THE SHOOTER

As soon as Martin Luther King fell, an aide, believed to be Marrell McCullough, pointed to the bathroom window of Bessie Brewer's boarding house. The fingers of others followed him, as recorded in photographs of the assassination. (For more on McCullough, see Part 5, "Strange Goings-On at the Memphis P.D.")From that window, or so the official story goes, a man named James Earl Ray allegedly fired the shot that killed Martin Luther King. Yet a number of questions and contradictions offer reason to doubt the official explanation. For instance:

-- James Earl Ray, not unlike his lone-nut cousin Lee Harvey Oswald, was a poor shot in the Army.

-- Ray was never convicted in a trial by a jury of his peers. He confessed to the crime under extremely adverse circumstances, but immediately recanted his confession and sought a new trial.

-- At Ray's evidentiary hearing, a former FBI ballistics expert testified that not even the most skilled gunman could have accurately fired a rifle in the manner claimed by the government prosecution. According to the expert, to effectively line up for such a shot, the butt of the rifle would have had to stick six inches into the wall. The prosecution countered that Ray had contorted himself into position around the bathtub in order to make the kill shot, which seems equally incredulous.

-- After the assassination, Wayne Chastain, a reporter at the Memphis Press Scimitar, came across an unpublished Associated Press photograph in the newspaper's files which was taken from the boarding house bathroom window, through which Ray allegedly shot Martin Luther King. The sniper's view was obscured by branches from trees growing between the boarding house and the Motel Lorraine. The City of Memphis ordered the sanitation department to cut those trees down shortly after the assassination, maMartin Luther King it impossible to conclusively determine how the tree branches may have interfered in a shot fired from the boarding house bathroom.

-- The bullet recovered from Martin Luther King's body has not been adequately tested and has not been proven to match Ray's alleged murder weapon.

-- Only one witness claimed to have seen Ray leaving the boarding house bathroom, a man named Charles Stephens. According to two other sources, Stephens was extremely inebriated at the time. The first three descriptions Stephens gave didn't resemble Ray at all -- in fact, Stephens' first two descriptions of the alleged assassin were of a "nigger". Stephens admitted that he did not get a good look at the alleged assassin. It wasn't until the FBI paid $30,000 in bar tabs for Stephens that he fingered Ray as the hit man.

-- Two other witnesses saw someone leaving the boarding house bathroom. One witness, Bessie Brewer, the owner of the boarding house, could not identify the individual and refused to identify Ray as the man she had rented a room to. The other witness, Stephens' common law wife Grace, said she did get a good look at him, and that it was definitely not James Earl Ray. Grace's drunken husband became the preferred witness. Grace was committed to a mental institution. According to her lawyer, C.M. Murphy, she was committed illegally, and after she was committed, the Memphis prosecutors removed her records from the hospital. After years of imprisonment under heavy sedation, Grace still refused to recant her story.

-- In addition to Brewer, two other witnesses at the boarding house insisted that the man who rented Ray's room looked nothing like James Earl Ray.

-- Less than two minutes after the fatal shot was fired, a bundle containing the 30.06 Remington rifle allegedly used in the assassination and some of Ray's belongings was conveniently found in the doorway of the Canipe Amusement Company next door to the boarding house. Ray would have had to fire the shot that killed Martin Luther King from his contorted position in the bathroom, exit the sniper's nest, go to his room to collect his belongings and wrap and tie it all in a bundle, leave his room, run down the stairs and out of the boarding house, stash the bundle next door, and then get away from the scene unnoticed -- all within two minutes!

-- A service station manager told an investigator for Ray's defense team that he saw Ray several blocks from the boarding house at the time of the shooting. He was stabbed soon after he started talMartin Luther King to the defense team.