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

45 A BANK WITHDRAWAL

DURING THE MIDDLE of May, the focal point in the hunt for James Earl Ray shifted north to Canada. The FBI learned that Ray had spent time in Toronto and Montreal shortly after his escape from the Missouri penitentiary--that, in fact, he had developed his Eric Galt alias in Canada, stealing identification details from a real Eric S. Galt, who lived in a Toronto suburb. On the theory that he might have returned to Canada after the assassination, the FBI asked the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to pursue a variety of labor-intensive leads. Foremost among these, the bureau wanted Canadian authorities to examine all passport applications dating back to April 1967, the month of Ray's escape from Jeff City, and then single out any photos that bore a resemblance to Ray.

It was an immense undertaking: during that time, Canada had issued some 218,000 passports and had renewed 46,000 more. Reviewing this mountain of paperwork would require staggering man-hours--all the document and photo comparisons would have to be done by hand and by eyeball. But the Mounties took up the task with urgency and zest.

Superintendent Charles J. Sweeney,⁶⁹⁶ commander of the RCMP criminal investigating squad in eastern Ontario, assumed command of the task force in Ottawa. Sweeney selected twelve uniformed constables and equipped them with magnifying glasses. Night after night, working high up in a government building one block from Parliament, the Mounties painstakingly went through the applications, one by one.

THAT SAME WEEK, Ramon Sneyd was staying in a cheap hotel called the Heathfield House, on Cromwell Road, a major thoroughfare that cuts through West London. The Heathfield House was in Earls Court, a low-rent neighborhood then known as Kangaroo Valley because it was especially popular among Australian workers. Sneyd had been here for ten days, holed up in his room, reading newspapers and magazines--and desperately trying to hatch a new plan. He still had Psycho-Cybernetics and other self-help books to help him while away the hours, as well as a book on Rhodesia and a detective novel, The Ninth Directive. Lying low from dawn until late at night, reading in his small wallpapered room, he could hear the frequent roar of the big Heathrow jumbo jets as they banked over the Thames, offering the promise of freedom in the extremities of the faded empire.

Doris Catherine Westwood,⁶⁹⁷ the proprietress of the Heathfield House, hardly ever saw her tenant and wasn't quite sure of his name. "Owing to his bad writing," she later told Scotland Yard, "I thought his name was 'Snezel.'"

May 1968 was a vibrant time to be in groovy, bell-bottom London. The musical Hair was about to open at the Shaftesbury Theatre--though censors vowed to ban the show's frontal nudity. In the history of rock 'n' roll super-bands, it was a month of ferment. The same week that Sneyd arrived in London, the Beatles, having returned from a Transcendental Meditation sojourn in Rishikesh, India, buried themselves in Abbey Road Studios to begin recording what would become known as The White Album. Elsewhere the Rolling Stones were just wrapping up one of their greatest contributions to vinyl, Beggars Banquet, and The Who's Pete Townshend had begun writing the first strains of a rock opera about a deaf, dumb, and blind kid named Tommy.

Trapped in his room, racked with stomach pains and headaches, Sneyd had neither time nor inclination to enjoy the city, and he caught little of London's vibe. Since arriving here, Sneyd had become a lizard-like creature, keeping to the cracks and shadows. He was extremely reluctant to show his face in public during the day. American newspapers and magazines on sale at London newsstands were carrying his photo with some regularity. Life magazine had come out with a long cover story on Ray's childhood and criminal career. Sneyd bought a copy of it--"The Accused Killer: Ray, Alias Galt, the Revealing Story of a Mean Kid," the cover said--and he read the story with a feeling of deepening dread that Hoover's men would soon follow his trail across the Atlantic.

