James Earl Ray

James Earl Ray, 70, who confessed to assassinating the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and then spent three decades protesting his innocence, died of liver failure yesterday in a Nashville hospital, frustrating those who fear they may never learn the full story. About a year after the 1968 shooting, Ray told authorities that he was the man who fired the bullet that struck down Dr. King in Memphis, Tenn. But Ray recanted almost immediately and spent the rest of his life battling for a trial.

In 1969, a career criminal named James Earl Ray pleaded guilty to murdering the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., so he was never tried for the assassination. Ray changed his mind and vainly sought a trial, and tonight he will finally get one - on cable television. Probably nothing that happens in Guilt or Innocence: The Trial of James Earl Ray, at 8 on HBO, will shorten the 99-year prison sentence Ray is serving. This TV trial has no legal standing, although Ray is holding onto long-shot hopes that it could lead either to the granting of a real trial, on the ground of newly discovered evidence, or to a successful appeal for clemency.

James Earl Ray will awaken on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s holiday tomorrow in his cell, a concrete cube with no bars and a 4-inch-wide glass slit for a window. Then, he will go to work. Behind 12-foot razor-wire fences at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, the man serving 99 years as Dr. King's assassin will resume his quest to prove he is innocent, a claim repeated in a new autobiography and in a prison interview. He is speaking the truth, he said, and the truth can set him free.

NOTE TO SELVES: Don't mess with Miami's supercouple. Musical pair Gloria and Emilio Estefan were granted a temporary restraining order against a soap opera actor and aspiring singer who's been causing them nothin' but grief. Juan Carlos Diaz has accused Emilio of making sexual advances and threatening him. Judge Deborah White-Labora granted the order Friday for the Estefans against Diaz, a Venezuelan thespian who has requested a similar order against Senor Estefan and his bodyguard, Antonio Almeida.

For nearly three decades, James Earl Ray has been a despised man - convicted of the murder of the most celebrated African-American leader ever, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But with Ray - now 68 and suffering from kidney and liver damage in a Nashville, Tenn., hospital hasn't long to live - and many black leaders and civil- rights activists in Philadelphia and across the nation are hoping Ray hangs on a bit longer. The reason? They believe Ray has something still to say about allegations that there was actually a conspiracy to assassinate King, who was killed by a sniper as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn.

Chipper Jones's 26th birthday couldn't have turned out much better. Jones led off the ninth inning with his fourth hit of the game and scored the winning run on a double by Javy Lopez as host Atlanta beat Arizona last night, 6-5, the Braves' ninth win in 10 games. "It was the perfect script tonight," said Jones, who raised his batting average to .400. "We win it in dramatic fashion on my birthday. You couldn't ask for much better. " After Jones's leadoff single against losing pitcher Russ Springer (1-1)

It seemed to mark a major turn in the assassination case of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: A judge declared yesterday that test bullets recently fired from James Earl Ray's rifle had marks different from the slug that killed the civil rights leader. But a respected firearms expert who tested the gun for a House investigative committee in 1978 said he did not think the recent tests were any different from previous tests that were inconclusive. "They can look at it from now until the year 2050, and it won't change," said George Wilson, a former president of the Association of Firearm and Tool Mark Examiners.

William Bradford Huie, 76, the author of several books about violence during the civil rights movement in the South, died Saturday of an apparent heart attack. He also was the author of The Execution of Private Slovik, which was made into a television movie, about the only U.S. soldier executed for desertion during World War II. He wrote The Americanization of Emily and The Klansman, which were made into films. In He Slew the Dreamer, he wrote about James Earl Ray, the man convicted of assassinating the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

BOSTON 'MISTAKES' IN BUNGLED RAID The mayor and police commissioner attended Sunday services at a Baptist church to deliver a message of peace and healing after a bungled police drug raid led to the death of a retired minister. "A mistake was made and we're going to heal those mistakes," Mayor Thomas Menino said following the service at the Dorchester Temple Baptist Church. The Rev. Accelynne Williams, 75, a retired Methodist minister, died of a heart attack Friday, 45 minutes after a police SWAT team broke into his apartment.

WASHINGTON FEMALE POW WAS SEXUALLY ASSAULTED A female Army officer was sexually molested after being captured during the Persian Gulf War. The incident involved Maj. Rhonda Cornum, who was captured after her helicopter was shot down over Iraq. The officer testified Monday before the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Military that she was "violated manually - vaginally and rectally," according to USA Today. The major went on to say she considered the episode "an occupational hazard of going to war," the paper reported.

