Attack on an Assassin

James Earl Ray, serving a 99-year sentence at Tennessee's Brushy Mountain Prison for killing Martin Luther King, has long wanted to become a jailhouse legal expert. Early one morning last week, as Ray studied in the prison's law library, he was attacked from behind by three fellow cons, all of them black. The gang beat and stabbed Ray, 53, with a foot-long metal window brace. Doctors in nearby Oak Ridge found 22 wounds in Ray's head, neck and chest, but after an hour of surgery and 77 stitches he was out of danger. At week's end Ray was discharged from Oak Ridge hospital and transferred to Brushy Mountain Prison infirmary. The motive for the bloody assault is a mystery. "If they wanted to kill him, they would have used a sharper weapon," says Ron Bishop, director of institutional programs for the Tennessee Correction Department. But, inevitably, conspiracy theorists saw the attack as an attempt by King's real killers to silence Ray. Although the assailants are reportedly members of the prison's militant black Alkebu-Lan Association, prison officials doubt that retribution against King's killer was intended. Reasons Bishop:

"If it had been a real effort to avenge King's assassination, it could have come any time.

They have been there a long time and so has he." Arzo Carson, director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, believes the attackers merely sought publicity, not vengeance.

Yet Anna Sandhu Ray, a courtroom sketch artist whom Ray married in 1978, remains convinced that forces outside Brushy Mountain--"people in the Mob and people in Government"--want her husband killed.

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