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WATCH CLIPOn 4th April 1968, black activist Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead by an assassin's bullet after stepping onto the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee.
The police soon found a rifle in a nearby doorway and traced the fingerprints back to a James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old escaped convict. Ray managed to evade the police in the USA and made it across the Atlantic to England.
However, on 7th June 1968, he was spotted at a London airport and sent back to Memphis. In 1969 Ray was sentenced to 99 years in prison after telling a Memphis Courthouse that he had acted alone in killing the great leader.
On 7th September 1978 Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian writer and broadcaster working in London, was rushed to the hospital with a high fever. Three days later he was dead.
Markov had been broadcasting opinions against the hardline Communist regime of his homeland. Tests soon showed that he was the subject of political assassination. As he caught a bus on his way to work, he had been stabbed in the thigh with an umbrella, containing a poisoned pellet. Despite the fall of Communism in Bulgaria in 1989, the case remains officially unsolved.
On 5th January 1970, Kenneth Yablonski arrived in his parents' house in Clarksville, Pennsylvania. There he discovered the bodies of his parents and his sister dead in their bedrooms. They had each been shot several times.
Yablonski had worked in the coal mining industry for 40 years. In May 1969 he announced he was going to run for the powerful United Mine Workers of America's presidency. Support for his candidacy grew daily, and the current president, Tony Boyle, grew alarmed at what dirty secrets Yablonski might reveal. When Yablonski lost out to Boyle and announced he was going to contest the result, he sealed his fate.
Three hit men were finally traced and implicated the two union leaders who had hired them. It was another five years until Tony Boyle would be brought to justice. On 1 April 1974 he was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The police soon found a rifle in a nearby doorway and traced the fingerprints back to a James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old escaped convict. Ray managed to evade the police in the USA and made it across the Atlantic to England.
However, on 7th June 1968, he was spotted at a London airport and sent back to Memphis. In 1969 Ray was sentenced to 99 years in prison after telling a Memphis Courthouse that he had acted alone in killing the great leader.
On 7th September 1978 Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian writer and broadcaster working in London, was rushed to the hospital with a high fever. Three days later he was dead.
Markov had been broadcasting opinions against the hardline Communist regime of his homeland. Tests soon showed that he was the subject of political assassination. As he caught a bus on his way to work, he had been stabbed in the thigh with an umbrella, containing a poisoned pellet. Despite the fall of Communism in Bulgaria in 1989, the case remains officially unsolved.
On 5th January 1970, Kenneth Yablonski arrived in his parents' house in Clarksville, Pennsylvania. There he discovered the bodies of his parents and his sister dead in their bedrooms. They had each been shot several times.
Yablonski had worked in the coal mining industry for 40 years. In May 1969 he announced he was going to run for the powerful United Mine Workers of America's presidency. Support for his candidacy grew daily, and the current president, Tony Boyle, grew alarmed at what dirty secrets Yablonski might reveal. When Yablonski lost out to Boyle and announced he was going to contest the result, he sealed his fate.
Three hit men were finally traced and implicated the two union leaders who had hired them. It was another five years until Tony Boyle would be brought to justice. On 1 April 1974 he was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
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