The King Assassination

The King Assassination Revisited

Coretta King marched through the streets of Atlanta last week, honoring the 47th birthday of her slain husband by leading a band of protesters demanding jobs for the unemployed. Before he died, Martin Luther King Jr. had been immersed in planning a Poor People's Campaign with the same goal. Then came the sniper's shot that killed him in Memphis on April 4, 1968, the two-month pursuit of his killer, and the swift conviction of a smirking, small-time thief named James Earl Ray. Yet nearly eight years later, the widespread feeling still persists that King's murder has not really been solved.

In the most recent Harris Poll, 60% of the population has expressed the opinion that there must have been a conspiracy to murder the civil rights leader. Prompted by the revelation that the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had conducted a vicious vendetta to discredit King, the Justice Department is probing both the FBI's harassment of him and its investigation of his death.

Tough to Prove. Certainly there are a number of unanswered questions. Why would Ray have killed King? How did he finance a year of travel, ranging from Acapulco to Montreal, London and Lisbon, between his escape from the state penitentiary in Jefferson City, Mo., on April 23, 1967, and his arrest at London's Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968? How could he have acquired passports, false identification and four cred ible aliases without help? For that matter, did Ray—who has repudiated his guilty plea and demanded a trial—really kill King? The evidence against him is persuasive, but it is also largely circumstantial. The case might be tough to prove in court. Because of his guilty plea, Ray's case never went before a jury.

Intriguing answers to some of those questions will be published this fall in a book about James Earl Ray. The book is the fruit of seven years of dogged research by George McMillan, 62, a freelance investigative reporter from Tennessee now living in Cambridge, Mass.* He wrote magazine articles on Southern race problems before working on an NBC-TV special on the John Kennedy assassination. With an advance from his publisher, Little, Brown, McMillan set out in 1969 to do a psychological study of Ray. As he gradually gained the confidence of various members of the impoverished and prison-prone Ray family (he paid Ray's father, two brothers and one sister a total of $3,850 to help with his research), McMillan became convinced that Ray had the motive, the means and the capability for killing King without any help at all (see excerpts page 18).

As have other writers, McMillan traces Ray's itinerant and difficult upbringing: eldest of nine children; father sometimes fixing and trading junk cars, hauling with a pickup truck, dishwashing, more frequently out of work, then abandoning the family; mother turning to alcohol; two brothers often in prison or reform school; one uncle a convict; life, with no privacy, in a farm shack near Ewing, Mo., and in a grandmother's house in Alton, Ill.; postwar service as an Army MP in Nurnberg, Germany; a discharge for a "lack of adaptability" to military service.