From Dallas to Memphis: Correlations of Two Assassinations

...ORIGINALLY WRITTEN OCTOBER, 2013...

EVERYONE WHO KNOWS ME KNOWS I'M A JFK ASSASSINATION BUFF... BLAH BLAH BLAH, BUT I STUMBLED UPON THIS PIECE THAT I WROTE ROUGHLY 2 YEARS BACK COMPARING THE EVENTS SURROUNDING JFK'S ASSASSINATION BACK IN 1963 TO THE EVENTS OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.'S ASSASSINATION IN 1968 (AND ALL OF THE STRANGE PARALLELS BETWEEN THE TWO). AS PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING ELSE I WRITE, IT'S A LONG ONE (ABOUT 13 PAGES, ME THINKS). IT'S SOMETHING I REALLY ENJOYED STUDYING AND WRITING AND I'M EVEN CONSIDERING DOING AN INDEPENDENT FILM ON THE MATTER. JUST FIGURED I'D STICK IT HERE IN CASE ANYONE IS INTERESTED IN SOME HISTORICAL READING OR WHATEVER AND I KNOW I STUCK IT ON ONE OF MY TUMBLR'S A WHILE BACK. SO NOW IT IS HERE FOR Y'ALLS VIEWING PLEASURE. :)

   As many know I am an avid researcher and expert on the subject of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I have been researching that tragic event since 1993 when I was only eight years old. Other famous assassinations and killings went relatively un-followed by me, primarily because I did not feel they had the mystery that the Kennedy killings did. That came after my first experience with the assassination when I came home from school one day, I was in second grade, and my mother was tape recording the British television mini series “The Men Who Killed Kennedy.” I came home just in time to catch the second episode in the series, titled “The Forces of Darkness”, wherein the first half of the program focuses on the discovery of what appears to be a man in a Dallas policeman’s uniform firing a weapon at President Kennedy in a photograph taken by bystander Mary Moorman. Upon seeing that I had the direct visual I needed to be sent into stunned trepidation; the man arrested and held accountable for the killing of the President was innocent!?

    Now as I have grown older, more intelligent and researched the case much further much skepticism has arose as to the validity of this figure in Moorman’s photograph and whether it was a real person. However, that’s what sparked the intrigue on my part and in the last seventeen years all of my study has helped me reach the conclusion on the case that while he may have and likely was involved on some level, Lee Harvey Oswald (the man arrested and held accountable for the assassination of President Kennedy) did not play a role in the shooting of the President at all. At worst he committed an act of conspiracy to commit murder.

    While I have always had a supreme dedication to the assassination of President Kennedy, only recently have the other two great American assassinations of that decade really come of interest to me, these obviously being the assassinations of Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy (JFK’s brother) and the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. My lack of interest came from simple ignorance as to the story surrounding those two assassinations. As far as I knew Sirhan Sirhan was undoubtedly the one and only killer of Robert Kennedy and that James Earl Ray was undoubtedly the one and only killer of Martin Luther King, Jr. The Robert Kennedy assassination was the first to attract my attention after I got a hold of what I would call the quintessential RFK assassination documentary titled “RFK Must Die”. Within it I was stunned to see and hear all the evidence that argued perhaps Sirhan did not act alone (however unlike Lee Harvey Oswald there is little doubt and far too much eyewitness testimony to argue he was not involved at all). So that got my wheels spinning about the RFK assassination.

    Of further intrigue in this matter is the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed almost exactly two months before RFK was, and therefore in much of the RFK information I examined there was constant reference to the King killing only a short time before. Despite this not telling me a thing about the ins and outs of how the assassination of Dr. King went down, it got my attention and asked me to do a little delving into that matter. Even in only gather a novice collection of information on the matter and having seen what officially happened compared to what the immediate evidence, as well as what James Earl Ray had to say on the matter, I was completely stunned as to how remarkably similar and sinister the aspects surrounding the Martin Luther King murder was to the killing of President Kennedy and his supposed assassin.

