Why James Earl Ray Murdered Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
by
John J. Dunphy
Author’s note: There is an entire chapter about James Earl Ray in my book Murder and Mayhem in Southwestern Illinois. My family has an inadvertent connection with Ray. My late grandmother was shopping in an Alton grocery store that Ray robbed in 1959!
The confessed assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on March 10, 1928, in his family’s house at 1021 West Ninth Street in what was then the red-light district of Alton, Illinois, a small city located on the Mississippi River . The residence has since been torn down, and the lot remains empty. Ray later referred to the neighborhood as a place so rough that the toughest characters in the fiction of Mark Twain would have been considered sissies. He was the eldest of ten children born to parents who never escaped from the cycle of poverty.
Ray claimed his family was nominally Catholic and that in 1934 his parents enrolled him in the first grade of St. Mary’s School, located on the corner of East Third and Henry Streets. He was forced to leave St. Mary’s before the academic year ended when his father was run out of Alton because of his involvement in a forgery scheme. The Ray family moved to Bowling Green, Missouri, and finally settled in a rundown farmhouse outside Ewing, Missouri, across the Mississippi River from Quincy, Illinois. James Earl Ray’s first altercation with the law occurred in 1942 when the fourteen-year-old was visiting his grandmother in Alton. Ray grabbed a bundle of newspapers that had been tossed from a delivery truck and began selling the papers himself. The police seized the young thief and ended Ray’s entrepreneurial enterprise.
The Ray family moved to Galesburg, Illinois, but James decided to live with his grandmother in Alton. He dropped out of school at 16 and took a job in 1944 as a laborer at the old International Shoe Tannery in Hartford, Illinois. When World War II ended and the military cut back its orders, however, Ray was laid off. With no high school diploma or marketable skills, his job outlook was poor. An Army recruiter in East St. Louis persuaded Ray to enlist.
Ray was sent to Germany but received a general discharge in 1948 for what the Army termed as “ineptness.” Ray returned to Alton and then decided to hit the road. He moved to Chicago, then drifted west to Los Angeles. He visited his family, now living in Quincy’s seedy riverfront area, and then returned to Chicago. It was during this aimless period of his life that Ray acquired his first arrest as an adult: April 18, 1950, on a vagrancy charge in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
But it was in the Windy City that Ray’s life of crime began in earnest. His bungling as a criminal, however, easily rivaled his incompetence as a soldier. Fleeing from Chicago police after robbing a cab driver of $11, Ray fled into a dead-end alley where a cop’s bullet passed through both his arms. Ray fell through a basement window and cut open his face. This botched caper earned him a stretch at the state prison at Joliet and the state prison farm at Pontiac from 1952 to 1954. Upon his release, Ray returned to the River Bend to ply his criminal trade. On October 28, 1954, the hapless Ray was arrested for the burglary of the National Cleaners in East Alton. Ray had jumped through a plate glass window, losing his loafers and badly cutting his feet. When the police arrived, they disabled Ray’s getaway car. He walked miles to a relative’s house where he was shortly apprehended by the police, who simply followed his bloody footprints.
Ray was indicted for the National Cleaners burglary, but the case never went to trial. While out on bail, Ray was arrested for breaking and entering a U.S. Post Office in Hannibal, Missouri. He was sentenced to three years and nine months in the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas.
In 1958, Ray’s father deserted his wife for another woman and moved to the Soulard area of St. Louis. Ray’s mother and some of his siblings chose to settle in Soulard, as well. Upon release from prison, Ray also moved to St. Louis and then returned to Alton to resume his criminal activity. He robbed two grocery stores in the Gateway City and then robbed Wegener’s, a grocery store located on the corner of Alby and East Ninth Street in Alton.
Store owner Mary Wegener told a Life magazine reporter in 1968 that she initially thought it was some kind of bizarre joke. “At first, I thought he was fooling around so I started telling him about God and then he pulled the gun.“ Wegener recalled Ray’s behavior as erratic. “He chased people all around the store. He just ran around like a wild man.” Nine years after the robbery, Wegener admitted, “I can still feel his gun in my back.“ The author’s grandmother, who lived next door to Wegener’s, was shopping for groceries in the store at the time of the robbery.
A police officer on a three-wheel motorcycle chased Ray and an accomplice as they fled the scene in their car. Ray jumped from the vehicle and escaped, but his cohort was captured after stopping and fleeing into some woods. Police found firearms that had been used in the robbery in the getaway car. Convicted of the St. Louis robberies, Ray was sentenced to serve twenty years at the Missouri State Penitentiary, which he entered in March 1960.
He escaped in April 1967 and shortly met with two of his brothers in Chicago. Authorities believe that James Earl Ray and another man robbed the Bank of Alton on July 13, 1967. Armed with a shotgun, the pair scooped up $30,000 from the cash drawers. Police found the partially-burned shoulder stock for a shotgun and clothing worn by the robbers near a street where Ray’s relatives lived in Alton. The day after the Alton robbery, Ray paid cash for a car he purchased in East St. Louis. Investigators also believe that Ray used money from the bank robbery to purchase the 30.06 Remington Gamemaster hunting rifle that he used to assassinate King.
The U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1978 that Ray killed the civil rights leader in order to earn a $50,000 bounty that had been placed on King’s head some years earlier by a clique of white supremacists. Conrad “Pete” Baetz of Glen Carbon, a former Madison County sheriff’s deputy who served as an investigator for the committee, stated in an exclusive interview with The Telegraph that the conspirators met in a home on Arsenal Street in St. Louis. The site, according to Baetz, was about 200 yards from the Grapevine Tavern, which was owned by Ray’s brother, John Ray.
