Stewart then approached Warner-Seven Arts directly, but their offer was similarly unacceptable to Stax. Unhappy with either offer, Stewart then asked for the return of the Stax masters, but the executives at Warner-Seven Arts refused. It was then that he was informed that Atlantic's lawyers had included a clause in the 1965 distribution contract that gave Atlantic all right, title and interest, including any rights of reproduction, in all Stax's Atlantic-distributed recordings between 1960 and 1967. Only its unreleased recordings remained the property of Stax; all of the masters delivered to Atlantic between 1960 and 1967 are still wholly owned by Atlantic's current parent company, Warner Music Group. Stewart regarded his original deal with Wexler as a gentleman's agreement, and when the distribution arrangement was formalised with a contract in 1965, he had signed it without reading it, thus missing the fateful ownership clause. Stewart was furious at what he felt was Atlantic's—and Wexler's—betrayal of his trust, although Wexler continued to insist for years that he also had not read the contract and had nothing to do with the ownership clause. As a result of this turn of events, Stewart did not renew his distribution deal with Atlantic, and instead sold Stax a week after it expired in May 1968 to Paramount Pictures (who also owned Dot Records), a unit of Gulf+Western. Consequently, Stax was forced to move forward without the most desirable portion of its back catalogue and without Sam and Dave, who had been unofficially "on loan" to Stax up to this point, and who were forced to return to Atlantic after the split (although they never scored another major hit). The company was dealt another crushing blow when its biggest and best-loved artist, Otis Redding, as well as all but two of the members of the Bar-Kays, died in a plane crash on December 10, 1967. In April 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the place where many members of the Stax staff regularly met and ate, and where Steve Cropper and Eddie Floyd had written "Knock on Wood". In the riots that followed King's murder, many properties in the vicinity of the Stax studio were attacked by rioters, but Stax was left untouched. Stewart remained at the company, and former Stax marketing executive Al Bell became the company's vice president and a co-owner, taking on a more active role as Stewart became less active in Stax's day-to-day operations.