Who Killed Martin Luther King?

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00:12

Well, hello and welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris.

00:18

As always, we have a special guest today who's never been on the podcast before. This is his first time.

00:23

We have John Avery Emison, who is the author of this book, The Deep State Assassination of Martin Luther King.

00:31

And this is going to be an interesting topic and probably a bit of a controversial one, but I'm no stranger to controversy.

00:38

So Dr. Emison, thank you for joining me. I appreciate it. And tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, what made you interested in this subject?

00:48

Well, glad to be here, John. I appreciate you having me on your podcast.

00:54

Well, I grew up in West Tennessee, about 75 miles from Memphis in the small town of Alamo.

01:02

And on April the 4th, 1968, I was one month away from graduating from high school when

01:13

Dr. King was assassinated. And so I feel like I've almost lived this situation.

01:24

Obviously, I wasn't in Memphis when they had curfew and all of the problems that they had.

01:33

Our local National Guard unit was mobilized down there. So I knew a number of the people who were actually on the scene.

01:44

And then my great uncle, my mother's uncle,

01:50

Harry Avery, was commissioner of correction. And within a year or so of Ray being captured, he was in the custody of my uncle in the

02:05

Tennessee State Penitentiary. He began the only real investigation, when

02:12

I say real, the only independent investigation, free from outside influence, into the

02:22

King assassination. And within three months, Governor Buford Ellington, who had found out about the investigation and had warned him to stop it, we don't want to know what happened, fired him.

02:41

So he went out the door, but the interest has always been there.

02:49

Then I had the opportunity in the early 90s to interview James Earl Ray four times.

02:56

There are not many of us left who actually had that experience. And so eventually

03:05

I knew I was going to do a book, and this is my second one on the King assassination.

03:12

So I don't know, I don't think you mentioned it, but you are the current mayor, is that right, of Alamo, Tennessee?

03:18

That's correct. I'm the mayor of Alamo, Tennessee. And you're the third in your family to be the mayor of that small town.

03:24

My dad served two different periods.

03:30

He served a couple of terms and then later on three more terms when they were two year terms.

03:37

And my grandfather, my mother's father, and my namesake served two non -consecutive periods as mayor as well.

03:50

Wow. So, I mean, this is something I've talked about on the podcast before. Not the topic of our conversation today, but thinking local, living in a local area, building up trust over the course of generations is something that I think we've lost that still somehow exists in some of these small pockets in different states.

04:09

And it sounds like you're in one of them. So that must be a wonderful thing to live with such a rich history and such a familiarity with the people that you serve there.

04:21

I want to talk to you, though, about your book. You have a quote here. This is from page six in the beginning.

04:28

And you said this, James Earl Ray is a symbol. He is the symbol, the visible,

04:34

I should say, manifestation of something that is invisible. The violent Southern white racism that killed

04:40

Dr. King. At least this is what we are told. And you're writing,

04:45

I think, more from like you've been doing all the reading on, I don't know if I want to say the secular world or the academic world, you know, the official narrative of what happened.

04:57

You've been reading that. And this is the conclusion you've come to. But for the sake of my audience, which

05:02

I think many of whom are evangelical Christians, I just wanted to highlight something real quick, get your reaction, because it fits in with what you're saying here.

05:12

Thabiti Anabwile is a pastor in Virginia. He was for a long time part of an organization called

05:19

Nine Marks, which is a Christian ministry. But he had a lot of influence with the Gospel Coalition, another

05:24

Christian organization. And he had written a blog a few years ago that caused a lot of controversy. Some people may remember it because he said this, he said,

05:32

James Earl Ray initially confessed to assassinating Dr. King, but he did not act alone. Many have long believed there was a literal conspiracy of government actors, the mafia and Memphis police.

05:42

Whether or not you believe Ray acted as a patsy for these conspirators, he did not act alone. He acted with a tacit and sometimes explicit approval of white supremacists.

05:52

He acted with the encouragement of a white society dedicated to the advantage of whites above all others, and simultaneously the segregation, oppression and exploitation of black people.

06:02

Almost done. Ray acted with the assistance of whites who suppress their consciences. He acted with the assistance of anti -civil rights propagandists and white collar country club segregationists.

06:12

He acted with the assistance of the FBI, which I know we're going to talk about a bit.

