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2025 MLK Records Releases |
The MLK Assassination Files Release: An Overview
The Mary Ferrell Foundation’s new collection of Martin Luther King Jr. assassination records consists of 243,496 pages of files, mainly from the FBI and in some cases other agencies. They were released by the United States government on July 21, 2025 pursuant to Executive Order 14176. Dr. King was murdered on April 4th, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. Although his accused assassin, James Earl Ray, confessed to the crime to a jury on March 10, 1969, earning a 99 year sentence, Ray soon publicly recanted the admission and maintained his complete innocence while attempting to void his sentence until he died in 1997. Controversy surrounding Dr. King’s murder began not long after he died on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. The Mary Ferrell website has organized this quarter-million page collection into three major tranches of material. These tranches augment the (partial) Central Headquarters file and other documents that the Mary Ferrell Foundation has featured online for almost two decades.
The largest tranche consists of over 200,000 pages and represents what are known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation Murder of Martin Luther King (MURKIN) files. The MURKIN investigation began soon after the murder and was part of one of the largest manhunts the nation has ever seen. It involved — and the Mary Ferrell files are organized according to — every one of the 55 city-based FBI field offices in the nation as well as a handful of foreign FBI stations. Additionally, FBI Headquarters became a clearinghouse that synthesized much of this material in the case. This is the headquarters (HQ) file, not to be confused with the Washington, D.C. Field Office (WFO) files, also contained in the collection. The files are also identified by the FBI classification system, with common classification codes being 44- (FBI Investigative Homicide – Civil Rights) and 157- (Civil Unrest) but also administrative files often beginning with 62- which contain bulky or lab reports on physical evidence. The second code refers to the field office. A typical field office file will thus look like FBI MURKIN Atlanta Field Office (44-2386).
A major structural feature of the MURKIN files is the use of “Subfiles” and “Exhibits.” In general, the “Vol” (Volume) or Serial-stream files represent the straight chronological investigative paperwork (FD-302 interview write-ups, teletype transmissions, office memos, reports, Airtels, etc). Subfiles (often lettered A, B, C or A-1, A-2, etc.) represent topical collections: batches of 302s (witness interviews) grouped together, or press clippings grouped for one lead, or correspondence grouped for one city. Exhibits—usually labeled with a “1A” prefix—are the physical and photographic evidence streams: photos of Ray, photos of suspect vehicles, physical bullet exhibits, cartridge comparisons, fingerprints, and so forth. For example, a file named “Vol 1 Sub 1A (Exhibits – Photographs 1A1–1A27)” might consist entirely of 27 physical evidence photographs used to help the public and law enforcement identify Ray while he was at-large in 1968. Subfiles and Exhibits therefore show what type of material is contained inside and how the field offices separated that material from the pure chronological paperwork.
Much of this material shows the evolution of the investigation as it first considered the possibility of a multi-assassin conspiracy involving the three identities tied directly to the evidence found in the green blanket outside Canipe’s amusement store: Eric Starvo Galt, Harvey Lowmeyer, and John Willard—until further investigation eventually revealed that all three “people” were aliases (fake names) used by James Earl Ray. The Jackson field office (Jackson – 157-9586) offered many leads on conspiracy angles until Attorney General Ramsey Clark and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover began shutting down all avenues suggesting that anyone other than Ray was involved in the killing.
