Shortly after the murder, rooming house resident and State’s chief witness Charles Stevens is arrested and imprisoned on $10,000 bail. When he sobers sufficiently to sign a statement identifying James Earl Ray as the man fleeing the building, he is released.

When his partner Grace Walden refuses to sign a similar statement, she is—with no public hearing or notice to friends or relatives—locked away in a psychiatric hospital without any documentation, leaving no evidence of her imprisonment. She is allowed no visitors.

She has no history of mental illness and the resident psychiatrist petitions for her release. It is denied.

When suit is brought in court for her release, it too is denied. During 10-year’s confinement in Western State Mental Hospital, Boliver, Tennessee, attorney Mark Lane slips in to see her, and asks if she remembers what she saw the afternoon of April 4th, 1968.

“Oh, yes. I remember what I saw and who I saw run away. That’s why I’m here."

One of the Army snipers begins drinking heavily and commenting on the assassination. He is shot seven times in the chest with a .357 Magnum at point-blank range inside his front door with no investigation made of his death. Fearing a clean-up operation is underway, other members of his team go into hiding in Latin America.

When Shelby County Criminal Court Judge Joseph Brown, presiding over the last appeal of James Earl Ray, voices to members of Congress that Ray’s rifle is not the murder weapon, he is removed from the case.

Through back channels James Earl Ray is twice offered $220,000, a full pardon from the Governor of Tennessee, and a new identity, in exchange for a detailed confession, and cooperation on a book and movie project—How and Why I Killed Dr. King. He rejects them and continually petitions the State of Tennessee for a jury trial until his death in a prison hospital 29 years later.