06:19

He talks about them trying to malign and silence black dissent. And these parties acted in concert in the same direction against Dr.

06:28

King and by extension, the millions of African -Americans hoping for some larger piece of freedom's promise. And he stops at the end of the quote, as I'm saying, the entire society killed

06:37

Dr. King. This society had been slowly killing him all along. And he goes on and calls for, well, basically blames the ancestors of white people from that era for having guilt in this assassination.

06:52

So I know there's some overlap there because we're going to talk about the government and what kind of part they played.

06:59

But this view, when I saw that, I thought I've seen this before. I mean, how common is that view that this is whites, especially

07:08

Southern but white people in America, racists who are responsible for this? How common is that view?

07:16

Yeah, I mean, academic world, that's the persona that was painted by.

07:24

By the four authors whose works I go through in my book,

07:34

George McMillan, who wrote The Making of an Assassin, and William Bradford Huey and his book,

07:46

He Killed the Dreamer, which he had had a actually had a contract to write that book with James Earl Ray.

07:55

And the initial title was We Killed the Dreamer. And he kind of switched during the process.

08:02

And then Gerald Posner, who's written extensively about several assassinations, the

08:10

JFK assassination, as well as the MLK assassination. And then more recently,

08:16

Hampton Sides, who wrote Hellhound on His Trail, and they all portray

08:23

Ray as this extremely violent racist who was on a mission.

08:33

The only problem is they have no evidence that Ray was a racist.

08:40

He was in the Army. He had a record in the Army. He was in the federal penitentiary system.

08:47

He was in Leavenworth. So he had a record in Leavenworth. He had a record, I believe he served some time in Florida.

08:55

I know he served time in California, I think maybe in Illinois and certainly in the

09:02

Missouri prison, all before the assassination. And there's no record anywhere of his racism.

09:17

Of course, he was white and he sounded Southern because he talked kind of slow and had a little bit of a draw, but, you know, he grew up in Illinois.

09:27

He wasn't a Southerner. So there's a lot to the quote that you've cited, but look beyond that just a little bit and glimpse how easily it was to manipulate all of us into believing that that Ray did it because of racism, because he certainly didn't have any other motive.

10:05

And as soon as Dr. King was dead and within minutes they came over the radio and said they're looking for a white man and a white

10:14

Mustang. I dare say that just about every

10:20

Southerner and probably every citizen of the country draw the conclusion, well, a white man killed a civil rights leader because he wanted to shut him up.

10:33

Now, these authors went into great detail in making specific accusations, certain bars that Ray was in in California and situations where he worked, even some of his prison records and so forth, particularly

11:01

George McMillan. The only problem is

11:09

McMillan's book came out. It was published in 1966, pardon me, 1976, right on the eve of the vote by the

11:21

U .S. House of Representatives to stand up the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which was in operation from 76 to 79.

11:33

It had two different chairmen during that period. And it went across two different Congresses, so the next

11:43

Congress had to reauthorize it, which they did.

11:49

But the committee investigators, eventually headed by G.

11:58

Robert Blakey, who was the general counsel, they investigated all of these allegations.

12:06

McMillan had about a dozen of them. They could not prove a single one of them, and they positively disproved about two thirds of them.

12:20

So all of that was made up propaganda. That's where that came from. McMillan had been a propaganda writer during the war.

12:30

He worked for the Office of War Information. And he married

12:37

Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who likewise wrote a lone nut gunman about Oswald.

12:51

So they're the husband and wife team. They wanted you to believe during their entire lives that their work was unbiased.

13:03

It came from them. It came from their research. It was not influenced. But the problem is, in recent years, the releases by the

13:13

National Archives under the JFK Records Act clearly shows, and I've got it in the book, there's a specific reference to the document in the book, and anybody can look up online.

13:27

It's very easy to find, that shows that Priscilla McMillan, who only died a couple of years ago and outlived her husband by decades, was, in spite of her assurances to the contrary, including emails to me, personal emails where we exchanged and I asked her questions and she answered most of them.

13:56

One of the documents shows that her CIA handler, which she had denied her whole life, was handing her off to another

14:07

CIA handler. So you have to dismiss all of that as a very elaborate effort of propaganda.

14:19

Now, who's behind that effort to propagandize the people of this country?

