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

At 9:15 the next morning, April 19, Les Trotter called DeLoach. "We're getting there," 642Trotter said, noting that Bonebrake and his team hadn't slept a wink and that they'd already plowed through more than five hundred sets of cards. "Give us just a little more time."

"OK," DeLoach said, and then ducked into a weekly meeting of FBI muckety-mucks led by Clyde Tolson, Hoover's right-hand man. DeLoach was reluctant to tell Tolson the truth--that although countless specialists were hard at work and making progress, the investigation seemed to be momentarily stymied.

Several hours later, as the meeting was adjourning and DeLoach was gathering up his papers, the phone rang. It was Les Trotter on the line. "Deke," he said, and already DeLoach thought he could detect a "note of triumph" in Trotter's voice. There was a long pause, and then Trotter gloatingly said: "Tell the Director. We've got your man!"

"Are you sure?"

"No doubt about it. Bonebrake's experts found an exact match just a few minutes ago, on the 702nd card."

"I take it he's not really Eric Galt. Or Lowmeyer. Or Willard."

"Nope," Trotter said. "His card number is 405,942G. The guy's a habitual offender. Escaped last year from the state pen at Jeff City, Missouri. His name is James Earl Ray."

BOOK THREE

THE HOTTEST MAN IN THE COUNTRY

Thy chase had a beast in view;

Thy wars brought nothing about;

Thy lovers were all untrue.

'Tis well an old age is out,

And time to begin a new

.

JOHN DRYDEN, "THE SECULAR MASQUE"

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 on 643and 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, 644ordered 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.