James Earl Ray
Mar. 10, 1928 - Apr. 23, 1998
I admit it. I really don't know that much about the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Once you've got into the JFK assassination, everything else seems kind of minor. Not that MLK and RFK weren't important, mind you...but there's only so much time to look into these things, and JFK is the Holy Grail of Conspiracy Science. Therefore my JFK knowledge is strong and my MLK knowledge is weak. But I do know that James Earl Ray, the man generally considered to be the assassin of Martin Luther King, first confessed to the crime and then spent thirty years in jail denying he did it. He was so persuasive that, by the time he died in 1998, he even had MLK's family convinced he didn't do it. And I don't really know whether he did or not. Everything I know comes from U2's song "Pride (In the Name of Love)", and even it is factually incorrect. The shooting happened at six in the evening...not early morning, as the song states. Ray claimed to have been set up by a mysterious man named "Raoul" or some such, and it was actually this shady character who shot King that evening. But if you saw that episode of X-Files, you know it was Cigarette Smoking Man who really did it.
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