William F. Pepper was the central figure in a controversial decades-long effort to prove that the Rev. Martin Luther Jr. was killed not by a lone gunman but by a vast government conspiracy. This position made him kind of. A prominent figure in the country's many conspiracy theorist subcultures died on April 7 in Manhattan. He was 86 years old.
His wife, Mina Gwenpepper, said at the hospital that the cause of death was pneumonia. He lived in Manhattan.
James Earl Ray shot and killed Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis on April 4, 1968. He was arrested two months later at London's Heathrow Airport, just before boarding a flight to Brussels and eventually to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). under white rule.
Mr. Ray was not brought to trial because he pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty. However, he quickly recanted after his conviction and spent the rest of his life claiming he was innocent and the victim of a plot to kill Dr. King.
Even after Ray's death in 1998, it was Pepper, a lawyer, who continued to campaign for Ray longer than anyone else. After recruiting Mr. Ray as a client in 1988, Mr. Pepper pursued the case in various capacities. Various media including courtrooms, news media, television specials, and his three books.
Although most experts on the king's assassination rejected his claims, he was repeatedly able to capture mainstream opinion. A mock trial television special aired on HBO in 1993. Salon published an excerpt from his 2017 book, “Planning to Kill King: The Truth Behind the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.” That same year, he gave a lecture at the National Civil Rights Museum.
The mock trial, which included jurors drawn from all over the country but was stage-managed primarily by Mr. Pepper, acquitted Mr. Ray. In 1999, Mr. Pepper represented Dr. King's family in a wrongful death lawsuit against Lloyd Jowers, convincing the jury that Jowers had hired the former police officer as the real assassin.
But Mr. Pepper's claims have rarely been subject to scrutiny. Five government investigations and a long list of historians and journalists concluded that Mr. Wray acted alone. Among them was Hampton Sides, who detailed the search for Martin Luther King Jr.'s killer in Hellhound on His Trail: The Shocking Account of the Greatest Manhunt in American History (2010).
They concluded that, at best, Mr. Wray may have been funded by white supremacists eager to see Dr. King dead — a conspiracy of the kind that Mr. Pepper claimed. far cry.
He suggested a vast network of conspirators, including the FBI, President Lyndon B. Johnson, and the Mafia. In his 1995 book, “Order to Kill: The Truth About the Murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” a man named Billy Ray Eidson leads a special unit to Memphis to kill Dr. King, and Mr. Eidson claimed to have been among them. He is killed to keep his mission secret.
However, when the ABC News program “Turning Point'' investigated Mr. Pepper's claims in 1997, it found that Mr. Eidson was alive and well and brought him on the show to confront Mr. Pepper.
“We found no verifiable evidence to support Mr. Pepper's theory,” program correspondent Forrest Sawyer told The New York Times. “I emphasize 'verifiable' because Mr. Pepper says there are other sources of information that he will reveal at a later date.”
Mr. Eidson then sued Mr. Pepper. He earned his $11 million from his publisher in 1997.
The civil suit against Mr. Jowers was also not very convincing to reporters who covered the trial. Jurors and even the judge sometimes fell asleep, unsworn testimony was admitted into evidence, and Mr. Jowers himself was never called to testify except in his deposition.
The King family received $100 in damages.
William Francis Pepper was born in the Bronx on August 16, 1937 to an Irish immigrant family. His father, Frances, worked for the railroad and his mother, Lillian (Gilliland) Pepper, ran the home.
He earned a bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 1959, a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1973, and a law degree from Boston University in 1977.
After graduating from Columbia University, he served as an instructor in political science at Mercy College in Westchester County, New York. He also actively participated in the anti-war movement. He traveled to South Vietnam as a freelance journalist in 1966 and returned with harrowing reports of the toll on women and children caused by napalm.
The article was published in the counterculture magazine Ramparts. Mr. Pepper claims that it was his article that persuaded Dr. King to publicly speak out against the war, and that in April 1967, when Dr. King gave a major speech denouncing America's involvement in the war, I was in the audience at Riverside Church in Manhattan on the 4th. Southeast Asia.
Mr. Pepper became executive director of the National Conference for a New Politics, which met in Chicago at the end of 1967 to discuss the nomination of Martin Luther King Jr. and pediatrician and anti-war activist Benjamin Spock as third-party presidential candidates. Ta. .
However, the convention collapsed amid conflicts between liberal civil rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and black radicals. Mr. Pepper later claimed that black radicals were actually government saboteurs.
Mr. Pepper first met Mr. Wray in 1977, when he and King's aide Ralph Abernathy visited Mr. Wray in prison. They both left the meeting convinced that Mr. Ray was not the murderer.
Still, it would be another decade before Mr. Pepper would have him as a customer. During that time, he moved to London, where he practiced commercial law on behalf of governments in the Middle East and Asia.
Mr. Pepper married Mina Nguyen in 2014. In addition to Pepper, survivors include a daughter, Lily;
Assassinating the king was just one of Mr. Pepper's interests. He frequently attended conspiracy theory rallies and was a traveler among the 9/11 truthers. In 2011, he advocated for the parole and retrial of Sirhan Sirhan, who was convicted of killing Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles in 1968, arguing that Sirhan was framed.
Pepper said Sirhan had been hypnotized and “programmed” to carry out the diversionary shooting, and that another assassin had actually killed him.
“Sirhan was set up as a distraction,” Pepper told CNN in 2012. “Meanwhile, the gunman crouched directly behind Bob and fired close and upward, resulting in four bullets hitting the senator's body or penetrating his clothing.”
Mr. Pepper's motion failed and Mr. Sirhan remains in jail.
