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

Now marksmen in the various towers replied with shotgun blasts and a fusillade of rifle fire. Inmates scattered from the base of the ladder. The seventh and last man clambering up the wall, a bank robber named Jerry Ward, was struck in the arm and face with buckshot. He jumped over the edge, smarting and bleeding, but not badly hurt.

The Brushy Mountain guards had no idea how many prisoners might have disappeared over the wall--nor did they know the identities of the escapees. Within a few minutes, lawmen easily caught Ward in the brambles just outside the prison. When they hauled him off to the infirmary to treat his wounds, the prisoner had a curious reaction to the failed escapade: he seemed almost beside himself with joy.

"Ray got out!" Ward cried in delicious disbelief. "Jimmy Ray got away!"

A LINEUP OUT in the yard quickly confirmed it: Brushy Mountain's most famous prisoner was indeed one of the six men who'd bolted over the wall. In fact, he'd masterminded the plot. James Earl Ray, #65477, had been planning his breakout for months. He'd been saving pipe, figuring sight lines, measuring distances, patiently waiting through the early spring for the greening forests to sprout sufficient camouflage. He'd conditioned his body by playing volleyball and lifting weights. He apparently designed the queer-looking pipe ladder himself, and he was the first one over the wall. Ray had even dropped hints to the media that an escape was imminent. "They wouldn't have me in a maximum security prison if I wasn't interested in getting out," he told a Nashville reporter only two weeks earlier.

Yet the Brushy Mountain guards didn't see it coming, even though everyone knew Ray had a penchant for disappearing from prisons. The deputy warden Herman Davis said it was "the most daring escape I ever heard of." Scrambling under that high-voltage wire, he said, was all but suicidal. "If you get yourself grounded, you're a cinder." Davis also wondered why the phone lines and power lines had gone out--were some of the prison guards colluding with Ray? "It sure makes you think, don't it?"

It wasn't clear to Davis whether all the escapees had conspired together. Some might have seen the ladder and decided to join in the fun. But the five men who were out there with Ray were all hard-core offenders: two murderers, a rapist, and two armed robbers. C. Murray Henderson, the Tennessee commissioner of corrections, figured that at some point the other fugitives would break away from Ray, because, as he put it, "Ray's hot, 743hotter than any of them. They'd want him to split off."

Within minutes of the breakout, authorities set in motion the largest fugitive search in Tennessee history. A posse of more than 150 men, armed with shotguns and miner's lamps, fanned out across the mountains. K9 police shepherds barked in the tenebrous woods, and highway patrolmen set up roadblocks within a twenty-mile radius. The families of guards who lived nearby packed up their things and took off.

As soon as the phones were working again, the word was shot to officials in Nashville, and then to Washington. At President Jimmy Carter's behest, a reportedly "terrified" attorney general, Griffin Bell, had the FBI send in a team of agents. The FBI director, Clarence M. Kelley (Hoover had died in office in 1972), immediately gave the case the highest priority. Ray made the bureau's Ten Most Wanted list for the second time in his life. Forty thousand flyers were printed and would soon be circulated around the nation.

After nearly a decade of incarceration, James Earl Ray was again where he most loved to be--on the outside, giving lawmen a good chase.

THE LEGAL ROAD he'd traveled from his Memphis holding cell to this dramatic night in the mountains of East Tennessee was long and convoluted. In June 1969, after hiring a succession of lawyers, Ray had pleaded guilty in a Memphis courtroom to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and received a ninety-nine-year sentence. Three days later, however, he disavowed parts of his confession and claimed that though he had bought the rifle that killed King and had checked in to the flophouse only hours before the assassination, a criminal associate of his named Raoul had actually pulled the trigger. Ray's frustratingly vague tales about "Raoul" opened up an eternal cataract of conspiracy theories and captivated many within King's inner circle and family. Yet Ray couldn't offer a consistent description of his mysterious partner in crime, or give his nationality, or provide a phone number or an address. He couldn't produce a single witness who'd ever met "Raoul" or who'd ever seen him in the same place with Ray.

Some people close to the case sensed that "Raoul" might be a cover for Ray's brother Jerry, whom the FBI still suspected as an accomplice in the assassination. But to most people, "Raoul" smelled distinctly like a figment of Ray's imagination--another a.k.a. in a life spent developing aliases and making shit up.

What an enigmatic piece of work James Earl Ray had turned out to be, far stranger than anyone could have imagined. Lawyers, prosecutors, wardens, guards, prison shrinks, journalists--no one could figure him out. Through all his mumbled mixed signals, he seemed to have what psychiatrists call the "duping delight." He loved to launch people on crazy searches, even people who were trying to help him. It meant nothing to him for his own attorneys to waste months or even years burrowing in mazy rabbit holes, running down leads that he knew had no basis in fact. He took pleasure in other people's bafflement. Behind his clouds of squid ink, he seemed to be grinning. One of Ray's many lawyers had an expression: the only time you can tell if Ray's lying is when his lips are moving.

Yet he craved something, maybe some brand of fame but maybe something else entirely. His lies seemed to have design, reaching for an endgame known only to him. Percy Foreman, the celebrity Houston lawyer who ended up representing him during his plea bargain in Memphis, put it this way: "Ray is smart like a rat. 744He has a strongly developed, fundamental instinct to be somebody. He would rather be a name than a number."

SINCE HIS CONVICTION in Memphis, James Earl Ray had served his first few years in a Nashville prison, most of the time in solitary confinement--an ordeal that, he thought, may have made him "funny in the head." 745He hired J. B. Stoner, the neo-Nazi firebrand, as his lawyer. Jerry Ray quit his job as a Chicago golf course greenskeeper and moved south to become Stoner's bodyguard and driver.

Ray was released from solitary in early 1971. Shortly thereafter, the Tennessee Corrections Department transferred him to Brushy Mountain, where almost immediately he set about trying to escape. One night in May 1971, he left a dummy of pillows in his cell room bed, squeezed through a ventilation duct, and pried open a manhole cover leading to a steam shaft. He might have made it to freedom had he not been repelled by the four-hundred-degree temperatures lurking deeper inside the tunnel.

A year later, in May of 1972, Ray's beloved George Wallace, campaigning again for president but renouncing his old segregationist policies, was paralyzed from the waist down by an assassin's bullet.

For a time, during the mid-1970s, Ray's interest turned from escaping to legal stratagems designed to win a new trial. Constantly reading law books, he burned through another string of lawyers, but his legal efforts foundered. In December 1976, his attempt to withdraw his guilty plea was rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit--as well as by the U.S. Supreme Court. Two months later, in February 1977, his case received another blow. The Justice Department, which had been leading an inquiry into the King assassination, concluded in its final report that the FBI's investigation was "thoroughly, honestly and successfully conducted ... The sum of all the evidence of Ray's guilt points to him exclusively."