The official history of King’s death goes like this: The civil rights leader was assassinated on April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Initially, law enforcement agents believed they were searching for several possible killers. But two weeks after the murder, the FBI matched fingerprints found at the scene and announced that the fugitive assassin was one man, James Earl Ray, an escapee from the Missouri State Penitentiary.
On June 8, two months after King’s death, Ray was arrested by customs agents while attempting to board a flight to Brussels at London’s Heathrow Airport. Ray was extradited to the United States, and nine months after his capture, on March 10, 1969, he pleaded guilty to King’s murder. Three days later, he recanted that confession and spent the rest of his life professing his innocence, claiming that he was made a patsy for the real assassin, a man he called “Raoul.” Raoul was transparently fictitious, but that doesn’t mean that someone else, or perhaps several people, didn’t aid and abet Ray in what has always been a crime for which he alone was held accountable.
For over 50 years—both because of Ray’s continued protestations as to his innocence, and because of the stunning revelations about the FBI’s harassment of King during his lifetime—conspiracy theories have proliferated about who really killed the civil rights icon and why. Of all those theories, the Byers Bounty, alleging that a far-right Southern organization offered to pay to have King killed, is considered the most credible, and is the only one to have been backed by a full-blown congressional investigation.
For years after revealing this alleged bounty, Byers largely disappeared from public view, deepening the mystery surrounding King’s assassination. In fact, for most of this century, he was widely believed to already be dead by those with an interest in the King case. In my own years of reporting and research, I attempted to locate Byers numerous times to no avail. I, too, thought he was dead. That was until this past summer, when somebody reached out to me with his whereabouts, along with a note saying, “The man that brokered the murder of MLK is alive.”
A few months later, Byers was indeed dead—but not before I spoke to him one last time. What he told me, and what I discovered in tandem, added a chilling new dimension to a case many had long assumed would never be fully explained. There’s still one way it could be.