James Earl Ray

James Earl Ray (March 10, 1928 – April 23, 1998) was an American fugitive who was convicted of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. After the assassination, Ray, who had planned on living in exile in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), fled to London and was captured there. Ray was convicted in 1969 after entering a guilty plea—thus forgoing a jury trial and the possibility of a death sentence—and was sentenced to 99 years of imprisonment. He later made many attempts to withdraw his guilty plea and to be tried by a jury, but was unsuccessful.

While Ray was not formally registered with a political party, his political views were aligned with the segregationist platform. He was a staunch supporter of the segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace and his 1968 presidential campaign with the American Independent Party. Ray died on April 23, 1998, at the age of 70, at the Nashville Memorial Hospital in Madison, Tennessee, from complications related to kidney disease and liver failure caused by hepatitis C, having served twenty-nine years in prison.

In 1994, Loyd Jowers, a restaurant owner, publicly began claiming that he had been part of a conspiracy to assassinate King and that Ray was a scapegoat. In a Memphis civil trial in 1999, a jury unanimously concluded that Jowers was liable for the assassination, that King was the victim of a conspiracy, and that various U.S. governmental agencies had conspired to murder King and frame Ray for the assassination. The King family has consistently said that they believe Ray was innocent, although this conclusion was disputed by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2000. The King family has stated that they believe the true murderer was a Memphis Police Department officer, Lieutenant Earl Clark.

Ray was born on March 10, 1928, in Alton, Illinois, to George Ellis Ray and Lucille Ray (née Maher). He had Irish, Scottish and Welsh ancestry.

In February 1935, Ray's father, known by the nickname Great Dane, passed a bad check in Alton, Illinois, and then moved to Ewing, Missouri, where the family changed their name to Raynes to avoid law enforcement. James Earl Ray was the oldest of nine children, including John Larry Ray, Franklin Ray, Jerry William Ray, Melba Ray, Carol Ray Pepper, Suzan Ray and Marjorie Ray. His sister Marjorie died in a fire as a young child in 1933. Ray left school at the age of 12. He later joined the U.S. Army at the close of World War II and served in Germany. Ray struggled to adapt to military life and in 1948 was discharged for ineptitude and lack of adaptability.

Before his conviction for the murder of King, Ray had committed a variety of crimes and was a small time crook.^{[citation needed]} Ray's first conviction for criminal activity, a burglary in California, came in 1949. In 1952, he served two years for the armed robbery of a taxi driver in Illinois. In 1955, he was convicted of mail fraud after stealing money orders in Hannibal, Missouri. For this, he was imprisoned for four years in the federal United States Penitentiary Leavenworth. In 1959, he was caught stealing $120 (~$1,325 in 2025) in an armed robbery of a Kroger store in St. Louis. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison for repeated offenses. He escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary on April 23, 1967 by hiding in a truck transporting bread from the prison bakery.

After his escape, Ray stayed on the move throughout the United States and Canada, going first to St. Louis and then onward to Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, and Birmingham, Alabama. He arrived in Birmingham, Alabama on August 26, 1967. While there he purchased a white 1966 Ford Mustang for $1,995 in cash on August 30 from a newspaper ad he answered the previous day. Ray applied for and received an Alabama driver's license under the name Eric Starvo Galt with license #2848947. Also in Birmingham he bought .38 revolver at some point which he later had with him when he was arrested in London. He then left Alabama going to Mexico, stopping in Acapulco before settling in Puerto Vallarta on October 19.

While in Mexico, Ray, using the alias Eric Starvo Galt, attempted to establish himself as a pornographic film director. Using mail-ordered equipment, he filmed and photographed local prostitutes. Frustrated with his results and jilted by the prostitute with whom he had formed a relationship, Ray left Mexico on or around November 16, 1967, arriving in Los Angeles three days later While there, Ray attended a local bartending school and took dance lessons. His chief interest was the Democrat George Wallace presidential campaign, and Ray was quickly drawn to Wallace's segregationist platform, spending much of his time in Los Angeles volunteering at the Wallace campaign headquarters in North Hollywood.