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James Earl Ray pleaded guilty in court to assassinating Dr Martin Luther King, but spent the rest of his life denying having fired the shot that rocked America.

A low-life drifter from Illinois who earned notoriety for killing the civil rights leader on April 4, 1968, Ray was the oldest of nine children of an alcoholic mother and a father who had been jailed for burglary.

He learnt about crime from his adored uncle Earl, a former convict who taught him about stealing and brothels. After a two-year spell in the US Army, during which he spent three months in detention for drunkenness and going absent while on duty, Ray was discharged for failing to adapt to army life. He turned to crime to support himself, leading to a string of arrests. While serving a 20-year term for robbing a St Louis grocery store, he escaped by hiding in a bakery truck.

Times Archive, 1968: Photo clue in search for Ray

If the evidence of a conspiracy to murder Martin Luther King does emerge no one will be more gratified than the FBI

• Ramon Sneyd denies that he killed Dr King Luther

• US Justice department chief interviews King case man Luther

Ray then spent almost a year roaming the United States, Canada and Mexico. The only friends he made were prostitutes. On the day of Dr King’s assassination he checked in to a Memphis rooming house across the street from the Lorraine Motel, where the Nobel Peace Prize laureate was staying while supporting striking black city workers.

Investigators believe that Ray shot Dr King from the rooming house bathroom and escaped just ahead of police.

A Remington rifle he had bought several days earlier was found with a spent shell in the chamber and his fingerprints on it, wrapped in a bedspread on a street. He was arrested at Heathrow on June 8, 1968, with a ticket for Brussels. He was apparently trying to get to white-ruled Rhodesia.

He was never tried for Dr King’s assassination, because he pleaded guilty on March 10, 1969 — his 41st birthday. He was given a 99-year sentence. Ray always protested his innocence, blaming a shadowy smuggler known as Raoul, whom he said gave him money to buy a rifle and bring it to Memphis.

He convinced Dr King’s younger son, Dexter, that he was innocent at a prison meeting in 1997. Ray died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1998, aged 70.

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