FAMILY FORGIVENESS

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For example, Pepper got the idea that clandestine Army units were stalking King from a sensational series of articles by former Memphis Commercial Appeal reporter Steven G. Tompkins, who now serves as a spokesman for Georgia Governor Zell Miller. In 1993 Tompkins wrote, "On April 3 [the day before the killing], King returned to Memphis. Army agents from the 111th Military Intelligence Group shadowed his movements and monitored radio traffic from a sedan crammed with electronic equipment. Eight Green Beret soldiers from an 'Operation Detachment Alpha 184 Team' were also in Memphis carrying out an unknown mission." Although Tompkins wrote that he had "uncovered no hard evidence that Army Intelligence played any role in King's assassination," Pepper takes the tale to the races. Pepper writes that the soldiers were in Memphis to shoot King--and his deputy Andrew Young--if the hired civilian gunman who actually fired the fatal shot had missed. All of the witnesses Pepper claims can back up this story are dead, in hiding or unwilling to come forward--so there is no way for anyone else to question them.

And then there is what Pepper says about Merrell McCullough, ostensibly a Memphis undercover cop who infiltrated the Invaders, a militant black-youth organization that had allied itself with King's movement. McCullough's real mission, Pepper maintains, was to report to the 111th Military Intelligence Group headquartered at Camp McPherson, Georgia, on King's movements and plans. Pepper even includes in his book a photograph of McCullough kneeling over King's body moments after the shooting, "apparently checking him for life signs." But the man in the photograph is Earl Caldwell, then a New York Times reporter. Pepper told TIME last week that he believed the man in the picture was McCullough because he was so identified in Mark Lane and Dick Gregory's 1976 book about the assassination.

A Tennessee appellate court is considering whether to allow new ballistics tests that Pepper says will prove Ray's rifle was not the murder weapon. If they do, Ray might eventually get the real-life day in court he has been demanding for 29 years. And even if they don't, all the new wrinkles touted by Pepper make the King case sound more like a movie from Oliver Stone, who happens to be negotiating a deal with the King family associate who owns the rights to the story. It would make a heck of a movie, all right: MLK, not JFK.