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John Ray used to own a tavern in Benton Park. Now he lives in Quincy and dabbles in conspiracy theory.

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From Truth At Last:

To say he was in a panic would be too strong, but he felt it was urgent.... He asked me to meet him the next night.

The next day, I put a machine gun in the trunk of my Thunderbird, and stuck a couple of handguns under the front seat on the passenger side of the T-Bird in case they were needed, just in case something was going down. James was involved with serious people.

It was now the evening of April 3, 1968. Down in Memphis, violent storms had moved into the Delta. Raul was attired in a wet trench coat, looking like a true spook when he showed up at James's room, #34 at the New Rebel Motel. Raul told Jimmy, "We're staying for a few days in Memphis. There's a place located near the waterfront where we will rent a room."

Meanwhile, John Ray says, rumors had been circulating among the Memphis police that King wouldn't leave the city alive. King famously finished his speech that night with what some took as a premonition: "And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

While King spoke, John Ray remembers, he was walking into a West Memphis tavern to meet James. "He was drinking a few beers, which I thought was odd, because he didn't like beer — said it gave him headaches," Ray recounts. "He told me he was going to do a job, but he didn't know what it was — only that he was going to be the getaway driver. Then he told me he needed to go, that he had to meet some people back across the river."

Ray pauses. "I don't remember him even mentioning King's name or that he knew that he was in Memphis," says Ray. "And then I saw him leaving, walking out of the bar into the alley. It was like a scene from Casablanca."

On January 15, 1999, John Ray mailed a short, typo-specked letter to Coretta Scott King. It reads:

Greetings Ms. King:

I am coming clean on Rev. Martin Luther King, jr. birthday, and making available to you a copy of James Earl Ray's confession. The information I am making herein to you about the Washington shooting and brother James' OSS [U.S. Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency] is nothing new to the feds....

If you want to get on the right trail of the shooting of Rev. King, then I suggest you asked your good friend attorney General Janet Reno why is she holding information back of soldier Washington, and James Earl Ray's OSS connection with soldier Washington and Raul.

The letter arrived several months after Attorney General Reno, at the request of President Bill Clinton, reopened a limited investigation of the assassination, which found nothing to disprove that James Earl Ray was the gunman.

Looking worn from the hours spent retracing the road to infamy, John Ray says in barely a whisper, "James got caught up in something he didn't understand. He didn't know what was going down. He just thought he'd be the getaway driver. He was never a racist. Never."

Lyndon Barsten asked for and received from his literary agent the sum of $1,000 for his work on Truth At Last. "I just wanted that for expenses, even though I figure I've spent $40,000 over the past few years," says Barsten. "But it doesn't matter. This has been my life for the past fifteen years, and I need to move on. My wife hates this. She says it's never-ending."

For his efforts, John Larry Ray received $8,500, which, for a man who gets by on monthly Social Security disability checks, represents his life savings.

Of the money, Ray says, "I think I'll probably use it for my tombstone."

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