Book Review: Rev. Martin Luther King’s Assassin
Apr 30, 2010 Entertainment
Ray seemed an especially unsatisfying suspect. A lifelong but not especially successful crook (he had spent almost half his adult life behind bars), he was clever enough to engineer his escape—by squeezing himself into a breadbox going out on a delivery truck—from a maximum-security prison in 1967. On the other hand, he was so witless that after shooting King, he had no escape plan more elaborate than jumping in his car and driving away. Even so, he managed to elude law officers for two months before he was caught. Some of Ray’s success was just dumb luck, but most of it can be attributed to the fact that he was astonishingly forgettable. Landlords, employers, prison guards—even his own sister—had trouble remembering a single memorable thing about him. As for what drove Ray to kill King, there too the evidence comes up short. While he was certainly a racist (he worked to get George Wallace on the ballot in California), he had no history as aviolent criminal, and there is nothing that explains exactly what pushed him to get in his car in mid-March 1968 and drive from Los Angeles to Atlanta and then on to Memphis, where, only four hours before the shooting, he rented a room in a boardinghouse overlooking the Lorraine Motel, where King was staying.