April 9, 2026 • 43 mins
Decades before he sculpted a Confederate general out of old bathtubs, Jack Kershaw briefly represented his most famous client - Martin Luther King Jr's assassin, James Earl Ray. The relationship soured after Ray discovered his lawyer had pocketed a payment from Playboy magazine.
Sources:
James McKinley, "Playboy Interview: James Earl Ray," Playboy Magazine, September 1977
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/09/archives/polygraph-indicates-ray-lied.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/10/25/archives/james-earl-ray-wants-mark-lane-to-replace-his-tenth-lawyer.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/sports/the-barkley-marathons-few-know-how-to-enter-fewer-finish.html
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Right around this time of year fifty eight years ago,
it was pouring rain in Memphis, Tennessee. You could hear
the wind rapping at the windows and occasional peals of thunder.
In the recording of doctor Martin Luther King Junior's final speech.
He arrived in the city around lunch time on April
(00:28):
third and checked into the Lorraine Motel. He was exhausted
and starting to come down with something, and the weather
was getting worse by the moment, but he gave the
speech anyway.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
That night, he.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Addressed a crowd of over two thousand people packed into
the Mason Temple. It was, of course, a moving speech,
they always were, and his words were about more than
just the Memphis Sanitation workers strike. They were about the
struggle for freedom everywhere across all of human history, from
(01:05):
the Book of Exodus to the churches in Alabama. Bull
Connor hadn't turned them around in Birmingham, not with dogs,
not with fire hoses, and they wouldn't be turned around now.
They'd keep struggling and they'd win one day. Maybe not today,
but one day. Speeches don't have titles, not when you
(01:30):
write them. But this speech is remembered today as his
I've been to the mountaintop speech, because that's how it ends.
He knows the struggle ends in victory, even if he
won't be there with him at the end. The speech
ends with what sounds like a prophecy now in hindsight,
(01:57):
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Longevity has its place, but I'm not concerned about that now.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
I just want to do God's will.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain,
and I've looked over and I've seen the promised Land.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
I may not get there with you, but I want
you to know the night that we as a people
will get to the promised Land. So I'm happy to night.
I'm not worried about anything.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
I'm not fearing in a man mine eyes have.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Seen the glory, all the coming of the Lord.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
The very next day, he was dead shot by an
assassin as he was leaving his motel room. I'm Molly Conger,
and this is weird, little guys. Doctor Martin Luther King
(03:31):
Junior was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, a little after six
pm on April fourth, nineteen sixty eight. This isn't an
episode about that moment in history. Not really, not directly,
but it was an odd surprise as I sat down
to write this week when I realized what day it was.
(03:55):
I was reading and writing about these supporting characters in
the conspiracy theories about King's assassination on the anniversary of
his death. I'm trying to spend less time online. I
think that's something we should all aspire to. But I
saw an interesting post on Blue Sky that day from
a user I'm not familiar with, but their display name
(04:18):
is I to B Wells Winchester Rifle. The post was
about when we celebrate doctor King. Martin Luther King Junior.
Day is in January.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
It's on his birthday.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
And even as someone who routinely bumps up against some
element of the story of his death and the course
of my work, I don't think I could confidently tell
you what day he died.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
I mean, right now.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
I could, but any other time of year, if you
caught me by surprise and said what day was King assassinated?
I wouldn't bet money on my ability to come up
with a date. A fourth nineteen sixty eight, And the
gist of the post is that this is intentional. We
celebrate on his birthday as part of this project of
(05:11):
whitewashing his legacy, because if we celebrated him on the
day of his death, it would raise questions, it would
make us reckon with that death. How did he die?
He was murdered, he was assassinated. He wasn't just a nice,
(05:33):
peaceful spokesman of polite nonviolence. He was a dangerous man
if you were in the business of maintaining the political order. Anyway,
he didn't die. They killed him. And if all you
have is a vague recollection of I have a dream,
(05:54):
you might think that's all. It was a passive dream
of a possible better world. But he was dreaming of
a world he was willing to die for, one that
he did die for. It's a dream that's dreamt in
milliseconds behind eyes squeezed shut against the blast of a
fire hose in Birmingham. And whether you were conscious of
(06:17):
it or not, it's the same dream that so many
of you have had when you squeezed your eyes shut
in a cloud of tear gas on the street in
Minneapolis or Ferguson or your own hometown. So, as I
was writing this week, I took a moment to really
hear that final speech, to hear his words about developing
(06:43):
a kind of dangerous unselfishness, about rising up with greater readiness,
with greater determination, about struggling through the darkness because we
believe that what's on the other side is something so
beautiful that it's worth fighting for. He'd been to the mountaintop.
(07:03):
He had an unshakable faith that the promised land really
does lie ahead if we're willing to keep going, even
if we know, as he did, that we're planting trees
whose shade we'll never rest him. It's an important message today.
I think it's not what this episode is about at all,
(07:26):
But as I'm assembling the details about these terrible men
and trying to position them in their proper context, I've
actually really enjoyed giving myself the kind of education about
the civil rights movement that I just don't think I
was getting in school. I've found some comfort in that
(07:47):
speech this week, in the darkness of the work that
I do and the world that we're living in. I
am going to tell you about a strange little racist
I promise I always do, but it's sometimes to remember
they're not the whole story. Turning to the topic at hand, though,
(08:09):
the reason I was thinking about doctor King in the
first place is because I was reading some vintage pornography
again this week that didn't come out right.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Let me explain.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
This is a continuation of the story from last week.
We are still talking about Jack Kershaw, the man who
made the world's ugliest Confederate monument. His twenty five foot
tall polyurethane love letter to Confederate general and clan wizard
Nathan Bedford. Forest stood next to the highway outside of Nashville, Tennessee,
(08:43):
until twenty twenty one, when it was taken down by
its new owner. Jack Kershaw died in twenty ten at
nearly one hundred years old, and when he died, there
were three facts about him in every new story he
made that fucked up statue. He co founded the neo
(09:05):
Confederate secessionist group, the League of the South, and he
was a lawyer. More specifically, though those articles all have
the same exact single fact about his career as an attorney,
he once represented James Earl Ray. That's why I was
(09:27):
reading that old softcore pornomag. I finally understand now that
old joke about reading it for the articles, because this
is the third time now that for some episode of
this show I have had to hunt down an issue
of a nineteen seventies Newty magazine. First it was the
(09:49):
Hustler spread that drove a Nazi serial killer to start
plotting to kill Larry Flint. Then it was an old
penthouse interview with the Alabama Attorney General who indicted a
church bomber. And now the September nineteen seventy seven issue
of Playboy magazine featuring the results of a polygraph test
(10:09):
administered to James Earl Ray in prison. James Earl Ray
died in prison in nineteen ninety eight while serving a
ninety nine year sentence for the murder of doctor Martin
Luther King Junior. Today won't be the day we get
into all of the competing overlapping and contradictory conspiracy theories
(10:32):
about the exact level of his responsibility for that crime.
