James Earl Ray: The Man Who Shot Martin Luther King Jr.

Here’s a sanitized version of the provided YouTube transcript:

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At 6 PM on April 4th, 1968, Patrolman Richmond of the Memphis Police Department was at his observation post inside a fire station on South Main Street. The African-American undercover officer had been instructed to keep an eye on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights activist was in town to support and direct a strike of sanitation workers. Richmond could clearly see the reverend as he stood on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel. Then came the shot. A police tactical squad had just stopped at the fire station for a break. Richmond came running to them, telling them that King had just been shot. Some of the tactical team ran to the Lorraine Motel.

Witnesses reported that the shot had come from a red brick building on South Main Street, just across the road. Other patrolmen immediately ran there to inspect the area. One of them found a blue suitcase in a box containing a rifle outside the Canopy Amusement Company at 424 South Main Street. A witness said it had been dropped just a few minutes earlier by a sharply dressed white male. Shortly afterward, a white Mustang had left the area at high speed.

At 7:05 PM, Dr. King was pronounced dead at St. Joseph’s Hospital. A bullet had torn the major blood vessels in his neck on the way in, then severed his spinal cord on the way out. The FBI immediately declared this to be a top investigative priority. Investigators traced the origin of the shot to the rooming house owned by Mrs. Bessie Brewer at 422 South Main Street. She reported that John Willard had registered on April 4th between 3 and 3:30 PM. He had rejected his first room, moving into another one that faced the Lorraine Motel. Willard was approximately 35 years old, 5 foot 11, with a neat appearance.

Charles Stevens, a guest at the house, was staying in a room next to Willard’s. That afternoon, he heard someone occupying the bathroom on that floor for a long time without sounds of running water or toilets flushing. When he heard the loud bang of a gunshot, he looked in the hallway and saw a man running with a large bundle under his arm. A few minutes later, a man matching Willard’s description had dropped the bundle outside the Canopy Amusement Company. This bundle contained a model 760 Remington Game Master rifle, a scope, and a blue zipper bag. In the bag was a pair of binoculars and a receipt proving that they had been bought at York Arms Company in Memphis that very day.

The FBI was able to trace the rifle to Aero Marine Supply Company in Birmingham, Alabama. On March 29, a man named Harvey Lomair had bought the rifle and a scope. He had then exchanged the original weapon for the 760 the following day, claiming that he needed a more powerful weapon to hunt deer. The FBI also combed through hotel and motel reservations in Memphis. They found that on April 3rd, an Eric Starbo Gold had registered at the Rebel Motel in Memphis. This man matched the description of John Willard and drove a white Mustang.

Agents found that Gold had bought a Mustang in August of 1967, listing a home address in Birmingham, Alabama. While inquiring about Gold in Birmingham, agents learned that he had an interest in dancing. On April 11th, police found an abandoned white Mustang in Atlanta. It was Gold’s. By searching the car, they found it had been serviced in Los Angeles.

The FBI started probing dance schools, and Gold’s name popped up in the records of the National Dance Studio. Here, the owner mentioned that Gold had an interest in becoming a bartender. Investigators found an international school of bartending in the area, and they struck gold. Eric Gold had indeed attended its courses, and there was even a photo of his graduation.

Meanwhile, agents in Atlanta searched throughout low-cost rooming houses looking for any evidence that Gold may have been staying there. He had indeed registered in one of them on March 24th. In his room, agents found a map of Atlanta. Someone had circled the house of Reverend King and the headquarters of his civil rights organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Further clues proved that Gold had returned to Atlanta on the day after the assassination, but the trail stopped there.

Luckily, the FBI was able to recover three fingerprints from the binoculars and the rifle. Thanks to their extensive database, on April 19th, they found a match. The man known as Eric Starbo Gold was identified by his real name, a known criminal and prison escapee by the name of James Earl Ray.

James Earl Ray was born on March 10, 1928, in one of the poorest and roughest neighborhoods in Alton, Illinois. He was the first child of George “Speedy” Ray and his wife, Lucille, better known as “Seal.” For the first six years of James’s life, Speedy tried to live honestly, but opportunities were scarce. When James turned seven, Speedy was arrested for forgery. Once freed on bond, he moved the whole family to Ewing, Missouri. Life kept piling misery upon the family. In the spring of 1937, one of their daughters, Marjorie, died in a fire. The tragedy tightened the bond between James and his younger brothers, John and Jerry. The three would always remain close in adult life, helping each other through hard times.

It was with John, in fact, that James experienced his first arrest when he was just 14 for selling stolen newspapers. At the age of 15, James spent most of his free time with his uncle Earl, who introduced him to the world of all-night bars, brothels, gambling, and brawling. After Uncle Earl was arrested in late 1943, James decided to leave Ewing and move back to Alton, staying with his maternal grandmother, Mary Mayer. The teenager took a job at a shoe factory, staying out of trouble. During this period, he hung out with his young uncle Willie Meyer and his co-worker Henry Stumstun, a German American who did not hide his admiration for Hitler and the Nazi Party. Uncle Willie later confirmed to the FBI that James’s friend was an individual who had pro-Nazi leanings, and Ray became anti-Negro and anti-Jewish as a result.

