James Earl Ray, the assassin of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., died in prison on April 23, 1998. He was 70 years old.
Ray was serving a 99-year sentence at the Lois M. DeBerry Special Needs Facility in Nashville, Tennessee. He had been diagnosed with liver cancer in 1997, and his condition had deteriorated in recent months.
Ray was the only person ever convicted of killing King. He was arrested in London in 1968 and extradited to the United States. Ray pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to life in prison.
In 1977, Ray recanted his guilty plea and claimed that he had been framed. He spent the rest of his life trying to overturn his conviction, but his appeals were unsuccessful.
Ray's death marked the end of a long and controversial chapter in American history. His assassination of King was a watershed moment in the civil rights movement, and it helped to galvanize support for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.