On the snowy evening of January 29, 1978, Cass Gilbert’s early masterpiece stood radiant in the moonlight. The city had just spent $6.6 million to renovate the Saint Louis Art Museum’s east wing and Sculpture Hall. Hydraulic cranes had been brought in to remove priceless statues. Dark corridors had been leveled to restore Gilbert’s original open floor plan. Windows had been added, skylights uncovered to enhance the Beaux-Arts motif.
Museum officials had hailed the project as the most ambitious art-museum renovation in America.
Earlier in the day, St. Louisans had been sledding on Art Hill. Only lovers remained at 10:30 p.m., when a dirty, white 1965 Chevrolet pulled up to the front of the well-lit museum. Three men, wearing ski masks, gloves, coats and jeans, got out. They left the engine running, walked over to a 15-foot arched window and, with a 16-pound sledgehammer, smashed a 3-foot hole into the double-paned plate glass.
The thieves crawled through the breach.
Ninety seconds later they crawled out, walked back to the car, tossed their souvenirs in the back seat and drove away like tourists.
The museum’s two security guards were shocked when the cops appeared 30 minutes later, blue lights flashing. The new motion-detecting alarm had apparently sounded—but only for two minutes and out of the guards’ earshot. A sweep of the building revealed that Frederic Remington’s “Bronco Buster” had been stolen, along with “Hope,” Prudence” and “St. Sebastian”—all creations by unknown artists. The value of the loot totaled $100,000. The most ambitious art-museum renovation in America hadn’t included enough security to put foil strips on the windows.
The security chief fired the guards, then resigned.
Twenty-two days later, thieves struck again.
This time they busted through new glass doors that had been blocked before the renovation. They walked through three galleries and into Gallery 213. There sat three small bronze statues by Auguste Rodin, the French sculptor best known for “The Thinker.” Two of the three statues bore a founder’s mark and Rodin’s rare signature. The thieves yanked them off the pedestals, then walked back through the galleries and out the door.
That night, museum officials conducted a sweep in the dark, believing that nothing had been stolen. The next morning, they were aghast. No one could even put a value on Rodin’s statues.
The FBI was brought in. And a few days later, four St. Louis detectives received a tip regarding the whereabouts of Johnny Crenshaw, who was wanted by the FBI for a jewelry heist in Illinois.
At a house on Vest Avenue, a woman answered the door and said “Johnny Cool” wasn’t there. The detectives asked to look around, and the woman said, “Sure.” They found a closet trapdoor that led to a basement.
Hiding behind a curtain, Crenshaw didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t reach his rifle or shotgun, so when the detectives attempted to cuff him, he started a fight, then yelled for help. All of a sudden, the four detectives found themselves in a brawl with Johnny Cool Crenshaw and his three women.
After a trip to City Hospital, Crenshaw decided to cooperate. He volunteered that he and three accomplices—one of whom had been killed days before the second burglary—had robbed the museum. As a gesture of good faith, Crenshaw led police back to the house, where they found poor “St. Sebastian” stashed in a pile of junk with one finger broken off.
Crenshaw started dropping names.
The FBI’s Own Secrets
If the FBI’s St. Louis field office ever needed a gimme, now was the time. A few months before, a Post-Dispatch series had revealed the field office’s role in COINTELPRO (code name for the FBI’s counterintelligence war against suspected Communists). The Post used internal FBI documents to describe “such efforts as a poison pen letter to the wife of a black militant ... [and] publication of a bogus newspaper carrying sex smears against civil rights leaders.”
The most humiliating revelation concerned the bureau’s relationship with the Post-Dispatch’s in-town rival, the Globe-Democrat. From the mid-’60s to the early ’70s, special agents had fed information to Globe reporters, fully expecting to see it in print the next day. Often, it was.
On March 28, 1968, for example, Martin Luther King Jr. joined striking workers at a civil-rights march in Memphis. When King reached Main Street, teenagers in the rear of the procession started causing trouble. Immediately an FBI special agent sent a report to the Globe-Democrat. On March 30, an editorial titled “The Real Martin Luther King” appeared in the paper, taking as its premise the FBI agent’s version of what happened: “Rev. King knew that the Memphis march could push the tense situation above the boiling point. He had made advance plans for this. When 20 or 30 youths broke away from the march of some 6,000 Negroes and started smashing windows and looting, King sprinted down a sidestreet to an awaiting automobile and sped away.”
Alongside the editorial, the Globe published a cartoon of a haggard King firing a revolver, with the words “Looting,” “Violence” and “Trouble” appearing in the smoke. The caption read: “I’m Not Firing It—I’m Only Pulling the Trigger.”
