade abnormal personal behavior, I will not dignify your name with either a Mister or a Reverend or a Doctor, and your last name calls to mind only the type of king such as King Henry VIII and his countless acts of adultery and immoral conduct lower than that of a beast." Talk about an intro. After proceeding throughout the entire course of the letter to call King a fraud, it ends by saying: "King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do this. This exact number has been selected for a specific reason; it has definite practical significance. You are done. There is but one way out for you; you better take it before your filthy abnormal fraudulent self is bare to the nation."
So if you ever think that the government didn't hate Martin Luther King four years before his assassination, here is a letter where they literally told him to kill himself. The head of the Memphis Police Department at the time was a 25-year veteran of the FBI, and as a matter of fact, whenever he came to the position, he said his number one goal was to make sure that the FBI and the MPD had a two-way street of communication.
After the first march took place on March 28th within Memphis, King decided that it was too dangerous to stay in Room 306, as it was a large windowed room that opened up into an open street. He decided to change his room to Room 202, that being a more secluded room facing away from the main road. However, before King got there, someone called the hotel and said that they were part of King's accompaniment and asked if they could have the room changed back to 306. By the time King got there, everything else had been booked, so he decided to just stick with Room 306. However, that call ahead was not part of King's group, and as a matter of fact, no one has ever identified where the random caller came from. However, I can think of a couple of people it could be, and they both start with "FBI."
During the course of our investigation, we revealed the fact that the mission of the FBI was to destroy Dr. King. That is all documented in the course of our reports, and we did criticize him severely for the illegal, unconstitutional way in which his civil rights were violated. Also, the day of the shooting, the FBI immediately took over the investigation, which made no sense because at the time it had nothing to do with anything outside of the state of Tennessee; it should have been a state issue. Even more weird, as soon as the FBI got MLK's body, they never performed an autopsy.
Also, remember that book I mentioned earlier, *He Slew a Dreamer*, the book that had all the information about how James Earl Ray was a racist and how he just really wanted to kill King? Well, the author of that book was William Bradford Huey, and he was very close friends with—you guessed it—J. Edgar Hoover. Immediately after MLK's assassination, a high-ranking agent by the name of Cartha Deloach put out a bulletin to Hoover saying that there's so much misinformation going around about the case that the FBI should quietly fund a book that would then allow there to be correct information about James Earl Ray and how racist and evil he was. Cartha Deloach—that name sounds familiar. Oh yeah, and while we're going down the rabbit hole of suspicious stuff that happened around this, let's just keep going.
The day of the assassination, whenever they were investigating the boarding house, Captain Ed Atkinson said that he overheard Earl Clark say to another police officer: "We're gonna have to cut the branches down. He couldn't have taken a shot from here." Which, if you'll remember, the branches mean a shot couldn't have been taken, and the MPD worked all night to make sure none were there. Also, Tennessee state commissioner at the time, Harry Avery, began his own investigation to try to figure out how James Earl Ray, a supposed klutz of a convict, was able to amass so much money and get so many fake IDs, to which he was immediately fired by Governor Buford Ellington.
A nurse who was at St. Joseph Hospital at the time that MLK was brought in said that he still had a pulse and they were attempting to resuscitate him before a group of men in suits came in and told them to step away from the body. As she was leaving the room, she turned around and said she saw the men take off King's life-saving equipment, and the only remaining doctor in the room who was with the men was the one who gave King the official time of 7:05 as being his time of death.
And speaking of deaths related to this whole thing, let's talk about some of the weird ones. A cab driver by the name of Lewis Ward—that's the third cab driver in this whole thing, anyway—said that the night of the shooting he met with another friend of his, named Buddy, who was a cab driver picking someone up from the Lorraine Motel whenever the shooting took place. But he said that he was looking at Martin Luther King whenever he was shot and then turned to his left and saw someone run out of the bushes in front of the boarding house, scale a wall, and get into a vehicle and drive away. Lewis Ward said that a few days later he stopped at the cab agency to ask if anyone had seen Buddy because he hadn't heard from him in a while, and they said that Buddy jumped out of a moving car going down the highway and was immediately run over and killed in a supposed suicide. They also said that before his death, the last time they saw him he was trying to tell everyone the story of the shooter who was escaping the crime scene.
