He Slew the Dreamer: My Search for the Truth about James Earl Ray and the Murder of Martin Luther King

By William Bradford Huie, Wayne Greenhaw and Riché Richardson

Author William Bradford Huie was one of the most celebrated figures of twentieth-century journalism. A pioneer of "checkbook journalism," he sought the truth in controversial stories when the truth was hard to come by. In the case of James Earl Ray, Huie paid Ray and his original attorneys $40,000 for cooperation in explaining his movements in the months before Martin Luther King’s assassination and up to Ray’s arrest weeks later in London. Huie became a major figure in the investigation of King’s assassination and was one of the few persons able to communicate with Ray during that time.

Huie, a friend of King, writes that he went into his investigation of Ray believing that a conspiracy was behind King’s murder. But after retracing Ray’s movements through California, Louisiana, Mexico, Canada, Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis, and London, Huie came to believe that James Earl Ray was a pathetic petty criminal who hated African Americans and sought to make a name for himself by murdering King. He Slew the Dreamer was originally published in 1970 soon after Ray went to prison and was republished in 1977, but was out of print until the 1997 edition, published with the cooperation of Huie’s widow.

This new edition features an essay by scholar Riché Richardson that provides fresh insight, and it includes the 1977 prologue, which Huie wrote countering charges by members of Congress, the King family, and others who claimed the FBI had aided and abetted Ray.

In 1970, 1977, 1997, and now, He Slew the Dreamer offers a remarkably detailed examination of the available evidence at the time the murder occurred and an invaluable resource to current debates over the King assassination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Nov 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781496820648

William Bradford Huie

William Bradford Huie (1910–1986), a journalist, investigative reporter, editor, television host, and novelist, wrote hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles as well as over twenty books, including The Americanization of Emily, The Execution of Private Slovik, The Revolt of Mamie Stover, Mud on the Stars (all made into films), and Wolf Whistle, the story of the Emmett Till lynching. He is author of Three Lives for Mississippi and He Slew the Dreamer: My Search for the Truth about James Earl Ray and the Murder of Martin Luther King, both published by University Press of Mississippi.

Book preview

PROLOGUE TO THE 1977 EDITION

The murder of Martin Luther King in 1968 was not the result of a conspiracy. A Negro-hating, habitual criminal named James Earl Ray, alone and unaided, killed Reverend King expecting to make himself a hero. So there was no conspiracy; Ray wasn’t hired, directed, or used.

Now, however, there is a conspiracy in this case … a despicable conspiracy. Nearly a decade after the murder, an effort is being made to convince Americans, especially young Americans, that the murder was arranged by agents of the US government. Aiding this effort are black members of Congress, known as the Black Caucus; the US ambassador to the United Nations, Reverend Andrew Young; and Coretta King, widow of Reverend King.

These black leaders were enraged by the revelation that Reverend King was so distrusted by John and Robert Kennedy that in 1961 they ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to tap his telephones and install listening devices in his offices and bedrooms. These black citizens were further enraged by the revelation that the director of the FBI, John Edgar Hoover, so detested Reverend King that he invited him to commit suicide before he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and he (Hoover) informed Mrs. King of Reverend King’s frequent acts of adultery.

These revelations, startlingly cruel, are hard to bear by the relatives and disciples of the black Baptist preacher who led the movement for racial change in America. These citizens have cause to feel resentful and hurt. But they do not have cause to charge government complicity in murder.

Let it be agreed that John and Robert Kennedy ordered Reverend King bugged unmercifully. Let it be agreed that Hoover, who considered Reverend King a hypocrite, used counter-intelligence methods against him. Let it be agreed that some FBI agents, along with many other Americans, welcomed the news that Reverend King was dead. The conflicts in America since 1960 have engendered such bitterness.

But it cannot be agreed that Hoover or any other government agent arranged the murder of Reverend King by or with James Earl Ray. For this is a lie. There is no evidence that any agent of the United States, or of the state of Tennessee, or of the city of Memphis was involved in the murder; to charge this, when a stunned nation is trying to recover its equilibrium, is a grave offense.

