James Earl Ray | |
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![]() Mug shot of Ray taken on July 8, 1955 | |
Born | Alton, Illinois, U.S. | March 10, 1928
Died | April 23, 1998 70) Nashville, Tennessee, U.S. | (aged
Resting place | Cremated; ashes scattered in Ireland |
Known for | Being convicted for the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. |
Conviction(s) | First degree murder Armed robbery Burglary Escape |
Criminal penalty | 100 years imprisonment [lower-alpha 1] |
Escaped | June 10–13, 1977 |
Details | |
Victims | Martin Luther King Jr., 39 |
Date | April 4, 1968 |
James Earl Ray (March 10, 1928 – April 23, 1998) was an American fugitive who was convicted of the Murder of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. After the assassination, Ray fled the United States and was captured in the United Kingdom. Ray was convicted in 1969 after entering a guilty plea—thus forgoing a jury trial and the possibility of a death sentence—and was sentenced to 99 years of imprisonment.
In 1993, Loyd Jowers, the owner of a restaurant, publicly began claiming that he had been part of a conspiracy to assassinate King and that Ray was a scapegoat. In a Memphis civil trial in 1999, a jury unanimously concluded that Jowers was liable for the assassination, that King was the victim of a conspiracy, and that various United States governmental agencies had conspired to murder King and frame Ray for the assassination. The King family has consistently said that they believe Ray was innocent, though this conclusion was disputed by the United States Department of Justice in 2000. [1] [2] The King family has stated that they believe the true murderer was a Memphis Police Department officer, Lieutenant Earl Clark, [3] despite physical evidence, including fingerprints on the rifle which fired the shot that killed King, would link Ray to the assassination. [4]
Ray was born on March 10, 1928, in Alton, Illinois, the son of George Ellis Ray and Lucille Ray (née Maher). He had Irish, Scottish and Welsh ancestry. [5]
In February 1935, Ray's father, known by the nickname Great Dane, passed a bad check in Alton, Illinois, and then moved to Ewing, Missouri, where the family changed their name to Raynes to avoid law enforcement. [6] James Earl Ray was the oldest of nine children, [7] including John Larry Ray, [8] Franklin Ray, Jerry William Ray, [9] Melba Ray, Carol Ray Pepper, Suzan Ray, and Marjorie Ray. His sister Marjorie died in a fire as a young child in 1933. [10] Ray left school at the age of 12. He later joined the U.S. Army at the close of World War II and served in Germany. Ray struggled to adapt to military life and was eventually discharged for ineptitude and lack of adaptability in 1948. [10]
Ray committed a variety of crimes prior to the murder of King. Ray's first conviction for criminal activity, a burglary in California, came in 1949. In 1952, he served two years for the armed robbery of a taxi driver in Illinois. In 1955, he was convicted of mail fraud after stealing money orders in Hannibal, Missouri. For this, he was imprisoned for four years in the federal United States Penitentiary Leavenworth. In 1959, he was caught stealing $120 (~$1,254 in 2023) in an armed robbery of a Kroger store in St. Louis. [11] He was sentenced to twenty years in prison for repeated offenses. He escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1967 by hiding in a truck transporting bread from the prison bakery. [12]
Following his escape, Ray stayed on the move throughout the United States and Canada, going first to St. Louis and then onward to Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, and Birmingham, Alabama, where he stayed long enough to buy a 1966 Ford Mustang and get an Alabama driver's license. He then drove to Mexico, stopping in Acapulco before settling in Puerto Vallarta on October 19, 1967. [13]
While in Mexico, Ray, using the alias Eric Starvo Galt, attempted to establish himself as a pornographic film director. Using mail-ordered equipment, he filmed and photographed local prostitutes. Frustrated with his results and jilted by the prostitute with whom he had formed a relationship, Ray left Mexico on or around November 16, 1967, [14] arriving in Los Angeles three days later. While there, Ray attended a local bartending school and took dance lessons. [15] His chief interest, however, was the George Wallace presidential campaign. Ray was quickly drawn to Wallace's segregationist platform. He spent much of his time in Los Angeles volunteering at the Wallace campaign headquarters in North Hollywood. [16]
He considered emigrating to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where a predominantly white minority regime had unilaterally assumed independence from the United Kingdom in 1965. [17] The notion of living in Rhodesia continued to appeal to Ray for several years afterwards, and it was his intended destination after King's assassination. The Rhodesian government expressed its disapproval. [18]
On March 5, 1968, Ray had an operation on his nose, performed by physician Russell Hadley. [19] On March 18, 1968, Ray left Los Angeles and began a cross-country drive to Atlanta, Georgia. [20]
Arriving in Atlanta on March 24, 1968, Ray checked into a rooming house. [21] He bought a map of the city. FBI agents later found this map when they searched the room in which he was staying. On the map, the locations of the church and residence of Martin Luther King Jr. were circled. [22]