Ray learned about the bounty while he was on the run, or possibly while he was still in the Missouri State Penitentiary. He began stalking King as the civil rights figure traveled around the nation. Ray caught up with King in Memphis, where the Noble Prize winner was trying to bolster support for striking sanitation workers. Ray checked into a boarding house across from the Lorraine Motel, where King was staying. He fired his rifle from the bathroom window and killed King with a single bullet to his throat while the revered civil rights activist was standing on the balcony of his motel.
Ray dropped the rifle, which carried his fingerprints, outside the motel, as well as a portable radio that had been inscribed with his prisoner number while he was incarcerated at the Missouri State Penitentiary. Using money garnered from the Bank of Alton robbery, Ray fled to Canada and then, with the aid of a fake passport, to London. Baetz stated that Ray intended to go to South Africa and seek employment as a mercenary. Ray was apprehended at London’s Heathrow Airport in June 1968. At the time of his arrest, he had only $123 in his pocket. Baetz is not certain whether Ray ever received the $50,000 bounty that had been offered by the white supremacists.
River Bend residents were shocked to learn that King’s assassin was a native of their region. The national media reporters who descended on Alton to learn more about Ray found any number of people who were willing to talk. Alton Police Chief William Peterson described Ray as “the kind of criminal who gets into all kinds of trouble, hates and has no respect for the law.” William Maher, an uncle of James Earl Ray, dismissed him as “the kind of guy who only turned up when he wanted something — like bail money.” He also remarked that “every time he came back here, he got into trouble.”
In March 1969, Ray pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. He soon recanted and, for the rest of his life, insisted that he had not killed King. In a crudely-written 1988 autobiography, Ray insisted that he was framed by a man called Raoul. Ray claimed that Raoul, a mysterious figure he had met in Montreal after escaping from the Missouri State Penitentiary, took a rifle the two of them had purchased in Alabama to show to dealers in Memphis.
On the day of King’s assassination, according to Ray, he went to see Raoul at the boarding house across the street from the Lorraine Motel, but Raoul turned him away. He later heard about the assassination on the radio of his white Mustang and fled when he heard they were looking for a white man who was driving such a vehicle. Raoul, Ray argued, must have deliberately left the rifle, which contained the former Altonian’s fingerprints, at the crime scene to implicate him. Baetz and other authorities believe that Raoul is a product of Ray’s imagination. Anna Sandhu, a courtroom artist who was married to Ray from 1978 to 1992 while he was in prison, initially believed that Ray was innocent but later became convinced of his guilt.
As the one generally acknowledged to be King’s killer, Ray was not popular with some of the black inmates at Brushy Mountain State Prison in Petros, Tennessee, where he served his sentence. He was assaulted by three black inmates in 1980 while using the prison’s law library. Ray was stabbed in the arm, face and chest.
Ray died on April 23, 1998, of liver disease from a blood transfusion he received in prison. He never stopped protesting his innocence and gained some unlikely supporters. A year before his death, Ray was visited in prison by Dexter King, a son of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He told King that he had nothing to do with his father’s death. King replied that he believed him. A few days later, Martin Luther King III, Dexter King’s older brother, announced that he also believed Ray to be innocent and that the former Altonian had been framed as a patsy by conspirators.
Ray’s funeral was held at Metropolitan Interdenominational Church, a prominent black church in Nashville. Coretta Scott King declined an invitation to attend the service, although she sent a note of consolation to the Ray family.
Jerry Ray secretly scattered his brother’s ashes in Ireland, the nation of the family’s ancestors. While James Earl Ray’s mother and grandmother are buried in a local cemetery, James had no desire to be buried in the River Bend. Jerry Ray explained that his brother was afraid that his remains would be dug up by a prankster.
Bibliography
Dunphy, John J. “James Earl Ray;” Springhouse Magazine, Volume 26: Number 3.
— -. “The Secret Revealed: How James Earl Ray Got His Money, New Letters 77: 2 (Winter 2011).
Huie, William Bradford. “The Story of James Earl Ray and the Plot to Assassinate Martin Luther King,” Look; November 12, 1968.
Kramer, Roger. “Ray’s biography declares ‘conspiracy,’ “The [Alton, IL] Telegraph; March 31, 1988.
Levins, Harry. “Ray spent much of his life in St. Louis area, getting into trouble,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch; April 24, 1998.
McWhirter, William A. “The story of the accused killer of Dr. King,“ Life; May 3, 1968.
Yakstis, Ande. “Alton bank robbery financed Ray’s escape,” The [Alton, IL] Telegraph; April 4, 1998.
— . “ ‘Ray pulled trigger,’ ” The [Alton, IL] Telegraph; April 4, 1998
— .“Ray’s dying wish: Prove innocence,” The [Alton, IL] Telegraph; April 24, 1998
— . “Ray’s life of crime began in Alton,” The [Alton, IL] Telegraph; April 24, 1998
— . “Service held for Ray,” The [Alton, IL] Telegraph; May 29, 1998.
— . “King murder revisited,” The [Alton, IL] Telegraph; June 19, 2000.
John J. Dunphy is the author of Abolitionism and the Civil War in Southwestern Illinois, Lewis and Clark’s Illinois Volunteers and From Christmas to Twelfth Night in Southern Illinois. His latest book, Unsung Heroes of the Dachau Trials, will be published this winter by McFarland.