In 1968 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by James Earl Ray supposedly. James Earl Ray was a petty thief that had an arrest record stemming from 1949 until 1968. James Earl Ray was sentenced to the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1960 to serve a twenty year sentence. He had a rap sheet for petty crimes but was he capable of murdering someone? James escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1967 and was on the loose for over eleven months. The story was told that James Earl Ray traveled to Memphis, TN on April 3, 1968 and checked into a room across from the Lorraine Motel (National Archives, 1979). Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to Memphis to speak on behalf of the sanitation workers of Memphis on April 3, 1968. On April
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The bullet was identified as a Remington-Peters, soft-point, metal-jacketed bullet. An autopsy was performed immediately after Dr. King was pronounced dead by Dr. Jerry T. Francisco in the Shelby County at Gaston Hospital. James Earl Ray was named as the suspect one month later. The police later caught an escaped thief named James Earl Ray. James Earl Ray was caught in London, England at the airport on June 8, 1968. The Memphis Police Department supposedly found a bag with the murder weapon inside of it near the room where James Earl Ray rented on April 4, 1968. The police stated that the fingerprints were those of James Earl Ray and he drove a white mustang where his fingerprints were collected and matched the fingerprints found on the murder weapon (Saferstein, R. …show more content…
King and finally found him and murdered him. What kind of thief would have the time to track Dr. King, know his whereabouts, planned to assassinate him while being on the run from the police? Why would a suspect leave the murder weapon on the scene with his fingerprints and flee the scene? A high-powered rifle was a weapon that government normally possessed, why would a two-bit thief buy such a weapon and just escaped from the penitentiary? How did James Earl Ray arrive in London, England if the authorities were looking for him for the murder of Dr.
The bullet was identified as a Remington-Peters, soft-point, metal-jacketed bullet. An autopsy was performed immediately after Dr. King was pronounced dead by Dr. Jerry T. Francisco in the Shelby County at Gaston Hospital. James Earl Ray was named as the suspect one month later. The police later caught an escaped thief named James Earl Ray. James Earl Ray was caught in London, England at the airport on June 8, 1968. The Memphis Police Department supposedly found a bag with the murder weapon inside of it near the room where James Earl Ray rented on April 4, 1968. The police stated that the fingerprints were those of James Earl Ray and he drove a white mustang where his fingerprints were collected and matched the fingerprints found on the murder weapon (Saferstein, R. …show more content…
King and finally found him and murdered him. What kind of thief would have the time to track Dr. King, know his whereabouts, planned to assassinate him while being on the run from the police? Why would a suspect leave the murder weapon on the scene with his fingerprints and flee the scene? A high-powered rifle was a weapon that government normally possessed, why would a two-bit thief buy such a weapon and just escaped from the penitentiary? How did James Earl Ray arrive in London, England if the authorities were looking for him for the murder of Dr.