Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis, Tennessee, on the evening of April 4, 1968. He had come to the city to stand with its striking sanitation workers, and his death set off riots in more than 100 American cities and one of the largest manhunts the country had ever mounted. Sixty-five days later, an immigration officer at Heathrow Airport in London stopped a traveler carrying a Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd. The traveler was James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old career criminal from Illinois who had walked out of a Missouri state prison a year earlier and had been a fugitive ever since.
On March 10, 1969, his forty-first birthday, Ray stood before the Criminal Court of Shelby County in Memphis and pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder of Dr. King. The plea, negotiated by his lawyers with the county's prosecutors, spared him a trial and a possible death sentence. He was sentenced to 99 years. Three days later he began trying to take it back.
He never stopped. For the next 29 years Ray filed motions, petitions and lawsuits in state and federal courts, claiming that his plea had been coerced, that his lawyers had failed him, and that he had been set up by a man he knew only as Raoul. Every court that ruled on the plea upheld it. A congressional committee concluded in 1979 that he was the assassin, while finding a likelihood of a wider conspiracy that it could not prove. In the 1990s Dr. King's own family came to believe him innocent and joined his call for a trial. He died in custody in Nashville on April 23, 1998, with a petition still pending, and the arguments over the case outlived him: a civil jury in Memphis returned a conspiracy verdict in 1999, and the Justice Department rejected it in 2000, concluding that nothing it found disturbed the 1969 judgment that Ray murdered Dr. King.
James Earl Ray was born on March 10, 1928, in Alton, Illinois, a river town across the Mississippi from the St. Louis area. His family moved to Bowling Green, Missouri, in 1930 and, about five years later, to the countryside near Ewing, Missouri, where he went to elementary school. At 16 he went back to Alton.
He was laid off from a job there in December 1945 and enlisted in the Army about six weeks later. He served in West Germany. The Army did not keep him: he was discharged in December 1948 for what his discharge record called "ineptness and lack of adaptability for service." He was 20.
The convictions began almost at once. In December 1949 he was arrested in California on a burglary charge and served a short jail term. In 1952 he was convicted of robbery and served two years. In 1955 a forgery conviction sent him to the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, for three years. In 1959 he was convicted of robbery in St. Louis and, under Missouri's habitual offender law, sentenced to 20 years in the state penitentiary.
He had served about seven years of it when, on April 23, 1967, he escaped. He later told congressional investigators that he had planned the escape alone but had help from two other inmates, whom he would not name.
For the next 14 months Ray lived under a string of borrowed names and moved constantly. The congressional committee traced him first to the Chicago area, where he worked at a restaurant in Winnetka from early May to late June 1967. From there he went to Quincy, Illinois, to St. Louis, and then to Montreal. By August he was in Birmingham, Alabama, where he bought a car. In October he was in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. In December he drove to New Orleans. He spent the winter in Los Angeles and stayed there until March 1968.
He was essentially unemployed the whole time. The committee estimated that he spent about $9,000 over those 14 months and concluded that the money most likely came from crime. By April 4 he was in Memphis, living under an assumed name.
Dr. King was the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which had its national headquarters in Atlanta, his own city. In March 1968 he had traveled to Memphis to lead a march in support of the city's striking sanitation workers. That march broke down in violence and ended in a riot. He came back on April 3, determined to show that a peaceful march could succeed. The next evening, April 4, 1968, he was killed in Memphis. In the long fight over who was responsible for his death, the King family would come to stand on the opposite side of the question from every official inquiry.
Ray left Memphis immediately afterward. He drove to Atlanta and left his car there the next day, then traveled on to Canada. By April 8 he was in Toronto, living in cheap rented rooms. There he took the name Ramon George Sneyd and obtained a Canadian passport in it.
The FBI ran the largest manhunt in its history, at a cost of about $1 million. It alerted officials in Mexico and Canada and sent agents to Europe and Australia; Scotland Yard and Interpol joined the effort. Within weeks the Bureau had identified the man it sought, known until then by the alias Eric Starvo Galt, as James Earl Ray, the Missouri escapee.
Ray was already gone. On May 6 he flew from Canada to London and went on to Lisbon the next day. On May 16, in Lisbon, he told the Canadian consul that his name had been misspelled on his passport and was issued a new one. Back in Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had been checking roughly 300,000 passport photographs at American request, and on June 1 they found his face among them.
