At around 3 p.m. on April 4, 1968, the man who would soon become Martin Luther King Jr.’s killer, James Earl Ray, used a fake name to rent a room from a lodging house near the Lorraine Motel. He went on to buy some binoculars and started staking out the motel. He spotted King on the balcony mere hours after checking in to the room, and fatally shot the civil rights leader from a bathroom window at 6:01 p.m.
Witnesses had noticed where the shot came from, but by the time the police entered the building, Ray was nowhere to be found. His rifle and equipment were found nearby, but the assassin himself had already driven away in a white Ford Mustang.
Ray left the car in Atlanta and switched to a bus during what was the start of a lengthy international escape — first to Canada and then Europe. He already had plenty of experience evading authorities before the assassination, since he was an escaped convict who had been on the loose since April 23, 1967, and was skilled at using aliases. It took until April 19 for the authorities to identify him, and he was able to stay on the run until June 8, when he was detained at London’s Heathrow Airport in possession of a gun and two different fake passports.
