Occasionally on this page, I will reflect on memories of interviews past, photos of which are displayed on Teddy’s Photo Gallery page of this web site.
     This one is about my time spent talking to James Earl Ray.
     I prepared for the interview with James Earl Ray more diligently that any other interview I had done up until that time. I had read every article, transcript, and report I could get my hands on. So as the three of us—a news reporter who was doing a story on the interview, a photographer and me headed east from Nashville to Wartburg, Tennessee that afternoon near the end of May, 1977, I felt a keen sense of excitement. This was the man convicted of assassinating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And from all I researched I thought I knew him.
     My first shock was seeing Brushy Mountain Prison. It’s stuck on the side of a mountain like a medieval fortress. If seeing the place did not conjure up images of chains and flogging, entering it certainly did. Suddenly I felt nauseous. There is a sickening pall that hovers in the air of Brushy Mountain. Its very energy seems to emit a feeling of pain, suffering, and evil.
The warden at Brushy granted us one hour with Ray so we set up our camera quickly in a small room devoid of any décor other than a table and four chairs. I tried to clear out that toxic energy that gripped me since entering the fortress. Suddenly Ray walked in accompanied by a guard with arms as thick as the trunk of a mature oak tree. I noticed his eyes darting to each of us, instantly sizing us up, using that inmate scanner learned from years in the slammer. Thinner and smaller than I imagined him to be, he nodded hello, and took his seat. One corner of his mouth grinned slightly when he said, “Sorry I couldn’t wear something better for TV but blue is the only color shirt I’ve got in my wardrobe here.”
     The joke evoked a nervous laugh from our newsman, our camera man, as well as the guard standing off to the side of Ray. But to me, the joke was a jolt! Every document I had read about Ray stated that he has no sense of humor. Was this a tactic of a street-smart con to throw an obvious anxious interviewer off balance? Or were those who wrote about Ray writing about their profile of an assassin rather than Ray himself? 
      I never found out the answers to those questions, nor did I develop information that broke new ground. Ray’s answers were talking points he had memorized so well over time. What I did develop was an opinion about the King killing.
After an hour with the man who pleaded guilty to killing King, then recanted his confession, I came away with a gut feeling that Ray was involved in the King assassination as a part of a conspiracy but was not the lone killer. Ray’s mind is that of a career con, always watching his back, looking for an edge, never trusting anyone. To James Earl Ray truth is the convenient statement, not the factual one. Words are tunes he dances to. He may have killed Dr. King; but others put him up to it. He’s savvy, street smart, not sophisticated. To arrange to do what he did and do it and escape to Canada only to get caught in England requires sophistication as well as a convict mentality. It also requires assistance.
     One final thought: the interview with James Earl Ray came about as a result of correspondence he initiated months before with me. Ray escaped from Brushy Mountain shortly after we filmed him only to be re-captured a few days later.
Why he never told me he was planning to escape, I’ll never figure out!