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

48 RING OF STEEL

ON JUNE IO, two days after his arrest, in a chamber deep inside London's Brixton prison, Ramon Sneyd met for the first time with his British solicitor, a diligent young man named Michael Eugene. Sneyd was mild mannered and pleasant at first, but he soon fell into a rant. "Look," he said, "they got me mixed up⁷³¹ with some guy called James Earl Ray. My name is Sneyd--Ramon George Sneyd. Never met this Ray guy in my life. I don't know anything about this. They're just trying to pin something on me that I didn't do."

Eugene tried to calm his client and explain to him that he was not concerned with the crimes Sneyd had been accused of in the United States. His concern, properly speaking, was only with the coming extradition hearings. Eugene asked Sneyd whether, in the meantime, he could do anything to make him more comfortable. Eugene later recalled the conversation.

"Yes," Sneyd replied. "I'd like you to call my brother."⁷³²

"Certainly," Eugene agreed. "How do I reach him? What is his name?"

"Oh, he lives in Chicago," Sneyd said. "His name is Jerry Ray."

Eugene blinked in disbelief. Was this man a blithering idiot? Did he realize what he'd just said? He took down Jerry Ray's contact information and didn't say a word. For days and weeks, the prisoner would continue to insist his name was Sneyd. Eugene happily went along with the fiction.

"And another thing," Sneyd said. "I'm going to need to hire a lawyer in the States--in case we lose the extradition trial. Could you make contact with a few lawyers for me?"

Again, Eugene cheerfully agreed. "Any ones in particular?"

Sneyd was aiming for the stars. First, he said he wanted F. Lee Bailey, the famous Boston trial attorney. If Bailey said no, then he wanted Melvin Belli, out of San Francisco.

What little Eugene knew about American lawyering told him that retaining either of these two celebrity attorneys would cost a king's ransom. "Oh," Sneyd said dismissively. "I'm not worried about their fees. Even if it takes a hundred thousand dollars, I can raise it. They'll be taken care of."

Although Eugene seriously doubted Sneyd's assertion, there was a good deal of truth to the notion that he could quickly build a war chest of funds. In fact, the United Klans of America was already in the process of raising ten thousand dollars to defend Sneyd. Another group, the Patriotic Legal Fund,⁷³³ out of Savannah, Georgia, had pledged to pay all of Sneyd's attorney fees, court expenses, the cost of any appeals--as well as his bond. The Patriotic Legal Fund was affiliated with the National States Rights Party, whose chairman and legal adviser, the bow-tie-wearing J. B. Stoner, had already written a letter offering to defend the accused free of charge. Sneyd, Stoner told the media, was a "national hero" who had done America a favor and "should be given a Congressional Medal of Honor."

Sneyd knew about Stoner through reading his neo-Nazi rag the Thunderbolt. He was intrigued and flattered by Stoner's overtures, and would soon pursue a correspondence with the racist attorney. For now, though, Sneyd thought he should try to hold out for the biggest name he could get.

WHILE SNEYD WAS waiting for his extradition hearings to begin, he had several weeks to kill inside Brixton--and later, another large London prison known as Wandsworth, to which he was eventually transferred. He knew no one and was kept completely isolated from the rest of the inmate population, living in what the authorities referred to as a "condemned cell." He was a "Category A Prisoner," to whom the highest security precautions applied. The wardens, fearing their celebrity inmate might attempt suicide, would not allow Sneyd to eat his food with utensils. Then, one morning, when he was handed a pile of slimy eggs and greasy sausage, he made a stink. How was he supposed to eat this mess with his hands?

His specially assigned guard, a veteran Scotland Yard detective sergeant named Alexander Eist,⁷³⁴ came to his aid and tried to get him a spoon and fork. For this small favor, Sneyd was extremely grateful, and the two men became, in a manner of speaking, friends. Eist not only guarded Sneyd in prison but also accompanied him to his appearances in court--the two men handcuffed to each other at all times. Along the way, Eist performed other small favors for Sneyd--procuring him American magazines and newspapers, and even bars of chocolate, which were forbidden by the wardens. "He began to look at me," Eist later told the FBI, "as the only friend he had in the country. With my constant contact with him, he began to look on me as somebody he could talk to."

Sneyd carefully studied the papers Eist brought each day. He must have noticed the national reports that George Wallace, having faltered in his presidential bid after Lurleen's death, had resoundingly returned to the fray. On June 11, after a month of mourning, the widower made his first comeback appearance, raising more than a hundred thousand dollars at a luncheon rally that attracted thirteen thousand die-hard fans. He chose to hold the rally in, of all places, Memphis.

Mostly, though, Sneyd was curious about how his own case was playing out in the media. "He seemed absolutely mad about publicity,"⁷³⁵ Eist recalled. "He was continually asking me how he would hit the headlines, and he kept wanting news of publicity."

"Has anything else appeared in the papers this morning?" Sneyd asked Eist one day.

"No, that's it," Eist replied.

