[10], While in Mexico, Ray, using the alias Eric Starvo Galt, attempted to establish himself as a pornographic film director. James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old convicted armed robber who had escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, Mo., on April 23, 1967, pleaded guilty on March 10, 1969, in Shelby County (Tenn.) Criminal Court to the first degree murder of Dr. King. When Kings son, Dexter, visited Ray in prison, Dexter asked Ray point-blank: Did you kill my father?. Ray said he wasnt in the room when King was shot, but he was unable to consistently explain where he had been, or keep other important details in his story straight. [49] 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. YouTubeJames Earl Ray in 1977. By signing up you are agreeing to our, What Happened to Martin Luther King Jr.'s Last Campaigns, How Black Filmmakers Are Reclaiming Their History Onscreen. Over several decades, federal investigators have routinely concluded that Raoul doesnt exist. Joseph Blakeney Brown Jr. (born July 5, 1947), known as Judge Joe Brown, is a former American lawyer and television personality. In March 1960 Ray started a 20-year sentence for the crimes. As Sides points out, it isnt surprising that members of Kings family and his fellow civil-rights leaders would have suspected that some larger government conspiracy to kill the minister must been at play. The Committee Believes, on the Basis of the Circumstantial Evidence Available to it, that there is a Likelihood that James Earl Ray Assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King, JR., as a Result of a Conspiracy The FBI Investigation The committee's investigation Transactional analysis Ray's associates examined Examination of Ray's motive The bureau wiretapped his phone and monitored his movements, taking advantage of times when he seemed particularly upset or depressed. I do think [Ray] had help, but I never found any proof that a group helped him, says Sides. No I didn't." This organization would later morph into the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei better known as the NAZI party. Somehow, Ray managed to escape from prison on two different occasions. In 1961, Russian spy Gordon Lonsdale used a false Canadian passport for his espionage activities in England, as did his associates in the British naval . He said that a Memphis police officer was the one who had actually killed King and that Jowers had stashed the gun. His body was cremated and his ashes were flown to Ireland, the home of his maternal family's ancestors. He considered moving to Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe), a country with a predominantly white minority government. Ray began claiming that a man he had met in Montreal back in 1967, who used the alias "Raul," had been involved in the assassination. [49], Before his death, Ray was transferred to the Lois M. DeBerry Special Needs Facility in Nashville, a maximum-security prison with hospital facilities. Martin Luther King, Jr., original name Michael King, Jr., (born January 15, 1929, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.died April 4, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee), Baptist minister and social activist who led the civil rights movement in the United States from the mid-1950s until his death by assassination in 1968. ), where he secured a second Canadian passport (May 16), and back to London (May 17?). For some 50 years,. Senator in Robert Byrd. [6] Ray left school at the age of 12. "I had nothing to do with killing your father," Ray said. After all, the FBI stalked King and his cohort in order to, as Sides puts it, ruin and smear the civil rights movement. The ugly reach of that campaign has only become clearer over the years. AP Photo. 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. Exactly what led Ray to kill King continues to be a source of debate, as does his role in the murder. She graduated from Oberlin College, where she earned a double degree in American History and French. In the mock trial, the prosecutor was Hickman Ewing. By 1969, James Earl Jones was no stranger to either the movie or TV screens. The Rhodesian government expressed its disapproval. He was sentenced to 90 days in prison, but the lockup did little to reform him. The story may seem outlandish and no one has ever definitively found Raoul but Kings family and some of his most ardent supporters have come to see Rays story as the truth. For 72 hours after his guilty plea, James Earl Ray stayed quiet. Was Abraham Lincoln Black? * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. [13], He considered emigrating to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where a predominantly white minority regime had unilaterally assumed independence from the United Kingdom in 1965. And, indeed, despite Rays persistent denials of his guilt, his conviction has withstood multiple inquiries. In 1952, he served two years for the armed robbery of a taxi driver in Illinois. And he asserted that he did not "personally shoot Dr. King," but may have been "partially responsible without knowing it," hinting at a conspiracy. In 1955, he was convicted of mail fraud after stealing money orders in Hannibal, Missouri. I think that contributed to the sense of conspiracy, like a What are they hiding? kind of thing. (Sides also appears in the PBS American Experience documentary on this subject, Roads to Memphis, airing Tuesday.). James. James Earl Ray (1928-1998) Some of us may have heard of Dr. Pepper's efforts, as attorney for the