More than 230,000 pages of previously classified documents related to the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., were released by the Trump administration despite opposition from the slain Nobel laureate’s family.
Files released on Monday, reportedly the government’s entire file on the assassination, which includes memos from the FBI, the CIA and foreign records, revealed King’s killer, James Earl Ray, had a brief stint in Chicago.
In 1967, Ray was serving 20 years in the Missouri State Penitentiary for robbery.
The newly released documents reveal that, in April of 1967, less than a year before King was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee, Ray broke out of prison and escaped in a bread truck.
Less than three weeks later and still on the lam, according to the FBI, he arrived in Chicago, where his brother Jerry lived at the time.
According to the documents, in early May of 1967, Ray used the alias “John Larry Rayns” to rent a one-room basement apartment at 2731 Sheffield Ave. in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, paying $14 a week.
And he got a job working as a dishwasher and cook’s helper at the “Indian Trail” Restaurant in Winnetka, where he worked for about eight weeks and made a total of $664.
The next month he moved from the Sheffield address to an apartment at 1648 Lunt Ave. in Rogers Park.
In less than a week he left his job and soon left Chicago for East St. Louis, Illinois, later heading to Canada, then Alabama. He then eventually went to Memphis, Tennessee, where he met up with King on April 4, 1968.
Unlike the files about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the files regarding King were never digitized and sat, for decades, gathering dust in federal buildings.
In a newly obtained interview, we heard from Ray’s brother, Jerry, who spoke to a reporter some time after King’s murder. He describes a theory that James was paid to implicate himself:
“If your brother has been used by somebody, as you think, will he implicate those people?” a reporter asked. “He’ll never implicate them. He’ll die with it.”
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