But he did confess, plead guilty, recant his confession, try
and fail to get new trials, and seed some of
those alternative theories of the case himself. Over the course
of the three decades he spent in prison.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
For the crime.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
That's all you really need to know for the purposes
of this article in Playboy Magaze. And I mean, you
know how I feel about the idea that something like
this could have been the work of a lone wolf,
you know. But I have a stack of very unhinged
books by conspiracy theorists of varying degrees of sincerity and
(11:20):
contact with reality that I want to read before I
try to navigate that minefield. We've butted up against hearts
of this story before, though, after King's murder, James Earl
Ray was on the run for two months before his arrest.
He confessed and pleaded guilty in March of nineteen sixty nine,
(11:42):
and then, almost immediately after being convicted for the crime
he confessed to, he recanted the confession and hired church
bombing enthusiast JB. Stoner to represent him in an attempt
to reverse his guilty plea that was obviously unsuccessful, and JB.
Stone Or didn't stay on the case for very long,
(12:02):
although he did keep James Earl Ray's brother Jerry, on
his personal payroll for years After that and throughout the
nineteen seventies, James Earl Ray burned through attorneys like wildfire
so in nineteen seventy seven he hired a new one,
Jack Kershaw. So that's why I was reading Playboy, because
(12:28):
it was Jack Kershaw who arranged for the magazine to
interview his client in prison, allowing them to conduct a
polygraph examination just days after Ray was returned to custody
after a brief escape. If you did recently listen to
these series of episodes about Joseph Paul Franklin, parts of
(12:48):
this timeline will ring a bell if you didn't, don't
worry about it. I'm trying to be more mindful that
any episode could be someone's first, so I should stop
writing like you've all got an encyclopedic memory of all
the tangential lore from old episodes. So if you didn't
just listen to that three month long series of episodes
(13:10):
about the Nazi serial killer. In nineteen seventy seven, Congress
was starting to hold hearings on the King assassination. The
United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations had
been established the year prior, and they were going to
investigate the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin
(13:31):
Luther King Junior. I'll go ahead and spoil this one
for you. The seven hundred page report that came out
a few years later essentially concludes in both cases that
the fatal shots were fired by the guy we got
for it. Lee Harvey oswaldfired the shot that killed Kennedy.
(13:51):
James Lray was the shooter who killed King.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
That's what they decided.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
But the committee determined that it was kind of likely
that neither man had actually truly acted alone. But we
can't really say what the conspiracy was. Just we're pretty
sure it wasn't a foreign government, and it definitely wasn't
our government. So maybe there was a conspiracy, but who
(14:20):
can really say incredible conclusions. Make of that what you will.
I'll link the report in the show notes if you're
interested in losing your minds.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
I guess.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
So.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
In nineteen seventy seven, James Earl Ray is in prison.
He's not quite a decade into his ninety nine year sentence,
and he's starting to hear that he's going to get
hauled in front of a congressional committee. They were going
to ask him some hard questions, questions that he had
managed to avoid up to that point. I mean, at
(14:57):
this point, he is crying foul and claiming his innocence,
But when he originally entered that guilty plea, the whole
point had been to avoid a trial, to avoid any
more questions about who might have helped him kill Martin
Luther King Junior, and whether or not there was a
(15:18):
giant conspiracy involving both of his brothers. It makes perfect
sense to hire a lawyer if you think you're going
to get a congressional subpoena. He already had a lawyer,
of course, but the lawyer he had was not making
any progress on the impossible task of getting him a
(15:39):
new trial, and he was in the middle of threatening
to sue the lawyer he'd had before that one, and
so he was in the market for new representation. In
early nineteen seventy seven, James Earl Ray's attorney was a
man named James Lasar. Lasar had been working on Ray's
case for almost seven years, and when he heard about
(16:01):
the Congressional Committee, he advised his client not to voluntarily
comply with the House investigation. There wasn't a whole lot
anybody could do about a congressional subpoena if one were
to come, but at this stage the committee was just
hoping he would agree to talk, and they made several
(16:22):
attempts to interview him in prison, and initially he refused,
which was his right. He and his lawyer were initially
on the same page about this. Say no to this,
don't have a voluntary conversation with an investigator. There's nothing
(16:42):
to gain from this. It's all downside pretty much. Any
good lawyer will tell you to say as little as
possible in almost any situation. But James Earl Ray had
his own plans, and after an initially refusing to speak
to the committee, he wrote a letter to the New
(17:04):
York Times that he'd changed his mind and he was
interested in a conversation. His lawyer heard about this from
the New York Times reporter, who called him for a comment,
and then in March of nineteen seventy seven, Ray sent
a letter directly to the Congressional Committee informing them that
(17:24):
he no longer agreed with the advice of his attorney,
James Lazar, and if the committee had any further inquiries
for him, they should contact his new lawyer, Jack Kershaw.
This too was news to James Lazar, who told reporters
that this Jack Kershaw character hadn't even asked him for
(17:45):
access to the case files. Lazar told a reporter from
the Associated Press that he thought Ray was making a
big mistake, saying, quote, one of the difficulties is that
Ray's passed at turn jorneys have been clearly motivated by
financial gain or publicity reasons, and he enters the case
(18:06):
again in a manner which suggests that history is repeating itself.
He was right, of course, Jack Kershaw wanted money and fame.
He may have hoped to get something else to Several
(18:28):
articles about the negotiations between Kershaw and the Congressional committee
about the terms of Ray's potential cooperation mentioned that he
was very insistent on receiving access to FBI files. One's
quote dealing with King's enemies. The reason he gave was
(18:49):
that this would help him conduct his own investigation into
the real killer. He needed to see these files so
he would know who else might have had a motive
to kill King, and at face value, that seems reasonable.
He's a defense attorney, and a defense attorney wants to
be able to present an alternative theory of the crime
(19:12):
to a jury. But there is no jury because this
isn't a trial, and his client's already been convicted, so
that actually kind of falls apart. Why does he want
to see these files? I wonder if he wanted access
to those files because he wanted to see what the
(19:35):
FBI knew about his own associates, not specifically as it
pertained to the King assassination.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Right.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
I'm not saying Ray wasn't the shooter. Probably was, But
the investigation into the King assassination was very wide ranging.
Even once they'd identified and arrested the shooter, they kept
investigating the possibility of a wider conspiracy. And you won't
(20:05):
be surprised to hear that a lot of white supremacists
who were active in the nineteen sixties had made public
threats on King's life, threats that were serious enough now
that he's dead they warranted some follow up from the FBI.
(20:25):
I've actually spent a lot of time with the redacted
versions of these files that have been publicly released, and
I can very easily imagine that the scores of racists
whose associates were interviewed by the FBI would have loved
to know what they said. There was information in those files,
(20:48):
but a lot of guys Jack Kirshaw knew some close
friends and maybe some rivals. Now it's entirely possible that
(21:12):
Jack Kershaw was just a fucking idiot who didn't see
any problem with letting his client be interviewed repeatedly for
hours at a time about a crime he'd already confessed to.