Ironically, James and Stun worked at a factory that supplied the U.S. Army in its fight against the Nazis in Europe. At the end of the war, the military suspended orders from the factory, and James was laid off. Somewhat counterintuitively, James joined those who were responsible for his firing: the U.S. Army. In early 1946, James earned a marksman qualification at Camp Crowder, Missouri, and was transferred to Bremerhaven, Germany. The deployment was not a positive experience. Ray came face to face with the desperation of the German people living among the rubble of bombed-out cities. He came to sympathize with the neo-Nazi werewolves who ambushed the Allied troops, but his time in Germany was marked by petty crime. James dealt in army-issued cigarettes, selling them to civilians or trading them for black market goods.

During his deployment and well until 1948, James began drinking heavily. According to his brother John, James also experimented with drugs, mostly amphetamines. His superiors eventually took notice, and in October 1948, Ray was charged with being drunk in quarters. Three days later, he escaped and was briefly AWOL before being captured. The Army had had enough, and so Ray was dishonorably discharged in December of 1948.

After a vagabond period, Ray was arrested for burglary in Los Angeles in October of 1949. This would be the start of a recurring pattern of burglaries and incarcerations. Ray’s pattern was briefly interrupted by two years of relative stability in Chicago. There, he worked several factory jobs, attended evening school, and even dated a girl, but it didn’t last. On May 6, 1952, Ray tried to rob a taxi at gunpoint. Upon release in March of 1954, he learned that his family was disintegrating. John and Jerry were in jail, Speedy had left Seal for good, and some of his younger siblings had been institutionalized. The way that James Ray saw it, there wasn’t much else to do but return to his fledgling life of crime.

In March of 1955, Ray burglarized a post office in Kellerville, Illinois. After three weeks on the lam, the highway patrol caught him. At the police station, when asked about his occupation, Ray smirked and said, “Love her.” Ray was sentenced to 45 months to be served at Leavenworth Prison in Kansas. Over that period, Ray was noted as being a well-behaved convict who furthered his education by taking classes in typing, English, Spanish, and bakery. He was offered a spot in the honor farm for model prisoners, but Ray refused on the grounds that the farm was racially integrated; he preferred to stay in the main prison, which was segregated.

After his release, Ray moved to San Luis and returned to his old habits, robbing gambling dens and spending his ill-gotten gains in bars and brothels on trips to Mexico and Canada. By this stage, Ray had become quite the competent felon—so much so that in the summer of 1959, he pulled a string of 12 burglaries. But Ray’s good streak couldn’t go on forever, and he was arrested yet again on October 10, 1959. The sentence he received on March 17 of the following year was a harsh one. Due to his recidivism, the judge dealt him 20 years to be served in the Missouri State Penitentiary, also known as Jeff City.

In November 1961, Ray staged his first attempted prison break using a makeshift ladder, but the contraption gave way, and he crashed into the prison courtyard. For the following three years, Ray kept a low profile, but he was no model convict. He dealt in contraband, bookmaking, and dealing amphetamines smuggled in by his brothers John and Jerry. The time spent at Jeff City accentuated Ray’s racist views. He frequently got into fights with Black convicts and guards. He began planning a move to Rhodesia, which he believed did not have a Black population.

John and Jerry later testified that James never expressed hatred for Martin Luther King; he simply disliked all African Americans. But according to fellow convicts, Ray had pondered the idea of killing the reverend for money. Ray theorized that if the civil rights leader were to enact economic boycotts, then business owners might pay for his murder.

In 1976, the House Select Committee on Assassinations discovered a group that may have wanted King dead, and they may have crossed paths with Ray at Jeff City. This was according to Russell G. Barr, a St. Louis criminal real estate developer. John Kaufman had introduced buyers to John Sutherland, a wealthy segregationist lawyer who had offered $50,000 to kill King. Buyers had refused, but the Missouri contract may have made its way to Jeff City and reached Ray’s ears. Both buyers and Kaufman had connections within the prison, including the resident doctor. Another convict, D.L. Mitchell, claimed Ray had tried to involve him in an assassination plan against King, a contract worth $50,000.

The lure of such a payday may have been the reason for the next escape attempt. In March of 1966, Ray tried once again to scale the walls of Jeff City and was again caught in the act. At the following trial, Ray pleaded temporary insanity, which prompted a psychiatric evaluation. The report noted that he had an IQ of 105, slightly above average. He exhibited no evidence of psychosis but was a sociopathic personality, antisocial type with anxiety and depressive features. Ray was returned to prison, where in late 1966 and early 1967, he was assigned to the prison bakery, where he began planning his next breakout.

