In 1967, James Earl Ray escaped from a Missouri prison. One year after his jailbreak, America came to know him as the fugitive sought in the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Ray pleaded guilty to murder but later retracted his confession. Decades later, details about King’s killing are still coming to light. This summer, the Trump administration unsealed more than 243,000 files from the FBI investigation into the assassination.
For St. Louis native and documentary filmmaker Nina Gilden Seavey, who has spent decades studying the assassination, the files’ release triggered a series of events: After appearing in a St. Louis Magazine article, she was contacted with a tip about where to find Russell Byers — a figure at the center of a purported $50,000 bounty offered for the eventual killing of King in 1968.
The bounty is one of several possibilities that were officially investigated by the FBI in the years after the assassination. But it’s the one that Seavey described in a recent essay for Slate as “the most credible.” That essay calls Byers “The Man Who Was Supposed to Kill Martin Luther King Jr.”
“The ‘Byers Bounty’ is not an unknown sort of phenomenon,” Seavey said Thursday on St. Louis on the Air. “It's not a theory. It's not a conspiracy theory. There are actual conspiracies in life.”
Like James Earl Ray, Russell Byers had many connections to St. Louis. Proponents of the “Byers Bounty” theory draw those connections into a series of links, tying together Ray, the $50,000 offer and the bar owned by one of Ray’s brothers in south St. Louis City.
It was in that bar, the Grapevine Tavern, where Byers claimed he was offered the bounty by two men, John Kauffman and John Sutherland. Taken together, the links pose a possible monetary motive for James Earl Ray to escape from prison and kill the civil rights leader.
The only problem with the theory? There’s no evidence that Ray had ever heard of the bounty. Byers had always insisted he never spoke of it until after King’s death.
But then, this summer, 94-year-old Byers got on the phone with Seavey. His story changed — he told the filmmaker that he had shared word of the bounty almost immediately after hearing it. The person he confessed to was an FBI informant.
Seavey remembered being stunned. “I was like: ‘Wait a minute. No. You testified before the [U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations] that you didn't tell anybody about the bounty until after King was dead.’ And he said, ‘Do you understand what I'm telling you? It wasn't five years after the bounty [offer] was made, it was five minutes.’”
In Seavey’s transcription of the interview, Byers blamed the FBI for failing to act on the informant’s knowledge: “He told the FBI immediately. They should have acted upon it.”
Two months after the interview, Byers died. Seavey said that although there still isn’t proof that Ray knew about the bounty, “there is now more hard and solid evidence that the FBI knew that King was going to be killed.”
Seavey said she believes what Byers told her before his death.
“There was no reason for him to tell me what he told me,” she said. “He had an official story. That official story was something he was willing to give up, in the sense that he was willing to tell me the true story. He knew he was going to die.”
To hear the full conversation with Nina Gilden Seavey, including how federal investigators traced the “Byers Bounty” theory to St. Louis, listen to “St. Louis on the Air” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube, or click the play button below.
“St. Louis on the Air” brings you the stories of St. Louis and the people who live, work and create in our region. The show is produced by Miya Norfleet, Emily Woodbury, Danny Wicentowski, Elaine Cha and Alex Heuer. The production intern is Darrious Varner. The audio engineer is Aaron Doerr.