Even as he's promising this client that he's going to
get him a new trial. I can't imagine what kind
of lawyer would think that's a good idea, But I'm
(21:34):
willing to leave open the possibility that he really was
just dumber than a box of hair. More likely, though,
he had absolutely no intention of winning this fight to
get Ray a new trial. He just wanted to be
a part of this process for his own reasons, and
within his first full month as Ray's attorney, he had
(21:57):
allowed investigators from the Congressional Committee to spend four full
days grilling his client in prison. Kershaw told reporters that
he was exploring the possibility of civil lawsuits that he
could file on Rai's behalf that would afford them access
to classified government documents on Martin Luther King Junior and
(22:19):
the investigation into those who had a motive to kill him.
In May, Kershaw's wife, Mary nol Kershaw wrote and recorded
a ballad called They Slew the Dreamer. It's as weird
as you might expect. Mary nol Kershaw has been dead
(22:40):
since nineteen eighty nine, but the guy who co wrote
the song is still alive and extremely online, so I
won't play it here. The last thing I need is
a copyright case from this weirdo, but if you're curious,
you can find it online. And part of the chorus
includes these lyrics, they slew the Dreamer, Let a dreamer
(23:04):
take the fall. They turned the courtroom into a costume ball.
Elsewhere in the song, the lyrics referenced the mysterious Raoul,
a made up guy that James Earlraay claimed was the
real mastermind and actual shooter behind King's murder.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Raoul was a.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Blonde Cuban French Canadian who did not exist. And then,
in June of nineteen seventy seven, Jack Kershaw arranged for
his client to spend the day with someone else who
wanted to talk to him. Not an FBI agent, not
(23:46):
someone from the DOJ, not an investigator with the Congressional Committee,
but a man named James McKinley, a writer for Playboy, magazine.
The interview took place over the course of several separate visits,
with one visit having to be rescheduled due to raise
(24:07):
escape from prison. He was one of seven men who
escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petrust, Tennessee, on
June tenth, nineteen seventy seven. He was about eight miles
away when tracking dogs caught up to him fifty four
hours later. And a fun side note here for any
(24:27):
outdoors extreme sports enthusiasts, this is the origin of the
Berkley Marathons. That's the annual one hundred mile ultra marathon
that takes place in the woods in Tennessee every year.
So a regular marathon is twenty six point two miles
because that's how far a Greek messenger had to run
(24:49):
to get to Athens to deliver the news the Battle
of Marathon. So why is this eight mile journey into
the woods the inspiration for a one hundred mile ultra marathon.
The man who designed the course, ultra runner Gary Cantrell,
had spent quite a bit of time in that area.
He liked to hike in the area that is now
(25:11):
Frozen Heads State Park, and he says when he heard
the story of Ray's escape, he thought to himself, killing
me in it eight miles, I bet I could do
at least one hundred, so he did. In its current form,
the race has been held almost every year since nineteen
ninety five, and only twenty people have ever finished it.
(25:35):
That doesn't have anything to do with this story. I
just have to respect a guy who heard about James
Earl Ray getting lost in the woods and wanted to
see how much better he could do it running through
the same woods. Interestingly, James Olray didn't die until nineteen
ninety eight, so he could conceivably have been aware that
(25:56):
ultra runners were gathering in the woods every year just
to clown on him. But I couldn't find anything specific
about whether anyone told him about it. I hope they did.
Back in nineteen seventy seven, though, he was, as I said,
(26:17):
very quickly recaptured and the prison immediately allowed the interview
to continue. They resumed the interview the day after he
was returned to custody. I mean, you would assume he
would be placed in lockdown or something, right, he was
just allowed to get right back to hanging out with
the guys from Playboy In the second half of the interview,
(26:41):
he's complaining about having poison ivy because he just got
back from hiding in the woods for two days. I mean,
maybe things were just different in the seventies, but it
seems very weird.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
And so.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
On their third visit with Ray, it says, after he's
returned from escaping from prison, the Playboy team brought someone
else along, Douglas Wicklander, a polygraph examiner from John E.
Reid and Associates. John E. Reid and Associates is a
polygraph examination company named for its founder, John Reid, the
(27:17):
Chicago cop whose read technique of police interrogation is notorious
for producing false confessions. And a polygraph is an interesting thing.
Not that you asked me, but if you did ask me,
I would say, don't ever take a polygraph examination. They
(27:40):
aren't admissible in court because they aren't science. The machine
can't tell if you're lying. That's not something a machine
can measure. It measures things that are measurable, like your pulse,
your respiration rate, your blood pressure, your galvanic skin response,
(28:02):
which is just a fancy way of saying the machine
can tell if you're sweaty. It doesn't measure the truth.
It measures physiological signs of stress. Do some people start
sweating when they're nervous?
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Okay? Do a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Get nervous when they lie? Sure, But a lot of
people get nervous when they're being honest too, if we're
talking about something kind of stressful, like whether or not
you're going to go to prison. I mean, every doctor
I've ever seen thinks I have a very high heart
rate because I get nervous when they take my pulse
(28:40):
and they're not even asking me a question. There's just
no scientific support for this. It's not reliable, it's not consistent,
it's totally subjective. The exact same results can be read
differently by different examiners, and the same subject can have
two wildly different examinations depending on whether they had breakfast,
(29:04):
or if it's hot, or if they really have to pee.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
It's fake.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
There's no scenario where passing a lie detector test is
going to help you, and it could end up hurting you,
even if it can't be admitted as evidence in court.
I know you didn't ask me for my advice, but
if you're ever in some kind of situation, get a
lawyer and shut up and don't let them put electrodes
(29:31):
on you, for God's sake. So what I mean is
the actual results of this test administered by a guy
hired by Playboy magazine or irrelevant. We don't believe in this.
It's not real, but if you are curious. The examiner
concluded that James Earl Ray showed quote significant emotional disturbances
(29:55):
indicative of deception when he denied murdering Martin Luther King,
but the examiner said he appeared to be telling the
truth when he said no one paid him to do it.
(30:23):
When the article was published, the prison warden was pretty upset.
I mean, it seemed so weird that Ray was allowed
to hang out with the reporter from Playboy all day,
just hours after he got back from his prison. Ray right, well,
according to the warden, he was not allowed to be
(30:44):
doing that. Warden Stannie Lane says Ray was placed in
administrative segregation after the escape and he was only allowed
to have contact with his lawyer. Warden Lane says, raised
lawyer Jack Kershaw told him that the reporter was an
investigator and the polygraph examiner had been hired to work
(31:08):
on the case. We got Houdini, That's what we got,
the warden told an Associated Press reporter in August, shortly
before the interview was published in Playboy's September issue. We
didn't know until this afternoon that Playboy had been here.
I went through the ceiling up there today. I couldn't
believe it. Prison officials had apparently not actually asked the reporter,
(31:32):
his editor, or their polygrapher for any kind of identification.
Jack Kershaw told him he'd hired them to investigate the case,
and they took his word for it. But the warden
wasn't the only one who was upset about how it
turned out. They didn't get the results they were hoping for,
(31:54):
and Kershaw seemed surprised and furious that the polygraph examiner
concluded that was lying about killing King. So he went
to the press and called the examination faulty and blamed
the results on the room being too hot and Ray
not being allowed to have an aspirin for a headache.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
And before the.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Article was even published, Ray tried to file a lawsuit
against Playboy, but he didn't do it through his lawyer.