14:27

Well, it's the CIA, of course. Yeah, well, this gets us to,

14:33

I guess, the main question, who did kill Martin Luther King, Jr.? If it wasn't

14:38

James Earl Ray or if James Earl Ray did not act alone, who assisted him? And I know there's so much.

14:45

I mean, this book is quite extensive, so we can't get into all of it. But maybe give us a few of the main things that people ought to know about the official story, the holes in it that don't make sense.

15:01

Well, one of the most interesting holes in the story is Ray's sophisticated aliases that he used for primarily for aliases from just within a few weeks of his escape from the prison in Missouri at Jefferson City.

15:26

And let's say that would have been April. That was about 50 weeks before Dr.

15:32

King was killed. So now we're going back to April of 67. And so he began using these aliases very shortly after that.

15:47

In fact, as soon as he came back from his first trip to Canada, which was in the summer of 1967, and it turns out, well, certainly when he entered his guilty plea, which was a rambling, less than four minute exchange with the criminal court in Memphis.

16:17

I've run the timer on it, the elapsed timer. It's three minutes and 43 seconds.

16:23

That was the entirety of what the court knew about James Earl Ray, and it didn't even know about these aliases.

16:33

And these aliases are extremely important and extremely suspicious because, in a sense, they weren't aliases.

16:43

These were personas. Ray used four personas while he was on the lam from about May, maybe early

16:57

June, 67, until June of 68, when he had escaped from Canada and gone to England and was already in Portugal and had come back to England.

17:13

Come back to England. And these four personas were real Canadian men who lived within a five mile radius of each other, but otherwise did not know each other.

17:29

And one of them, the one that he used for the longest was

17:37

Eric S. Galt, G -A -L -T, and all this is in the book and the pictures are in the book.

17:44

In fact, there's an array of pictures. Maybe I can find this pretty quickly because it's striking.

17:57

It's just striking. But the Eric S. Galt persona that, here we go.

18:07

Yeah, is that? Yeah. What page is that? That's on page 437.

18:15

So they're the four guys, real Canadian men, all of them alive, all of them about James Earl Ray's age, all of them about 5 '10 or so, all of them with dark hair, blue eyes, and a medium build.

18:40

And these, so you see what Ray looked like.

18:47

There's. Oh, yeah. Let me put you full screen. Yeah. Hold on. There you go. There you go. Right. That's a picture of Ray.

18:53

Right. Cleaned up when he applied for the Canadian passport.

19:01

Yeah. So he used all these aliases. I know you talk about, he wound up, there's so many details that were fascinating, but one of them was the commonalities between him and Lee Harvey Oswald, showing up at the

19:15

Mexican embassy right before. Well, there's this allegation. First of all, we'll chase rabbits just a moment.

19:25

Right. I don't think Oswald, it wasn't Oswald at the Mexican embassy in 63.

19:31

And what would that have been? October of 63. I don't believe it was.

19:36

It didn't look like him. And when this document that was released just in the

19:44

Trump and Biden era document releases, there was this allegation raised that, well, we think it was

19:56

James Earl Ray at the same Cuban embassy a few years later in November of 1967.

20:07

So you need to know something about James Earl Ray, and maybe we should touch on this.

20:13

James Earl Ray probably didn't even know what an embassy was. I mean, he would be one of the last people that you would think of that would have any business with an embassy, particularly a foreign embassy in a foreign country.

20:31

He was personally incapable of the extremely complex crime of stalking a prominent person, of knowing where to stalk him, and shooting him, and escaping, and getting out of the country.

20:58

I mean, this was a guy who had eighth grade education. He was a ninth grade dropout. And he eluded the largest manhunt in the history of North America, and took a bus from Atlanta to Toronto, and then had very suspicious contacts at two different rooming houses.

21:23

By then, he had dumped the GALT persona, the

21:30

GALT alias, and he was using, I believe, the

21:37

Bridgman alias first, and then eventually the Snead alias.

21:51

So, you're dealing with a guy who you wouldn't hire to wash your car because he's going to mess something up, and he's able to elude by himself the largest manhunt in the history of North America?

22:06

Why don't you walk us through a little what was involved, the chances of someone being able to get a firearm that's sighted incorrectly to the exact place where they can, from this supposed hotel room, shoot

22:24

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? What are the chances? What are the obstacles? Yeah, just the location.

