MLK assassin was Illinois native

By Tom Emery

Most consider Martin Luther King, Jr. to be the greatest civil rights leader of all. Sadly for Illinois, his alleged assassin is a native son.

James Earl Ray, the man who many believe pulled the trigger, was born in Alton and spent time there at various points over the next four decades, sometimes with criminal intent. He committed many other misdeeds at various locales around Illinois.

Ray pled guilty to the killing of King, but later recanted. His role is still debated by researchers today, and some believe he was innocent, a bit player in a murky conspiracy. Among the doubters are members of the King family, who have stated their belief that the reverend was not killed by Ray, but by a massive government plot.

Gerald Posner, however, disagrees. Posner, an attorney and investigative reporter from New York City, has authored over a dozen books, including the widely acclaimed 1998 work, Killing the Dream, an intricate analysis of Ray and the King assassination. He cites, among other things, the numerous inconsistencies in Ray’s stories and finds no conclusive evidence that disputes Ray’s guilt.

“Do I think that Ray was the trigger man? Absolutely,” said Posner, who has appeared on The History Channel, CNN, CBS, Fox News, and NBC. “The question is why. There are many reasons why he may have done it.”

Posner notes that little is known on Ray’s time in Alton, and few have delved into his earlier years. “A lot of people have researched Ray and the assassination, and have looked into every detail,” he remarked. “But not much has ever been done on his connections to Alton. People really don’t talk much about that.”

*****

James Earl Ray was born in a two-room basement apartment in a simple frame house near the corner of Ninth and Belle streets, a tough part of Alton, on March 10, 1928. One of the largest brothels in the city was just a few doors down.

He was the first of eight children of George and Lucille Ray, who had married in 1926. George, who was nicknamed “Speedy” because of his slow way of talking, was a small-time hood who preferred crime to honest work. A former inmate at the Iowa State Penitentiary, he used over a dozen surnames in his life. Lucille, who hailed from a decent family, eventually became a disheveled individual who slid into alcoholism.

George’s many misdeeds and inability to hold a real job relegated the Ray family into a life of economic misery in one of the poorest areas of Alton. “I think it’s hard to overstate the degree of hard existence, with a grinding poverty in a poor white neighborhood,” said Posner. “It was a hardscrabble, tough life.”

James’ middle name came from his uncle Earl, who was in prison for most of his life. It carried on a family tradition.

“Ray came from a heralded history of petty criminals,” remarked Posner. “His father, grandfather, and uncle all had criminal backgrounds steeped in crime. They were always trying to beat the system, rather than work within the system.”

Brothers John and Jerry also spent plenty of time behind bars. Both would later produce books claiming their brother’s innocence in the King assassination.

When James was a year and a half old, the Rays left Alton and moved north, living both in Quincy and northeastern Missouri. In May 1944, James, then sixteen, dropped out of the eighth grade and returned to Alton, where he lived with his maternal grandmother, Mary Maher, in her boarding house on Broadway.

Maher was one of the few positive influences in Ray’s life. “I think Ray felt comfortable in Alton. It gave him a feeling of stability,” said Posner. “When he was with his grandmother, he was away from the anger, hatred, and violence of his father, and his mother’s increasing drinking.

“His grandmother was one of the few people who dealt with him in saying, if you want to work, then here’s what you do. She always helped him find jobs,” continued Posner. “She provided a different atmosphere than his home life, because role models of any kind for James in that household were nonexistent.”

*****

The next few months were one of the brighter times in Ray’s sordid life. With his grandmother’s help, he found a job in the dye department at International Shoe Company in East Hartford, near Alton, for 77 cents an hour. Ray commuted to his job by streetcar. Production at the company was high because of WWII, and Ray racked up plenty of overtime.

In Dec. 1945, Ray’s account at the Alton Bank and Trust Company totaled $1,180. “That was an amazing amount of money for someone like him at the time,” said Posner. “That he saved that much money is remarkable.

“He could have spent it drinking and whoring, or bought himself a truck to go out partying,” continued Posner. “But he did what his grandmother would have wanted, to save it."

He was also around his uncle, Willie Maher, and a close relationship formed, albeit briefly. “They did everything together,” said Posner. “They went to football games, and played pickup baseball.”

However, Ray became fond of a German friend at work, Henry Stumm, who was a German nationalist and follower of Adolph Hitler. Some believe that Ray enhanced his already-racist views from his connection to Stumm.

“I don’t view Ray as a racist in the sense of someone in the Ku Klux Klan, whose life is driven by racism,” remarked Posner. “But Ray had a denigrating view of blacks, who were the only ones below the poor whites like Ray’s family on the socioeconomic scale."

Ray’s job at International Shoe abruptly ended in Dec. 1945 when he was fired as the company stopped its military shoe production with the end of wartime.

“There was one window in James Earl Ray’s life, and that was in Alton at that time,” theorized Posner. “There was a span of about a year where he had the option of going straight, not have a life of crime. He had a steady job, and was saving some money. He had a chance to turn himself around. But when he was fired, he gradually fell back into the life he had before.

“It’s certainly easy to speculate. But what if he hadn’t lost the job with International Shoe?” wonders Posner. “Would things have turned out differently? Would he have killed Martin Luther King in 1968? It’s very possible that he wouldn’t have. But we’ll never know for sure.”

