Former sheriff and mayor pens book about his ‘legendary life’

Former Shelby County sheriff and mayor William Noel "Bill" Morris discusses his
new book, "Bill Morris: A Legendary Life," at Novel Memphis. (Photo by Wiley Henry)

Jim McCarter sat quietly in a packed room thumbing through a recently published book that he’d purchased at Novel Memphis minutes before the author’s 6 p.m. book talk and signing Thursday, March 28.

While waiting on the former Shelby County sheriff and mayor William Noel “Bill” Morris to address the capacity crowd, an age-old photograph on page 181 in the book, “Bill Morris: A Legendary Life,” caught McCarter’s attention.

“That’s my picture. I had to look at it closely,” said McCarter, who’d granted Morris permission to use the vintage photograph. “I showed the picture to Bill and he said he wanted to use it in the book.”

Morris is seen interviewing the owner of Canipe's
Amusement Company in 1968 minutes after Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. was killed. (Courtesy photo)

McCarter was pleasantly surprised that Morris had actually used the photograph.

The black and white photograph captures the moment in time when a bundle – wrapped in a bedspread and containing an overnight bag, binoculars, suitcase, and the rifle that James Earl Ray had reportedly used to kill Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. – was discovered at the entryway of Canipe’s Amusement Company at 424 South Main St.

Morris can be seen through the plate-glass window questioning the owner of the amusement company, Mr. Guy Canipe, which was next door to the boarding house and one street over from The Lorraine Motel on Mulberry where the shot rang out.

McCarter said he was around 17 or so when the photograph was snapped in 1968, minutes after a young sheriff Morris made the scene. McCarter would eventually become Canipe’s son-in-law after marrying his daughter.

The aforementioned photograph, along with the widely published photograph of Morris escorting the accused handcuffed assassin to jail, catapulted the young sheriff into the national spotlight.

Even so, Morris encouraged the audience to read the book rather than provide them with too many details.

The book was published by Legacies in Print on Jan. 1. It is loaded with historical accounts and information on Morris’ exploits in government – as sheriff when pandemonium erupted after Dr. King’s death, and when he was the four-term Shelby County mayor.

The book also includes Morris and community stakeholders, decision makers, pioneers and legends, including his friend Elvis Presley. Add to that Morris’ affiliations, civic involvement, and his role as an unofficial ambassador for the city of Memphis.

 “The last 60 years…there has been a lot of history,” said Morris, explaining his reasons for penning his autobiography. “Some of the history should be recorded differently than [what was covered in] the media.”

Morris pointed out that the arduous writing project began several years ago in his mind before meeting his co-writer, Darrell B. Uselton, who transcribed 268 recordings before working with Morris on his 400-plus-page autobiography.

“It was a little over two years in the process and sometime before that,” Uselton said matter-of-factly. In addition to the writing, the book is punctuated with more era photographs than the ones with Ray that made Morris a household name.

Just to give the audience even more of a peep into the book, Morris dropped a few names, including the infamous mayor Edward Hull “Boss” Crump. Crump – “not Trump,” he joked – built a political machine that dominated Memphis and Tennessee politics for decades.

“Mr. Boss Crump was one of the most marvelous persons I ever met,” he said. “He was good to me.”

The name Richard C. “Dick” Hackett kept coming up in Morris’ discussion about his work in government. He said he and Hackett had often traveled together to bring business to Memphis and Shelby County.

“We were successful, because we worked hard,” said Morris. “We believed Memphis could be better.”

 As a result of their efforts, he added, “I think the community is working better than we ever had compared to Washington.”

“Bill Morris: A Legendary Life” is an important read for those with an appetite for history and compassion for one man’s journey from Itawamba County, Mississippi, to Memphis, where his enduring legacy is anchored.

He eventually raised himself up from the depths of adverse poverty to become an important figure in the political and historic annals of Memphis and Shelby County.

“It’s the best I can do to tell the truth,” Morris said. “You can’t write an autobiography unless you tell the truth.”

Dr. William Pepper Explores the Plot to Kill Dr. King

Nearly 50 years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of the Loraine Motel, James Earl Ray is still – and forever will be – inextricably linked to the civil rights leader.

That fact cannot be disputed. What is often disputed is whether Ray, described as a two-bit petty criminal with a hankering for money, acted alone or was merely the patsy that a well-heeled apparatus employed to divert attention from the real assassin.

