King assassination remains mystery 40 years later

The assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 40 years ago today is one of the nation’s enduring tragedies — and mysteries.

As a reporter for The Associated Press and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in the 1980s, I followed the aftermath of that mystery, which was then still unfolding.

The alleged assassin, James Earl Ray, lived in two different Tennessee prisons while I was there, and he was always making news.

I covered his 1981 stabbing at Brushy Mountain Penitentiary and the resulting trial, when authorities hauled him into a Knoxville courtroom under tight security to try to force him to testify. (Ray swore he didn’t see the inmates who stabbed him, but his brother told me otherwise.)

I wrote to Ray in January 1986 requesting an interview for a Journal-Constitution special section marking the first King national holiday. I got a terse response, typed on a small sheet of blue paper and signed. Ray said he had read the many stories I had written about him — and didn’t care much for them.

“I can’t conceive of anything more ludicrous than me denying a long list of accusations, including the MLK homicide, while the prosecutions touts the other side, and all of the records in the case have either been deep-sixed or classified,” he wrote me.

Ray escaped to England after the assassination, was captured two months later and confessed to the crime in 1969. But three days after his confession, he took it back. Ray claimed he was forced to plead guilty by government officials and his lawyer. From then on, he insisted he was a pawn in a complex conspiracy and was framed by a mysterious man he knew only as “Raoul.”

Ray spent years seeking a trial, but despite pleas from Jesse Jackson and other black leaders, he never got one. Many believe Ray, a petty criminal with a 10th-grade education, had neither the motive to kill King nor the intelligence to pull it off alone.

Ray died in prison April 23, 1998, so we may never know.