He wrote it himself and mailed it from prison, and
then his lawyer went to the press and said just kidding.
We're retracting that. And I don't really know where that
suit ended up. I guess nowhere, but his representation of
(32:36):
Ray didn't last much longer after that. The Playboy interview
had not worked out well for anyone except Playboy, and
within months of the issue appearing on newsstands, James Earl
Ray did file a lawsuit, not the initial one he
contemplated against Playboy Magazine. He was suing his own lawyer,
(33:01):
and Jack Kershaw responded by countersuing Ray and filing suit
against the new attorney Ray had hired to replace him.
Those lawsuits must have fizzled out, because when Ray filed
a second lawsuit against Kershaw over the same issue four
years later in nineteen eighty two, none of the reporting
I could find mentioned that there had been a prior lawsuit,
(33:24):
so they must have been dismissed pretty quickly. Ray's second lawsuit,
the one he filed in eighty two, was against both
Kershaw and the magazine. He claimed the rigged polygraph test
was hurting his chances of getting a new trial. The
only comment Playboy gave to the press was we never
(33:47):
pay for interviews, and they denied they'd paid Kershaw the
eleven thousand dollars to arrange the prison meeting with Ray.
I couldn't actually find any original court documents in this case,
not the time that I had this week, and it
seems to have faded away before anybody really had to
make a bunch of sworn statements in court. So all
(34:09):
I have is that comment Playboy gave the press about
how they don't pay for interviews. I don't know if
they would have made the same statement in court, because
I don't think that's true. Kershaw himself admitted in filings
he made in the first lawsuit, one where Playboy wasn't
a named party, that he had absolutely received that money.
(34:32):
The fact that he received the money was not an
issue in the lawsuit between Kershaw and Ray. The only
facted issue was whether or not Kershaw had told Ray
about the money and whether that money went into Ray's
legal defense fund or Jack Kershaw's pockets. Again, everybody's seeing
(34:53):
each other, and I don't think any of it ever
made it very far. And in the end, Jack Kershaw
only worked for James Olray for eight months or so.
In one of his lawsuits he called it close to
a year. But we're talking March of nineteen seventy seven
through some time later that fall, after the Playboy issue
(35:17):
came out, and most of what he did was arranged
for other people's access to his client. There were interviews
with reporters that he got paid for, and half a
dozen interviews with investigators from the Congressional Committee on Assassinations.
No progress was made on getting Ray a new trial,
(35:37):
and it's not clear to what extent he was successful
in accessing any non public information about the King assassination.
This was the highest profile case of his career, but
if he ever actually entered a courtroom as a result,
it would have been when he and his former client
were suing each other. Not long before his death, in
(36:03):
twenty ten, Jack Kershaw was interviewed by controversial true crime
writer Sondra London about his involvement with King's assassin. The
word controversial is doing some heavy lifting here. It's the
word that's used on her Wikipedia page. I might choose
(36:23):
a harsher one. I've talked a bit in the past
about my own fraud relationship with a genre of true crime,
but I think even if you're a diehard fan of
the form, you have to agree it was not consistent
with what you might call journalistic ethics for her to
get engaged to the Gainesville Ripper while she was writing
(36:47):
a book about the incarcerated spree killer who brutally raped
and murdered five women. I don't know, so it's not
surprising to me that she seems to have given a
pretty softball interview to an elderly racist who was still
peddling MLKA conspiracy theories in his old age. The interviews
she did with Kershaw appears to have been a longer
(37:09):
conversation that just doesn't exist online anymore. I can only
find a short clip of it. But in the clip
that I found, she asks him how he got involved
in the James Earl Ray case in the first place,
which is a question I would actually really like to
know the answer to. Unfortunately, he doesn't answer the question.
(37:35):
He does, though, immediately tell a very strange lie.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
As I recall, James L. Rage helped him out of
the blue, and that in noun that he wanted me
to represent him, and so I hadn't been practicing law
too long at the time, and I was very much
interested in the case, and so I ringed an interview,
(38:05):
and he told me his story.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
By nineteen seventy seven, he'd been a lawyer for fifteen years.
I mean, I know, he's a very old man. He's
about to die in twenty ten, and I imagine the
years sort of start to run together at a certain point.
But I think he would have some idea, even in
(38:35):
his nineties that he was closer to the end of
his legal career than the beginning of it in nineteen
seventy seven. I mean, he was sixty four years old
in nineteen seventy seven, and he all but retired just
a few years later. So it's a very odd thing
to say. Most write ups about Kershaw's life, articles written
(38:58):
before and after his death, tend to focus on just
this one case, just this one client. You only ever
hear about the case he took on in nineteen seventy
seven when he worked for James ol Ray. And I
had a sort of passing familiarity with Jack Kershaw. I
always kind of figured, yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
Who's a lawyer. Who's always a lawyer.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
I knew that he was a lawyer and that he
was a racist, and that he made use of those
two things together, But the fact that he was a
lawyer in the first place didn't factor into my understanding
of him as a person. So the fact that all
of these stories leave out any additional detail about how
he came to be a lawyer, I think that misses
(39:44):
the real story. He didn't start practicing law until he
was fifty years old. He was in late midlife when
he decided to become a lawyer so he could get
better at racism. Representing James Earl Ray as a flashy headline,
(40:05):
but he didn't accomplish much in that case. Ray's victim
was already dead. He was just wasting everyone's time and
getting a little more attention. It's convenient shorthand maybe to
say Jack Kershaw represented James Earl Ray. It communicates very
quickly something that is true. He was a lawyer, and
(40:28):
he was a racist, and he engaged in the practice
of law as part of his ideological commitment to racism.
And what's more emblematic of that than representing the man
who killed Martin Luther King Junior. But all of these
stories represent his legal career just by telling you about
the few months he spent arranging media interviews with James
(40:49):
Earl Ray, and they ignore the fact that his actual
legal career was dedicated to fighting school desegregation. He signed
up for classes at the YMCA Law School because he
got so angry about the Supreme Court decision in Brown
versus Sport of Education, and that says a lot more
about who he was and what he spent his life doing.
(41:15):
I'm gonna stop making promises about how long a story
might be, because there's really no point pretending. I know.
Just one more, I swear, because it's just so interesting
to me that I can draw a straight line from
a guy getting so mad about school integration in nineteen
(41:37):
fifty five that he made it his whole personality too.
Decades later, members of the organization he would later found
using money from the foundation he named after his dead wife,
beating my neighbors in the streets in August of twenty seventeen,
years after he was dead and buried. When I see
all these stories are just pieces of one larger, singular story,
(42:02):
I really mean it. The guy who made the racist
statue out of old bathtubs is part of this long
chain of events that led to me being the person
who is obsessed with connecting those events telling you about them.
You know, So, even though I did promise that this
(42:22):
was going to be the end of this story. I
spent way too much time proving exactly which Nashville area
shown these A bunch of old racists used to meet
up out every week.