On June 8, 1968, Ray arrived at Heathrow on a flight from Lisbon and was stopped at immigration over his passport. His identity was confirmed that day, and Scotland Yard took over the case. He was held in London while the United States sought his extradition, and after the British proceedings he was returned to Memphis to await trial in Shelby County.
The case never came to trial. Ray's lead defense lawyer negotiated with the Shelby County prosecutor, and the two sides reached an agreement: Ray would plead guilty and the state would not seek the death penalty, the maximum punishment Tennessee law then allowed. Two lawyers from the county Public Defender's Office assisted the defense.
On March 10, 1969, before the presiding judge of the Criminal Court of Shelby County, Ray pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. He agreed to a stipulation of the material facts of the case, objecting only to one passage about his alleged political activities. The judge questioned him about the plea. Asked whether anyone had pressured him to enter it, Ray answered, "No, no one in any way." The judge found the plea knowing, intelligent and voluntary and imposed the agreed sentence of 99 years in the state penitentiary.
Within days of the plea, Ray wrote two letters to the trial judge expressing dissatisfaction with it, and by March 13 he had disavowed it. From then on he said, as he would for the rest of his life, that he had been pressured into pleading guilty and was innocent.
On March 31, 1969, before he could act on the letters, the trial judge died. Ray's new lawyers treated the letters as motions for a new trial and filed a fuller motion, alleging that his first lawyer had a financial conflict of interest and had pushed him to plead guilty. The judge who succeeded to the case held a hearing, found that the plea had been knowing, intelligent and voluntary, and on May 26, 1969, denied a new trial.
Ray took the denial to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which reviewed it on certiorari and refused relief. The court found that he had entered his plea "willingly, knowingly and intelligently and with the advice of competent counsel," and it held that a lawyer's urging a client to plead guilty is not a ground for setting the judgment aside.
Ray next filed a petition under Tennessee's post-conviction law, repeating his claims about his lawyers and the pressure to plead and adding a new one: that the conditions of his pretrial confinement in the Shelby County Jail had helped drive him to the plea. The trial court dismissed the petition without a hearing. On February 24, 1972, the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed. It noted that the Supreme Court had already found the plea entered "willingly, knowingly and intelligently and with the advice of competent counsel," that the jail conditions had been litigated at a pretrial hearing and found proper, and that complaints about retained counsel did not involve state action. A knowing and voluntary guilty plea, the court said, "waives all non-jurisdictional defenses and alleged prior constitutional rights violations."
He then turned to the federal courts with a petition for habeas corpus. The federal courts reviewed the plea over several years and left the conviction standing, and on December 13, 1976, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the case.
By then Ray was held in the state prison at Petros, in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. On June 10, 1977, he escaped with six other inmates. The escape drew more than 200 reporters to Petros. He was recaptured 54 hours later, on June 13, and placed in solitary confinement. At his trial for the escape he said he had hoped to reach Canada and bargain from there with the Attorney General for a new trial. One year was added to his sentence, making it 100 years.
It was not his only attempt. He tried to escape in 1971, 1972, 1977 and 1979; the last attempt, on November 9, 1979, ended with his recapture the same day. On June 17, 1981, he was transferred to the state penitentiary in Nashville.
In 1977 a Justice Department task force completed a review of the FBI's original investigation. The task force found "no evidence of the complicity of the Memphis Police Department or the FBI," and it described Ray's claims that someone else had killed Dr. King as "so patently self-serving and so varied as to be wholly unbelievable." It concluded that Ray had acted alone.
Congress went further. The House Select Committee on Assassinations reopened the case in 1977, and on August 16, 1978, Ray testified before it in public. The committee issued its findings at the end of 1978 and its final report in 1979. On the central question it was unequivocal: "James Earl Ray was the assassin of Dr. King, and Raoul, as described by Ray, did not exist." It found that Ray had acted "with full knowledge of what he was doing," that it was highly probable he had stalked Dr. King in the period just before the killing, and that he fled Memphis immediately afterward. His alibi and his account of Raoul were, in its words, "not worthy of belief." It found no evidence to support allegations that the FBI had taken part.
The committee examined the plea at length. It found that a conflict of interest had existed in Ray's defense but "did not materially affect the quality of the representation Ray received." It found that his lead lawyer had not conducted a thorough and independent investigation, but that Ray could show no actual prejudice from that. It could not substantiate any of his charges that the plea was coerced. It concluded that the plea was "knowing, intelligent and voluntary" and called it "a significant indication of Ray's guilt in the assassination of Dr. King."