Luckily for Sneyd, Great Britain had recently passed the Criminal Justice Act, which, among other things, virtually prohibited British publications from printing anything but the most rudimentary facts about a suspect before trial. Consequently, the London papers had not yet published photographs of Ray, and scarcely anyone in London other than a few Scotland Yard officers knew of the FBI warrant for his arrest. And in truth, although King's assassination had made huge headlines in Great Britain, most English citizens referred to the slain civil rights leader as "Luther King" and had only a vague idea of what, besides winning a Nobel Peace Prize for civil rights, he had actually done. Unlike in the United States, King's death, and the manhunt for his killer, had largely receded into the background.

For all these reasons, Sneyd remained under the radar screen, well hidden among the warrens of London's more than five thousand inns and bed-and-breakfast establishments.

But his troubles were mounting. He'd had no luck finding a cheap passage to Africa. Since his arrival here on May 17, Sneyd's money woes had become truly acute. He now had less than fifty pounds on his person. On May 27, when Mrs. Westwood told him it would soon be time to pay the rent, Sneyd knew he would have to do something desperate, something rash. "I'll go to my bank," he promised her, "and make a withdrawal."

A FEW HOURS later, sixty-two-year-old Maurice Isaacs and his wife,⁶⁹⁸ Billie, were getting ready to close up their small jewelry store in Paddington. The shop, which had been operating since the end of World War II, was located at 131 Praed Street, only a few blocks from Paddington Station, in a neighborhood bustling with commuters, transients, and tourists.

The gray-haired husband and wife were showing diamond rings to a customer when Ramon Sneyd walked in. In his pocket was his loaded snub-nosed Liberty Chief .38 revolver. He lingered by the glass cases in the front, pretending to be shopping for something. Eventually, the customer left, and Sneyd made his move. He grabbed Maurice Isaacs, brandished the revolver, and stuck it in the side of the jeweler's neck.

"This is a stickup!" Sneyd said. "Now both of you get on back there!" He gestured manically toward the darkened rear of the store, where the couple kept their office.

Over the years, the Isaacses' shop had been burglarized, but they'd never been held up at gunpoint. The couple kept no weapons in their store, nor had they ever rehearsed a plan for how to handle such a situation. Neither of them moved an inch toward the back as Sneyd had commanded--they were determined to take their chances out in the open, where someone on the busy street might see them through the plate-glass window. They knew there was a crowded pub just down the street--the Fountains Abbey--and the sidewalks outside were thronged with rush-hour foot traffic.

Instinct took over. Billie Isaacs, a sweet and matronly woman in her late fifties, leaped onto Sneyd's back. When she did, Maurice wrestled free from Sneyd's grip. He turned and struck the would-be robber several times, then set off the alarm.

Realizing he'd seriously underestimated the tenacity of these shop owners, Sneyd turned and darted from the store. In the early evening light, he raced down busy Praed Street, past St. Mary's Hospital--frustrated that, after his sorry performance, he was none the richer.

IN OTTAWA, AFTER a week of exacting work, the team of twelve constables had plowed their way through more than a hundred thousand passport applications--and had singled out eleven as "possibles." But each of these "possibles" led detectives to the valid passports of legitimate Canadian citizens. As everyone feared, this was shaping up to be a pointless fishing expedition.

But on June 1, a twenty-one-year-old constable named Robert Wood⁶⁹⁹ lingered over a certain photograph. He eyed it with his magnifying glass, saw the dimple in the chin, the touch of gray at the temples, the slightly protruding left ear. He compared it carefully with the numerous Ray photos he had as a reference. "This could be him," Wood said out loud, "if he wore glasses." The name on the passport was Ramon George Sneya.

Now Constable Wood's colleagues set aside their work and gathered round to examine the photo. Some saw the likeness; others weren't so sure. The horn-rimmed eyeglasses threw them off, as did the nose, which was sharper at the tip than that in the old Ray photos. This man looked considerably more dignified in his sport coat and tie, almost like an academic.

Wood held the application in his hand for a while. Not knowing what else to do with it, he laid it in the "possibles" pile--and got back to his monotonous work.

