ATLANTA - Most know that Atlanta was the home of Martin Luther King Jr. but many don’t know that it was also the temporary home of his assassin, James Earl Ray or that the city was Ray’s destination after King's murder on April 4, 1968.
In 1968, Midtown Atlanta was a very different place than it is now.
Peachtree Street had a small-town quality to it – a hodgepodge of businesses, churches, homes, and boardinghouses. One boardinghouse was at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Street, now the towering home of Colony Square. For 12 days, it was the home of a drifter named Ray.
“He escaped from prison in 1967,” James Swanson told 11Alive.
Swanson wrote a book called "Chasing King’s Killer" and tracked Ray’s movements.
"He went to Canada. He went to Mexico. He studied self-help books. He went to dancing school. He took bartending lessons,” Swanson said. “The last thing James Earl Ray was doing was hunting for Martin Luther King.”
But in early 1968, Ray became inexplicably, yet lethally, fixated on Dr. King.
“The mystery, the enigma, of James Earl Ray is to this day we don’t know exactly why he did it,” Swanson said.
But in March, armed with a pistol, Ray drove from Los Angeles to New Orleans to Selma, Alabama to Atlanta. He rented a room in the Midtown boardinghouse and clumsily tried to stalk King.
Swanson said that Ray wanted to stalk Dr. King but, because the Civil Rights Leader’s schedule was often in flux, Ray rarely knew where King would be.
“He could have waited for him outside his church, he could have walked up to him with his pistol and shot him. But he decided he would stand out in Atlanta, a white man near a black church. He would never get away,” Swanson said. “He did want to escape. So, he decided Atlanta was not the best place to kill Dr. King.”
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Ray read in a newspaper that King planned a march in Memphis on behalf of the city’s striking sanitation workers. Ray bought a rifle, rented a room near the Lorraine Motel, and Swanson said, saw Dr. King in the flesh for the first time from a makeshift sniper’s nest nearby.
Ray ran from the boardinghouse but dropped the rifle when he saw a police cruiser. A witness saw him get into a white Ford Mustang. However, by the time Memphis police knew that, Ray was driving Mississippi and Alabama’s backroads back to Atlanta.
“So, he drove through the night and sometime during that journey, on the radio, he heard the announcement Martin Luther King was dead,” Swanson said.
Ray went back to the boardinghouse in midtown, cleared his room, then drove his car to a downtown public housing project called Capitol Homes and took a bus out of town. Dr. King’s killer had abandoned the Mustang in a parking lot off Memorial Drive, a few blocks from the state Capitol.
“For days, [the Mustang] sat there. People who lived in the housing project thought this is odd, with police looking for a white Mustang,” Swanson said. “Several days later, one of [the residents] actually called the police and the police and FBI came and discovered the car.”
By the time police and the FBI found the Mustang, the assassin was in Toronto getting a Canadian passport and fleeing the country for Europe. Fingerprints in the Mustang matched the prints found on the rifle abandoned in Memphis and matched the prints of the Missouri prison escapee named James Earl Ray.
“It was actually one of the FBI’s finest hours, despite the fact that J. Edgar Hoover hated Martin Luther King,” Swanson said.
Two months after the murder, a Scotland Yard detective in London’s airport recognized Ray from his mug shot and detained the killer of an American icon.
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