On the 4th of April of 1968, in Memphis Tennesse, Martin Luthe
r King was assassinated by James Earl Ray. At first, James assumed the crime and because of that received a 99-year sentence. The strange part of this story was that later on, James regretted his own assumption and said that he was forced to do the same. After many battles in the court without any result, James died in prison, when he was seventy (1998).
So to this day, nobody really knows what happened in the Lorraine Motel. It is believed that there was a conspiracy between James and his brothers to plan the assassination of King, but his brothers ended up as innocents in the case.
Another conspiracy consisted in the story that James always brought up in the court. A man named Raoul, whom he first met in Montreal in 1967. According to Ray, Raoul had involved him in a gun-running scheme, and actions such as buying the Remington rifle and renting the room at Bessie Brewer’s had all been done at Raoul’s behest, ostensibly as part of that scheme. However, the details of the story changed as time passed, as James' information about Raoul kept changing, mainly about his physical appearance. Besides that, Ray was also unable to provide witnesses to his supposed encounters with Raoul. It is believed by some that «Raoul» was actually an agent of the government and that they were the ones who truly were behind the death of MLK.
Of course, if that has some truth to it, it may be possible that we never find out what really happened in Memphis in 1968.