22:32

Let's start with that problem, because if you want to kill somebody, you need to know where they are, right? I mean, it's not just a matter of aiming it somewhere.

22:40

You're aiming it where you know they are. All of the explanations as to how

22:51

Ray knew where Dr. King was in Memphis, the one by Posner, the one by McMillan, the one that was repeated in Hampton's sides book, all that's false.

23:07

It's made up. They said it was on the front page of either the Commercial Appeal or the

23:13

Press -O -Meter. I've forgotten which. I think maybe the Press -O -Meter was the afternoon paper at the time, the

23:19

Memphis Press -O -Meter, and it wasn't. I went back to the archives. It's not there.

23:25

I even had an email exchange with Hampton's sides. They said, well, that's probably a mistake.

23:31

We conflated that from some other stuff, and we'll take care of it in the next edition. Well, I looked in the next edition.

23:37

They didn't. It was still there because it is one of those, let me put it this way,

23:48

Judge Arthur Haynes, Jr., who he and his father were

23:53

Ray's original attorneys when he was extradited from England back to Memphis.

24:02

He made a statement. He made a comment to me a number of years ago now that has really stuck with me, and as I look at various elements of the case, it's just a series of ahas.

24:16

But he said that when they were representing Ray, the government storyline was so precise and so meticulous that if you attacked successfully any element of it, the whole thing collapsed.

24:36

And certainly, the whole thing of where Ray knew

24:42

Dr. King was never existed. It was never proven.

24:48

The House Select Committee had no explanation for it. The writers had no truthful explanation for it.

24:57

They proposed some ideas that they said were fact when actually they were not.

25:05

And so, that element is just a complete mystery. Now, let's go to the rooming house.

25:16

That was interesting because Ray checked into the rooming house. It certainly was

25:21

Ray on the afternoon of the assassination, and he used the alias of John Willard.

25:32

That's, as far as we know, that was the only time that he used that particular Canadian persona.

25:40

So, he was on the second floor. There's a community bathroom. There are several other tenants up there.

25:49

And here he is with a community bathroom that he's going to spend maybe two or three hours in.

26:03

He's got a rifle in there. Nobody saw the rifle. Nobody saw him on that floor that afternoon.

26:12

They saw somebody. Nobody saw him fire the shot, and the position of having to stand in the bathtub and look out the window with a very narrow view across the street, it doesn't make any sense.

26:41

It doesn't make any sense. Well, here's a picture. I think this is of—I was just looking it up—it's kind of small,

26:49

I guess. And that's the bathroom, I guess, from where he—so, he would have been standing right there. That's the window.

26:55

Yes. And he would have had to have been there knowing that he would be in range.

27:00

I mean, it is an interesting—I would have thought with the profile that Martin Luther King Jr.

27:08

had, things would have been fairly kept under wraps. He had bodyguards and that kind of thing.

27:14

Well, the Memphis Police Department met him at the airport the afternoon before, and they didn't even know where he was going to stay.

27:26

He had been on a holiday in Rivermont about 10 days earlier when he had been in Memphis, but they didn't know where he was going to stay.

27:36

Right. I don't know if James Earl Ray is going to know something the Memphis Police Department didn't even know.

27:43

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of interesting pictures here, but here's the famous one.

27:49

Maybe you can—let me see if I can pull this up for you. You've seen this picture,

27:54

I'm assuming. Oh, yes. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, where they're all pointing, and I think they're—are they pointing towards, then, where the shot came from?

28:00

They're pointing at an angle that is closer to the top of the adjacent building, the flop house, rooming house,

28:17

Bessie Brewer rooming house, rather than the window, because it was only a slight downward angle from that bathroom window to a man standing up on the catwalk, as you see there.

28:33

Okay. So, they're pointing to something that's probably a little higher than that window.

28:41

Are you suggesting— More like the roof of the building. Do you think in the picture that they're suggesting it was the roof, then?

28:49

I'm not sure. What are you trying to say? What's the significance of them pointing on the roof?

28:55

Well, they're pointing at an angle that could have been the second floor, or it could have been the roof.

29:04

I gotcha. Okay. Okay. So, I want to make sense of this for everyone who's listening, because there's other things

29:11

I'd love to get into, like the ballistics tests and these kinds of things. But I think the thing popping in most people's minds at this point is, but didn't

29:19

James Earl Ray confess to doing it? Didn't he go to prison for doing it? Why is that?

