Ray was convicted in 1969 after entering a guilty plea—thus forgoing a jury trial and the possibility of a death sentence—and was sentenced to 99 years of imprisonment.

In 1994, Loyd Jowers, the owner of a restaurant, publicly began claiming that he had been part of a conspiracy to assassinate King and that Ray was a scapegoat.

The King family has consistently said that they believe Ray was innocent, though this conclusion was disputed by the United States Department of Justice in 2000.

[1][2] The King family has stated that they believe the true murderer was a Memphis Police Department officer, Lieutenant Earl Clark.

[5] In February 1935, Ray's father, known by the nickname Great Dane, passed a bad check in Alton, Illinois, and then moved to Ewing, Missouri, where the family changed their name to Raynes to avoid law enforcement.

Frustrated with his results and jilted by the prostitute with whom he had formed a relationship, Ray left Mexico on or around November 16, 1967,[14] arriving in Los Angeles three days later.

[16] He considered emigrating to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where a predominantly white minority regime had unilaterally assumed independence from the United Kingdom in 1965.

Ray had continued using the Galt alias after his stint in Mexico, but when he made this purchase, he gave his name as Harvey Lowmeyer.

[28][7] He picked up his belongings and fled north to Canada, arriving in Toronto three days later, where he hid for over a month and acquired a Canadian passport under the false name of Ramon George Sneyd.

[34] At check-in, the ticket agent noticed the name on his passport, Sneyd, was on a Royal Canadian Mounted Police watchlist.

He had entered a guilty plea on the advice of his attorney, Percy Foreman, to avoid the sentence of death by electrocution, which would have been a possible outcome of a jury trial.

Unbeknownst to Ray, however, a death sentence would have been commuted as unconstitutional under the de facto moratorium in place since 1967[citation needed] and following Furman v. Georgia.

Ray began claiming that a man he had met in Montreal back in 1967, who used the alias "Raoul", had been involved in the assassination, and he asserted that he did not "personally shoot Dr. King" but may have been "partially responsible without knowing it", hinting at a conspiracy.

Ray told Huie that he purposely left the rifle with his fingerprints on it in plain sight at the crime scene because he wanted to become a famous criminal.

"[42] Ray spent the remainder of his life unsuccessfully attempting to withdraw his guilty plea and secure a jury trial.

[citation needed] On June 10, 1977, Ray and six other convicts escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee.

The family accepted $100 (~$183.00 in 2023) in restitution to demonstrate they were not pursuing the case for financial gain, and they publicly stated that Ray, in their opinion, had nothing to do with the assassination.

[49][47] Coretta Scott King said, "The jury was clearly convinced by the extensive evidence that was presented during the trial that, in addition to Mr. Jowers, the conspiracy of the Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies, were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband.

"[50][51][52][3] Prompted by the King family's acceptance of some of the claims of conspiracy, United States Attorney General Janet Reno ordered a new investigation on August 26, 1998.

[53] On June 9, 2000, the United States Department of Justice released a 150-page report rejecting allegations that there was a conspiracy to assassinate King, including the determination of the Memphis civil court jury.

[55] Ray died on April 23, 1998, just nineteen days after the thirtieth anniversary of King's assassination, at the age of seventy, at the Nashville Memorial Hospital in Madison, Tennessee, from complications related to kidney disease and liver failure caused by hepatitis C, having served twenty-nine years in prison.