Ray was soon on the road again and drove his Mustang to Birmingham, Alabama. There, on March 30, 1968, he bought a Remington Model 760 Gamemaster .30-06-caliber rifle and a box of 20 cartridges from the Aeromarine Supply Company. He also bought a Redfield 2x–7x scope, which he had mounted to the rifle. [23] He told the store owners that he was going on a hunting trip with his brother. Ray had continued using the Galt alias after his stint in Mexico, but when he made this purchase, he gave his name as Harvey Lowmeyer. [24]
After purchasing the rifle and accessories, Ray drove back to Atlanta. An avid newspaper reader, Ray passed his time reading The Atlanta Constitution . The paper reported King's planned return trip to Memphis, Tennessee, which was scheduled for April 1, 1968. On April 2, Ray packed a bag and drove to Memphis. [25]
On April 4, 1968, Ray rented a room in a rooming house across the street from the motel. He subsequently locked himself in the bathroom, stood in the bathtub, opened the window and fired a single shot at Martin Luther King Jr. from a Remington rifle while King was standing on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Shortly after the shot was fired, Ray was seen fleeing from the rooming house. A package was abandoned close to the site that included a rifle and binoculars, both found with Ray's fingerprints. [26] [27] [28]
Ray fled to Atlanta in his white Ford Mustang, driving eleven hours. [28] [7] He picked up his belongings and fled north to Canada, arriving in Toronto three days later, where he hid for over a month and acquired a Canadian passport under the false name of Ramon George Sneyd. He left Toronto in late May on a flight to the United Kingdom. [29] He stayed briefly in Lisbon, Portugal, and returned to London. [30] In London, on June 4, he called The Daily Telegraph and requested to talk to Ian Colvin, the newspaper's foreign correspondent in Africa and the Middle East, whose articles about Africa he claimed to have read, and asked him to connect him to former British Army Commandant Alistair Wicks about the possibility of becoming a mercenary in Africa. Ray contacted Colvin again on June 6 for further inquiry, after no contact from Wicks. Colvin told Ray that it was not a good time to become a mercenary, but nevertheless gave him an address in Brussels. [31] [32] Ray was then arrested at London Heathrow Airport attempting to leave the UK for Brussels. He was trying to depart the UK for Angola, Rhodesia or South Africa [33] using the falsified Canadian passport. [34] At check-in, the ticket agent noticed the name on his passport, Sneyd, was on a Royal Canadian Mounted Police watchlist. [34] [35] [36]
Airport officials noticed that Ray carried another passport under a second name. The UK quickly extradited Ray to Tennessee, where he was charged with King's murder. He confessed to the crime on March 10, 1969, his 41st birthday, [37] and after pleading guilty he was sentenced to 99 years in prison. [38]
Three days later, Ray recanted his confession. He had entered a guilty plea on the advice of his attorney, Percy Foreman, to avoid the sentence of death by electrocution, which would have been a possible outcome of a jury trial. Unbeknownst to Ray, however, a death sentence would have been commuted as unconstitutional under the de facto moratorium in place since 1967[ citation needed ] and following Furman v. Georgia .
Ray dismissed Foreman as his attorney and thereafter derisively called him "Percy Fourflusher". Ray began claiming that a man he had met in Montreal back in 1967, who used the alias "Raoul", had been involved in the assassination, and he asserted that he did not "personally shoot Dr. King" but may have been "partially responsible without knowing it", hinting at a conspiracy. Ray told this version of the assassination and his flight during the following two months to journalist William Bradford Huie.
Huie investigated this story and discovered that Ray lied about some details. Ray told Huie that he purposely left the rifle with his fingerprints on it in plain sight at the crime scene because he wanted to become a famous criminal. He was convinced that he would escape capture because of his intelligence and cunning, and he also believed that Governor of Alabama George Wallace would soon be elected to the presidency, so that Ray would only be confined in prison for a short time, pending a presidential pardon by Wallace. [39]
In December 1973, Ray filed a $500,000 lawsuit against Tennessee seeking his release from prison on the grounds that crucial evidence in his case was mishandled by his attorney Percy Foreman, who pressured him to plead guilty, [40] [41] Foreman denied Ray's allegations, saying that he "spent approximately 20 hours over 4 1/2 days cross-examing Ray...At no time did he ever implicate anything or anybody other than himself." [42] Ray spent the remainder of his life unsuccessfully attempting to withdraw his guilty plea and secure a jury trial.[ citation needed ]
On June 10, 1977, Ray and six other convicts escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee. They were recaptured on June 13. [43] A year was added to Ray's previous sentence, increasing it to a full century.
