James Earl Ray

James Earl Ray, born in Alton, Illinois, in 1928, was the oldest of nine children and left school at age twelve. After a brief, unsuccessful stint in the U.S. Army following World War II, he was discharged for ineptitude. He then embarked on a life of petty crime, with his first burglary conviction in California in 1949. Subsequent offenses included armed robbery of a taxi driver, mail fraud, and an armed robbery of a grocery store, for which he received a twenty-year sentence.

He escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary in April 1967 by hiding in a bread truck. On the run, he assumed the alias Eric Starvo Galt, purchased a white Ford Mustang in Alabama, and acquired a .38 revolver. He traveled to Mexico, where he attempted to become a pornographic film director, before relocating to Los Angeles. There, he volunteered for the segregationist presidential campaign of George Wallace.

Ray underwent a nose operation in early March 1968, then drove cross-country to Atlanta. An FBI search of his room later revealed a city map with Martin Luther King Jr.’s church and residence circled. On March 30, 1968, in Birmingham, Alabama, he bought a .30-06-caliber rifle with a scope. After assassinating King in Memphis on April 4, 1968, Ray fled to London, where he was captured.

He pleaded guilty in 1969, avoiding a possible death sentence, and received 99 years in prison. He spent the rest of his life attempting to withdraw that plea. Decades later, a 1999 civil trial found that Ray had been framed as part of a conspiracy involving government agencies, a conclusion the King family supported, though the Department of Justice disputed it. Ray died in 1998 after serving twenty-nine years, from complications of kidney disease and hepatitis C.