Last time, after honoring Dr. King’s life and work before the day set aside for remembering him, we followed the FBI on the killer’s trail, looking at the evidence turned up along the way, until the suspect, James Earl Ray, was captured at a London airport. Already, conspiracy theories abounded, suggesting that the CIA, the FBI, Memphis police, the mafia, white supremacists, or black militants had plotted King’s murder. Flatly listing these theories tends to make them sound ridiculous, but there were good reasons to harbor suspicions in those post-Warren Report years, when New Orleans DA Jim Garrison was making noise about a conspiracy behind JFK’s assassination. And there were certainly some details around King’s death that contributed to the speculation. First, the failure of the police to set up road blocks and inform neighboring states about their search for a white Mustang suggested to many that local authorities were letting the assassin get away. The fact that a hoaxer led police on a wild goose chase with a phony CB radio broadcast also suggests to some the idea that a conspirator was working to help the assassin escape, even though that hoax broadcast took place more than half an hour after the shooting, when the shooter was likely already in another state. Then there was the fact that the principal witness at the rooming house, Charlie Stephens, who claimed to see a man matching Ray’s description leaving the shared bathroom carrying a rifle-length bundle, was a known drunk who appears to have been intoxicated that day, though police who took his statements indicated he was not exceedingly drunk. And Stephens was important to placing James Earl Ray in the rooming house, for while police did find Ray’s fingerprints on items in the abandoned bundle, they found none in the room he had rented and only a partial palm print in the bathroom. This is easily accounted for by the fact that, a career burglar and escaped convict, Ray himself spoke in some interviews about his habit of wiping his fingerprints. As for ballistics evidence, the FBI determined that the bullet fired into Dr. King matched the other bullets in the abandoned bundle, but that it could not be confirmed that it had been fired from the rifle in the bundle. This was simply because the bullet had been damaged and identifying marks could not be perceived, and in no way indicated that the bullet had not been fired from the gun discarded on the street outside the rooming house. Nevertheless, it has contributed to theories that the bundle was planted as part of a frame-up. As for the sniper’s perch, though most were certain the gunshot had originated from the building across the street from the Lorraine Motel, some few others thought it had come from some shrubbery above a retaining wall. Dr. King’s driver thought he saw some movement in those bushes, and months later, one of the rooming house residents said he was in the bushes drinking wine and had seen a figure with a gun dashing through the foliage. Later, it came out that the driver, who was known for telling tales, had actually been in the pool area and would have been unable to see the foliage across the road, and the rooming house resident had previously told the authorities that he’d been in his room, not in the bushes, and that he’d seen nothing. Nevertheless, the foliage above the retaining wall has since become a legendary place, like the grassy knoll at John F. Kennedy’s assassination. And just as Lee Harvey Oswald proclaimed himself a patsy before his murder by Jack Ruby, James Earl Ray insisted he had been set up. The difference was that great care was taken to protect Ray from a similar fate, and so he survived and had far more to say. The story he told his lawyers and the author William Bradford Huie involved a mysterious figure whom he had met in Montreal while on the lam. This man, named Raoul, had drawn Ray into a smuggling operation, bought him the Mustang and paid his living expenses, maneuvered him various places on the promise of eventually providing him with a passport, ordered him to buy the rifle as part of an arms deal, and eventually schemed to get him in Memphis, in the wrong place at the wrong time, a completely oblivious patsy.

