March 27, 2025 • 41 mins
A manhunt is launched for MLK’s killer, James Earl Ray. After his capture he pleads guilty. With no trial the world won’t hear the facts of the case laid out in court, giving rise to decades of conspiracy theories that even the King family came to believe.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck.
And this is part two of our two parter. I'm
the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
That's right where we locked off with Part one was
the funeral of Martin Luther King Junior. And we're going
to pick up now with the investigation and the manhunt.
And while we're talking about that, we might as well
go ahead and say it's still perhaps the largest manhunt
and FBI history, depending on who you ask, cost a
couple of million bucks in those dollars, thirty five hundred investigators.
(00:44):
And it was all just a bit awkward because, as
we all know, or maybe some people don't know this,
but the FBI had been tracking Martin Luther King Junior
since nineteen fifty six, so for twelve years under a
program called racial Matters, Racial matters.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
And then I don't think they meant like matters like
race matters.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
No, I think they meant the other way, like the
matters of race.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Right.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
And then in nineteen sixty three they started tapping his
bones under the Communist infiltration program and Jay Edgar Hoover
was still around at the time, because it seems like
he was there for three hundred years. Yeah, and he
didn't like Martin Luther King Junior. He called the most
notorious liar in the country publicly at a press conference
because King had been criticizing the FBI because they, you know,
(01:33):
weren't protecting the civil rights of black Americans, and so.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Hoover didn't like the guy.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yet he was the guy kind of at the top
of this huge investigation.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
I read Martin Luther King's cool response to Jaegar Hoover
calling the most notorious liar. Get bent, No, no, He
said that Jayegar Hoover must be under tremendous pressure to
have said such a thing. Was sympathetic.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Jeez, let's talk about the high road man.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Yeah for sure.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
All right, So, the FBI gets a hold of that
thirty out six rifle that was determined to be the
murder weapon. They couldn't actually conclusively link that bullet to
the gun because the shell had been fragmented, but it
was the same caliber, and everybody was like, come on,
it's the gun. Can we all just agree to that?
Speaker 2 (02:25):
How many rifles do you guys? Have just laying around
in Memphis that day.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah, dumped minutes after by a guy who sped away
in a Mustang.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Right hundreds of just one hundred feet or so away
from the murder scene. So yeah, they couldn't conclusively link
that to the gun, but they were able to trace
the serial number, and they traced it back to a
sporting goods store in Birmingham, Alabama called Aeromarine Supply, and
they confirmed that it had been purchased just a few
(02:54):
days before MLK was assassinated.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Yeah, along with a scope and a gentleman who said
that he was going hunting on a hunting trip with
his brother.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Okay, because yeah, you have to you have to be
like that, that's believable, right, when you're buying a gun,
you gotta have a cover story.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Yeah, and under an alias, under the name Harvey Lomyer.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Right. So, two weeks after the killing, they figured out
that the prints on the gun matched those of a
guy named James Earl Ray. And at the time, James
Orl Ray had been an escape convict from a state
prison in Missouri for basically a year, he'd been on
(03:37):
the run. So now we had a suspect and we
had photos, and they started circulating it around to people
who had putatively interacted with James Orlray, including the guy
at the aeromarine supply store who sold him the gun.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
Yeah, so he was like, that's the guy.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
There are witnesses we mentioned earlier in part one at
Bessie Brewer boarding house. They also looked at pictures and
they were like, yeah, that's the guy we saw running away.
And they went to the hotel clerk or the boarding
house clerk and they said, yeah, this guy signed in.
That's him for sure, under the name John Willard. So
he had multiple aliases, and they that portable radio that
(04:20):
they found in the bundle had a scratched out ID
number and they eventually figured out that that was his
his prison radio. It had his his inmate number on it.
So he escaped prison, was like, I'm taking my radio.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
It seems pretty conclusive that James o'ray would have been
the shooter, right, Yeah, So they issued an indictment for
his arrest for the murder of Martin Luther King Junior
on May seventh, a couple months after or Noah month
after MLK was murdered, and an international manhunt began I
know the FBI was definitely concentrating on the United States,
(04:55):
but they didn't rule out the possibility that he had
started to go abroad, and so they he issued it
far and wide, a wanted poster with his data and
his photos on it.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
So the FBI started tracking his movements.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
He's got all these aliases in that year that he
was on the LAMB. After the shooting, he was into
politics for a little while, supporting Alabama Governor George Wallace
his presidential campaign. He was in la for a little while,
he took dance lessons, He went to Bartending School. He
lived in Mexico for like a month or so, trying
(05:32):
to become a pornography director under the name Eric Salvo Galt.
That didn't work out, so he left Mexico came back
to the States, and apparently in like the month or
so before the assassination, he had been stalking King and
had followed him from Atlanta to Memphis.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Yeah, so it seemed like the month before he murdered
Martin Luther King Junior. He suddenly got that idea in
his head because none of his movement suggested that he
had even focused on Martin Luther King at all up
to that point. After the assassination, James ro'ray fled to Toronto.
(06:13):
It's eventually where he landed first. Sorry, I'm sorry Toronto.
I know that too, thanks Chuck. So at the time, apparently,
if you were an American criminal in Canada, they were very,
very trusting at the time. They basically said, if you
(06:33):
swear that you're a Canadian citizen, you give us your name,
we'll send you a passport. And that's what crooks would do.
They would go to Canada when they were on the run.
They would look up old newspapers at the library and
find birth announcements from about the same time that they
were born, finding people who were their age, and they
would get their name. They would get their mother's maiden
(06:54):
name sometimes And apparently you didn't even need that. You
just fill out this form, say your name, say yes,
I swear I'm a Canadian citizen, and mail off for
a passport which would be mailed back to you too sweet.
And now you had a fraudulent, but official and legitimate
passport that you could use to travel the world with
(07:15):
under a new alias.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Yeah, and this time his alias was because you know,
it was a real dude. In fact, the guy was
a cop. Pretty ironic. But his name was Raymond George.
I guess sneid sn e y d.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
I heard snaid from somebody. Want. I don't know if
that was definitive.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Okay, well it's good that we spelled it out because
that'll come into play in a minute here. But from
Toronto he went to London. He was actually in London
a couple of times. He passed through London on his
way to Lisbon after that first flight from Canada. And
he was going to Lisbon because he was hoping to
go to Africa before the murder, and then afterward, his
(07:54):
long term plan was to go to Rhodesia now Zimbabwe
because in nineteen sixty a five percent white minority there
had assumed independence from the UK and he was to
go to Rhodesia and I'm gonna integrate into this small
white minority and become a paid mercenary.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Yeah. So, I mean he went to Lisbon hoping to
secure passage to Africa, and while he was there, he's like,
I got a great idea, surely that people are on
my trail, that Feds are on my trail now, and
they might even know my alias, so I need a
new alias. I'm going to go to the Canadian consulate
here in Lisbon. I'm going to tell them that they
(08:37):
misspelled my name on my passport. So he went there
and he told the Canadian consulate there that his last
name actually is spelled with an A, not a D.
