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On Saturday, Oct. 11, a man named Russell Byers died. He lived in Creve Coeur, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. He was 94 years old. He lived a rich and full life. He was a criminal for almost all of it.

Byers stole cars and precious art from the Saint Louis Art Museum. He was a fence. He is known to have threatened more than a few people, though he always maintained that he “didn’t kill people or deal drugs.” He believed that committing those crimes was too easy a way to end up in prison. Even though his own attorney said that Byers was “one of the most dangerous criminals” in St. Louis, and despite a life of a never-ending litany of criminal activities and many indictments, Byers never spent one day behind bars.

That said, none of this unlawful behavior became the reason for Byers’ brief notoriety. He came to national fame in the late 1970s as the recipient of what is known in criminal conspiracy circles as the Byers Bounty—a $50,000 offer to kill Martin Luther King Jr. The Byers Bounty has long been considered the key to understanding whether there was a broader undiscovered conspiracy to murder the civil rights icon. It is a theory about King’s assassination that many still believe, including several who investigated the crime.

The official history of King’s death goes like this: The civil rights leader was assassinated on April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Initially, law enforcement agents believed they were searching for several possible killers. But two weeks after the murder, the FBI matched fingerprints found at the scene and announced that the fugitive assassin was one man, James Earl Ray, an escapee from the Missouri State Penitentiary.

On June 8, two months after King’s death, Ray was arrested by customs agents while attempting to board a flight to Brussels at London’s Heathrow Airport. Ray was extradited to the United States, and nine months after his capture, on March 10, 1969, he pleaded guilty to King’s murder. Three days later, he recanted that confession and spent the rest of his life professing his innocence, claiming that he was made a patsy for the real assassin, a man he called “Raoul.” Raoul was transparently fictitious, but that doesn’t mean that someone else, or perhaps several people, didn’t aid and abet Ray in what has always been a crime for which he alone was held accountable.

For over 50 years—both because of Ray’s continued protestations as to his innocence, and because of the stunning revelations about the FBI’s harassment of King during his lifetime—conspiracy theories have proliferated about who really killed the civil rights icon and why. Of all those theories, the Byers Bounty, alleging that a far-right Southern organization offered to pay to have King killed, is considered the most credible, and is the only one to have been backed by a full-blown congressional investigation.

For years after revealing this alleged bounty, Byers largely disappeared from public view, deepening the mystery surrounding King’s assassination. In fact, for most of this century, he was widely believed to already be dead by those with an interest in the King case. In my own years of reporting and research, I attempted to locate Byers numerous times to no avail. I, too, thought he was dead. That was until this past summer, when somebody reached out to me with his whereabouts, along with a note saying, “The man that brokered the murder of MLK is alive.”

A few months later, Byers was indeed dead—but not before I spoke to him one last time. What he told me, and what I discovered in tandem, added a chilling new dimension to a case many had long assumed would never be fully explained. There’s still one way it could be.

Over the years, Russell Byers discussed the alleged bounty to kill Martin Luther King Jr. at various times with a number of people, but he always maintained that he never had any involvement in the actual assassination. As Byers related the incident in 1978 in front of the House Select Committee on Assassination, the offer went like this: One afternoon in late 1966 or early 1967, John Kauffman, a friend of Byers’ and the owner of the Bluff Acres Motel in Imperial, Missouri, where Byers stored his stolen goods, asked him if he wanted to make $50,000 (or about $500,000 today). Byers said he was interested and asked him what he needed to do. All Kauffman would say was that they’d meet a man at 6:30 p.m. who would let him know.

That evening, both men went to the home of John Sutherland, a well-to-do patent attorney who also lived in Imperial and who had his law office about 25 miles away in downtown St. Louis. When Sutherland met them at the door, he was outfitted in overalls and wearing a Confederate cap. Upon entering the living room, Byers noted the decor, which prominently featured Confederate flags and other rebel artifacts: bugles, swords, and additional antebellum paraphernalia. They exchanged pleasantries with Mrs. Sutherland, she departed, and the men got straight down to business.

Sutherland told Byers he would pay him $50,000 either to assassinate King or, as Byers later interpreted it, to arrange to have him executed. The offer made total sense to Byers. In the hierarchy of St. Louis criminals, Byers was right at the top, so if he didn’t commit the murder himself (always being one to avoid prison), he could definitely organize it. Indeed, Byers had a brother-in-law serving a life sentence at the Missouri State Penitentiary for a contract hit. Coincidentally, that brother-in-law was the cellmate of a man named James Earl Ray. Either way, Byers was certainly one of the few men in St. Louis who could deliver on the job, especially for that large an amount of money.

But Byers was a canny, cautious criminal. He told Sutherland that he didn’t know who King was. Sutherland informed him that King was a civil rights leader. Byers was intrigued and asked how he would get paid. Sutherland said that “he belonged to a secret Southern organization that could raise the money.” That “secret” organization might have been the Southern States Industrial Council, of which Sutherland was an active member. The organization funded many right-wing causes, from the staunchly anti-communist John Birch Society to the rabidly segregationist White Citizens’ Councils. Or it might have been a more loosely formed group of reactionary zealots.

Whoever the backers, Byers thought it seemed like the kind of business he normally avoided, being unwilling to risk prison. But he was afraid to say no immediately. As he later testified before the House Select Committee on Assassination, “I sort of crawfished a little. I seen too many late-night movies where they make you an offer you can’t refuse, and you jump up and shout out, ‘Absolutely, no,’ and you may never leave........

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