James Earl Ray

James Earl Ray (March 10, 1928 - April 23, 1998) was a career criminal from Illinois who was convicted of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Ray pleaded guilty on March 10, 1969, was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison, recanted the plea three days later, and spent the remaining twenty-nine years of his life claiming to have been set up by a conspiracy he could never fully document. He died in prison of hepatitis C complications on April 23, 1998.¹

Background

Ray was born in Alton, Illinois, to a family with a criminal history. He served in the U.S. Army after World War II, was discharged for incompetence in 1948, and entered a career of small-time robbery and burglary. He was convicted of multiple felonies and was serving a twenty-year sentence at the Missouri State Penitentiary when he escaped on April 23, 1967 - concealing himself inside a bread box. He was one of the few prisoners ever to escape from that maximum-security facility.

After his escape, Ray traveled to Chicago, Montreal, Birmingham, and Los Angeles under various aliases, apparently supporting himself through a grocery store robbery in Illinois and through drug smuggling on the Mexico-California border. He had no obvious source of legitimate income and no documented associates who could explain his travel or housing expenses during this period.¹

The Assassination and Capture

On April 4, 1968, Ray rented a room at Bessie Brewer's rooming house at 422.5 South Main Street in Memphis, across from the Lorraine Motel where King was staying. At approximately 6:01 PM, King was shot while standing on the second-floor balcony. The shot came from the direction of the rooming house; a Remington Model 760 .30-06 rifle, a pair of binoculars, and other personal items were found in a bundle on the sidewalk outside the rooming house entrance.

The rifle had been purchased in Birmingham on March 29 under the alias "Harvey Lowmeyer." The car Ray had been driving was found abandoned in Atlanta. Ray had fled Memphis immediately after the shooting, driving to Atlanta, then flying to Toronto and then London, then to Lisbon and back to London. He was arrested at Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968, sixty-five days after the assassination, carrying a forged Canadian passport in the name "Ramon George Sneyd."¹

Guilty Plea and Recantation

Ray was extradited to the United States and represented by attorney Percy Foreman, who advised him that proceeding to trial would likely result in the electric chair. On March 10, 1969, Ray pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in a proceeding before Shelby County Criminal Court Judge Preston Battle. He was sentenced to ninety-nine years. Under Tennessee law at the time, he was not eligible for parole.

On March 13 - three days after his plea - Ray sent a letter to Judge Battle asserting that his attorney had pressured him into the plea and that he maintained his innocence. He petitioned for a trial numerous times over the following decades; every petition was denied.

Ray's account changed over the years but centered on a conspiracy organized by a man he called "Raul" - a figure he claimed had directed him in the weeks before the assassination without revealing the purpose, supplied the murder weapon, and arranged the circumstances that made Ray the obvious suspect. Ray was never able to identify "Raul" beyond a physical description, and no independent verification of the figure's existence was established.²

HSCA Findings

The House Select Committee on Assassinations investigated the King assassination in 1976-1979. The committee concluded:

• Ray had fired the shot that killed King
• Ray "was not a member of an organized conspiracy to assassinate Dr. King"
• But Ray's brothers John and Jerry Ray "may have assisted" in the planning of the escape from Missouri and possibly other aspects of the plot
• There was insufficient evidence to conclude that any government agency was involved in a conspiracy

The committee found that Ray's post-escape resources - his travel across multiple countries, his training in bartending and dancing in preparation for an undefined future, his Canadian documents - remained inadequately explained by his own account.¹

Civil Trial

In 1999, the King family filed a civil wrongful death action in Memphis against Lloyd Jowers, a restaurant owner who had made statements in a 1993 television interview suggesting he had been paid $100,000 to arrange the assassination and that James Earl Ray was not the shooter. The civil jury found for the King family and concluded that a conspiracy involving Jowers and "others, including governmental agencies" had caused King's death. The verdict was non-binding and produced no criminal prosecution; the Department of Justice conducted a review in 2000 and found insufficient evidence to support the conspiracy claims.¹