# Who Killed Martin Luther King Jr?

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005/who-killed-martin-luther-king-jr
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005/who-killed-martin-luther-king-jr.md
Podcast: [Disturbing History](https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005)
Published: 2026-03-08T05:00:04+00:00
Episode link: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/who-killed-martin-luther-king-jr--70529034
Audio file: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/70529034/dhkingfinal.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/disturbing-history-7341005/episodes/who-killed-martin-luther-king-jr
Duration seconds: 5807

## Resource

On April 4th, 1968, a single rifle shot ended the life of Doctor Martin Luther King Junior on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was thirty-nine years old. The official story has always been simple: a lone escaped convict named James Earl Ray, acting out of personal racial hatred, pulled the trigger and was caught sixty-five days later in London. Case closed. Except it wasn't. And it isn't.In this episode of Disturbing History, we go deep into one of the most consequential and most deliberately obscured murders in American history. We trace Doctor King's life from his Atlanta childhood through the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Birmingham campaign, the March on Washington, and his evolution from civil rights leader into something the American power structure found genuinely terrifying — a man demanding the economic restructuring of the entire country, calling the United States government the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, and building an interracial coalition of the poor to march on Washington and force a reckoning. We dig into J. Edgar Hoover's decade-long COINTELPRO campaign against King — the illegal wiretaps, the forged letters, the blackmail attempts, the anonymous package urging him to kill himself, and the internal FBI memo identifying King as "the most dangerous Negro in America." None of this is conspiracy theory. All of it is documented in the Bureau's own declassified files.We walk through what happened in Memphis — the sanitation workers strike, the disrupted March twenty-eighth demonstration, the Mountaintop speech, and the events of April fourth itself. And then we go where the official account refuses to go: the removal of King's police bodyguards the morning of the assassination, the military intelligence…

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## Transcript

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