one was at the front door with a shotgun. the other, leaner individual went over the counters. this individual went from cage to cage and scooped up about 30 grand, total. most of the money was in $20 bills, an important fact as we ll soon hear. the gunmen got away, but near the cemetery where ray s mother was buried we found the shotgun partially burned, and the bib overalls with a stocking mask partially burned here. so who robbed the bank? i think james earl ray did. the very next day ray bought a used car and headed for canada. suddenly, he had enough money to buy a tailor-made suit and take a week s vacation at a resort. but he returned to his cheap room along the montreal waterfront trying to find a way to ship out to white-ruled areas of africa. ray s own words from 40 years
floor boarding house. the rear of the building looks out at the lorraine motel just across the street. ray managed to get this room, 5b, in the back. it is incredibly small. it is, indeed. and a little bit tacky, too. the boardinghouse is now part of the national civil rights museum at the lorraine motel. museum president, beverly robertson, showed me ray s room. one of the witnesses later said that this desk with a mirror that we can see there was actually in front of the window. it had been. he shifted that. he moved it. they say he moved it, because people on either side of the room heard noise during the course of the day. furniture dragging? furniture dragging, chairs moving. ray used a $20 bill to rent the room for the week, then left to buy these binoculars at a nearby sporting goods store. he paid with two more $20 bills. an eerie echo of the unsolved
is true or not, because james earl ray said it, i would say it s a pure toss-up. when a police team stopped for a rest break at this firehouse, patrolman gene douglas was left in a car outside to monitor the radio. i heard a noise, like a shot, well, it was more like a rifle. that s when everybody inside the firehouse started running out saying king s been shot, king s been shot. douglas reached for his radio mic. we have information king has been shot at the lorraine. captain ray raced out of police headquarters heading to the scene. there, on south main street, he saw a bundle abandoned in the recessed doorway of a record store, right below the rooming house.
in 1997, dr. king s youngest son, dexter, thanked the man who pleaded guilty to murdering his father. dexter was just 7 when he lost his dad. now, as a grown man, dexter looked ray in the eye and asked him the question. did you kill my father? no, no, i didn t. but like i say, sometimes these questions are difficult to answer. i want you to know that i believe you and my family believes you. and we are going to do everything in our power to try and make sure that justice will prevail. thank you all for coming here this morning. the attorney who orchestrated this unlikely event is william pepper. as ray s lawyer, he saw an opening. and with the king family s
escape, he would write me a code letter. what would a code letter look like? code letter is you read every seventh word. if he underlined his name twice, that means read every seventh word. see the signature with the two lines underneath it? now read every seventh word. place to bury articles. this is a letter james sent jerry before he did escape from the tennessee state prison in 1977. he also smuggled out a wish list of what to bury, cigarettes, boots, ponchos, whiskey. what was the whiskey for? just to keep warm while he was out there. seven inmates went over the back wall. jerry hid a bag of supplies in the woods but james couldn t find it. he told me if i hadn t dropped that bag they would have never caught me. instead james earl ray was captured in just three days. his last days of freedom ever. in the spring of 1998, james,