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

42 RESURRECTION CITY

IN THE FIRST week of May, J. Edgar Hoover and Cartha DeLoach became distracted by another development, one that was separate from, but not entirely unrelated to, the hunt for James Earl Ray. When King was assassinated in Memphis, he had regarded the garbage strike as a miniature of the larger fight he was planning to wage in Washington--the Poor People's Campaign.

The POCAM, as the FBI called it, had been one of Hoover's dreads all along, and the mayhem caused by the assassination riots in Washington only seemed to validate his warnings that a mass convergence of angry indigents on the nation's capital would be a formula for certain violence.

King's death had momentarily taken the wind out of the SCLC's plans; deprived of his charismatic oratory and his judicious leadership, such an ambitious enterprise as the Poor People's Campaign seemed unlikely to happen. But by late April, Ralph Abernathy announced that his organization was going ahead with King's grand protest. Through deft negotiations, the SCLC secured a monthlong permit from the National Park Service to build a sprawling shantytown encampment on sixteen acres of the Mall, in West Potomac Park, between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of the poor were planning to converge on Washington in what Andy Young predicted would be "the greatest nonviolent demonstration⁶⁵⁸ since Gandhi's salt march." In honor of King, the shantytown would be called Resurrection City--a name that would symbolize, Young said, "the idea of rebirth⁶⁵⁹ from the depths of despair."

Now, it seemed, Hoover's nightmare was about to begin.

All across the country, masses of the destitute--the Poor People's Army--were forming caravans and aiming toward Washington. Just as King had originally envisioned it, they were not only African-Americans but also poor whites from Appalachia, Hispanics from Los Angeles, Puerto Ricans from New York, and Native Americans from all over the country--Seneca, Hopi, Flatheads, Yakama, Sioux.

The eight great caravans got their symbolic kickoff in Memphis on May 2. Returning to the site of her husband's assassination, Coretta King stood outside room 306 at the Lorraine, which was now glassed in and adorned with wreaths. A gold cross had been cemented into the balcony floor, and a plaque nearby bore a passage from Genesis. "Behold," it said, "here cometh the dreamer ... let us slay the dreamer and we shall see what will become of his dreams." At Mason Temple later that day, Coretta and Ralph Abernathy blessed the marchers, and they took off toward Marks, Mississippi, the tiny town deep in the Delta where King had seen so much despair on the faces of sharecroppers.

From Marks, the pilgrims transformed themselves into a mule caravan, with teams of farm animals pulling wooden carts of the sort widely used, until very recently, by sharecroppers in the South. Facetiously, Abernathy gave all the mules nicknames like Eastland and Stennis--in honor of staunch segregationist senators and congressmen in Washington. The mule-team marchers gathered more and more followers as they inched east on back roads toward Alabama, where state troopers vowed to arrest the caravan for endangering public safety.

Much of Alabama--or at least white Alabama--was in a period of mourning: on May 7, Governor Lurleen Wallace had finally succumbed to colon cancer at the age of forty-one. George Wallace, who'd been riding a tidal wave of support across the country, was now so distraught that many assumed he would drop out of the presidential race. Lurleen Wallace's body lay in the rotunda⁶⁶⁰ of the state capitol in Montgomery--the same spot where Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, had lain in state. The Poor People's Army rolled past the surreal sight of Confederate flags flying at half-staff and beefy highway patrolmen in tears over the loss of their lady governor. In Birmingham, the mule teams would be put on trailers to be trucked the rest of the way to D.C.

As the caravans drew ever closer, planners in Washington began to build the great tent city. Hundreds of A-frame structures, made of canvas and plywood, began to go up in sight of the Reflecting Pool. There would be electric lines, water lines,⁶⁶¹ sewage lines, phone lines, and a central structure called City Hall for "Mayor" Ralph Abernathy. Resurrection City would even have its own ZIP code.

Hoover, meanwhile, girded his FBI for the imminent "assault on Washington," as he called it. He had informers embedded in all the different caravans and agents bird-dogging every militant group. He urged all the SACs around the country to consider Project POCAM "one of the bigger tasks⁶⁶² facing the bureau at the present time."

