Chapter 2: A Hybrid Monster

Witness One: Ed Redditt

It was early in the investigation when Gary was driving on his way to an interview and noticed a black Sedan in his rear view mirror. Spotting it again on a separate trip soon afterward, he began to wonder if he was being followed by someone, or being paranoid. But on the day that he visited the isolated country home of a man named Ed Redditt, the debate was settled: A Sedan and its pair of suited agents sat parked within blatant view of Redditt’s living room window, lingering there long enough to make sure their presence was obvious. And their increased aggression in surveillance likely correlated to the importance of that day’s interview.

As one of the few black men serving with Memphis law enforcement in the 1960s, Redditt was placed in charge of King’s security at the Lorraine Motel the morning of the assassination, during which something strange occurred: Redditt took a brief phone call from an anonymous source who threatened to kill Redditt with no explanation for why. Perhaps it was meant to obviously correlate to the fact of his providing King with security.

In any case, Redditt followed protocol by phoning headquarters to report the incident. The morning and afternoon proceeded without any further calls and without anything being done in response to the call. It was at the curious time of about 5:45 PM, however, when a police car pulled into the Lorraine with orders to pick Redditt up and return him to headquarters.

These orders came from Frank Holloman, commissioner to both the MPD and Memphis Fire Department, who then told Redditt he was relieved of duty for the day and that MPD intelligence officer Eli Arkin would be escorting him home. The stated rationale for which was the threatening call made that morning on Redditt. As if the day hadn’t been anomalous enough, Reddit then arrived home to the news that King had just been shot. It occurred at 6:01 PM—roughly 15 minutes or so after he had been pulled from providing security. 

In the following days, Redditt’s attempt to find out who was behind the anonymous call led to his own discrete investigation into the circumstances around King’s death. A person of interest, as it turned out from looking at recent police call logs, was the very man at top who ordered King’s security pulled, Fire Commissioner/Chief of Police Frank Holloman. On the morning of March 28th, 1968, while King was leading his peaceful march for the striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Holloman was observed in the logs phoning Mayor Henry Loeb with directions on their response to the march. “You call the governor,” Holloman ordered, “and I’ll in call the [National] Guard.”

Now the fact that Holloman was both the city’s police and fire commissioner was in itself a unique arrangement fraught with questions, but making a phone call that only a governor is authorized to make was plainly illegal. Who was this man Frank Holloman that he commanded such power over the State of Tennessee?

Digging further into his senior’s background, Redditt found that after graduating from the University of Mississippi, Holloman spent 25 years as a special FBI agent in charge of various field offices. This included being inspector at the Bureau’s D.C. office as J. Edgar Hoover’s right-hand man. Little wonder, then, that as the police chief to Memphis, Holloman broke with tradition by having his police force train at the FBI Academy instead of a standard one. But why? 

Judging by how he operated the MPD—especially regarding the events around King’s assassination—it became apparent that Holloman had essentially transformed Memphis law enforcement into an illegal arm of the notoriously corrupt Hoover FBI. No ballistic tests, for example, were done on the bullet found in King’s body because the FBI determined that it was too damaged for testing. Yet Redditt knew first-hand this simply was not true; the bullet was in rather ideal condition. Either the FBI was lazy or trying to hide something, and all things considered, only the latter seemed plausible.

Besides Redditt’s own dismissal from duty shortly before the assassination, he also learned that the TACT 10 unit at the firehouse nearby the Lorraine was sent on break just before the grim event. And just before then, the firehouse’s only two black firemen were abruptly transferred to a station in the suburbs. This meant there was a solid window of time during which King was an open target as he stood on the balcony interfacing with bystanders, without any on-duty trained personnel anywhere within earshot who might observe the security breach and think to fix it.

Furthermore, Redditt shared with Gary, “The police radio mysteriously went out right after the assassination. The whole system—the whole system had never gone out before ever.”  Although, as Gary pointed out in reply, “the same thing happened in Dallas, right after Kennedy’s assassination. The president’s usual military protection was gone, too.” Was it possible that the King and Kennedy assassinations were variations of the same script?

What was becoming clear to Gary at that early point in the investigation is best summed up by a comment Redditt made toward the end of their meeting: “I don’t care how expert Ray was or wasn’t as a shooter, he couldn’t shoot through all those branches and hit anybody, let alone Dr. King.”

