James Earl Ray

James Earl Ray was a white American who didn't believe black people should be campaigning for rights. He is famous for assassinating Martin Luther King.
1. Martin Luther King was killed by a single rifle bullet on April 4, 1968, while standing on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Shortly after the shot was fired, witnesses saw a man believed to be James Earl Ray fleeing from a rooming house across the street from the Lorraine Motel.
  1. Ray had been renting a room in the house at the time. A package was dumped close to the site that included a rifle and a binocular, both found with Ray's fingerprints.
    1. He had to calculate the trajectory and angle of where the bullet would fire so that he would definitely kill Martin Luther King, so he thought it through carefully.
2. He did not like Martin Luther King because he thought that black people were dirty and that white people were superior to black people.
  1. His father was also involved in crime, which may have been where he got his criminal natures from.
On June 8, 1968, a little more than two months after King's death, Ray was captured at London's Heathrow Airport while trying to leave the United Kingdom on the false Canadian passport.
1. At check-in, the ticket agent noticed the name on his passport—Sneyd—was on a Royal Canadian Mounted Police watchlist.
  1. At the airport, officials noticed that Ray carried another passport under a second name. The UK quickly extradited Ray to Tennessee, where he was charged with King's murder. He confessed to the crime on March 10, 1969, his 41st birthday and after pleading guilty was sentenced to 99 years in prison.
On June 11, 1977, Ray made his second appearance on the FBI Most Wanted Fugitives list, this time as the 351st entry. He and six other convicts had escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee, on June 10. They were recaptured on June 13 and returned to prison.[25] A year was added to Ray's previous sentence, to total 100 years.
James Earl Ray was born to a poor family in Alton, Illinois, the son of Lucille (Maher) and George Ellis Ray. He had Welsh, Australian, and Irish ancestry, and was raised Catholic.
1. In February 1935, Ray's father, known by the nickname Speedy, passed a bad check in Alton, Illinois, then moved to Ewing, Missouri, where the family had to change their name to Raynes to avoid law enforcement. Ray left school at age 15. He joined the US Army at the close of World War II and served in Germany.
  1. Ray returned to the United States, arriving in Los Angeles on November 19, 1967. While in L.A., Ray attended a local bartending school and took dance lessons.[10] His chief interest, however, was the George Wallace presidential campaign. Ray harbored a strong prejudice against African Americans and was quickly drawn to Wallace's segregationist platform. He spent much of his time in Los Angeles volunteering at the Wallace campaign headquarters in North Hollywood.
2. He was convicted of his first crime, a burglary in California, in 1949. In 1952 he served two years for armed robbery of a taxi driver in Illinois. In 1955, he was convicted of mail fraud after stealing money orders in Hannibal, Missouri, and then forging them to take a trip to Florida. He served three years at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. In 1959 he was caught stealing $120 (equivalent to $1,000 in 2015) in an armed robbery of a St. Louis Kroger store.[6] Ray was sentenced to twenty years in prison for repeated offenses. He escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1967 by hiding in a truck transporting bread from the prison bakery.
Following his escape, Ray stayed on the move throughout the United States and Canada, going first to St. Louis and then on to Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, and Birmingham. When he got to Alabama, Ray stayed long enough to buy a 1966 Ford Mustang and get an Alabama driver's license
1. He then drove to Mexico, stopping in Acapulco before settling down in Puerto Vallarta on October 19, 1967. While in Mexico, Ray, using the alias Eric Starvo Galt, attempted to establish himself as a pornography director. Using mail-ordered equipment, he filmed and photographed local prostitutes. Frustrated with his results and jilted by the prostitute he had formed a relationship with, Ray left Mexico around November 16, 1967.

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