RAY'S DEATH MAY NOT END QUESTIONS : MAN DENIES KILLING KING IN '68.

Byline: Jack Warner and Hollis Towns Cox News Service

James Earl Ray, whose life is running out in a Tennessee prison hospital, is likely to go to his grave as one of the great enigmas of the 20th century.

The question is whether he acted alone in the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or was part of a larger conspiracy. There are also some who believe he had nothing at all to do with it.

The fact that he has never been tried has helped to promote various conspiracy theories, most of which involve government participation.

But no theory has been able to surmount Ray's single fingerprint on a rifle, the oft-challenged ballistics tests that showed it was that rifle that killed King in Memphis, and Ray's own confession.

Three days after Ray abruptly pleaded guilty to killing King in April 1968, he recanted his confession. But in 28 years of trying, he hasn't produced anything to win a new trial.

Ray, 68 and suffering chronic liver disease, is in a Nashville prison hospital for the third time since just before Christmas. His attorney says he will die within months without a liver transplant. He will probably live long enough for a state court hearing Feb. 20 in Memphis on his lawyers' request for new scientific tests on the rifle the state contends was the murder weapon. The question of whether Ray could attend the hearing personally has not been answered.

The King family recently broke with its long-held policy of refusing to comment on Ray and is now supporting his request for a trial.

Dexter King, president and chief executive officer of the King Center, said the family is calling for a trial ``in the name of truth and justice,'' and to bring all the facts out.

Phillip Jones, CEO of Intellectual Properties Management, the firm that manages the King Estate, said the family decided to break its long silence on Ray after receiving an appeal from Ray's family. In the past, Ray's family has kept its distance and has never before sought out the King family to help them gain Ray a new trial, Jones said.

The King family was moved by Ray's ``last wish'' request and decided to speak out because it was the ``Christian thing to do,'' Jones said.

``The family has always believed that the truth did not come out,'' Jones said. ``The King family believes there are issues that remain unresolved regarding his guilt or innocence.''

The governments of Tennessee and the United States professed themselves steadfastly satisfied that Ray was the only person involved in the assassination.

Unanswered questions

But central questions never answered include his motivation and how he was able to flee the United States and bounce around Europe for two months before he was arrested in London.

After the killing, the federal government's role in maintaining constant surveillance of King and its attempts to discredit him were revealed, raising theories of federal involvement in the killing.

Not even a congressional committee's conclusion that Ray may have been hired to kill King, and its sharp criticism of the FBI for a sloppy investigation, produced any answers.

Even in prison, Ray has been in the headlines often, ranging from his marriage to a Nashville artist to his spectacular escape in 1977 from remote, forbidding Brushy Mountain State Prison. Through it all, he has insisted he was framed and blamed everything on a shadowy man he could identify only as Raoul.

However, many old-timers within the civil rights movement insist he was merely a dupe. Among them is the Rev. James Lawson, who taught King the principles of nonviolent resistance and at whose behest King was in Memphis when he was killed.

So certain is Lawson of Ray's innocence that he officiated at Ray's prison marriage to Anna Sandhu, a courtroom artist, in 1978.

But Taylor Branch, author of the book ``Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63'' and a leading historian of the civil rights movement, said, ``There are a lot of reasons why they might want to think that Ray is a victim, and they are very human reasons.

``People don't like to believe that an important life can be snuffed out without any great consequence in the world, but that's the way life is,'' Branch said. ``Ray is where he belongs. I don't think there was the kind of high-level conspiracy that many people want to believe in.''

Ray's early life

Ray was born March 28, 1928, one of eight children of an often unemployed day laborer and an alcoholic woman. He grew up in St. Louis, dropped out of school in the eighth grade and joined the Army when he was 18.

He was a military policeman in Germany for a while before the Army gave him a general discharge for ineptitude. Back in the United States, he drifted around the Midwest and the West, running up a record of arrests that included vagrancy, burglary and armed robbery.

His first fall came in 1955, when he was sent to Leavenworth Prison for three years for forging a postal money order.

He had been out of Leavenworth only a little more than a year when he was arrested in St. Louis for a supermarket holdup. He drew 20 years for that.

In 1967, Ray was working in the bakery at the Missouri State Prison in Jefferson City. A small man, he crawled into a large breadbox being trucked out of the prison and disappeared.

By his own account, Ray made his way to Canada, robbed a brothel in Montreal and then met the famous Raoul.

Ray said Raoul was a gunrunner who hired the fugitive to help him smuggle guns or drugs through Canada and Mexico and into the United States.

King assassinated 

Ray was living at a boarding house in Atlanta in March 1968, he said, and despite an apparently ready access to unregistered weapons, Raoul sent him to a gun shop in Alabama to buy a .30-06 hunting rifle. From there, he said, they went to Memphis, where Ray was registered as ``John Willard'' in a flophouse behind the Lorraine Motel.

King, in Memphis to help striking garbage collectors, was staying at the Lorraine. On the evening of April 4, as King was leaning over the balcony railing of his second-floor room, he was slain by a single bullet.

That bullet, the government contended later, was fired by Ray from the bathroom of the flophouse, after which he dashed out of the building, conveniently dropped his rifle on the sidewalk, leaped in a white Mustang and fled.

Ray, however, claimed he had left the flophouse to get a tire fixed on his Mustang, and when he returned he found the area crawling with police. ``I didn't hang around too long,'' he told the Tennessee parole board in 1994.

Ray said he fled south to Atlanta and heard of King's killing on his car radio. ``I didn't pay too much attention to that,'' he said. Then, however, he heard that police were looking for a white man in a white Mustang and ``I did pay attention to that.''

It was 16 days before the FBI identified Ray as the killer and issued a warrant for him.

By that time, Ray had been in Canada nearly two weeks, got a Canadian passport, and flew to London on May 6, all under the auspices of Raoul, he said. He went to Lisbon on May 7 and returned to London on May 17. Scotland Yard detectives arrested him at Heathrow Airport.

Guilty plea

Ray was held in Memphis while the government prepared its case against him and what was expected to be the trial of the half-century was to have started in March 1969. The renowned trial lawyer Percy Foreman stepped forth to defend Ray. But on March 10, 1969, Ray was ushered into the courtroom and announced he was pleading guilty. He was sentenced to 99 years in state prison. The furor from that had not died away when Ray recanted, saying he had been bullied into pleading guilty by Foreman and journalist William Bradford Huie, to whom he had sold his life story to raise money to pay Foreman.

``King was just another politician to me,'' he said. ``Why would I want to do something like kill a big-shot politician, me a fugitive, and bring all that heat down on myself?'' Nonetheless, his pleas for a new trial never succeeded, nor was he able to win parole.

Prison wardens knew Ray as a runner - a man who was always plotting his escape. He tried at least four times, and succeeded on one sensational occasion.

On June 10, 1977, a fistfight broke out in the recreational yard at the fortress-like Brushy Mountain prison. Ray and six other convicts were lurking at another part of the prison wall with seven sections of smuggled lead pipe. While guards were trying to quell the staged fight, Ray and his cohorts constructed a 7-foot ladder out of the pipe and scaled the gray brick wall, squeezing beneath the 2,300-volt wire that runs along the top.

But 54 hours later, bloodhounds found him in a hole, under a pile of leaves, on a dark mountainside eight miles from the prison.