Forty-two years after the assassination of black civil-rights leader Edwin T. Pratt, investigators are confident they've identified the three white men who killed him, and say there is "compelling" evidence that the mystery man behind the hit was a local African-American building contractor who felt Pratt was an "Uncle Tom" and "white inside."
Richard Nixon called Pratt the "Martin Luther King of the Northwest."
King County Sherriff
Tommy Kirk displays his arsenal, circa the late 1960s.
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Pratt at the time was also carrying on a two-year affair with a white woman, according to sources who have seen the six volumes of confidential police files on Seattle's most historically important unsolved murder. The files reveal that local and FBI authorities initially focused on dozens of suspects, including the black contractor and a relative of the white woman. Now, four decades later, cold-case detectives reworking the case feel that the contractor, who died 15 years ago, likely paid $25,000 for Pratt to be killed by the three white assassins, who are all dead.
King County Sheriff's Det. Scott Tompkins confirms the contractor is at the top of his cold-case suspect list. "No one had a greater motive," says Tompkins. "When you look at the evidence, it's very compelling." Sources say that in addition to details about the contractor, the Pratt case files include long lists of other suspects (viable and eliminated), lengthy interviews, polygraph tests, and tipster accounts that all seem to amount to nothing (one of the bound files is devoted only to supposed sightings of the getaway car, which was never found). But the cold-case investigation, keying off the original probe, has turned up the most useful details, sources say.
Pratt was the director of the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle when someone threw a snowball at the side of his Shoreline home on the wintry night of Jan. 26, 1969. As he padded to the door in his slippers, his wife Bettye, peering out the bedroom window at her carport, saw two crouched figures, one of them raising a gun. She saw a red burst of gunfire. "They've got a rifle!" she shouted, but her husband was likely already dead.
Standing in the open doorway, Pratt was struck in the mouth by a shotgun round. The 38-year-old father of two fell backward and died almost instantly. His slaying was similar to the 1963 shooting of Mississippi civil-rights leader Medgar Evers, assassinated in his driveway by a Ku Klux Klan member, and came nine months after the April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. by white gunman James Earl Ray.
Two men were seen running to a car that roared away the moment they hopped in, indicating they had a driver accomplice. No one saw their faces, and few, including Pratt's wife, were sure of their skin color. Most speculated the killers were white, although police zeroed in on black suspects as well, even later restaging the murder using black stand-ins.
The Nixon administration was also hoping to head off what appeared to be another white-on-black political assassination. Two days after the shooting, then-U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell, according to federal documents revealed in a 2007 report by Seattle Weekly, wrote a memorandum to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover: "It has come to my attention that certain black groups are circulating a story to the effect that the death of Pratt was caused by White racists," wrote Mitchell to the Seattle FBI. "Does your bureau have any information to the contrary, and, if so, is there any way it might be publicized through local police or otherwise."
Then-King County Sheriff Jack Porter candidly told reporters in 1969 there was no reason for the slaying "other than politics or race." But it took 25 years for the sheriff's office to confirm the shooters were white, according to a 1994 report in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The P-I said a white ex-con named Tommy Kirk, 21, had most likely been hired to assassinate Pratt. Kirk himself was murdered four months after Pratt's killing by an alleged co-conspirator, also white, named Texas Barton Gray, 49.
Gray, who was later convicted of manslaughter for Kirk's slaying over a drug debt, told detectives that Kirk had admitted to killing Pratt. Gray didn't cop to his own role in the assassination, but others later told police that both Kirk and Gray had privately confessed. Gray died of a heart attack in 1991.
Now, based on new information from tipsters, investigators feel they have identified the third man, the getaway driver, a drug addict with a long record who died in 2006. The new information comes from a prison inmate and a man dying of cancer who wanted to clear his conscience, both of whom fingered the addict as the wheelman.
Most important, detectives now say they think it was the black contractor who put the three white street criminals up to assassinating one of Seattle's most important black leaders. The contractor, like the driver, is so far not being named. Unlike with Kirk and Gray, there is less direct evidence pointing to their roles in the murder, and sources say it would be unfair to name them at this point in the cold-case probe, which is ongoing.
According to those who have seen the confidential case files and newer cold-case findings, FBI investigators were on the contractor's trail only days after the shooting—something, like Pratt's affair, never revealed to the press and public. Agents were told by informants that the contractor was tied to black power groups, had threatened Pratt, and owned a vehicle identical to the getaway car.
