Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. And the International Hunt for His Assassin

41 THE TOP TEN

AS THE FBI prepared to break the news around the world, Ramon George Sneyd kept a low profile in his digs on Toronto's Dundas Street West. For nearly a week, he refused to venture from his room. Sun Fung Loo, the Chinese lady who ran the place with a lax eye and a wide, gummy smile--and who usually had a small child strapped to her back--hardly ever saw her tenant. "He came with a suit on⁶⁴³ and a newspaper in his hand," she said. "He never spoke to anybody."

Luckily for Sneyd, Mrs. Loo could neither speak nor read English and, unlike Mrs. Szpakowski, exhibited no interest in the careers and backgrounds of her roomers. She took his rent and left him alone.

Paranoid, exhausted from worry, running out of money, Sneyd knew he must stay in a nerve-racking holding pattern for nearly two weeks while he waited for his passport, birth certificate, and airline ticket to arrive. At some point he bought a new cheap transistor radio to replace his trusty Channel Master, and from Dundas Street West he constantly monitored the airwaves for any news on the manhunt.

On Sunday night, April 21, he did emerge from his room. The Loo rooming house had no television, and that night there was a particular show he wanted to watch--ABC's wildly popular series The FBI, which presented semi-fictionalized dramas spun from the FBI's actual case files. Sneyd visited several bars in the neighborhood and found to his dismay that they were all tuned to watch The Ed Sullivan Show, but eventually he found a tavern where the barkeep was willing to switch the tube to ABC, which came in over the rabbit ears from an affiliate station across Lake Ontario, in Buffalo, New York. Wearing his horn-rimmed glasses, Sneyd sat at the crowded bar,⁶⁴⁴ ordered a drink, and endeavored to stay in the shadows. He watched the one-hour show, which starred Efrem Zimbalist Jr. in the role of Inspector Lewis Erskine. But what Sneyd had really come for was the little kicker that famously ended the program each week--in which the FBI presented the current list of the ten most wanted public enemies in America.

Sure enough, Zimbalist's voice suddenly broke in over the airwaves--wanted in connection with the fatal shooting of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.--and there was Sneyd's photograph, flashing across the screen. Only Zimbalist didn't say Sneyd's name. He didn't say Eric Galt's name, either, or Harvey Lowmeyer's, or John Willard's. Enunciating in his most orotund and officious-sounding baritone, Zimbalist named the name for all the world to hear: James Earl Ray.

Sneyd must have felt a stab of terror that was sharpened by the fact that he could not show the slightest flinch of discomfort, in the loud and boisterous bar, lest he draw unwelcome attention to himself. "An escapee from the Missouri State Penitentiary, he is forty years old, five feet ten inches tall, 174 pounds. The FBI is engaged in a nationwide search but Ray may have fled to Mexico or Canada." Sneyd sat there during the awkward bulletin, nervously fidgeting with his vodka and orange juice. "Memphis has offered a reward of $100,000 to anyone with information leading to Ray's capture." Sneyd later confessed that he was astounded that a Southern city where King had stirred up so much trouble would put up so much money. More and more photographs flashed on the screen, images from a shabby criminal past that Sneyd found all too familiar. "Consider him armed and extremely dangerous. If you have seen Ray, notify the FBI immediately."

THE "AMERICA'S MOST WANTED" bulletin had hit the airwaves as the result of a three-day spasm of activity in FBI offices around the United States. At frantic speed, agents had learned much about the life and times of James Earl Ray; they'd followed every lead, digested every stray scrap, tied up every loose end. Hoover, DeLoach, and Clark had no doubts--they had the right man.

Yet they realized they needed to enlist the public to help with the search. So the FBI prepared a series of public service announcements to air on radio stations from coast to coast. The bureau also printed more than 200,000 "Wanted" notices and distributed them around the nation, while another 30,000, printed in Spanish, were plastered all over Mexico. The hunt was entering its most relentless phase.

