Did  James  Earl  Ray  really  kill  Martin  Luther King?

 

 

Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) (1929-1968) was a Baptist minister who was a major leader in the American civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his assassination on April 4, 1968 in the City of Memphis.

 

According to the police investigators, James Earl Ray (JER) shot Dr. Martin Luther King from a bathroom window of a flop house which looked out onto the swimming pool of the Lorraine Motel where King and his entourage were staying on the second floor and where at the moment of the shooting, he and some members of his entourage were standing on a balcony.

 

Surprisingly, the King family does not think JER was the killer. They won a civil court case proving there was a conspiracy.

 

Right after King's death, his aide-de-camp, Ralph Abernathy, hinted at some vast unfathomable plot. White supremacists accused black militants as being responsible. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that JER wasn’t part of some conspiracy. Favorite suspects included the Mafia, racists, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the FBI. Of the latter, its director, J. Edgar Hoover, was certainly no fan of MLK although I seriously doubt that Hoover (albeit a man who acted rather stupidly in his later years) would stoop to such a level of evil.    

 

Conspiracists in history have concocted convoluted theories full of strange logic in which anyone looking back at the assassinations could get the feeling that while considering these out of shape theories; they are looking at a fun-house mirror.

 

Many people refuse to accept JER’s role in Martin Luther King’s assassination (or Lee Harvey Oswald's role in JFK's assassination or Sirhan Sirhanin’s role in Robert Kennedy’s assassination) because they can't accept that one insignificant lowlife could topple a hero and alter history. Well as we all know by now, lone killers are quite capable of killing people. Consider the case of Mark Chapman who killed John Lennon. He was an insignificant lowlife loser and loner who snuck up behind Lennon and shot him in his back. JER was a lowlife loner and a criminal and was quite capable of sneaking up to someone and killing him.

 

JER was willing to admit to almost everything except firing the fatal shot however, he eventually pleaded guilty in Memphis in 1969 to killing the civil rights leader and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. However he recanted the confession three days later. He tried for years to reverse his guilty plea. The question that comes to the fore is—why did he plead guilty in the first place if he really didn’t commit the crime? He was offered a plea deal. If he pleaded guilty, he would not be executed. He later said that the reason why he pleaded guilty was that he was coerced into making the plea. I find that hard to believe that someone who is being tried with a death penalty facing him would feel coerced into accepting a plea that would spare his life. He might have concluded that there was enough evidence to condemn him so pleading guilty was a way out to save him from being executed. 

 

He was aware that a bundle had been dropped in the doorway of a store beneath the flophouse he had been in. In it was a .30-06 rifle with one shot fired. It bore Ray's fingerprints and he later admitted that he bought the gun. Also in the bundle were binoculars bought that afternoon which also had Ray's fingerprints on them. There were other personal items belonging to JER in the same bundle in which he admitted were his; such as a small radio with JER’s former inmate number from the Missouri prison which was also found with the rifle and there were also other items found in the bundle that the authorities say he dropped while fleeing.

 

JER’s fingerprints were also found in the room he had rented in the flop house. I doubt that those fingerprints were lifted from some other source and placed in the room.  I am convinced that he actually had been in that room. Whether or not he was in that flophouse when the fatal shot was fired is a question that can’t be answered conclusively.

 

I am not going to suggest that the police beat him to get a confession out of him. So we are forced to ask ourselves—why did he admit owning these items, knowing that such evidence was all that was needed to convict him?

 

One possible reason is that as a nobody, he wanted to go down in history as the killer of MLK. He would be famous for the rest of his life. Theorizing in that manner isn’t as far-fetched as one might surmise. Many people who assassinated notables did so for that same reason. JER may have believed that he may have only received a sentence of 25 years and when he learned that it was a 99-year sentence he got, he could very well have had second thoughts about confessing to the murder of MLK.

 

However, there are his fingerprints on the rifle and the binoculars but did he put them on those two items? First of all, why would a killer, be he smart or stupid, leave a rifle with his fingerprints on it just below the flophouse he was living in?  It couldn’t be because he wanted to be arrested for the murder of MLK just to be famous. If that was his motive, he could have waited in the bathroom of his flophouse for the police to arrest him. And the fact that he actually went out of his way to flee from the scene of the shooting and hide from the authorities for some considerable time may lead us to believe that he didn’t commit the murder to obtain fame. However, if he fired the rifle and left it on a sidewalk below his rooming house and fled the scene, he could still be famous anyway since the police would believe that he fired the shot since his fingerprints were on the rifle.

 

But suppose, fame was not his motive, then why were his fingerprints on the rifle and binoculars? Well one explanation is believable. Someone lifted his fingerprints from another object and placed them on the two items. That isn’t as hard to do as you may think. Then that same person or another person wore latex gloves as he fired the fatal shot that killed MLK.

