Thousands of FBI agents spent months hunting down every lead looking for Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin, but the final crack in the case came almost by accident.
One name was used to check into Bessie Brewer’s rooming house in Memphis, across the street from the Lorraine Motel, where King and his associates were staying.
“He used 17 different aliases over the course of his criminal career,” author Hampton Sides told ABC News. One came in the form of an unusual number, stamped onto the shell of a transistor radio found in the room the shooter had rented. Another lead was the “almost microscopic number in the inseam” of a pair of undershorts found in the boarding house room.
When it came to running the fingerprints off the gun that was found tossed in the street near the site of the shooting, that meant there were “armies” of fingerprint analysts “just eyeballing and comparing them” to the fingerprints of “every known felon who was on the lamb or had escaped from any prison or skipped bail,” Sides said.
The pull toward the neighbors to the north was not only to evade American authorities but also because it had been a haven for him in the past where he had some contacts and was able to obtain false identification. That’s how Ray ended up using a Canadian passport under the name Ramon George Snyed, a picture of which is included inThe Canadian Passport that James Earl Ray used under the alias Ramon George Sneyd.
In the following weeks, he tried and failed to rob a jewelry store, and then robbed a local bank but didn't make off with much.On June 8, 1968, it had been more than two months after King was killed when a customs officer in London’s Heathrow Airport spotted a customer who had two Canadian passports as he tried to check in for a flight headed for Belgium.
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