Today in History: Martin Luther King’s assassin was arrested
The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. took place on 4 April 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, USA.
James Earl Ray was arrested in June 1968 for the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee two months earlier.
On 4 April, 1968, in Memphis, King was shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-storey room at the Lorraine Motel.
That evening, a Remington .30-06 hunting rifle was found on the sidewalk next to a rooming house one block away from the Lorraine Motel.
In the following weeks, the rifle, eyewitness reports and fingerprints on the weapon all implicated a single suspect: escaped convict James Earl Ray.
A two-bit criminal, Ray escaped a Missouri prison in April 1967 while serving a sentence for a hold-up.
In May 1968, a massive manhunt for Ray began.
The FBI eventually determined that he had obtained a Canadian passport under a false identity.
On 8 June, Scotland Yard investigators arrested Ray at a London airport, while he was en route to Belgium with the eventual goal of reaching Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
He was extradited to the United States where he went on trial Ray before a Memphis judge in March 1969. He pleaded guilty to King’s murder in order to avoid the electric chair.
He was sentenced to 99 years in prison.
Three days later, he attempted to withdraw his guilty plea, claiming he was innocent of King’s assassination and had been set up in a larger conspiracy.
He claimed that in 1967, a mysterious man named Raoul had approached him and recruited him into a gunrunning enterprise. On April 4, 1968, however, he realised that he was to be the fall guy for the King assassination and fled to Canada.
Ray’s motion was denied, as were his dozens of other requests for a trial during the next 29 years.
Over the years, the assassination has been re-examined by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the Shelby County, Tennessee, district attorney’s office, and three times by the US Justice Department.
All of these investigations have ended with the same conclusion: James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King Jr.
In addition to the mountain of evidence against him, Ray had a definite motive for assassinating King: hatred.
According to Ray’s family and friends, he was an outspoken racist who had told them of his intent to kill King.
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