ON THE AFTERNOON of June 4, Ian Colvin,⁷⁰⁰ a foreign-desk journalist and editorial writer for London's Daily Telegraph, was sitting in his office when the phone rang. "Hello, this is Ramon Sneyd," the caller nervously said, in a garbled American accent Colvin couldn't quite place. "I got a brother lost somewhere down in Angola, and I've heard you've written about the mercenary situation down there."

"Yes."

"Well," Sneyd continued, "I think my brother's with the mercenaries. Can you put me in touch with someone who can help me find him?"

Colvin was not particularly surprised by the call; it was true, he had written a book about the colonial wars and mercenary armies in Africa and had developed an extensive circle of contacts in that world. To his credit, this man Sneyd appeared to have done some homework. "Do you have a telephone number of Major Alastair Wicks?" he asked Colvin.

A British-born Rhodesian mercenary with a swashbuckling reputation, Wicks had been involved with armed conflicts in Biafra and was a high-ranking officer in an outfit called the Five Commando Unit down in the Belgian Congo. Though Colvin knew Wicks well, he was reluctant to give out a phone number. "But give me your name and a phone number," Colvin offered, "and I'll forward it on to Major Wicks."

At this point, Colvin could hear an electronic chirping on the line--Sneyd was clearly calling from a pay telephone, and the shrill beep-beep-beep indicated that he needed to shove another sixpence into the slot. "Uh, wait a minute," Sneyd said, "I got to put in more money." But he evidently couldn't dig out his coins fast enough--the phone connection cut off.

Colvin's phone rang a few minutes later. "This is Sneyd," a voice said, sounding somewhat flustered. "I was just talking to you." Listening as Sneyd repeated his shaggy-dog story about a long-lost brother, Colvin began to think that his caller was "odd" and "almost unbalanced." Sneyd was adamant to the point of desperation about getting himself to Africa, and seemed to think that if he could only get in touch with the right person, his airfare would be paid for in exchange for his promise to serve a stint as a soldier.

"Again," Colvin reassured him, "I will be delighted to forward your contact information on to Major Wicks."

"OK," the caller said. "That's Ramon Sneyd. I'm staying here at the New Earls Court Hotel."

Right, Colvin said, and Sneyd hung up.

SNEYD HAD MOVED from the Heathfield House to the New Earls Court Hotel only a few days before. Though the little hotel was just around the corner, on Penywern Road, the weekly rent was cheaper and the accommodations a little nicer. Besides, Sneyd thought it prudent not to linger too long in any one place--especially after his aborted jewelry store stickup in Paddington.

The hotel was a four-story walk-up, with Doric columns and a blue awning covering a cramped vestibule; it was near the Earls Court tube stop and Earls Court Stadium, where Billy Graham had recently conducted a series of wildly successful crusades. For another week, Sneyd remained faithful to his usual nocturnal schedule, keeping to his brown-wallpapered room all day, receiving no calls, and taking no visitors. "He was nervous,⁷⁰¹ pathetically shy, and unsure of himself," the young hotel receptionist, Janet Nassau, later said. Feeling sorry for him, Nassau tried to make conversation and help him out with a few currency questions. "But he was so incoherent," she said, "that nobody seemed able to help him. I thought he was a bit thick. I tried to talk to him, but then I stopped myself, I was afraid he might think I was too forward--trying to chat him up."

For Sneyd, a far bigger worry than the peculiarities of British money was the fact that he scarcely had any money at all; his funds had dwindled to about ten pounds. But on June 4, the same day he called the Daily Telegraph journalist Ian Colvin, Sneyd worked up his courage and resolved to finally dig himself out of his financial straits.

That afternoon he put on a blue suit and pair of sunglasses. Then, at 2:13 p.m., he walked into the Trustee Savings Bank in Fulham⁷⁰² and stood in the queue until, a few minutes later, he approached the till of a clerk named Edward Viney. Through the slot, Sneyd slid a paper bag toward the teller. At first, Viney didn't know what to do with the rumpled pink bag. Then, on closer inspection, he saw writing scrawled across it.

