He's one of history's most notorious assassins.
But before the dark day 50 years ago when Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, James Earl Ray called Alton, Illinois his home.
And he left a path of petty crime in his wake.
At Vincent's Supermarket in Soulard, the best stories are kept behind glass.
"It was our 15 minutes of fame," said Vincent Rhomadka, a third generation small business owner in St. Louis. Rhomadka's grandfather opened Vincent's Market in 1912.
But before their 15 minutes of fame came danger.
Early in 1959, Alton native and petty criminal James Earl Ray was on a crime spree sticking up several supermarkets and dry cleaners around St Louis.
One August day, Ray, gun in hand, came face to face with Rhomadka's father. Rhomadka was just 16 when he first heard the tale.
"There was James Earl Ray and his accomplice. They walked up to the counter and said 'Act natural, don't put your hands up,'" said Rhomadka.
Then, with a few hundred dollars in his pocket, Ray and his pal hit the street. But Rhomadka's father was close behind with his shotgun. He fired a few shots but missed Ray and his accomplice.
By fall of 1959, police caught up with Ray. And he found himself in another part of Soulard.
"You can tell by '59 he does not give a s**t anymore. He doesn't care if you're the police, he doesn't care he's in trouble," said Ron Buechele.
That's a professional opinion.
Buechele, a former police officer turned restaurateur, says Ray's petty crimes from that time landed him in a building just across from the Anheuser Busch Brewery. The site was once the St Louis Police Department's third district precinct. Now, it's a popular barbecue restaurant called the Capitalist Pig.
"He had been arrested rather frequently in the time he was here in St Louis, mainly for being drunk and fighting in his brother's bar. He was known in the neighborhood. He had a reputation for being a troublemaker," said Buechele.
By 1960, Ray's supermarket crime spree landed him a 20 year sentence in the Missouri penitentiary.
If the penitentiary had been able to hold him, history may have been different, but in 1967, he escaped.
"The story is he somehow or another hid himself in a bread box or bread delivery truck, and he was out of there," said Brian Combs, a Historian at the Alton Museum of History and Art.
A year later, Ray was in Memphis.
Dr. King was assassinated, but 50 years later, there are still questions.
"How does a man go from petty theft to burglary, to assassination of a public and popular figure? It's quite a leap," said Combs.
In the years since, Ray's childhood home in Alton was torn down.
And eventually, came an irony: a few years later the street in front of it was renamed: Dr. Martin Luther King Drive.
