Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Christian minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the Civil Rights Movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. King is best known for advancing civil rights through nonviolence and civil disobedience, inspired by his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover considered him a radical and made him an object of the FBI's COINTELPRO from 1963 on. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties, recorded his extramarital liaisons and reported on them to government officials, and, in 1964, mailed King a threatening anonymous letter, which he interpreted as an attempt to make him commit suicide. Before his death, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People's Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. His death was followed by riots in many U.S. cities. Allegations that James Earl Ray, the man convicted of killing King, had been framed or acted in concert with government agents persisted for decades after the shooting. In December 1993, decades after the murder, Loyd Jowers, a white man from Memphis, asserted that the Mafia and the U.S. government were involved in a conspiracy against Martin Luther King. Jowers claimed that he participated in a conspiracy to kill Dr. King, along with an alleged Mafia figure, Memphis police officers, and a man named Raoul. For 30 years, others have similarly alleged that Ray was Raoul's unwitting pawn and that a conspiracy orchestrated Dr. King's murder. These varied theories have generated several comprehensive government investigations regarding the assassination, none of which confirmed the existence of any conspiracy. United States Department of Justice has examined all allegations and presented its findings in this report.

At approximately 6 pm Eastern Standard Time on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr., one of America's great moral leaders was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. The largest manhunt in FBI history eventually resulted in the capture of James Earl Ray, a career criminal who had escaped from prison in April 1967. Ray entered a guilty plea and confessed his guilt before a judge, but immediately following his conviction, he recanted his confession and insisted on his innocence until his death in 1998. For decades, Americans debated issues of the crime, with a new congressional investigation in the 1970s concluding that Ray was guilty but part of a larger conspiracy. Using new data, interviews, and data–mining techniques, we are closer than ever to an accurate accounting of how Dr. King died and, most importantly, why he was killed.

Doubts about James Earl Ray, Dr. Martin Luther King’s lone assassin, arose almost immediately after the civil rights leader was fatally shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on 4 April 1968. From the start, his aides voiced suspicions that a conspiracy was responsible for their leader’s death. Over time many Americans became convinced the government investigations covered up the truth about the alleged assassin. Exactly what led Ray to kill King continues to be a source of debate, as does his role in the murder. However, Mel Ayton believe the answers to the many intriguing questions about Ray and how conspiracy ideas flourished can now be fully understood. Missing from the wild speculations over the past fifty-two years has been a thorough investigation of the character of King’s assassin. Additionally, the author examines exactly how the conspiracy notions came about and the falsehoods that led to their promulgation. The Man Who Killed Martin Luther King is the first full account of the life of James Earl Ray based on scores of interviews provided to government and non-government investigators and from the FBI’s and Scotland Yard’s files plus the recently released Tennessee Department of Corrections prison record on Ray. Most importantly, the testimony of Anna Sandhu has often been ignored by writers but her story is crucial in gaining an understanding of Ray’s deceptive ways. A courtroom artist, who, after listening to Ray’s story, later married him. Also missing from accounts of the alleged ‘conspiracy’ is the story told to this author by Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary Deputy Warden Rolland H. Cisson, which decisively renders Ray’s claims of innocence to be bogus. In the short-lived freedom he acquired after escaping from the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1967, following being sentenced to twenty years in prison for repeated offenses, he traveled to Los Angeles and decided to seek notoriety as the one who would stalk and kill Dr. King, who he had come to hate vehemently. From the time of King’s murder, the reader will follow Ray to solitary confinement in a Nashville prison. Then, six years later, on 10 June 1977, James Earl Ray again escaped from prison, this time with five others. Ray was the last to be recaptured, having survived only on wheatgerm. Finally, the book relays Ray’s stabbing by several black inmates, then his resulting diagnosis with Hepatitis C, which caused his death twelve years later, in 1998.

FBI 100 Years chronicles the Bureaus successes and failures from its early days as Teddy Roosevelt's trust-busting detective force to the increased emphasis on counterterrorism the post 9/11 world. Along the way, Holden revisits the gangster era and the days of McCarthyism, the unmaking of the Mob, and the disastrous standoffs at Ruby Ridge and Waco. The famous and the infamous make their appearances in the story, colorful characters such as John Dillinger and "Machine Gun" Kelly, J. Edgar Hoover and turncoat spy Robert Hansen. With added features including an exploration of the 200 categories of federal crimes that fall within the Bureaus purview, all the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives lists since the first in 1949, and an entertaining look at the FBI in popular culture, this is the most thorough and authoritative book ever written about the principal law enforcement arm of the United States Department of Justice.