Thirty-one years after the assassination of the civil rights leader, one man is still fighting to expose what he says is the truth behind the murder. Tony Stark reports
Bill Pepper is a crusader – a man with a mission that has transformed this quietly spoken American lawyer from an unknown attorney into someone who sees himself as a champion of justice, a warrior against tyranny.
There are many who would agree with this description. Many others would prefer to use words like naive and gullible.
For 20 years, Pepper has been fighting for a belief that excites the strongest of emotions. He’s pursuing an elusive truth that has divided the United States into those who believe and those who deride. It’s a search that has also divided his family, and, he says, cost him about $1-million of his own money.
But this month Pepper has the chance for which he’s been waiting for the past two decades. In a courtroom in Memphis, Tennessee, he is suing a man for conspiracy to murder – a man he believes took part in the assassination of the country’s greatest civil rights leader, Dr Martin Luther King. This civil case will be Pepper’s last chance to prove to the world that King – who was gunned down in Memphis in 1968 – was the victim of a major government conspiracy. The police, the Mafia and even the army were in on the plot, claims Pepper. And far from being a lone, deranged racist, James Earl Ray, the man who served a life sentence for the killing, was in fact an innocent man.
“What happened on April 4 1968 and since then in terms of the cover-up that’s taken place, has gone to the essence of the health of democracy in America,” says Pepper.
In the 1960s, he was a civil rights activist who came to know and respect King. “I regard America as a pervasively sick country, and his assassination is a symptom of the pervasive illness of this society,” he adds.
King’s assassination stands alongside that of president John F Kennedy as one of the most outrageous and shocking events in modern American history. King was a preacher who took his message of equality fearlessly into the segregated streets of the US’s deep south. At a time when black people couldn’t even sit next to whites on buses, when the races were rigorously kept apart in schools and when black Americans who spoke out against the indignities of racism were attacked and even lynched, King championed opposition to the white-run power structures. He led demonstrations. He organised boycotts of racist companies and he made passionate and outspoken speeches.
For his pains, he was jailed by the white-run police force and vilified by the south’s racist politicians. But King didn’t compromise his basic message: that equality of access and opportunity between blacks and whites was an essential prerequisite to a just society. His courageous and principled stand against racism was the catalyst that helped to end segregation in the US’s southern states. It also made him many enemies. Few were surprised when he was shot dead – least of all King himself, who was in Memphis to support a strike by the city’s poor sanitation workers when his assassin struck.
“Like anybody I would like to live a long life,” he said in his most famous speech, delivered just a few hours before he was killed. “Longevity has its place, but I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. 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.”
Hours later, a single bullet from a Remington pump action rifle tore into King’s neck as he stood on the balcony of a small motel in Memphis. It left an irreparable trail of damage in his body.
The official story of the assassination is straightforward and, at first sight, watertight. Several weeks after the murder, a drifter and small-time crook called James Earl Ray was arrested in London. Police said he’d fired the fatal shot from a bathroom window overlooking the hotel.
Ray was returned to the US where he pleaded guilty at his trial and was given a 99-year sentence. The police evidence in the case was never tested in open court. There was just one problem with this account: three days after the start of his sentence, Ray began claiming he was an innocent man who’d been setup to take the rap by the real killers. And he kept on claiming this untilElast year, when he died in prison. The authorities scoffed: of course he’d say that, they insisted, wouldn’t you if you were in his position?
But when Pepper took a trip to the isolated Brushy Mountain maximum security prison to meet Ray in the late 1970s, he came away with different opinions. “Everybody in America and in the world had been painted a picture of a virulent racist, an aggressive and volatile personality, and I saw none of that,” he says. “He was self-effacing, withdrawn; if anything, diffident. He spoke softly, and he was clearly not the person whom he had been depicted as being. I questioned him intensively for over five hours on details having to do with the case and he told a very plausible, consistent story.”
Ray told Pepper he had handled the gun found near the crime scene, but said he’d been given it by a shadowy figure called Raul, for whom he was working at the time. Ray maintained that Raul had taken the weapon away from him just before the shooting. It was all part of a plot to frame him, he claimed.