Remember how I said earlier that despite all this, James Earl Ray couldn't get a retrial? Well, at first he had a lawyer, Z.T. Osborne, the former lawyer of Jimmy Hoffa, come and say that he would try to get him a new case. Three months after this, Osborne committed suicide, and his wife said that she never believed that he actually killed himself. Shortly after this, a judge said that he would look at the case because the evidence shows that Ray needs to be retried, and then he died of a heart attack. Another judge came in his place and says that Ray needs to be retried, and then he died of a heart attack. And then the third guy says: "Nope, no retrial, don't need it; he just leave him in there."
A year after the assassination, Martin Luther King's brother, Alfred King, was also looking into all of the details of this until he was found floating dead in his at-home swimming pool. The official story is that Alfred drowned; however, Alfred was a fantastic swimmer and, even more alarming, did not have any water in his lungs. He was also wearing just his underwear and had severe bruising around his neck, but the police decided that it was a drowning.
In 1971, Bill Sater, a reporter who was looking into the whereabouts of this assassination, was asking questions in Waco, Texas, whenever his drink was poisoned, and he died. Six years after this, the FBI Assistant Director of Intelligence, William Sullivan, was set to testify against J. Edgar Hoover in the House Select Committee on Assassinations. However, a few days before he was set to testify against Hoover, he was shot in the middle of the woods by a man who "mistook him for a deer."
Also, that thing I just mentioned, the House Select Committee on Assassinations—if you remember in my JFK video, this was an entire committee put together that was made up of senators and other government members to determine if the JFK assassination and the MLK assassination were part of a conspiracy. The one real piece of evidence that they managed to get out of that was: remember how in the beginning I said that Ray was supposedly taking a bounty to kill King from two KKK members? Yeah, it turns out they were dead at the time that that happened, so yeah, that's not true. However, the House Select Committee didn't come to the conclusion that MLK was definitely a conspiracy, but in 2012 it came out that the liaison that was giving them the information to review was actually a CIA agent. So in the committee that was put together to determine if the CIA killed MLK, it was determined that the CIA did not kill MLK because the evidence provided by the CIA said so.
So to go ahead and cover all my bases: uh, I do not want to unalive myself; I'm a great swimmer; I do not look like a deer. Is there anything else I'm missing? You're a questionable swimmer? Oh no, there was also a group of the CIA that was currently monitoring King at the time of the assassination, known as the 902nd Military Intelligence Group, that was being led by a Colonel Downey. They had cameras set up everywhere, secret agents set up everywhere to see what would happen with King. Now you would imagine that whenever the shooting happened they would have like a picture or something, and according to one former agent, there were in fact several pictures of Jowers running down the hill and around to the back of Jim's Grill. Whenever they were asked for these pictures as part of evidence at the House Select Committee on Assassinations, they said that they got rid of all of them; that every picture they took of the day of the assassination disappeared, and they dumped it. And isn't that convenient?
So after all of that, do you see why Shelby County, Tennessee, gave the King family a hundred dollars? There was this information, as well as personal accounts of witnesses, and everything combined that led a jury to believe that yeah, the government, as well as several other agencies including Lloyd Jowers, were a part of a larger conspiracy to kill Martin Luther King Jr. So take everything I just said as the evidence that the conspiracy occurred compared to the evidence of James Earl Ray, which is one drunk guy's report and fingerprints on a gun that did not shoot the bullet, and most of the people who were involved in this whole thing are either dead or ineffective now. Anyway, yeah.
When we see people like Martin Luther King, who were so resolved to make a difference that he garnered the hatred of those around him and including the country that he resided in, while we may not be able to hold these people accountable in any court on earth, it is our job to better understand the past so that we can be more prepared for what actions come in the future. And on that note, the FBI killed Martin Luther King.
