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

Chapman had grown impatient with the feds and all their instruments and all their worrying. He knew that his bloodhounds would find Ray in due course. All they needed was a good drenching rainstorm. That was the funny thing about bloodhounds: their extraordinary snouts didn't work well in dry weather. When the forest was in want of moisture, all the wild odors mingled into olfactory confusion, and the dogs couldn't pick out a man's clear scent.

Then, on Sunday afternoon, the weather turned. For hours and hours it rained strong and steady, flushing out the forest, driving the stale airborne smells to the ground. Chapman looked at the gray skies and smiled.

Around nightfall he put a harness to his two best hounds, a pair of fourteen-month-old bitches named Sandy and Little Red. He'd personally trained them, teaching them to hunt in perfect silence--none of the usual yelping and singing normally associated with hounds. Late that night, along the New River about eight miles north of the prison, the dogs picked up something strong. The wet ground quickened their senses, just as Chapman knew it would. Tugged by Sandy and Little Red, Chapman followed the river toward the Cumberland strip mine. After a few miles, they crossed over to the other side, then started up the steep flanks of Usher Top Mountain. An hour into the chase, the hounds remained keen.

Now Chapman radioed back to the prison: "We've got a hot trail!" He crossed a set of railroad tracks and a logging road and a clearing strewn with coal. In his headlamp, Chapman could see a rusty conveyor belt and other industrial machinery of the West Coal Company. It was nearly midnight, but the dogs kept leading him uphill, toward Usher Top. For two hours, he strained and struggled up the face of the ridge, his dogs never letting up. At one point he halted them and heard thrashing in the blackberry bushes, not more than fifty yards up the mountain.

In another ten minutes, Chapman and the dogs had nearly reached the mountain's summit. Halting his dogs again, he heard silence--nothing but the crickets and a slight breeze whispering through the oaks and the rush of the river down in the moonlit valley, hundreds of feet below. It was ten minutes past two on Monday morning. Sandy and Little Red yanked Chapman a few feet farther. They snuffled and sniffed in the wet leaves. Their bodies went rigid, but still they didn't bark or bay--they only wagged their tails.

Chapman shined his lamp at a bulge in the forest floor. From his shoulder holster, he produced a Smith & Wesson .38 Chiefs Special. "Don't move or I'll shoot!"

Then, like a ghoul, a pale white man rose lurchingly from the leaves. He was wet and haggard and smeared in mud. His scratched arms were crusted with poison ivy. He wore a navy blue sweatshirt and dungarees and black track shoes. James Earl Ray's fifty-four hours of freedom had come to an end.

Chapman slapped some cuffs over the fugitive's wrists and frisked him. Ray had a map of East Tennessee and $290--a stash he'd apparently saved up from his $35-per-month job in the prison laundry. Aside from the map, he had nothing on his person that appeared to have come from outside the prison, nothing that indicated he'd had any help.

"Ray, how do you feel?"

"Good," he mumbled, averting his eyes in the lamp glare.

"Had anything to eat?"

"Naw," Ray said. "Only a little wheat germ, is all."

Chapman got on the radio to share the good news--and in the process learned that other bloodhounds had found another fugitive down on the New River several hours earlier (the sixth and final runaway wouldn't be caught until Tuesday). Chapman congratulated Sandy and Little Red, tugging at their slobbery dewlaps. But he had to hand it to Ray, too. "For a 49-year-old man 752who didn't know the mountains," he said later, "Ray really didn't do bad."

Inmate #65477 headed down the mountain, back to a prison term that would last, unbroken by any more escapes, until his death in 1998 from hepatitis C (probably contracted through a tainted blood transfusion he would receive after several black inmates repeatedly stabbed him). Now, tromping in manacles through the soggy Cumberland woods, Ray didn't say a word. He only thought about his mistakes and what he'd do differently next time, if he ever got another chance.

"It's disappointing being caught," 753he told an interviewer back at the prison. "I wasn't happy being run down. I'd rather be ... out there . But it's not the end of the world. There's tomorrow."

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In order to trace the final days of Martin Luther King, and to follow in James Earl Ray's fugitive footsteps, I had to go on a round-the-world odyssey, one that required many road trips and many flights over many years--and one that now taxes my memory of all the good folks I need to thank.

But let me try: In Puerto Vallarta, Lori Delgado was most generous in guiding me to Ray's haunts. In the early going, the prizewinning King scholar David Garrow proved extremely helpful during a visit to Cambridge University. Pedro and Isabel Branco were nice enough to show me Lisbon and introduce me to the melancholy joys of fado--Portugal's answer to the Delta blues. In Austin, Doug and Anne Brinkley nursed me back to health after a hard fluish stint at the LBJ Presidential Library. My researches in London were a success thanks in no small part to Ben and Sarah Fortna, to Robert McCrum, and to Sarah Lyall of the New York Times . In Toronto, I must thank Mike Fuhr and the CBC's John Nicol for their expert help. In North Carolina, a big thanks to Sir Newton Stevens for his hospitality during my research junket to the UNC archives. In Birmingham, Arthur Hanes Jr., one of Ray's first lawyers, graciously shared his view of the case over a sumptuous pile of Jim 'n Nick's BBQ. In Boston, I thank Jon Haber and Carolyn Goldstein for their hospitality, as well as Tony Decaneas at the Panopticon Gallery and the archivist Alex Rankin at BU's Gotlieb Center.

I'm enormously grateful to the Hoover Institution's Edwards Media Fellows Program at Stanford University, which provided a generous research grant. Also at Stanford, a hearty thanks to Clayborne Carson and Clarence Jones at the King Papers Project. I also thank the MacDowell Colony for recharging my fizzled batteries in the mountains of New Hampshire, and the Bunburys in Ireland.

Several researchers proved indispensable in helping me track down key sources and exhume old newspaper and magazine accounts. I must especially thank Scott Reid in Atlanta, Jean Hannah Edelstein in London, Ciara Neill in Memphis, and Shay Brown in Santa Fe.

I logged a lot of quality time in my old hometown of Memphis, and my list of people to thank there is long and wide-ranging. First, my appreciation to Beverly Robertson and the staff of the National Civil Rights Museum, which organized a fascinating symposium in April 2008 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the MLK assassination. I thank also John Campbell with the Shelby County District Attorney's Office, the retired pathologist Jerry Francisco, and the attorneys Mike Cody and Charlie Newman at Burch, Porter & Johnson.

Others who generously gave their time include Martha Huie, Louis Donelson, Charles Crump, John T. Fisher, and Marc Perrusquia. A special thanks to the whole crew at Memphis magazine, especially Ken Neill, Mary Helen Randall, and Michael Finger. Hope Brooks, at Cargill Cotton, helped me understand the world of "white gold," as did the fine folks at the Cotton Museum downtown.

I doff my hat to Edwin Frank, curator of the amazing Mississippi Valley Collection at the University of Memphis, and to Wayne Dowdy, over at the Memphis Room. I sincerely appreciate the forbearing souls at Quetzal on Union, my well-caffeinated research bunker during all my Memphis stays. Thanks also to Robin and Ann Smithwick, Billy Withers, John Harris, Jim McCarter, and everyone at the Drake and Zeke show. My gratitude to John Ruskey--a.k.a. River Jesus--for showing me the real Mississippi during a fabulous spring canoe trip, and to Mary Turner, at Outside , for making it possible.