29:27

What evidence do you need? Let's get into that, because that tells a lot.

29:34

Well, you've talked to him personally, so I figured if he meant something different or disagreed with that, then you would know.

29:42

First of all, let's look at the circumstances of James Earl Ray's incarceration and the pressure he was under.

29:54

The Shelby County Sheriff's Department, all county sheriffs run the county jail system in Tennessee.

30:05

Basically, there are almost no cities that have their own city jail anymore.

30:13

It's all run by the county, and that's the way it was even in the 1960s in Shelby County, the county that Memphis is in.

30:27

So, they made two cells into one.

30:36

They took out the bars in between. Now, the reason they did that is because they installed a closed circuit television camera system in that cell.

30:49

And back then, the resolution was very bad unless you had a lot of lights.

30:57

It took TV studio type lights to make that work.

31:03

So, they installed the lights. They had them on 24 -7 from June until the following March.

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They had a jailer in Ray's cell 24 -7 the whole time.

31:25

They welded steel plate on the window so that Ray couldn't even see outside.

31:36

If he woke up taking a nap or woke up in the middle of the night and he asked him, you know, it's two o 'clock.

31:44

Is it AM or PM? He wouldn't know. He didn't see the sunlight. They didn't let him out to exercise, and he was under surveillance in the view of the jailer when he went to sleep, when he woke up, when he went to the bathroom, when he dressed.

32:09

Zero privacy 24 -7. And they logged all of his activities, everything that he said, everything that he did, whether he read a book or read a newspaper or whatever, all that's in the logs, whether he asked for an aspirin and he took aspirin, whether he had sweet tea or unsweet tea with his bologna sandwich for lunch.

32:36

All that's in there. And the Haineses, his attorney, tried to get the court to intervene and stop that sort of surveillance and at least give him an opportunity to sleep at night without having

32:56

TV studio cameras on him. But the court turned that down.

33:02

And in the process, they asked Sheriff Bill Morris about all these details, and all that's in the court record.

33:14

So he was confined and isolated.

33:21

And then you come to the point where he and his brothers decide right before the trial, we want to get rid of the

33:36

Haineses and we want Percy Foreman. So Percy Foreman came in, one of the leading murder lawyers in the country.

33:48

And at first, indicated to Ray and to his family that this is going to be an easy case.

33:56

I'm going to get him off. We're going to put up a defense. We're going to go to trial.

34:04

The state can't prove anything. They don't have a murder weapon. This is part of the ballistics that you referred to.

34:11

And maybe we'll get to that and maybe we'll have to do that later. But the weapon was never proven to be the murder weapon.

34:23

And so over time, somebody got to Percy Foreman and the

34:32

FBI started feeding him information to pressure Ray. They discovered that his elderly father had skipped parole in Iowa decades before.

34:46

And they told him, if you don't confess, the FBI is going to arrest your daddy and he's going to die in jail just like you are if you don't get executed.

35:00

As a matter of fact, Foreman threatened him. They said, they're going to fry you in the electric chair.

35:06

Well, that's a problem because Tennessee did have a death penalty, but it had successive governors that serve for, let's see,

35:17

I guess about a 16 -year period, Frank Clement and then Buford Ellington. They had not allowed any executions.

35:25

They had commuted the death sentences to life in prison of every person.

35:36

Tennessee had not executed an inmate in way more than 10 years.

35:44

And then Foreman gave his brother Jerry money.

35:50

And we've got in the book, there's a picture of one of the checks that Percy Foreman wrote to Jerry Ray.

36:02

And he told Jerry, James Earl Ray's brother, and he told

36:08

James Earl Ray, I've given you your brother money and I'm not giving him any more unless you go into the courtroom and plead guilty.

36:18

And in addition to which, there was a three -party contract that helped pay for Ray's defense.

36:30

It initially was between Ray and William Bradford Huey, who was doing the writing, and the

36:36

Haineses. So that the Haineses, so that James Earl Ray would feed the information to Huey, Huey would write it up and sell it to Look Magazine, Live Magazine, others, and eventually do a book.

36:50

And then from those proceeds, he would pay Ray's legal bills.