When considering the likelihood of a plot against King, one has to begin with the local authorities. Dr. King had been considered a thorn in the side of numerous municipal and state authorities in areas he had visited. Alabama serves as a principal example. One of Dr. King’s most zealous adversaries was Alabama governor George Wallace, a segregationist who had staked his political career on racism, famously standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama to prevent black students from entering. His calls for Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever helped make Birmingham the frontlines for the Civil Rights Movement, and under his auspices, led by his terrible example, Birmingham police resorted violence during the SCLC campaign in that city. Another of King’s worst opponents had been the Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, “Bull” Connor, who, taking his cues from the bigoted governor, callously turned the hoses of the firemen and the batons of the policemen he commanded against King and his protesters. And later, demonstrating against illegal, racially motivated obstacles to voting registration that Governor Wallace tacitly allowed to persist in his state, King and the SCLC planned a historically lengthy march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, where on Bloody Sunday unarmed protesters were welcomed by tear gas and truncheons. Indeed, if Dr. King had been assassinated in any city in Alabama, the very first suspects might have been members of its police force, with implications that orders might have come down all the way from the governor’s office to rid their state of the troublesome activist. But King was killed in Tennessee, a state where he had not done any extensive organization previous to the sanitation strikes, which had only begun about a month before his arrival there. This is not to say that Tennessee had not seen its fair share of struggles for civil rights. On the contrary, since the ’50s there had been multiple bombings in Nashville in response to the desegregation of schools and in retaliation for student-led sit-in campaigns in the ’60s aimed at integrating lunch counters. And Dr. King did have some influence on the activism in Tennessee, as it was spearheaded by the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference, an affiliate of King’s SCLC, and King had sent one of his own to tutor them in the techniques of non-violent resistance. But Dr. King himself only came to Nashville after a bomb destroyed the home of a lawyer who represented sit-in participants, and he came not in a leadership capacity, but rather to express his admiration for all the work that had been done there without him, saying he was there “not to bring inspiration but to gain inspiration.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. being arrested in Alabama for "loitering," via Wikimedia Commons

It’s not impossible to imagine that he had enraged many in Tennessee simply through his very famous work, which had spread to states all over the country, or even that police in Memphis blamed King, despite his non-violent message, for the violence that erupted during the March 28th demonstration that he attended, but it would have been a drastic step to resort to assassinating him, and they would have had a very short time to organize their plot. Some have pointed to the fact that police were not providing any security for Dr. King as proof that they were part of a conspiracy bent on seeing him killed, but in truth Dr. King preferred not to be surrounded by police officers, who of course represented the immediate opposition in any street demonstration and who only days earlier had shot a 16-year-old rioter to death. So wary was he of having a police escort that he and his group actually made an attempt to elude their police security detail before it was finally called off them in favor of surveilling the group from a distance. Others have contended that King and his entourage had been maneuvered to the Lorraine Motel in order to put him in the cross-hairs, a contention that is also untrue. King and his group customarily stayed at the Lorraine, an establishment owned by African Americans, and moreover always stayed in the same room. In fact, days earlier, during the March 28th violence, the police had warned him away from the Lorraine for his own safety, directing him to stay at a Holiday Inn instead, a change of lodgings for which Dr. King was subsequently criticized. Their failure to order roadblocks or extend their APB certainly reflects poorly on them, but they were dealing with rioting in the wake of the news that Dr. King had been murdered. And a bigger problem with the notion that King’s assassination was the object of a plot by Memphis police is that it simply doesn’t work with the idea that James Earl Ray was a patsy. Ray had only just arrived in Memphis the night before the assassination. Even King himself had not long been there and had been in and out of the city three times in the preceding weeks on impromptu visits, making a Memphis-based plot unlikely. Moreover, for the local conspiracy theory to work with Ray’s story about Raoul, it would require that the authorities in Memphis or Tennessee generally so wanted Dr. King dead that they planned his assassination long before the sanitation strike that drew him there had even begun. And it would mean they sent an agent to Montreal, of all places, to skulk around bars scoping out promising scapegoats, only to lead him on a circuitous escapade all over North America, from Canada to Mexico and from California to Georgia, before finally sending him to Memphis in order to frame him. While this seems manifestly unlikely, the idea that Ray was groomed as part of a plot at a higher level of government may seem less unlikely. After all, the FBI were present with the Memphis police in that nearby fire station, spying on Dr. King at the Lorraine.

