Who Killed Martin Luther King

The alleged assassin of Martin Luther King gives his side of the story. He claims that he is innocent. Rev. Jesse Jackson, in the foreword, agrees that James Earl Ray did not assassinate Martin Luther King and that the U.S. government was involved in the plot.

A deep dive into James Earl Ray’s role in the national tragedy: “Superb . . . a model of investigation . . . as gripping as a first-class detective story” (The New York Times). On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis, Tennessee, by a single assassin’s bullet. A career criminal named James Earl Ray was seen fleeing from a rooming house that overlooked the hotel balcony from where King was cut down. An international manhunt ended two months later with Ray’s capture. Though Ray initially pled guilty, he quickly recanted and for the rest of his life insisted he was an unwitting pawn in a grand conspiracy. In Killing the Dream, expert investigative reporter Gerald Posner reexamines Ray and the evidence, even tracking down the mystery man Ray claimed was the conspiracy’s mastermind. Beginning with an authoritative biography of Ray’s life, and continuing with a gripping account of the assassination and its aftermath, Posner cuts through phony witnesses, false claims, and a web of misinformation surrounding that tragic spring day in 1968. He puts Ray’s conspiracy theory to rest and ultimately manages to disclose what really happened the day King was murdered.

Bestselling author, James Earl Ray’s defense attorney, and, later, lawyer for the King family William Pepper reveals who actually killed MLK. William Pepper was James Earl Ray’s lawyer in the trial for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., and even after Ray’s conviction and death, Pepper continues to adamantly argue Ray’s innocence. This myth-shattering exposé is a revised, updated, and heavily expanded volume of Pepper’s original bestselling and critically acclaimed book Orders to Kill, with twenty-six years of additional research included. The result reveals dramatic new details of the night of the murder, the trial, and why Ray was chosen to take the fall for an evil conspiracy—a government-sanctioned assassination of our nation’s greatest leader. The plan, according to Pepper, was for a team of United States Army Special Forces snipers to kill King, but just as they were taking aim, a backup civilian assassin pulled the trigger. In The Plot to Kill King, Pepper shares the evidence and testimonies that prove that Ray was a fall guy chosen by those who viewed King as a dangerous revolutionary. His findings make the book one of the most important of our time—the uncensored story of the murder of an American hero that contains disturbing revelations about the obscure inner-workings of our government and how it continues, even today, to obscure the truth.

Argues that James Earl Ray was not King's assassin, and gathers evidence to support a theory that figures in government and organized crime were actually responsible

One of the most infamous and devastating assassinations in American history, the murder of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., was also one of the most quickly resolved by authorities: James Earl Ray was convicted of the crime less than a year after it occurred. Yet, did they catch the right person? Or was Ray framed by President Lyndon B Johnson and FBI Director J Edgar Hoover? In Who REALLY Killed Martin Luther King, Jr.?, Phillip F. Nelson explores the tactics used by the FBI to portray Ray as a southern racist and stalker of King. He shows that early books on King’s death were written for the very purpose of “dis-informing” the American public, at the behest of the FBI and CIA, and are filled with proven lies and distortions. As Nelson methodically exposes the original constructed false narrative as the massive deceit that it was, he presents a revised and corrected account in its place, based upon proven facts that exonerate James Earl Ray. Nelson’s account is supplemented by several authors, including Harold Weisberg, Mark Lane, Dick Gregory, John Avery Emison, Philip Melanson, and William F. Pepper. Nelson also posits numerous instances of how government investigators—the FBI originally, then the Department of Justice in 1976, the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigators in 1978 and the DOJ again in 2000—deliberately avoided pursuing any and all leads which pointed toward Ray’s innocence.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • On April 4, 1968, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel. The nation was shocked, enraged, and saddened. As chaos erupted across the country and mourners gathered at King's funeral, investigators launched a sixty-five day search for King’s assassin that would lead them across two continents—from the author of Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers. With a blistering, cross-cutting narrative that draws on a wealth of dramatic unpublished documents, Hampton Sides, bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers, delivers a non-fiction thriller in the tradition of William Manchester's The Death of a President and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. With Hellhound On His Trail, Sides shines a light on the largest manhunt in American history and brings it to life for all to see. With a New Afterword

On November 8, 1985, 18-year-old Tom Odle brutally murdered his parents and three siblings in the small southern Illinois town of Mount Vernon, sending shockwaves throughout the nation. The murder of the Odle family remains one of the most horrific family mass murders in U.S. history. Odle was sentenced to death and, after seventeen years on death row, expected a lethal injection to end his life. However, Illinois governor George Ryan’s moratorium on the death penalty in 2000, and later commutation of all death sentences in 2003, changed Odle’s sentence to natural life. The commutation of his death sentence was an epiphany for Odle. Prior to the commutation of his death sentence, Odle lived in denial, repressing any feelings about his family and his horrible crime. Following the commutation and the removal of the weight of eventual execution associated with his death sentence, he was confronted with an unfamiliar reality. A future. As a result, he realized that he needed to understand why he murdered his family. He reached out to Dr. Robert Hanlon, a neuropsychologist who had examined him in the past. Dr. Hanlon engaged Odle in a therapeutic process of introspection and self-reflection, which became the basis of their collaboration on this book. Hanlon tells a gripping story of Odle’s life as an abused child, the life experiences that formed his personality, and his tragic homicidal escalation to mass murder, seamlessly weaving into the narrative Odle’s unadorned reflections of his childhood, finding a new family on death row, and his belief in the powers of redemption. As our nation attempts to understand the continual mass murders occurring in the U.S., Survived by One sheds some light on the psychological aspects of why and how such acts of extreme carnage may occur. However, Survived by One offers a never-been-told perspective from the mass murderer himself, as he searches for the answers concurrently being asked by the nation and the world.