And they're like, okay, whatever, here's your new passport with
your last name spelled correctly. And he had a new alias,
Ramon George Snee Yeah, instead of Snade. So there's one
(08:57):
letter change. And apparently that's satisfied James Orlray that he
had a new alias.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
Now, yeah, we'll get to who Ray was a little bit.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
But the one takeaway from everything that I've read is
he was not a very smart person.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Not a criminal mastermind. He was no brain from Pinky
in the Brain No.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Also, because he did not throw that first passport away
and that was would be his undoing. He like, like
we said, he could not secure that passage to Africa,
so he went back to London to figure out what
his next move was. He called a This is a
sort of a weird part of the story. He called
a reporter named Ian Colvin at the Daily Mail's foreign desk,
(09:38):
and I don't know if this guy had written articles
about it mercenaries or something.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
I don't know either, That's the only thing I can
figure out.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Because he called this random reporter and said, hey, you
got any contacts for these mercenaries. Colvian was like, no,
but if you're I guess, if you're looking to get
into that kind of thing, check into Brussels, because that's
where he might have better luck. It's a very strange
little side part of this story, for sure.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
It really is. So James Earl Ray was like, thank you,
thank you much and starts booking a flight two Brussels
from London. And it was in London on his way
to Brussels that he finally got nabbed. But not because
somebody noticed his mugshot or wanted poster and saw that
he was him, but because he had those two Canadian
(10:25):
passports and he had him in the same wallet.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Yeah, two different names, yes.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
And the passport checker noticed that he had two passports
and asked him about it. And I guess a cop
was standing nearby and stepped over and was like, hey,
why don't you join us in the back room. We've
got some questions for you, and that was it for
Ramon George Snade Snea. Yeah, he was quickly identified as
James Rolray. He had a thirty eight caliber pistol tucked
(10:52):
in the back of his pants going to board a plane.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
You could do that back then any metals detectors.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Yeah, as long as you didn't shoot it off because
you were excited during takeoff in the plane that they
didn't really care.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Yeah, So he was confirmed as James Lray. He was
taken into custody and on July nineteenth was flown back
to the US to stand trial. And that seems like
a great place for our first break.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Okay, So James Arrol Ray's been taken into custody and
he's flown back to the United States on July nineteenth
to stand trial, and the whole world is watching. They
want to know why the man who assassinated Martin Luther
King Junior, did that, Why he murdered MLK, What was
(12:11):
the point, what was the reason. They also wanted to
know if he had been working with other people, because
from the outset people were the public was just openly
skeptical that there was some conspiracy that had resulted in
mlk's murder and the world got none of that because
(12:31):
James o'ray pled guilty instead of going to trial. And
there was a paper reporting on the case who was
at this hearing where he played guilty and said that
it brought a shockingly swift ending to the case and
everybody was like, what just happened? And that was essentially
that there was no trial ever and there were no
(12:52):
facts presented, so it was just like, yep, I did
it send me to jail? Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
His attorney at the time, Percy Foreman, said, well, you know,
if you go to a jury trial, you're probably going
to get a death sentence because of you know, because
of the murder and its impact on the country. Basically
like you're not going to avoid the electric chair. So
if you plead guilty, you can get the maximum life sentence,
(13:21):
which is ninety nine years in prison in Tennessee. And
he said that's probably the right route to take, so
Ray took it. It was a two hour affair in court.
No one got the satisfaction of hearing any of the evidence.
It also meant he wouldn't be eligible for parole for
thirty years, whereas if he had gotten a life sentence
(13:42):
and not the ninety nine. He could have gotten out
in twelve and a half, but just three days after
he pleaded guilty, he recanted and tried for the rest
of his life to get a new trial, tried to escape.
He did escape. In fact, if you listened to our
Barkley Marathon episode, he escaped success for three days in
nineteen seventy seven and was picked up in Brushy Mountain
(14:04):
where that race takes place. But he would eventually die
in prison in nineteen ninety eight at the age of seventy,
which would also been the year he was first eligible
for parole.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Yes, and you said earlier that we were going to
talk a little bit about James Rolray in his criminal career.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
So he was born in Illinois, but mostly grew up
in Missouri, and he was the oldest of nine kids,
and his family was impoverished. His father was a convict
himself who didn't work very often. His mother was, as
James Earlray put it, a woman of very limited intelligence,
barely able to communicate, and she also drank very heavily.
(14:44):
And there was a report card from grade school that
said his attitude towards regulations was that he violates all
of them. This was him as a kid, and he
didn't improve very much as an adult. He dropped out
of high school at sixteen, worked for a while, and
then he joined the arm.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Yeah, he joined the army. Yeah, he dropped out of
high school at sixteen. King was in college at fifteen.
To just contrast the two situations, and forty sixty he
joined the army after being laid off from his civilian
job in the army. He was charged with drunkenness with
breaking arrest. He served three months in the army clink
(15:23):
hard labor for that. He was discharged less than honorably
for quote ineptness and lack of adaptability to military service
in nineteen forty eight. So just a couple of years
in the army. And then was a drifter and a
petty criminal who was in and out of jail over
and over.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Yeah, and he was serving a twenty year sentence for
robbery in Missouri. He started at nineteen sixty when he
broke out in nineteen sixty seven and began that year
on the lamb that culminated in the assassination of MLK.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yeah, and you know, it was really a twenty year
prison sentence for everything because it was a pretty small
like robbery at Kroger that wouldn't have gotten a twenty year.
But he had other armed robbery convictions, He had mail
fraud convictions and escape attempts, so it was like, hey,
we're just going to try and put you away for
a while. And if you're curious how he escaped, he
(16:20):
hid in a bread delivery truck that was leaving the prison.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
I heard that too. Yeah, you would have found me
eating loaves of bread too, with.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
Your little portable radio prison radio.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Just snaffing my fingers with a mouthful of bread. So
his criminal history, just because your lifetime criminal doesn't mean
you're good at it. Yeah, And James Earl Ray is
an excellent example of that time. Magazine described him back
in nineteen seventy seven as a bungling, petty gunman and
burglar whose life of crime has mostly been one fizzle
(16:55):
after another. And they weren't lying because some of his
greatest hits that they went on to site was that
at one crime scene he dropped identification, He dropped his ID. Yeah,
one hold up in a neighborhood he got lost drive
as he was making his getaway, ended up back driving
(17:16):
back into the neighborhood where he just robbed somebody and
was caught by the police who'd arrived on the scene
by then.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Yeah, who are apparently surprised. I imagine they were like,
oh wait a minute.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Is that him coming back?
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Get a load of this guy.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Another time he came back to re rob a place
he had already robbed, re entered the window to get
more stuff.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
That is a no, no, that is crime. One oh one.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Yeah, like, get out of there. I'm not a criminal,
but I would get out of there.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
So even when he was in London too, when he
was on the run after assassinating MLK, he carried out
not one, but two bungle robberies.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
It's crazy.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
One was a bank and he managed to only get
one hundred pounds from a bank.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
The other was a jewelry store. He got nothing because
the owner knocked the gun out of his hand and
pressed the alarm. So James Lreay ran away.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
And these are Londoners, they're not used to knocking guns
out of hands, and this guy still managed to do it.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
That's right, you know.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Yeah, he just was not a very good criminal, even
though he tried it over and over again, and he
was successful. I mean, like he did successfully rob people
and break into places and all that. But if you
put it all together, he didn't have like a violent
criminal rap sheet. He was just kind of this petty criminal.
That's how he supported himself in life as a criminal
who went from that to murdering one of the most
(18:43):
important Americans in history in one single action, seemingly overnight.
And a lot of people say that just doesn't add up.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Yeah, and you know, we don't lend our show than
ourselves to conspira. We're not conspiracy minded generally, but you
don't have to be to look at this and say
he probably didn't act alone. It just doesn't add up,
Like you said, So, there have been congressional committees over
the years. They have been family members of Martin Luther
(19:17):
King Junior that said, yeah, this was this was part
of a conspiracy. There's never been any solid agreement on
what kind of conspiracy and who else was behind it.
And we're not going to get into the nitty gritty
of all the there's a lot of there's a lot
of discounted stuff and stuff that rabbit holes.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
He shouldn't even go down.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Yeah, So we're not going to get into those, but
we are going to talk about the legit idea of
a conspiracy and who could have been involved, like for real?
Speaker 2 (19:47):
Yeah, because again, how did this petty criminal plan an
assassination that he successfully carried out and then also panic
in a panic like dropped us the murder weapon and
ran off in a place where it be found within
a minute or two. Where did he get the funding
that he would need to support himself for a year
(20:07):
on the lamb and then to travel abroad to flee
after the assassination. These are just a few of the
questions people have come up with, and the obvious solution
is that he had help in some way, shape or form.
But another really big question that I think that a
lot of people overlook is why, like why did he
(20:28):
murder Martin Luther King Junior. He wasn't known as a fanatic.
