THE world had hardly learned of Martin Luther King's murder in Memphis before speculation began that the civil rights leader had been the victim of a well-planned conspiracy. The rumor mills were lubricated in part by the assiduously cultivated doubts that some still entertain about the killing of John F. Kennedy. In this case, however, the conspiracy theorists could point to the fact that, though the gunman was clearly identified, he remained —for all the far-flung resources of the FBI—mysteriously at large.
While the hows and whys of the murder continued to elude the authorities, amateur assassinologists assumed from the start that King's death had been engineered by a group of white Southern racists. The plot, said some, was hatched in Birmingham; others maintained that it was a made-in-Memphis undertaking. The latter theory was given some support last week by a Memphian who told TIME and later the FBI that he had overheard a local businessman giving an unknown triggerman urgent orders to kill King on the balcony of his motel, and even specifying the price for the job ($5,000) and the pickup point for his fee (New Orleans).
Threading through the cloud of gossip and guesswork, the authorities managed to assemble the basic jigsaw puzzle from which the killer's identity—if not his motive—emerged.
How It Began. The first putative name broken out of the FBI was that of Eric Starve Gait. This, it soon became clear, was a pseudonym built up to throw pursuers off the trail. Fingerprints found on the rifle left in the street when the killer fled belong to James Earl Ray, an escaped Missouri convict who has spent prison time for four major crimes, including armed robbery, burglary, forgery of U.S. money orders and car theft. The prints were painstakingly checked against the FBI's bank of 53,000 sets of records on wanted men; it took 13 days to find them.
According to several current theories, the death of King was plotted about three months ago in Memphis. At least one witness reported seeing a man roughly matching Ray's description in Memphis last fall. He was thin, neatly dressed, with short, dark hair; his face and neck were marred by the scars of acne or smallpox.
James Earl Ray had fled the Missouri State Penitentiary in April 1967, hiding in a big wooden breadbox to get from the prison bakery to the outside world. He had twice before tried to escape, once placing a dummy in his bed and hiding in a ventilator shaft; once he broke a makeshift ladder trying to scale the wall.
Ray's youth in Alton, Ill., had been full of tangles with the law. Son of a laborer who had the same name, Ray dropped out of school in the 10th grade, spent two years in the Army, where he served a term for drunkenness and "breaking arrest," was discharged in 1948, and turned to civilian crime. He was convicted of burglary in Los Angeles in 1949, of robbery in Chicago in 1952, of forgery in Missouri in 1955, and in 1960 had drawn the 20-year term for armed robbery and car theft that he was serving when he made his escape.