Attack on an Assassin

James Earl Ray, serving a 99-year sentence at Tennessee's Brushy Mountain Prison for killing Martin Luther King, has long wanted to become a jailhouse legal expert. Early one morning last week, as Ray studied in the prison's law library, he was attacked from behind by three fellow cons, all of them black. The gang beat and stabbed Ray, 53, with a foot-long metal window brace. Doctors in nearby Oak Ridge found 22 wounds in Ray's head, neck and chest, but after an hour of surgery and 77 stitches he was out of danger. At week's end Ray was discharged from Oak...

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