James Earl Ray

James Earl Ray was the assassin of American Baptist minister and civil rights activist, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Background
Ray was born in 1928 in a poor Irish-American family of Alton, Illinois, and was raised a Catholic. Shortly before his seventh birthday, in 1935, his father passed a bad check and the Rays fled to Ewing, Missouri, where they changed their name to Raynes to avoid detection. Ray dropped out of school when he was fifteen years old. Later, he volunteered for the U.S. Army near the end of World War II and served in Germany.

Ray was convicted for the first time, for burglary, in 1949. In 1952 he was sentenced to two years for the armed robbery of a taxi driver in Illinois, and in 1955, to four more years for stealing money orders in Missouri and modifying them to travel to Florida. In 1959 he was arrested again for armed robbery in St. Louis and he was sentenced to twenty years for repeated offenses. However, he escaped in 1967 by hiding in a bread truck leaving the prison's bakery. He moved through St. Louis, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal and Birmingham, Alabama, where he acquired a car and driver's license and drove to Mexico. He resided briefly in Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta, where he tried to start a career as a pornographic director, but he left soon for Los Angeles.

Ray was strongly prejudiced against black people. He was a firm supporter of the pro-segregationist, third party presidential campaign of Alabama Governor George Wallace, and he spent much of his time in late 1967 and early 1968 volunteering at the Wallace campaign headquarters in North Hollywood.

Murder of King, Incarceration and Death
Ray's exact motive for murdering King isn't clear, since he denied his guilt later, but notoriety has been suggested. His apparent plan hinged on three premises: On March 5, 1968 Ray underwent a rhinoplasty in Los Angeles. Thirteen days later, he drove to Atlanta, where he bought a map of the city and circled the location of King's house and church. Two further weeks later, he drove to Birmingham, Alabama, where he bought a pump-action rifle, cartridges, and a telescopic sight under different aliases. When asked, he said it was for a hunting trip. He returned to Atlanta, and stayed there until he read in the Atlanta Constitution that King was travelling to Memphis, Tennessee on April 1. The next day, he left for Memphis and rented a room in a boarding house across the street from King's room in the Lorraine Motel. At 6:01 PM, April 4, he shot King on the head once, while he was standing on the motel's balcony. Witnesses saw Ray running away from the scene, and his fingerprints were found in the rifle and a pair of binoculars which were left in a package nearby.
 * 1) Avoiding capture and leaving the country in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, like he had already done when he escaped from Missouri State Penitentiary in 1967;
 * 2) Taking refuge in Rhodesia (modern day Zimbabwe), a white-dominated apartheid state that had  proclaimed unilateral independence from the United Kingdom in 1965 and had no extradition treaty with the U.S.; and
 * 3) Waiting for Wallace to be elected president, which Ray took for granted, then return to the U.S. after receiving a presidential pardon from him.

Ray drove back to Atlanta for eleven hours straight, picked his belongings, and left for Canada. On the way north, he heard on the radio that Police was looking for a man of his likeness and driving his vehicle's model, a white 1966 Ford Mustang. He abandoned the vehicle immediately and crossed the border by train two days after the murder. After another day, Ray arrived in Toronto and he hid there for a month, during which he acquired a Canadian birth certificate for "Ramon Sneyd". He used the certificate to apply for a passport, and on May 7 he flew to London and right after to Lisbon, Portugal, which was one of the few cities in the world with a Rhodesian embassy. However, a clerical mistake resulting in "Sneya" being written in the passport instead of Sneyd prevented him from sailing to Africa. Although Ray managed to get a corrected passport from the local Canadian embassy, his time run out and he was forced to fly back to London after ten days in the Iberian country. In London, Ray called Ian Colvin, a journalist at The Telegraph, and asked him for contacts that could allow him to become a mercenary in Africa. Colvin suggested an unnamed man in Brussels who had dealings in Congo. By this point, Ray had run out of cash and the FBI had learned that he was using the alias Ramon Sneyd from the Canadians. He attempted to rob a small jewellery store on May 27, but the elderly owners attacked and attempted to disarm him, much to his surprise; when they pressed the alarm button, he fled empty-handed. On June 4, Ray robbed a Trustee Savings Bank but he only made out with about £100. He bought a ticket to Brussels and was ready to embark at Heathrow on June 8, when an immigration officer caught a glimpse of Ray's old passport and inquired him about it. Ray relied that the passport was issued incorrectly and that he had replaced it, but a Special Branch officer was suspicious and took him into custody. After determining Ray's real identity, Scotland Yard decided not to pursue charges for the robberies and he was returned to the U.S. under FBI guard, on July 18.

On March 10, 1969 Ray confessed to the murder and entered a guilty plea on the advice of his first attorney, Percy Foreman, who especialized in helping clients avoid the death penalty. Ray was then sentenced to 99 years in prison. Three days later, Ray fired Foreman, recanted his confession and claimed he was the victim of a conspiracy. He would unsuccessfully request his guilty plea to be withdrawn and to be granted a trial for the rest of his life. On June 10, 1977 he escaped from prison again, along with six other convicts, but they were all recaptured after three days. Another year was added then to Ray's sentence, bringing it to 100 years. He died in prison on April 23, 1998, as a result of complications from Hepatitis C that he contracted from a contaminated blood transfusion while he was incarcerated.

