How My Father Helped Identify James Earl Ray as the Assassin
In the online transcript dealing with the timeline of the assassination, we read this:
April 6-10From the evidence left behind in Ray's bundle, the FBI believe the killing was a conspiracy between three men: Eric S. Galt, Harvey Lowmeyer, and John Willard.
The FBI traces laundry tags on Ray's shirt and shorts to Home Service Laundry in Los Angeles, CA, who tells them the name on the receipt is Eric S. Galt. They also trace a pair of pliers to Rompage Hardware, two blocks from Home Service Laundry.
For me, this was an old story. I published the following in Chapter 4 of the 2007 edition of my book, Boundaries and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Leviticus, Volume 1, footnote #153. In the 2012 edition, I removed the section of the book in which it appeared: the section on assassinations. The original edition is here.
My father, Sam W. North, then a Los Angeles-based F.B.I. agent, had a part in solving this case. The authorities had discovered a pair of pliers dropped near the assassination site in Memphis, Tennessee. A pair of undershorts had also been dropped. The pliers had a sticker: Rompage Hardware. The F.B.I. put out a bulletin to its offices to trace this company. Los Angeles agents Gil Benjamin and George Moorehead investigated a hardware store with this name; they found pairs of identical pliers in a bargain bin. The store was located a few blocks from the St. Francis Hotel, where the convicted murderer James Earl Ray acknowledges in his book that he lived. Ray, Who Killed Martin Luther King? The True Story by the Alleged Assassin (Washington, D.C.: National Press Books,1992), p. 84. Another agent, Ted Ahern, went down the block to a dry cleaners. There the tag number on the shorts was identified as having been assigned to “Eric S. Galt.” Moorehead and my father later investigated “Galt’s” previous residences. They located a paper that had been signed by “Galt.” They sent the paper to the FBI laboratory in Washington. On it was an impression: “James Earl Ray.” Moorehead provided the details of this in a letter to me dated March 3, 1995; they confirm my father’s recollections. Ray does not mention the pliers and shorts in his account of the F.B.I.’s announcement: ibid., p. 100.
Ray had been using the alias, Eric S. Galt, for a year. He used it when he entered Canada in the summer of 1967. He stayed a month. Despite the fact that he was an escaped felon, the Mounties did not get this man. Galt's name appeared in a telephone book in Southeastern Ontario.
There have been books arguing that Ray was set up. The most persuasive of these books are written by William Pepper. King's family has always believed Ray was innocent.
If Ray was set up, the conspirators planted the evidence in Memphis: the rifle, the pliers, and the underwear with the dry cleaning tags. In California, the dry cleaning tags were confirmed as belonging to Ray, and the hardware store sold Rompage pliers.
My friend William Marina taught history at Florida Atlantic University. He died in 2009. We once discussed King's assassination. He had studied the case. He had no doubt that Ray did it.