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Letters of King assassin shown in online museum

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CIOL Bureau
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NASHVILLE, USA: A Memphis county official has opened an online museum of case files, personal correspondence and little-seen black-and-white images chronicling the jail time of James Earl Ray, who killed U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. 43 years ago.

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"This is not just an incredible part of Shelby County history and Tennessee history, but national and world history," said Tom Leatherwood, 54, Shelby County register of deeds.

Ray gunned down the Nobel peace laureate Baptist minister at the city's Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968, sparking unrest across the country. King had gone to Memphis to support a strike by black sanitation workers for better pay and conditions.

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The museum can be visited at register.shelby.tn.us. Scroll down below the "archives" section to find the "Martin Luther King Assassination Investigation" link, highlighted in small yellow print.

One section of the site contains a big batch of documents of the killer's legal proceedings Leatherwood found in 2007.

He says it took so long to make the records accessible because he needed to get permission from the public defender's office to post files detailing efforts by Ray's attorneys.

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Memphis photographer Gil Michael, 77, was caught off-guard when he saw that the site contained photos of Ray that he took on the night he was booked.

Michael, then director of photography for the University of Memphis, was asked by the sheriff's office to volunteer his time and take pictures to be distributed to news outlets. "It wasn't feasible to have tons of media in there," said Michael, who Ray tried to kick as he was shooting a picture.

Ray pleaded guilty, but later recanted and unsuccessfully fought to clear his name. He died in prison in 1998.

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