He was a racist, and like we said, he supported
George Wallace for his segregationists presidential bid, but he wasn't
He wasn't like a fanatic, and also like he didn't
have any particularly deep emotions one way or another for MLK.
He just was his murderer. And it just does not
(20:51):
make a lot of sense.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Yeah, So after he retracted that confession, just days after
his conviction, he started saying, I was set up, and
I was set.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
Up by a guy named Raoul.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
So supposedly he had a lot of interactions with this
Rol guy, but he went from describing him as a
Latino with blonde hair to a French Canadian with red hair.
Nobody ever witnessed him with anyone that looked like either
one of those people. A lot of people think there
is no Raoul at all, but he still could have
had help, you know, from someone else.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Yeah. So you mentioned congressional committees that concluded that there
was some sort of conspiracy. One of them was House
Select Committee on Assassinations in nineteen seventy eight. They said
that there was a likelihood of conspiracy in the assassination
of doctor King, but they didn't think it like Raoul
was involved or anything like that. It was much more
(21:48):
pedestrian and mundane, and in my opinion then much more
likely as far as the conspiracy theories go. But they
put it on two prominent but shady Saint Louis's I'm
pretty sure that's what you call people from Saint Louis.
One was a former stockbroker who became a motel owner.
His name was John R. Kaufman. The other was a
(22:10):
patent lawyer in town named John H. Sutherland, and both
of them were dead by the time the committee hearings
were held in nineteen seventy eight, but they supposedly put
a bounty on mlk's head, and James E. O'ray, whose
brother was a tavern owner in Saint Louis at the time,
heard about this bounty and decided that he would go
(22:32):
ahead and murder MLK and collect on the bounty. And
I also saw that he probably believed that as a
white man, he would never be convicted of murdering a
black man in the South, and even if he did,
George Wallace was definitely going to win the nineteen sixty
eight election, and George Wallace would pardon him. So if
you put all that together, it really seems like a
(22:54):
pretty legitimate explanation for the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Yeah, as far as Martin Luther King Junior's widow, Coretta.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
Scott King, she was she always thought the FBI might
have had something to do with it.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
She knew that they had been surveilled and their phones
had been tapped. She thought they, you know, were a
possible you know, bad actors. They even you know, this
is sort of startling, and in fact it startled the
country in the late nineties, but they came around to
believing James Ray. Dexter Scott King, one of his sons,
(23:30):
visited James Ray in prison. They pushed for him to
get an appeal. He apparently asked him point blank, like
did you kill my father? And James or Ray said no,
I didn't know, And then apparently he also said, but
like I like I say, sometimes these questions are difficult
to answer. Sometimes you have to make your own evaluation
and maybe come to the conclusion. I think that could
(23:51):
be done today, but not thirty years ago, which is
none of that makes any sense.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
No, because it isn't difficult to say you either did
or you did not commit murder.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Yeah, but as shocking as this meeting was, they got
on board and said, I don't think you did this.
I think you were patsy. I think you were set up.
And a lot of Americans were confused and a lot
were offended. Politzer Prize winning biographer of Martin Luther King junior.
David Garo said that Dexter King's support was of Ray
(24:23):
was egregious and embarrassing.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Yeah, I say we take a break and we come
back and kind of get stick with the late nineties
because they were kind of the nineties were a big
decade for conspiracy theories in the MLK assassination. How about that, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
So there's an attorney named William Pepper who was a
very conspiracy theory minded attorney. He became James Olray's attorney eventually.
And he's not someone that a lot of people thought
a lot of In his career, he'd been described as
disgraceful by some the most gullible person I've ever met
by someone else. He was readily and willing to just
(25:35):
malign innocent people to get his theories out there. And
I remember this happening. I didn't watch it, but on
the twenty fifth anniversary of King's murder, so I guess
somewhere in the mid nineties he sold HBO on producing
and broadcasting a mock trial TV special of James Olray
(25:56):
in which Ray was acquitted by the mock jury.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Yeah, and so that was you know, Oh, that's crazy.
But it's a mock trial on HBO, and it's a
mock jury. It doesn't mean anything. It just basically promoted
William Pepper and his theories. But after that special was aired,
conspiracy theories about the MLK assassination got a real boost
because a guy named Lloyd Jowers came forward. He said
(26:22):
he was inspired to come forward by the series and
has come clean essentially after all of these years. And
he owned a tavern in Memphis called Jim's Grill, which
just happened to be located beneath Bessie Brewer's boarding house
where the fatal shot that killed MLK was fired from.
And Lloyd Jowers said that he was part of a big,
(26:45):
giant conspiracy to murder MLK that included the Memphis Police,
the FBI, the mafia, himself, and some other just you know,
tangential players who were all coming together to kill King
in order to collect on a bunch of money. Lloyd
(27:06):
Jowers said that he was him, just him alone, was
offered one hundred thousand dollars to basically project to manage
the contract killing.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Yeah, I feel like if you're floating a conspiracy about
an assassination, if you just throw out like local cops
in mafia, then you're probably halfway there.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Yeah for you, Yeah, oh definitely, that'll get everybody's attention.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
So Martin Luther King Junior's family sued him for wrongful
death in civil court. Again, this is not a criminal
trial or anything. They didn't want money. They wanted a
hundred bucks. They basically wanted to get all these claims
heard in court and have it you know published, you know,
out in public. And they this is sort of shocking
as well. The family was represented by that attorney, William Pepper,
(27:54):
who had represented James Haray. The jury did decide that
Jowers and others, including government agencies, had been responsible for
King's debts, So they actually won that civil trial.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
They did, and I've read two things. I read that
Dexter King basically said like, we did this so that,
you know, to prove that the investigation needed to be reopened.
And then he also said, regardless of whether it gets
reopened or not, this is like the period on the
sentence for us, Like this just basically supports everything we've
(28:26):
always said. Right. The Justice Department, their Civil Rights Division,
had simultaneously launched an investigation in de Lloyd Jowers claims.
I guess they seemed legitimate enough. But also this investigation
entailed claims made by a former FBI agent named Donald Wilson,
and Wilson said that he had been I guess he
(28:49):
had been one of the people who had searched through
the mustang that James Rolraay got away in, and that
he had found some papers in this mustang that had
in foe about the jfk assassination. Okay, I think Donald
Wilson's like, how can I get people to listen JFK.
(29:10):
He also said that the name Raoul was mentioned in
it as well, in these papers, and so the Justice
Department starts looking into it, and they concluded in a
report in two thousand that this is all just kind
of bs.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
To paraphrase, Yeah, basically he's out for a book deal,
is what they concluded. Percy Foreman, the original attorney for
James Olray, as far as he was concerned, he thought
Ray acted alone. His biographer, William Bradford Hughey, also said, Yeah,
I think he acted alone, and he was trying to
(29:45):
just become a bigger criminal and like impress larger criminals
that he was a valuable guy to work with.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Yeah, there was an investigative reporter too who investigated James R. Lray,
as investigative reporters do. His name was George Mill him.
He interviewed a bunch of Ray's fellow prisoners from the
Missouri prison that he broke out of in nineteen sixty seven,
and they were like, yeah, he was a huge drug
dealer in prison, like he was rolling in it. One
(30:13):
of them claimed that he was able to smuggle out
sixty five hundred dollars from the prison. Yeah, and in
today's money, that's about sixty thousand dollars.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
So that alone, if true, satisfies that really big question
about how could he's this petty criminal support himself for
a year on the lamb. Sixty k can go a
long way, especially if you're committing other crimes. But yeah,
it sounds like he blew a lot of it on
bartending school and dance lessons. Still, you could live for
a year on sixty k, no problem.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Yeah, And he had to buy some of that camera
equipment because he tried to be a porn director in Mexico.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
That's right, you know.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
So I guess we're at the point now where we
can kind of talk a little bit about, you know,
had the sliding doors gone another way and had that
march gone for on April fourth, and maybe James Orray
doesn't get that shot, what would have happened had King
been around. I guess we'll talk at first about what
happened since that that did occur, was that he was
(31:14):
an instant martyr, you know, for all practical purposes, he was.