"Well, just wait," Sneyd said confidently. "You haven't seen anything yet."

As he got to know the prisoner better, Eist began to worry about the state of Sneyd's mental health. "I formed an opinion that this man was possibly psychiatric," Eist said. "Sometimes he would go into a shell and just look at me. Through it all was coming a clear pathological pattern. It was quite eerie. I had visions of him going berserk any minute when he was in these funny moods."

Over time, Eist earned the prisoner's trust. The two men got to talking about Sneyd's past in America and the King assassination in Memphis. He was clearly replaying the shooting in his head, trying to pinpoint his errors. "When I was coming out of there, I saw a police car," he told Eist one day. "That's where I made my mistake. I panicked and threw the gun away. All I know is, they must've got my fingerprints on it."

Sneyd was still not reconciled to his capture at Heathrow. He kept reliving it in his mind. If he'd only made it onto that plane to Brussels, he was confident that he could have found a cheap way to reach Rhodesia, or Angola. He came within a hairbreadth of making it.

Once he was there in the wilds of southern Africa, he was looking forward to the life of a mercenary soldier. "He just hated black people," Eist recalled. "He said so on many occasions. He called them 'niggers.' In fact, he said he was going to Africa to shoot some more. He mentioned the Foreign Legion. He seemed to have some sort of wild fantasy that he was going to do something of this nature."

Now that he was captured, Sneyd didn't seem at all worried about this future; he had what the Brits call a "Bob's your uncle" air about him. He believed that at most, he would face charges of conspiracy, which would carry a sentence of no more than a dozen years. Neither F. Lee Bailey nor Melvin Belli had agreed to represent him in the United States; instead, he had hired Arthur Hanes, the former mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, who had successfully defended Klansmen in high-profile murder cases. "There's no way⁷³⁶ they can pin the murder on me," Sneyd told Eist, because "they can't prove I fired the gun." Along the way, he would have no trouble profiting from the notoriety of the case. "I can make a half-million dollars," he boasted to Eist. "I can raise a lot of money, write books, go on television. In parts of America, I'm a national hero."

THE IDLING JET engines of the big C-135 whined in the night air as a convoy of Scotland Yard vehicles pulled up on the tarmac. Detective Chief Superintendent Tommy Butler emerged from one of the police cars, as did Ramon Sneyd, his hands cuffed. Butler and a gaggle of other Scotland Yard officials boarded the plane with their prisoner.

It was just before midnight on July 18 at the U.S. Air Force Base in Lakenheath, Suffolk. Throughout the hour-long ride from London, Butler had been sitting with Sneyd, trying to engage the prisoner in conversation and, though it would have little or no value in court, to draw out a confession of the sort Sneyd had already given, in so many words, to his jailhouse guard, Alexander Eist. But Sneyd proved impervious to Butler's probings, providing only grunts and monosyllabic answers while staring out the window.

On the big, mostly empty plane, Sneyd was met by four FBI agents⁷³⁷ and an Air Force physician. There in the aisle, Tommy Butler officially remanded the prisoner to the custody of the United States. While Butler and the other Yard men exited the plane, the physician quickly took Sneyd's vital signs to ensure he was in good health. Ordinarily, a C-135 carried 125 passengers or more. On this journey, the Air Force jet would carry only six, plus a small crew. Within a half hour, the big plane taxied down the runway and climbed into the sky, turning west toward North America. The secret transfer of America's most wanted prisoner--officially dubbed Operation Landing--had begun.

Sneyd sat harnessed and locked in his seat, saying nothing, refusing all offers of food and drink. A week earlier, he had lost his extradition hearing; at the famed Bow Street Magistrates' Court in London, Ramsey Clark's team of prosecutors had presented a case utterly convincing to the British authorities, and Sneyd had not bothered to appeal. In a letter to his brother Jerry Ray, he wrote that he would forgo the appeals process because he was "getting tired of listening to these liars." He still stubbornly insisted that he was indeed Ramon Sneyd. He even attempted to have some fun with his character. He facetiously told people he was Lord R. G. Sneyd, and claimed no familiarity with anyone named James Earl Ray.

During the long flight, Sneyd got up only once, to use the bathroom. Two FBI agents accompanied him and watched him do his business, with the lavatory door open. He was cinched back in his seat and didn't rise again for the rest of the journey. Once, he complained of a headache and was given aspirin. The agents guarding him noticed that he would pretend to fall asleep--only to cock one eye open, stare at them for a few long moments, and then close it again. It was a little game of peekaboo that went on through the night as the plane arced over the Atlantic.

A FEW HOURS before dawn, at the Millington naval air base seventeen miles north of Memphis, Shelby County's sheriff, William Morris, Fire and Police Director Frank Holloman, and the FBI special agent in charge Robert Jensen anxiously waited for the prisoner's arrival. An armored personnel carrier sat squatly on the tarmac, surrounded by a convoy of police cars. Outside stood federal marshals, FBI agents, and guards carrying submachine guns. The night was moonless, and the runway was puddled with water from thunderstorms that had just passed through western Tennessee.