If there is such a thing as a "typical" assassin, the forty-year-old James Earl Ray didn't seem to meet the description--at least not on the surface. He was not a young male burning with religious fervor, and his racial politics, though smoldering and reactionary, had never led him to join the Klan or any other overtly violent organization. While his rap sheet was long, he had never been convicted of murder or manslaughter--or any crime that involved discharging a gun. While serving in the Army in Bremerhaven, Germany, just after World War II, he had learned to shoot an M1--earning the basic medal as a marksman--but certainly this was no professional hit man.

Ray, above all, was a man who loved the chase, and who seemed almost subconsciously to want to get caught in order to break free again and thus initiate another chase. There was a bumbling picaresque quality to many of his escapades; in one of his heists, he fell out of his own swerving getaway car because he forgot to pull the door shut. A high-school dropout, Ray was discharged from the Army for "ineptness and lack of adaptability for military service." Most of his crimes--burglary, forgery, armed robbery--ranged from the petty to the merely pathetic. His criminal career was marked by moments of rash stupidity, yet Ray was not stupid, and he had a reputation in prison as a keen reader and a patient plotter with a perversely creative intelligence, especially when it came to confounding any sort of authority. Anyone who could break from a maximum-security prison and stay on the lam for more than a year possessed a certain kind of street cunning that was not to be dismissed.

At various points in his life, Ray had tried to go straight. He'd been, among other things, a color matcher at a shoe company, a laborer at a tannery, an assembly line worker at a company that manufactured compressors, and a dishwasher at a diner. But he kept slipping deeper into a life of recidivism--it was the only world he knew. "He was a dirty little neck,"⁶⁴⁵ recalled William Peterson, police chief in the blue-collar town of Alton, Illinois, where Ray was born in 1928 and where he lived off and on between his jail terms. "He was a thief who slept all day and stole all night."

FBI agents arrived at Jefferson City, Missouri, and began to piece together a thumbnail sketch⁶⁴⁶ of James Earl Ray's years in prison there and the story of his escape from the bakery a year earlier. Ray, investigators learned, was widely thought to have been using and selling amphetamines inside Jeff City--his role as a narcotics "merchant" was a likely source of funds that had sustained him during his year on the run. (By one close accounting made much later, Ray over the years may have sent out as much as seven thousand dollars he'd made in the narcotics trade--most likely salting it away with members of his family.) But mainly Ray was known as someone obsessed with the notion of escape. Nicknamed the Mole, Ray had tried to break out of Jeff City on several earlier occasions and, as punishment, was forced to serve many hard months in solitary. Though his several escape attempts should have permanently caught the attention of the prison staff, something about his style made him oddly forgettable, innocuous, generic. Most guards just called him by his prison number: 416-J.

To the investigating agents, the vandalized numerals found on the Channel Master radio suddenly made sense. Specialists at the crime lab had successfully used an ultraviolet scanner to "raise" the numerals⁶⁴⁷ that Ray had so diligently scratched out. The number: 00416. Jeff City records showed that James Earl Ray had bought the radio from the prison canteen two days before his escape and that, as required by prison regulations, the number had been etched on the radio's housing.

OTHER FBI MEN branched out across Missouri and Illinois, tracking down members of Ray's family. Both of Ray's parents were said to be dead, but agents soon found a brother, John Ray,⁶⁴⁸ at the bar he ran on Arsenal Street in a rough neighborhood of South St. Louis. The Grapevine Tavern was just a block away from the George Wallace for President headquarters, and was a frequent gathering place for campaign organizers. John Ray, it turned out, was a die-hard Wallace fan himself and freely used his bar to distribute American Independent Party literature. Because of its proximity to the Wallace office, the Grapevine had become known around town as a watering hole for John Birchers, White Citizens Council members, and other ardent segregationists. Much like his brother James Earl in Los Angeles, John Ray had a habit of personally escorting prospective AIP registrants to the local campaign headquarters to enlist them in the Wallace cause.

