James Earl Ray

• 1. Introduction

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  James Earl Ray escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary on the 23rd of April 1967 by hiding in a truck that carried bread out of the prison bakery. Thirty-one years later, on that same date, he died. In the years between, he became the man convicted of assassinating Martin Luther King Jr. Ray had spent most of his adult life as a small-time crook, drifting between burglaries, robberies and prison cells. Who was he before 1968? How did a fugitive living under borrowed names carry out one of the most notorious killings in American history? Why did he confess, then spend decades trying to take it back? And why did the family of his victim come to say that he was innocent?

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• 2. Early Years and Small Crimes

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  In Alton, Illinois, on the 10th of March 1928, James Earl Ray was born to George Ellis Ray and Lucille Ray, whose maiden name was Maher. His ancestry was Irish, Scottish and Welsh. He was the oldest of nine children, and his siblings included John Larry, Franklin, Jerry William, Melba, Carol, Suzan and Marjorie.

  In 1933, Marjorie died in a fire while still a young child. Two years later, in February 1935, Ray's father, nicknamed Great Dane, passed a bad check in Alton. He then moved to Ewing, Missouri, and the family took the surname Raynes so that law enforcement could not find them.

  At the age of 12, Ray left school. Near the close of World War II he joined the U.S. Army and served in Germany. He struggled with military life, and in 1948 the Army discharged him for ineptitude and lack of adaptability.

  California brought Ray's first criminal conviction in 1949, for a burglary. In 1952 he served two years for the armed robbery of a taxi driver in Illinois. In 1955 he stole money orders in Hannibal, Missouri, and was convicted of mail fraud. That conviction cost him four years in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth.

  In 1959, a Kroger store in St. Louis was the target of an armed robbery that netted Ray just $120. Because of his repeated offenses, he received a sentence of twenty years. That term would not hold him for long, and the name Eric Starvo Galt would soon appear on an Alabama driver's license.

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• 3. The Man Called Galt

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  On the 26th of August 1967, Ray arrived in Birmingham, Alabama. Since slipping out of prison he had moved through St. Louis, Chicago, Toronto and Montreal, never staying anywhere for long.

  Four days later, on the 30th of August, he paid $1,995 in cash for a white 1966 Ford Mustang, answering a newspaper ad he had spotted the day before. He applied for an Alabama driver's license, number 2848947, and received it in the name Eric Starvo Galt. At some point in Birmingham he also bought a .38 revolver. It was still with him when he was arrested in London.

  Acapulco was his next stop in Mexico, and on the 19th of October he settled in Puerto Vallarta. Still calling himself Galt, he tried to reinvent himself as a pornographic film director. Using mail-ordered equipment, he filmed and photographed local prostitutes. The results frustrated him, and the prostitute he had formed a relationship with jilted him. Around the 16th of November 1967 he left Mexico and reached Los Angeles three days later.

  In Los Angeles, Ray went to a bartending school and took dance lessons. His real interest, though, was George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, who was running for president. Ray spent much of his time volunteering at the Wallace campaign headquarters in North Hollywood. He was not formally registered with any political party, but he was a staunch supporter of Wallace and his American Independent Party campaign.

  Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, also fascinated him. A white minority regime there had unilaterally assumed independence from the United Kingdom in 1965. Ray kept coming back to the idea of living there for several years, and it became his intended destination after the assassination. The Rhodesian government let it be known that it disapproved.

  On the 5th of March 1968, a physician named Russell Hadley operated on Ray's nose.

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• 4. Road to Memphis

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  On the 18th of March 1968, Ray left Los Angeles and began driving across the country to Atlanta, Georgia. He reached the city on the 24th of March and checked into a rooming house. There he bought a map of Atlanta. When FBI agents later searched his room, they found that map, with the church and the residence of Martin Luther King Jr. circled.

  Back in Birmingham on the 30th of March, Ray walked into the Aeromarine Supply Company. He bought a Remington Model 760 Gamemaster rifle in .30-06 caliber, along with a box of 20 cartridges. He also bought a Redfield 2x-7x scope and had it mounted on the rifle. The store owners were told he was going on a hunting trip with his brother. For this purchase Ray gave the name Harvey Lowmeyer, setting aside the Galt alias he had been using since Mexico.