    Having deeply researched the killing and the background of Lee Harvey Oswald I am much more educated to offer an opinion as to his direct involvement as an assassin as oppose to James Earl Ray, and this despite the striking similarities in both cases I cannot argue in favor of Ray’s innocence in some cases the way I can Oswald’s. But nevertheless, the fact that I believe there was a well-structured and powerful conspiracy involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, and that Oswald was a patsy as he always said, I am strongly led to believe the same to be the case for James Earl Ray.

    Before delving into the assassinations directly, it is interesting how Ray found his way to Memphis. He didn’t live there and in fact had a hard time finding the place that he supposedly shot Dr. King from. According to Ray he was in town as part of a gun running operation, wherein he was working along with a Hispanic man who went by the name of “Raoul”. Now seeing as this Raoul has never been found (seeing as in the investigation of Dr. King’s murder no effort was made to find him) it is impossible to say this was his real name but considering the type of work being conducted and the fact that Ray was himself using an alias as they worked together leads me to believe that Raoul was just an alias. Whatever the case, Ray’s dealings with drug running are reportedly what put him in Memphis right across the way from Dr. King’s hotel. Furthermore, according to Ray’s story, it was Raoul’s suggestion for him to get a room at that particular location. Therefore, Raoul set him up there.

    This is intriguing especially in the case of Lee Harvey Oswald, who himself just happened to be working in an office building that President Kennedy was passing by on his trip through Dallas in 1963. Even more intriguing is the fact that on the President’s whole route from the airport to the planned luncheon he was to attend on the edge of Dallas, the only part of the route that was altered was a small one block change that put President Kennedy right under the windows of Oswald’s place of business (as oppose to passing it at a city block’s distance away).

    This connection was intriguing enough but it was almost empty of meaning when it came to the assassination events themselves. On the day of Dr. King’s death the security that had been there to watch over him during his visit to Memphis was suddenly called away, leaving the area around the motel he stayed at there suddenly unobserved and wide open for anyone with a grudge to take a pot shot at him. The fact that Dr. King stayed at a motel that required him to walk up and outdoor staircase to the second floor in itself made him more open to an attack from someone. On a side note, Dr. King had been planning on staying at a white owned hotel but received an anonymous call from someone suggesting he relocate to the Lorraine Motel, which was a black-owned motel in the more black part of Memphis. Dr. King did just that and interestingly enough that relocation cost him his life.

    In the case of Dallas 1963, President Kennedy was visiting a major city in the American south, the part of the country where he was most hated. Up until that day in Dallas the hostility towards the President had been building and building (and only a short time before while cabinet member Adlai Stevenson was visiting the city he was accosted by someone on the street). However, despite this obvious hostility towards the President (including the fact that his life had been threatened in Miami only days before) his security was trimmed down as far as it could be. He had only two motorcycle officers around his motorcade and the Dallas Police officers on the scene were told not to assist in the motorcade at all. They were practically there as spectators! So in both the situation of JFK as well as Dr. King, despite obvious hostilities about both men suddenly saw the security around them dwindle when they most likely needed it to increase. And in both cases both men were taken out in a relatively open and easy manner.

    The outline of the two prospective shootings are so similar it’s almost frightening and makes even the strongest disbelievers consider the possibility that similar factions were involved in both the rubbing out of President Kennedy and Dr. King. It is of interest here that even President Kennedy supported the Civil Rights Movement, even then in its early stages. And if one takes even just a modestly close glance at the ways the two events were bore out the similarities are just staggering.

    First there are the reactions to the two individual shootings. Officially in Dallas it was determined that all shots fired at President Kennedy were fired from the Texas School Book Depository and that there was no evidence of additional shots or shots fired from other locations. In the case of Dr. King in Memphis, the official story is very similar. One key difference is the complete acceptance that there was only one shot fired at Dr. King (whereas there were at least three, and likely more, fired at the President). However, much as with Dallas, officially it was determined the one shot fired was fired from the second floor bathroom window of a boarding house nearby the Lorraine Motel. Both these conclusions were reached by government bodies, both of which were heavily influenced by the FBI.

