ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. -- This week marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. While James Earl Ray was convicted of killing him, one Florida man claims his father from St. Augustine was actually the one who shot King.
While St. Augustine today is a bustling tourist town, St. Augustine in 1960's was a hotbed of activity during the Civil Rights Movement as well.
King visited and preached in St. Augustine, encouraging demonstrators.
"I got a telephone call about 15 years ago," said historian David Nolan, who lives in St. Augustine and has studied the civil rights movement there. That phone call he got came from "a man who said he had spent a lot of time in the slave market in 1964."
A covered pavilion in downtown St. Augustine's Plaza de la Constitucion is often referred to as the slave market. Whether slaves were actually sold there depends on who you ask. But during the Civil Rights Movement, it became a place for local demonstrations.
"And that was where the KKK types held their rallies, so I knew something was up," Nolan said.
Nolan explained the man on the phone was Ronald Wilson, who was a minister at the time. He asked Nolan some historical questions.
"Shortly after that, he held a press conference up in Gainesville," Nolan recalled.
At that press conference in 2002, Wilson announced his father was the man who actually shot and killed Martin Luther King in Tennessee. His father was Henry Clay Wilson.
Noland said he was "a local plumbing contractor who had run for public office here."
In newspaper reports, the younger Wilson said his father, on his deathbed, admitted to killing King. Reports also indicate the younger Wilson had no evidence that his father shot King.
James Earl Ray was convicted of killing King. Ray recanted his confession and some of King's own family members, including his widow, Coretta Scott King, believe someone besides Ray shot King.
Nolan said the FBI investigated Wilson's claims, but nothing came of it.
"But the assassination of Dr. King, like the assassination of President Kennedy, is something people will always ask, 'Do we know everything?' 'Is it just a simple cut and dried case or was there some kind of larger conspiracy behind it?' I suspect we haven't heard the last of it," Nolan said.