James Earl Ray

Criminal convicted of **inating Martin Luther King Jr. (1928–1998)For other people with the same name, see James Ray (disambiguation).

James Earl Ray (March 10, 1928:– April 23, 1998) was an American man convicted for **inating Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April:4, 1968. 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.

1 Early life and education
2 Initial convictions and first escape from prison
3 Activity in 1967
4 Activity in early 1968
5 **ination of Martin Luther King Jr.
- 5.1 Apprehension and plea
- 5.2 Recanting of confession
6 Escape from prison
7 Conspiracy allegations
- 7.1 House Select Committee on **inations
- 7.2 Mock trial and civil suit
8 Death
9 Further reading
10 References
11 External links

Early life and education

Ray was born on March 10, 1928, in Alton, Illinois, the son of Lucille Ray (née Maher) and George Ellis Ray. He had Irish, Scottish and Welsh ancestry and had a Catholic upbringing.

In February 1935, Ray's father, known by the nickname Speedy, p*ed a bad check in Alton, Illinois, and then moved to Ewing, Missouri, where the family changed their name to Raynes to avoid law enforcement. Ray was the oldest of nine children, including John Larry Ray, Franklin Ray, Jerry William Ray, Melba Ray, Carol Ray Pepper, Suzan Ray, and Marjorie Ray. His sister Marjorie died in a fire as a young child in 1933. 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 inep*ude and lack of adaptability in 1948.

Initial convictions and first escape from prison

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, then forging them to take a trip to Florida. He was imprisoned for four years in Leavenworth. In 1959, he was caught stealing $120 in an armed robbery of Kroger store in St. Louis. 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.

Activity in 1967

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 license. He then drove to Mexico, stopping in Acapulco before settling in Puerto Vallarta on October 19, 1967.

While in Mexico, Ray, using the alias Eric Starvo Galt, attempted to establish himself as a adult movieographic film director. Using mail-ordered equipment, he filmed and photographed local pros*utes. Frustrated with his results and jilted by the pros*ute with whom he had formed a relationship, Ray left Mexico on or around November 16, 1967, arriving in Los Angeles three days later. While there, Ray attended a local bartending school and took dance lessons. His chief interest, however, was the George Wallace presidential campaign. Ray was a racist and 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.

He considered emigrating to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where a predominantly white minority regime had unilaterally *umed independence from the United Kingdom in 1965. The notion of living in Rhodesia continued to appeal to Ray for several years afterwards, and it was his intended destination after King's **ination. The Rhodesian government expressed its disapproval.

Activity in early 1968

On March 5, 1968, Ray underwent a rhinoplasty, performed by physician Russell Hadley. On March 18, 1968, Ray left Los Angeles and began a cross-country drive to Atlanta, Georgia.

Arriving in Atlanta on March 24, 1968, Ray checked into a rooming house. 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.

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. 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.

After purchasing the rifle and accessories, Ray drove back to Atlanta. An avid newspaper reader, Ray p*ed his time reading The Atlanta Cons*ution. The paper reported King's planned return trip to Memphis, Tennessee, which was scheduled for April 1, 1968. On April 2, 1968, Ray packed a bag and drove to Memphis.

**ination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Main article: **ination of Martin Luther King Jr. FBI most wanted fugitive poster of James Earl Ray The Lorraine Motel, now known as the National Civil Rights Museum, where King was **inated

On April 4, 1968, Ray killed civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. with a single shot fired from his Remington rifle, while King was standing on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Shortly after the shot was fired, witnesses saw Ray fleeing from a rooming house across the street from the motel where he had been renting a room. A package was abandoned close to the site that included a rifle and binocular, both found with Ray's fingerprints.

Apprehension and plea

Ray fled to Atlanta in his white Ford Mustang, driving eleven hours. 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 p*port under the false name of Ramon George Sneyd. He left Toronto in late May on a flight to England. He stayed briefly in Lisbon, Portugal, and returned to London.

On June 8, 1968, two months after King's death, Ray was arrested at London Heathrow Airport attempting to leave the United Kingdom for Brussels. He was trying to depart the United Kingdom for Angola, Rhodesia, or apartheid South Africa using the falsified Canadian p*port. At check-in, the ticket agent noticed the name on his p*port, Sneyd, was on a Royal Canadian Mounted Police watchlist.

At the airport, officials noticed that Ray carried another p*port 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, and after pleading guilty he was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

Recanting of confession

Three days later, Ray recanted his confession. He had entered a guilty plea on the advice of his attorney, Percy Foreman, in an effort to avoid the sentence of death by electrocution, which would have been a possible outcome of a jury trial. Unbeknownst to Ray, however, under the de facto moratorium in place since 1967 and following Furman v. Georgia, a death sentence would have been commuted as uncons*utional.

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 "Raul," had been involved the **ination. And he *erted 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 **ination and his own 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 purposefully 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. However, Ray spent the remainder of his life unsuccessfully attempting to withdraw his guilty plea and secure a jury trial.

Escape from prison

On June 10, 1977, Ray and six other convicts escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee. They were recaptured on June 13. A year was added to Ray's previous sentence, increasing it to 100 years.

Conspiracy allegations

Main article: Martin Luther King Jr. **ination conspiracy theories

House Select Committee on **inations

Ray hired Jack Kershaw as his new attorney, and Kershaw publicly argued and promoted Ray's claim that he was not responsible for the **ination of King. His claim was that the **ination was the result of a conspiracy of the otherwise unidentified man named "Raul." Kershaw and his client met with representatives of the United States House Select Committee on **inations (HSCA) and convinced the committee to conduct ballistics tests that they believed would prove Ray had not fired the fatal shot. 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 *istance 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 by the magazine in exchange for the interview and instead hired attorney Mark Lane to provide him with legal representation.

Mock trial and civil suit

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. 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.

In 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 in res*ution 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 **ination.

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 **ination 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."

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. On June 9, 2000, the United States Department of Justice released a 150-page report rejecting allegations that there was a conspiracy to **inate King, including the determination of the Memphis civil court jury.

Death

Before his death, Ray was transferred to the Lois M. DeBerry Special Needs Facility in Nashville, a maximum-security prison with hospital facilities.

Ray died at age 70 on April 23, 1998, at the Columbia Nashville Memorial Hospital from complications related to kidney disease and liver failure caused by hepa*is C. 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. Ten years later, Ray's other brother, John Larry Ray, co-aut*d a book with Lyndon Barsten, *led Truth At Last: The Untold Story Behind James Earl Ray and the **ination of Martin Luther King Jr.

References

External links

Roads to Memphis (American Experience, first aired Monday, May 3, 2010):– Public Broadcasting System (PBS).
James Earl Ray at Find a Grave

James Earl Ray Is A Member Of

41 Year Olds

James

Alton, Illinois