    However, in the reality of these two moments there is much more to the story. In Dallas, while the whole story seemed to be open and shut, more than half of the witnesses to the shooting claimed it came from areas other than the Book Depository. The bulk of these witnesses thought the shooting came from behind the fence at a top of a small knoll to the right side of the President’s motorcade, and these witnesses were captured in photographs and films charging up the hill towards the fence right after the shooting. Amidst these witnesses were the bulk of Dallas police officers in the area, who also believed they heard the shots from that area. There was an abundance of evidence and eyewitness testimony to the contrary of what was officially determined, and anyone who had anything to say different from what was officially decided was essentially ignored.

    Such is very similar with the shooting of Dr. King. In the first photograph taken of the scene, showing Dr. King down on the ground and his colleagues standing directly above him and pointing in the direction they thought the shooting came from. They were not pointing towards the boarding house however, but rather the bank next to it. All eyewitness testimony points to something other than the official conclusion that James Earl Ray shot Dr. King from the bathroom of the boarding house. One eyewitness in particular saw a man who seemed to be obscuring himself behind a sheet in a thicket of trees between the motel and the boarding house. This man was the one who fired at Dr. King and then quickly fled the area only to mix in with the mingling people flocking to the scene of the shooting later on. Another witness (whose story is subject to skepticism because he had been reportedly recovering from an alcoholic binge at the time of Dr. King’s shooting) claimed he saw a man in this same area fire a shot and then break down the gun. This witness too claimed the man he saw with a gun was later in the mix of people who flocked to the scene afterward. There were other witnesses as well who claimed to have seen activity there in that thicket area.

    Conversely, as far as the two official murder scenes are considered there is little to nothing that justifies the guilt that has been maintained against both Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray all these many years. In the case of Oswald, of the nine witnesses who saw activity in the proposed shooting location only one witness claims the man he saw was Oswald (and some half of these witnesses claimed there were either two men at the shooting location or that the man there was of dark complexion (of which Oswald was not). Due to the distinctive difference in markings on the three shells found at the proposed shooting location it would have been impossible for them to have been fired three in a row in rapid succession (yet such would have had to be the case if Oswald was alone guilty of the murder of President Kennedy). The weapon was also conveniently discovered near the sniper’s nest. Despite strong efforts, it has never completely and legitimately been tied to Oswald. His palm print was found on it, but only after his death when “agents” came and visited his body and printed him. The chain of evidence from the place of the rifle’s purchase in Chicago to Oswald’s post office box in Dallas was also broken by the fact that the name Alek Hidell, presumably an alias of Oswald’s, was used to purchase the rifle. Oswald had his box in his name and did not clear any mail for anyone other than himself to be picked up there. While it cannot be seriously argued that there was not someone or someone’s in that sniper’s next location, whether they played a significant role in the shooting of the President is in serious doubt.

    Such is true in the case of James Earl Ray and the second floor bathroom window he supposedly fired from. Of all the witnesses who saw anything from outside the boarding house none of them corroborate the shooting as having come from that house at all. From within only one witness legitimately saw a man walk out of the bathroom (“with something in his hands”; a gun?). Immediately after the shooting to this day she has said the man she saw was definitely not James Earl Ray, and interestingly enough, shortly after the death of Dr. King this witness’s was unjustly put into an asylum for over a decade. Assumed forgotten, it wasn’t until famous attorney Mark Lane (who was one of the first to criticize the Warren Commission and their handling of the Kennedy assassination) found out she was there and what she had to day and had her released. Instead the investigators and the FBI put their stock in another inhabitant of the boarding house there. He would state that he saw James Earl Ray specifically flee the bathroom with a gun right after the shooting. However, the account of this first witness along with a cab driver who visited the house right around the time of the shooting said this witnesses was passed out drunk at the time of the shooting.

    By his own account, which has been substantiated by a few others, Ray stated that shortly before the shooting took place he went to have a flat tire on his Mustang fixed. When he arrived at the mechanic he was told they were to busy and to come back later. When Ray returned to the rooming house police had already converged on the scene and the Reverend had already been shot. Being an escaped felon, Ray decided not to hang around and left the scene. By this account he was not even in the boarding house, much less the second floor restroom, at the time of the shooting. This connects strongly with the story of Oswald, of whom there is much more evidence to suggest he was down on the first or second floor at the time President Kennedy was assassination; and yet the sniper’s perch was way up on the sixth floor. As with this story that Oswald was elsewhere during Kennedy’s assassination, Ray’s story that he was not around when Dr. King was shot was equally immediately dismissed as nonsense by the authorities. But at the same time, with only one witness (and a passed out alcoholic one at that) to corroborate Ray’s presence in the house at all during that time there is less proof to suggest he was there than to suggest that he was not.

