Word: rays
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Later, in letters that he wrote to his biographer William Bradford Huie, Ray claimed that he had merely followed directions from a man he had met in a Montreal bar after his escape from the Missouri prison. Ray claimed he knew the blond Latin stranger only as "Raoul." He told Huie that Raoul had asked him to smuggle unnamed contraband into the U.S. from both Canada and Mexico, then buy a car and a rifle in Birmingham, and finally to drive to Memphis and check into a sleazy rooming house facing the Lorraine Motel, where King was staying. Ray insisted...
...Without Ray's confession, the case against him was strong but circumstantial. There was no doubt he had bought the rifle and binoculars left near the scene of the crime; he had rejected a room in the rooming house that did not have a view of the Lorraine before taking one that did, was seen near the murder site within minutes of the killing. No one actually saw him fire the rifle, of course, and the bullet that killed King was too fragmented to be conclusively linked with the gun, which bore Ray's fingerprints...
Hiring and firing various attorneys, Ray fought in vain for a trial, claiming that Foreman had pressured him into confessing. Foreman concedes that he advised Ray that both the evidence and the outraged mood of the country were so strong against him that he probably would be sentenced to death if he insisted on a trial at first, instead of admitting his guilt. Last year Ray's attempt to withdraw his guilty plea and gain a trial was rejected by both the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Judicial Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court. At the time...
Indeed, as the chances of a House committee investigation grew, Ray began to hint that he had concocted the story about Raoul. Before Richard Sprague, the veteran Philadelphia prosecutor, resigned as counsel to the House Select Committee in a flurry of internecine committee bickering, Sprague interviewed Ray in prison three times. Sprague said they were beginning to develop a rapport. After these interviews, Sprague concluded that Raoul "does not and did not exist." Ray did insist, however, that he had had some help from unnamed others while he was a fugitive in Canada, Portugal and England after King...
Author Huie, who at first promoted Ray's Raoul story in a series of magazine articles, later concluded in a book, He Slew the Dreamer, that Ray had misled him. Huie decided that Ray had acted alone in killing King. But what had motivated Ray? Huie, who dug into much of Ray's life, contended he was just a small-time career crook determined to impress the big shots in his chosen profession by scoring one major...