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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What events followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.?
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and this is part two of our two-parter on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
That's right. Where we left off with part one was the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr., 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 in FBI history, depending on who you ask. Cost a couple of million bucks in those dollars. 3,500 investigators.
Chapter 2: How was the manhunt for James Earl Ray conducted?
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 Jr. since 1956. So for 12 years under a program called Racial Matters.
And I don't think they meant like matters, like race matters.
No, I think they meant the other way, like the matters of race. And then in 1963, they started tapping his phones under the Communist Infiltration Program. And J. Edgar Hoover was still around at the time because it seems like he was there for 300 years. And he didn't like Martin Luther King Jr.
Chapter 3: What role did the FBI play in the investigation?
He called him the most notorious liar in the country publicly at a press conference because King had been criticizing the FBI because they, you know, weren't protecting the civil rights of black Americans. And so Hoover didn't like the guy, yet he was the guy kind of at the top of this huge investigation.
I read Martin Luther King's cool response to J. Edgar Hoover calling him the most notorious liar.
Get bent?
No. No, he said that J. Edgar Hoover must be under tremendous pressure to have said such a thing. Wow. Like he was sympathetic.
Jeez, let's talk about the high road, man.
Yeah, for sure.
All right, so the FBI gets a hold of that .30-06 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?
How many rifles do you guys have just laying around in Memphis that day?
Yeah, dumped minutes after by a guy who sped away in a Mustang.
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Chapter 4: How was James Earl Ray captured?
So he had multiple aliases. Oh, yeah. And. that portable radio that they found in the bundle had a scratched out ID number, and they eventually figured out that that was his prison radio. It had his inmate number on it. So he escaped prison and was like, I'm taking my radio.
It seems pretty conclusive that James Earl Ray would have been the shooter, right?
Yeah.
So they issued an indictment for his arrest for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. on May 7th, a couple months after, or no, a month after MLK was murdered. Yeah. And an international manhunt began. I know the FBI was definitely concentrating on the United States, but they didn't rule out the possibility that he had started to go abroad.
And so they issued it far and wide, a wanted poster with his data and his photos on it.
So the FBI started tracking his movements. He's got all these aliases. In that year that he was on the lam after the shooting, He was into politics for a little while, supporting Alabama Governor George Wallace, his presidential campaign. He was in L.A. for a little while. He took dance lessons. He went to bartending school.
He lived in Mexico for like a month or so, trying 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.
Yeah, so it seemed like the month before he murdered Martin Luther King Jr., he suddenly got that idea in his head because none of his movements suggested that he had even focused on Martin Luther King at all up to that point. After the assassination, James Earl Ray fled to Toronto. It's eventually where he landed first.
I think you mean Toronto.
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Chapter 5: What happened during James Earl Ray's trial?
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Have you ever wondered if your pet is lying to you?
Why is my cat not here? And I go in and she's eating my lunch.
Or if hypnotism is real. You will use the suggestion in order to enhance your cognitive control.
What's inside a black hole? Black holes could be a consequence of the way that we understand the universe.
Well, we have answers for you in the new iHeart original podcast, Science Stuff. Join me, Jorge Cham, as we tackle questions you've always wanted to know the answer to about animals, space, our brains, and our bodies. Questions like, can you survive being cryogenically frozen? This is experimental. This may never work for you.
What's a quantum computer? It's not just a faster computer. It performs in a fundamentally different way.
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Chapter 6: Who was James Earl Ray and what was his background?
Yeah, 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, which is 99 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 30 years, whereas if he had gotten a life sentence and not the 99, he could have gotten out in 12 and a half.
Right.
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 listen to our Barkley Marathon episode, he escaped successfully for three days in 1977 and was picked up in Brushy Mountain where that race takes place.
But he would eventually die in prison in 1998 at the age of 70, which would also been the year he was first eligible for parole.
Yes. And you said earlier that we were going to talk a little bit about James Earl Ray and his criminal career. That's right. 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 Earl Ray put it, a woman of very limited intelligence, barely able to communicate. And she also drank very heavily. And there is a report card from grade school that said his attitude toward 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 16, worked for a while, and then he joined the Army.
Yeah, he joined the Army. Yeah, he dropped out of high school at 16. King was in college at 15. So just contrast the two situations. In 46, 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, hard labor for that.
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