James Earl Ray

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James Earl Ray (1955)

James Earl Ray (born March 10, 1928 in Alton , Illinois , † April 23, 1998 in Nashville , Tennessee ) was an American who went down in history as the assassin and murderer of Martin Luther King .

Early life

Ray was born to George Ellis Ray (rarely also James Gerald Ray) and Lucille Maher and raised a Catholic; he grew up in poor conditions. His ancestors were Welsh and Scottish on his father's side and Irish on his mother's side .

In February 1935, his father, known by the nickname “Speedy”, committed check fraud in Alton. To avoid prosecution, the family moved to Ewing , Missouri, and renamed themselves Raynes. Ray attended school there until the age of fifteen.

At the end of World War II he joined the United States Army and served in Germany, although he struggled to obey the strict rules of conduct of the military.

Criminal career

After retiring from the military and returning to the United States, Ray was sentenced for the first time in California in 1949 after a burglary.

From 1952, he served another two-year prison sentence for an armed robbery against a taxi driver in Illinois.

In 1955 he was convicted of postal fraud after stealing money orders in Hannibal, Missouri, to finance a trip to Florida ; he served four years in Leavenworth Federal Prison .

In 1959 he stole 120 US dollars in an armed robbery of a Kroger shop in Saint Louis ; due to his repeated offenses, he was sentenced this time to twenty years in the (now closed) federal prison of Missouri, which he took on March 17, 1960 as inmate number 00416J.

In 1967 he escaped by hiding in a truck that was carrying bread from the prison bakery.

The first stage of his escape led him back to Saint Louis; it was followed by the stations in Chicago , Toronto , Montreal and finally Birmingham in Alabama . There he bought a Ford Mustang and got his driver's license without being recognized.

His further escape led him, after a stopover in Acapulco , to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico , where he arrived on October 19, 1967. Under the pseudonym Eric Starvo Galt Ray was planning a career as a porn - Director : He ordered through mail order a corresponding film equipment and began recording local prostitutes. When he was unsuccessful and a prostitute with whom Ray had entered into a relationship, he left Mexico on November 16, 1967.

Ray returned to the United States and reached Los Angeles on November 19, 1967 . He continued to use his pseudonym Galt .

During his time in Los Angeles, he attended a local bartending school and took dance lessons. His main interest, however, was in George Wallace's presidential campaign . Ray had a strong aversion to blacks and was quickly drawn to Wallace's segregationist platform. He spent much of his time in Los Angeles as a helper at Wallace's campaign headquarters in North Hollywood . At that time he also considered emigrating to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe ), where a white minority regime unilaterally proclaimed independence from the United Kingdom in 1965 (Unilateral Declaration of Independence; UDI).

Preparation for the crime

On March 5, 1968, Ray underwent a nose job performed by Dr. Russell Hadley was performed.

On March 18, 1968 Ray left Los Angeles and reached Atlanta , Georgia on March 24, 1968 , where he moved into a room in a guest house. In the same room, FBI agents later found a map of Atlanta showing the locations of the church and home of Martin Luther King Jr.

On March 30, 1968, in Birmingham, Alabama, Ray bought a Model 760 Gamemaster forend repeater rifle from the US arms manufacturer Remington Arms and a box of 20 .30-06 Springfield cartridges from Aeromarine Supply Company. He also bought a Redfield 2x-7x rifle scope , which he later mounted on the weapon.

He told the staff at the store that he was going on a hunting trip with his brother, this time using the code name Harvey Lowmeyer .

Ray returned to Atlanta after purchasing firearms and accessories. He knew from a report in The Atlanta Constitution that King's return to Memphis , Tennessee was scheduled for April 1, 1968. On April 2, 1968, Ray packed a bag and drove to Memphis.

Assassination, arrest and conviction

On April 4, 1968, according to a later court ruling, James Ray shot Martin Luther King from the bathroom window of a guest house while he was standing on a balcony on the second floor of the Lorraine Motel across the street (which is now the National Civil Rights Museum ). King was fatally wounded here.

Ray then escaped from Memphis in his car towards Toronto , Canada , but left his rifle and binoculars, which he had not cleaned of his fingerprints, near the crime scene. He hid in Canada for over a month and obtained a Canadian passport under the false name of Ramon George Sneyd . At the end of May 1968 he left Canada on a flight to England .

In Europe he went into hiding in Lisbon and shortly afterwards returned to London . While trying to leave the United Kingdom for Rhodesia (then apartheid state ), Ray was arrested on June 8, 1968 at London Heathrow Airport . His code name Sneyd was already on a wanted list of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

Back in the US, one of his lawyers advised him to confess in order to avoid the death penalty . On March 10, 1969 - his birthday - Ray confessed and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Three days later, he retracted his confession and subsequently denied being King's killer.

