Butler's biggest mistake on February 21, 1965, was in wearing that tweed coat and his hat at the "hillbilly-style" 45-degree angle reminiscent of Barney Fife and Jethro.
The text of my letter to the Manhattan District Attorney regarding Butler:
February 7, 2020
Dear Mr. Vance and Mr. Casolaro:
I am writing as regards the current misguided attempt to “clear the name” of Norman 3X Butler, aka Muhammad Abdul Aziz, one of three Black Muslims who shot Malcolm X to death inside the Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965.
While it is true, as retired detective Anthony V. Bouza noted recently in the
New York Times, that the investigation was botched in many ways, it most certainly was not botched in terms of Norman Butler. As the old movie tag goes: “[the] Butler did it.”
While researching the assassination of Malcolm X in the late 1970s, I thought after reading affidavits from Thomas Hagan (aka Talmadge Hayer) and Benjamin Goodman (aka Benjamin Karim), that Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson were wrongfully convicted.
I spent five years discoursing with Johnson some time ago. He asked me to pen his autobiography but I was skeptical of his motives. By the time our discussions ended, I had read the trial transcript and enough documents related to the assassination to know that the person who fired the shotgun at Malcolm X could not have been Thomas 15X Johnson.
Eyewitness statements uniformly described that person as a tall (about 6’ 2”) dark brown-skinned African American male who wore a short beard. Johnson was a much shorter, very light-skinned African American male who never wore a beard.
“I couldn’t grow one if I tried,” he said. He sported a thin mustache most of his adult life.
In addition, there was film footage available on Youtube which captured images of the three assassins shortly after the assassination. The footage, filmed by two local TV stations, was later donated to a film school in Los Angeles.
Briefly, it shows a tall, dark brown-skinned black man fighting with police and Malcolm X supporters to free Hagan from their clutches. This individual was positively identified in 2010 by several people as William Bradley, a former lieutenant at one of the Nation of Islam’s temples in the Newark area.
As such, eyewitness statements were accurate. A proper investigation should have eliminated Johnson as a suspect in the assassination of Malcolm X.
But we needn’t waste time thinking that Johnson was a victim of injustice. His justice was poetic, for seven weeks earlier, Johnson and Butler went to a local temple operated by a former member of the Nation of Islam and ordered him to remove a photo of their leader, Elijah Muhammad, from the window of his storefront location or suffer grave consequences.
When Benjamin Brown refused to remove the photo, Johnson asked him to step outside to discuss the matter. Once Brown did so, Johnson removed a .22 caliber rifle from underneath his coat and shot Brown. The first shot struck him in his left shoulder, and then the rifle jammed.
“I was trying to shoot him in the chest,” Johnson told me.
Johnson, Butler, and other Muslims were quickly arrested. But for a stroke of good luck for Brown, they would have faced murder charges.
As you can see by the enclosed new story, Butler was wearing a tweed coat, a dark suit, and a black hat when he and Johnson were arrested for shooting Brown.
Johnson told me that the coat was the only decent one that Butler owned at the time and he, therefore, wore it daily during winter.
Every killer makes a mistake; it’s up to investigators to find it. In the case of Malcolm X, it was Butler’s tweed coat that gave him away. That, along with the black hat he always wore at a forty-five-degree angle. You can count on one hand men who wear a fedora at a forty-five-degree angle.
In the linked video titled “
The Black Zapruder Film: They Killed Malcolm X,” skip to the sixteen-minute mark and you will see a black man wearing a tweed coat and black hat at a forty-five-degree angle wrestling his way through the crowd as Malcolm X is removed by stretcher from the Audubon Ballroom and taken to the hospital across the street.
The man is none other than Norman 3X Butler. He lied in 1965 about not being involved in the assassination, and he has been lying about it ever since. Look at the tweed coat. How many tweed coats do you see in the crowd?
Butler wouldn’t recognize the truth if she sat on his lap. Neither would Hagan. Their trial testimony was one lie or misstatement after another, making it easy for Vincent Dermody to win convictions.
When I spoke to an attorney currently representing Butler, he said that he had never seen this footage. This made me wonder whether Ark Media included the footage in its overly long series on Malcolm X. How could they spend a year developing the project and not show this footage if they really were searching for the whole truth?
As for the Innocence Project, it appears to have become drunk with power. One of the attorneys claiming that Butler is innocent and should have been freed after Hagan’s 1977 affidavit comes from the same pack of lawyers who would have us believe that O.J. Simpson didn’t nearly decapitate his wife Nicole and butcher Ronald Goldman, a young restaurant worker, in a fit of rage.
Why would Butler deserve freedom because his conspirator swears that four others helped him kill Malcolm X and that Butler was not there? Hagan and Butler were members of the Nation of Islam, a sect that refers to the
Holy Bible as the “poison book.” It meant nothing for them to place their hand on the
Bible and swear to tell the truth because they regard the
Bible as unworthy of honor.
The other red herring is the affidavit of Benjamin Karim, a top aide to Malcolm X who introduced him on the afternoon of February 21, 1965. Karim swore that Johnson and Butler could not have been inside the Audubon because he would have recognized them and they would have been expelled.
In the same document, Karim admits that he was not actually
present in the ballroom, which nullifies his affidavit. Karim was too busy hiding in the Green Room behind stage to see who was in the audience.
He makes no mention of the three men on the front row center who, according to former New York Police Department detective Eugene “Gene” Roberts (interviewed in the documentary “Brother Minister”), were pretending to be reading newspapers, making it impossible to see their faces.
Those were the same three men, Roberts said, who shot Malcolm X to death a few minutes later. Since Karim was cowering backstage when the shooting started, his affidavit isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.
Numerous eyewitnesses identified Norman Butler as the person they saw firing a gun at Malcolm X. A reporter said that Butler started “firing like a cowboy” in his bid to escape. Many eyewitnesses said that Butler appeared to injure himself when he jumped over several people and landed on the steps leading out of the building. This would explain why Butler went to the doctor four days after the assassination to have his injured leg examined.
Butler infuriated Johnson by using the same alibi. But Johnson had proof from his physician that he was ordered to stay home and keep his leg elevated on February 21. During the trial, Butler’s physician demolished Butler’s alibi by testifying that he did not see Butler until February 25, the day before he was arrested for murder.
I won’t belabor my point, which is that Norman Butler deserves no consideration whatsoever for his legitimate conviction in the murder of Malcolm X. He and Johnson were facing trial for shooting Benjamin Brown at the time of the assassination of Malcolm X. Call it fate, karma, poetic justice, or whatever you want. The bottom line is that they were going to jail either way.
Butler fought the law, and the law won. End of story.
P.S. I have enclosed still images from the documentary, “The Black Zapruder Film.” Any moderately competent specialist in forensic photography will confirm that the man in the images is none other than Norman Butler. You can tell by the tweed coat, the type and shape of the black fedora, and the right profile of the man in the photos as compared to the right profile of Norman Butler today.
This corroborates statements by Yuri Kochiyama, Sharon 6X Poole, and numerous other eyewitnesses who positively identified Norman Butler as one of three men they saw kill Malcolm X.
Respectfully,
Karl Evanzz
author