*****

Ray then enlisted in the Army in Feb. 1946 and, enamored with Hitler and the Rhineland, requested station in Germany. But he soon became disillusioned, and briefly returned to Alton after a general discharge in late 1948. He still had $1,400 in the bank, but that soon was spent, and he left for Chicago in June 1949.

He drifted amid various convictions, including a sentence for robbing a Chicago cab driver in 1952 that resulted in 22 months in prisons at Joliet and Pontiac. He was back in Alton in the brutally hot summer of 1954, and was nabbed in a bungled burglary at a dry cleaner in East Alton that Aug. 27.

Ray skipped out after bail and went back to Quincy, where much of his family now lived. He was subsequently convicted of robbing a rural post office in Adams County and sentenced to Leavenworth.

Sixteen months after his release, Ray and another man, Joseph Austin, robbed an IGA supermarket in Alton with pistols at 9:30 a.m. on Aug. 7, 1959. The crime netted them almost $1,000, and they fled in a blue 1950 Buick.

“I was on a three-wheeler, and I chased them into the woods,” recalled John Light, who spent thirty years on the Alton police force. “We got his accomplice, Austin. But Ray got away.”

He was eventually captured and tied to an armed robbery of a St. Louis Kroger store with another man two months later. Two of the IGA employees identified Ray as the perpetrator, though he only admitted to the Kroger crime. As a repeat offender, he received a 20-year sentence at the Missouri State Penitentiary.

On April 23, 1967, Ray escaped in a bread truck from the penitentiary. Once again, he would make his way back to Alton.

*****

There, police were not aware that Ray had escaped. “The Missouri State Pen thing was a farce,” said Light, who was then chief of detectives in Alton. “They had prisoners working in the office who made the fliers for escapees. They had the wrong photo, wrong everything.”

On July 13, 1967, two masked gunmen with shotguns held up the Bank of Alton. “That was a different kind of bank robbery,” said Light, who now lives in Oregon. “Normally, bank robbers will go up to one cage, get the money, and run. In this case, one robber jumped from counter to counter and cage to cage, and got away with a lot.”

A total of $27,230 was taken in the incident. Witnesses described the men as similar in height and build to the Ray brothers, and the robbers fled in a waiting getaway car that drove deeper into Alton, rather than making a run out of town. The shotgun, masks, and clothing were found near Willie Maher’s home on Fourth Street.

An FBI investigation could not definitively tie the Rays to the robbery, though the House Select Committee later determined that “substantial, albeit circumstantial” evidence existed to link the Rays.

Light is among the believers. “Oh, yeah, that’s who I think it was,” he said. “I heard it from informants, and we knew what they had been doing.” Light also believes that James was the robber who went from counter to counter at the bank.

A 2008 CNN report asserted that the Alton bank heist bankrolled Ray in the months leading to King’s assassination. Ray used cash for a number of subsequent purchases, including for a 1962 Plymouth on July 14, the day after the incident at the bank.

Four days after the robbery, Ray arrived in the Montreal area, the first stop in a string of travel that took him to Mexico, Los Angeles, and elsewhere in late 1967 and early 1968.

*****

At 6:01 p.m. on Thursday, April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was standing on the second-floor walkway of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., when he was felled by an assassin’s bullet. An investigation determined the shot was fired by an assailant standing in a bathtub in the upstairs room of a boarding house, some 207 feet away.

The killing sparked unrest in dozens of cities, including Alton. Ray, who fled to Canada and on to London, later claimed that he was swept up in an intricate plot involving a shadowy figure named Raoul. Many discount Ray’s claims as fantastic and believe that he fired the shot.

The King family is not among them, believing that their father was the victim of a government conspiracy that involved the CIA, FBI, Army intelligence, and President Lyndon B. Johnson.

In March 1997, Dexter Scott King, the youngest son of the slain reverend, met with Ray in a Nashville prison. Ray denied killing King, to which Dexter replied, “I believe you, and my family believes you.”

The King family later requested a new government inquiry from the Clinton administration, but the Justice Department offered only a limited investigation. In June 2000, the Department concluded that no evidence of a plot existed, and that Ray acted alone.

Ray died of liver disease in prison on April 23, 1998. In Dec. 1999, the King family prevailed in a civil suit against Memphis businessman, Loyd Jowers, who owned a restaurant below the rooming house where the fatal shot was fired.

Jowers had claimed in an ABC-TV interview in 1993 that he had hired King’s assassin as a favor to a friend in the underworld. The Kings believed the verdict validated their claim that someone other than Ray was the assassin.

Posner believes otherwise. He states that Ray’s desire for notoriety, as well as a possible payday from one of many bounties on King, may have played a factor.

He also states that Ray was apparently not driven by political motives, unlike assassins such as Lee Harvey Oswald, and was much older than many assassins, who are often younger men seeking to change the world. Ray, who was 40 at the time of the King assassination, was actually a year older than King himself.

“There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Ray was the trigger man. The more troubling question is why,” said Posner. “It’s not enough to just say he was a racist. But Ray took those final answers with him to the grave.

“I think that's why so many Americans have difficulty accepting that Ray was the lone assassin, because they don't understand his motive,” continued Posner. “Only by understanding Ray is it possible to know why King died and it's puzzling, even for those of us who have studied Ray.

“Ray had peculiar demons,” concluded Posner. “The hard part is figuring them out.”

Tom Emery may be reached at [email protected].