In their effort to strike at the government, these black citizens and their servants in the media are striking at me, calling me an ally of the FBI. To maintain that FBI agents committed the murder, they must discredit my account of how Ray, alone and for his own reasons, committed it.

In 1968–70, in Look magazine and in a book titled He Slew the Dreamer, I explained how Reverend King was murdered by Ray. With Ray’s help and approval, I answered the questions as to where he got his money, how he obtained a Canadian passport, and what his motive was.

Then and thereafter my account of the murder was denounced but never disproved, and in 1976 the US Department of Justice, under Attorney General Edward H. Levi who had been head of the University of Chicago Law School, reported that my account is true.

In 1969, after Ray pleaded guilty of the murder, his attorney became J. B. Stoner, an anti-Semitic and anti-Negro lawyer long associated with the Ku Klux Klan. Stoner sued me, charging I had violated Ray’s civil rights when I paid Ray and his lawyers for helping me find the truth in the case. The suit went through the federal courts to the US Supreme Court. To defend myself cost me $20,000. The courts ruled that in no way had I violated Ray’s rights in establishing and publishing the truth.

I was a friend of Reverend King, and he was my friend. We first met in 1956. In May 1965, less than three years before his death, he wrote an introduction to my book Three Lives for Mississippi. Our names appeared together on that book in every major language. The book was published in the United States by the New York Herald Tribune and was serialized by the Herald Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, and about forty other newspapers belonging to the Herald Tribune Syndicate.

Here are excerpts from Reverend King’s introduction:

…. Three Lives for Mississippi reveals without mitigation the worst in American life with no effort to obscure realities because it speaks from the honest conscience of man. It resurrects from death the meaning of three fine lives. This is a book written to validate the promise of Canon John Donne, Death, thou shalt not die.

…. It is an important book because its author makes himself a part of the continuing struggle for freedom. William Bradford Huie writes as a reporter but also as an impassioned man. He writes with clinical detail but not with detachment. And above all, he writes of evil in the South as an eight-generation Southerner.

…. Mr. Huie recognizes that the unholy alliance of violence and Southern justice indicts not only murderers but the larger society that shelters them. In boldly proclaiming war upon both he joins a yet small but growing force in the white Southern community: those who have decided that social-economic privilege does not compensate for a mutilated conscience and a base betrayal of their democratic heritage.

…. This book is part of the arsenal decent Americans can employ to make democracy for all truly a birthright and not a distant dream.

When Reverend King was murdered, it was as his friend … and as the reporter whom he admired … that I paid Ray and his lawyers $40,000 on their promise to help me establish the truth.

I carried out my contract with Ray to the letter. And he, at first, tried to give me what he had promised. Then he began lying, and I proved to him that he was lying. And despite his lies, I established and published the truth in 1968–70.

Now, because Americans, particularly young Americans, need the truth to save themselves from being hoodwinked, I have added this prologue and reissued He Slew the Dreamer.

WILLIAM BRADFORD HUIE

Hartselle, Alabama

June 17, 1977

ONE

When a forty-year-old habitual criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested in London on June 8, 1968, and charged with the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I decided to try to persuade him to sell me information. That he would ever give or sell information to any agent of the law seemed unlikely; that he would ever give information at any trial seemed even less likely. And no suspect or defendant in the United States can be compelled to give information. So what Ray knew could be learned and used only if someone like me could deal with him.

Through his attorney, Arthur J. Hanes, of Birmingham, Alabama, I sent this letter to Ray:

Dear Mr. Ray:

I’m interested in dealing with you. I’m told that you read, so perhaps you have read some of my books or magazine stories. My latest books, Three Lives for Mississippi and The Klansman, are about murder planned and done by groups of men to try to prevent racial change. Both these books are being filmed. I want to find the truth about how the murder of Dr. King was planned and done. I want to publish this truth, then film it.