36:57

So Foreman inherited that. And right on the eve of the guilty plea in March of 1969,

37:11

Foreman told Ray, I'm assigning and put this in writing, this is in writing, this is all documented and referenced in the book, that Ray would, that I'm going to assign this contract back to you.

37:33

It's my property. By then, he had gotten Ray to give him the value of the whole story.

37:43

But he says, this contract is my property, but I'm going to assign it back to you if you go in and plead guilty and don't say anything embarrassing in the court about this whole thing.

38:00

In other words, just keep your mouth shut and say that you, except to say that you did it.

38:07

Well, that's suborning testimony. That's, that's bribery.

38:13

He proposed and did this in writing.

38:19

He proposed giving Ray something of value as long as he said what

38:26

Foreman wanted him to say in court the next day. And the court knew nothing about any of this.

38:34

All of that was in the background. So is your contention or your, is what you're proposing that James Earl Ray then confessed to a crime he did not do because he was pressured into doing so?

38:49

That's correct. One of the elements that a court is obligated to establish is whether or not in accepting a guilty plea, whether it's for a fight, whether it's assault, a simple assault, or whether it's murder, the court has to know that the person is entering the guilty plea under no duress.

39:21

If there is duress, the court is obligated under the undercourt precedent not to accept the guilty plea.

39:34

So did, I'm just curious, did he, when you've talked to him, interviewed him, has he said to you, hey, look,

39:40

I didn't actually do it. Or is he not?

39:47

Well, of course he did. He did. Okay. I mean, that's right. So I'm sure you're not the only one that he said that to.

39:55

Oh, well, he said that to Martin Luther King's children who have concluded that he didn't do it.

40:03

Oh, I didn't. So wait, Martin Luther King Jr.'s children don't believe it was James Earl Ray. Right.

40:09

Now, I'm not speaking on their behalf, but just publicly, Dexter King, I think, and some of the other relatives have said they don't believe that James Earl Ray was guilty.

40:21

So who's guilty in this? You mentioned a source that you think, but you do make it clear that you can't piece everything together because we don't have all the information.

40:33

But you do have a fairly strong case, I think. Yeah. It's too late now for us to ever know who the trigger man was.

40:43

That's, you know, we'll never know that. Too many years have passed.

40:50

But obviously it was a professional hit because somebody fired one shot from a remote concealed location, escaped with the weapon, and was on the lam.

41:08

So that's not amateur. And by the way, that's not KKK. I mean, they would take credit for it.

41:15

And it's certainly not mafia. They would spray the whole thing with machine gun bullets and, you know, it would have all their ear markings of it.

41:30

But Ray was just not capable of that sort of sophisticated crime.

41:40

What was his... Because he was a CIA asset, though, right? He had an involvement. Oh, yes.

41:45

He had a handler. His name was Raul. And in the book, there's information in there that I obtained from Judge Arthur Haynes Jr.

42:03

that they got the contents of Ray's...

42:08

of the trunk of Ray's Mustang sometime during the summer of 68.

42:17

And he said it was just... he said it was electric, that they got a very small jacket.

42:26

Now, Ray had always described Raul, which the government says didn't exist.

42:32

Raul was made up. Raul, the House Select Committee said, well, maybe he's...

42:40

it's a conflation of various characters, including probably his brothers.

42:48

But neither one of them were... So a psychological reading of it. Right, right, right.

42:54

So Ray had always described Raul as a very diminutive man, a small man.

43:02

And Judge Haynes said, we got the contents of the trunk, the evidence released to the defense.

43:12

And there was a small, small jacket that he said Ray couldn't possibly get it on.

43:18

And he made kind of a funny comment to me that I guess if we had...

43:26

if Ray hadn't fired us at the last minute right before the trial and hired

43:31

Percy Foreman, that I would have been the one who said, if the jacket doesn't fit, you must quit.

43:41

Well, I mean, it's funny, but it's sad that this evidence hasn't...

43:48

I mean, is that even mentioned in the other books that you cited at the beginning? Does anyone try to account for that?

43:53

No, I don't think anybody said anything about that. That's evidence that doesn't line up with the government storyline.

44:04

Sure, there are things, there are some things that line up with the government storyline.

44:10

But when you start looking at all of the elements of it and you see where these weaknesses are, the whole thing just falls apart.