Pentagon generals were prepared to deploy twenty thousand troops to put down any possible insurrection. President Johnson was personally offended by the Poor People's Campaign; it seemed a direct indictment of his vaunted Great Society programs, which had foundered as the war in Vietnam had escalated. Ramsey Clark said the notion of a shantytown going up beside the White House "hurt the president--deeply hurt him."⁶⁶³

On Capitol Hill, many senators were apoplectic at the prospect of this invasion of "welfare brood mares," as some conservatives called the Poor People's Army. Senator John McClellan of Arkansas led the charge, saying that Washington was about to be transformed into a "Mecca for migrants"⁶⁶⁴ and claiming to possess inside knowledge that black militants had a secret "master plan" for the violent overthrow of the national government.

As the tattered army of pilgrims and mules drew near, the mood in Washington, Clark said, had become "one of paranoia⁶⁶⁵--literally. There were predictions of holocaust, and absurdly improbable testimony on the Hill about clandestine meetings and planned violence. The nation was led to expect horrible crimes."

AT FBI HEADQUARTERS during the first week of May, the search for James Earl Ray appeared to be going nowhere but backward--back into the creases of Ray's biography, back into the mix of stunting environments and stifling influences, back into the genesis stories of a lifelong criminal. By relentlessly interviewing and reinterviewing Ray's family and acquaintances, the FBI had hoped that some stray piece of information would break loose, some random fact that would lead agents to Ray's hiding place. But the strategy didn't work. Instead, the FBI men, with journalists following close on their heels, began to assemble something altogether different: an exceedingly strange and sad portrait of a man who'd grown up in a cluster of depressed towns along the Mississippi River, in the heart of Twain country. It was a severe story, a heartbreaking story--but one that was thoroughly American.

The Ray clan had a hundred-year history⁶⁶⁶ of crime and squalor and hard luck. Ray's great-grandfather was an all-around thug who sold liquor to Indians off the back of a wagon and was hanged after gunning down six men. Ray's beloved uncle Earl was a traveling carnival boxer and convicted rapist who served a six-year prison sentence for throwing carbolic acid in his wife's face.

Throughout James Earl Ray's life, the despair was panoramic. The family suffered from exactly the sort of bleak, multigenerational poverty that King's Poor People's Campaign was designed to address. Living on a farm near tiny Ewing, Missouri, the Rays were reportedly forced to cannibalize their own house⁶⁶⁷ for firewood to get through the winter--ripping it apart, piece by piece, until the sorry edifice fell in on itself and they had to move on, to a succession of equally shabby dwellings up and down the Mississippi.

The Ray children, predictably, were a mess. John, Jimmy, and Jerry were all felons, but that was just the start of the family's disappointments. In the spring of 1937, Ray's six-year-old sister, Marjorie, burned herself to death while playing with matches. The two youngest Ray siblings, Max (who was mentally disabled) and Susie, were given up for adoption after Ray's father abandoned the family in 1951. A decade later, Ray's kindhearted but overwhelmed mother, Lucille, then fifty-one, died in St. Louis from cirrhosis of the liver. Two years after that, Ray's eighteen-year-old brother, Buzzy, missed the bridge in Quincy, Illinois, and plunged his car into a slough of the Mississippi River, drowning himself and his girlfriend.

Then there was Melba--perhaps the saddest and most disheveled of the Ray children. An emotionally disturbed woman who shouted obscenities at strangers and spent much of her time in mental hospitals, Melba made local news a year before, in 1967, when she was found dragging a painted, seven-foot cross down a major street in Quincy. "I made it to keep my sanity,"⁶⁶⁸ she said, by way of explanation. "After what happened to President Kennedy and the war and all, I had to turn to Jesus."

Melba, when interviewed, said she hardly knew her older brother James Earl. "He liked being clean,"⁶⁶⁹ she dimly recalled. "He always kept his hair combed."

As the FBI agents took note of the misery that pervaded the Ray family history, the biggest question mark was Ray's father. Who was the patriarch of all this pathos? Whatever happened to the man? On prison forms at both Leavenworth and Jeff City, James Earl Ray had consistently declared his father "deceased," noting that he'd died of a heart attack in 1947. But soon the FBI learned that, on the contrary, Ray's sixty-nine-year-old father was alive and well and living as a recluse on a little farm in Center, Missouri, not far from Twain's childhood home of Hannibal.

