FAMILY FORGIVENESS

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What a strange moment. In a meeting room in a Nashville, Tennessee, prison hospital, the youngest son of Martin Luther King Jr. sat face to face with James Earl Ray, the man serving 99 years for murdering the civil rights leader. It could have been in a movie. And maybe it will be.

"I just want to ask you for the record," said Dexter King as CNN cameras homed in on his face. "Did you kill my father?"

"No, I didn't, no," replied Ray in a quavering voice. Then he added, "But like I say, sometimes these questions are difficult to answer."

You bet they are--and of all the difficult questions that have swirled around King's murder for the past 29 years, none is more perplexing than why his heirs have become the chief boosters of the bid by Ray to exonerate himself before he dies from liver disease. In February, both Dexter and his mother Coretta Scott King testified in a court hearing in Memphis, Tennesee, that Ray should be given the full-fledged trial he never had because he pleaded guilty to the killing, before recanting three days later. Last week, after listening to Ray's up-close and personal protestations that he had "nothing to do with" the murder, Dexter declared, "I believe you, and my family believes you." Never before had the King family put itself so firmly in Ray's camp.

Which is odd, given the overwhelming evidence that Ray at the very least had something to do with the shooting: he has admitted purchasing the high-powered rifle that the FBI says was the murder weapon, renting the room from which the shot was allegedly fired and being in Memphis when the killing occurred. Dexter King's credulity suggests the Kings have fallen under the hypnotic spell of William F. Pepper, Ray's current lawyer and the architect of a breathtakingly convoluted conspiracy theory about the assassination. They should step back from the brink.

In his book Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King, Pepper delivers a turgid blend of proved fact, hearsay and wild speculation. He claims that Ray was merely a fall guy in an intricate plot woven by U.S. Army intelligence units in which dozens, maybe even hundreds, of Mafia dons, government agents, white racists and small-time crooks were involved. He writes that he pieced together evidence of this vast conspiracy during a courageous 18-year investigation that ranged over several continents. But some of his most unsettling charges were lifted straight out of newspaper stories, then stretched beyond recognition.