I am further emphasizing that everything I just said was in Minecraft as a joke. It's all part of a big satire post that I'm doing right now, and none of it's real. None of this at all is real. It's all just me trying to be funny on my comedy YouTube channel, and boy, I sure do love jokes, and I thought it was pretty funny, and I hope that you thought it was funny too, and thank you for watching. But first of all, I need to make an announcement. So for starters, let me fix this. Now that's better. I'm excited to announce the new film from Ryder Evan Royalty and director Stephen Hancock: SCP Heretic. If you're watching this channel right now, then you've probably heard about their previous works; the likes of SCP Dollhouse and SCP Overlord are some of the best movies ever put to YouTube. Not only are they incredibly well-shot and edited movies in their own right, but they also serve as a love letter to the SCP community, one of the foundations of internet horror. Their new film, Heretic, is going to be the end of their trilogy and is shaping up to be the biggest yet. Evan did a better job at describing the movie than I ever could, so I'm going to leave a link to his video about it in the description. There will be a link to the Heretic Kickstarter in the description. I myself will be donating, and any bit helps. And even if you can't donate, which is totally understandable, just sharing the Kickstarter or the video introduction to Heretic itself will certainly help get the ball rolling. These movies serve as a testament of what can be done by independent creators on this website, which is why I'm so honored to be talking about it now. As a matter of fact, I have a video coming out in the near future about the other films that they have done, so stay tuned for that. But for now, check out Evan's previous videos and check out the links in the description and be on the ground floor of something really amazing. Thank you for listening to this; it certainly is a labor of love, and hopefully you love it at least a little bit as much as I do. So check that out. I hope that you enjoyed, and we are back to the video.
It's been a while since I've done a video like this that required this much research, especially about something like an assassination as a joke again, but I really love doing it. I love getting into all of the nitty-gritty about this; I've spent the past few days just combing over documents and watching documentaries about it, and I love it. This is my stuff, and I love having the opportunity to do that, and thank you all so much for giving me the opportunity to do that, and thank you for putting me where I'm at. And um, let me just say thank you so much for one million subscribers. This is honestly, for the channel, a pretty good video to have at one million. And I come here—no, you have to come here. This is the end of the video where I'm talking nonstop and I can't cut it, so you made noise, so now you have to be introduced. Um, I was standing up—that she said she was just standing up. It's still going right now; there's—I'm not cutting any of this, so well, it doesn't matter; it's too late; you already ruined it. So come over here. Um, hi. Okay, she's in my lap. Hello, this is Kayla. Hi. Hi. Uh, here's Kayla. How do you feel about one million subscribers? It's good. It's good. She threw me a party, and it was very cute, and I enjoyed it, so thank you for that. Okay, you can go now. Shoving me around. Thank you all so much uh for one million subscribers. Okay, thank you all so much for one million subscribers. Um, whenever I started this, it was just like a fun side project so that I could talk about weird stories on the internet, and now it's become all of this: one million people who like to listen to my ridiculous stories about conspiracy theories or the supernatural or Bible theory or whatever. And being able to take that from just like a fun little thing to do in my free time to all of this is an opportunity I never thought I received, but you've given it to me, and that means a lot. So thank you so much. Not only thank you to all of my subscribers, but thank you to all of my patrons. Thank you to my top-tier patrons that you can see here. Um, you guys have supported the channel and like something I never considered: like if you asked me at the game, "Would people pay you money directly for you to do this?" I would have said no, because that absolutely blows my mind, and I'm just overwhelmed with how good you all have been to me. This opportunity, you've given me a million subscribers; I can't process it. Um, but thanks to you all, thanks to you all supporting me as much as you have, allowing me to get to this point and everything else, and I'm just overwhelmed and blessed. Um, there will be a one-million Q&A; the questions have been coming from Patreon, so thank you for that. Not sure when that will be because I also want to open up the gold play button, so as soon as that gets here we'll do that. Um, but just thank you all so much for getting me to this point. I'm so excited for stuff I have coming in the future, and if you stuck around with me this long, I hope you want to stick around with me till then. But thank you all for being here. That should do it for now, so thank you for one million subs. I hope that you enjoyed, and as always, I will see you in the next one. Bye.