Thursday, March 8, 2007

Martin Luther King & MontrealConnection?

I don't Remember ever hearing this story,.....that James Earl Ray had escaped from Prison in the states,.& fled to Montreal,...........
 
• On April 23, 1967, James Earl Ray hid in a bread truck and escaped from the maximum-security wing of the Missouri State Prison. He fled to Montreal, frequenting the Neptune Bar on de la Commune, where he claims to have befriended a shadowy figure named Raoul. To his dying day, Ray swore that Raoul hatched the plan to assassinate Martin Luther King.
 
...............taken from a story by Kristian Gravenor of the Montreal Mirror
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2 comments:

edbro68 MSN said...

Les, I don't remember this either. But the Mirror has never been known for it's veracity.        Ed 

edbro68 MSN said...

Apparently Ray was in Montreal but it was when he first escaped prison before King was murdered.        ED   A little more than two months after King's death, on June 8, 1968, Ray, an escaped convict who had broken out of the Missouri State Penitentiary a year before the assassination, was captured at London's Heathrow Airport while trying to leave the United Kingdom on a false Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd. Ray was quickly extradited to Tennessee and charged with King's murder, confessing to the assassination on March 10, 1969, (though he recanted this confession three days later) and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. On the advice of his attorney Percy Foreman, Ray took a guilty plea to avoid a trial conviction and therefore the possibility of receiving the death penalty. Ray later fired Foreman as his attorney (from then on derisively calling him "Percy Fourflusher") claiming that a man he met in Montreal, Canada, using the alias "Raoul" had been deeply involved, as was his brother Johnny, but not himself, further asserting that although he didn't "personally shoot Dr. King," he may have been "partially responsible without knowing it," hinting at a conspiracy. He spent the remainder of his life attempting (unsuccessfully) to withdraw his guilty plea and secure the trial he never had. Escape