Assassin altered history & writer’s life

King’s arrival was a sight to behold. A crowd of hundreds was waiting. They gave him a rock star’s reception.

He led his entourage to a room on the upper floor off the balcony. This was his inner circle, his chief assistants. He called them his “wild horses.” All of them black, all of them ministers, all of them under 30 except King and Abernathy.

Memphis was to be a quick visit to help the garbage workers — part of the grand project King called the “Poor People’s Campaign.”

Late in the afternoon of his first day in Memphis, Dr. King invited me to join him in his motel room for an interview. He told me that he was aware of the concern and criticism directed at him and his campaign.

But he was firm in saying that he had no intention of turning back. King’s plan was to gather activists from the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, the Latino movement and all the others he could gather and to bring waves of these people to Washington to force a shutdown of the government until his demand — a job or an income for everyone — was enacted into law.

He already had people visiting black churches, telling parents not to let their sons be drafted and sent to Vietnam.

“Give your sons to Dr. King,” his emissaries implored. “Let them go with him to Washington to join the fight to end poverty.”

After our interview ended, King walked me to the door and then the two of us stepped out onto the balcony.

We lingered there, leaning against the railing, indulging in a personal chat.

Twenty-four hours later, in almost the same spot, at almost the same time, he was struck down by an assassin’s bullet.

Even though I was a registered guest at the Lorraine Motel and a Times reporter who was at the crime scene moments after that fatal shot, nobody ever came to ask me if I knew anything or saw anything.

But even if they had, it might not have mattered.

The official story came the night of the assassination with a stamp of “case closed.” The killer was James Earl Ray, an escaped convict, officials said.

Ray fired the shot from the bathroom window of a flophouse a block away. A manhunt was already in the works.

Two days later, I stood in my motel room doorway and noticed the crime scene had been altered.

Across from the motel, the thicket of trees, brush and big weeds all had been cut to within an inch of the ground.

But, as it turned out, I was not the only person to have questions about what I’d seen.

As I continued reporting from the motel, I learned King’s driver, Solomon Jones, had reported seeing a man he believed was the shooter in that thicket.

Ceola Shave, a housekeeper at the Lorraine, also told of seeing a man in those bushes.

Was that the figure that I had witnessed rising in the thicket, I wondered?

In 1972, Gerold Frank, a wellknown author and journalist who freelanced for The New Yorker, published “An American Death,” billed as “The true story of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the greatest manhunt of our time.”

I had spoken with Frank a few weeks after the assassination.

It was a friendly chat — even though Frank shared none of his findings. He put me in his book, including a picture of me interviewing people in the aftermath of King’s assassination.

Four years later, I read his book. It was mind-boggling.

All the images — the slivers of memory — I carried like freezeframed pictures in my mind came rushing back.

Frank had gotten access to a lot of the witness reports given to authorities — things that black reporters had difficulty getting from officials in the South.

I came to one involving a man named Harold Carter, better known as Cornbread.

Cornbread told Frank that he’d been in those bushes behind the flophouses drinking wine with a buddy, Dude Wheeler, when King was killed. They were lounging in cardboard boxes and had run out of wine.

Wheeler went for another bottle. Cornbread, alone in the bushes, told Frank he heard someone creeping through the thicket.

At first he thought it was Wheeler, returning with more alcohol.

But the man crept right past him, unaware anyone was nearby, Cornbread told Frank.

Cornbread said he saw the man go to the edge of the thicket of bushes and remove a weapon — a firearm he assembled from pieces removed from his clothing.

The man waited at the edge for many minutes — then pulled the trigger, Cornbread told Frank.

Then the man quickly disassembled the weapon, and stuffed the pieces back in his clothing, according to Cornbread.

What he saw before King was shot and what we both saw in the frozen, horrified moments after King was shot are almost mirror images, each from our own vantage point.

And the proximity of the shooter, if that was indeed King’s shooter, would answer one question that always bedeviled me — why had the bullet blast been so loud?

Perhaps the gunshot that to me sounded like an explosion didn’t come from a flophouse a block away after all, but somewhere much closer — the tangle of trees and bushes just across the wide gully at the Lorraine Motel.

Authorities dismissed Cornbread as an old drunk — and as I said, they never spoke to me.

But the way I see it, I can give Cornbread’s story what the official tale about James Earl Ray lacks: corroboration.

And maybe finally, 50 years after the killing of Martin Luther King Jr.,we can get down to the real nitty-gritty of how he died.