A plot against King at the FBI is certainly not unbelievable, for it’s well-documented that one actually existed. The FBI had been keeping an eye on Dr. King’s activities since his earliest activism in Montgomery in 1955, with Director J. Edgar Hoover suspecting that King harbored Communist leanings and classifying him as a national or domestic security risk. Indeed some of those closely involved with King and SCLC leadership were known members of Communist organizations, including Bayard Rustin, Hunter Pitts O’Dell, and Stanley Levison, but this should not be surprising of progressive activists in their era. Today, we know that the FBI tasked a sophisticated surveillance network with spying on King, complete with wiretaps on his phones and paid informants on his staff. Because of this surveillance, there is ample evidence of just how little Dr. King thought of Communism, which he called “an alien philosophy contrary to us.” But despite evidence that he was not a Communist insurgent, in 1964, King incurred the redoubled wrath of Director Hoover when he declared that the FBI was “completely ineffectual in resolving the continued mayhem and brutality inflicted upon the Negro in the deep South,” to which, like a child, Hoover responded by calling King a liar. True to his peace-loving nature, Dr. King arranged a meeting with Hoover, who received King with no outward animosity. Meanwhile, Hoover’s FBI engaged in an all-out smear campaign, maligning his character to Roman cardinals in an effort to prevent a meeting between Dr. King and the Pope that year, and sending a notorious package to his house in an effort to sow discord in his marriage. This package contained a tape with moaning sex sounds and a letter that addressed him only as “King,” continuing, “In view of your low grade, abnormal personal behavior (sic) I will not dignify your name with either a Mr. or a Reverend or a Dr. And, your last name calls to mind only the type of King such as King Henry the VIII and his countless acts of adultery and immoral conduct lower than that of a beast.” The letter called him an immoral, sexually psychotic fraud and a liability to the cause of civil rights, insisting that his extra-marital liaisons with both women and men would soon be made public, suggesting that the tape was a recording of him and insinuating that the only thing left for him to do was to kill himself. Although the letter made statements intended to indicate it had been written by an African American and perhaps someone in his own organization, Dr. King perceptively guessed that it had been sent by the FBI. Indeed, now, due to recently declassified files, we know that the FBI was preparing reports on Martin Luther King all the way up to the time of his assassination, still claiming that he was a Communist agent and that workshops King held were really only fronts for drunken orgies at which attendees committed adultery with prostitutes and engaged in homosexual acts. It is certainly true that Dr. King was no saint. Indeed, he once penitently confirmed as much to activist and singer Joan Baez who had seen him intoxicated the night before. In response, Baez said, “And I’m not the Virgin Mary. What a relief!” Ralph Abernathy, in his autobiography, did reveal that King, a man frequently on the road and away from home and family, had been involved in extramarital affairs, but there appears to be no evidence whatsoever for the salacious and defamatory claims made by the FBI in their efforts to ruin Dr. King.

NY Herald Tribune article from 1964, via the University of Virginia’s Office of African-American Affairs

Clearly the thought that Hoover’s FBI might have been responsible for the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., was well justified. But this would have to be a compartmentalized plot, for surely the President of the United States, to whom the FBI answers, would not condone such action against a non-violent reverend. Or can some credence be given to the conspiracist who claims the plot went all the way to the top? Well, above Hoover was the Attorney General, a role Ramsey Clark served at the time of King’s murder, but Clark is an unlikely suspect for involvement in a plot against King as he was a consistently staunch supporter of the civil rights movement. And above the Attorney General, of course, would be the President himself. Now, many take it for granted that King had positive relationships with both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, but both executives had J. Edgar Hoover pouring poison in their ears, trying to convince them of what a threat Dr. King really was. While Kennedy had made promises to King about getting civil rights legislation passed, behind his back he was signing his approval of the wiretaps Hoover had requested. After Kennedy’s assassination, President Johnson reached out and made clear his intentions to take up Kennedy’s civil rights agenda. And in fact he did, working with Dr. King on passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in an effort to end segregation and discrimination. King found in Johnson an accommodating ally. Although sometimes he prioritized other objectives, like his War on Poverty initiatives, over the most pressing concerns of Dr. King and the SCLC, like ensuring obstacle-free black voter registration in order to get black Southerners on juries and into civic service, nevertheless King found that with a little persistent pressure, LBJ always seemed to do the right thing, and in 1965 Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act to help remove illegal barriers to black voter registration in the South. And certainly, after Dr. King’s death, Johnson expressed grief publicly and continued to work to cement King’s legacy in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. It would be misleading to suggest, however, that Dr. King never represented a problem for LBJ. The simple fact that he was known to work with King, whom so many others in power despised, appears to have been an issue for him, and he was known to distance himself from the reverend, denying their relationship like Peter denying Jesus. And their partnership was certainly strained in the end, when Dr. King very publicly split from him on the issue of the Vietnam War. And of course, taking a stand against the conflict in Vietnam surely gave Hoover more ammunition against him, more reason to claim he was a Communist. So the question, then, is could Hoover have exploited this rift between Johnson and King to convince the Commander-in-Chief that some covert action was warranted to rid the country a man he portrayed as a dangerous agitator? This is pure conjecture based on speculation. All we really know is that the President’s often positive partnership with King was lately troubled and that the director of the largest domestic law enforcement organization was waging a very personal campaign against King, one that even included threats. Beyond this, to support the notion of a conspiracy, there is only the legend of Raoul.

