Word: rays
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Ray's three-day appearance in a jammed House hearing room, guarded by 30 U.S. marshals, was nonetheless enlightening. Understandably jittery upon emerging from seclusion into the glare of Washington publicity, the scrawny ex-holdup man stumbled almost incoherently through a 90-minute statement that he had written himself. But as the more skeptical committee members questioned Ray, he turned out to be a patient, polite and cooperative, if unpersuasive witness. By contrast, his attorney, professional Conspiracy Theorist Mark Lane, loaded his frequent objections to the questioning with such sneering sarcasm that he angered even the most sympathetic members...
...shoot Martin Luther King," Ray insisted in his statement. Instead of revealing new evidence of a plot to kill King, Ray stuck to his claim that he had been framed by an elusive stranger named Raoul, whom he had met in a Montreal bar after escaping from a prison in Jefferson City, Mo., on April 23, 1967. It was Raoul, Ray insisted, who asked him to buy a telescopic-sighted rifle in Birmingham and a pair of binoculars in Memphis-and it was Raoul who must have left them near the scene of the shooting, well marked with Ray...
...time of the murder, Ray said, he was not even in the rooming house from which the shots were fired. Where was he? "I believe I was at a gas station," he said. "Or I may have been driving around in my car." Under questioning, Ray could not provide the name of the station where he said he had tried to get a leaky tire repaired, and he was unsure of its location. Although claiming to be innocent of the murder, he said he fled Memphis in his white Mustang when he saw unusual police activity near the rooming house...
Committee Chairman Louis Stokes, who had predicted that Ray would be killed by fellow conspirators during his escape from Brushy Mountain state prison in Tennessee last summer, now led the critical questioning of Ray. Why had he not tried harder to help his lawyers find Raoul? "I thought he would probably testify against me," said Ray. The answer fit Ray's contention that Raoul was a conspirator working with unknown others to kill King but let Ray take the punishment. Offering no evidence, Ray implied that Raoul may have been working with...
...Ray offered various reasons for having pleaded guilty. He said one of his first attorneys, Percy Foreman, convinced him that he would face the death penalty if he went to trial; that both Foreman and Ray had a financial interest in keeping the public from hearing Ray's story until it was first told in a book by William Bradford Huie; and that Ray's father, who Ray said had escaped from prison in the 1920s, would probably be returned to prison if Ray fought the Government's indictment. According to Ray, Foreman said Ray...