The Assassination According to Capote

On the rare occasions when writer Truman Capote agrees to submit to a television interview, it is usually because he has something that he wants to say. Last week, when he appeared (for the first time) on Johnny Carson's Tonight show, he wasted little time in getting to the point. "I have a theory," announced the author of In Cold Blood, "about the murder of Martin Luther King."

So, of course, does almost everybody else, but Capote's credentials make him worth listening to--wild though his theory may be. The FBI, he says, is looking for the wrong man. James Earl Ray, alias Eric Starvo Gait, was indeed in on the assassination plot--which Capote believes was carried out by "leftists, not rightists," for political gain. Ray did not, however, kill Martin Luther King. "I have studied his record very carefully, and in my experience with interviewing what I call homicidal minds [Capote has talked at length with 100 murderers in the past nine years], he's simply a man not capable of this particular kind of very calculated and cruel, and exact and precise kind of crime."

In Capote's reconstruction of the crime, in fact, Ray's only function was to throw the FBI off the assassin's trail, first by assuming the name of Eric Starvo Gait ("My theory is that there are two Eric Starvo Gaits"), and finally by planting his fingerprints on the gun that was later to be used for killing King.

This was a setup," Capote believes. The central factor of what happens is that, after the assassination, this assassin rushes out of the rooming house and what does he do? He does a very amazing, unusual thing. He takes a suitcase and very carefully props it up in front of a store. And in this suitcase there is a shotgun, very carefully left. And what is on it is Mr. James Earl Ray's fingerprints."

And where was Ray at the time?

"Dead." Capote believes he was killed "and disposed of" at least ten days before the assassination. "He didn't quite understand," said Capote with a grimace, "what his part in the plot was going to be."

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