On motive, the committee did not accept racism alone as the explanation. It concluded that Ray's "predominant motive lay in an expectation of monetary gain," and said that conclusion "necessarily raised the possibility of conspiracy." It found "a likelihood of conspiracy in the assassination of Dr. King." It found substantial evidence of a St. Louis-based plan to finance the killing, an offer of money for Dr. King's death made by two St. Louis men who had died before the inquiry began, and thought it likely that Ray knew of it. It also found it likely that one or both of his brothers had helped him. But it could not establish a direct link between the St. Louis men and Ray or his brothers, and it found no evidence that the offer was ever accepted. Despite a major effort, it said, "no evidence of a payoff was uncovered." The conspiracy that led to Dr. King's death, the committee wrote, "could have been brought to justice in 1968."
Ray kept pressing. In November 1991 he published a book arguing his innocence. In April 1993 a televised mock trial built around his case ended with its jury acquitting him. On May 6, 1993, the governor of Tennessee rejected a request by Ray's lawyer to exonerate him and reopen the investigation. In December 1993 a former Memphis tavern owner, L.J., said in a network television interview that he had been part of a plot to kill Dr. King; for 25 years before that he had told police and the FBI that the afternoon of April 4, 1968, had passed without incident.
In January 1994 Ray's lawyers asked the courts to overturn the conviction on what they called newly discovered evidence of a plot. Shelby County prosecutors answered that it came too late. That petition, the last of his post-conviction cases, became the vehicle for his final years of litigation, with his lawyers arguing that the key physical evidence recovered in Memphis in 1968 had never been tied conclusively to the killing. In May 1994 the state parole board denied him parole and told him to reapply in five years; in October he sued the board, claiming its members had conspired with officials to keep him imprisoned. In May 1995 the Tennessee Supreme Court denied his request to have the evidence retested.
The case turned in early 1997, when the King family publicly backed his bid for a trial. In February 1997 members of the family went to Memphis to support his request in court, and on March 27, 1997, one of Dr. King's sons met Ray in Nashville, where Ray again denied the killing.
A Shelby County criminal court judge then allowed new testing of the evidence, which began in May 1997. The results were inconclusive, as earlier testing in 1968 and 1977 had been. On March 6, 1998, the Court of Criminal Appeals removed the judge who had ordered the tests, finding that he appeared biased in Ray's favor. No replacement had been named when Ray died.
That same month, Memphis prosecutors said they had identified the man Ray called Raoul, and that he had been at work in his own city when Dr. King was killed, with no connection to the case. They did not release his name. A Shelby County grand jury had already found, in 1997, no credible evidence to justify investigating L.J.'s claims, and in 1998 the District Attorney General closed a four-year investigation with the finding that there was "no credible evidence" implicating him.
James Earl Ray died in custody in Nashville on April 23, 1998. He was 70. He had served 29 years of his sentence, and his last post-conviction petition was still pending.
The questions he left behind went to court the following year. Members of the King family brought a wrongful death suit in a Tennessee state court in Memphis against L.J., the former tavern owner, who was the only defendant. The trial began in November 1999 and lasted nearly four weeks. On December 8, 1999, the jury returned a verdict that L.J. and "others, including government agencies" had taken part in a conspiracy to kill Dr. King, and awarded the family a symbolic $100. Local officials said the verdict was unlikely to lead to criminal charges, and the Deputy Attorney General of the United States said a federal investigation was unlikely to produce a criminal trial.
On August 26, 1998, four months after Ray's death, the Attorney General of the United States had directed the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division to investigate two new allegations: L.J.'s account and a claim by a former FBI agent. The investigators interviewed about 200 witnesses and reviewed tens of thousands of pages of records, including the transcript of the civil trial. L.J. refused to be interviewed.
The report, dated June 2000 and released on June 9, 2000, found that neither allegation was credible. It concluded that the Raoul allegations, which had originated with Ray, had no merit, and that Raoul was "merely the creation of James Earl Ray," a figure about whom Ray had never given a coherent, consistent account. It found that the civil trial had relied largely on hearsay and speculation, that only three witnesses had offered firsthand information, and that the jury's verdict was incompatible with the weight of the relevant evidence. It found too little evidence to justify investigating whether Ray's brothers had conspired with him. Nothing it found, the report said, disturbed the 1969 judicial determination that James Earl Ray murdered Dr. King. It recommended no further federal investigation "unless and until reliable substantiating facts are presented." L.J. died on May 20, 2000.