THE MYTHOLOGY of the year 1968 A.D. is a black hole so powerful that objectivity can hardly escape it. What follows is drawn from research, from impartial sources and from my personal memory. One of the most cherished beliefs about 1968 is that it culminated the years of liberals' struggle to improve America. In fact, vast social change pre-dated 1968. Under the Great Society, barriers were torn down in 1964 and 1965, with civil-rights acts outlawing racial segregation and enshrining equal opportunity in jobs and voting.

As a journalist and White House correspondent, I was privileged to come in contact with distinguished African American leaders - in a couple of instances working with and for them - Malcolm X, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., W.E.B. DuBois, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. All of them heightened my stream of consciousness and broadened my world view. King periodically visited New York City when I worked there, either to visit friends or to autograph his books at a Harlem bookstore.

The loud and uncontrollable sobs I heard from the living room in my house were jolting, especially since the sobs came from my mother. In between her sobs she kept repeating in a mantra-like trance, "He's dead, He's dead. " He was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Her plaintive cry was not merely a cry of anguish from someone who had lost a cherished loved one. It symbolized the collective wail of legions of African Americans, and indeed Americans of all colors, who loved and cherished a man who had meant so much and had done so much for them.

NOTE TO SELVES: Don't mess with Miami's supercouple. Musical pair Gloria and Emilio Estefan were granted a temporary restraining order against a soap opera actor and aspiring singer who's been causing them nothin' but grief. Juan Carlos Diaz has accused Emilio of making sexual advances and threatening him. Judge Deborah White-Labora granted the order Friday for the Estefans against Diaz, a Venezuelan thespian who has requested a similar order against Senor Estefan and his bodyguard, Antonio Almeida.

No conspiracy? Sure! Many people remain unconvinced, even after the latest FBI investigation, that James Earl Ray acted alone in killing Martin Luther King Jr. (article, June 10). They simply realize that, to the degree there are political considerations to a crime, investigation of that crime is affected or even determined by those considerations. Whatever else may have happened, the conclusion most acceptable to the political establishment was that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman who killed President John F. Kennedy, that Vincent Foster walked into Fort Marcey Park and committed suicide there and that the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City was blown up by a couple of right-wing nuts.

Almost 32 years after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis, there are few answers concerning why he was killed and who orchestrated his assassination. Allegations of involvement in King's murder on April 4, 1968, range from a government conspiracy involving the FBI, the CIA, and President Lyndon B. Johnson to the Memphis police, the Ku Klux Klan, and a variety of white-supremacist organizations in the South. Legally, however, the blame for the assassination rests squarely at the feet of James Earl Ray, a petty misfit who spent much of his life behind bars, before and after King's death.

Members of the family of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said they were prepared to "move on with our lives" after a Tennessee jury found that the 1968 murder of the civil rights leader was the result of a conspiracy and not the work of a lone gunman. The jury's conclusion, in a civil case Wednesday, pleased family members who had dismissed earlier investigations as a cover-up. They had voiced support for James Earl Ray, who though convicted had contended that he was not the assassin who gunned down Dr. King on a motel balcony in Memphis.

Dead men tell no tales, but the questions they inspire can be immortal. This is true for James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Ray died in a Nashville hospital April 23 from liver disease at age 70. Ray's death ends the King family's campaign to gain him a trial in which the truth finally could be determined. Now that truth is more elusive and ambiguous than ever. Answers may lie in the secret federal files on the King assassination.

Chipper Jones's 26th birthday couldn't have turned out much better. Jones led off the ninth inning with his fourth hit of the game and scored the winning run on a double by Javy Lopez as host Atlanta beat Arizona last night, 6-5, the Braves' ninth win in 10 games. "It was the perfect script tonight," said Jones, who raised his batting average to .400. "We win it in dramatic fashion on my birthday. You couldn't ask for much better. " After Jones's leadoff single against losing pitcher Russ Springer (1-1)

Thirty years ago this week, James Earl Ray was the most hated man in black America, the target of a worldwide manhunt for killing the nation's greatest civil-rights leader, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. But yesterday, when the 70-year-old confessed killer finally succumbed to liver disease in a Nashville, Tenn., hospital, widow Coretta Scott King released a statement that called Ray's death "a tragedy . . . for the entire nation. " The King family reaction was seconded by other black leaders who now believe that America will never know for sure whether the April 4, 1968, assassination was part of a broad conspiracy.