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Ray hired Jack Kershaw as his new attorney, and Kershaw publicly argued and promoted Ray's claim that he was not responsible for the assassination of King. His claim was that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy of the otherwise unidentified man named "Raoul" who was a blond Cuban. Kershaw and his client met with representatives of the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) and convinced the committee to conduct ballistics tests that they believed would prove Ray had not fired the fatal shot. [44] The tests ultimately proved inconclusive.
Kershaw claimed the prison escape was additional proof that Ray had been involved in a conspiracy that had provided him with the outside assistance he would have needed to break out of prison. Kershaw convinced Ray to submit to a polygraph test as part of an interview with Playboy . The magazine reported that the test results showed "Ray did, in fact, kill Martin Luther King Jr. and that he did so alone." Ray then fired Kershaw after discovering the attorney had been paid $11,000 (~$55,308 in 2023) by the magazine in exchange for the interview and instead hired attorney Mark Lane to provide him with legal representation. [44]
In 1997, King's son, Dexter, met with Ray at the prison and asked him, "I just want to ask you, for the record, did you kill my father?" Ray replied, "No. No I didn't." Dexter told Ray that he, along with the rest of the King family, believed Ray, and the family also urged publicly that Ray be granted a new trial. [45] [46] [47] William Pepper, a friend of King during the last year of his life, represented Ray in a mock trial televised by HBO in an attempt to grant him the trial he never received. In the mock trial, the prosecutor was Hickman Ewing. The mock trial jury finally acquitted Ray. [48]
In 1998, and continuing into 1999, Pepper represented the King family in a wrongful death civil suit against Memphis restaurant owner Loyd Jowers, whose restaurant was near the Lorraine Motel. They sued Jowers for participation in a conspiracy to murder King. Rendering their verdict on December 8 of that year, the jury found that Jowers and others, including government agencies, had conspired to murder King, and he was therefore legally liable to pay compensation to the King family. The family accepted $100 (~$183.00 in 2023) in restitution to demonstrate they were not pursuing the case for financial gain, and they publicly stated that Ray, in their opinion, had nothing to do with the assassination. [49] [47]
Coretta Scott King said, "The jury was clearly convinced by the extensive evidence that was presented during the trial that, in addition to Mr. Jowers, the conspiracy of the Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies, were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband. The jury also affirmed overwhelming evidence that identified someone else, not James Earl Ray, as the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame." [50] [51] [52] [3]
Prompted by the King family's acceptance of some of the claims of conspiracy, United States Attorney General Janet Reno ordered a new investigation on August 26, 1998. [53] On June 9, 2000, the United States Department of Justice released a 150-page report rejecting allegations that there was a conspiracy to assassinate King, including the determination of the Memphis civil court jury. [53] [54]
Before his death, Ray was transferred to the Lois M. DeBerry Special Needs Facility in Nashville, a maximum-security prison with hospital facilities. [55]
Ray died on April 23, 1998, just 19 days after the 30th Anniversary of King's assassination, at the age of 70, at the Columbia Nashville Memorial Hospital in Madison, Tennessee from complications related to kidney disease and liver failure caused by hepatitis C having served 29 years in prison. [7] His brother Jerry told CNN that his brother did not want to be buried or have his final resting place in the United States because of the way the government had treated him. His body was cremated and his ashes were flown to Ireland, the home of his maternal family's ancestors. [56]
Ten years later, Ray's other brother, John Larry Ray, co-authored a book with Lyndon Barsten titled Truth At Last: The Untold Story Behind James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. [45]
Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister, activist, and political philosopher who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. A black church leader and a son of early civil rights activist and minister Martin Luther King Sr., King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through the use of nonviolent resistance and nonviolent civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of legalized discrimination.
Loyd Jowers was an American restaurateur and the owner of Jim's Grill, a restaurant near the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. For the first 25 years after the assassination of King, Jowers testified that he was in the restaurant at the time of the assassination, a fact supported by the other witnesses in the restaurant.
Dexter Scott King was an American civil and animal rights activist, attorney, and author. The second son of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, he was also the brother of Martin Luther King III, Bernice King, and Yolanda King; and also grandson of Alberta Williams King and Martin Luther King Sr. He is the author of Growing Up King: An Intimate Memoir.
The National Civil Rights Museum is a complex of museums and historic buildings in Memphis, Tennessee; its exhibits trace the history of the civil rights movement in the United States from the 17th century to the present. The museum is built around the former Lorraine Motel, which was the site of the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Two other buildings and their adjacent property, also connected with the King assassination, have been acquired as part of the museum complex.
J. Wyeth Chandler served as mayor of Memphis, Tennessee from 1972 to 1982. He was the adopted son of former Memphis mayor and U.S. Representative Walter Chandler. Chandler succeeded the controversial Henry Loeb, who battled local sanitation workers during a strike that brought Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis in April 1968.