He was sainted in that moment. It was just so sudden,
it was so violent. And the polling, you know, we
talked about polling in episode one about how white Americans
felt about him. In nineteen sixty six, people polled, thirty
six percent of all Americans had a favorable opinion of King,
(31:37):
twenty seven percent of white America, and in twenty eleven
that number had gone to ninety three percent of white
Americans had a favorable view of King, and eighty one
percent of all American adults said he had a positive
impact on the US. So that's from sixty six to
twenty eleven. But that was also happening at the time,
Like in the days and months before and after, there
(31:58):
was a stark difference, right.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Yeah, there was an almost immediate change and opinion of
him after he died. It was like the band Cinderella said,
you don't know what you got till it's gone.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
There was this just complete happenstance study that had been
carried out in February March of nineteen sixty eight, where
they sent ten thousand surveys to college and university trustees
I guess to take a pulse on the university and
college trustee subculture that asked, among other things, how they
(32:35):
felt about Martin Luther King, how they felt about his views,
how much they aligned with their own views. And after
MLK was assassinated, they went through and they separated the
surveys that they'd received before his death and after his death,
and there was a stark difference. Before he was assassinated,
thirty six percent of the respondent said that they held
(32:55):
similar views to King. After the assassination, that rose to
fifty percent. This is within a couple of weeks. Before
the assassination, thirty percent, more than thirty percent said that
King's views were very unlike theirs. Afterward it dropped down
to nineteen percent. So it was happening in real time,
(33:16):
and we know that thanks to that poll, and it's
really hard to overstate the effect, the immediate effect that
his assassination had on the conscience of the United States.
I think it really made a lot of probably everyday
racist Americans really rethink themselves. You know that at the time,
(33:38):
you could dislike Martin Luther King Junior. He was alive,
he was railing against Vietnam and going on about poor
people and everything. But now he's gone murdered, and just
something like that can really shock people into focusing more
on themselves and on their viewpoints than otherwise you would.
Speaker 3 (33:59):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
I mean one thing that definitely came out of this
was Lyndon Johnson kind of used this to get the
Fair Housing Act of nineteen sixty eight passed. It had
failed in sixty six and sixty seven, so it wasn't
a bill that looked like it had an immediate future.
So he kind of did the same thing with the
Civil Rights Act to sixty four right after JFK was assassinated, So,
(34:21):
you know, very politically savvy kind of get these things
passed through when the nation would have been more on
board with that and politicians would.
Speaker 3 (34:28):
Have been more on board.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Maybe wouldn't have been able to get it passed through
in sixty eight, and then he had already announced that
he wasn't running for reelection before the assassination. So given
what happened with Nixon and then Reagan coming in, if
King had lived, it's doubtful that he would have had
the kind of relationship that he had with Johnson with
those two guys.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
Yeah, but remember also that he and Johnson had already
had a rift because of mlk's more open vocal stance
against Vietnam. Yeah, and you know, he would have definitely
kept railing against Vietnam, so that rift would have widened
even further. And also general Americans opinions of him probably
(35:12):
would have declined even further because remember after that nineteen
sixty seven Vietnam speech, his popularity, especially among white Americans,
just plummeted, in part because he called the US government
the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. That's
a pretty direct shot against, you know, the government. And
if you are all about the government and this, you know,
(35:34):
black civil rights leader saying stuff like that, you're going
to take your angst out on the black civil rights
leader who's saying it. Rather than stopping and questioning whether
he's right.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Yeah, for sure. A lot of people point out that,
like the he would have continued to work for civil
rights for black Americans Americans, but also may have started
championing the cause of the LGBTQ rights as a community.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
Correta.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
Scott King vocally supported this stuff, you know, after his passing,
and Martin Luther King Junior worked very closely with a
gentleman named Bayard Rustin, and openly gay civil rights advocate
who could have kept himself in the closet, but very
much was out. And so people think that, yeah, King
probably would have taken up that cause as well.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Later on, Yeah, we did an episode from twenty fifteen
on the March on Washington. We talked about Bayard Rustin
a lot.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
He's also often compared to Nelson Mandela. Had MLK lived,
they people say, like he might have followed some sort
of trajectory similar to Nelson Mandela's, but Mandela became President
of South Africa. Would MLK have ever run for president?
From what I saw, most historians say probably not. That
was never an aspiration of his h and in fact,
(36:53):
he actually turned down and offered to run on a
third party ticket, the People's Party ticket for the nineteen
sixty eight election, with pediatrician the author of the very
famous baby book, doctor Benjamin Spock, who had turned anti
war activist as his vice president, So he probably would
not have ever run for president, but he still would
(37:14):
have remained a very potent, powerful voice for civil rights
for everybody. But had he not been assassinated, I don't
think his legacy would be anything like it is today.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
How great though, would it have been to be able
to source a King Spock sixty eight T shirt or
bumper sticker?
Speaker 2 (37:36):
I guess somebody like dummied that up or else. Oh? Really,
it got far enough that somebody made buttons, because I
saw some image of that on the internet. Yeah, I
don't know if it was made up or not. You
can't tell these days, you know.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
You can't.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
And then this all culminated finally with Martin Luther King
Junior the national holiday. The campaign for that federal holiday
began just a few days after he was killed in
nineteen sixty eight, and it would be installed in nineteen
eighty three.
Speaker 3 (38:11):
It took a little while.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Representative John Conyer's, a Democrat from Michigan reintroduced that legislation
every single year with the backing of the Congressional Black Caucus,
which he helped found, and it was denied every single
year until fifteen years later when President Ronald Reagan signed
that bill making the third Monday in January federal holiday.
(38:33):
And then it was first observed in nineteen eighty six
by everybody, very famously except for Arizona.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
They were the last holdout.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
I remember this happening very well, mainly because of the
great great song by the time I get to Arizona
by Public Enemy that came out. So we got that
out of it, which is pretty great. But the NFL
was like, you know what, you're not getting the super
Bowl in nineteen ninety three, and then after that they said,
we'll get on board.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
So we can have a super.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Bowl whatever it takes, by any months necessary.
Speaker 3 (39:06):
Arizona get it together.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
They did. That was way back in nineteen ninety three.
Those policymakers are all dead and gone by now.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
I know. I lived in Arizona. I love that place.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
Oh yeah, that's right, Uma, right yeah. Do you ever
take the three ten uh?
Speaker 3 (39:24):
No? No trains?
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Okay, Well, since I made Chuck laugh. I think that
we should end on a high note here and say
that it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
That's right, by pointing out a Josh mass error.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Oh great, so sorry, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
Hey, guys, always laugh when hearing when you quickly correct
yourselves before the email start. I didn't hear that one
today though, and I'm sure you'll get more than just
this email.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
Actually, Andrew, we didn't. You were the only one that
caught this.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
Oh nice, Andrew.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
This was in the uh what would this have been? GPS?
I guess okay, By the way, I never posted that
that uh what do you call it? When things intersect?
The vin diagram that I sent you that said bingo,
I need to put.
Speaker 3 (40:08):
That on our Insta. Please do I'll do it, hey, guys.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
When Josh was describing the two D trilateration circles and
distance from Denver, he said, to draw a circle around
the named city with a diameter of distance described. But
that would be a circle too small. You need a
circle with a radius for that distance, or a diameter
of twice that radius. Your compass would be said, to
(40:31):
the width of the distance you are from the city,
and you draw that circle, which would give you a
circle around a city where every point on that circle
is that described distance from city center point. This is
from an electrical engineer in Knoxville, Tennessee, Andrew White, who said,
it makes me happy to listen and learn from you
(40:52):
all each day. So I trust you, Andrew, because you're
an electrical engineer.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
Yeah, Andrew White, the fastest compass in Tennessee. Thanks a lot, Andrew,
I totally get that. That was very well explained, better
than I explained it, for sure. And if you want
to be like Andrew and correct my math. There's not
really much sport in it, but you can still do
it anyway by sending us an email to Stuff Podcasts
(41:16):
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck.
