James Earl Ray

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on 4 April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. Two months later James Earl Ray, an American with a record as a petty criminal, was captured in England and charged with killing King. Ray pled guilty to the charge in 1969 and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. However, Ray soon tried to take back his guilty plea, claiming he was innocent. By the 1990s his continued requests for a new trial had gained fresh life; a Memphis bar owner named Loyd Jowers even claimed that he participated in a plot to kill King. King's son Dexter met with Ray in 1997 and publicly supported him, and the next year Attorney General Janet Reno ordered a full review of the case. That review ended in 2000 with a finding that "no credible evidence" existed to support the claims of Jowers or the various other conspiracy theories. Ray died in prison in 1998.