 

There were weaknesses in the prosecution case. Two boarders in the flophouse could not identify the man they saw running from the bathroom after the shot, and ballistics tests on Ray's rifle could not conclusively link it with the mangled bullet that caused King's death. In May 1997, the rifle was test-fired at a laboratory at the University of Rhode Island. Ballistics tests comparing bullets with surviving fragments of the one that killed King were inconclusive.

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His explanation of his innocence was that he was in Memphis to meet with a gunrunner named Raoul whom he originally met in Montreal, Canada and rented a room at the flophouse in Memphis at Raoul’s direction. He brought the gun as part of Raoul's gunrunning operation. He said that he gave the rifle to Raoul at the flophouse shortly before the shooting and then he (JER) went out to run some errands and was nowhere near the flop house when the fatal shot was fired.

 

He insisted that Raoul or someone else must have dropped the bundle to implicate him. If that was so, then that same man had to be the same man who fired the fatal shot at MLK. And yet, not a single witness could be located who saw the mystery man with JER in his travels through Alabama, Atlanta, Georgia, and finally Memphis. Not a shred of physical evidence surfaced to implicate anyone other than JER as being MLK’s killer. That doesn’t necessarily mean that a man named Raoul didn’t exist. In fact, there is such a man. The State prosecutors in Memphis said that a person identified as Raoul actually existed but had nothing to do with the killing. Prosecutors said the man was in his own home city working on April 4, 1968 when King was shot in Memphis. Of course, that doesn’t mean that JER didn’t have previous dealings with this particular man but that man certainly wasn’t in Memphis when MLK was assassinated. And that being as it is, who then was in the bathroom of the flophouse when the fatal shot was fired?  

 

Another flophouse resident told the police that he saw JER in a hallway seconds after the shooting. JER’s response to that allegation was that witness was too drunk to identify anyone. Someone would have to be almost unconscious not to be able to identify someone passing by him. I am inclined to believe that it really was JER whom he saw in the hallway.

 

Conspiracy theorists have long argued that JER could not have fled the US and avoided authorities for as long as he did unless he had financial help. The U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1978 that JER killed MLK, perhaps in hopes of collecting a $50,000 bounty offered by a group of racial bigots in St. Louis. The committee said JER may have stalked MLK in Selma, Alabama and Atlanta prior to coming to Memphis. Unfortunately, that is all supposition and you can’t get a conviction on supposition alone. However, he managed to flee to Canada and then later to England and one is forced to wonder where he got enough money to flee to Canada and later to London, England and live in both countries and even go to Portugal briefly and return to London until he was arrested there two months after the shooting and extradited to the US.  And more importantly, how did he get a passport that would have to be used to enter England and Portugal? It wouldn’t have come cheap since it would have to be a fake passport in someone else’s name with JER’s picture in it.  

 

When he was in Toronto, Canada after the shooting of MLK, he frequented various taverns whiling away his time in two of the city’s taverns, while rooming in a house at Ossington and Dundas streets.

 

I don’t know if there was enough evidence that would convict JER in this century but in the middle of the last century, a great many innocent persons in the US were convicted and sentence to death who were later exonerated of the crimes they were convicted of. Even though the evidence that could have been used by the State to convict JER was flimsy at best, there was such an outpouring of grief at MLK’s demise, it would almost be impossible for a jury hearing the evidence that would have been submitted to them at JER’s trial for them to not find him guilty as charged. It was in an era where someone had to pay for the crime and it didn’t matter who it was so long as someone paid the ultimate penalty for the horror brought upon them. I believe that the jury members were also of that frame of mind when they arrived at their decision.

 

I can’t say with complete conviction that JER actually assassinated MLK but on a scale one to ten, I am inclined to suggest that nine is a reasonable number. I base this on what little I know of the true facts in that case but with my background as an investigator who investigated and solved four murder cases, many bank and insurance frauds, found missing persons and spent nine months studying forensic sciences at one of the world’s best forensic sciences laboratories in the world, I arrived at my conclusion. I think I can safely say that in my opinion, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King Jr. to death on April 4, 1968 in the City of Memphis.  

 

I am convinced that JER didn`t murder MLK just to be famous. If that really was his motive, then he would have stated so before he died of liver failure at 11:36 a.m. EDT at the Columbia Nashville Memorial Hospital on April 23, 1998 at the age of 70.

 

With him no longer with us, we won`t learn from his lips as to who paid him to kill MLK. And if someone did pay him to kill MLK (and I believe that someone did) it is highly unlikely that that person will admit his role in the assassination of MLK. Perhaps some time in the far future, someone will find a diary in some attic of a conspirator who wrote in the diary his role and perhaps the role of others in the conspiracy. If that doesn`t happen, then the mystery will remain as long as the memories of Martin Luther King Jr. remain in the minds of all those who revered him for the great man he was.