And this is part two of our two parter. I'm
the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
That's right where we locked off with Part one was
the funeral of Martin Luther King Junior. And we're going
to pick up now with the investigation and the manhunt.
And while we're talking about that, we might as well
go ahead and say it's still perhaps the largest manhunt
and FBI history, depending on who you ask, cost a
couple of million bucks in those dollars, thirty five hundred investigators.
(00:44):
And it was all just a bit awkward because, as
we all know, or maybe some people don't know this,
but the FBI had been tracking Martin Luther King Junior
since nineteen fifty six, so for twelve years under a
program called racial Matters, Racial matters.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
And then I don't think they meant like matters like
race matters.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
No, I think they meant the other way, like the
matters of race.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Right.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
And then in nineteen sixty three they started tapping his
bones under the Communist infiltration program and Jay Edgar Hoover
was still around at the time, because it seems like
he was there for three hundred years. Yeah, and he
didn't like Martin Luther King Junior. He called the most
notorious liar in the country publicly at a press conference
because King had been criticizing the FBI because they, you know,
(01:33):
weren't protecting the civil rights of black Americans, and so.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Hoover didn't like the guy.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yet he was the guy kind of at the top
of this huge investigation.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
I read Martin Luther King's cool response to Jaegar Hoover
calling the most notorious liar. Get bent, No, no, He
said that Jayegar Hoover must be under tremendous pressure to
have said such a thing. Was sympathetic.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Jeez, let's talk about the high road man.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Yeah for sure.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
All right, So, the FBI gets a hold of that
thirty out six rifle that was determined to be the
murder weapon. They couldn't actually conclusively link that bullet to
the gun because the shell had been fragmented, but it
was the same caliber, and everybody was like, come on,
it's the gun. Can we all just agree to that?
Speaker 2 (02:25):
How many rifles do you guys? Have just laying around
in Memphis that day.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah, dumped minutes after by a guy who sped away
in a Mustang.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Right hundreds of just one hundred feet or so away
from the murder scene. So yeah, they couldn't conclusively link
that to the gun, but they were able to trace
the serial number, and they traced it back to a
sporting goods store in Birmingham, Alabama called Aeromarine Supply, and
they confirmed that it had been purchased just a few
(02:54):
days before MLK was assassinated.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Yeah, along with a scope and a gentleman who said
that he was going hunting on a hunting trip with
his brother.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Okay, because yeah, you have to you have to be
like that, that's believable, right, when you're buying a gun,
you gotta have a cover story.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Yeah, and under an alias, under the name Harvey Lomyer.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Right. So, two weeks after the killing, they figured out
that the prints on the gun matched those of a
guy named James Earl Ray. And at the time, James
Orl Ray had been an escape convict from a state
prison in Missouri for basically a year, he'd been on
(03:37):
the run. So now we had a suspect and we
had photos, and they started circulating it around to people
who had putatively interacted with James Orlray, including the guy
at the aeromarine supply store who sold him the gun.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
Yeah, so he was like, that's the guy.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
There are witnesses we mentioned earlier in part one at
Bessie Brewer boarding house. They also looked at pictures and
they were like, yeah, that's the guy we saw running away.
And they went to the hotel clerk or the boarding
house clerk and they said, yeah, this guy signed in.
That's him for sure, under the name John Willard. So
he had multiple aliases, and they that portable radio that
(04:20):
they found in the bundle had a scratched out ID
number and they eventually figured out that that was his
his prison radio. It had his his inmate number on it.
So he escaped prison, was like, I'm taking my radio.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
It seems pretty conclusive that James o'ray would have been
the shooter, right, Yeah, So they issued an indictment for
his arrest for the murder of Martin Luther King Junior
on May seventh, a couple months after or Noah month
after MLK was murdered, and an international manhunt began I
know the FBI was definitely concentrating on the United States,
(04:55):
but they didn't rule out the possibility that he had
started to go abroad, and so they he issued it
far and wide, a wanted poster with his data and
his photos on it.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
So the FBI started tracking his movements.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
He's got all these aliases in that year that he
was on the LAMB. After the shooting, he was into
politics for a little while, supporting Alabama Governor George Wallace
his presidential campaign. He was in la for a little while,
he took dance lessons, He went to Bartending School. He
lived in Mexico for like a month or so, trying
(05:32):
to become a pornography director under the name Eric Salvo Galt.
That didn't work out, so he left Mexico came back
to the States, and apparently in like the month or
so before the assassination, he had been stalking King and
had followed him from Atlanta to Memphis.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Yeah, so it seemed like the month before he murdered
Martin Luther King Junior. He suddenly got that idea in
his head because none of his movement suggested that he
had even focused on Martin Luther King at all up
to that point. After the assassination, James ro'ray fled to Toronto.
(06:13):
It's eventually where he landed first. Sorry, I'm sorry Toronto.
I know that too, thanks Chuck. So at the time, apparently,
if you were an American criminal in Canada, they were very,
very trusting at the time. They basically said, if you
(06:33):
swear that you're a Canadian citizen, you give us your name,
we'll send you a passport. And that's what crooks would do.
They would go to Canada when they were on the run.
They would look up old newspapers at the library and
find birth announcements from about the same time that they
were born, finding people who were their age, and they
would get their name. They would get their mother's maiden
(06:54):
name sometimes And apparently you didn't even need that. You
just fill out this form, say your name, say yes,
I swear I'm a Canadian citizen, and mail off for
a passport which would be mailed back to you too sweet.
And now you had a fraudulent, but official and legitimate
passport that you could use to travel the world with
(07:15):
under a new alias.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Yeah, and this time his alias was because you know,
it was a real dude. In fact, the guy was
a cop. Pretty ironic. But his name was Raymond George.
I guess sneid sn e y d.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
I heard snaid from somebody. Want. I don't know if
that was definitive.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Okay, well it's good that we spelled it out because
that'll come into play in a minute here. But from
Toronto he went to London. He was actually in London
a couple of times. He passed through London on his
way to Lisbon after that first flight from Canada. And
he was going to Lisbon because he was hoping to
go to Africa before the murder, and then afterward, his
(07:54):
long term plan was to go to Rhodesia now Zimbabwe
because in nineteen sixty a five percent white minority there
had assumed independence from the UK and he was to
go to Rhodesia and I'm gonna integrate into this small
white minority and become a paid mercenary.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Yeah. So, I mean he went to Lisbon hoping to
secure passage to Africa, and while he was there, he's like,
I got a great idea, surely that people are on
my trail, that Feds are on my trail now, and
they might even know my alias, so I need a
new alias. I'm going to go to the Canadian consulate
here in Lisbon. I'm going to tell them that they
(08:37):
misspelled my name on my passport. So he went there
and he told the Canadian consulate there that his last
name actually is spelled with an A, not a D.
