Name of Assassin: James Earl Ray
Victim: Martin Luther King Jr.
Place of Assassination: On the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee
When: April 4, 1968 at approximately 6:01 p.m.
How: Rifle shot from the bathroom of a fooming house 60 m away by a Remington .30-06
Why:Ray had no reason to King's assassination.
Ray told the authorities and the public that he had nothing to do with the assassination.
There are many controversial theories that Ray had been set up.
James Earl Ray was born in Alton, Illinois in 1928. He started off as a petty criminal, though he was said to have pulled off an average of one or two stick-ups a month. He was prisoned many times before the assassination and he escaped two of the toughest prisons in the country.
In the early spring of 1968, Ray began stalking King from one public appearance to the next. Ray also began using the alia "Eric S. Galt" which was the name of a defence-industries worker in Toronto where he visited briefly.
Ray fled the scene after the assassination and led authorities on a merry
chase that involved 3500 FBI agents, the largest number ever assembled on a single case. Ray slipped
back to Toronto renting rooms under the names, Ramon Sneyd and Paul Edward Bridgeman. Ray was finally
arrested while travelling to Portugal as Raomon George Sneyd. Sneyd, in fact, was a Toronto police oficer.
(Galt, Sneyd and Bridgeman were all innocent Canadians who were used as part of Ray's elaborate escape plan.
Ray pleaded guilty when he returned to the U.S. However, he recanted after three days and was sentenced
to niney-nine years behind bars. Ray fought long and unsuccessfully to win a new trial. Ray had no history
of racist behaviour. There were some reports that Ray killed King with the assisstnace of others and that
President Lyndon was behind the killing. King's son, Dexter pursued his own investigation of the case and
shook hands with Ray on T.V. in 1997 while Ray was dying fo cancer. The Kings believed that Ray had not
killed the civil-rights leader. James Ray died in 1998 from a liver failure in the Columbia Nashville
Memorial Hospital.