Special Agents William Duncan and James Duffey⁶⁷⁰ showed up at Old Man Ray's tiny clapboard house, located on a plot of pasture just beyond the town dump, and conducted a series of highly unusual interviews. Ray was a tough and watchful little bantam rooster, quick to warn of guns lying about; despite his advanced years, he was proud of his physique, which had been honed to hardness from years of weight lifting and calisthenics. At first he denied that his name was Ray--it was Jerry Raynes, he insisted. He also denied that the fugitive was his son. "Stepson," he claimed. "Anyways, I haven't seen Jimmy in seventeen years."

After a while, though, especially when Agent Duffey reminded him of the harsh provisions of the "harboring statute," the old man opened up a little. When a succession of reporters came knocking on his door in the weeks and months ahead, he opened up a little more. Raynes turned out to be the sort of guy who, once he got started, wouldn't shut up. He spoke so slowly that people thought he had a speech impediment. When he was a kid, his languorous drawl earned him what became his lifelong nickname: Speedy.

Yes, it was true, Speedy said, he'd been born George "Jerry" Ray back in 1899, but over the years he'd changed his name to Ryan, Raines, Raynes, Rayns, and assorted other spellings. As he dabbled in petty crimes (breaking and entering, forgery, bootlegging), and as he drifted from job to job (railroad brakeman, farmer, junk hauler), he'd kept his identity deliberately fungible, the better to confuse the tax man and escape the clutches of creditors and landlords and the law. His policy of existential vagueness had confused the kids, too--so much so that some of them were adults before they knew their true names.

And yes, James Earl Ray was his son. Old Man Ray seemed proud of the boy. Of all his kids, he said, Jimmy was the smart and ambitious one, the one destined for big things. "He was thinking all the time,"⁶⁷¹ Speedy told a reporter. "Jimmy wanted to be a detective. He'd pick up anything right now and learn it. He had a hell of a lot of drive. He'd tell you he was going right to the top, you know." Yet there was something odd about the boy, too, Speedy admitted. "Jimmy had funny ways about him. Like, he used to walk on his hands. Hell, he could even run on his hands."

Speedy Raynes was a muddle of superstitions and rants--tenaciously held ideas that he pummeled into Jimmy's adolescent head while they drove around Ewing together, shooting pool in taverns, hauling junk up and down the Fabius River valley. Speedy wouldn't eat Chinese food, he said, because "those people will poison you."⁶⁷² He believed all baseball games were fixed, that doctors were determined to kill you, that pretty much everything in life was a racket. "All politicians are thieves⁶⁷³ and gangsters," he said. "Well, maybe not Wallace. But when the government gets after anybody, they don't have a chance."

He wanted to make it clear that he wasn't a racist--and didn't raise his kids to think that way. "I don't hate niggers,"⁶⁷⁴ he said, noting that around Ewing there weren't any black folks anyway. On the other hand, he pointed out, "They aren't the same as us. They just lay around and fuck all the time."

As he thought about his son's present troubles, he was convinced that where Jimmy went wrong was in failing to heed his childhood lesson, the one Speedy ingrained in him over and over again--that the little guy can't win, that the cards are stacked against him, that the best course is to keep your identity murky and aim low. "People try to get too much out of life,"⁶⁷⁵ he told the journalist George McMillan. "Sometimes I think Jimmy outsmarted himself. I can't figure out why he tried to compete with all them bigshots. Life don't amount to a shit anyway. Jimmy had too much nerve for his own good. He tried to go too far too fast."

WHILE THE FBI dug ever deeper into the disturbing muck of James Earl Ray's past, Ramon Sneyd was hiding five thousand miles across the ocean, in Portugal.

Balmy Lisbon, the salt-bleached capital of Moorish palaces and Romanesque castles perched on the westernmost edge of Europe, afforded Sneyd a refreshing change from gray Toronto. His hotel was not far from the waterfront and the swirling chaos of Rossio Square, where the acres of marble reverberated night and day with the fat thunk of soccer balls and the longing strains of fado music. The city was crawling with sailors, fishermen, and merchant mariners; huge freighters could often be seen clanking in from the ocean, taking refuge in the estuary of the Tagus River, which formed one of the world's greatest ports.