On the night of April 3, King gave a speech in Memphis: “Some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.”
The next day, at 6:01 p.m., James Earl Ray assassinated King at the Lorraine Hotel. A Justice Department task force report cleared the FBI of any involvement in 1977, but the House Select Committee on Assassinations continued to review other theories connecting Ray—who had escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1967—to a broader conspiracy.
The Art Connection
When Johnny Cool dropped the name Russell Byers, police knew they had a big fish. Byers had been suspected of numerous art and antique thefts, most notably a 1972 heist of an antique-jewelry store in Maryland Plaza. So the day after the police arrested Johnny Cool, they took a trip to Byers’ Rock Hill home. Byers’ wife and two children watched as the cops took seven Norman Rockwells and a Rembrandt off the walls and loaded them into a cruiser.
A few days later, Byers was charged in the museum robbery. Then Capt. John Walsh of the St. Louis Police Department started receiving late-night calls at his home. On March 11, an unidentified woman told him to send some cops to Room 204 of the Quality Inn on Oakland. There they found “Hope” and “Prudence” stashed away in a cardboard box.
More tips came, and other statues were recovered, many from bizarre locations, such as a Goodwill drop box and a scrap yard. But the greatest find of all was not a work of art. It was a paragraph in a 1974 memo in Byers’ FBI file—a memo that had never been cross-indexed with the King investigation. An FBI informant had reported Byers’ boasting that a St. Louis lawyer—later identified as Jack Sutherland—had offered him between $10,000 and $20,000 to kill Martin Luther King Jr.
The First Confession
Murry Randall had survived Japanese kamikazes in World War II, graduated at the top of his law-school class at Mizzou and argued cases for the Justice Department. In the late ’50s, he made a name for himself in St. Louis by prosecuting high-level tax cases as an assistant U.S. attorney. He shouldn’t have had time for a lowlife like Russell Byers.
But by mid-1968, Randall had left a big firm and started his own practice downtown. He could barely afford a secretary when Byers walked into his office that summer. The two men had met the previous December in a Peoria, Ill., courtroom, where Randall was representing a client and Byers was pleading guilty to stealing cars. Now Byers needed help incorporating a “vending machine” business.
Bobby Kennedy had just been assassinated, and since April, newspaper headlines had screamed of the manhunt to capture King’s assassin. Conspiracy was in the air. Everyone seemed to know someone who had talked about killing the civil-rights leader—and that included Byers. According to his later testimony, he told Randall he himself had been offered money to kill King.
If Randall heard Byers (he later denied knowing any specifics at that point), he shrugged off the story. The FBI had just caught James Earl Ray at Heathrow Airport in London.
The two men parted ways. But five years later, Randall defended a man who, authorities believed, was involved in that infamous Maryland Plaza jewelry-store robbery—the one to which police could never link Byers. Randall won an acquittal, but an unofficial member of the defense, Judge Kelsey Journey, was being investigated for possible jury tampering. Randall defended the acquittal vigorously. He was being nominated for a judgeship that he desperately wanted. [Editor's Note: Please scroll to the bottom to read about a clarification made to this paragraph.]
The last thing the embattled attorney needed was for Byers to walk into his office and demand to know who had informed the FBI in the jewelry-store case.
“Is it Richard O’Hara?” Byers demanded. Randall lied and said he didn’t know. O’Hara had also been charged in the Maryland Plaza robbery, but, mysteriously, prosecutors had dropped the charges. The next year, 1974, Randall agreed to represent Byers, whose vending-machine company had been sued. This time, in the hallway outside the courtroom, Byers told Randall the whole inconvenient story about the offer to kill King.
The Man Who Wanted King Dead
Jack Sutherland was a prominent St. Louis patent attorney. A graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, he led three chapters of the John Birch Society. It wasn’t that he didn’t like black people; he just didn’t want them living in his neighborhood. Or eating at the same restaurants as white people. Or voting. So when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in June 1964, he organized a Citizens Council in St. Louis and sent out invitations for membership on letterhead emblazoned with crossed American and Confederate flags surrounded by the words “Citizens Council, States-Rights-Racial Integrity.”
The manifesto, a nasty little travesty of logic and sanity, read like minutes from last night’s Klan meeting: “All agree that we are deep in the throes of minority rule, that we ‘forgotten men’ got that way by failing to heed the admonition of the great seal of Missouri ‘United We Stand, Divided We Fall.’”
