Word: rays
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...seeming paradox of the two-bit thief who destroyed one of America's heroic figures is certain to tantalize imaginative minds forever. Ray grew up in a farm shack near Ewing, Mo., in an impoverished, quarreling family that in his early years struggled to survive. His father at times worked at local hauling jobs with a pickup truck, and as a railroad hand. He had also spent two years in prison for larceny. Ray turned to crime, following the precedent of his father, an uncle and a brother. His parents split in 1952, after his mother had become...
...Ray grew into such an incompetent criminal that he dropped telltale identification at the site of one breakin; got lost after a holdup and drove his getaway car back into the robbery neighborhood, to be pursued and caught by surprised police; was caught another time when he re-entered the window of a business as he tried to steal more items from a place he had already robbed. Despite his reputation as an escape artist, most of his many efforts ended in frustration...
Beyond that background, another reason that questions persist is that no official investigation has even attempted to lay out publicly all the details of Ray's involvement in King's murder. When Ray pleaded guilty in court on March 10, 1969, Tennessee prosecutors merely declared that they had examined all the evidence compiled by local and state police, the FBI and even international agencies and concluded that "we have no proof other than that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by James Earl Ray and James Earl Ray alone, not in concert with anyone else." Ray...
...after telling the Memphis judge that he had indeed shot King, Ray injected an objection that has fanned conspiracy theories ever since. He said he did not agree with the conclusions, cited by Foreman, of the Tennessee attorney general, U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover that there was no conspiracy. But Ray refused to elaborate...
Although Judge W. Preston Battle failed to pursue Ray's tantalizing reservation, he did repeatedly ask Ray if he understood just what he was admitting and that he was waiving forever his right to a trial. Said Ray: "Yes, sir." The judge: "Has anything besides your sentence of 99 years in the penitentiary been promised to you to get you to plead guilty?" Ray: "No, no one has used pressure...