"Put all PS5 notes in this bag," the message demanded. Viney caught a faint glimpse of the man's eyes through his shades and realized he was serious. Glancing down, he saw the glinting nose of a revolver, pointed at him.

Viney quickly emptied his till of all small denominations--in total, only ninety-five pounds. Sneyd was displeased with his slim pickings, and he leaned over the counter and craned his neck toward the adjacent till. "Give me all your small notes!" he yelled, shoving his pistol toward the teller, Llewellyn Heath. In panic, Heath backpedaled and kicked a large tin box, which produced a concussive sound similar to a gunshot. The noise startled everyone, including Sneyd, who leaped away from the counter and sprinted down the street. Two tellers took off after him, but he lost them, ducking into a tailor's shop, where for five minutes he feigned interest in buying a pair of slacks.

At Trustee Savings Bank, Edward Viney surveyed the premises and realized that the robber had left his note behind, scrawled on the pink paper bag. When the bobbies arrived, Viney handed them the bag--upon which, it was soon discovered in the crime lab of New Scotland Yard, the robber had left a high-quality latent thumbprint.

IN TORONTO, an investigator with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Detective Sergeant R. Marsh, was given a copy of the latest passport application that Constable Wood had placed in the "possibles" pile. Working off the details in the application, Detective Marsh quickly deduced that "Sneya" was merely a clerical error, and then tracked down the real Ramon George Sneyd.

Even though Sneyd was a Toronto policeman, Detective Marsh initially had to regard him as a possible suspect in the King assassination--or at least a possible co-conspirator--and he began the interrogation in a distinctly adversarial posture. "Mr. Sneyd," Marsh said, "on April 4,⁷⁰³ a killing took place in Memphis, Tennessee. The American authorities are seeking a suspect. That suspect later took up residence here, in Toronto, under the name Ramon George Sneyd. What, if anything, can you tell us about this?"

Constable Sneyd was flummoxed, to say the least. He searched his memory for any incident, any stray encounter in which someone might have filched his identity. Then he remembered.

"About a month ago," he replied, "I received a telephone call from a stranger who asked me, 'Is this Mr. Sneyd?' He wanted to know if I'd lost my passport--he said he was with the passport division and was making a routine check. I said, 'You've got the wrong Mr. Sneyd.' But then he asked me again, wasn't I Ramon George Sneyd, born in Toronto on October 8, 1932? I said, 'Yes, but there must be some mistake. I've never had a passport. I've never applied for a passport in my whole life.' The man apologized for the mistake, and hung up."

Sneyd's story was convincing enough that Marsh soon let this very confused policeman go. The passport that had been issued to "Sneya" was obviously phony.

Meanwhile, other RCMP detectives began to investigate the various addresses noted in the passport application. They visited Mrs. Loo's place on Dundas Street, Mrs. Szpakowski's place on Ossington Avenue, and the Arcade Photo Studio, where they confiscated the original negative of the passport photo. They discovered that "Sneyd" had also been using the alias "Paul Bridgman"--and that the real Bridgman, like the real Sneyd, had recently been telephoned by a stranger claiming to be from the passport office in Ottawa.

Their curiosity more than piqued, RCMP detectives then visited the Kennedy Travel Bureau, the Toronto travel agency from which the notarized passport application had originated. There they interviewed Lillian Spencer, the travel agent who had worked with Sneyd. Consulting her files, Spencer told the detectives that Sneyd had presumably traveled to London Heathrow on May 6 aboard British Overseas Flight 600. She hadn't heard from him since.

Airline records at the Toronto International Airport indicated that "Sneya" had indeed kept to his itinerary: on the flight list to London was the name detectives were looking for--Ramon G. Sneyd.

Copies of the passport application were forwarded posthaste to the FBI Crime Lab, where handwriting experts soon ascertained that Sneyd's handwriting matched that of Eric S. Galt and James Earl Ray. The train of evidence was thus indisputable: the fugitive, after acquiring a new identity in Canada, had escaped to England. It was time to notify Scotland Yard.

