James Earl Ray

James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King on a Memphis motel balcony on 4 April 1968, pleaded guilty, and spent the remaining twenty-nine years of his life trying to withdraw the plea. He was a career burglar and armed robber from Illinois who had escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary in a bread van in 1967. He bought a rifle in Birmingham under an alias, took a room in a boarding house opposite the Lorraine Motel, and fired one shot from a shared bathroom window. The manhunt ran for two months and ended at Heathrow, where he was arrested travelling on a Canadian passport in the name of Ramon Sneyd. He pleaded guilty in March 1969 to avoid the electric chair, received ninety-nine years, and recanted within days, claiming he had been directed by a man called Raoul. No such person was ever identified. The House Select Committee concluded in 1979 that he fired the shot and that a conspiracy was likely, pointing at a St Louis bounty rather than at any agency. King's own family came to believe Ray innocent and supported his request for a trial, and Coretta Scott King testified in a 1999 civil suit that found a broad conspiracy - a verdict most historians reject. He died in prison of hepatitis C. He escaped from prison again in 1977 with six others and was recaptured in three days. The Department of Justice reviewed the case in 2000 at the King family's request and found no evidence for the conspiracy alleged in the civil trial. What is not disputed is that the FBI had spent years trying to destroy King, which is a large part of why the family found a conspiracy easier to believe than the alternative.

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