Speaker 1 (42:34):
To skip this part of the story.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Weird Little Guys Say production of Coolshoe Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly Hunger. Our
executive producers are Sophie Lectremant and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Worry Gagan. The theme
music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me
at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I
will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
(43:14):
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit
and right now. Don't forget to submit your questions either
on the subreddit or by email for the upcoming Q
and A episode.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
But as always, just
Speaker 2 (43:31):
Don't post anything that's going to make you one of
my Weird Little Guys
Cool Zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Right around this time of year fifty eight years ago,
it was pouring rain in Memphis, Tennessee. You could hear
the wind rapping at the windows and occasional peals of thunder.
In the recording of doctor Martin Luther King Junior's final speech.
He arrived in the city around lunch time on April
(00:28):
third and checked into the Lorraine Motel. He was exhausted
and starting to come down with something, and the weather
was getting worse by the moment, but he gave the
speech anyway.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
That night, he.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Addressed a crowd of over two thousand people packed into
the Mason Temple. It was, of course, a moving speech,
they always were, and his words were about more than
just the Memphis Sanitation workers strike. They were about the
struggle for freedom everywhere across all of human history, from
(01:05):
the Book of Exodus to the churches in Alabama. Bull
Connor hadn't turned them around in Birmingham, not with dogs,
not with fire hoses, and they wouldn't be turned around now.
They'd keep struggling and they'd win one day. Maybe not today,
but one day. Speeches don't have titles, not when you
(01:30):
write them. But this speech is remembered today as his
I've been to the mountaintop speech, because that's how it ends.
He knows the struggle ends in victory, even if he
won't be there with him at the end. The speech
ends with what sounds like a prophecy now in hindsight,
(01:57):
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Longevity has its place, but I'm not concerned about that now.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
I just want to do God's will.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain,
and I've looked over and I've seen the promised Land.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
I may not get there with you, but I want
you to know the night that we as a people
will get to the promised Land. So I'm happy to night.
I'm not worried about anything.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
I'm not fearing in a man mine eyes have.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Seen the glory, all the coming of the Lord.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
The very next day, he was dead shot by an
assassin as he was leaving his motel room. I'm Molly Conger,
and this is weird, little guys. Doctor Martin Luther King
(03:31):
Junior was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, a little after six
pm on April fourth, nineteen sixty eight. This isn't an
episode about that moment in history. Not really, not directly,
but it was an odd surprise as I sat down
to write this week when I realized what day it was.
(03:55):
I was reading and writing about these supporting characters in
the conspiracy theories about King's assassination on the anniversary of
his death. I'm trying to spend less time online. I
think that's something we should all aspire to. But I
saw an interesting post on Blue Sky that day from
a user I'm not familiar with, but their display name
(04:18):
is I to B Wells Winchester Rifle. The post was
about when we celebrate doctor King. Martin Luther King Junior.
Day is in January.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
It's on his birthday.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
And even as someone who routinely bumps up against some
element of the story of his death and the course
of my work, I don't think I could confidently tell
you what day he died.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
I mean, right now.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
I could, but any other time of year, if you
caught me by surprise and said what day was King assassinated?
I wouldn't bet money on my ability to come up
with a date. A fourth nineteen sixty eight, And the
gist of the post is that this is intentional. We
celebrate on his birthday as part of this project of
(05:11):
whitewashing his legacy, because if we celebrated him on the
day of his death, it would raise questions, it would
make us reckon with that death. How did he die?
He was murdered, he was assassinated. He wasn't just a nice,
(05:33):
peaceful spokesman of polite nonviolence. He was a dangerous man
if you were in the business of maintaining the political order. Anyway,
he didn't die. They killed him. And if all you
have is a vague recollection of I have a dream,
(05:54):
you might think that's all. It was a passive dream
of a possible better world. But he was dreaming of
a world he was willing to die for, one that
he did die for. It's a dream that's dreamt in
milliseconds behind eyes squeezed shut against the blast of a
fire hose in Birmingham. And whether you were conscious of
(06:17):
it or not, it's the same dream that so many
of you have had when you squeezed your eyes shut
in a cloud of tear gas on the street in
Minneapolis or Ferguson or your own hometown. So, as I
was writing this week, I took a moment to really
hear that final speech, to hear his words about developing
(06:43):
a kind of dangerous unselfishness, about rising up with greater readiness,
with greater determination, about struggling through the darkness because we
believe that what's on the other side is something so
beautiful that it's worth fighting for. He'd been to the mountaintop.
(07:03):
He had an unshakable faith that the promised land really
does lie ahead if we're willing to keep going, even
if we know, as he did, that we're planting trees
whose shade we'll never rest him. It's an important message today.
I think it's not what this episode is about at all,
(07:26):
But as I'm assembling the details about these terrible men
and trying to position them in their proper context, I've
actually really enjoyed giving myself the kind of education about
the civil rights movement that I just don't think I
was getting in school. I've found some comfort in that
(07:47):
speech this week, in the darkness of the work that
I do and the world that we're living in. I
am going to tell you about a strange little racist
I promise I always do, but it's sometimes to remember
they're not the whole story. Turning to the topic at hand, though,
(08:09):
the reason I was thinking about doctor King in the
first place is because I was reading some vintage pornography
again this week that didn't come out right.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Let me explain.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
This is a continuation of the story from last week.
We are still talking about Jack Kershaw, the man who
made the world's ugliest Confederate monument. His twenty five foot
tall polyurethane love letter to Confederate general and clan wizard
Nathan Bedford. Forest stood next to the highway outside of Nashville, Tennessee,
(08:43):
until twenty twenty one, when it was taken down by
its new owner. Jack Kershaw died in twenty ten at
nearly one hundred years old, and when he died, there
were three facts about him in every new story he
made that fucked up statue. He co founded the neo
(09:05):
Confederate secessionist group, the League of the South, and he
was a lawyer. More specifically, though those articles all have
the same exact single fact about his career as an attorney,
he once represented James Earl Ray. That's why I was
(09:27):
reading that old softcore pornomag. I finally understand now that
old joke about reading it for the articles, because this
is the third time now that for some episode of
this show I have had to hunt down an issue
of a nineteen seventies Newty magazine. First it was the
(09:49):
Hustler spread that drove a Nazi serial killer to start
plotting to kill Larry Flint. Then it was an old
penthouse interview with the Alabama Attorney General who indicted a
church bomber. And now the September nineteen seventy seven issue
of Playboy magazine featuring the results of a polygraph test
(10:09):
administered to James Earl Ray in prison. James Earl Ray
died in prison in nineteen ninety eight while serving a
ninety nine year sentence for the murder of doctor Martin
Luther King Junior. Today won't be the day we get
into all of the competing overlapping and contradictory conspiracy theories
(10:32):
about the exact level of his responsibility for that crime.
But he did confess, plead guilty, recant his confession, try
and fail to get new trials, and seed some of
those alternative theories of the case himself. Over the course
of the three decades he spent in prison.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
For the crime.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
That's all you really need to know for the purposes
of this article in Playboy Magaze. And I mean, you
know how I feel about the idea that something like
this could have been the work of a lone wolf,
you know. But I have a stack of very unhinged
books by conspiracy theorists of varying degrees of sincerity and
(11:20):
contact with reality that I want to read before I
try to navigate that minefield. We've butted up against hearts
of this story before, though, after King's murder, James Earl
Ray was on the run for two months before his arrest.
