Petros, Tennessee
CNN
—
Fifty years ago, a career criminal named James Earl Ray traveled from Atlanta to Memphis, stalking the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights leader was there to energize a strike of sanitation workers asking for better working conditions and higher pay. Ray was there to assassinate him.
While King stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel (now a museum for peace), Ray accomplished his sinister goal with a single shot from more than 200 feet away.
Over the next two months, while on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives List, Ray was on the run, traveling to Europe on a false passport. He was eventually caught at London’s Heathrow Airport. He pleaded guilty to avoid a jury trial and the death penalty, was sentenced to 99 years and sent to Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in eastern Tennessee, surrounded by thick wooded hills.
In its day, it was considered one of the toughest state prisons, where inmates frequently killed each other. In the novel “The Silence of the Lambs,” Dr. Hannibal Lecter negotiates a transfer to the prison.
