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

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, 661sewage 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 tasks 662facing 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" 664and 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 paranoia 665--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 history 666of 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 house 667for 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," 668she 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," 669she 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 Duffey 670showed 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. "Step son," 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," 671Speedy 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."