    As with Oswald and the rifle and shells found in the Book Depository, Ray was equally ignorant and sloppy as to leave a nice little bundle of evidence behind at the killing scene when he reportedly fled. Down on the street in front of the boarding house was found a rifle that Ray supposedly purchased mixed up with a bundle of other belongings tied back to him. This appears even more inconceivable than the idea that Oswald would have shot the President and then abandoned the shells and the rifle there. However, if one is to have someone else killed and then another person must be framed up for the killing evidence must be planted. Such was never more obviously the case for James Earl Ray, who obviously did not want to get caught if he was the killer seeing as he fled the country a short time after the shooting. But even more remarkable than with the case of “Oswald’s” rifle, which could not be tied to him, could not have fired shots from the three found shells in succession and which could only be connected to one bullet (the magic bullet) as far as the ammunition fired at President Kennedy was “Ray’s” rifle. While the bullet fragments found in the Kennedy assassination were subjected to specific testing, including spectrographic analysis (in which the results have been kept from the public), none of the fragments recovered from the bullet fired into Dr. King were subjected to analysis of this nature. They were never officially or legitimately tied to the rifle found at all. The evidence, as it stands now, to tie this rifle to the bullet fired into Dr. King is, not partially, but completely zero!

    One more interesting connection between Oswald and Ray is the relative quickness with which things were discovered after the shootings. In Oswald’s case there is the issue of how quickly he was seen after the assassination and with Ray it’s the issue of how quickly this bundle of his belongings was found after the Dr. King assassination.

    In the case of Oswald, he was found in the lunchroom on the second floor of the Book Depository within 90 seconds of the assassination. Officially the time figure is 90 seconds, however the witness who first saw him was Dallas Officer Marion Baker, who performed a timed test, at a walking pace, for the Warren Commission, wherein they determined this 90 second figure. All witness accounts and physical evidence states he ran into the Book Depository and sprinted upstairs to the second floor. A more legitimate time figure suggests he encountered Oswald between 60 to 75 seconds. This is after Oswald would have had to rearrange boxes (as photos show boxes were moved within 30 seconds after the last shot fired at Kennedy), wipe his rifle of prints, stash it in a well hidden spot, spring the length of the building to the staircase and then descend four floors; doing all of this in less than a minute. When these factors are considered the whole feat seems impossible. The impossibility is only bolstered by Officer Baker’s remembrance that Oswald was not tired or short of breath during their encounter (even though he had just supposedly killed the President of the United States and ran the length of a floor and down four staircases only seconds before). True researchers into this aspect of the Kennedy assassination would have no choice but to say that whether Oswald was involved in the assassination there is no way he could have been a shooter up on the sixth floor of the Book Depository. In really, time does not stand still!

    In the case of Ray, who was not found at all until after he had already split the country and was arrested in Britain, it was his weapon and a few articles that belonged to him that were discovered quickly. Within two minutes of the shooting of Dr. King these items were found, and most there argue this time figure was more than likely less than two minutes. This left Ray less than 120 seconds to finish his feat, escape his bathroom sniper’s perch, gather up a bunch of his belongings, of which he wrapped the rifle in with, and then flee down to the first floor of the boarding house and go outside. And here it seems he randomly dropped this collection of articles and climbed into his car and took off. Again, while not as improbable as the Oswald feat, other than the argument that these articles found were genuinely Ray’s and genuinely left there by him there is nothing to defend, either evidentially or psychologically, the idea that Ray himself abandoned these items in his effort to flee. On top of this, as with Oswald who was not seen by a single soul going up or coming down from the sixth floor of the Book Depository, not a soul saw Ray in the rooming house around the time of Dr. King’s shooting. Nobody saw him flee from the house or take off in his car. In fact, nobody reported ever seeing him in the area, which only goes to substantiate his story. The odds are these items were conveniently left there to frame the accused killer.