And they're like, okay, whatever, here's your new passport with
your last name spelled correctly. And he had a new alias,
Ramon George Snee Yeah, instead of Snade. So there's one
(08:57):
letter change. And apparently that's satisfied James Orlray that he
had a new alias.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
Now, yeah, we'll get to who Ray was a little bit.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
But the one takeaway from everything that I've read is
he was not a very smart person.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Not a criminal mastermind. He was no brain from Pinky
in the Brain No.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Also, because he did not throw that first passport away
and that was would be his undoing. He like, like
we said, he could not secure that passage to Africa,
so he went back to London to figure out what
his next move was. He called a This is a
sort of a weird part of the story. He called
a reporter named Ian Colvin at the Daily Mail's foreign desk,
(09:38):
and I don't know if this guy had written articles
about it mercenaries or something.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
I don't know either, That's the only thing I can
figure out.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Because he called this random reporter and said, hey, you
got any contacts for these mercenaries. Colvian was like, no,
but if you're I guess, if you're looking to get
into that kind of thing, check into Brussels, because that's
where he might have better luck. It's a very strange
little side part of this story, for sure.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
It really is. So James Earl Ray was like, thank you,
thank you much and starts booking a flight two Brussels
from London. And it was in London on his way
to Brussels that he finally got nabbed. But not because
somebody noticed his mugshot or wanted poster and saw that
he was him, but because he had those two Canadian
(10:25):
passports and he had him in the same wallet.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Yeah, two different names, yes.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
And the passport checker noticed that he had two passports
and asked him about it. And I guess a cop
was standing nearby and stepped over and was like, hey,
why don't you join us in the back room. We've
got some questions for you, and that was it for
Ramon George Snade Snea. Yeah, he was quickly identified as
James Rolray. He had a thirty eight caliber pistol tucked
(10:52):
in the back of his pants going to board a plane.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
You could do that back then any metals detectors.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Yeah, as long as you didn't shoot it off because
you were excited during takeoff in the plane that they
didn't really care.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Yeah, So he was confirmed as James Lray. He was
taken into custody and on July nineteenth was flown back
to the US to stand trial. And that seems like
a great place for our first break.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Okay, So James Arrol Ray's been taken into custody and
he's flown back to the United States on July nineteenth
to stand trial, and the whole world is watching. They
want to know why the man who assassinated Martin Luther
King Junior, did that, Why he murdered MLK, What was
(12:11):
the point, what was the reason. They also wanted to
know if he had been working with other people, because
from the outset people were the public was just openly
skeptical that there was some conspiracy that had resulted in
mlk's murder and the world got none of that because
(12:31):
James o'ray pled guilty instead of going to trial. And
there was a paper reporting on the case who was
at this hearing where he played guilty and said that
it brought a shockingly swift ending to the case and
everybody was like, what just happened? And that was essentially
that there was no trial ever and there were no
(12:52):
facts presented, so it was just like, yep, I did
it send me to jail? Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
His attorney at the time, Percy Foreman, said, well, you know,
if you go to a jury trial, you're probably going
to get a death sentence because of you know, because
of the murder and its impact on the country. Basically
like you're not going to avoid the electric chair. So
if you plead guilty, you can get the maximum life sentence,
(13:21):
which is ninety nine years in prison in Tennessee. And
he said that's probably the right route to take, so
Ray took it. It was a two hour affair in court.
No one got the satisfaction of hearing any of the evidence.
It also meant he wouldn't be eligible for parole for
thirty years, whereas if he had gotten a life sentence
(13:42):
and not the ninety nine. He could have gotten out
in twelve and a half, but just three days after
he pleaded guilty, he recanted and tried for the rest
of his life to get a new trial, tried to escape.
He did escape. In fact, if you listened to our
Barkley Marathon episode, he escaped success for three days in
nineteen seventy seven and was picked up in Brushy Mountain
(14:04):
where that race takes place. But he would eventually die
in prison in nineteen ninety eight at the age of seventy,
which would also been the year he was first eligible
for parole.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Yes, and you said earlier that we were going to
talk a little bit about James Rolray in his criminal career.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
So he was born in Illinois, but mostly grew up
in Missouri, and he was the oldest of nine kids,
and his family was impoverished. His father was a convict
himself who didn't work very often. His mother was, as
James Earlray put it, a woman of very limited intelligence,
barely able to communicate, and she also drank very heavily.
(14:44):
And there was a report card from grade school that
said his attitude towards regulations was that he violates all
of them. This was him as a kid, and he
didn't improve very much as an adult. He dropped out
of high school at sixteen, worked for a while, and
then he joined the arm.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Yeah, he joined the army. Yeah, he dropped out of
high school at sixteen. King was in college at fifteen.
To just contrast the two situations, and forty sixty he
joined the army after being laid off from his civilian
job in the army. He was charged with drunkenness with
breaking arrest. He served three months in the army clink
(15:23):
hard labor for that. He was discharged less than honorably
for quote ineptness and lack of adaptability to military service
in nineteen forty eight. So just a couple of years
in the army. And then was a drifter and a
petty criminal who was in and out of jail over
and over.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Yeah, and he was serving a twenty year sentence for
robbery in Missouri. He started at nineteen sixty when he
broke out in nineteen sixty seven and began that year
on the lamb that culminated in the assassination of MLK.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yeah, and you know, it was really a twenty year
prison sentence for everything because it was a pretty small
like robbery at Kroger that wouldn't have gotten a twenty year.
But he had other armed robbery convictions, He had mail
fraud convictions and escape attempts, so it was like, hey,
we're just going to try and put you away for
a while. And if you're curious how he escaped, he
(16:20):
hid in a bread delivery truck that was leaving the prison.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
I heard that too. Yeah, you would have found me
eating loaves of bread too, with.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
Your little portable radio prison radio.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Just snaffing my fingers with a mouthful of bread. So
his criminal history, just because your lifetime criminal doesn't mean
you're good at it. Yeah, And James Earl Ray is
an excellent example of that time. Magazine described him back
in nineteen seventy seven as a bungling, petty gunman and
burglar whose life of crime has mostly been one fizzle
(16:55):
after another. And they weren't lying because some of his
greatest hits that they went on to site was that
at one crime scene he dropped identification, He dropped his ID. Yeah,
one hold up in a neighborhood he got lost drive
as he was making his getaway, ended up back driving
(17:16):
back into the neighborhood where he just robbed somebody and
was caught by the police who'd arrived on the scene
by then.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Yeah, who are apparently surprised. I imagine they were like,
oh wait a minute.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Is that him coming back?
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Get a load of this guy.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Another time he came back to re rob a place
he had already robbed, re entered the window to get
more stuff.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
That is a no, no, that is crime. One oh one.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Yeah, like, get out of there. I'm not a criminal,
but I would get out of there.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
So even when he was in London too, when he
was on the run after assassinating MLK, he carried out
not one, but two bungle robberies.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
It's crazy.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
One was a bank and he managed to only get
one hundred pounds from a bank.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
The other was a jewelry store. He got nothing because
the owner knocked the gun out of his hand and
pressed the alarm. So James Lreay ran away.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
And these are Londoners, they're not used to knocking guns
out of hands, and this guy still managed to do it.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
That's right, you know.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Yeah, he just was not a very good criminal, even
though he tried it over and over again, and he
was successful. I mean, like he did successfully rob people
and break into places and all that. But if you
put it all together, he didn't have like a violent
criminal rap sheet. He was just kind of this petty criminal.
That's how he supported himself in life as a criminal
who went from that to murdering one of the most
(18:43):
important Americans in history in one single action, seemingly overnight.
And a lot of people say that just doesn't add up.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Yeah, and you know, we don't lend our show than
ourselves to conspira. We're not conspiracy minded generally, but you
don't have to be to look at this and say
he probably didn't act alone. It just doesn't add up,
Like you said, So, there have been congressional committees over
the years. They have been family members of Martin Luther
(19:17):
King Junior that said, yeah, this was this was part
of a conspiracy. There's never been any solid agreement on
what kind of conspiracy and who else was behind it.
And we're not going to get into the nitty gritty
of all the there's a lot of there's a lot
of discounted stuff and stuff that rabbit holes.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
He shouldn't even go down.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Yeah, So we're not going to get into those, but
we are going to talk about the legit idea of
a conspiracy and who could have been involved, like for real?
Speaker 2 (19:47):
Yeah, because again, how did this petty criminal plan an
assassination that he successfully carried out and then also panic
in a panic like dropped us the murder weapon and
ran off in a place where it be found within
a minute or two. Where did he get the funding
that he would need to support himself for a year
(20:07):
on the lamb and then to travel abroad to flee
after the assassination. These are just a few of the
questions people have come up with, and the obvious solution
is that he had help in some way, shape or form.
But another really big question that I think that a
lot of people overlook is why, like why did he
(20:28):
murder Martin Luther King Junior. He wasn't known as a fanatic.
He was a racist, and like we said, he supported
George Wallace for his segregationists presidential bid, but he wasn't
He wasn't like a fanatic, and also like he didn't
have any particularly deep emotions one way or another for MLK.