The meeting set Pepper down a path that has become the raison d’tre of his life. >From his small office in New York’s Madison Avenue, he’s masterminded an extensive investigation into King’s assassination, ploughing his own money into his search for the conspirators and the man whom he believes to be the real killer. It’s been costly in time as well, as his voicemail message indicates: “This is William Pepper,” it announces. “I’m either on the phone, in conference or out of the country. Please leave a short message.”
Now, after 20 years of unrewarding slog, Pepper believes he’s uncovered enough evidence to implicate a Memphis police sharpshooter as the man who murdered King. The sharpshooter has since died. He also thinks that racists in the Mafia put up the money for the killing. And the cover-up of the crime involved an unholy alliance between the local police and the FBI. In all this, says Pepper, Ray was nothing more than the fall guy set up to take the blame for the killing.
Pepper is an articulate exponent of his cause. Behind his tired and dishevelled demeanour lies an intellect that can convince all but the most hardened sceptic that King was killed by a conspiracy of dark forces that make Darth Vader look positively benevolent. They are composed of people who, Pepper believes, will stop at nothing to prevent the truth from coming out – a determination that long ago persuaded him to travel incognito for his own safety. He uses false names, and only gives his home number to those he completely trusts.
“I’ve had occasional break-ins, and there have been some threats on my life,” he says. “You know as we sit here, at any point in time, if these forces want to kill one, they can do it. There’s just no way that you can stop them from killing you, if they want to do it.” One reason Pepper believes that they’re out to get him is his view that if you dive deep enough into the King killing, you’ll eventually come face to face with the assassins of Kennedy. Unwarranted paranoia? Or the justified caution of a man who knows too much?
To those in the know inside the grey faade of Shelby County District Attorney’s office in downtown Memphis, the answer is clear. It was Shelby County’s prosecutors who brought the case against Ray in the first place – a case they believe is as sound today as it was at the original trial in 1969. Pepper’s radical views are given short shrift here. In fact, the dogged investigator is seen as something of a joke, his claims dismissed as speculation based more on shoddy research than established fact.
“I’ve spent four years on Mr Pepper’s theories,” says assistant district attorney John Campbell. “After you’ve watched them change [so frequently] you just don’t want to hear any more of them. It’s so bizarre that it’s hard to take it seriously any more. It’s a tragedy. This should be taken seriously, but it’s become almost comical.”
But Pepper does have his allies – among them no lesser person than Martin Luther King’s widow, Coretta, and her children. Shortly before Ray died, King’s eldest son, Dexter, decided to meet his father’s convicted killer in jail. Like Pepper, he too came away convinced that they’d got the wrong man. The King family has now publicly staked its considerable reputation on Pepper’s investigation.
“This is not solely based on historical record or on what I’ve seen,” Dexter King explains. “I think the evidence bears a lot of it out, but [it’s also] the gut feeling of a man who’s been around long enough, dealt with enough people, experienced enough situations to know when what you’re feeling is right.”
But Pepper’s latest and most controversial allegation has offered his enemies a long-awaited chance to put the knife into his conspiracy theories. In a book published in the US, Pepper maintained he’d found evidence to show that several members of a secret military group were also in Memphis on April 4 1968 – with orders to kill King if the police sharpshooter failed. They were, Pepper said, a backup hit team from the 20th Special Forces Group based in Birmingham, Alabama, and led by a man called Billy Eidson. What’s more, Pepper claimed that Eidson had since been killed to cover up the truth.
Apart from the denials from the 20th Special Forces Group, there was one major problem with this theory. Eidson was very much alive – as a rather uncomfortable Pepper discovered when ABC television surprised him with the living proof of the error they’d so astutely uncovered.
It was a moment of excruciating embarrassment that Pepper handled with considerable dignity. “I’d like to talk to him,” he offered, when told that the man he’d accused of attempted murder was waiting behind the scenes in the studio. Out came Eidson for an historic confrontation.
Pepper walked towards the former soldier with his hand outstretched. Eidson just stared at the unfortunate lawyer: “No, I won’t shake your hand,” he growled. “I just want to look at you.” Pepper says it was an honest mistake. Eidson is now suing him for a sum thought to be in the region of $15-million.