King Family, to defend James Earl Ray (the man wrongly imprisoned for the assassination of Dr. King) as part of an effort to bring the actual killers to justice. (Credit: State of Tennessee, Earl Warren/AP Photo), Coretta Kings specific belief in Rays innocence is a little tougher to explain. The verdict did convict Loyd Jowers and "other parties known and unknown" for their parts in the vast US government conspiracy to assassinate King. For the first 25 years after Kings death, Jowers did not claim any involvement in the murder. An hour later, he was declared dead. [16] On March 18, 1968, Ray left Los Angeles and began a cross-country drive to Atlanta, Georgia. He pursued a life of crime but seemed to have been a clumsy criminal. Rays fingerprints were the only ones found on the gun, and there were no witnesses who had seen him with Raoul during the nine months they supposedly knew each other (Rays description of Raoul also changed a few times). He died on April 23, 1998, Nashville, TN. So, are there are still remaining questions about how everything happened the day of Kings assassination? James Earl Ray has 7 siblings in His family: John Larry Ray, Suzan Ray, Melba Ray, Marjorie Ray, Franklin Ray, Jerry Ray . [39][40][41] 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. And after he returned to Illinois and robbed a taxi driver at gunpoint for $11, police easily arrested him in a dead-end alleyway. Considered one of the greatest boxers of all time, Sugar Ray Robinson held the world welterweight title from 1946 to 1951, and by 1958, he had become the first boxer to win a divisional world championship five times. 2023 Biography and the Biography logo are registered trademarks of A&E Television Networks, LLC. To people whod known Ray, the answer seemed obvious. He travelled there on a Canadian passport. Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Carter, who has rarely used his full name-James Earl Carter, Jr.-was born October 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia. Labels: James Earl Ray, MAGA, Martin Luther King Jr., Racism, Republican Party, Republicans. They sued Jowers for participation in a conspiracy to murder King. 1. A man named Vincent Harding is credited with writing most of it. In 1999, James Earl Ray was found innocent of killing Martin Luther King Jr. in the same way O.J. Ray risikerede ddsstraf, sfremt han . ''. [9], 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 drivers license. One week prior to Kings assassination on April 4, 1968 he had gone to Memphis to show support for local sanitation workers. Ray died while that campaign was ongoing, but though the King family did win $100 in a 1999 wrongful death suit after the man charged as being part of a conspiracy didnt show up to the trial an official inquiry reiterated that the evidence against Ray was overwhelming and that there was no credibility to various theories that anyone else had been involved. No comments: Post a Comment. 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. The evidence brought forth by attorney William Pepper was so powerful . Ray fled to Toronto, secured a Canadian passport through a travel agency, flew to London (May 5), then to Lisbon (May 7? Investigators announced that James Earl Ray, an escaped prisoner, had fatally shot King. 191 Ben Barrack 18 Jan 2011 0 In 1999, James Earl Ray was found innocent of killing Martin Luther King Jr. in the same way O.J. The two married in 1978 and divorced in 1992. Four days after that, Martin Luther King, Jr. was dead. Three days later, Ray recanted his confession. He insisted that a man he'd met in Canada, who went by the name of Raoul, had orchestrated the murder and ultimately shot King. Indeed, the House Select Committee on Assassinations later speculated that Ray had killed King in order to collect a $50,000 bounty offered by Wallace supporters in St. Louis who wanted the civil rights leader dead. Updates? James Earl Ray (March 10, 1928 - April 23, 1998) was an American criminal who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968.Ray was convicted in 1969 after entering a guilty pleathus forgoing a jury trial and the possibility of a death sentenceand was sentenced to 99 years of imprisonment. 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. Whether anybody helped him indirectly has yet to be determined. Housed at the Missouri State Penitentiary, Ray managed to escape the facility in 1967. As Kings horrified associates shouted and pointed to where they thought the bullet had come from, Ray wrapped his gun in a blanket, dumped it in a doorway of a nearby building, and fled the scene. But that biography doesnt explain why or how Ray moved from committing property crime and supporting racists, to killing a national icon. In the book, "The Making of an Assassin: The Life of James Earl Ray," George McMillan details Ray's background; He came to love German politics. A consequence of Kings alleged involvement in those riots was that it caught the attention of some powerful politicians. And it is committed, as Barack Obama once promised, to fundamentally transforming America. What Political Party was James Earl Ray part of? [7], Ray committed a variety of crimes prior to the murder of King. A part of his life was shaped by tragedy. A Democratic Senator from West Virginia delivered an extremely incendiary speech on the Senate Floor that was directed specifically at President Lyndon Johnson, also a Democrat. 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. 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