He just was his murderer. And it just does not
(20:51):
make a lot of sense.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Yeah, So after he retracted that confession, just days after
his conviction, he started saying, I was set up, and
I was set.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
Up by a guy named Raoul.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
So supposedly he had a lot of interactions with this
Rol guy, but he went from describing him as a
Latino with blonde hair to a French Canadian with red hair.
Nobody ever witnessed him with anyone that looked like either
one of those people. A lot of people think there
is no Raoul at all, but he still could have
had help, you know, from someone else.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Yeah. So you mentioned congressional committees that concluded that there
was some sort of conspiracy. One of them was House
Select Committee on Assassinations in nineteen seventy eight. They said
that there was a likelihood of conspiracy in the assassination
of doctor King, but they didn't think it like Raoul
was involved or anything like that. It was much more
(21:48):
pedestrian and mundane, and in my opinion then much more
likely as far as the conspiracy theories go. But they
put it on two prominent but shady Saint Louis's I'm
pretty sure that's what you call people from Saint Louis.
One was a former stockbroker who became a motel owner.
His name was John R. Kaufman. The other was a
(22:10):
patent lawyer in town named John H. Sutherland, and both
of them were dead by the time the committee hearings
were held in nineteen seventy eight, but they supposedly put
a bounty on mlk's head, and James E. O'ray, whose
brother was a tavern owner in Saint Louis at the time,
heard about this bounty and decided that he would go
(22:32):
ahead and murder MLK and collect on the bounty. And
I also saw that he probably believed that as a
white man, he would never be convicted of murdering a
black man in the South, and even if he did,
George Wallace was definitely going to win the nineteen sixty
eight election, and George Wallace would pardon him. So if
you put all that together, it really seems like a
(22:54):
pretty legitimate explanation for the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Yeah, as far as Martin Luther King Junior's widow, Coretta.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
Scott King, she was she always thought the FBI might
have had something to do with it.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
She knew that they had been surveilled and their phones
had been tapped. She thought they, you know, were a
possible you know, bad actors. They even you know, this
is sort of startling, and in fact it startled the
country in the late nineties, but they came around to
believing James Ray. Dexter Scott King, one of his sons,
(23:30):
visited James Ray in prison. They pushed for him to
get an appeal. He apparently asked him point blank, like
did you kill my father? And James or Ray said no,
I didn't know, And then apparently he also said, but
like I like I say, sometimes these questions are difficult
to answer. Sometimes you have to make your own evaluation
and maybe come to the conclusion. I think that could
(23:51):
be done today, but not thirty years ago, which is
none of that makes any sense.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
No, because it isn't difficult to say you either did
or you did not commit murder.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Yeah, but as shocking as this meeting was, they got
on board and said, I don't think you did this.
I think you were patsy. I think you were set up.
And a lot of Americans were confused and a lot
were offended. Politzer Prize winning biographer of Martin Luther King junior.
David Garo said that Dexter King's support was of Ray
(24:23):
was egregious and embarrassing.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Yeah, I say we take a break and we come
back and kind of get stick with the late nineties
because they were kind of the nineties were a big
decade for conspiracy theories in the MLK assassination. How about that, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
So there's an attorney named William Pepper who was a
very conspiracy theory minded attorney. He became James Olray's attorney eventually.
And he's not someone that a lot of people thought
a lot of In his career, he'd been described as
disgraceful by some the most gullible person I've ever met
by someone else. He was readily and willing to just
(25:35):
malign innocent people to get his theories out there. And
I remember this happening. I didn't watch it, but on
the twenty fifth anniversary of King's murder, so I guess
somewhere in the mid nineties he sold HBO on producing
and broadcasting a mock trial TV special of James Olray
(25:56):
in which Ray was acquitted by the mock jury.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Yeah, and so that was you know, Oh, that's crazy.
But it's a mock trial on HBO, and it's a
mock jury. It doesn't mean anything. It just basically promoted
William Pepper and his theories. But after that special was aired,
conspiracy theories about the MLK assassination got a real boost
because a guy named Lloyd Jowers came forward. He said
(26:22):
he was inspired to come forward by the series and
has come clean essentially after all of these years. And
he owned a tavern in Memphis called Jim's Grill, which
just happened to be located beneath Bessie Brewer's boarding house
where the fatal shot that killed MLK was fired from.
And Lloyd Jowers said that he was part of a big,
(26:45):
giant conspiracy to murder MLK that included the Memphis Police,
the FBI, the mafia, himself, and some other just you know,
tangential players who were all coming together to kill King
in order to collect on a bunch of money. Lloyd
(27:06):
Jowers said that he was him, just him alone, was
offered one hundred thousand dollars to basically project to manage
the contract killing.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Yeah, I feel like if you're floating a conspiracy about
an assassination, if you just throw out like local cops
in mafia, then you're probably halfway there.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Yeah for you, Yeah, oh definitely, that'll get everybody's attention.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
So Martin Luther King Junior's family sued him for wrongful
death in civil court. Again, this is not a criminal
trial or anything. They didn't want money. They wanted a
hundred bucks. They basically wanted to get all these claims
heard in court and have it you know published, you know,
out in public. And they this is sort of shocking
as well. The family was represented by that attorney, William Pepper,
(27:54):
who had represented James Haray. The jury did decide that
Jowers and others, including government agencies, had been responsible for
King's debts, So they actually won that civil trial.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
They did, and I've read two things. I read that
Dexter King basically said like, we did this so that,
you know, to prove that the investigation needed to be reopened.
And then he also said, regardless of whether it gets
reopened or not, this is like the period on the
sentence for us, Like this just basically supports everything we've
(28:26):
always said. Right. The Justice Department, their Civil Rights Division,
had simultaneously launched an investigation in de Lloyd Jowers claims.
I guess they seemed legitimate enough. But also this investigation
entailed claims made by a former FBI agent named Donald Wilson,
and Wilson said that he had been I guess he
(28:49):
had been one of the people who had searched through
the mustang that James Rolraay got away in, and that
he had found some papers in this mustang that had
in foe about the jfk assassination. Okay, I think Donald
Wilson's like, how can I get people to listen JFK.
(29:10):
He also said that the name Raoul was mentioned in
it as well, in these papers, and so the Justice
Department starts looking into it, and they concluded in a
report in two thousand that this is all just kind
of bs.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
To paraphrase, Yeah, basically he's out for a book deal,
is what they concluded. Percy Foreman, the original attorney for
James Olray, as far as he was concerned, he thought
Ray acted alone. His biographer, William Bradford Hughey, also said, Yeah,
I think he acted alone, and he was trying to
(29:45):
just become a bigger criminal and like impress larger criminals
that he was a valuable guy to work with.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Yeah, there was an investigative reporter too who investigated James R. Lray,
as investigative reporters do. His name was George Mill him.
He interviewed a bunch of Ray's fellow prisoners from the
Missouri prison that he broke out of in nineteen sixty seven,
and they were like, yeah, he was a huge drug
dealer in prison, like he was rolling in it. One
(30:13):
of them claimed that he was able to smuggle out
sixty five hundred dollars from the prison. Yeah, and in
today's money, that's about sixty thousand dollars.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
So that alone, if true, satisfies that really big question
about how could he's this petty criminal support himself for
a year on the lamb. Sixty k can go a
long way, especially if you're committing other crimes. But yeah,
it sounds like he blew a lot of it on
bartending school and dance lessons. Still, you could live for
a year on sixty k, no problem.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Yeah, And he had to buy some of that camera
equipment because he tried to be a porn director in Mexico.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
That's right, you know.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
So I guess we're at the point now where we
can kind of talk a little bit about, you know,
had the sliding doors gone another way and had that
march gone for on April fourth, and maybe James Orray
doesn't get that shot, what would have happened had King
been around. I guess we'll talk at first about what
happened since that that did occur, was that he was
(31:14):
an instant martyr, you know, for all practical purposes, he was.
