James Earl Ray | |
|---|---|
 Mug shot of Ray taken on July 8, 1955 | |
| Born | (1928-03-10)March 10, 1928 Alton, Illinois, U.S. |
| Died | April 23, 1998(1998-04-23) (aged 70) Nashville, Tennessee, U.S. |
| Known for | Being convicted for theassassination of Martin Luther King Jr. |
| Convictions | First degree murder Armed robbery (4x) Mail fraud Burglary (2x) Passport fraud Escape (2x) |
| Criminal penalty | 100 years imprisonment[a] |
| Escaped | April 23, 1967–June 8, 1968 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 themurder of Martin Luther King Jr. at theLorraine Motel inMemphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. After the assassination, Ray fled toLondon and was captured there. Ray was convicted in 1969 after entering aguilty plea—thus forgoing ajury trial and the possibility of adeath sentence—and was sentenced to 99 years of imprisonment.
In 1994,Loyd Jowers, a restaurant owner, publicly began claiming that he had been part of aconspiracy to assassinate King and that Ray was a scapegoat. In aMemphis 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 andframe Ray for the assassination. The King family has consistently said that they believe Ray was innocent, though this conclusion was disputed by theUnited States Department of Justice in 2000.[1][2] The King family has stated that they believe the true murderer was aMemphis Police Department officer, Lieutenant Earl Clark.[3][4]
Ray was born on March 10, 1928, inAlton, Illinois, the son of George Ellis Ray and Lucille Ray (née Maher). He hadIrish,Scottish andWelsh ancestry.[5]
In February 1935, Ray's father, known by the nickname Great Dane, passed abad check in Alton, Illinois, and then moved toEwing, 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 theU.S. Army at the close ofWorld 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 before 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 inIllinois. In 1955, he was convicted ofmail fraud after stealingmoney orders inHannibal, Missouri. For this, he was imprisoned for four years in the federal United States PenitentiaryLeavenworth. In 1959, he was caught stealing $120 (~$1,294 in 2024) in an armed robbery of aKroger store inSt. Louis.[11] He was sentenced to twenty years in prison forrepeated offenses. He escaped from theMissouri 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 toSt. Louis and then onward toChicago,Toronto,Montreal, andBirmingham, Alabama, where he stayed long enough to buy a 1966Ford Mustang and get an Alabama driver's license. He then drove toMexico, stopping inAcapulco before settling inPuerto Vallarta on October 19, 1967.[13]
While in Mexico, Ray, using the alias Eric Starvo Galt, attempted to establish himself as apornographic film director. Usingmail-ordered equipment, he filmed and photographed localprostitutes. 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 inLos Angeles three days later. While there, Ray attended a local bartending school and took dance lessons.[15] His chief interest was theGeorge Wallacepresidential campaign, and Ray was quickly drawn to Wallace'ssegregationist platform, spending much of his time in Los Angeles volunteering at the Wallace campaign headquarters inNorth Hollywood.[16]
He considered emigrating toRhodesia (nowZimbabwe), where a predominantlywhite minority regime hadunilaterally 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 toAtlanta, Georgia.[20]
Arriving in Atlanta on March 24, 1968, Ray checked into arooming house.[21] He bought a map of the city. FBI agents later found this map when they searched the room. 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 aRemingtonModel 760 Gamemaster.30-06-caliber rifle and a box of 20 cartridges from the Aeromarine Supply Company. He also bought a Redfield 2x–7xscope, 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 Galtalias 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 readingThe 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 with Ray's fingerprints.[26][27][28]
Ray fled to Atlanta in his white Ford Mustang, driving for eleven hours.[28][7] He picked up his belongings and fled north to Canada, arriving inToronto three days later, where he hid for over a month and acquired aCanadian 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 inLisbon,Portugal, and returned toLondon.[30] In London, on June 4, he calledThe 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 atLondon Heathrow Airport attempting to leave the UK forBrussels. He was trying to depart the UK forAngola,Rhodesia orSouth Africa[33] using the falsified Canadian passport.[34] At check-in, the ticket agent noticed the name on his passport, Sneyd, was on aRoyal Canadian Mounted Police watchlist.[34][35][36]
Airport officials noticed that Ray carried another passport under a second name. The UK quicklyextradited Ray toTennessee, 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 aguilty plea on the advice of his attorney,Percy Foreman, to avoid thesentence of death byelectrocution, which would have been a possible outcome of ajury trial. Unbeknownst to Ray, however, a death sentence would have been commuted as unconstitutional under thede facto moratorium in place since 1967[citation needed] and followingFurman v. Georgia.
Ray dismissed Foreman as his attorney and thereafter derisively called him "Percy Fourflusher". Ray began claiming that a man he had met inMontreal 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 aconspiracy. Ray told this version of the assassination and his flight during the following two months to journalistWilliam 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 thatGovernor of AlabamaGeorge 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 fromBrushy Mountain State Penitentiary inPetros, Tennessee. They were recaptured on June 13.[43] A year was added to Ray's previous sentence, increasing it to a full century.
| External videos | |
|---|---|
 Interview with James Earl Ray by John Auble (November 3, 1977). KST-TV, St. Louis. |
Ray hiredJack 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 theUnited 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 apolygraph test as part of an interview withPlayboy. 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 (~$57,078 in 2024) by the magazine in exchange for the interview and instead hired attorneyMark 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 byHBO in an attempt to grant him the trial he never received. In the mock trial, the prosecutor wasHickman Ewing. The mock trial jury acquitted Ray.[48]
In 1998, and continuing into 1999, Pepper represented the King family in a wrongful death civil suit against Memphis restaurant ownerLoyd 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 thereforelegally liable to pay compensation to the King family. The family accepted $100 (~$189.00 in 2024) 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 GeneralJanet Reno ordered a new investigation on August 26, 1998.[53] On June 9, 2000, theUnited 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 theLois M. DeBerry Special Needs Facility in Nashville, a maximum-security prison with hospital facilities.[55]
Ray died on April 23, 1998, at the age of 70, at the Nashville Memorial Hospital inMadison, Tennessee, from complications related tokidney disease andliver failure caused byhepatitis C, having served twenty-nine years in prison.[7] His brother Jerry toldCNN 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 wascremated and his ashes were flown toIreland, the home of his maternal family's ancestors.[56] The funeral was held at the Metropolitan Interdenominational Church in Nashville.[57]
Ten years later, Ray's other brother, John Larry Ray, co-authored a book with Lyndon Barsten titledTruth At Last: The Untold Story Behind James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.[45]
