That's what I always thought. A lot of people assume that Ray was arrested immediately after the assassination. That was not the case. Despite the fact that every law enforcement agency in the world was looking for him, he evaded capture for more than two months before he was arrested at the airport in London. That tells me that he had people helping him hide out, and providing him with money and transportation so that he could move around the country, and eventually fly to London. James Earl Ray did not have the resources to do this on his own, and he was not a criminal mastermind by any stretch of the imagination.
I agree, when it happened I was a young fellow more interested in partying than with politics but I long ago was struck by how those who tell the story present James Earl Ray as a bumbling, small time criminal who could barely tie his own shoes but somehow he morphs into someone who is able to set up this assassination and carry it off, then becomes stupid enough to drop the murder weapon with his fingerprints on it and changes yet again into a genius able to elude the law for months after escaping to a foreign country and living there with no visible means of support. It all sounds like fantasy. I find Ray’s story more credible than the government’s, after all I never knew Ray so I don’t know whether he was a habitual liar but I know damned well our government lies to us every day.