  The Atlanta Constitution was Ray's daily reading, and he was an avid follower of newspapers. In its pages he learned that King planned to return to Memphis, Tennessee, on the 1st of April 1968. On the 2nd of April, Ray packed a bag and drove to Memphis.

  He rented a room on the 3rd of April at the New Rebel Motel for a single night. The next day he moved to a rooming house managed by Bessie Brewer, directly across the street from the Lorraine Motel. This time he used the name John Willard. He first took room 8 but switched to room 5B, which had a direct view of the Lorraine Motel. That same day he bought a pair of binoculars.

  At 6:01 PM on the 4th of April 1968, Ray locked himself in the bathroom, stood in the bathtub and opened the window. King was standing on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Ray fired a single shot from the Remington rifle. He then ran from the rooming house, dropping a package that held the rifle and the binoculars. Ray's fingerprints were on both.

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• 5. Flight and Capture

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  Eleven hours of driving carried Ray back to Atlanta, arriving in the early morning hours of the 5th of April. The trip ran longer than he expected because he stuck to side roads to avoid being caught. He abandoned the white Mustang in the parking lot of a housing project. Authorities found it on the 11th of April after someone phoned in a report about the car.

  In Atlanta, Ray collected his pistol from a rooming house and cleaned it of prints. He picked up clothing he had left at a laundromat a few days earlier. At 1:30 PM he boarded a bus for Cincinnati, arriving at 1:30 AM on the 6th of April. Another bus took him to Detroit, and from there a cab carried him across to Windsor, Canada.

  A train brought him from Windsor to Toronto, where he reached a rooming house at 5 PM. In Toronto he stole the identity of a Canadian named Ramon Sneyd. Ray phoned Sneyd pretending to be a passport official and asked whether he held a passport. When Sneyd answered "no", Ray obtained a passport in Sneyd's name.

  On the 2nd of May, Ray paid for a round-trip plane ticket to London. The flight left on the 6th of May and landed the next morning. His return to Canada was booked for the 21st of May, but he exchanged that portion for a ticket to Lisbon, Portugal. He arrived there on the 7th of May. After a short stay he came back to London on the 17th of May.

  On the 4th of June, Ray robbed a branch of the Trustee Savings Bank in Fulham and took £150. The same day he phoned The Daily Telegraph and asked for Ian Colvin, the paper's foreign correspondent for Africa and the Middle East. Ray said he had read Colvin's articles about Africa. He also asked to be connected to Alistair Wicks, a former British Army commandant, about becoming a mercenary in Africa. When Wicks never called, Ray rang Colvin again on the 6th of June. Colvin said it was a poor time to become a mercenary, but still gave him an address in Brussels.

  At London Heathrow Airport, Ray was arrested while trying to leave Britain for Brussels. His plan was to reach Angola, Rhodesia or South Africa on the false Canadian passport. The ticket agent at check-in noticed that the name on it, Sneyd, appeared on a Royal Canadian Mounted Police watchlist. Airport officials then found that Ray was carrying a second passport under another name.

  Britain quickly extradited him to Tennessee, where he was charged with King's murder. On the 10th of March 1969, his 41st birthday, Ray confessed and pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

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• 6. Recanting and Lawyers

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  Percy Foreman, Ray's attorney, had advised him to plead guilty so that he could avoid death in the electric chair. Ray took that advice, and a jury trial never happened. Unknown to Ray, a death sentence would have been commuted as unconstitutional, because a de facto moratorium had been in place since 1967 and Furman v. Georgia followed.

  Three days after confessing, Ray recanted. He dismissed Foreman and mocked him with the nickname "Percy Fourflusher". Ray began to tell of a man he had met in Montreal in 1967, who went by the alias "Raoul". He said that Raoul had been involved in the assassination. Ray stopped short of a plain denial. He claimed only that he did not "personally shoot Dr. King" but might have been "partially responsible without knowing it". He gave this account, and the story of his flight over the following two months, to the journalist William Bradford Huie.