It was the port, in fact, that had attracted Ramon Sneyd to Lisbon. Knowing that the Portuguese capital was an international recruitment center for mercenaries, he'd come straight from London hoping to catch a cheap ship to Africa. Sneyd had simply exchanged the return portion of his excursion fare for a ticket to Lisbon and then hopped on a flight the same day, May 7. For a week now he'd been prowling the wharves, just as he had in Montreal a few weeks earlier. He found a promising ship bound for Angola,⁶⁷⁶ the war-torn Portuguese colony in Africa. The passage would only cost him 3,777 escudos, or about $130. But again Sneyd was stymied by paperwork; entry into Angola, he discovered, required a visa, which would take over a week to obtain. The ship was leaving in three days.

Sneyd thought Lisbon would be a safe place to hide out and cool off for a while, until he could find passage to Africa or figure out something else to do. He was aware that Portugal's extradition laws were strict--always favoring the fugitive--and that Portugal, which had abolished capital punishment back in 1867, would not extradite him to the United States if prosecutors there vowed to seek the death penalty.

Sneyd was staying on the second floor of the Hotel Portugal,⁶⁷⁷ a sternly appointed establishment in a bustling precinct that smelled of smoked fish and spitted chickens. His rent was 50 escudos--about $1.80 a night. Gentil Soares,⁶⁷⁸ the main desk clerk at the hotel, thought Sneyd was an "unfriendly tourist." The day clerk, Joao, said he was a "bashful fellow, always walked around with his face down." He never tipped, never ordered room service, never talked with anyone. Soares noticed that Sneyd wore eyeglasses in his Canadian passport photo, and also when he was checking in, but that he never wore the glasses again. Once Sneyd tried to bring a prostitute up to his room, but the hotel management refused; the couple left and evidently stayed the night together somewhere else, as Sneyd was not seen again at the hotel until the following afternoon.

Sneyd spent his daytimes at the docks, or at places like the South African embassy, where he pointedly inquired about immigration procedures. He told someone at the embassy's front office that he was hoping to travel to southern Africa to search for his long-lost brother; Sneyd said he had reason to believe that his brother, last seen in the Belgian Congo, was now a mercenary fighting in Angola. Did the embassy have any information on how he might sign up to become a soldier of fortune down there? (On this question, the understandably suspicious embassy officials proved to be of no help, but Sneyd did eventually learn about several mercenary groups operating in Angola--he jotted down contact information on a piece of paper that he then folded and wedged into the power compartment of his new transistor radio, to ensure a tight battery connection.) Sneyd also visited, to no avail, the Rhodesian mission and the unofficial legation for Biafra, then stopped by the offices of South African Airways and gathered information on flights to Salisbury and Johannesburg.

Nighttimes Sneyd kept to a fairly regular circuit of sailors' bars--the Bolero, the Galo, the Bohemia, the Fontoria, Maxine's Nightclub. Usually he sat off by himself, drinking beer in the shadows, but some nights he tried to make conversation with women. One evening at the Texas Bar, he met a hooker named Maria Irene Dos Santos and managed to negotiate a bargain rate of three hundred escudos--about eleven dollars--for her favors. At Maxine's, he grew particularly friendly with a prostitute named Gloria Sausa Ribeiro⁶⁷⁹ and spent several nights with her. She was a tall, willowy woman with blond hair clipped in a stylish poodle cut. She noticed that Sneyd was obsessed with the news and bought every American and British paper he could get his hands on. For her services, Sneyd insisted on paying not in cash but in gifts--a dress and a pair of stockings. "He did not know any Portuguese,"⁶⁸⁰ Gloria later told Portuguese police detectives, "and I spoke no English, so we conversed only in the international language of love."

While Sneyd was freely sampling the Iberian nightlife, he knew his time in Lisbon was short. He was desperate over his finances--which, after eight days, had dwindled to about five hundred dollars. He'd had no luck finding a ship, and feared that his complete unfamiliarity with both the Portuguese tongue and the Portuguese currency made it impractical for him to consider pulling a heist or robbing a store. Lisbon was too strange and exotic. He couldn't see a way to fall back into his usual pattern of melting into the crowd.

He decided he had to rethink his options in an English-speaking city. He dropped by the Canadian consulate and had a new passport issued, this time with the surname spelled correctly. On Friday, May 17, Sneyd took a taxi to Lisbon's Portela Airport and boarded a flight on Transportes Aereos, bound for London.