John Ray seemed a beefier, ruddier version of the fugitive, with a fast-receding hairline that exposed the bony facades of his forehead. He had a criminal record of his own, having served seven years in an Illinois penitentiary for robbery. His tavern's name, in fact, was an allusion to the "prison grapevine," the mill of intrigue and scuttlebutt that had enlivened his days behind bars. It was a small irony that, as a felon, he couldn't vote at all, much less for Wallace.

At first, John Ray seemed drunk and was not cooperative, especially when FBI agents reminded him that he had visited his brother Jimmy in Jeff City the day before he escaped in a bread box. John claimed he'd had no contact with his brother since the breakout and had no idea of his whereabouts.

The skeptical FBI agents asked John why he smiled when he gave his answers--he constantly flashed a curling smirk that was nearly identical to that of his brother Jimmy. John said it was just "a nervous reaction" that didn't mean anything, but he did concede that this unfortunate tic had sometimes gotten him in trouble with the law.

"Jimmy was never the same after he got out of the Army," John said. "He went crazy, and got mixed up with drugs." If he did kill Martin Luther King, Jimmy was probably dead now--his conspirators would have tried to "seal his lips forever."⁶⁴⁹ But if Jimmy was still alive, he was certainly out of the country by now.

Which country would he flee to? the agents wanted to know.

John declined to speculate, but he did recall visiting Jimmy in prison once and getting an earful about Ian Smith and the good job he was doing down in Rhodesia. John Ray characterized himself as "a mild segregationist" and soon confided his frustration to the FBI agents. "What's all the excitement about?"⁶⁵⁰ he wondered aloud. "He only killed a nigger. If he'd killed a white man, you wouldn't be here."

Reporters who ended up on John Ray's doorstep similarly found that he was not bashful about sharing his views on King. "He was not a saint as they try to picture him," John would later write the author George McMillan. "King was not only a rat but with his beaded eyes and pin ears, he looked like one, too."

Initially considering John Ray a possible suspect in a conspiracy, FBI agents interrogated him about his whereabouts on April 4 but were unable, either then or in subsequent interviews, to pin anything definitive on him. (Years later, however, John Ray would boast⁶⁵¹ in a co-authored book that he drove from St. Louis and visited his brother Jimmy at a tavern in West Memphis, Arkansas--just across the Mississippi River from the city--on the afternoon before the assassination.)

Meanwhile, a second team of agents soon found Ray's younger brother Jerry Ray at a country club in the Chicago suburbs, where he was a golf course greenskeeper. A clownish man who seemed to take the FBI's manhunt as a thrilling game, Jerry was determined to tell the agents only enough to keep them off his back. His brother Jimmy was now the "hottest man in the country,"⁶⁵² Jerry reckoned, "the most wanted man there ever was."

Jerry, who was also a felon, said he had no idea where Jimmy went to, or even if he was still alive. He doubted his brother had it in him to kill anyone, though. If Jimmy murdered King, it had to be for money. "He sure didn't have any love⁶⁵³ for colored people," Jerry conceded. "But he wouldn't have put himself in a spot like this unless there was something in it for him."

Whatever Jimmy Ray did or did not do, Jerry said, he would never tell a soul about it. "Jimmy would never snitch on anyone, I know that. He'll go to his grave with his secrets."

FEELING THE STARE of the world boring at his back, Ramon Sneyd skulked through Toronto's darkened streets the night the bulletin ran on The FBI, and slipped into Mrs. Loo's place. He locked himself in his room for twenty-four hours and tried to figure out what to do next.

The following morning, April 23, he paid a visit to Loblaws, a grocery store only a few blocks away. Probably packing his .38 Liberty Chief revolver, Sneyd gave serious thought to robbing the joint. "A supermarket⁶⁵⁴--that's really a corporation's money and they're probably gougin' it out of somebody else, anyway," he later rationalized. "Better to rob them than an individual." Samuel Marshall, the assistant manager, found him in the rear of the store⁶⁵⁵ in an area off-limits to customers, snooping around near the office safe. Marshall demanded to know what he was doing there.

