National Archives and Records Administration - ARC 43297, LI 233-MLK-150170 - INTERVIEW OF JAMES EARL RAY BY JOHN AUBLE, KST-TV ST LOUIS - DVD Copied by Ann Galloway. U.S. House of Representatives. Select Committee on Assassinations. (09/17/1976 - 01/03/1979).
James Earl Ray (March 10, 1928 – April 23, 1998) assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. Ray was convicted on his 41st birthday after entering a guilty plea to forgo a jury trial. Had he been found guilty by jury trial, he would have been eligible for the death penalty. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison. He later recanted his confession and tried unsuccessfully to gain access to a retrial. In 1998, Ray died in prison of complications due to chronic hepatitis C infection. He had served 29 years in prison at the time of his death.
Martin Luther King was felled by a single bullet fired from a Remington 760 Gamemaster .30-06 rifle 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 motel. 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 binoculars, both found with Ray's fingerprints.
On the day of the assassination, Ray fled north by car from Memphis to Canada, arriving in Toronto three days later, where he hid out for over a month and acquired a Canadian passport under the false name of Ramon George Sneyd. He left Toronto in late May on a flight to England. He stayed briefly in Lisbon, and returned to London. On June 8, 1968, a little more than two months after King's death, Ray was arrested at London's Heathrow Airport while trying to leave the United Kingdom on the false Canadian passport. At check-in, the ticket agent noticed the name on his passport—Sneyd—was on a Royal Canadian Mounted Police watchlist. 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 he was sentenced to 99 years in prison.
source Link
https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.43297
copyright Link
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
Information Link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Earl_Ray
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