Ray did not kill Dr. King, according to Dr. William F. Pepper, who offered his perspective and keen insight on the role Ray played leading up to the assassination and afterward during a book talk at the National Civil Rights Museum on Nov. 2.

Dr. William F. Pepper

Drawing his conclusion from countless interviews, court documents, sworn depositions, and other painstaking research material, Pepper compiled what he’d learned into his latest book, “The Plot to Kill King: The Truth Behind the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.”

Questions still abound, however. Was Ray indeed the patsy rather than the assassin whose aim was spot on? And was Ray telling the truth when he implicated the mysterious “Raoul” in the murder of Dr. King?

Ray pleaded guilty to Dr. King’s murder to avoid a jury trial and possibly the death penalty, if he had been convicted. Three years later he recanted his confession and aroused suspicion when he fingered Raoul.

The book talk wasn’t centered precisely on Ray, but around a chain of events that conspiracy theorists and the inquisitive alike have long chewed on and regurgitated over and over since that fateful day on April 4, 1968.

“The Plot to Kill King” is Pepper’s third and final book in the trilogy surrounding Dr. King’s assassination and the trail of evidence leading to government culpability, including a plot, Pepper maintains, with far-reaching tentacles across the United States.

“What I’m trying to do in the final book is to now put the full context of all the critical depositions we took in the appendix of the book so nobody can say Pepper is making this up.”

“A volume of new people had evidence and wanted to relay it before they died,” added Pepper, detailing, for example, in book two – “Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” – that new evidence confirmed Ray’s innocence.

“‘Orders to Kill’ laid out the evidence at that time,” said Pepper, a New York-based attorney also working from London. He represented Ray and fought valiantly to get him a trial that he’d never had.

“The case took on a whole new perspective,” he said.

Pepper’s first book, “An Act of State: The Execution of Dr. Martin Luther King,” was the end product of an exhaustive investigation that Pepper began in 1978, 10 years after the martyrdom of Dr. King.

He surmised it was Frank Liberto, a Memphis grocer with supposed Mafia connections, who admitted on TV that he’d killed Dr. King during the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations.

In his quest to find the elusive truth, Pepper has tarried over the years with laser-focus determination to bring the murder conspiracy to its final conclusion by uncovering the real culprits behind this inglorious chapter in American history.

The bullet that killed Dr. King was fired by a civilian, claimed Pepper, who’d befriended the civil rights leader in 1967 and represented the King family in a wrongful death lawsuit following the death of Ray in 1998.

The King family was convinced that Ray did not kill Dr. King after his son, Dexter King, had interviewed him. They weren’t buying the lone gunman theory and that Ray was the mastermind.

It was Pepper’s revelation of Dr. King’s admittance to St. Joseph Hospital that likely drew some attention – even disbelief that a nonviolent crusader of international repute would be whisked on a gurney to the emergency room.

“Dr. King was not dead when they took him to St. Joseph,” Pepper shared with the audience. “Martin was alive in the emergency room on a gurney.”

Pepper said Lula Mae Shelby, a surgical assistant at the hospital, maintained that Dr. King was alert in the operating room when a team of surgeons began working to save his life.

He said according to Shelby’s testimony, Dr. Breen Bland, the hospital’s chief of surgery, forbade the team to “stop working on the nigger and let him die.” Then he ordered them out of the operating room.

“The witness said Dr. Bland put a pillow over Dr. King’s head and suffocated him. I believe that’s how he died,” Pepper said.

There was a Q&A session following the book talk. After drawing to a close, an unsuspecting man on a cane was determined to have his say.

“You remember me, John Billings?” the man asked Pepper. “I do respect your education and your perseverance – because we know each other quite well – to find out the true killer of Martin Luther King.”

Pepper acknowledged knowing Billings, who worked with him in 1990 to investigate the death Dr. King, and again in 1993 for the televised mock trial to determine Ray’s guilt or innocence.

“Why didn’t you ask me?” said Billings, a 20-year-old college student and emergency room orderly in 1968 who was asked to guard Dr. King’s body.

“What you’ve said is full of crap,” he shouted at Pepper. “I was there (at the hospital). He’s going on hearsay.”

While being escorted from the auditorium by Memphis police, he exhorted the audience to Google “John Billings, Private Investigator.”

“Find out for your own self,” he said.