He confessed and pleaded guilty in March of nineteen sixty nine,
(11:42):
and then, almost immediately after being convicted for the crime
he confessed to, he recanted the confession and hired church
bombing enthusiast JB. Stoner to represent him in an attempt
to reverse his guilty plea that was obviously unsuccessful, and JB.
Stone Or didn't stay on the case for very long,
(12:02):
although he did keep James Earl Ray's brother Jerry, on
his personal payroll for years After that and throughout the
nineteen seventies, James Earl Ray burned through attorneys like wildfire
so in nineteen seventy seven he hired a new one,
Jack Kershaw. So that's why I was reading Playboy, because
(12:28):
it was Jack Kershaw who arranged for the magazine to
interview his client in prison, allowing them to conduct a
polygraph examination just days after Ray was returned to custody
after a brief escape. If you did recently listen to
these series of episodes about Joseph Paul Franklin, parts of
(12:48):
this timeline will ring a bell if you didn't, don't
worry about it. I'm trying to be more mindful that
any episode could be someone's first, so I should stop
writing like you've all got an encyclopedic memory of all
the tangential lore from old episodes. So if you didn't
just listen to that three month long series of episodes
(13:10):
about the Nazi serial killer. In nineteen seventy seven, Congress
was starting to hold hearings on the King assassination. The
United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations had
been established the year prior, and they were going to
investigate the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin
(13:31):
Luther King Junior. I'll go ahead and spoil this one
for you. The seven hundred page report that came out
a few years later essentially concludes in both cases that
the fatal shots were fired by the guy we got
for it. Lee Harvey oswaldfired the shot that killed Kennedy.
(13:51):
James Lray was the shooter who killed King.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
That's what they decided.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
But the committee determined that it was kind of likely
that neither man had actually truly acted alone. But we
can't really say what the conspiracy was. Just we're pretty
sure it wasn't a foreign government, and it definitely wasn't
our government. So maybe there was a conspiracy, but who
(14:20):
can really say incredible conclusions. Make of that what you will.
I'll link the report in the show notes if you're
interested in losing your minds.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
I guess.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
So.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
In nineteen seventy seven, James Earl Ray is in prison.
He's not quite a decade into his ninety nine year sentence,
and he's starting to hear that he's going to get
hauled in front of a congressional committee. They were going
to ask him some hard questions, questions that he had
managed to avoid up to that point. I mean, at
(14:57):
this point, he is crying foul and claiming his innocence,
But when he originally entered that guilty plea, the whole
point had been to avoid a trial, to avoid any
more questions about who might have helped him kill Martin
Luther King Junior, and whether or not there was a
(15:18):
giant conspiracy involving both of his brothers. It makes perfect
sense to hire a lawyer if you think you're going
to get a congressional subpoena. He already had a lawyer,
of course, but the lawyer he had was not making
any progress on the impossible task of getting him a
(15:39):
new trial, and he was in the middle of threatening
to sue the lawyer he'd had before that one, and
so he was in the market for new representation. In
early nineteen seventy seven, James Earl Ray's attorney was a
man named James Lasar. Lasar had been working on Ray's
case for almost seven years, and when he heard about
(16:01):
the Congressional Committee, he advised his client not to voluntarily
comply with the House investigation. There wasn't a whole lot
anybody could do about a congressional subpoena if one were
to come, but at this stage the committee was just
hoping he would agree to talk, and they made several
(16:22):
attempts to interview him in prison, and initially he refused,
which was his right. He and his lawyer were initially
on the same page about this. Say no to this,
don't have a voluntary conversation with an investigator. There's nothing
(16:42):
to gain from this. It's all downside pretty much. Any
good lawyer will tell you to say as little as
possible in almost any situation. But James Earl Ray had
his own plans, and after an initially refusing to speak
to the committee, he wrote a letter to the New
(17:04):
York Times that he'd changed his mind and he was
interested in a conversation. His lawyer heard about this from
the New York Times reporter, who called him for a comment,
and then in March of nineteen seventy seven, Ray sent
a letter directly to the Congressional Committee informing them that
(17:24):
he no longer agreed with the advice of his attorney,
James Lazar, and if the committee had any further inquiries
for him, they should contact his new lawyer, Jack Kershaw.
This too was news to James Lazar, who told reporters
that this Jack Kershaw character hadn't even asked him for
(17:45):
access to the case files. Lazar told a reporter from
the Associated Press that he thought Ray was making a
big mistake, saying, quote, one of the difficulties is that
Ray's passed at turn jorneys have been clearly motivated by
financial gain or publicity reasons, and he enters the case
(18:06):
again in a manner which suggests that history is repeating itself.
He was right, of course, Jack Kershaw wanted money and fame.
He may have hoped to get something else to Several
(18:28):
articles about the negotiations between Kershaw and the Congressional committee
about the terms of Ray's potential cooperation mentioned that he
was very insistent on receiving access to FBI files. One's
quote dealing with King's enemies. The reason he gave was
(18:49):
that this would help him conduct his own investigation into
the real killer. He needed to see these files so
he would know who else might have had a motive
to kill King, and at face value, that seems reasonable.
He's a defense attorney, and a defense attorney wants to
be able to present an alternative theory of the crime
(19:12):
to a jury. But there is no jury because this
isn't a trial, and his client's already been convicted, so
that actually kind of falls apart. Why does he want
to see these files? I wonder if he wanted access
to those files because he wanted to see what the
(19:35):
FBI knew about his own associates, not specifically as it
pertained to the King assassination.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Right.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
I'm not saying Ray wasn't the shooter. Probably was, But
the investigation into the King assassination was very wide ranging.
Even once they'd identified and arrested the shooter, they kept
investigating the possibility of a wider conspiracy. And you won't
(20:05):
be surprised to hear that a lot of white supremacists
who were active in the nineteen sixties had made public
threats on King's life, threats that were serious enough now
that he's dead they warranted some follow up from the FBI.
(20:25):
I've actually spent a lot of time with the redacted
versions of these files that have been publicly released, and
I can very easily imagine that the scores of racists
whose associates were interviewed by the FBI would have loved
to know what they said. There was information in those files,
(20:48):
but a lot of guys Jack Kirshaw knew some close
friends and maybe some rivals. Now it's entirely possible that
(21:12):
Jack Kershaw was just a fucking idiot who didn't see
any problem with letting his client be interviewed repeatedly for
hours at a time about a crime he'd already confessed to.
Even as he's promising this client that he's going to
get him a new trial. I can't imagine what kind
of lawyer would think that's a good idea, But I'm
(21:34):
willing to leave open the possibility that he really was
just dumber than a box of hair. More likely, though,
he had absolutely no intention of winning this fight to
get Ray a new trial. He just wanted to be
a part of this process for his own reasons, and
within his first full month as Ray's attorney, he had
(21:57):
allowed investigators from the Congressional Committee to spend four full
days grilling his client in prison. Kershaw told reporters that
he was exploring the possibility of civil lawsuits that he
could file on Rai's behalf that would afford them access
to classified government documents on Martin Luther King Junior and
(22:19):
the investigation into those who had a motive to kill him.
