Word: mcmillans
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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...
...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...
...McMillan claims that Ray was a Nazi sympathizer who used to give...
...Heil Hitler" salute around his home (this was one reason he requested duty in Germany); that he was an anti-black racist; and that he developed an intense hatred for King. McMillan supports these claims with statements quoting Ray's relatives, criminal accomplices and fellow inmates. They may all be shaky sources, but they would seem to . have little reason to lie about Ray. McMillan quotes one of Ray's burglary accomplices, Walter Rife, for example, as saying: "Yeah, Jimmy was a little outraged about Negroes. He didn't care for them at all. Once he said...
...recruited by conspirators to kill King? According to McMillan, he was plotting the murder well before he escaped from prison by hiding in a large crate used to carry loaves of bread to a prison honor farm (this required an accomplice in the prison). Moreover, McMillan quotes the assassin's brother Jerry as saying that Ray telephoned him from Memphis on the morning of the murder and said he was going to get "the big nigger" the same...