William Francis Pepper was an American lawyer who was based in New York City and noted for his efforts to prove government culpability and the innocence of James Earl Ray in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.. Pepper also tried to prove the innocence of Sirhan Sirhan in the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. He was the author of several books, and had been active in other government conspiracy cases, including the 9/11 Truth movement, and had advocated that George W. Bush be charged with war crimes.
Frederick Tupper Saussy III was an American composer, musician, author, artist, and conspiracy theorist. He was a self-styled theologian, restaurant owner, ghostwriter of James Earl Ray's biography, King assassination conspiracy theorist, anti-government pamphleteer, and radical opponent of the federal government’s taxation and monetary authority.
James W. "Jim" Douglass is an American author, activist, Christian theologian, and investigative journalist. He is a graduate of Santa Clara University. He and his wife, Shelley Douglass, founded the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Poulsbo, Washington, and Mary’s House, a Catholic Worker house in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1997 the Douglasses received the Pacem in Terris Award.
The John F. Kennedy's assassination and the subsequent conspiracy theories surrounding it have been discussed, referenced, or recreated in popular culture numerous times.
Martin Luther King Jr., an African-American clergyman and civil rights movement leader, was fatally shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, at 6:01 p.m. CST. He was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital, where he died at 7:05 p.m. He was a prominent leader of the civil rights movement and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was known for his use of nonviolence and civil disobedience. James Earl Ray, a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary, was arrested on June 8, 1968, at London's Heathrow Airport, extradited to the United States and charged with the crime. On March 10, 1969, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 99 years in the Tennessee State Penitentiary. He later made many attempts to withdraw his guilty plea and to be tried by a jury, but was unsuccessful. Ray died in prison in 1998.
Arthur J. Hanes served as mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, between 1961 and 1963, a tumultuous time that saw the city become a focal point in the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement during the Birmingham campaign. Hanes, who served just one term as mayor, was part of a three-man commission that ran the city, a trio which included police commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor. Hanes would also serve as legal counsel for defendants in two important murder cases connected to the civil rights movement.
William Noel Morris, known as Bill Morris, is a Tennessee politician who served as mayor of Shelby County, Tennessee, including the city of Memphis. He also was a sheriff of the Shelby County Sheriff's Office. He was the president of the Tennessee County Services Association, an organization of county officials.
"The Promised Land" is an episode from the police drama television series New York Undercover, and was first broadcast on February 20, 1997 on Fox. Written by Reggie Rock Bythewood and directed by Don Kurt, it is the 17th episode of the third season, and the 69th episode of the series.
John Karl Kershaw was an American attorney best known for challenging the official account of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, claiming that his client James Earl Ray was an unwitting participant in a ploy devised by a mystery man named Raul to kill the civil rights leader.
The Martin Luther King Jr. Records Collection Act, or MLK Records Act, is proposed legislation that would release United States government records pertaining to the life and death of Martin Luther King Jr. Versions of the law have been proposed on multiple occasions, and a complete version was brought to both chambers of the United States Congress in 2005–2006.
Harold Weisberg served as an Office of Strategic Services officer during World War II, a U.S. Senate staff member and investigative reporter, an investigator for the Senate Committee on Civil Liberties, and a U.S. State Department intelligence analyst who devoted 40 years of his life to researching and writing about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. He wrote ten self-published and published books and approximately thirty-five unpublished books related to the details for those assassinations, mostly with respect to Kennedy's assassination.
Hellhound on His Trail (Doubleday), 2010, is a nonfiction book written by author Hampton Sides, focusing on the characters and events surrounding the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Using multiple narratives, Hellhound is an attempt at exploring the psychology and emotion that dominated and divided the United States during the Civil Rights Movement.
W. Hickman Ewing Jr. is an American attorney. Ewing served as the United States Attorney for the western district of Tennessee from 1981 to 1991. He later served as the special prosecutor overseeing the Whitewater investigation.
Conspiracy theories about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a prominent leader of the civil rights movement, relate to different accounts of the incident that took place on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, the day after giving his final speech "I've Been to the Mountaintop". Claims soon arose over suspect aspects of King's assassination and the controversial role of the assassin, James Earl Ray. Although his guilty plea eliminated the possibility of a trial before a jury, within days, Ray had recanted and claimed his confession was forced. Suspicions were further raised by the confirmation of illegal surveillance of King by the FBI and the CIA, and the FBI's attempt to allegedly prompt King to commit suicide.
The Loyd Jowers trial, known as King family v. Jowers and other unknown co-conspirators, was an American wrongful death lawsuit brought to trial by the family of Martin Luther King Jr. against Loyd Jowers. The family filed the lawsuit after Jowers admitted on national TV that he had been part of a conspiracy to assassinate the civil rights leader on April 4, 1968. The trial occurred in late 1999. The jury unanimously agreed there was a conspiracy perpetrated by Jowers and other parties, including various government agencies, to murder King and frame James Earl Ray as a patsy.
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