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

On the eve of his escape, Ray's only hope was the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which the U.S. House of Representatives had recently impaneled to investigate the JFK and MLK murders. In the late winter, the House's chief counsel, Richard Sprague, had come to Brushy Mountain and led several long cell-block interviews with Ray. The talks got off to a shaky start, but in recent weeks the prisoner finally seemed to be opening up. Ray was even beginning to come clean, hinting that "Raoul" might be fictitious after all. Upon his final interview with Ray, Sprague was moved to declare with complete confidence: "Raoul does not and did not exist." 746

While these interviews were being conducted, a curious development was taking place just outside Brushy Mountain's walls. Jerry Ray had come to the Petros area to live for several months that spring and was seen casing the wooded terrain outside the prison. Then he visited Jimmy one week before the escape--much as their brother John had visited Ray just before his breakout from Missouri's Jeff City prison ten years earlier. (John could not lend his help this time around; he was in prison, serving an eighteen-year federal sentence for robbing a bank.)

The timing of Ray's breakout was beginning to make sense. His legal prospects had dimmed. He'd grown weary of maneuvering. He figured he had nothing left to lose. His brother had scoped out the country around the prison and had probably given him a recon report. So his thoughts returned, fully and passionately, to escape.

"You always have it 747in the back of your mind," he told an interviewer from Playboy only days before he went over the wall. "When you come to the penitentiary, you check out various escape routes. You file them away, and, if the opportunity arises, well, you can go ahead. I suspect that everyone in here has it in the back of his mind. The only thing is whether they have the fortitude to go through with it."

BY SATURDAY AFTERNOON, two of the runaways had been captured--but James Earl Ray was still out there. Authorities stepped up the manhunt. Governor Ray Blanton called out the National Guard, and soon the skies shuddered with helicopters that were equipped with infrared heat-sensing scopes much like the ones that American servicemen had used to hunt Vietcong in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Predictably, a hue and cry rose up in the national media. Reporters were calling it "the escape of the century." The ease with which Ray had broken out from a maximum-security prison, some said, was further proof of the massive conspiracy that was behind the death of Martin Luther King. The people who had killed King now wanted Ray to disappear (or die) before he could testify in Washington in front of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Ray's escape wasn't an escape at all, some said; it was an abduction.

Ralph Abernathy, who had stepped down from the SCLC, said he was "convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt" 748that "authorities in very high places have planned the escape. I would say Ray is going to be destroyed." Abernathy's worries were echoed by Representative Louis Stokes, the Ohio Democrat who was serving as chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Stokes speculated that the escape was "engineered to see that Ray 749is permanently lost and never heard from again. There are people out there who would not want him to talk."

An even more horrifying conspiracy theory rose up from the depths of the newspapers. As it happened, Martin Luther King's father, Daddy King, was only forty miles away from Brushy Mountain on that particular weekend. He was scheduled to preach in a Baptist church in Knoxville on Sunday. People began to speculate that this was not a coincidence at all, that the escape was somehow tied to King's appearance in Knoxville: people literally feared that King's life was in danger.

It wasn't as crazy as it sounded, given the tragedies that had befallen Daddy King since his son's assassination. In 1969, his other son, A. D. King, was found dead at the age of thirty-eight, floating in his swimming pool in Atlanta. Then, in 1974, the matriarch of the family, Daddy King's beloved wife, Alberta, was gunned down by a deranged black man while she was playing the organ during a service at Ebenezer Baptist Church.

How much pain could one man bear? How much bad fortune could be directed at a single family? On Saturday, reporters reached Daddy King in Knoxville and asked him about the manhunt for his son's assassin that was going on in the mountains just to the west. "I hope they don't kill him," 750King said. "Let's hope he doesn't get killed. You're looking at the face of a black man who hates nobody." But King wasn't taking any chances, either, especially with a posse of known murderers on the loose. He had a bodyguard with him at all times, he said, and he'd "stopped checking into hotels in my own name a long time ago. I go nowhere without someone traveling with me, without security at both ends. I've gotten used to it."

The hysteria that Ray's escape had generated was understandable, as were the public suspicions that something much larger was afoot. Nonetheless, prison officials insisted that--so far, at least--they'd found absolutely no evidence that anyone had aided the runaways, and no evidence of a wider conspiracy either inside or outside the prison walls. Warden Stonney Lane, somewhat irritable from having to return prematurely from his vacation to deal with the crisis, promised a full investigation. For now, all he could report was that the phone lines had gone out because the prison had received too many calls all at once from people down in Petros who'd heard the steam whistle shrieking. The power lines had temporarily fizzled as a result of what he rather opaquely called a "panic button overload on the penitentiary circuits."

Mostly, though, Lane was focused on finding Ray and the others. He vowed that the search would venture into "every hollow and back road where a man could hide."

Governor Ray Blanton, meanwhile, tried to reassure the nation that, whatever else happened, his National Guardsmen and corrections department officers would not shoot James Earl Ray. They were, he said, "under orders to use all possible restraint." He conceded that the breakout might have been avoided, that there was possibly "a failure and a laxity" on the part of the Brushy Mountain guards. But, he added, this James Earl Ray character was something else, a fish too big and slippery for any state pen to keep.

"It's not a matter of we can't handle him," the governor said. "It's a matter of we can't contain him. The breakout was concocted, designed, and planned in such a manner that he could be in Guatemala now."

BY SUNDAY MORNING, officials were fairly boiling with frustration. Although three of the prisoners had been caught, Ray remained at large. The full might of the state and the nation could not bring the prime fugitive to bay--not the planes and helicopters with their heat-sensing machines, not the National Guardsmen with their night-vision goggles, not the FBI with its topo maps and roving surveillance cameras. So the search would have to come down to the man hunter's oldest technology, the surest technology of all. It would have to come down to the dogs.

Sammy Joe Chapman 751was the captain of the bloodhound team at Brushy Mountain. He was a big, pale guy with a miner's lamp blazing from his forehead and an impressive Civil War mustache that crimped and tweezed when he smiled. People around the prison called him a "sniffer" and a "dog boy." He'd spent his life tracking coons and hunting for ginseng root in the Cumberland woods, learning what he called "the tricks of the mountains." He knew all the landmarks around the New River valley--Flag Pole, Chimney Top, Twin Forks, Frozen Head. He knew where the burned-out cabins were, and the abandoned mine shafts, and the naked faces of the mountains where the strip miners had done their crude scrapings.