Escape 1977

On June 10, 1977, he and five other inmates managed to escape from the maximum security prison in Petros, Tennessee . With the help of a sniffer dog, he was found and arrested on June 13 about 8.5 miles (13.6 km) from the prison. Because of this escape, his sentence was increased to 100 years.

Doubts about Ray's perpetration, death

Ray tried unsuccessfully to have his case retried. In the years that followed, he repeatedly claimed to be the victim of a conspiracy, but sometimes became involved in contradictions. He kept claiming that a man named Raoul, whom he met months before the crime, ordered him to shoot King. This assertion has varied over the years. His greatest achievement in trying to prove his innocence was when Dexter King , the son of Martin Luther King, visited him in prison in 1997. Dexter believed Ray's claims and publicly accused the then government of murdering his father. The King family supported Ray's demand for a retrial, which in 1998 also led to a success. Lloyd Jowers, the owner of a restaurant near the crime scene, was charged in a civil court with part of a conspiracy to assassinate Martin Luther King. The trial ended with a guilty verdict. There have been repeated calls from the King family for a full investigation into what happened. In 2000, a commission concluded that there was no evidence of a conspiracy.

James Earl Ray died on 23 April 1998 in prison as the result of kidney failure, which probably caused by hepatitis C caused. The autopsy report also contained evidence of cirrhosis of the liver . In the book by William F. Pepper (friend of Martin Luther King and later lawyer of James Earl Ray) it is noted that in prison he was diagnosed with hepatitis C two years before his death, but this was not reported to Ray or his relatives was. The author here takes into account that the government was hoping for Ray's death. The book also sheds light on the Army's secret service activities in relation to King's death and thus Ray's innocence, as well as putting Ray off to a trial by the public prosecutor's office. No trial led to the arrest of James Earl Ray, Pepper said, because he pleaded guilty. His revocation had been ignored by the judiciary for 25 years.

Shortly before Ray's death, the German author, director and producer Thomas Giefer had the opportunity to speak to him in prison. Ray's statement - he continued to deny involvement in the murder - became part of a television documentary made by Giefer. In this documentary, numerous other people have their say who argue that it was not Ray who was the killer, but rather a conspiracy whose masterminds were to be found in the mafia, in circles of the military and the FBI. In this sense, lawyers, detectives, the King biographer David Garrow and the former UN ambassador to the United States, Andrew Young, express themselves in the documentary .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Who killed Martin Luther King ?: the true story by the alleged assassin - James Earl Ray . Books.google.ca. Retrieved July 29, 2015.
  2. ↑ Gerald Posner, Killing The Dream 1998
  3. ↑ James Earl Ray on biography.com
  4. ^ The Martin Luther King Assassination . Books.google.com, (Retrieved June 27, 2014).
  5. ↑ Mark Gribben: James Earl Ray: The Man Who Killed Dr. Martin Luther King, chapter 3 . In: truTV Crime Library . truTV. Archived from the original on June 14, 2006. Retrieved June 25, 2006.
  6. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Hampton Sides: Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Hunt for His Assassin . Doubleday, New York 2010, ISBN 978-0-385-52392-9 .
  7. ↑ Gerald Horne: From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War against Zimbabwe, 1965–1980 , 2000th edition, University of North Carolina Press ,, ISBN 978-0807849033 , p. 24.
  8. ^ Report of laboratory, FBI headquarters to Memphis, Apr. 17, 1968, FBI headquarters Murkin file 44-38861 . The Harold Weisberg Archive. Retrieved May 5, 2015.
  9. ↑ Why assassin James Earl Ray returned to Toronto . Thestar.com. June 6, 2010. Retrieved June 27, 2014.
  10. ^ Seeking answers on King's killer . April 4, 2008. 
  11. ↑ Clive Borrell: Ramon Sneyd denies that he killed Dr King . In: The Times , June 28, 1968, p. 2. Retrieved January 13, 2009. 
  12. ^ Archives of the FBI branch in Knoxville ( Memento of April 24, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ↑ Death in Memphis - The Enigmatic Death of Martin Luther King (as part of the WDR series Political Murders ), last broadcast on June 10, 2008 at 00:15 on WDR

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Ray, James Earl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American assassin
DATE OF BIRTH March 10, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Alton , Illinois
DATE OF DEATH April 23, 1998
Place of death Nashville , Tennessee