Later, Sutherland tied it all together: “Like Hitler and Khrushchev, the collectivists have announced their program. They will settle for nothing less than total integration of every residential area, every social gathering and every privately owned business enterprise! The white majority must act before state coercion prevents us from doing so!”
Before long, Sutherland fell out with the Citizens Council. He just didn’t mix well with the workers who found excuses for their misery in the council’s hateful message. Instead, he turned his efforts toward the presidential campaign of Alabama Gov. George Wallace, paying the $600-a-month salary of the American Independent Party’s Missouri chairman and personally running as a candidate for presidential elector.
The Wallace message resonated in South St. Louis. Wallace supporters and Citizens Council types congregated at the Grapevine Tavern, on Arsenal, every afternoon to talk about the campaign. The bar also served as a sort of criminal temporary-employment office. Ex-cons would show up there and find themselves a “job,” listen to racist political speeches and drink themselves drunk.
The man who ran the Grapevine, John Larry Ray, visited his brother, James Earl Ray, at the state penitentiary on April 22, 1967. They discussed the Wallace campaign. The next day, James Earl Ray escaped from the penitentiary in a bread box.
Fingering the Informant
In late April 1978, two weeks after police recovered Remington’s “Bronco Buster,” the investigation unraveled. Johnny Cool had refused a sweetheart deal to testify against Byers, and prosecutors couldn’t use the statement Johnny gave on the night of the arrest because he hadn’t signed it. So Byers walked.
But he didn’t exactly celebrate.
The FBI agent who stumbled upon the 1974 memo in Byers’ file hurriedly forwarded it to Washington. The congressional committee asked Byers to testify in executive session on May 9, 1978. And what he told them that May led to a massive investigation of a possible St. Louis–based conspiracy to kill King.
That June, Byers’ closest associate was found in Illinois, shot to death and burned so severely that it took days to identify the body. The associate had disappeared hours after walking into the FBI’s St. Louis field office. Byers worried that his involvement with the committee would make him a target, too. Police believed that an “art collector,” still at large, had paid Byers to orchestrate the museum robbery—and had Byers’ associate killed.
On July 18, 1978, Byers stood in his carport as two reporters for The New York Times pulled up. He agreed to answer their questions but told one of the reporters to walk away. He wanted to be able to deny his story later.
A week later, the front page of The New York Times read: “Report by a Missouri Man Suggests Plotters Sought Murder of Dr. King.” Days later, the FBI released the 1974 memo to the press, and a reporter for the Post-Dispatch showed it to Byers. FBI Director William Webster announced that an internal investigation had concluded that the misfiling of the memo was a “simple inadvertence.” He called Byers’ story “hearsay three times removed.”
A couple of days later, Randall, by then a special judge in the St. Louis Circuit Court, called Byers after work and asked to meet him at Gianino’s Restaurant—within the hour.
Randall was worried. Committee investigators had come to his chambers days before the FBI released the memo, and he had agreed to cooperate. Now he wanted to make sure that Byers didn’t consider him the informant.
When Randall pulled into the Gianino’s lot, Byers was standing outside his car, reserving a spot for the judge. Randall pulled into it and asked Byers to get in. Byers declined, saying he was afraid the FBI had wired both cars. He said he wanted to get home before dark because somebody was trying to kill him. He also said he knew who the informant was: Richard O’Hara, the man he’d suspected as the informant in the jewelry robbery, too. Byers was torn: Did he reveal O’Hara’s identity and risk getting fingered for the jewelry robbery?
A few days later, Randall read O’Hara’s name in the Post.
The Public Hears the Story
On November 29, the committee held a public hearing to release preliminary results of its investigation into a St. Louis–based conspiracy to kill King. Randall had tried to avoid testifying. “I believe my public testimony and that of Mr. Byers’ will endanger lives including my own,” he warned the committee. He also insisted that Byers had fabricated the whole story to pinpoint O’Hara as an informant. Unmoved, the committee had Randall flown to Washington.
The hearing opened with the point that dozens of conspiracy allegations had been looked into by the committee and the FBI, “but the conspiratorial allegation that has received the most attention from the committee originated in St. Louis earlier this year, when the FBI advised it of a memorandum containing information on a concrete offer to pay money to kill Dr. King.”
Next they introduced Byers—and you would have thought they had Jimmy Hoffa. Immediately Byers invoked a committee rule allowing him to ban photographers and television camera crews from taking his picture. Finally the star witness took the stand, identified a photo of Sutherland and said, “He offered me $50,000 to arrange to murder Martin Luther King.”