  Huie investigated and discovered that Ray had lied about some details. Ray also told him that he had deliberately left the fingerprinted rifle in plain sight because he wanted to become a famous criminal. He was convinced his intelligence and cunning would keep him free. He also expected Governor George Wallace of Alabama to win the presidency soon, leaving Ray in prison only briefly until Wallace pardoned him.

  In December 1973, Ray filed a $500,000 lawsuit against Tennessee, seeking release from prison. He argued that Foreman had mishandled crucial evidence and pressured him into pleading guilty. Foreman denied it. He said he "spent approximately 20 hours over 4 1/2 days cross-examing Ray". According to Foreman, Ray never implicated anyone but himself. Ray spent the rest of his life failing to withdraw his plea or win a jury trial.

  On the 10th of June 1977, Ray and six other convicts broke out of Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee. They were recaptured on the 13th of June, and a year was added to Ray's sentence, bringing it to a full century. The escape inspired the Barkley Ultra, a 100-mile race run in the wilderness around the mountains where Ray had fled. The founder of the race talks about this in a Netflix documentary.

  Jack Kershaw became Ray's next attorney and publicly promoted the claim that Ray was not responsible for the killing. Kershaw's version blamed a conspiracy led by Raoul, whom he described as a blond Cuban. He and Ray met with representatives of the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations and persuaded them to run ballistics tests. The tests proved inconclusive.

  Kershaw also argued that the prison break was further proof of a conspiracy, since Ray would have needed outside help. He pushed Ray to take a polygraph test as part of an interview with Playboy. The magazine reported that the results showed "Ray did, in fact, kill Martin Luther King Jr. and that he did so alone." Ray fired Kershaw on learning that the magazine had paid the lawyer $11,000 for the interview. He then hired Mark Lane.

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• 7. Doubts of the King Family

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  In 1997, King's son Dexter sat down with Ray in prison and asked him a direct question: "I just want to ask you, for the record, did you kill my father?" Ray answered, "No. No I didn't." Dexter told him that he and the rest of the King family believed him. The family also urged publicly that Ray receive a new trial.

  William Pepper, a friend of King during the final year of his life, then represented Ray in a mock trial televised by HBO. It was an attempt to give Ray the trial he never had. Hickman Ewing served as prosecutor. The mock trial jury acquitted Ray.

  In 1994, a Memphis restaurant owner named Loyd Jowers began to claim publicly that he had been part of a conspiracy to kill King and that Ray was a scapegoat. His restaurant stood near the Lorraine Motel. In 1998, and continuing into 1999, Pepper represented the King family in a wrongful death civil suit against Jowers. The family accused him of taking part in a conspiracy to murder King.

  On the 8th of December 1999, the Memphis jury reached its verdict. It found unanimously that Jowers was liable for the assassination, that King was the victim of a conspiracy, and that U.S. governmental agencies had conspired to murder him and frame Ray. The King family accepted $100 in restitution to show they were not pursuing the case for money. They stated publicly that Ray, in their opinion, had nothing to do with the assassination.

  Coretta Scott King said the jury had identified "someone else, not James Earl Ray, as the shooter". She added that "Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame."

  The family's acceptance of some conspiracy claims had already prompted U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno to order a new investigation on the 26th of August 1998. On the 9th of June 2000, the Department of Justice released a 150-page report rejecting every allegation of a conspiracy, including the conclusion of the Memphis jury. The King family remains convinced of Ray's innocence. They have named a different suspect as the true murderer: Lieutenant Earl Clark of the Memphis Police Department.

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• 8. Death and Burial

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  Near the end of his life, Ray was moved to the Lois M. DeBerry Special Needs Facility in Nashville. It is a maximum-security prison with hospital facilities. He died at the age of 70 at Nashville Memorial Hospital in Madison, Tennessee. The cause was complications from kidney disease and liver failure, brought on by hepatitis C. By then he had served twenty-nine years in prison.

  His brother Jerry told CNN that Ray did not want to be buried in the United States, or to have his final resting place there, because of how the government had treated him. His body was cremated, and his ashes were flown to Ireland, the home of his maternal family's ancestors. The funeral took place at the Metropolitan Interdenominational Church in Nashville.

  Ten years later, his other brother, John Larry Ray, co-authored a book with Lyndon Barsten. They titled it Truth At Last: The Untold Story Behind James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

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