He was sainted in that moment. It was just so sudden,
it was so violent. And the polling, you know, we
talked about polling in episode one about how white Americans
felt about him. In nineteen sixty six, people polled, thirty
six percent of all Americans had a favorable opinion of King,
(31:37):
twenty seven percent of white America, and in twenty eleven
that number had gone to ninety three percent of white
Americans had a favorable view of King, and eighty one
percent of all American adults said he had a positive
impact on the US. So that's from sixty six to
twenty eleven. But that was also happening at the time,
Like in the days and months before and after, there
(31:58):
was a stark difference, right.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Yeah, there was an almost immediate change and opinion of
him after he died. It was like the band Cinderella said,
you don't know what you got till it's gone.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
There was this just complete happenstance study that had been
carried out in February March of nineteen sixty eight, where
they sent ten thousand surveys to college and university trustees
I guess to take a pulse on the university and
college trustee subculture that asked, among other things, how they
(32:35):
felt about Martin Luther King, how they felt about his views,
how much they aligned with their own views. And after
MLK was assassinated, they went through and they separated the
surveys that they'd received before his death and after his death,
and there was a stark difference. Before he was assassinated,
thirty six percent of the respondent said that they held
(32:55):
similar views to King. After the assassination, that rose to
fifty percent. This is within a couple of weeks. Before
the assassination, thirty percent, more than thirty percent said that
King's views were very unlike theirs. Afterward it dropped down
to nineteen percent. So it was happening in real time,
(33:16):
and we know that thanks to that poll, and it's
really hard to overstate the effect, the immediate effect that
his assassination had on the conscience of the United States.
I think it really made a lot of probably everyday
racist Americans really rethink themselves. You know that at the time,
(33:38):
you could dislike Martin Luther King Junior. He was alive,
he was railing against Vietnam and going on about poor
people and everything. But now he's gone murdered, and just
something like that can really shock people into focusing more
on themselves and on their viewpoints than otherwise you would.
Speaker 3 (33:59):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
I mean one thing that definitely came out of this
was Lyndon Johnson kind of used this to get the
Fair Housing Act of nineteen sixty eight passed. It had
failed in sixty six and sixty seven, so it wasn't
a bill that looked like it had an immediate future.
So he kind of did the same thing with the
Civil Rights Act to sixty four right after JFK was assassinated, So,
(34:21):
you know, very politically savvy kind of get these things
passed through when the nation would have been more on
board with that and politicians would.
Speaker 3 (34:28):
Have been more on board.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Maybe wouldn't have been able to get it passed through
in sixty eight, and then he had already announced that
he wasn't running for reelection before the assassination. So given
what happened with Nixon and then Reagan coming in, if
King had lived, it's doubtful that he would have had
the kind of relationship that he had with Johnson with
those two guys.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
Yeah, but remember also that he and Johnson had already
had a rift because of mlk's more open vocal stance
against Vietnam. Yeah, and you know, he would have definitely
kept railing against Vietnam, so that rift would have widened
even further. And also general Americans opinions of him probably
(35:12):
would have declined even further because remember after that nineteen
sixty seven Vietnam speech, his popularity, especially among white Americans,
just plummeted, in part because he called the US government
the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. That's
a pretty direct shot against, you know, the government. And
if you are all about the government and this, you know,
(35:34):
black civil rights leader saying stuff like that, you're going
to take your angst out on the black civil rights
leader who's saying it. Rather than stopping and questioning whether
he's right.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Yeah, for sure. A lot of people point out that,
like the he would have continued to work for civil
rights for black Americans Americans, but also may have started
championing the cause of the LGBTQ rights as a community.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
Correta.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
Scott King vocally supported this stuff, you know, after his passing,
and Martin Luther King Junior worked very closely with a
gentleman named Bayard Rustin, and openly gay civil rights advocate
who could have kept himself in the closet, but very
much was out. And so people think that, yeah, King
probably would have taken up that cause as well.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Later on, Yeah, we did an episode from twenty fifteen
on the March on Washington. We talked about Bayard Rustin
a lot.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
He's also often compared to Nelson Mandela. Had MLK lived,
they people say, like he might have followed some sort
of trajectory similar to Nelson Mandela's, but Mandela became President
of South Africa. Would MLK have ever run for president?
From what I saw, most historians say probably not. That
was never an aspiration of his h and in fact,
(36:53):
he actually turned down and offered to run on a
third party ticket, the People's Party ticket for the nineteen
sixty eight election, with pediatrician the author of the very
famous baby book, doctor Benjamin Spock, who had turned anti
war activist as his vice president, So he probably would
not have ever run for president, but he still would
(37:14):
have remained a very potent, powerful voice for civil rights
for everybody. But had he not been assassinated, I don't
think his legacy would be anything like it is today.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
How great though, would it have been to be able
to source a King Spock sixty eight T shirt or
bumper sticker?
Speaker 2 (37:36):
I guess somebody like dummied that up or else. Oh? Really,
it got far enough that somebody made buttons, because I
saw some image of that on the internet. Yeah, I
don't know if it was made up or not. You
can't tell these days, you know.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
You can't.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
And then this all culminated finally with Martin Luther King
Junior the national holiday. The campaign for that federal holiday
began just a few days after he was killed in
nineteen sixty eight, and it would be installed in nineteen
eighty three.
Speaker 3 (38:11):
It took a little while.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Representative John Conyer's, a Democrat from Michigan reintroduced that legislation
every single year with the backing of the Congressional Black Caucus,
which he helped found, and it was denied every single
year until fifteen years later when President Ronald Reagan signed
that bill making the third Monday in January federal holiday.
(38:33):
And then it was first observed in nineteen eighty six
by everybody, very famously except for Arizona.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
They were the last holdout.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
I remember this happening very well, mainly because of the
great great song by the time I get to Arizona
by Public Enemy that came out. So we got that
out of it, which is pretty great. But the NFL
was like, you know what, you're not getting the super
Bowl in nineteen ninety three, and then after that they said,
we'll get on board.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
So we can have a super.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Bowl whatever it takes, by any months necessary.
Speaker 3 (39:06):
Arizona get it together.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
They did. That was way back in nineteen ninety three.
Those policymakers are all dead and gone by now.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
I know. I lived in Arizona. I love that place.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
Oh yeah, that's right, Uma, right yeah. Do you ever
take the three ten uh?
Speaker 3 (39:24):
No? No trains?
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Okay, Well, since I made Chuck laugh. I think that
we should end on a high note here and say
that it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
That's right, by pointing out a Josh mass error.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Oh great, so sorry, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
Hey, guys, always laugh when hearing when you quickly correct
yourselves before the email start. I didn't hear that one
today though, and I'm sure you'll get more than just
this email.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
Actually, Andrew, we didn't. You were the only one that
caught this.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
Oh nice, Andrew.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
This was in the uh what would this have been? GPS?
I guess okay, By the way, I never posted that
that uh what do you call it? When things intersect?
The vin diagram that I sent you that said bingo,
I need to put.
Speaker 3 (40:08):
That on our Insta. Please do I'll do it, hey, guys.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
When Josh was describing the two D trilateration circles and
distance from Denver, he said, to draw a circle around
the named city with a diameter of distance described. But
that would be a circle too small. You need a
circle with a radius for that distance, or a diameter
of twice that radius. Your compass would be said, to
(40:31):
the width of the distance you are from the city,
and you draw that circle, which would give you a
circle around a city where every point on that circle
is that described distance from city center point. This is
from an electrical engineer in Knoxville, Tennessee, Andrew White, who said,
it makes me happy to listen and learn from you
(40:52):
all each day. So I trust you, Andrew, because you're
an electrical engineer.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
Yeah, Andrew White, the fastest compass in Tennessee. Thanks a lot, Andrew,
I totally get that. That was very well explained, better
than I explained it, for sure. And if you want
to be like Andrew and correct my math. There's not
really much sport in it, but you can still do
it anyway by sending us an email to Stuff Podcasts
(41:16):
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
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