When Ray roamed Atlanta

KING CONSPIRACY THEORIES

• Raoul. After he confessed, Ray changed his mind and said he had bought his rifle at the instruction of a gun smuggler named Raoul. No credible evidence of Raoul has ever surfaced.
• A racist plot. In its 1979 report, the House Select Committee on Assassinations said it was likely that Ray killed King, with help from relatives, in the hope of collecting a bounty put up by segregationist businessmen.
• The government. Ray's last lawyer, William Pepper, wrote a book, "Orders To Kill, " in which he implicated the Memphis police, the FBI, the Green Berets, Army intelligence and Lyndon B. Johnson's White House
• Jim's Grill. Loyd Jowers, owner of a cafe across the street from the Lorraine Motel, claimed decades after the fact that a Memphis produce dealer had given him $100,000 to hire a hit man (not Ray) to kill King. The Justice Department investigated and found no basis for the story.

He called himself Galt --- Eric Starvo Galt.

He drove in from Alabama on the weekend of March 23, 1968, and paid $10.50 for a week's rent in a seedy rooming house on 14th Street near Peachtree, in Atlanta's hippie district.

Three weeks later, FBI agents discovered he had left something behind in his hurriedly vacated room: a map of Atlanta with the locations of a particular church, office and home circled in pencil. A thumbprint on the map linked the stranger to fingerprints found on items dropped outside another seedy rooming house in Memphis, including a rifle.

Eric Galt, the FBI announced, was the alias of an escaped prisoner named James Earl Ray, and he was wanted for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

Forty years ago today, a single sniper shot ended King's life in Memphis. It could have happened in Atlanta. Investigators believed that Ray had followed King for 2 1/2 weeks, from California to Alabama to Georgia, where he settled into Midtown, then a transitional neighborhood light-years away from the high-rent, high-rise district of today.

"He left a trail like a bleeding elephant in the snow, " said Jim Ponder, a retired FBI agent in DeKalb County who was part of the squad that tracked Ray.

The circles on the map? They seemed to target places where King could be found: Ebenezer Baptist Church, the headquarters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, his home on Sunset Avenue in Vine City.

"Ray didn't mean to leave that map, " said Gerald Posner, author of "Killing the Dream, " a 1998 book about the assassination. "That's one of the best pieces of documentary evidence that he was stalking King."

Stalker or 'patsy'?

Ray pleaded guilty in 1969 to avoid a trial that might have ended in a death penalty. He recanted three days later and claimed for the rest of his life that he was the innocent dupe of a conspiracy.

Many Americans believed him, including many of the people closest to King.

"I don't think [Ray] had anything to do with it, " said former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, one of King's closest aides, who suspected government involvement from the beginning. He knew all too well that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had a vendetta against his colleague and had ordered him wiretapped and harassed.

The King family shares Young's view. King's youngest son, Dexter, went so far as to visit Ray in prison and shake his hand as TV cameras rolled.

"I think James Earl Ray was a total patsy," said Dexter's older brother, Martin Luther King III. "He was hired to move around the country to give the perception that he was following my dad. There was an elaborate plan with some levels of the government involved. ... It's far bigger than what we've been told."

If there was a conspiracy, Ray took its secrets to the grave. When he died of liver disease in prison, in 1998, he had disclosed only one confederate: a shadowy gun smuggler named Raoul, who he said had instructed him to buy a rifle and go to Memphis.

Meeting at Mammy's

Ray's connection to Atlanta came to light six days after the assassination, when his car was found in the parking lot of Capitol Homes, a recently demolished housing project near the state Capitol. Residents had seen a man fitting his description leave it there early on the morning after King was killed. The white 1966 Mustang had an Alabama tag and was registered to Eric S. Galt of Birmingham.

Ray had been using the alias for months.

Ray, 40, was from Alton, Ill., and had spent most of his adult life in prison on four convictions for armed robbery and other crimes. Some inmates said he disliked black people and openly speculated that someone might pay a lot of money to have King killed.

In April 1967, Ray escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary and fled to Canada and then Mexico. He settled in Los Angeles and was still there on March 16, 1968, when King visited for a speaking engagement. Ray departed the next day, leaving his forwarding address as general delivery in Atlanta.

He drove east to New Orleans and then to Selma, Ala., where King had been scheduled to make an appearance, and finally to Birmingham and Atlanta.

Ray spent the better part of a week and a half here. How he spent his time is a mystery. He later claimed that he met Raoul over dinner at Mammy's Shanty, a restaurant on Peachtree, where he ordered London broil and was directed to buy a rifle.

"He might have been at Mammy's Shanty, but he wasn't there with Raoul, " said author Posner, who studied Ray's changing stories about the character and concluded Raoul was a complete fabrication.

Ray admitted to authorities that he drove to Birmingham on March 29 and bought a deer rifle from Aeromarine Supply Co., using the assumed name Harvey Lowmeyer. The next day, he exchanged it for a more powerful Remington Gamemaster, explaining that he wanted to hunt bigger game.

Ray insisted he did not go back to Atlanta after the purchase. But William Bradford Huie, an author who paid him for his story, concluded he was lying. The Atlanta rooming house manager, Jimmy Garner, remembered Ray paying another week's rent and had a receipt. An employee at Piedmont Laundry in Midtown recalled him leaving clothes and also had written proof. Both establishments have long since been replaced by office towers.

On April 1, the SCLC announced that King would travel to Memphis. He had been there a week before to lead a march of striking garbage workers that had erupted in violence. He felt honor-bound to return and lead a nonviolent protest.

Driving before dawn

On April 3, as King boarded a plane that was delayed because of a bomb threat, Ray drove his Mustang to Memphis. That evening, while King delivered his prophetic "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech, Ray checked into the New Rebel Motel on the outskirts of town.

On the following afternoon, he moved to a rooming house across the street from the Lorraine Motel, where King was staying.

The shot rang out at 6:01 p.m.

Ray realized he was being set up, he later explained, so he jumped in his car and dashed for the state line, melting into the gathering darkness in Mississippi. He stayed on back roads and took 11 hours to drive back to Atlanta. Arriving after dawn, he ditched his Mustang at Capitol Homes; he hated doing so, he told Huie, because it was the best car he had ever owned.

He visited his room in Midtown to wipe away fingerprints and remove some items, then picked up his clothes at the Piedmont Laundry, where manager Annie E. Peters noted his nervous pacing. At 1 p.m., he boarded a bus for Cincinnati.

Ray was in Canada by the time investigators linked the clues he had left in Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham and Los Angeles. It would be two months before he was caught trying to board a flight in London.