"Oh I, um, I'm looking for a job," the intruder stammered, boasting that he had some experience working in a grocery down in Mexico. When the store manager, Emerson Benns, approached, Sneyd edged toward the door, sprinted down the sidewalk, and hopped on a streetcar. The following day Marshall saw James Earl Ray's photograph in Newsweek and alerted police, saying, "That's the man."

Sneyd, prudently deciding he should keep himself scarce from the Dundas neighborhood for a while, headed for the bus station a few hours after his contretemps at Loblaws supermarket and boarded a coach for Montreal. He feared that the Sneyd passport application might fall through, or worse, that it might trip some internal bureaucratic alarm in Ottawa; in any case, he recognized that it was far too risky for him to stick around Toronto for two weeks until his airplane ticket and passport arrived.

In Montreal, he stayed in a rooming house under the name of Walters and wandered the shipyards for several days hunting in vain for a freighter that might take him to southern Africa. Sneyd did find a Scandinavian ship bound for Mozambique with a fare of six hundred dollars, but was disappointed to learn that the line's regulations required all passengers to carry a valid passport.

In desperation, Sneyd returned to Toronto and kept to his room at Mrs. Loo's place for a week. His Sneyd birth certificate arrived in due course, but in his agitated state he made another potentially critical mistake: while placing a call at a nearby phone booth, he absentmindedly left the Bureau of Vital Statistics envelope, holding his Sneyd birth certificate, on the little ledge by the phone. Later that day, Mrs. Loo opened the door and beheld a rotund man⁶⁵⁶ clutching an envelope. She hollered up to Mr. Sneyd to tell him he had a caller, but her skittish tenant wouldn't budge from his room. When she bounded up the stairs and coaxed Sneyd to come out, Mrs. Loo thought he looked nervous and "white as a sheet." Sneyd feared the worst: it must be a government official, a plainclothes cop, or a detective. In the foyer, Sneyd awkwardly spoke to the fat stranger, who turned out to be a paint company salesman named Robert McNaulton who'd spotted the official-looking document in the phone booth and, trying to do the right thing, had hand-delivered it to the Dundas address clearly typed on the outside of the envelope.

On May 2, Sneyd called the Kennedy Travel Bureau and to his profound relief learned from Lillian Spencer that his airline ticket and passport had finally arrived. But when he went over to the travel agency to pick up the documents, he fell into a mild panic: his surname was misspelled on the passport. It said "Sneya" instead of "Sneyd"--the result, no doubt, of his poor handwriting in his haste to fill out the application. It was too late to fix the error--his flight was scheduled to leave in a few days. He paid for the ticket, $345 Canadian, in cash.

On May 6, Sneyd quit Mrs. Loo's establishment, giving no advance notice, saying only that he was leaving because the children who constantly played outside his room were too noisy. While cleaning up the room, Mrs. Loo found a small suitcase that only contained a few odd things--some Band-Aids, a couple of sex magazines, maps of Toronto and Montreal, and six rolls of unopened Super 8 movie film. Loo stashed the bag in her storeroom, guessing that Mr. Sneyd might eventually return for it.

Checking in at Toronto International Airport later that afternoon as Ramon George Sneya, the world's most wanted fugitive boarded British Overseas Airways Flight 600. The jet took off without incident at 6:00 p.m., and Sneyd breathed a sigh of relief. But as the plane cruised out over the North Atlantic, his mind churned with worries, mainly having to do with his thinning reserve of cash. "I should have pulled a holdup⁶⁵⁷ in Canada," he later said, regretfully. "That's where I made my mistake. I let myself get on that plane to London without enough money to get where I intended to go."

At 6:40 the next morning, May 7, Sneyd's flight touched down at London Heathrow, the next stop in his long, strange journey toward Rhodesia.