In May, Kershaw's wife, Mary nol Kershaw wrote and recorded
a ballad called They Slew the Dreamer. It's as weird
as you might expect. Mary nol Kershaw has been dead
(22:40):
since nineteen eighty nine, but the guy who co wrote
the song is still alive and extremely online, so I
won't play it here. The last thing I need is
a copyright case from this weirdo, but if you're curious,
you can find it online. And part of the chorus
includes these lyrics, they slew the Dreamer, Let a dreamer
(23:04):
take the fall. They turned the courtroom into a costume ball.
Elsewhere in the song, the lyrics referenced the mysterious Raoul,
a made up guy that James Earlraay claimed was the
real mastermind and actual shooter behind King's murder.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Raoul was a.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Blonde Cuban French Canadian who did not exist. And then,
in June of nineteen seventy seven, Jack Kershaw arranged for
his client to spend the day with someone else who
wanted to talk to him. Not an FBI agent, not
(23:46):
someone from the DOJ, not an investigator with the Congressional Committee,
but a man named James McKinley, a writer for Playboy, magazine.
The interview took place over the course of several separate visits,
with one visit having to be rescheduled due to raise
(24:07):
escape from prison. He was one of seven men who
escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petrust, Tennessee, on
June tenth, nineteen seventy seven. He was about eight miles
away when tracking dogs caught up to him fifty four
hours later. And a fun side note here for any
(24:27):
outdoors extreme sports enthusiasts, this is the origin of the
Berkley Marathons. That's the annual one hundred mile ultra marathon
that takes place in the woods in Tennessee every year.
So a regular marathon is twenty six point two miles
because that's how far a Greek messenger had to run
(24:49):
to get to Athens to deliver the news the Battle
of Marathon. So why is this eight mile journey into
the woods the inspiration for a one hundred mile ultra marathon.
The man who designed the course, ultra runner Gary Cantrell,
had spent quite a bit of time in that area.
He liked to hike in the area that is now
(25:11):
Frozen Heads State Park, and he says when he heard
the story of Ray's escape, he thought to himself, killing
me in it eight miles, I bet I could do
at least one hundred, so he did. In its current form,
the race has been held almost every year since nineteen
ninety five, and only twenty people have ever finished it.
(25:35):
That doesn't have anything to do with this story. I
just have to respect a guy who heard about James
Earl Ray getting lost in the woods and wanted to
see how much better he could do it running through
the same woods. Interestingly, James Olray didn't die until nineteen
ninety eight, so he could conceivably have been aware that
(25:56):
ultra runners were gathering in the woods every year just
to clown on him. But I couldn't find anything specific
about whether anyone told him about it. I hope they did.
Back in nineteen seventy seven, though, he was, as I said,
(26:17):
very quickly recaptured and the prison immediately allowed the interview
to continue. They resumed the interview the day after he
was returned to custody. I mean, you would assume he
would be placed in lockdown or something, right, he was
just allowed to get right back to hanging out with
the guys from Playboy In the second half of the interview,
(26:41):
he's complaining about having poison ivy because he just got
back from hiding in the woods for two days. I mean,
maybe things were just different in the seventies, but it
seems very weird.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
And so.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
On their third visit with Ray, it says, after he's
returned from escaping from prison, the Playboy team brought someone
else along, Douglas Wicklander, a polygraph examiner from John E.
Reid and Associates. John E. Reid and Associates is a
polygraph examination company named for its founder, John Reid, the
(27:17):
Chicago cop whose read technique of police interrogation is notorious
for producing false confessions. And a polygraph is an interesting thing.
Not that you asked me, but if you did ask me,
I would say, don't ever take a polygraph examination. They
(27:40):
aren't admissible in court because they aren't science. The machine
can't tell if you're lying. That's not something a machine
can measure. It measures things that are measurable, like your pulse,
your respiration rate, your blood pressure, your galvanic skin response,
(28:02):
which is just a fancy way of saying the machine
can tell if you're sweaty. It doesn't measure the truth.
It measures physiological signs of stress. Do some people start
sweating when they're nervous?
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Okay? Do a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Get nervous when they lie? Sure, But a lot of
people get nervous when they're being honest too, if we're
talking about something kind of stressful, like whether or not
you're going to go to prison. I mean, every doctor
I've ever seen thinks I have a very high heart
rate because I get nervous when they take my pulse
(28:40):
and they're not even asking me a question. There's just
no scientific support for this. It's not reliable, it's not consistent,
it's totally subjective. The exact same results can be read
differently by different examiners, and the same subject can have
two wildly different examinations depending on whether they had breakfast,
(29:04):
or if it's hot, or if they really have to pee.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
It's fake.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
There's no scenario where passing a lie detector test is
going to help you, and it could end up hurting you,
even if it can't be admitted as evidence in court.
I know you didn't ask me for my advice, but
if you're ever in some kind of situation, get a
lawyer and shut up and don't let them put electrodes
(29:31):
on you, for God's sake. So what I mean is
the actual results of this test administered by a guy
hired by Playboy magazine or irrelevant. We don't believe in this.
It's not real, but if you are curious. The examiner
concluded that James Earl Ray showed quote significant emotional disturbances
(29:55):
indicative of deception when he denied murdering Martin Luther King,
but the examiner said he appeared to be telling the
truth when he said no one paid him to do it.
(30:23):
When the article was published, the prison warden was pretty upset.
I mean, it seemed so weird that Ray was allowed
to hang out with the reporter from Playboy all day,
just hours after he got back from his prison. Ray right, well,
according to the warden, he was not allowed to be
(30:44):
doing that. Warden Stannie Lane says Ray was placed in
administrative segregation after the escape and he was only allowed
to have contact with his lawyer. Warden Lane says, raised
lawyer Jack Kershaw told him that the reporter was an
investigator and the polygraph examiner had been hired to work
(31:08):
on the case. We got Houdini, That's what we got,
the warden told an Associated Press reporter in August, shortly
before the interview was published in Playboy's September issue. We
didn't know until this afternoon that Playboy had been here.
I went through the ceiling up there today. I couldn't
believe it. Prison officials had apparently not actually asked the reporter,
(31:32):
his editor, or their polygrapher for any kind of identification.
Jack Kershaw told him he'd hired them to investigate the case,
and they took his word for it. But the warden
wasn't the only one who was upset about how it
turned out. They didn't get the results they were hoping for,
(31:54):
and Kershaw seemed surprised and furious that the polygraph examiner
concluded that was lying about killing King. So he went
to the press and called the examination faulty and blamed
the results on the room being too hot and Ray
not being allowed to have an aspirin for a headache.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
And before the.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Article was even published, Ray tried to file a lawsuit
against Playboy, but he didn't do it through his lawyer.
He wrote it himself and mailed it from prison, and
then his lawyer went to the press and said just kidding.
