Fifty years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was fatally shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Five years prior, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been killed by a rifle in Dallas, Texas. The deaths of both men generated conspiracies of government complicity, which in 1976 led to the establishment of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. A copy of its final report is preserved in the Central Intelligence Agency’s declassified archives.

While some aspects of the investigation into the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. remain unknown to the public - such as NSA’s tracking of James Earl Ray - others are unknowable simply because they were never properly investigated. The most egregious example is Loyd Jowers, who in 1993 confessed to participating in an alleged conspiracy to, with the U.S. government and the mafia, kill Dr. King, and was found culpable in court. While the Department of Justice denied the veracity of these claims, the FBI, however, never investigated the matter and have no files on the man.