    From here we have the question of absurd locations to choose to commit political assassinations. The sixth floor sniper’s next in the Book Depository has been mercilessly critiqued as a horrible location to pick to commit the shooting from. The window there only opened halfway, forcing an assassin to be down on his knees. A stack of boxes there suggests the killer had to balance his rifle on these crooked boxes as a form of tripod. The boxes seemingly stacked around the window, presumably to obstruct a view of the assassin from other tall building’s nearby (which obviously didn’t work seeing as several witnesses from other locations saw people in that nest area), were next to impossible to fit behind. A shooter there would have been wedged and a pole along the wall there would have provided an obstruction as well. Oswald also had a tree obstructing the route the President took for a good distance. Had he moved down to the southwest corner windows there were no other tall buildings nearby, he would have had an easier route to the stairs to run down, this tree wouldn’t have obstructed his view and, most significantly, he would have had more space and an easier shot at the President. And yet he chose a cramped, confined, somewhat obstructed and uncomfortable location to shoot from with a shoddy weapon and yet somehow pulled off one of the greatest and most odd shooting performances of all time (especially since everyone who saw him with a weapon said he was a poor shot and there is little to no credible evidence to say he practiced much with a rifle after leaving the Marines in 1959). His first shot, the most prepared for one, missed the President by some twenty feet but the last two hit the President twice and Governor John Connally in front of him once. The whole feat appears quiet remarkable, but at the same time rather absurd to buy as well.

    James Earl Ray’s proposed sniper’s next was equally awkward to say the least. While it has not been as deeply criticized as the Depository sniper’s nest, the Ray sniper’s nest may very well have been an even more improbable shooting location. Researches who have been to the scene and been in that bathroom, to examine the trajectory from that bathroom window to Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King was standing have described it as, in the very least, an awkward shot if not an impossible one. Much like with the Oswald snipers next the window was one that could only open a small distance, making mobility a nightmare trying to work a weapon about. Furthermore, the window was located directly above a bathtub, in which a shooter would have had to crouch down in the bathtub and work his rifle out a small opening in the window. This alone makes the whole selection of such a location practically non-sensical. But beyond that, in order to just establish an angle legitimately close to Room 306 a shooter would have had to be left-handed, which Ray was not, and furthermore would have had to literally punch a hole in the wall to make space for his arching elbow as he aimed the weapon. Ray would have been practically smashed up against the wall and the window just trying to get close to his target.

    This all makes the fact that his mysterious friend “Raoul” had him set up in this boarding house all the more suspicious. The house may very well have served as a perfect place to kill Dr. King, had Ray been in a different room, as the house was full of drunks and people without a coherent care in the world. And it must be remembered that a man was seen walking out of the bathroom shortly after the shooting with something in his hand (but again this man was not identified as Ray). It is possible this man who left the restroom may very well have been someone staying there in the house. Possibly this individual was a part of the assassination (as it is at least interesting that he was there during the shooting), and again in a house full of inebriated people it would have been the perfect place to stick a spotter or another member of a plot, for had he been seen the government could have easily painted them as misguided, confused drunks who’s word couldn’t be taken for anything. The possibility whoever was in the bathroom was involved or connected to the assassination is certainly still strong, but at the same time, as with the Kennedy assassination, the investigators in the matter were not interested in establishing a conspiracy in the case of the murder of Dr. King. Therefore the man in the bathroom “had” to be James Earl Ray, no matter what.

