King Shooter's Gun On Display

The rifle that James Earl Ray used to shoot the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is heading for public display at the museum that sits on the site of the civil rights leader's murder.

The exhibit also will mention a recent civil court verdict the King family says supports their belief that Ray was an unknowing fall guy in a murder conspiracy.

But the evidence against Ray - much of which has been locked away in storage for more than three decades - is expected to dominate the museum's newest exhibit.

"What we will present is pieces of evidence that will help people evaluate the various theories," said Clayborne Carson, a Stanford University history professor working on the project.

Investigations by a congressional committee in 1978 and by state prosecutors in Memphis two years ago concluded Ray was the killer, though he may have had help from a small group of conspirators. His confession was upheld eight times by state and federal courts.

The investigations found no evidence of the widespread conspiracy involving the government and organized crime that the King family believes in.

"The most reasonable story is (Ray) had to be involved in it," Carson said. "The question is... whether other people had foreknowledge of it. That's where it gets a lot more complicated."

Along with the gun, on display for the first time, museum visitors will get a view of the murder scene from the flop house from which Ray admitted firing the death slug.

"A lot of people sort of think it was a pretty far distance, but from the back of that building you can see it really didn't take an expert marksman to hit the target," said Beverly Robertson, the museum's director.

King was shot while standing on the second-floor balcony of the motel on April 4, 1968. He was in Memphis to help lead a garbage workers strike.

The museum traces America's struggle for racial equality up to the time of King's death, focusing heavily on the 1950s and 1960s.

New exhibits will continue the story of the civil rights movement to the present, and for the first time, the museum will offer information on the assassination itself.

A jury hearing a wrongful death suit filed by the Kings against a former Memphis restaurant owner concluded in December that King was the victim of a murder conspiracy involving government agents and other "unknown conspirators."

While the verdict was what the King family had long wanted, critics described the trial as a hodgepodge of vague conspiracy claims and unsupported testimony that offered little new information on the killing.

Ray "was definitely not vindicated," said Robertson.

The state plans to give the museum the physical evidence and investigative reports that would have been used against Ray had he gone to trial. He died in prison in 1998.