James Earl Ray Assassination

James Earl Ray is the man responsible for civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. death. On April 4, 1968, Ray shot king standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel. The police confirmed that Ray shot king using a rifle from a window of a rented room across the street (“James”). He immediately fled from the scene and it took over two months for the FBI to catch him in London (Biography). Ray pled guilty for murder in 1969 and was sentenced to ninety nine years. After three days, Ray tried to withdraw his guilty plea, because he claimed he was innocent (“Ray”). However, there was evidence against him, such as fingerprints on the murder weapon (“Ray”). In Journal of Ray was known to be racist. When the family was living in Ewing, Missouri, the Ku Klux Klan thrived there during the 1920s and 1930s. The Rays embraced the group’s racist beliefs (“James”). According to his brother Jerry, Ray was an admirer of Hitler, stating, “he would make the U.S. an all-white country, …show more content…
According to Table 2, Goals for the Principal Incident, 68 percent of assassin’s goal was to harm the target as a primary goal (Fein). James Earl Ray was a male, white and forty years old when he assassinated King in 1968 (Biography). He married Anna Sandhu Ray on 1978, but she divorced him on 1993 (Biography). As I mention before, Ray dropped out of school in when he was in tenth grade and stared to work at the International Shoe Company (Gelder). In the Journal of Forensic Science, on Table 3, 86 percent of assassins were male and 77 percent were white (Fein). When Ray was discharge from the army he started to commit crimes (Biography). He would rob a post office, café, and grocery stores throughout the United States (“James”). His most serious crime was robbing two grocery stores at St. Louis while still on parole for theft. He was incarcerated for twenty years at the Missouri