    The intrigue then is how Ray would have been selected as the patsy. While I vehemently defend Lee Harvey Oswald’s innocence as an actual shooter and a lone act in the killing of President Kennedy I have little doubt that he was involved at some level. My greatest reason for this, above all others, is the simple fact that he was selected to go down as the patsy. Had he not been connected or suspicious as some level those who set him up wouldn’t have wasted their time on him and found someone else who could more easily have taken the fall. In the case of James Earl Ray, who certainly was an escaped convict with a record that could have been used against him, he still needed to be legitimately put in the area at the time of Dr. King’s death. This again brings us back to this character “Raoul”. Name aside, Ray stated specifically that the man was of Latin decent, which for the sake of profiling makes me consider a possible CIA involvement. Throughout the 1960s the CIA was connected to all types of characters from Central America (primarily Cubans), which makes me strongly suspicious of this Latin character Raoul. The fact that he only used one name, quite possibly an alias, makes the argument even stronger. Oswald’s connection when he traveled down to Mexico City only months before Kennedy was shot went by the name of “Maurice Bishop”. This connection has been argued by many to have been CIA man David Atlee Phillips. The fact that Ray discusses his work with this Rail as being connected with drug trafficking and gun smuggling bolsters the argument even more as the CIA was readily involved in both drugs and guns. And it was this “Raoul” who saw to it that Ray took a room at the boarding house. Remarkably, a day later Martin Luther King, Jr. gets shot and there is conveniently a record of James Earl Ray having stayed at a nearby rooming house with a view of the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King was shot. Of course, the investigators in this case as well as the FBI made no efforts to locate Raoul, for had they done so they would have been forced to consider the possibility of conspiracy in the killing of Dr. King, which they wanted to stray from.

    This is quite intriguing with what happened after Ray was found in Britain and extradited back to the United States. While the government never wanted to even address or hint on the possibility of conspiracy they found themselves facing a problem. It was British law that when an American outlaw was found and taken in by them the American authorities needed to provide them with proof of any wrongdoing. So here was the American government without an ounce of evidence against Ray except for a passed out alcoholic witness. They deceived the British authorities by stating the charge against Ray were for “conspiracy” to commit the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This was a much easier charge to defend and the British authorities handed Ray right over. Of course, after his return this conspiracy charge was quickly dropped and a charge of murder was quickly instated. So much for an honest and fair legal system.

    The strange circumstances in which Ray was finally charged however aren’t a whole lot more strange than in the case of Oswald, who was initially arrested for the shooting of Dallas Officer J.D. Tippit. In his proposed effort to flee the scene of the President’s Assassination, Oswald officially encountered Tippit on the street and in an effort to prolong his freedom pulled out a revolver (even though the evidence shows Tippit was killed by an automatic weapon) and shot him four times. It was this action that immediately made the authorities believe that Oswald was also the killer of the President. However, the only way this conclusion, without further investigation being done, could have even been legitimately reached was from the fact that Oswald was at the location where the President was shot, was the only employee to leave the scene and thus on the run he killed a police officer to keep from capture. This idea, while it’s a perfect presumption, under the harsh and direct rules of the law it was no more than speculation. Oswald was presented as the only Depository employee to not return to work after the assassination, when in reality several employees didn’t return (thus making his absence indistinct). Only forty minutes after the shooting of Tippit the police receive a simple report of a man acting suspicious near a Dallas theatre. In response to this, with no certainty this man was even involved in the Tippit killing, a flurry of Dallas officer’s reported to the scene, took Oswald down and arrested him for the murder of Officer Tippit. This was before they had one single piece of evidence against him. Later that night Oswald was formally charged with the President’s killing, again before any hard evidence, what little there was, was collected and properly presented against him. What’s of further interest here is the fact that Oswald was never charged with either attempted murder or manslaughter against Governor Connally, who too was wounded. As anyone knows, when one shoots one other person one count is made against them; if he shoots two people there are then two counts. But no charges were filed against Oswald in the case of Connally. That is how important it was for the authorities to plant the guilt on Oswald for the President’s death. They didn’t even bother with the other victim.

    Another remarkable similarity between the deaths of President Kennedy and Dr. King is the fact that the FBI had complete control of the investigations to follow each shooting. It is readily well known that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover despised both President Kennedy and Dr. King (and Robert Kennedy as well). In both situations Hoover was quick to reach conclusions on both shootings. Shortly after Kennedy was shot Hoover called his brother Robert to tell him such had taken place and gave him a full description of the killer as a man named Oswald with a peculiar background including a history of Communist sympathies (Oswald’s true adherence to a Communist/Marxist belief has been an unsettled topic of discussion almost since his death). This was before Oswald had even been identified for sure to be Oswald (he also had an identification piece on him that said he was “Alek Hidell”) by Dallas Police and several hours before he would even be charged for killing Kennedy. The way the FBI pursued Ray is equally strange and seemingly intentional, as when they first released information that they were pursuing him as King’s killer they used the name “Eric Galt”, instead of “James Earl Ray”. This is incredibly telling because the name Eric Galt was actually an alias of Ray’s, but an alias he only used during his dealings with “Raoul”. This means that somehow the FBI knew of an alias that only Ray and Raoul should have known about. This provides another strong argument that Raoul was, in addition connected to the CIA, also connected to the FBI perhaps seeing as they controlled the Martin Luther King investigation. There is no way such a mistake could have been made completely accidentally. This just shows a direct connection of James Earl Ray to the very organization planting the murder of a popular public figure on him. Oswald interestingly had plenty of strange ties to both the FBI and the CIA, among many other organizations.