Even before his extradition to the United States, James Earl Ray, still stubbornly sticking to his alias Ramon Sneyd at the time, began shopping his story around through his attorney. Indeed, from the time of his extradition to the time of his guilty plea, he went through a couple of prominent lawyers, all of which he retained on the promise of sharing the profits from his story, which he anticipated would be substantial. William Bradford Huie was first to sign a deal with and interview him, but before long numerous authors were hard at work on numerous books. Nevertheless, Ray worked exclusively with Huie, a journalist known for checkbook journalism, or paying handsomely for his stories, and famous for his recent work in what would today be considered the true crime genre, with particular focus on notorious cases of interracial murder, such as those of Emmett Till and the Freedom Summer murders. When Huie published the first of his interviews with Ray in Look magazine, he faced contempt of court charges, and not for the first time, for the judge feared Huie’s inflammatory revelations would influence the outcome of the trial. Huie’s article told of how Ray had escaped from prison in Missouri and hid out in Illinois before making his way to Montreal in hopes of getting travel documents and going overseas. There, he haunted a waterfront tavern, making it known that he was in trouble with the law in the U.S. and that he would be willing to engage in unlawful activity in order to gather some money and obtain false identification. That was when Raoul, a man Ray described as being a blond Latin, approached him. Over the course of several meetings, Raoul convinced Ray to make a few trips over the border to Detroit with some packages that he assumed contained narcotics. After receiving some money for this apparent smuggling operation, on Raoul’s promise of an eventual bigger payoff and provision of a passport, Ray made his way to Birmingham, where Raoul eventually caught up with him, bought him the white Mustang, and sent him down to Mexico to do some gun running south of the border. After a significant period of time in Mexico and thereafter in Los Angeles, Ray used a New Orleans contact number and arranged to meet again with Raoul in that city. At this rendezvous, Raoul continued to string Ray along, urging him to come out to Atlanta for some more gun-running, still dangling the promise of a big payoff and the paperwork that would finally ease Ray’s passage out of the country. Chasing after those promises, Ray returned to LA and made preparations to move to Atlanta. Once he’d settled in Georgia, he met with Raoul, who gave him $700 to buy a hunting rifle with a scope and some ammunition. The reason Raoul gave him was that the rifle would serve as an example to their Mexican connection of the kinds of guns they could provide. Raoul then directed Ray to take the rifle to Memphis, thus setting the stage for the final scene of the plot.

This was the story of James Earl Ray’s grooming by Raoul as Ray told it. And on the surface, to a lot of people, it makes sense, for how could James Earl Ray, a hapless small-time burglar, manage to get away with a high-profile murder and then obtain the money and the false identification necessary to make his escape to Europe like some smooth secret agent? But there are significant issues with this tale, even beyond the simple foundational flaw that he was encouraged to come up with a sensational story in order not only to defend himself but also to sell books and thereby make a tidy profit. One issue is that for most of the rest of his life, Ray failed to identify this Raoul character, and his descriptions seemed to constantly change, shifting from a Latin to a French Canadian, with hair that changed color from blond to red, to dark, auburn, and sandy and skin that was at times pale and at others dark and ruddy (Posner 162). Once he fanned the flames of conspiracy theory by identifying Raoul with one of the Three Tramps photographed at JFK’s assassination, but even then he only admitted some similarity. Then there are the simple logic problems. Why would any smuggler worth his salt even trust Ray with stashes of narcotics and guns on the promise of a later payment for delivery, when Ray might easily have just taken the contraband for himself? Moreover, why would their Mexican buyers have even needed them to procure guns when U.S. gun stores at the time were selling firearms over the counter without requiring any identification? And if all these smuggling operations were simply a ruse meant to draw Ray into their machinations, why on earth would they engage him, a wanted escapee, in risky criminal activity that could have easily landed him back in prison, abruptly foiling all the time they had spent grooming him as a patsy?

