Commercial-News
April 1, 2010
Danville, IL Commercial News
DANVILLE — A local author has taken the stories she listened to as a child and turned into a documentary of the investigation and capture of assassin James Earl Ray.
“The Boys of Birmingham” by author P.L. Ryan takes the experiences of former FBI investigator William Saucier and their investigation into the April 4, 1968, shooting death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.
Ryan, a longtime resident of Danville, said she had listened to the stories from Saucier, her father, as a child. It was a need to “let people know what really happened” that prompted her to write the book.
“My father knew all the steps of the investigation into James Earl Ray,” she said. “There’s been so much controversy as to whether (Ray) was the assassin or not. It’s a big piece of history and my father knew every step they took, everything they did.”
Ryan said she worked for five years on the book, which is currently available on Amazon.com and the Barnes and Noble Web site. Her father worked with her for two years before he passed away.
According to Ryan, he father enjoyed recounting the details of the investigation.
“I didn’t know the inside details of what he did,” she said. “Every step he took, going to the gun shops, interviewing everyone that was around when James Earl Ray was in the gun shop, the people that actually ended up identifying him. All the details that are in the book.”
FBI investigators were actually forced to wait out college exams before they got the information needed against Ray. Ryan said a dental student refused to talk to the FBI until after he finished he exams for the year.
Agents were outside the classroom with a photo to get a confirmed identification when the student’s last exam ended.
Ray was arrested in July 1968, about two months after King’s death. He was taken into custody at Heathrow Airport in London and extradited back to the U.S. to stand trial. Ray confessed to the crime, but changed his story days later. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Ray died in 1998 in prison.
The arrest of Ray is not the climax of the book, however. Ryan points out that the racially divided South left investigators facing more than the usual on-the-job challenges.
“They had a difficult job to do because blacks down South were afraid to give them information for fear they’d be harassed by white law enforcement down there,” Ryan said, debunking the stereotype that FBI agents in the South worked with prejudiced law enforcement officers. “They were harassed by the Ku Klux Klan because they were northern-born men and there’s information in the story about that.
“It was a very difficult time for them.”
Ryan, who has enjoyed writing as a hobby, said working on this book was difficult with a lot of additional research.
“It was very intense,” she said. “There were times that I got frustrated with it. It’s very hard to piece together a book with a bunch of stories. You have to find an order and sequence for them. It was a lot of work.” Sphere: Related Content
0 comments:
Post a Comment