James Earl Ray — sixty-five days, then a passport flag at Heathrow

On June 8, 1968, officers at London’s Heathrow Airport detained a man traveling on a Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd as he attempted to board a flight to Brussels. He was James Earl Ray, an American career criminal and prison escapee who, sixty-five days earlier, had assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The arrest closed an international flight that had carried Ray across Canada, into Portugal, and back to Britain, and it turned on a routine check: his alias had been entered on a passport watchlist, and the name flagged when he presented his documents.

Dr. King, the foremost leader of the American civil rights movement, was shot on the evening of April 4, 1968, as he stood on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had come to support striking sanitation workers. A single rifle shot fired from a rooming house across the street struck and killed him. The murder of King was an act of profound and lasting consequence, extinguishing one of the era’s most important moral voices and igniting grief and unrest across the country. The investigation that followed became one of the largest manhunts the FBI had ever conducted.

Ray’s escape relied on the same instruments that had served his earlier criminal life: false names, forged or fraudulently obtained identity documents, and constant movement. He had escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1967 and was already a fugitive when he killed King. He fled Memphis by car, made his way through Atlanta to Canada, obtained a Canadian passport under a borrowed identity, and flew to Europe, intending to reach white-ruled southern Africa. The system he exploited was also the one that caught him, because the alias on his passport had become a wanted name.

On March 10, 1969, Ray pleaded guilty to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison, avoiding a trial and a possible death sentence. Three days later he recanted the confession, and for the rest of his life he sought without success to withdraw the plea and obtain a jury trial, claiming he had been a pawn of a man he knew only as “Raoul.” No court accepted the recantation. Ray escaped briefly from a Tennessee prison in 1977 and was recaptured within days. He died in custody on April 23, 1998.