“Did you ask Mr. Sutherland where he was going to get the money?”
“Yes. It struck me rather strange. He told me he belonged to a secret Southern organization that could raise the money.”
“What did you do then?”
“I declined the offer.”
The essence of Byers’ story boiled down to this:
He had befriended a stockbroker–turned–drug dealer named John Kauffmann who ran his business from the Bluff Acres Motel, in Barnhart, Mo. Kauffmann let Byers store his stolen cars at the motel. One day in 1967, Kauffmann asked him whether he’d like to make $50,000. They left the motel for a farmhouse that stood on a hill behind Kauffmann’s motel. Sutherland opened the door wearing a Confederate colonel’s hat bearing the cavalry insignia of crossed sabers. He led his guests into a den decorated with Confederate carpet, Confederate flags, Confederate bugles and Confederate swords and, after some small talk, made the offer: “Either arrange [to] or kill Martin Luther King.”
No further questions. Byers left the hearing, and Randall took the stand. He basically corroborated Byers’ story, with a couple of exceptions. First, Randall didn’t recall Byers’ telling him about the offer in 1968, back when Sutherland was still alive and investigating could have made a difference. Second, he thought the sum Byers had been offered was closer to $10,000, as stated in the FBI memo. Third, Randall didn’t believe the story. He recalled that in Byers’ account, he had known who King was and said: “I pass. It’s too dangerous.” But Byers had just testified that he had not known who King was in 1967, when Sutherland made the offer.
The civil-rights leader had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and had been on the front page of every paper in the country. The idea that a 36-year-old man who could tell a Rockwell from a Rembrandt didn’t know who Martin Luther King Jr. was in 1967 was absurd. Nevertheless, the committee took Byers’ side—mainly because someone working with the FBI had repeatedly heard rumors in Kauffmann’s motel of a Sutherland bounty for assassinating King.
The committee found Byers’ allegation essentially truthful and presented four possible scenarios by which Sutherland’s offer could have reached James Earl Ray inside the penitentiary. Richard Billings, the committee’s editorial director, recalled in The Washington Post in 1997: “We did find the basis for a conspiracy, however, when we looked into a group of businessmen in St. Louis whose racism was expressed by a $50,000 bounty on King’s life. The group often gathered at the Grapevine, a tavern operated by John Ray, a brother of James Earl Ray, leading us to believe that the accused assassin would have known about the bounty.”
There was one small problem: The committee had no real evidence. Kauffmann had died in 1974, Sutherland in 1970—just two years after Wallace lost the election and Martin Luther King Jr. lost his life.
The only real conclusion the committee drew, as its commission expired in early 1979, was that an offer had been made in St. Louis to kill Martin Luther King Jr. In support, the committee released a voluntary statement given to the FBI on October 2, 1968, by a former inmate at the Missouri State Penitentiary, Donald Lee Mitchell. Here’s an excerpt from Mitchell’s six-page statement, reproduced as written:
“In 1961, I had the opportunity to meet one James Earl Ray. I was introduced by a friend of mine by the name of Hawks, who was doing twenty four (24) years. ... Ray showed great comtemp for the colored convicts, as he very seldom talked to them except on business deals for dope or money. He was always telling me how the boys from St. Louis and K.C. always kissed their ass. He said he never would, because if it hadn’t been for Lincoln they would still be shining his shoes.”
Mitchell told the FBI that in 1966, Ray had asked for a favor: “When he first mentioned escape I thought he wanted me to leave with him, but I quickly explained that I got out on June 1, 1966, that year. He said no, I want you to help me. ... Than after I make it I’ll wait on you in St. Louis. ... [Ray said] some people (friends in St. Louis) fixed it with Some one in Philadelphia, for him to kill Dr. Martin Luther King. ...
“Ray told me not to worry about a thing. Also how did a grand some of Fifty Thousand (50,000) dollars sound to me? I said great, but what if we get caught? He explained we wouldn’t and if we did we would get out of it with a fixer lawyer ...”
Unfortunately, the committee’s $2.5 million investigation—at that time, the most expensive in history—couldn’t locate Mitchell in 1978. He was, after all, just another petty criminal from Missouri.
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Editor's Note: The paragraph that began "The two men parted ways" has been clarified and updated since publication. It originally read, "Randall won an acquittal but was investigated for possible jury tampering." It now reads: "Randall won an acquittal, but an unofficial member of the defense, Judge Kelso Journey, was being investigated for possible jury tampering." We apologize for any misunderstanding the original wording created. – 9/17/09