Ray's claims
After Foreman, Ray hired Jack Kershaw, a noted segregationist and Southern secessionist, and claimed that he was the fall guy in a conspiracy involving several people. According to Ray, he was brought into the plot by a man named Raul that he met in Montreal in 1967. He admitted being in Memphis at the time of the murder and witnessing it, but denied being the shooter, and claimed that he purposely left his prints on the gun because he wanted to be famous. This was seemingly supported by witnesses who claimed that the shot was fired behind thick shrubbery at ground level and not from the window on Ray's room. At one point, Ray even identified the shooter as his elder brother John Larry Ray, who had been his accomplice in some robberies during the 1950s. In May 1977, Kershaw convinced the House Select Committee on Assassinations to perform ballistics tests that he claimed would prove Ray didn't shoot King, but the results were inconclusive. A wider investigation also failed to find evidence of a conspiracy while Ray was at large. Nevertheless, when Ray escaped from prison a month later, Kershaw (who continued to represent him) would that the escape was evidence of powerful figures helping Ray. After his recapture, Kershaw convinced Ray to give an interview to Playboy and to take a polygraph test whose results would be published alongside with it. Rather than exhonerating him, the publication claimed that the polygraph had confirmed Ray as the sole murderer beyond doubt. When Ray learned that Playboy had paid Kershaw $11,000 for the interview, he fired him and replaced him with Mark Lane, a noted JFK assassination conspiracy theorist. Another conspiracy theorist, William Francis Pepper, represented Ray during a mock trial in 1993 in which Ray was found innocent.

In 1997, King's son Dexter met Ray and asked him, "for the record, um, did you kill my father?", to which Ray replied, ''"No. No, I didn't." ''From then on, King's family stated publicly that they did not believe Ray was the real murderer, and supported his efforts to get a trial until his death.

Loyd Jowers
Loyd Jowers (1926 - 2000) was the owner of Jim's Grill, a restaurant near the Lorraine Motel. After Ray's mock trial, Jowers claimed on TV that he was paid $100,000 by Frank Liberto, a deceased merchant with ties to the Mafia, in exchange for hiring a hitman to kill King. He also claimed the unnamed hitman was not Ray. In 1998, the Kings sued Jowers "and other unknown co-conspirators" for the wrongful death of King. The ensuing trial was extremely unusual: it relied almost entirely on second or third hand witness accounts, other than Jowers; two former employees of Jowers who had supported his version earlier recanted, with one admitting that Jowers fabricated the story with the aim of selling its rights for a book or movie for $300,000; and Jowers himself agreed with the Kings (represented by Ray's last attorney, Pepper) in that he was part of a conspiracy involving not just the organized crime of Memphis and New Orleans but also the Memphis Police Department, the FBI, CIA and U.S. Military. None of these agencies were accused in the lawsuit and thus could not take part in the proceedings to defend themselves.

On December 8, 1999, Jowers was found guilty of being part of a conspiracy to kill King, along with "others, including government agencies". The shooter was not named, but Dexter King claimed that Jowers had earlier accused Lt. Earl Clark, a Memphis Police Department Officer who died in 1987. Jowers himself died from a heart attack five months after the verdict, in May 20, 2000. An investigation of the Department of Justice concurrent with the trial published its own report on June 9, rejecting all allegations of a conspiracy to kill King, although it also admitted that there were too few leads remaining 30 years after the murder. The DOJ highlighted that Jowers had been extremely inconsistent about the identity of the shooter, blaming at different times since 1993 an African American man firing from South Main Street, "Raul", a white MPD Lieutenant, and someone he didn't recognize.

Other claims
People who believe in a conspiracy to murder King have pointed that he was monitored by the FBI's COINTELPRO since 1963, on direct orders from J. Edgar Hoover, who considered him a subversive and a communist; and that the Bureau had mailed him an anonymous letter in 1964, blackmailing and inviting him to commit suicide. It has also been claimed that officers tasked with security in the area near the Lorraine or that could harbor sympathy for King were inexplicably removed from their posts on the day of the murder. Reverend James Lawson, one of King's friends, believes that King was murdered on April 4, 1968 because it was the anniversary of King's anti-war speech "Beyond Vietnam", and that the assassination was a last-ditch attempt to deflate King's impending Poor People's March on Washington. Another church minister, Ronald Denton Wilson, claimed in 2002 that King's murder was masterminded by his father, Henry Clay Wilson, because he believed that King was a communist. Wilson had previously stated that his father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, but he denied that the murder was racially motivated. He never offered evidence of any claim, however.

Modus Operandi
Ray fired a single .30-06 bullet through the boarding house's bathroom window with a Remington Model 760 rifle. King, who was standing on the Motel's balcony near his room, was hit on his right cheek; the bullet caused fatal damage as it deviated downward, breaking King's jaw and several vertebrae and blood vessels before lodging into his shoulder. After the attack, Ray wrapped the rifle and binoculars in a blanket and dumped them after running away from the house.

Known Victims

 * 1949, unspecified location in Missouri: A victimless burglary.
 * 1952, unspecified location in Illinois: Unnamed taxi driver
 * 1955, unspecified location in Missouri: A victimless theft and forgery.
 * 1959, St. Louis, Missouri: A Kroger store
 * 1968:
 * April 4, Memphis, Tennessee: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 39
 * May 27, London, U.K.: Maurice and Billie Isaacs
 * June 4, London, U.K.: Trustee Savings Bank

On Criminal Minds
Though Ray has never been mentioned or referenced directly in Criminal Minds, his mugshot appeared in L.D.S.K. alongside the mugshots and photos of other infamous assassins.