Was Jonestown a CIA medical experiment?

[Tracy Riddle]

When James Earl Ray was released from a Saint Louis prison, he had more to be thankful for than most new ex-cons. Ray had a generous sponsor, a mysterious benefactor who had given him more money than he had seen in years and instructions for a job that he did not fully understand. As ordered, he bought a gun and rented a particular room in Grace Walden's rooming house. Grace (who sometimes used the surname Stevens after her common-law husband) remembered Ray checking in with just a few possessions he brought from prison. She also remembers him leaving to go shopping for a car. She swears that while he was out, a stranger entered his room and gunshots were heard. The stranger quickly fled. The shots, said to have been fired from Ray's window to the balcony of a nearby motel, were those that killed Martin Luther King, Jr.

The police found Ray's gun, his toiletries and a radio he had brought from prison in the room. Ray was quickly picked up, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced and sent back to prison. No one questioned the identity of his mysterious benefactor or how Ray came to know that King would be staying in that particular motel, or even why he wanted to kill him.

Grace Walden could have proved him innocent and she tried. Following Ray's arrest, Grace insisted that the police had made a mistake, that Ray was not even in the room at the time of the shooting. Grace insisted for only a few days before she was kidnapped and, through alleged due process, declared incompetent and locked in the Tennessee State Prison Mental Hospital where she would remain drugged for the next eight years.

By 1977, Mark Lane had presented sufficient evidence supporting his conspiracy theory to prompt the House of Representatives to allocate six million dollars for an official investigation they entitled the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Their hearings, scheduled for November 1978, may well have dictated the schedule of the White Night.

Actually, Ryan's House International Relations Committee junket to Jonestown and Lane's House Select Committee on Assassinations were synchronized with the experiment or perhaps vice versa. Lane planned to call James Earl Ray and Grace Walden as his star witnesses and those a who really killed King were not about to let that happen.

Also in 1977, Ray escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary with the help of Larry Ed Hacker, a fellow inmate who masterminded the escape but remained behind to be released under an early parole from Tennessee Governor Ray Blanton. A month after the White Night in December of 1978, Governor Blanton and several of his aides were arrested by the FBI and charged with extortion and conspiracy to sell paroles. Cited in the complaint was the case of one Larry Ed Hacker, who may have been rewarded for helping Ray escape prison and, more importantly, the House Assassination hearings. Everyone agreed that Ray had fled the country but speculation differed as to where he had gone and how he got there. Some reports claimed s claimed he had gone to South America. If in fact he did, Guyana would have been the logical choice because it is the only English- speaking South American country. He may have even gone to Jonestown but, regardless of the route he took, he ended up at Heathrow Airport in London where he was arrested and returned to the United States. Many people questioned how Ray could have supported himself in his travels abroad. This question should have been asked years earlier regarding his unnamed sponsor who had instructed him to buy a gun, check into Grace Walden's rooming house and leave everything to go shopping for a car.

There are so many factual errors here, I wonder how accurate his other research is. Ray was not released from prison; he escaped. He did not go shopping for a car at the time of the MLK assassination - he already had one (a white Mustang). He went out to get a tire repaired. "Gunshots" were not heard - there was only one gunshot. He was not "quickly picked up" - it took two months to capture him. During the 1977 escape, Ray was only at large for 3 days. He certainly did not go to Jonestown. He seems to have mixed up the 1977 incident with the 1968 manhunt.