At 3:48 a.m.,⁷³⁸ the sound of a plane bored through the humid darkness, and the C-135 touched down. Sheriff Morris trundled up the steps, where he greeted the FBI agents and made his way toward the prisoner. With a sheriff's deputy recording everything on a video camera, Morris looked into Ray's face and said, in his deepest baritone: "James Earl Ray, alias Harvey Lowmeyer, alias John Willard, alias Eric Starvo Galt, alias Paul Bridgman, alias Ramon George Sneyd, will you please step forward three paces?"

Ray did so.

A Memphis physician, Dr. McCarthy DeMere, approached Ray and asked him to remove his clothes. A few minutes later, Ray stood stark naked and shivering in the aisle, his fish-belly skin shining brightly in the video camera lights. Dr. DeMere took Ray's blood pressure and other vital signs, then nodded to Morris: "He's all yours."

One of the FBI agents handed a receipt to Sheriff Morris and said: "I now give the person and property of James Earl Ray into the custody of Shelby County, State of Tennessee."

While the sheriff read the prisoner his Miranda rights, a deputy opened up a suitcase and produced a plaid flannel shirt, a pair of dark green pants, a pair of sandals, and a bulletproof vest. The deputy helped Ray put on the whole ensemble, and then Ray's hands were manacled to a leather harness.

Morris and his deputy practically lifted the prisoner off his feet and shepherded him down the steps into the open air. For the first time since April 4, the prisoner's feet touched Tennessee soil. Robert Jensen and his agents stood impassively in the shadows, watching. One of Jensen's men was on a mobile phone, narrating the proceedings to Cartha DeLoach in Washington: "They're getting out of the plane⁷³⁹ ... Now they're taking the prisoner." DeLoach wanted to hear the blow-by-blow, so that he would know the exact moment James Earl Ray ceased to be his problem.

DeLoach had made sure that the federal security around the plane amounted to a "ring of steel."⁷⁴⁰ Two lines of armed guards formed a long corridor extending from the plane to the waiting armored vehicle. As he awkwardly walked the gauntlet, Ray kept his head down, his eyes fixed on his sandaled feet.

Sheriff Morris ushered the prisoner into the rear of the personnel carrier, whose multiple armored plates were said to be strong enough to withstand a rocket attack and whose windshield was made of inch-thick bulletproof glass. Within a minute, the motorcade took off. The armored car, with its spinning dome light, made a heavy rumbling sound as it lumbered down the tarmac. The convoy turned onto the main road and aimed for downtown Memphis, the city lights glowing through the haze to the south.

Working with the FBI, Morris had arranged⁷⁴¹ every detail of this choreographed show. The transfer of James Earl Ray was to be carried out in complete secrecy, under cover of night. To throw off the media, Morris had arranged a "decoy convoy" to head simultaneously for the Memphis airport, where most journalists expected Ray's plane would touch down. Sheriff Morris, who was ultimately responsible for keeping Ray safe, feared a reprise of Dallas; Jack Ruby's murder of Lee Harvey Oswald was still fresh in the national memory. No one would be permitted a second's access to Morris's prisoner; no one would even get close.

Morris didn't have to be paranoid to believe that any number of people might want to ambush these proceedings. It was possible, he feared, that black militants might try to kill Ray, or that Klansmen might try to stage a commando-style rescue raid. And if there was a larger plot behind the assassination, then the conspirators themselves might try to assassinate Ray--or kidnap him--before he could spill any secrets.

At about 4:30 a.m., the convoy roared up to the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Memphis. Armed guards stood on roofs, while riot-control cops, wielding sawed-off shotguns, lined the street. A city bus pulled up to serve as a screen in case any long-distance snipers were out there. The rear door of the armored car swung open and Ray stepped out. Morris hustled him into the building and into an elevator that whisked them to the third floor. The elevator door opened, and as the prisoner emerged, a sheriff's department photographer snapped a few pictures. Averting his eyes, Ray tried to kick him in the head, screaming, "You son of a bitch!"

Morris led Ray down the hall toward his cell, which was really a fortified cell within a cell, specially prepared for him at a cost of more than a hundred thousand dollars. All the windows were covered with quarter-inch steel plates, reportedly strong enough to resist small-arms artillery. Bright fluorescent lights were set to burn twenty-four hours a day. Multidirectional microphones dangled from the ceiling, and closed-circuit television cameras trolled the cell block. At least two sets of eyes would be on him at all times--until the day he stood trial.

It was all Ray's tailor-made hoosegow, the entire third floor of what had become a citadel within the county courts complex. He would be the most heavily guarded, and most vigilantly watched, man in the United States.

Morris handed the prisoner over to the guards, who escorted him into his cell and removed his bulletproof vest, his handcuffs, and his leather harness. Then he was given corrections department garb to put on. Though it was impossible to tell through the steel skin that covered the windows, the sun was just beginning to rise over Memphis when James Earl Ray's cell door clanked shut.