A young James Earl Ray, via the LA Times

It is also not entirely inconceivable that James Earl Ray might have financed his own travels. He was after all, a burglar known for keeping himself in money by pulling the occasional heist. Immediately after his escape from prison, he took a straight job while lying low, washing dishes in a restaurant. Yet somehow he had enough money to live on when he made his way up to Montreal some weeks later. There is some indication that he met up with his brothers, Jerry and John, during this period, so perhaps they loaned him some money, but interestingly, at just that time, a nearby bank was robbed by two masked men with shotguns. Taking 27 grand, even a share of this haul would have easily bankrolled Ray’s subsequent travels, and records show that the next day, Ray bought the car he would drive to Canada for some $200. Moreover, the FBI suspected James’s brother John of the robbery, as he may have been involved in five similar holdups during the last two years, for one of which he was actually convicted. And the indications of James Earl Ray’s continuous thievery during the time between his escape from prison and his arrest for murder does not stop there. Ray told Huie that the night before paying a lease on an apartment in Montreal, he visited a brothel and after availing himself of its services, he robbed its pimp. By the time he got to London, he lacked the money to move on. He told Huie that he should have committed a robbery in Canada before getting on the plane. To renew his capital, he ended up robbing a bank there in London, leaving a thumbprint behind to prove it (Posner 249). He is often portrayed as being a bumbling and incompetent thief based on an early robbery of a taxi driver that had earned him a year in prison, but based on his successful escape from prison, the reports of various successful robberies he pulled, and indications of even greater heists he may have been involved with, the idea that he financed his own travels seems a lot more likely than that he relied on the piecemeal payments of the tightfisted Raoul.

Likewise, the notion that he would have allowed himself to be strung along for so long on the unfulfilled promise of obtaining a passport also strains credulity. For one thing, Ray had an idea of how to get a passport in Canada back when he was still in prison. He had read a newspaper article about an Italian criminal that had exploited the simple process of getting Canadian papers and had spoken with a fellow inmate about how one could use newspaper archives and city records to get a birth certificate and establish identity. Indeed, that appears to be the reason why he had gone to Canada in the first place. He had one misconception that held him back, though. He was under the impression that in order to get his passport he needed a voucher, a Canadian citizen willing to attest to his identity. So in Montreal, he bought himself a suit and got himself a haircut and went about trying to meet a lady friend that he could eventually convince to vouch for him. And he did meet someone, a polished woman in her thirties by the name of Claire Keating, with whom he had a fleeting romance. One of the bigger logical flaws of his story about Raoul was that he continued pursuing women, and Ms. Keating specifically, in his effort to obtain a passport even when Raoul had supposedly already offered to obtain the papers for him. One might suggest that he continued to pursue her for genuine romantic reasons, and considering the fact that she was by all accounts quite lovely and throughout his life his only other liaisons appear to have been with prostitutes, this would be quite plausible, were it not for the fact that he abandoned his pursuit of her as soon as he learned she worked for the Canadian Department of Transport. He was using her, and when he felt she represented a threat, he dropped her. Regardless, even according to Ray’s own legend of Raoul, the mystery figure never actually provided him with those long-promised papers. After making his escape from the scene of the crime and getting himself back up to Canada, he did that himself, using his old tricks to establish false identity and this time scheming to create a second identity that could vouch for him until he discovered he had no need for a voucher. In the end, we know exactly how he got himself overseas, and we have a clear idea of how he kept himself in money.