It was around that time that the parked Sedan made its full debut on the other side of the road from Redditt’s living room window. By the time Gary exited the back door and circled around the house toward the front for a closer look, the visitors were gone. These kind of psychological efforts to deter Gary’s investigation would only intensify from that day forward.

Witness Two: John McFerren

Now that Gary realized there were agents of some kind tracking his every move, he appreciated the need for increased discretion in contacting his subjects for interview. For his meeting with John McFerren, a mid-aged black man who owned and operated a gas station outside of Memphis, this involved the cautious approach of borrowing Mrs. Kershaw’s Chrysler and driving out to the gas station from Nashville using back roads when possible. As the car was getting washed at the station, Gary introduced himself to McFerren as a mutual friend of the Kershaws, and it wasn’t long before the two men wound up in the store’s windowless backroom sipping bottled soda. It was the only place McFerren felt safe discussing what he had witnessed on that afternoon of April, 1968.

Back then, the convenience store owner made routine trips each Thursday into Memphis to restock on his grocery supply from LL&L— a produce warehouse sharing a building with the Room and Boarding House from which the shots were supposedly fired at King. The warehouse owner was an Italian-American named Frank Liberto, an obese fellow with a cold demeanor and mean-looking crew of men under his employment. (Although it didn’t come up in his dialogue with McFerren, Gary already knew that Liberto was mafia-involved and answered to Carlos Marcello). 

Customarily, McFerren would receive his prepared goods on each trip right at Liberto’s office. Its door was accessible through an alleyway causing McFerren to approach it from the side rather than head-on. At about 5:15 pm on that day of the assassination, McFerren was several yards away from the office door and closing in when he stumbled into a nerve-racking situation. “I told you not to call here,” Liberto was overheard snarling into the phone. “Shoot the son of a bitch on the balcony!” he added before hanging it up.

Frozen in his steps for a moment, McFerren decided to proceed toward the door pretending not to have noticed anything unusual. He grabbed his produce without incident and got back on the road, arriving home almost an hour later to the televised news that King had just been shot. Of all places, it had occurred on a motel balcony—the one across the street from where he had overheard Liberto utter those chilling words about shooting someone on a balcony.

The next morning McFerren contacted the FBI to file a report. He visited with two young agents that same day who spent “half the day” asking him questions, which to McFerren seemed excessive considering the simple bit of information he had to volunteer. “And did anything result from that meeting with the FBI?” Gary asked him.

“Hell yes!” McFerren replied with indignation: Just a couple days after contacting the FBI, an imposing knock was heard at his door—this time from a pair of thugs dressed in plain clothing. Immediately knocking his heavy frame to the floor, they dragged him out into the backyard where he would have certainly died from their fatal blows were it not for Ms. Yates, the next door neighbor who rushed the scene brandishing her shotgun. Although the assailants fled, perhaps thinking their victim was as good as dead, whoever sent them never attempted to finish the job of killing McFerren. Perhaps they believed he would no longer be giving them more trouble as a witness.

In which case, they were grossly mistaken. No longer trusting federal or local authorities, McFerren began contacting newspapers with his information. A response came from 35 year old William Sartor, a journalist with Time who seemed genuinely committed to publishing McFerren’s story. Yet not only did Sartor fail to show up on the day of their scheduled meeting; he was never heard from again. 

As their interview came to a wrap, Gary told McFerren he would try to find out what came of the vanished reporter, which he eventually did. Sartor, as it so happened, was found dead at his home under mysterious circumstances the morning of his scheduled trip to Memphis (Sidebar A). Apparently, whoever had been keeping McFerren under close watch represented something of a hybrid monster—boasting the combined powers of government surveillance and mafia brutality. And as Gary was on the cusp of learning, the same was true of his situation.

Just hours later that night back in Nashville, the young investigator returned home to the bewildering scene of shattered glass on their hallway floor, still bloodied from the footprints of an angry, sobbing wife. Both she and the children had been jolted from their sleep when a brick came crashing through a bedroom window. To make an otherwise complicated story brief, suffice it to say that the brick came with a small hand-written containing the single word, STOP. And stop Gary did. Not wishing to incur any more terror on his family, he called attorney Jack Kershaw the next day with notice that his services as an investigator were no longer available.

But this decision to call it quits would not end up being permanent.