44:22

It's like a big Lego thing. You pull out the wrong block and the whole thing collapses.

44:31

Yeah, and there's so many little things like this. You've just scratched the surface. Even with the ballistic tests, you talk about how the rifle that they assume was used wasn't even cited in.

44:45

So there's all kinds of little things like that, that just don't make sense. And I wonder...

44:52

And the rifle had a three -round magazine. I have one very similar to that that I use for deer hunting.

45:02

Mine's an automatic. That one was a pump, a Remington pump -action rifle.

45:11

But there was only one round in the magazine. So here you've got a property hoodlum who's not real bright.

45:24

Let's say he fired the shot. He's going to load one round into a rifle that'll take one in the chamber and three in the magazine.

45:37

What if he hits his target, but he runs into a little trouble trying to get away?

45:46

He's going to have to fumble around and try to reload. Just stuff like that.

45:51

That doesn't make any sense at all. Nobody's going to do that. Well, not if he's the kind of person to sit there waiting for hours.

45:59

If he's a careful, cautious man, then of course he would have more rounds. So the question

46:06

I think naturally probably coming across people's mind at this point is then, if it was the government, if there was a hitman, what was the government's interest in this?

46:14

Well, the chapter that I have in the book that deals with the military and other surveillance of Dr.

46:33

King establishes, if you are open -minded and you are willing to read what the circumstances tell you, the circumstances are clear that the

46:54

Pentagon and CIA were very concerned that Dr.

47:04

King was going to interrupt the draft by telling black teenagers, don't register and don't comply with induction notices.

47:19

And they were likewise fearful, and this is also in the book documented, that he might tell soldiers and Marines in the field in Vietnam, lay down your weapons and don't go on patrol.

47:38

So whether or not he was about to do that, they certainly feared that.

47:45

And you can imagine the chaos of the late 60s with an unpopular war if suddenly only white people were going to die from now on.

48:03

I mean, that would create some problems. Well, I've also, of course, heard that there's this surveillance of MLK because there was a concern he was talking to the

48:18

Soviets that maybe he was on their side in a sense that he was a

48:24

Marxist. I mean, did that play into it? They were afraid that he was being financed by international communist governments.

48:32

Yes, that's clear. Okay. That's documented. Of course, they were never able to prove that.

48:41

There was no evidence. They just missed the fact that there was a lot of legitimate opposition to the war across the board, white, black, northern, southern, everywhere,

49:02

Democrats, Republicans. They just couldn't believe that these were the people who served and had some leadership capacity even then in World War II.

49:21

And that had only been about 20 years, but the whole society changed in that period of time and they didn't.

49:30

Why do you think it was to their advantage to take him out completely? Why not just blackmail him with the information they collected about his sexual escapades and that kind of thing and use him for their own purposes instead of kill him?

49:43

Were they just worried he wasn't going to go along with that? Well - I mean, we're getting into speculative territory.

49:51

That's not in the documents. It really doesn't address - But I want to know. Okay. Yeah, I know.

49:58

I know you want to know and it'd be nice to know, but it's just not there. It's not there.

50:03

Okay. What's the relevance of this? Obviously, you're an expert on it.

50:09

I guess two questions. First, your book is well -sourced, well -documented, well -written, and it is not seen as a mainstream book.

50:21

You've been shut out of polite society, we'll say, because of this. So that's one of the things

50:29

I guess I wanted to ask you about is why is that? And then that leads right into the next question, which is why is this so important?

50:39

Well, here's part of my explanation for both ends of that question, really.

50:49

My book, I think, destroys the credibility of the

50:56

House Select Committee on Assassinations, which had two jobs. One, they had a task force.

51:08

They had two task forces. One of them was on the JFK assassination, and the other one was on the

51:15

MLK assassination. And when you destroy the credibility on the

51:21

MLK side, and you see that they even doctored and changed documents to make their storyline look more believable, then you have to step back and say, well, why did they do that?

51:46

Or would they manipulate and lie about one of the assassinations, but not both of them?

51:54

So in essence, you're dealing with, by extension, the credibility of the government storyline about both assassinations,

52:07

President Kennedy and Martin Luther King. And you don't have to do a whole lot of thinking,

52:13

I don't believe, to realize that if you come to the conclusion, my government is capable of this, well, then it changes your whole view.

