Assassination of Martin Luther King

On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. An hour later, he was declared dead. For nearly 50 years, the federal government has maintained that James Earl Ray was the gunman who assassinated King that day. But within Martin Luther King’s family, there remains a persistent belief that Ray is innocent, and was set up to take the fall.

FBI investigators at the time traced the shot to a rooming house across the street, and witnesses directed them to a large bundle dropped on the sidewalk after the shooting. It contained a pair of binoculars, a newspaper with a story about King staying at the Lorraine Motel, and a .30-06 Remington Gamemaster that had fired one shot. All three bore the fingerprints of an escaped convict named James Earl Ray.

Ray, a white supporter of segregationist George Wallace, was a career criminal who’d been convicted at least four separate times for robbing a cafe, a taxi, a post office, and a grocery store. A year before, he’d escaped from Missouri State Penitentiary while serving a 20-year sentence, and was on the lam at the time King was shot. An international manhunt led to his capture in June 1968 at Heathrow Airport in London, where he was caught carrying two fake Canadian passports. Ray confessed to the crime on March 10, 1969 and received a 99-year prison sentence, which increased to a 100-year sentence after he briefly escaped in 1977. But within a few days of confessing, Ray began to claim his innocence, arguing that that he had been set up by a man he knew only as “Raoul.” It was Raoul, Ray said, who had directed him to buy the gun and the binoculars, and rent the room across the street from the motel. Ray said he wasn’t in the room when King was shot, but he was unable to consistently explain where he had been, or keep other important details in his story straight. Over several decades, federal investigators have routinely concluded that Raoul doesn’t exist.