Today is the 53rd anniversary of the killing of Martin Luther King Jr.. 4 April 1968, the leader of the African American civil rights movement came to Memphis, Tennessee, and settled at the Lorraine Motel. At 18:01 he stepped out onto the second floor balcony of the facility and was hit on the head by a shot fired from a sniper rifle. At the hospital, doctors found irreparable brain damage and announced the death at 19:05.
More than 3.500 FBI agents were involved in the investigation. In short, it was discovered that the bullet had been fired from a room in the Bessie Brower boarding house, located opposite the one where the Protestant pastor was staying. The camera was registered under the name of one John Willard, which later turned out to be an alias used by one James Earl Ray. His fingerprints were found on the murder weapon, which was found in front of a local store.
Ray was arrested on June 8 of the same year at London's Heathrow airport, while trying to travel to Brussels on a false Canadian passport. March 10, 1969 was sentenced to 99 years in prison. He died in 1998 and up until the end professed his innocence.
In December 1999 a jury ruled that King had been the victim of a conspiracy which also included Loyd Jowers, the owner of a restaurant located near the motel where the murder took place.
The proceedings of the investigation into the assassination of Martin Luther King were classified until 2002 by the US administration. It later emerged that, according to some witnesses, the shot had been fired from a different point than where Ray was.
In 1963, after the killing of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, King had said these words to his wife Coretta: “The same will happen to me. I keep telling you: this is a sick society." In 1964 he received the Nobel Peace Prize.