James Earl Ray’s fake Canadian Passport, via ABC News

As for the day in question, Ray contends that not only was he unaware of the plot against King, but he was wholly ignorant that King was even present in Memphis when he followed Raoul’s directions and drove there. We know that he checked in to the New Rebel Motel, alone, under his known alias Eric S. Galt, on the evening before the murder, and we know he was up late based on the clerk’s report of seeing his light on at 4am. What Ray tells us is that he met Raoul at the New Rebel, received directions to check into the rooming house across from the Lorraine Motel the next day and meet Raoul at the nearby restaurant Jim’s Grill at three in the afternoon. Ray claims he handed the hunting rifle he’d recently purchased in Birmingham over to Raoul in the New Rebel and never saw it again, the implication being that Raoul had asked him to buy it not for some weapons deal but merely to connect him to the murder weapon and to get his fingerprints on it. Of course, this story already doesn’t make sense in a few ways. For example, if the gun deal were real, they could have done it right there at the New Rebel, with no reason to switch hotels, and if that were just a ruse to get Ray into the rooming house and connect him with the sniper’s nest, why wouldn’t Raoul have just had him take the rifle there as well, on the understanding that they’d be completing their gun deal in the room? But regardless of why or at whose direction, Ray did indeed head to the rooming house the next day and check in under the alias John Willard, and then the various stories he has told over the years in crafting his alibi become muddled. He met with Raoul either at Jim’s Grill, in the parked Mustang, or in room 5B in the rooming house (Posner 230). We know that after checking into the room, Ray drove to buy a pair of binoculars, and he says he did that on Raoul’s instructions. After returning to the room and giving Raoul the binoculars, Ray made himself scarce at Raoul’s insistence. This is the critical hour before the assassination, and Ray asserts that he wasn’t even in the rooming house, claiming instead that he was in Jim’s Grill, or perhaps another restaurant or an ice cream parlor, but also at a movie theater, and maybe in a drugstore, plus sitting in his car for a while (Posner 231). Quite the vaguely busy hour. It was when he was sitting in his car that he heard the shot, and then Raoul, he claimed, burst out of the rooming house and got into the Mustang’s backseat, pulling a sheet over himself to hide. Ray drove him several block away, let him out, and that was the last he ever saw Raoul. The only problem with this alibi was that there were witnesses at a record store who saw a single man climb into an empty white Mustang after the shooting and drive off alone. True to form, Ray laughed it off, said that first story was just a joke, and emended his alibi (Posner 231). A gas station attendant named Willie Green had been quoted in a newspaper as reporting that during the assassination, a suspiciously nervous man was at his filling station pacing around the public phone. He said he believed Ray was the man he had seen and had identified him from a photo, and moreover, he believed there had been a white Mustang in the lot. In truth, the attendant’s claims to have identified the nervous man from a photo of Ray must have been false, as police did not have a photo of Ray when the attendant was questioned. And Gerald Posner, in his fantastic book Killing the Dream, which has been instrumental in creating this series, uncovered in the notes of the journalist who first quoted Green the detail that the gas station attendant had actually seen this nervous fellow sometime after the assassination, and that he had hung around the station until long after Ray would’ve been out of state. Nevertheless, Ray’s new alibi became that he had been at a gas station—one he couldn’t quite pinpoint in his memory—getting a spare tire repaired. As for why he suddenly fled the city and the country, he explained that he spooked when he ran into a police roadblock—already a doubtful scenario since there was a recognized failure of the police to establish roadblocks—and afterward, hearing on the radio news of the assassination and the fact that police were looking for a white Mustang, he put the pieces together and headed to Canada.

Ray’s story about Raoul has been found by many, including the House Select Committee on Assassinations that convened in 1978 to further examine conspiracy claims in both the King and the JFK slayings, to be wholly unreliable. Some of the strongest evidence against his claim that he had bought the rifle at Raoul’s direction simply to show a prospective Mexican buyer the kind of weapon they might provide in an arms deal comes from the testimony of the several gun store clerks who dealt with Ray in and around Birmingham during the weeks leading up to the assassination. They said he asked numerous questions about different rifles’ accuracy and about the quality of different scopes. They remembered him inquiring how far a bullet might be expected to drop over certain distances. When he finally did purchase a rifle, he returned it the next day, explaining he needed a more powerful gun as he intended “to hunt bigger game” (Posner 13). These appear to be the statements of a man with specific needs who plans to make a particular use of the firearm, not of a man picking up a rifle on behalf of someone else just to show to a third party. In the end, the House Select Committee on Assassinations determined that all evidence suggested James Earl Ray had pulled the trigger and killed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but they were a bit less definite on the question of whether he acted alone, suggesting that he may have had some help. So, if Raoul was simply a fabrication, meant to stir up conspiracy claims and help Ray sell his story, it seems the issue becomes who else might have aided or been aware of Ray’s plans to assassinate King, and in the reports of gun store clerks we have some further clues to this mystery. In explaining why he was exchanging the rifle he had bought for another, he said he had made the decision after speaking with his brother about it.

James Earl Ray and his lawyer testifying before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, via The Telegraph

Be on the lookout for the next installment in this continuing series, as we examine this and the further mystery of why James Earl Ray murdered Dr. King, in Part Three: Ray’s Reasons.

The Killing of Dr. King, Part Two: The Legend of Raoul

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