Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. And the International Hunt for His Assassin

43 A RETIREMENT PLAN

IN WASHINGTON, DeLoach's men were slowly piecing together field reports that hinted at the answer to perhaps the most salient question about James Earl Ray: his motive for killing King.

It was becoming more apparent to the FBI, and to investigative reporters burrowing into the case, that although Ray had not exactly lived at the forefront of racial politics, he had long been a virulent racist. When he was sixteen, he carried a picture of Hitler in his wallet, and while serving an Army stint in Germany just after World War II, he'd continued his adolescent fascination with Nazis. "What appealed to Jimmy about Hitler,"⁶⁸¹ his brother Jerry Ray told the journalist George McMillan, "was that he would make the U.S. an all-white country, no Jews or Negroes. He would be a strong leader who would just do what was right and that was it. Not try to please everybody like Roosevelt. Jimmy thought Hitler was going to succeed, and still thinks he would have succeeded if the Japs hadn't attacked Pearl Harbor."

A number of Ray's acquaintances told FBI agents that Ray couldn't stand black people. Walter Rife, an old drinking buddy who pulled off a postal service money order heist with Ray in the 1950s, said that Ray "was unreasonable in his hatred⁶⁸² for niggers. He hated to see them breathe. If you pressed it, he'd get violent in a conversation about it. He hated them! I never did know why." When Ray was in Leavenworth for the money order heist, he turned down a chance to work on the coveted honor farm because the dorms were integrated.

While serving his armed robbery sentence at Jefferson City, Ray allegedly told a number of inmates that he planned to kill King. Investigators had to take such stories with a grain of salt, of course--prisoners were notorious for telling authorities just about anything--but agents found a consistency to the story that was hard to ignore. One Jeff City inmate, a not always reliable man named Raymond Curtis, said Ray would become incensed whenever King appeared on the cell-block TV. "Somebody's got to get him," Ray would say. Curtis said an inmate from Arkansas claimed he knew a "bunch of Mississippi businessmen" who were willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars to anyone who killed King. This got Ray thinking. According to Curtis, Ray liked to analyze the mistakes Oswald had made in killing Kennedy, and talked about what he would have done differently. Ray once said that "Martin Luther Coon" was his "retirement plan⁶⁸³--if I ever get to the streets, I'm going to kill him."

THE FBI, MEANWHILE, had already begun to look for avenues by which Ray might have been paid to kill King--or at least avenues by which Ray might reasonably have hoped to get paid. The bureau was well aware of the existence of bounties on King's head. The talk was out there. Throughout 1967 and early 1968, FBI informers across the country got wind of new threats nearly every week. It was loose talk, mostly, whispered among liquored-up hotheads in bars and pool halls. The bureau understood that death threats, though they provided a certain barometer of the culture, weren't the real concern; the people who didn't threaten were usually the ones to worry about.

But some of the rumors about bounties seemed to have a basis in fact. The White Knights of the KKK, it was said, had offered a hundred thousand dollars to anyone who killed the Nobel laureate. Other groups, such as the Minutemen and various neo-Nazi cells, had also floated assassination proposals that involved a considerable financial reward.

Perhaps the most serious bounty of all, and the one that, years later, the FBI would deem the most credible, originated in Ray's hometown of St. Louis, where a wealthy patent attorney named John Sutherland⁶⁸⁴ had offered a bounty of fifty thousand dollars. Sutherland had a portfolio of stocks and other securities worth nearly a half-million dollars--investments that included sizable holdings in Rhodesia. One of St. Louis's most ardent segregationists, he was founder of the St. Louis White Citizens Council and an active member of the John Birch Society (he was a personal friend of its founder, Robert Welch). In recent years, he had become immersed in a right-wing business organization called the Southern States Industrial Council.

For years Sutherland had been venting his peculiar strain of racial rage. "Like Khrushchev, the collectivists will settle for nothing less than total integration of every residential area, every social gathering, and every privately owned business enterprise," he once wrote, on letterhead stationery that featured entwined Confederate and American flags emblazoned with the motto STATES RIGHTS--RACIAL INTEGRITY. "The white majority must act before state coercion prevents us from doing so!" Sutherland lamented that "we are deep in the throes of minority rule" and insisted that "we forgotten men got that way by failing to heed the admonition of the great seal of Missouri--'United We Stand, Divided We Fall.'"

Throughout 1968, Sutherland spent much of his time organizing for George Wallace. He sometimes could be found down at the Wallace headquarters in South St. Louis, where organizers frequently met at John Ray's tavern, the Grapevine.

Earlier in the year, Sutherland tried to persuade at least one man--Russell Byers, a forty-six-year-old auto parts dealer and sometime car thief--to accept his bounty offer and assassinate King. Byers claimed he met Sutherland in the den of his house, which was conspicuously Confederate themed: swords, bugles, flags. Sutherland wore the hat of a Confederate cavalry colonel, with crossed sabers on the front.

As Byers recalled the encounter to the FBI, Sutherland told him he'd like to pay fifty grand to contract for the killing of a well-known figure.

And who would that be? Byers asked.

"King," Sutherland answered. "Kill Martin Luther King. Or arrange to have him killed."

Byers had long dwelled in a criminal netherworld and was used to having exotic business ventures floated his way, but the whole situation struck him as strange. "Where's the money coming from?" he asked.

Sutherland replied that he belonged to "a secret Southern organization" that could easily raise the bounty.

Byers declined the offer. Though he was a small-time crook, a thief, and a con man, he was no murderer. But Byers could tell that this shadowy wheeler-dealer, this colonel manque in the Confederate cap, was serious about his project. If he was a wacko, he was a well-connected one, someone who could leverage the underworld of St. Louis and get things done.

The bureau never found definitive proof that Ray was ever paid a cent by Sutherland, or even that Ray knew about the bounty. But Sutherland's connections to the Wallace campaign, and to John Ray's Grapevine Tavern, would intrigue investigators for years. Russell Byers did not immediately come forward to the FBI, and it would not be until 1977 that agents were able to piece together the story. Investigators with the House Select Committee on Assassinations found Byers's story "credible" and singled out the Sutherland bounty as one scenario that likely could have motivated James Earl Ray to kill King. But by that point, John Sutherland was beyond the reach of prosecution. He died in 1970.