We're retracting that. And I don't really know where that
suit ended up. I guess nowhere, but his representation of
(32:36):
Ray didn't last much longer after that. The Playboy interview
had not worked out well for anyone except Playboy, and
within months of the issue appearing on newsstands, James Earl
Ray did file a lawsuit, not the initial one he
contemplated against Playboy Magazine. He was suing his own lawyer,
(33:01):
and Jack Kershaw responded by countersuing Ray and filing suit
against the new attorney Ray had hired to replace him.
Those lawsuits must have fizzled out, because when Ray filed
a second lawsuit against Kershaw over the same issue four
years later in nineteen eighty two, none of the reporting
I could find mentioned that there had been a prior lawsuit,
(33:24):
so they must have been dismissed pretty quickly. Ray's second lawsuit,
the one he filed in eighty two, was against both
Kershaw and the magazine. He claimed the rigged polygraph test
was hurting his chances of getting a new trial. The
only comment Playboy gave to the press was we never
(33:47):
pay for interviews, and they denied they'd paid Kershaw the
eleven thousand dollars to arrange the prison meeting with Ray.
I couldn't actually find any original court documents in this case,
not the time that I had this week, and it
seems to have faded away before anybody really had to
make a bunch of sworn statements in court. So all
(34:09):
I have is that comment Playboy gave the press about
how they don't pay for interviews. I don't know if
they would have made the same statement in court, because
I don't think that's true. Kershaw himself admitted in filings
he made in the first lawsuit, one where Playboy wasn't
a named party, that he had absolutely received that money.
(34:32):
The fact that he received the money was not an
issue in the lawsuit between Kershaw and Ray. The only
facted issue was whether or not Kershaw had told Ray
about the money and whether that money went into Ray's
legal defense fund or Jack Kershaw's pockets. Again, everybody's seeing
(34:53):
each other, and I don't think any of it ever
made it very far. And in the end, Jack Kershaw
only worked for James Olray for eight months or so.
In one of his lawsuits he called it close to
a year. But we're talking March of nineteen seventy seven
through some time later that fall, after the Playboy issue
(35:17):
came out, and most of what he did was arranged
for other people's access to his client. There were interviews
with reporters that he got paid for, and half a
dozen interviews with investigators from the Congressional Committee on Assassinations.
No progress was made on getting Ray a new trial,
(35:37):
and it's not clear to what extent he was successful
in accessing any non public information about the King assassination.
This was the highest profile case of his career, but
if he ever actually entered a courtroom as a result,
it would have been when he and his former client
were suing each other. Not long before his death, in
(36:03):
twenty ten, Jack Kershaw was interviewed by controversial true crime
writer Sondra London about his involvement with King's assassin. The
word controversial is doing some heavy lifting here. It's the
word that's used on her Wikipedia page. I might choose
(36:23):
a harsher one. I've talked a bit in the past
about my own fraud relationship with a genre of true crime,
but I think even if you're a diehard fan of
the form, you have to agree it was not consistent
with what you might call journalistic ethics for her to
get engaged to the Gainesville Ripper while she was writing
(36:47):
a book about the incarcerated spree killer who brutally raped
and murdered five women. I don't know, so it's not
surprising to me that she seems to have given a
pretty softball interview to an elderly racist who was still
peddling MLKA conspiracy theories in his old age. The interviews
she did with Kershaw appears to have been a longer
(37:09):
conversation that just doesn't exist online anymore. I can only
find a short clip of it. But in the clip
that I found, she asks him how he got involved
in the James Earl Ray case in the first place,
which is a question I would actually really like to
know the answer to. Unfortunately, he doesn't answer the question.
(37:35):
He does, though, immediately tell a very strange lie.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
As I recall, James L. Rage helped him out of
the blue, and that in noun that he wanted me
to represent him, and so I hadn't been practicing law
too long at the time, and I was very much
interested in the case, and so I ringed an interview,
(38:05):
and he told me his story.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
By nineteen seventy seven, he'd been a lawyer for fifteen years.
I mean, I know, he's a very old man. He's
about to die in twenty ten, and I imagine the
years sort of start to run together at a certain point.
But I think he would have some idea, even in
(38:35):
his nineties that he was closer to the end of
his legal career than the beginning of it in nineteen
seventy seven. I mean, he was sixty four years old
in nineteen seventy seven, and he all but retired just
a few years later. So it's a very odd thing
to say. Most write ups about Kershaw's life, articles written
(38:58):
before and after his death, tend to focus on just
this one case, just this one client. You only ever
hear about the case he took on in nineteen seventy
seven when he worked for James ol Ray. And I
had a sort of passing familiarity with Jack Kershaw. I
always kind of figured, yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
Who's a lawyer. Who's always a lawyer.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
I knew that he was a lawyer and that he
was a racist, and that he made use of those
two things together, But the fact that he was a
lawyer in the first place didn't factor into my understanding
of him as a person. So the fact that all
of these stories leave out any additional detail about how
he came to be a lawyer, I think that misses
(39:44):
the real story. He didn't start practicing law until he
was fifty years old. He was in late midlife when
he decided to become a lawyer so he could get
better at racism. Representing James Earl Ray as a flashy headline,
(40:05):
but he didn't accomplish much in that case. Ray's victim
was already dead. He was just wasting everyone's time and
getting a little more attention. It's convenient shorthand maybe to
say Jack Kershaw represented James Earl Ray. It communicates very
quickly something that is true. He was a lawyer, and
(40:28):
he was a racist, and he engaged in the practice
of law as part of his ideological commitment to racism.
And what's more emblematic of that than representing the man
who killed Martin Luther King Junior. But all of these
stories represent his legal career just by telling you about
the few months he spent arranging media interviews with James
(40:49):
Earl Ray, and they ignore the fact that his actual
legal career was dedicated to fighting school desegregation. He signed
up for classes at the YMCA Law School because he
got so angry about the Supreme Court decision in Brown
versus Sport of Education, and that says a lot more
about who he was and what he spent his life doing.
(41:15):
I'm gonna stop making promises about how long a story
might be, because there's really no point pretending. I know.
Just one more, I swear, because it's just so interesting
to me that I can draw a straight line from
a guy getting so mad about school integration in nineteen
(41:37):
fifty five that he made it his whole personality too.
Decades later, members of the organization he would later found
using money from the foundation he named after his dead wife,
beating my neighbors in the streets in August of twenty seventeen,
years after he was dead and buried. When I see
all these stories are just pieces of one larger, singular story,
(42:02):
I really mean it. The guy who made the racist
statue out of old bathtubs is part of this long
chain of events that led to me being the person
who is obsessed with connecting those events telling you about them.
You know, So, even though I did promise that this
(42:22):
was going to be the end of this story. I
spent way too much time proving exactly which Nashville area
shown these A bunch of old racists used to meet
up out every week.
Speaker 1 (42:34):
To skip this part of the story.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Weird Little Guys Say production of Coolshoe Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly Hunger. Our
executive producers are Sophie Lectremant and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Worry Gagan. The theme
music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me
at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I
will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
(43:14):
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit
and right now. Don't forget to submit your questions either
on the subreddit or by email for the upcoming Q
and A episode.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
But as always, just
Speaker 2 (43:31):
Don't post anything that's going to make you one of
my Weird Little Guys
Host
Molly Conger
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