James Earl Ray’s next breakout attempt took place on April 23, 1967. Ray hid inside a container used to carry bread throughout the prison. Two accomplices then loaded the container onto a truck, taking the bread outside of Jeff City. At the first stop, Ray jumped out of the truck and took off. Back in jail, his competitors told a prison informant that Ray was still inside. This resulted in two days of internal searches, giving time for Ray to make his getaway.

Five or six weeks after the escape, James met with his brothers John and Jerry in Chicago. Jerry later testified before the U.S. Senate that the Ray boys had discussed several money-making enterprises, ranging from kidnapping to shooting pornographic movies. Eventually, though, James revealed an explicit detail: he was planning on killing Martin Luther King. Jerry disagreed, commenting that there couldn’t be any real money in killing a Black man, even one as famous as King. Where there was money, though, was in robbing banks.

Allegedly, on July 13, James and John robbed a bank in their hometown of Alton. Two days later, James was in Montreal, Canada, now going by the alias Eric Starbo Gold. By his own account, he had befriended Raul, a shady character of apparent Spanish or Latino descent. Investigators were never able to confirm his existence. Ray needed a clean Canadian passport and identity, and his new friend offered to help in exchange for Ray smuggling unidentified packages, probably narcotics, south of the border. Ray did a good job, so Raul made a new offer: James had to relocate to Alabama and smuggle weapons into Mexico from there. Raul promised him safe travel documents, a new car, and a paycheck of $12,000.

Having accepted the offer, Ray moved back to the U.S. He first met with Jerry in Chicago again, mentioning the possibility of killing Dr. King for money. By the end of August 1967, James was living in Birmingham, Alabama. As we’ve learned, he had bought a white Mustang and would eventually take dancing and bartending lessons. He also frequented between two and nine psychologists with expertise in hypnotism, looking at how to improve his memory and social skills. Ray also spent some of his spare time advocating for presidential candidate George Wallace, an outspoken segregationist. According to an FBI report, his support of Wallace even got him into a racial argument followed by a mugging outside a bar. He also contacted the ultra-conservative John Birch Society, asking for information on moving to Rhodesia.

Finally, in March of 1968, he underwent some minor plastic surgery for his nose before leaving L.A. in his white Mustang. After a short stay in New Orleans, he moved to Selma, Alabama, on March 22nd. According to Ray’s own declarations to author William Bradford Huie, this is when he started stalking Martin Luther King Jr. The stalker moved from Selma to Montgomery, Birmingham, and finally Atlanta, Georgia, at the end of the month. He had purchased the model 760 rifle on April 3rd. Ray checked in at the Rebel Motel in Memphis on the 4th. He left the Rebel before 1 PM. At some point between 3 and 3:30 PM, the 30-year-old Mr. Willard registered at the Brewer rooming house in sight of the Lorraine Motel. In an interview with writer Huie, Ray claimed that it was Raul who checked in as Willard, but in a later letter, he admitted that it was he and only he who had registered at the lodging house.

Between 3:30 and 5 PM, Ray bought a pair of binoculars and then returned to his room. He then moved to the shared bathroom on the floor from which he could enjoy a better view of the Lorraine Motel. At 6 PM, Patrolman Richmond could clearly see Reverend King as he stood on a balcony, and then came the shot. Immediately after the shot rang out through Memphis, Ray left the building, dropped the rifle, and sped away in his Mustang. On April 5th, he abandoned his car in Atlanta and boarded a bus heading to Canada, which he reached by the 6th. On the 8th, he started the process of acquiring a Canadian passport. First, he went to a public library, searched newspapers from 1932, and picked two names from the birth notices. Then he applied for duplicate birth certificates for both names, taking care to rent two separate rooms to be provided as residents’ addresses.

Having obtained a duplicate birth certificate for the alias Raymond George Snide, he asked a travel agent to handle the request for a new passport. This was issued on April 24th. Let’s go back to the FBI investigation now. Agents discovered Ray’s identity and movements, but his trail had gone cold. They proceeded to question Ray’s fellow inmates in Missouri, who told them that he planned to get a Canadian passport. Following that clue, the bureau contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for help, asking them to review all passports issued after Ray’s escape from Jeff City. The Mounties obliged, and on June 1st, they identified a passport issued on April 24, 1968. It was in the name of Raymond George Snide, but the man in the photo looked like Ray. The application had been filed by a travel agency in Toronto.

By the same agency, Mr. Snide had bought a round-trip ticket to London, departing on May 6th and returning on May 21st. Now it was Scotland Yard’s turn to step in. They found that on the 7th, Snide had exchanged his ticket for a fare to Lisbon, Portugal. Lisbon police confirmed that Snide, aka James Ray, had indeed