Killing the Dream:: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, JR.

Having read several books on MLK's assassination, and well over 100 on JFK's, I am not what you would call anti-conspiracy. When you mix in the fact that I found Posner's "Case Closed" to be absolutely horrible, well, you can understand why I expected to hate this one as well. Boy, was I wrong. Posner's study of James Earl Ray and the MLK is far more reasoned - and reasonable - than "Case Closed" ever hoped to be. He does a terrific job of painting a portrait of Ray as a potential killer. And, while debunking most of the existing conspiracy theories, Posner does not dismiss conspiracy entirely. In fact, he implies that Ray conspired with his brothers to commit the crime in order to collect the bounty on MLK placed by a St. Louis man. Read with an open mind and you just might be surprised!

Contrary to what you might have heard elsewhere, Posner does not discount the possibility of Martin Luther King having been killed as the result of a conspiracy. But he makes it clear that if such a conspiracy existed--and if it did, it was likely concocted by a racist St. Louis businessman--James Earl Ray was at the heart of it.As in his "Case Closed," it is the life story of the assassin himself that emerges from this book as the most compelling tale. Ray, the oldest son of a dirt poor Illinois family, is mercilessly teased as the "smelly, dirty" kid in his grade school class when his family moves to Missouri. He begins a life of petty crime as a teenager, graduates to armed robbery and spends most of his adult life in jail. He is virulently racist, though this is not what drives his crime spree. Ray simply wants to make money, to hustle his way through life, drifting from one flophouse and brothel to another until he is caught, inevitably, by the police. Soon, he is a "four-time loser." By the time he makes it to one of the toughest prisons in America--the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City--he is a smart, seasoned criminal. It is in Jeff City that he likely hears about the $50,000 bounty being offered by a St. Louis segregationist to kill King. When he breaks out of Jeff City at the bottom of a large cart filled with bread loaves (after trying unsuccessfully twice before), he roams the country trying out a variety of schemes to make money, including buying hundreds of dollars worth of film equipment and sex manuals with the idea of making porn flicks. At some point he latches on to the idea of killing King and travels to Atlanta to stake him out--whether the assassination was a concrete plan to collect the bounty, or just another half-thought-out Ray scheme to make money, or simply Ray's attempt to make himself famous, remains unclear.When Ray gets caught in Canada, he does what he's done time and again in his life: he makes up a story to cover his tracks. After reading 100 pages of Ray's life story, you come to see his invention of "Raoul" for what it is--an elaborate hoax, crafted from disparate elements of truth, meant to confuse the police. In a certain sense, the hoax was a failure: Ray was quickly persuaded to plead guilty. But in another, it was wildly successful: investigators, official and self-appointed, spent years trying to track down Raul, not pursuing Ray's brothers (who may or may not have had a hand in the St. Louis conspiracy) and the shadowy businessman who offered the King bounty to at least one other Jeff City inmate.In its last section, "Killing the Dream" becomes a farce, as a few conspiracy theorists and attorneys--some with an eye, it seems, to making a killing on the movie rights--concoct a series of increasingnly unlikely assassination scenarios involving the FBI, the Green Berets and others.

Hurrah, Gerald Posner did it again! Did a great service to this country by exposing the conspiracy theories for what they are: great webs of unfalsifiable humbug spun out of anecdotal evidence and the minor glitches that are attendant to even well-done criminal investigations. I came into the book believing that there might well have been a conspiracy in the killing of Dr. King. I came away believing that the only conspiracy was an after-the-fact conspiracy among the Rays to assist James Earl's getaway. As a criminal attorney, I was fascinated by Posner's superdetailed description of Ray's life. In place of the impossibly malleable "pansy" of conspiracy theories, Posner presents someone who couldn't be more common; someone whose morality and attention span lag far behind their ambition. Ray was not a genius, but he was also not the hillbilly moron he has usually been described as, who would have pushed his lawbreaking talents to the limit with a liquor store stickup. Ray was an extremely mobile criminal, moving from place to place in the country and into Canada with ease as advantage dictated. His takes were not spectacular but they were significant. At the same time, he was not totally unsocialized. He fancied himself "going straight", and the Ray family kept in close contact with one another, and indeed, fed the both the legitimate and illegitimate ambitions of each other. Most of all, Posner exposes Ray as a master liar, who carefully gaged every response in light of what he thought the questioner knew about him. After the assasination, Ray would promptly work details of each new conspiracy theory into his story of what he was doing the evening of the crime. I have met quite a few Rays in my practice, for it is quite common for a criminal suspect to tell his lawyer: "I've been framed by a conspiracy, now go out and find a conspiracy for me." Ray was just a harder working in this regard than most. Cannot be recommended too highly.

You might wonder if the author of "Case Closed" deemed it merely obligatory to debunk yet another batch of conspiracy theories, this time surrounding the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Not so. Some of the same conspiratorial characters who cascaded in and out of the murky John F. Kennedy tale have transitioned into the Martin Luther King tragedy without so much as a blink of an eye. Gerald Posner takes them on once again with no less fervor and no less a flair for exhaustive research than he did in "Case Closed," the fruits of which are compellingly told to a fact-hungry America. If you're tired of tabloidisms about the Monica Lewinsky/Ken Starr mess, jump right into Gerald Posner's highly readable "Killing the Dream." I loved it. The footnotes themselves are a richly textured book within a book, sprinkles of wisdom delivered with the sledgehammer of truth. In "Killing the Dream" we find that James Earl Ray is not only a petty criminal, he's a jerk (parks his pale yellow Mustang sideways taking up two spaces so as not to expose his precious getaway car to bumps and bruises; a liar ("He was the most reluctant, sarcastic, overbearing liar I ever saw," said Alton police chief Harold Riggins in 1954); and a bigot. And -- you will meet the real Raul in Posner's disturbing account of intrusion on an innocent by sarcastic, overbearing conspiracy buffs. This exceptional book has put the Martin Luther King assassination in proper perspective, elevating it at the same time to its rightful place in history.

Killing the Dream is a great read as well as being animportant book about this tragic assassination. Even though Posnerhas meticulously documented everything in the book he keeps the detail out of the reader's way. The author keeps a nice flow in the narrative while making it easy to check the documentary references. Posner's ability to make a well documented book fun to read is a great skill that not many authors possess. Through this book we get to know James Earl Ray at every stage of his life. We see Ray becoming a petty criminal by growing up in a family of criminals. We follow his life as a fumbling loner and see that this is his nature both before and after the assassination. Ray's present pathetic attempts at vindication become understandable as part of his lifelong efforts to avoid responsibility for his criminal acts. Posner wisely lets Ray's actions and the documentary evidence speak the truth rather than vainly speculating about the assassin's psychology. We see for ourselves the type of person Ray is and the choices he made while avoiding accountability for his crimes. By seeing the context of Ray's entire life the monstrous act of killing Dr. King becomes understandable as the misbegotten attempt of a loser trying to make a big score. Sometimes it is hard to accept the mundane nature of evil, but Posner has done us the service of telling us the truth. The simple dignity of reality gives an historical weight to this telling of the crime that none of the sensationalists will ever achieve. People who want to know the truth will want to read this book. Others will endlessly babble their fantasies and allow themselves to be exploited by Oliver Stone and his ilk.