He Slew the Dreamer

s/t: My Search with James Earl Ray for the Truth about the Murder of Martin Luther King As the 30th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr approaches, his convicted killer has raised new claims of innocence & seeks a new trial. King's family & friends within the civil rights community have also expressed doubts that James Earl Ray was the killer, or, if he was, that he acted alone. One of King's children even went to Ray's prison cell to meet with the reportedly terminally ill convict & emerged to say that he believed Ray's denial. Conspiracy theories old & new swirl around the case, & news media from around the world have descended once again on Memphis, TN, where King was killed on 4/4/68. Amidst the speculation, He Slew the Dreamer is a remarkably detailed & clearheaded examination of the available evidence at the time the murder occurred. The author, the late Wm Bradford Huie, was one of the most celebrated figures of 20th century journalism & investigative reporting. He wrote a dozen books, most of them made into popular movies, & hundreds of articles in newspapers & magazines. A pioneer of "checkbook journalism", he sought the truth in controversial stories where the truth was hard to come by. In the case of James Earl Ray, Huie paid Ray & his original attorneys $40,000 for cooperation in explaining his movements in the months before King's assassination & up to Ray's arrest weeks later in London. Huie was a personal friend of Martin Luther King & he writes that he went into his investigation of Ray believing that a conspiracy was behind King's murder. But after retracing Ray's movements thru California, Louisiana, Mexico, Canada, Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis & London, he came to the opposite conclusion: that James Earl Ray was a pathetic petty criminal who hated African Americans & sought to make a name for himself by murdering King. He Slew the Dreamer was originally published soon after Ray went to prison & was republished in 1977, but has been out of print until this new edition, published with the cooperation of Huie's widow. Author Wayne Greenhaw has written a new foreword, epilogue & afterword to the book. An index has been added. This is an invaluable resource to the current debate over the King assassination, as well as an intriguing look both at the criminal mind & at the techniques of investigative journalism.