Do you want to help me? Obviously you were involved in Dr. King’s murder. You bought a rifle in Birmingham; you were in Memphis with this rifle and left it at the murder scene; you fled the scene in a white Mustang which you had also bought in Birmingham, then you abandoned the Mustang in Atlanta and fled to Canada and England. Evidence of these actions and movements is convincing. There are also indications that you may have had accomplices.

To the charge of murder I assume you will plead not guilty, so I’m not suggesting that you sell me a legal confession of murder. I am suggesting that you assist me in recreating your experience during the period between your escape and your arrest. You escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary on April 23, 1967. Dr. King was murdered in Memphis on April 4, 1968. You were arrested in London on June 8, 1968. I’ll want to know what you were doing, what name you were using, whom you talked with, and how and from whom you got money.

If you sell me such information, will you further jeopardize yourself? I don’t know. That’s for you to decide. I know that a large number of Americans are disturbed by the assassinations. Meaning the murders of the two Kennedys and of Dr. King. These Americans yearn to know the whole truth about why and how these murders were done, and what these murders tell us about our society. To any man who helps explain the murder of Dr. King, even if he is the murderer, these Americans will feel some measure of gratitude.

So I think you might help yourself by helping me. There is an old saying: To understand is to forgive. It isn’t entirely true, but it is partially true. You might help yourself by helping me to help others understand you.

If you want to deal with me, I will have a contract drawn for us to sign, and I will pay you a substantial sum. You can use the money to pay your lawyers or in any way you choose. Through your lawyers we can begin communicating in writing. I can send in questions; you can send out answers. After you have been returned to Memphis, I will go to the judge to whom your case is assigned and show him the contract existing between us. You can ask the judge to allow you to talk with me. The judge’s decision, at first, may be against you, but at some point, perhaps after your trial has begun, I believe he will allow you to talk with me. Until then we can do our best by writing to one another, and by communicating orally through your attorneys.

Sincerely,   

WILLIAM BRADFORD HUIE

When Ray replied that he wanted to deal with me, contracts were signed, and I made an initial payment of $10,000. I paid this money to James Earl Ray, who had personally signed the contract, and Ray assigned the $10,000 to Arthur J. Hanes. For me this was a calculated risk: I didn’t know what I might get for the money. Ray had served a total of thirteen years in four different prisons, so he would have an old con’s reluctance to identify accomplices. He had practiced deception all his life, so even about himself how much truth would he tell me? I could accept as truth only what I could verify; and verification is often difficult and sometimes impossible. Nevertheless, I had decided to pay my money and make the effort.

His first statement to me was that he didn’t kill Dr. King. He said that, as instructed, he bought the rifle in Birmingham, carried it to Memphis, and took a room at the rooming house at 3:15 P.M. on April 4. He said he didn’t know anybody was to be killed, didn’t know that Dr. King was in Memphis. He said that, when he heard the shot at 6:01 P.M., he was sitting in the Mustang on Main Street. The other man came running down the stairs, dropped the rifle on the sidewalk, jumped into the back seat of the Mustang, covered up with a sheet, and he (Ray) drove away. About eight blocks from the rooming house, he said, the other man told him to stop, then jumped out of the car, after which he (Ray) drove on toward Atlanta.

I regarded this account as neither true nor false, only as a beginning between a criminal accustomed to lying and a reporter seeking the truth. I thought that the truth could come only after weeks, perhaps months, of my working with Ray, pulling and hauling, checking, challenging, correcting, until two plus two finally equaled four.

When Ray was returned to Memphis on July 19, 1968, he was lodged in the Shelby County Jail under conditions which made reflection and writing difficult. Four ordinary cells had been converted into one cell. All windows had been covered with sheet steel, necessitating air conditioning and continuous lighting. Television cameras watched Ray continuously. To sleep he had to wear a mask. Guards were always in the cell with him, often playing gin rummy. But, despite these conditions, Ray began writing. He was given a table, and I sent him a dictionary, tablets, pens, road maps of the entire United States, Canada, and Mexico, and blank diaries for 1967 and 1968. I asked him to make at least one entry on every page of the diaries from April 23, 1967 to June 8, 1968. On the maps I asked him to trace all of his travels.