THE DAY AFTER his bank robbery in Fulham, Ramon Sneyd decided he needed to move again, and quickly cleared out of the New Earls Court Hotel. He wended his way through the rainy streets to Pimlico and inquired at a YMCA. It was full, but the YMCA receptionist referred him to a little place a few doors down called the Pax, where a VACANCY sign winked through the fog. Dressed in a beige raincoat with a bundle of papers under his arm, Sneyd asked the hotel's Swedish-born owner, Anna Thomas, for aspirin to soothe his throbbing headache--then went up to his room, which was small but clean, its walls decorated in a cheerful pattern of blue peacocks. "He seemed ill⁷⁰⁴ and very, very nervous," Thomas said. "He stayed in bed all day. I asked him several times to sign the register, but he refused."

In truth, Sneyd was in a state of growing panic. He was running out of ideas. He'd heard nothing from Ian Colvin or Major Alastair Wicks, and he still had no notion how he was going to get to southern Africa. His robbery had fetched the paltry equivalent of only $240--not enough to purchase an airline ticket to Salisbury. He'd already spent some of his takings on the street, buying a syringe and drugs--possibly speed or heroin--to shoot up. Mrs. Thomas soon picked up on his narcotized state. "He never smelled of liquor," she said, "but he kept acting sort of dazed."

Something else was on Sneyd's mind: News reports on June 5 carried the sensational story that Senator Robert Kennedy had been shot in the head at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, not far from where Sneyd, as Eric Galt, had been living a few months earlier. Senator Kennedy was still clinging to life in a hospital, his prognosis grim. Sneyd was no admirer of Senator Kennedy, but he feared that the outrage over another major U.S. assassination would only spur the FBI to redouble its efforts at finding King's murderer. He didn't know how, but he was convinced that the fallout from the Kennedy shooting would pursue him across the ocean.

"That's terrible news--about Senator Kennedy," a hotel staff member later recalled saying to Sneyd.

He replied with what the employee took to be sarcasm dripping from his voice: "It's terrible all right."

THE SAME DAY, Andrew Young and Coretta Scott King, along with several other SCLC staff members, were numbly watching the television news in a suite at Washington's Willard Hotel. They had withdrawn from the noise and mud and confusion of Resurrection City, only a few blocks away, to join the national vigil for Robert Kennedy. As the depressing news reports flickered over the screen, both Young and Mrs. King felt a horrible deja vu. "I was in a daze,⁷⁰⁵ functioning on autopilot," Young said. "I had never been so despondent."

Coretta could never forget Senator Kennedy's kindnesses after her husband's death--providing a plane for her to fly to Memphis, delivering that calming off-the-cuff speech in Indianapolis, touring the riot-scarred cities, and offering a vision for how to rewire the inner cities of America. Kennedy was the only presidential candidate who had openly supported the Poor People's Campaign.

Now the bulletins made it increasingly clear that Kennedy was not going to make it. The news was almost too much for Resurrection City to bear; it was the crushing blow to an already weather-beaten and hopelessly disorganized event at the frayed end of the civil rights movement. "We were all still trying⁷⁰⁶ to pretend that Martin's death had not devastated us," Young wrote. But with Kennedy's shooting, "I couldn't pretend anymore. I sank into a depression so deep it was impossible to go on."

THE FOLLOWING DAY in London, Anna Thomas, the Pax Hotel's owner, went in to clean Sneyd's room and saw a newspaper on the bed opened to news about the RFK assassination. The senator had died overnight, a young Palestinian Arab firebrand named Sirhan Sirhan had been charged, and a stupefied nation was preparing to mourn another Kennedy. The senator's body was to be flown to New York, for a requiem mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral, then taken by a slow train to Washington for burial at Arlington National Cemetery beside his brother's grave.

