From Reuters News Service
Monday December 30, 1996 11:07 AM EST

James Earl Ray's Condition Upgraded to 'Fair'

	    NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Reuter) - James Earl Ray, the confessed
assassin of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., was
upgraded to fair condition from serious but remained in a
hospital Monday, officials said.
	    Ray, 68, awoke from a coma last week at Columbia Memorial
Hospital where he was taken Dec. 21 suffering from liver and
kidney failure.
	    "That means he is responding positively to treatment. He's
continuing to stabilize," the hospital's chief operating
officer Cheryl Goforth said.
	    Tennessee prison officials said Ray would be returned to
prison when doctors discharge him from the hospital. He is
serving a 99-year sentence for shooting King in Memphis in 1968.
	    Ray, who twice tried to escape from Tennessee prisons and
was an escaped convict from Missouri at the time of the King
killing, has launched a stream of legal appeals demanding the
trial he never had.
	    Ray's next court hearing was scheduled for Feb. 20 in Shelby
County Criminal Court in Memphis.
	    Although he initially confessed to the slaying of King, Ray
recanted three days later and implicated a mysterious accomplice
named Raoul.
	    Conspiracy theorists contend the small-time robber did not
have the means, motive or intelligence to stalk and kill King
alone and then elude police for two months before he was
apprehended in London.

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