52:34

Does it not? Yeah, and I think because of 2020, a lot of people are more open to this.

52:40

I mean, I would not have been as open to even hearing someone like yourself out, probably years ago.

52:47

I mean, I would have talked to you, but I would have probably thought, that might be a little crazy.

52:53

And without looking at the documentation, just out of hand, because that's just the story I have been told.

53:00

But of course, I think, especially after 2020, people are much more open to believing, yeah, the government could lie to us about something, because they just did.

53:10

Right. And so I think that some of these things are coming back up.

53:16

Some of these things that were put to rest, that probably should have been dealt with, are now coming back up.

53:22

And I see this as kind of important, this is from the evangelical Christian standpoint of watching the politics of the

53:31

Christian community in this country. MLK has become somewhat of a lionized figure in especially

53:37

Baptist circles, but really all evangelical circles. They want to claim him as this is the ideal Christian person.

53:43

And he was killed. And he's a martyr. And we can learn from that. And almost like a

53:48

Jesus -like figure, to be honest. And then, of course, the question is, how do we deal with some of these racial tensions?

53:59

And it's usually the very government who lied to us about MLK and how he was killed, is the same government they want to somehow rectify all these disparities.

54:10

Exactly. So I think that's an important - Many people feel that the government has been and is the final just arbiter of race relations.

54:24

Except in my own personal opinion, that's just the propaganda that they want to use.

54:36

Against us. Yeah. Yeah. So I would just encourage people who are out there, whether you're

54:42

Christian or not, but I know many who listen to this podcast are to just get this book, go through it.

54:48

I mean, it's interesting, too. I mean, it's written in an interesting way. It's a story. But, you know,

54:54

I think you'll walk away pretty convinced that the story you've been told about this is probably not true.

55:01

And if that's the case, then it might cultivate a healthy cynicism about government sources, which

55:08

I think is probably at this point, we just need to be honest. I mean, I don't want that, but that's just the world we live in.

55:15

So people can go to Shotwell Publishing. I think is it ShotwellPublishing .com? I think it is.

55:21

ShotwellPublishing .com. Or they can go to, what, Amazon, I think. It's also on Amazon. But it's ShotwellPublishing .com

55:28

is the publisher's website. Is there an Audible, like a book on tape kind of thing yet?

55:36

You know, I'll have to look again. I think the plan is to make it a

55:43

Kindle. Yes. I can probably tell everyone right now. I got the technology.

55:50

Let's see. The deep state assassination of MLK is on Amazon. And it's on Kindle. Yeah. So there's not an

55:56

Audible yet, but it is on Kindle. It's about $10 on Kindle, $30 for the paperback.

56:04

But yeah, you can go on Amazon and get that, or you can just go to Shotwell Publishing. I'm sure they'd appreciate it probably if you went to the website.

56:11

Oh, yes. More than going to Amazon. But yeah, anyway, John, I appreciate your time.

56:18

And you're just, you know, we could have talked for a lot longer with all the information, but I hope that this helps you and gets the word out.

56:26

Well, I certainly do. And I appreciate it very much. Yeah. So last question.

56:33

You said you're a deer hunter. You gotten anything this season? Anything? No, I really haven't started yet. It's been so warm here.

56:39

I'm not in the mood. I need to feel a little cold air. I need to feel like I need to turn my propane heater on in the deer blind.

56:48

Oh, wow. Well, you'd be at home right now up here. I mean, it's in the 50s. I think it's actually warmer today.

56:53

It's hitting like 60. So yeah, it's certainly it's cold in the morning. So all right.

56:59

Well, is there I guess this is the real last question. Is there anywhere you want to send people?

57:05

I don't know if you have a website or a blog or where they can contact you. I know you have Twitter. Twitter is the main thing.

57:16

I'll have things on my Twitter feed from time to time. OK, or X, I guess they call it now.

57:22

But X, right. What's your handle? Let's see. OK, I'm logging on.

57:28

I have to look it up. I found it. It's John underscore a underscore Emerson.

57:34

So it's your name with an underscore between the middle initials. Right. So check out

57:39

John Avery Emerson on Twitter. And he posts there and you can get his thoughts on things.

57:45

Well, once again, thank you so much. I appreciate it very much. John, love the interview.