The King family rejected the findings and maintained that Ray had been a patsy who did not commit the killing.
On January 23, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the declassification of records on the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. King. On July 21, 2025, the National Archives released more than 230,000 pages of King assassination records, prepared with the FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department and the State Department. They include the FBI's investigative file on the killing, filed under the code name MURKIN, and State Department records on Ray's extradition from the United Kingdom.
Every court that heard Ray's case decided it on the same ground. Tennessee law in 1969 allowed a death sentence for first-degree murder, and the plea agreement took that punishment off the table in exchange for a plea of guilty and a fixed term of 99 years. Under Tennessee law as the courts applied it, a guilty plea that is knowing and voluntary waives all non-jurisdictional defenses, including claims of earlier constitutional violations. The questions Ray could raise after March 10, 1969, were therefore narrow: whether he understood the plea, whether he entered it freely, and whether his lawyers' conduct made it involuntary.
Each court answered those questions against him. The successor trial judge found the plea voluntary after a hearing in 1969. The Tennessee Supreme Court found that he had pleaded with the advice of competent counsel and that counsel's urging was no ground for relief. The Court of Criminal Appeals ruled in 1972 that his complaints about retained counsel did not involve state action and that the jail conditions had already been decided. The federal courts left the conviction standing, and the Supreme Court declined review in 1976. When the House committee examined the same record outside the courts, it reached the same answer. None of these rulings turned on the evidence that would have been heard at a trial, because the plea meant there was never one. That fact sat at the center of every later demand that Ray be tried.
The identity of Dr. King's killer is settled in law by Ray's guilty plea and the conviction entered on it, which every reviewing court upheld. Ray denied the killing from March 13, 1969, until his death, but he never gave a coherent, consistent account of the man he called Raoul, and the House committee, the 1977 Justice Department task force and the 2000 Justice Department review all rejected that account.
Whether Ray acted alone is a separate question. The 1977 task force concluded that he did. The House committee found a likelihood of conspiracy, pointing to an offer of money from St. Louis and to possible help from his brothers, but it could not establish a direct link to Ray. The committee also found it likely that his money during his time as a fugitive came from crime, citing a July 1967 bank robbery in Alton; that was a committee finding and not a charge.
The 1999 civil verdict found that L.J. and others, including government agencies, took part in a conspiracy. It was a civil judgment against a single defendant who did not testify, officials said it was unlikely to lead to criminal charges, and the Justice Department's 2000 review found it unsupported by reliable evidence.
New testing of the evidence ordered in 1997 was inconclusive, as earlier testing had been. The House committee's investigative files were placed under seal until 2029.
March 10, 1928: James Earl Ray is born in Alton, Illinois.
December 1948: He is discharged from the Army.
1949 to 1959: Convictions for burglary, robbery and forgery; in 1959, 20 years in Missouri for robbery.
April 23, 1967: He escapes from a Missouri state prison.
April 4, 1968: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is killed in Memphis, Tennessee.
June 8, 1968: He is arrested at Heathrow Airport, London.
March 10, 1969: He pleads guilty to first-degree murder and is sentenced to 99 years.
March 13, 1969: He disavows the plea.
March 31, 1969: The trial judge dies.
May 26, 1969: A new trial is denied.
February 24, 1972: The Court of Criminal Appeals affirms dismissal of his post-conviction petition.
December 13, 1976: The U.S. Supreme Court declines to review the federal ruling on his plea.
June 10 to 13, 1977: He escapes from the state prison at Petros and is recaptured; one year is added to his sentence.
August 16, 1978: He testifies before the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
1979: The committee's final report names him as the assassin and finds a likelihood of conspiracy.
June 17, 1981: He is moved to the state penitentiary in Nashville.
May 1994: Parole is denied.
February 1997: The King family supports his request for a trial.
March 6, 1998: The Court of Criminal Appeals removes the judge who ordered new testing.
April 23, 1998: Ray dies in custody in Nashville.
August 26, 1998: The Attorney General orders a new federal review.
December 8, 1999: A Memphis civil jury returns a conspiracy verdict against L.J.
June 9, 2000: The Justice Department releases its report finding no reliable evidence of a conspiracy.
July 21, 2025: The National Archives releases more than 230,000 pages of King assassination records.