For reasons as cruel as history, slain leaders are always linked with their murderers. John Wilkes Booth hardly deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Abraham Lincoln, but their stories and fates are intertwined. “American Experience” (9 p.m., PBS,) recalls another fateful tandem in “Roads to Memphis,” a powerful recounting of the separate-but-linked paths of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his convicted killer James Earl Ray.
King’s story is as well known as it has been well-documented, and there is no shortage of film and TV footage, both rare and familiar, of the civil rights leader. The loner Ray is more difficult to evoke on screen. But this visual deficiency inspires a stark, minimalist and almost poetic use of still photographs and various props. We’re shown the transistor radio Ray carried with him, hoping to hear of his criminal exploits and the coast-to-coast broadcast of the news that he had become the most hunted man in the world.
“Memphis” airs in conjunction with the publication of “Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin” (Doubleday, 2010) by Hampton Sides, who appears in interviews here. Other experts, law enforcement officers, authors, journalists and colleagues appear as well, including Dan Rather, Gerald Posner, Andrew Young and civil rights veteran Benjamin Hooks, who died April 15.