The case was assigned to Judge W. Preston Battle, and on Wednesday, August 14, 1968, I called on Judge Battle in his office in the Shelby County Courthouse. I explained my contracts with Ray and told the judge what I wanted to do. He said he would not allow Ray to talk with me prior to his trial. Pointedly, however, the judge issued no order to interfere with my communicating in writing with Ray. He allowed Ray and me to communicate in writing which was never read by any agent of the law other than Ray’s attorney.

As Ray began writing, I began trying to understand him, to see him in my mind as a person, to imagine how he felt and thought. And whenever I begin trying to understand a man, I always start with his birthdate. When was he born in relation to the Depression? Or to the wars? I was born in 1910, so I was out of college in 1931, a $20-a-week reporter writing about hungry people who were trying to survive and be somebody. I have always been aware that the year as well as the condition of my birth affected how I thought and felt and acted. In 1953 I wrote a book about Eddie Slovik, the only American since the Civil War to be shot by the Army for cowardice (The Execution of Private Slovik). Eddie Slovik was born in 1920, and a prison supervisor helped me to understand Eddie, whom I never met, by telling me this:

Here in the Michigan reformatory I was Eddie’s supervisor for about three of his teenage years. I never had a boy I liked more. He was good-hearted, a good worker, and with a little luck I figured he could make a pretty good citizen.

Well, he fouled up in the Army and Eisenhower had him shot. I’m not going to make any excuses for Eddie. A man’s only a man and he stands up to life as best he can and takes what comes to him. Men in my business don’t offer excuses for boys; we just try to help. But if you want to understand Eddie Slovik as he was, and not as he ought to have been, then you’ve got to understand the year and the condition of his birth.

Men in my business know that there are good years and bad years to be born in the United States. It’s like those good years and bad years for wine in France. There are good years and bad years to be born in a city like Detroit. And, brother, let’s face it: if your old man was a Polack punch press operator making automobile fenders, then 1920 was a bad year to be born.

If you were born in 1920 and your old man was a fender maker, then when you were ten and eleven and twelve, your old man didn’t make many fenders because Ford and General Motors and Chrysler weren’t selling many. Your old man had plenty of time to lie at home drunk and beat up the kids and the old woman. Your mother couldn’t get much scrubbing to do for other folks, so she had time to drink and fight while the kids foraged in the streets. The welfare paid your rent and gave you potatoes; and if you were twelve years old in that situation in 1932, then everybody you knew was hungry and fighting and stealing and drinking and in trouble. You were scared. And you came out of it—unless you were unusual—either weak and scared and feeling inferior, or else rebellious and resentful and full of hate, wanting to fight and maybe kill somebody.

Eddie Slovik, a petty thief at fifteen, came out of it weak and scared and feeling inferior.

James Earl Ray was born in Alton, Illinois, on March 10, 1928. That, too, was a bad year if your father was described as a laborer, a drifter, a ditchdigger, indifferent to his children, a frequenter of poolrooms, often unemployed, and away from home. In 1929, the family moved across the Mississippi River to St. Louis; then, in 1932, it moved northward past Huckleberry Finn country to Ewing, Missouri: population 324. Ray’s mother, Lucille Maher, was nineteen when he was born. During Depression years, she bore eight more children, in dirt-floor poverty, and broke down into alcoholism. In a neglected area of a Catholic cemetery at Godfrey, Illinois, I found her grave. LUCILLE MARY RYAN. 1909–1961. The spelling on the gravestone is significant. It should be LUCILLE MAHER RAY. But the Rays either couldn’t spell or else they had so little feeling of identity that they couldn’t care. When, in the early 1940s, the family broke up and the children went to live in orphanages or with relatives, they spelled their names in different ways: Ray, Rayns, Raines,