![]() ![]() Indeed, a former agent from the FBI’s field office in Atlanta said the bureau’s tracking of King was second “only to the way they went after Jimmy Hoffa.” In 1975, a group of former FBI agents called on Congress to investigate this harrassment. ![]() “They might not have been involved in the murder,” McMillian observes of the FBI, “but I wish people knew the really shameful things that they did.” With it came a letter threatening King with public exposure if he didn’t kill himself, and claiming that the sender had evidence of other affairs. In one instance, the FBI sent him a tape that allegedly contained audio of him having an affair. The bureau wiretapped his phone and monitored his movements, taking advantage of times when he seemed particularly upset or depressed. Yet given the way the bureau had treated her and her family, her suspicion of the FBI and its conclusions about her husband’s killer came from a very reasonable place, says John McMillian, a history professor at Georgia State University.ĭuring the 1950 and ‘60s, the FBI surveilled and harassed King, his family and his associates. It was a theory she maintained until her death in 2006 that has so far never been proven. “There is abundant evidence of a major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Coretta King said at a press conference in 1999, according to The King Center. But almost immediately after her husband’s assassination, she suspected that the FBI, which had investigated the murder, was involved in it. It’s not clear when Coretta Scott King, widow of King, began to believe in Ray’s innocence. (Credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images) An FBI Conspiracy? The House Assassinations Committee examining evidence in the killing of Martin Luther King, Jr. ![]() Ray’s fingerprints were the only ones found on the gun, and there were no witnesses who had seen him with Raoul during the nine months they supposedly knew each other ( Ray’s description of Raoul also changed a few times). When authorities caught him in London, he’d been planning to travel to Rhodesia, a former African state ruled by a white minority in present-day Zimbabwe.īut even if Ray had help, the evidence strongly pointed to him pulling the trigger. Some people had trouble, for example, believing Ray had arranged his international escape all by himself, since he had a track record of getting caught for more minor crimes. This doesn’t mean that Ray couldn’t have received assistance. ![]() Over several decades, federal investigators have routinely concluded that Raoul doesn’t exist. 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. Ray confessed to the crime on Maand received a 99-year prison sentence, which increased to a 100-year sentence after he briefly escaped in 1977.īut 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. An international manhunt led to his capture in June 1968 at Heathrow Airport in London, where he was caught carrying two fake Canadian passports. 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. 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. All three bore the fingerprints of an escaped convict named James Earl Ray. 30-06 Remington Gamemaster that had fired one shot. It contained a pair of binoculars, a newspaper with a story about King staying at the Lorraine Motel, and a. But within Martin Luther King’s family, there remains a persistent belief that Ray is innocent, and was set up to take the fall.įBI 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. For some 50 years, the federal government has maintained that James Earl Ray was the gunman who assassinated King that day. was shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. ![]()
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