    Further evidence that Ray was connected on some level was the simple fact that he was able to leave America in the way he did. After leaving Memphis he made his way down to Atlanta and was then transported up to Toronto, Canada before leaving for Britain. By all accounts from those who supported and have defended his guilt he has been described as a bumbling, no account criminal. Reportedly he once committed a robbery but dropped his wallet outside and was thus identified and apprehended quickly. In another case, after committing another crime he fell out of the getaway car he was in and once again found himself apprehended quickly. Nonetheless, after leaving Memphis he was able to transverse the country and somehow had the where-with-all to leave it. It was discovered that Ray had an absurd amount of money to his name, much more than a loner bumbling criminal could possibly have, and a great deal of that money has been attributed back to his colleague Raoul.

    Lee Harvey Oswald was strangely similar. The authorities painted him as a bumbling loser, bouncing from low pay job to low pay job. However, la glance at his financial information shows he had and spent a great deal more money than he could possibly have made at these low grade jobs he worked. As a poor and recently discharged Marine, Oswald had the capability and obviously the financial stability to choose to move all the way to the Soviet Union. It is known as well that Oswald frequented nightclubs in Japan while stationed there, wherein the average customer spent more cash in one night than Oswald made in a month.

    Another intriguing connection that ties back into the possibility that both Oswald and Ray had institutional connections is their interesting connections to people who looked just like them. It has long been argued that Oswald, when he left to Russia, went there on business for the United States government (as the Cold War was in full swing by that point). With this interesting twist on Oswald’s two and a half years in a hostile foreign land it is of interest that numerous photographs reportedly taken of him there the man in them looks a great deal like Oswald but through simple comparisons is obviously another person. And yet he appears in photographs with Oswald’s wife and with her family and their friends. Simply examining the dimensions of the man’s head in these pictures, the different between chins on the men, different hairlines, different mouth formations, the differences are exponential. Who this man is has only moderately been researched and in many documentaries and films done these pictures are shown and just presumed to be Oswald. In the weeks preceding the assassination of President Oswald look-alikes began popping up everywhere, even though many of the times they were seen Oswald was known to be at work. One look-alike was seen target shooting in Dallas and ranting about his hatred of Kennedy. Another was seen test driving a car (officially Oswald did not have a license and hardly knew how to drive), and afterward spouted of how he should go to Russia to get a good deal on a car. These -, using Oswald’s name, made their marks as far as convincing people they were “Oswald” and that he was a Communist, excellent with a weapon, and a hater of the President.

    This is all remarkably interesting and yet it connects well with Ray and the actions he took shortly after Dr. King was killed in Memphis. As one researcher found, after Ray traveled north into Toronto he used three different aliases. A background check into these names he used exposed that these three names belong to men who looked identical to him, living in the Toronto area. So again there is reason to believe Ray had connections at some level; that he could randomly arrive in Toronto and be given three aliases that remarkably matched men who looked exactly like him, and could easily be confused for him. Whoever was helping him at this point obviously knew what they were doing and they managed to get him out of the country.    

