This Day in History: On March 10, 1969, fugitive James Earl Wray pleaded guilty to the murder of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. on March 10, 1969. On April 4, 1968, King was shot to death while standing on the balcony outside his hotel room in Memphis, Tennessee. (It also resulted in the death of a hotel worker. Lorraine Bailey, the wife of the motel owner for whom it was named, suffered a heart attack after seeing King shot and later died of a heart attack. That's why the ambulance The delay was partly due to the fact that Lorraine was also the switchboard operator, so when the Reverend Samuel Kells tried to call an ambulance from the motel room phone,
Three days after his confession, Ray claimed he was Innocent and tried to withdraw his previous plea, insisting that he was a pawn in a larger conspiracy, his motion was denied.
The night Dr. King was shot, he was driving a car from Lorraine, where the assassination took place. A rifle was found a block from the hotel. Over the next few weeks, as the investigation continued, all the evidence—the rifle, fingerprints, and eyewitness accounts—pointed to a single suspect: petty criminal James. Earl Ray.
Ray, who escaped from a Missouri prison in 1967 while serving a sentence for robbery, was the target of a massive manhunt in May 1968 when he purchased a car under an assumed name. He had a Canadian passport and was arrested at a London airport on June 8, 1968. Ray admitted that he was trying to travel to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), according to his lawyer, a prominent criminal defense lawyer. Percy Foreman, James Earl Ray pleads guilty to murdering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. To avoid being sent to the electric chair, Mr. Foreman insisted that Ray sign every page of the letter in which he recommended his client plead guilty. read in part: "In my opinion, if your case goes to trial, you have a 99 percent chance of getting a death sentence."
A few days later, Ray claimed that he After meeting a man named Raoul in 1967, he pulled him into a gun-toting operation. When MLK was murdered, Ray said he realized he was being framed to take the blame and took it to Canada high and dry. The judge didn't buy it, so his motion to change his plea was denied, and he repeatedly asked for a new trial over the years. Coretta Scott King, MLK's widow, and their children came to believe that There may be something to his story, or at least he may be innocent. During the last years of his life, Martin Luther King was constantly bugged and intimidated by Edgar Hoover's FBI, which he spoke out about. The anti-war stance and calls for a guaranteed income for all Americans were hardly popular with top brass in the post-Kennedy era, such as this one that circulated around FBI offices after the "Dream" speech. Memo:
In light of King's powerful and incendiary speech yesterday, he has gone above and beyond all other black leaders on issues that affect large numbers of black people, and if we haven't done so before, we must put him in now. As the future most dangerous black man in the country, from a communist point of view, black people, and national security
The FBI later discovered that King was said to have had numerous affairs and issued him various warrants. An anonymous letter claiming "you are a huge fraudster and an evil, evil person" and threatening to blackmail him. In another anonymous letter purportedly from the FBI, they said,
The American public, the church organizations that have been helping Protestants, Catholics and Jews, will be punished for being an evil beast. Get to know you. So do other people who support you. You're done. King, there is only one thing left for you. You know what it is. You only have 34 days to do it (this exact number is somewhat realistic as specified). You're done. You have only one way out. You better accept it before your dirty deceitful self is exposed to the nation.
(Many of the FBI's surveillance records, written and audio, on King are currently in the National Archives but are classified until 2027.)
No That said, many conspiracy theorists believe it doesn't extend to thinking the FBI was involved in King's murder.
That said, in the years following the assassination, the crime was re-examined multiple times by the U.S. Department of Justice, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and the Shelby County, Tennessee, District Attorney's Office. Everyone came to the same conclusion: James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968.
The House committee acknowledged the possibility of a conspiracy involving one or more inmates in addition to Ray, although there was no conclusive evidence for the theory, according to Ray's family and friends.
In addition to physical evidence such as rifles and fingerprints, he had a compelling motive for the crime: blatant racism. People close to him also maintain that he often spoke of his plans to assassinate prominent civil rights leaders.
In the end, James Earl Ray was sentenced to 99 years in prison and died in 1998.
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