The military angle has even turned some of Pepper’s most staunch allies against him. For four years, Ken Herman was Pepper’s private investigator. If anyone knows the strength of Pepper’s case, Herman is the man. He’s met many of the eyewitnesses, he knows the story inside out and, like Pepper, he’s convinced that renegade members of Memphis police force killed King. But as for army involvement, even Herman is backing away.
“I’ve got a good opinion of Bill, he’s a nice enough guy,” Herman says in his broad southern drawl, “but he’s probably the most gullible person that I’ve ever met. You go to him with any story, and he’d take it for the truth … [It’s] the fact that he’s so naive. That’s the word that describes my displeasure with him.”
And if all that isn’t enough, there have even been sex allegations. In 1978, when Pepper was director of a company that ran a state foster care programme, he was arrested and charged with transporting two boys for immoral purposes. Pepper had allegedly encouraged the boys to commit sodomy. He angrily denied the charges, which were at first reduced and then dismissed altogether. He blames enemies he made at the time.
“I think it’s part of the price one pays if one decides to become a political activist,” he says. “Just look at the example of Martin King – what he suffered, the allegations against him ranged from sexual impropriety to financial misconduct to goodness knows what else.”
With all this intrigue, claim and counter- claim coming on top of a 20-year investigation, one facet of Pepper’s life has had to take a back seat: his family. He is separated from his wife and lives instead with his lover in a Manhattan apartment overlooking the dramatic New York skyline. His two sons live in England. His daughter, Tara, lives elsewhere in New York and remembers with sadness Pepper’s frequent absences during her childhood.
“We would go off on holiday, my mother and my two brothers and myself,” says Tara Pepper. “We had a beach house in Rhode Island. Every day, dad was supposed to join us. Every day, it’s like: ‘Oh, dad’s coming tomorrow.’ He never came … He was always jetting off somewhere else to talk to some other person. I honestly felt sometimes like dad didn’t even exist.”
Her sentiments bring Bill Pepper close to tears. The man who has fought so long for the US’s soul now struggles with his own: “I think at various times my children would rather I’d been more available to them as they grew up. That’s one of the prices that I’m afraid has been paid.” He pauses for a moment, overcome by emotion. “And the only thing one can say about that is that I hope there is an overriding benefit that she and her generation will realise from this work.”
Whether there is or not will shortly be decided in a Memphis courtroom. A jury of six Afro-American and six white members is due to give its verdict in a civil case that Pepper has brought – on behalf of the King family – against Lloyd Jowers, a 73- year-old former caf owner who Pepper alleges took part in the conspiracy that killed King. Jowers admitted as much himself in a nationwide TV interview. In 1993, he told the UShe’d been paid $100 000 by a now-deceased Mafia mobster to hire the killer, and that he’d even taken the still smoking gun from him when the deed was done.
The Memphis district attorney’s office has investigated and dismissed these claims. Prosecutors believe he only made them to cash in on the notoriety and, anyway, they say he’s changed his story far too many times to have any credibility.
The refusal to prosecute is, of course, more grist to Pepper’s conspiracy mill. This is why he’s now suing Jowers for conspiracy to murder in the hope that the first-ever official airing of the evidence in the King case will finally reveal the truth that Pepper believes has been covered up for the past 31 years. “The grief of the King family has – for a long time – required the truth to put it to rest,” says Pepper. “We will put the truth on the stand and give it every best effort. Now, 31 years after the event, it’s very difficult to have a trial of this sort, but the evidence has risen, it’s been accumulative and I think it will stand the test of cross-examination.”
After 20 years, Pepper is finally getting his day in court. And much is resting on the verdict. If he’s right, American law enforcement will stand condemned for its complicity in the murder of one of the world’s great moral leaders. If he loses, Pepper will increasingly be seen as man driven more by self advancement than any real commitment to truth and justice. Whatever the verdict, his daughter at least will heave a huge sigh of relief.
“It was time for him to get a life and focus more on the people around him,” says Tara Pepper. “I think he should turn his attention to more life-enhancing things, maybe, things that are going to give him actual pleasure rather than things that are going to cause him constant anguish. Which this case has, you know.”