Thomas found that Sneyd's room was already tidy, the bed made, the blue spread pulled tight. He'd washed his own shirts, and now they were hung up to drip-dry over the small sink beside the window.

Sneyd, it turned out, was at a telephone call box around the corner, ringing Ian Colvin at the Daily Telegraph. "I haven't heard from Major Wicks⁷⁰⁷ and now I've had to change hotels--did you call him?" Sneyd demanded to know. To Colvin, Sneyd sounded "overwrought and somewhat incoherent."

Colvin told Sneyd that he had phoned Major Wicks (and, in fact, Colvin had), but Wicks had said the name Sneyd meant nothing to him. Wicks checked around and found no one who knew Sneyd's brother. "How long has he been missing down there?" Colvin asked.

"Well," Sneyd admitted. "The truth is, he's not really missing. It's just that we haven't heard from him in a few months."

"Are you worried for his safety?" Colvin asked.

"It's not so much that," Sneyd said, hesitating. "You see, I'd really like to become a mercenary myself."

All this dissembling was trying Colvin's patience. He told Sneyd that now was a bad time to try to enlist with the mercenaries--in most African countries, the fight was fading, the movement drying up, the soldiers of fortune gradually heading home.

"In any case," he added, trying to make this importunate man go away, "London's not the best place to get information on the mercenaries."

This seemed to catch Sneyd's attention. "Where would you suggest I go?" he asked.

"Well," Colvin replied. "If I were you, I'd get myself over to Brussels." He explained that they had some sort of information center there that kept track of all the mercenaries.

"Where's that again?"

Brussels, Colvin said--Brussels, Belgium.

ABOUT A MILE away, at Scotland Yard, one of Great Britain's leading sleuths had taken command of the Ray-Galt-Sneyd fugitive case. His name was Detective Chief Superintendent Thomas Butler, the head of the famed Flying Squad that had recently solved one of England's most notorious heists--the so-called Great Train Robbery of 1963. Blunt, stolid, and balding, the fifty-five-year-old Tommy Butler was a bachelor who lived with his mother in Barnes, near the Thames. He didn't smoke, rarely drank, and was given to wearing natty houndstooth blazers.

Detective Butler had a reputation for methodical relentlessness. Writing of Butler, a London Times reporter said that "many criminals seeking refuge⁷⁰⁸ abroad later confessed that they knew no peace, even at the other side of the world, when they heard Mr. Butler was actively engaged in their recapture."

Butler's men quickly learned that Ramon "Sneya" had stayed only a few hours at Heathrow and then taken a plane straightaway to Lisbon. Portuguese police, working with the FBI and Interpol, traced Sneyd's movements in Lisbon. They found his hotel, his drinking haunts, his whores. They found that he'd obtained a corrected passport at the Canadian embassy in Lisbon. They found he'd returned to London on May 17.

So the brunt of the investigation, having been briefly tossed to Portugal, was back in Butler's court. The detective chief superintendent wasted no time. Detectives fanned out and began questioning the managers of every cheap hotel and bed-and-breakfast in London. Every airline, train line, bus line, and rental car agency was checked, as were luggage lockers, safe-deposit boxes, and nightclubs. A photo with a description of Sneyd was printed in the Police Gazette, a sheet circulated among every police and immigration officer in the British Isles. "Wanted in connection with a serious immigration matter," the caption under Sneyd's photo announced. "Do not interrogate but detain for questioning."

Finally, on June 6, the name Ramon George Sneyd was placed on the "All Ports Warning," which meant that immigration officials at every harbor and air terminal in the British Isles were alerted to halt anyone traveling under that name.

Butler reported back to the FBI in Washington--his men were on the case, he said, and he felt confident that something would turn up soon. Cartha DeLoach was cautiously optimistic: "We knew that the fugitive⁷⁰⁹ was hiding somewhere in England, Scotland, or Wales--an area smaller than the United States, but still a haystack in which a needle could disappear for weeks or months or years."