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

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," 735Eist 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 way 736they 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 agents 737and 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., 738the 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.