    The final pieces of these two remarkably comparable puzzles looms in the absurdly either inept or intentional investigations that were conducted for both of them. These cases have both been discussed in brief over the course of this place. But the over-encompassing conclusions reached in both the cases of Oswald and Ray make for just another remarkable failure on the part of the powerful forces that control our country. The case was made much simpler for the FBI and the Warren Commission with Oswald’s death at the hands of Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby (of which there is a good deal of evidence and a great deal of speculation that the two knew one another), who shot him in the stomach as he was being led from the basement of the Dallas Police Station. This silenced the accused killer. It is of interest to point out that Ray did not suffer such a dismal conclusion. However, there is a distinct difference between these two men. Oswald was a very intelligent and well read individual who even in the only two days he lived in police custody had done an amazing job expression and defending himself to the media. Ray on the other hand was a simple-minded bumbling criminal who if he survived to see his trial wouldn’t have been able to defend himself as articulately as Oswald. And once more, Oswald was held for the murder of the President of the United States. Not to demean the character of Dr. King at all, but even at the time of his death he was quite a step below the level of an American President.  

      The key failing in both of these investigations was the clear fact that instead of carrying out legitimate and proper investigations, looking at all possibilities, they did their best to put the blame on one man. This came after boatloads of evidence showed grave doubts as to such a conclusion while showing probable conspirators and connections to various areas of the American government such as the CIA and the FBI. In both cases ammunition was recovered that could have been subjected to spectrographic analysis, which would have answered practically any and all questions about the origin and the nature of the ammunition fired. Officially, spectrographic analysis was conducted on the recovered ammunition in the case of President Kennedy and yet those results have never been released so the validity of the test is almost nil. Even more inexcusable conduct occurred in the case of King, of whom the one bullet fired into him was never subjected to spectrographic analysis. The excuse given was that the bullet was too damaged for identification, which is a far-fetched notion considering the fact that spectrographic analysis to examining rifle ammunition is about as close to comparable to, say, DNA evidence for people as anything. It is incredibly unlikely that this excuse holds any water and even if the presumption was made that such would be the case the bullet still should have been tested regardless. Perhaps it would have yielded surprising results. However, it is equally possible that had this analysis been done in the case of King that the results could also have been suppressed.     

    What makes this lack of ballistics evidence, or at least the lack of exposure of such evidence, so significant besides the obvious elements of neglect in highly significant murder investigations is that the lack of this evidence makes it hard to believe the rifles supposedly involved in both slayings were tied to the shooting at all. The case is especially true in the case of Oswald, with the three spent rifles shells found in the Depository (more than one of which showed markings from the rifle’s magazine, which is only possible from the last round being loaded from a clip; and more than one of the shells didn’t even have markings from the rifle’s firing pin).

    The absurdities and neglect that mire both these investigations cannot be ignored or downplayed. When it comes to the most basic murder investigations, wandering hitchhikers found dead in rural areas of America have more proper and in-depth investigations conducted on them than were done in the case of one of America’s Presidents and one of it’s most recognizable and iconic civil rights figures (a man who has a U.S. holiday named after him, for God sakes!). The logic is unequivocally absent in both these cases and the similarities only spell all too clear to at least myself that similar elements or similar individuals or similar organizations were involved in the slayings of both these leaders. And in reality, when one looks back on these two men there are remarkable parallels. The Kennedy Administration was the first to really address civil rights, and in particular the social upheaval that was rampant in the south. Of course, Martin Luther King, Jr. was an avid figure in this movement. Both men sought out peace. Both men were deemed Communist threats, especially by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Kennedy was threatening to end America’s involvement in Vietnam as well as considering deconstructing the CIA, which had become a somewhat renegade organization by that time. With his brother Bobby at his side, Kennedy refused to take military action during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which could have easily led to an atomic war wherein none of us would likely be alive today. King too spoke out against the war in Vietnam. The two men were both men who inherently wanted an America that was moving towards a more peaceful and democratic place. Ideals like this don’t sit will with other people in power, the heads of our national institutions, oil men, and the like. The intrigue and obvious dissatisfaction with many people in places of authority is more than obvious in both cases and yet we are led to believe these two random men, neither of which had a place of great prominence, were entirely responsible for two of the most horrible murders in the history of our country. And in closing, it cannot be a surprise to anyone, when great men like this (and I will include Bobby Kennedy in that mix, who too strived for peace and desired to end the war in Vietnam and found himself too assassination under mysterious circumstances only three months after King) are killed that a little bit of peace is killed with it. Can it be any surprise that both those who were there and history remember the year of 1968 the way they do?