This is what is going to happen to me also.
—MLK, reacting to the assassination of President Kennedy, November 22, 1963
JAMES EARL RAY likely slept in on the morning of April 4. He did not check out of the New Rebel until early that Thursday afternoon. As was his habit, he bought a copy of the local paper—in the case of Memphis, that was the morning daily, the Commercial Appeal. He must have zeroed in quickly on a front-page story headlined “King Challenges Court Restraint, Vows to March.”
The story said that King was back in Memphis preparing for the march on Monday. It explained, though, that Judge Brown’s injunction might block him from leading the march. The story quoted King’s comment the day before that he might disregard such an injunction “on the basis of conscience.”
One detail buried in the tenth paragraph would have had Ray riveted to the story. He was on a mission to kill King, and he knew how he would do it. He would shoot him. Where he could find King was another question. If he had not learned where King was staying from the TV news the night before, the newspaper would have clued him in. It identified the Lorraine Motel as King’s lodging while he was in Memphis.
Determining King’s likely whereabouts so quickly and effortlessly from a TV broadcast or a ten-cent newspaper was the first of several lucky breaks that would advantage Ray’s murderous plan.
In the early afternoon, he left the New Rebel in his Mustang heading to the Lorraine. From the New Rebel it is a ten-mile drive through the city’s southwestern flank to the motel. Very likely Ray cruised the area around the Lorraine, scouting for a covert location from which he might observe King’s movements. Roaming the seedy area around the motel would have pointed him to four red brick buildings, none taller than four stories, which formed the 400 block of South Main. The Lorraine faced the rear of the four buildings across Mulberry Street.
Ray likely cased the 400 block of South Main, hoping that from inside one of the four buildings he might find a window that would afford him an unobstructed view of the motel. On the same logic, police officers Redditt and Richmond had picked the back of the fire station at 474 South Main as their surveillance post from where they could monitor King and his associates. Unlike Redditt and Richmond, Ray would not only have to locate the right building. He would also have to be fortunate enough to find a way to enter and remain in it long enough to get a bead on King.
Luck was on Ray’s side again. He was able to find just the place that suited his purpose. It was the rooming house at 418½–422½ South Main: two adjoining brick buildings, each two stories tall. On the ground floor were two businesses, Jim’s Grill and Canipe Amusement Company, a jukebox repair and record shop. To the left of the Canipe storefront, an entrance opened to a stairway leading to the rooming-house office on the second floor.
It was about 3:15 p.m. when Ray parked the Mustang nine blocks away, probably to distance the car far from the rooming house so no one could link it to his having been on the 400 block of South Main. He walked to the entrance of the rooming house, climbed the stairs, and knocked at the door of the office.
Bessie Brewer, the resident manager, interrupted her bookkeeping to answer the door. An ample woman in her thirties, she was wearing faded blue jeans and a checkered shirt, and her hair was in rollers. Her sixteen-unit establishment catered to hard-up transients. Ray, who was no stranger to derelict rooming houses, would belittle it later as a “wino place.”1 Its residents were not far removed from homelessness, and Brewer had learned to exercise caution. When Ray knocked, she opened the door a crack, leaving its chain latch closed, and gazed at Ray.
“Do you have a room to rent?” he asked through the door, as Brewer would relate to author Gerold Frank.2 In Frank’s account, she would remember Ray as a “trim white man who appeared to be in his early thirties,” having “dark hair, blue eyes, and a thin nose” and wearing “a dark suit that seemed much too nice for the neighborhood.” Reassured, she opened the door to admit him. “He was a clean, neat man,” she would tell a reporter for the Commercial Appeal a day later.
Brewer motioned to Ray to follow her across from the office to the first door on the left. It was Room 8, a kitchenette apartment that rented for $10.50 a week. It had a stove and refrigerator. Ray glanced around. The room was not on the side of the building facing Mulberry Street. “I only want a sleeping room,” he told Brewer.
She led him through a second-floor passageway to Room 5B in the adjoining building. To enter Room 5B, Brewer had to open a padlock on the door and turn a jury-rigged doorknob fashioned from a coat hanger. The rent was less, $8.50 a week, she told Ray. The room looked as humble as the door lock. A naked lightbulb dangled from the ceiling. A mattress on a metal bed frame sagged. There was a worn wooden dresser and a single window behind tattered, floral-patterned curtains. Ray glanced inside and said the room was fine. He would take it.
During its investigation a decade later, the House Select Committee on Assassinations would find no evidence that Ray had checked out the view from the window before taking Room 5B. Rather, the committee concluded, “the privacy and its location at the rear of the building apparently made the room more acceptable to Ray” than Room 8.3
Back in Brewer’s office, she asked him to pay for the room in advance. He dipped into his pocket for a crisp $20 bill and handed it to her. As she wrote a receipt, she asked his name. He said it was John Willard. To Brewer he seemed pleasant and calm. He even smiled reassuringly. Only after he left the office did something about him strike her as odd. He did not ask for the padlock to lock the door of Room 5B. Nor did he have any luggage.
A half hour later, Ray turned up at the York Arms Company, a sporting goods store on South Main four blocks north of the Lorraine. Ray asked a store clerk, Ralph Carpenter, to show him a pair of binoculars. Carpenter would comment later on his impression of Ray and how he was struck by the quaint neatness of the slender man. Ray’s dark hair was combed straight back, and he wore a narrow, old-fashioned knit tie.
The clerk offered two of the store’s pricier models, one pair of binoculars for $200 and another for $90. Ray asked for something cheaper. He was shown a pair of 7x35 Bushnell Banner binoculars. The price was $40, plus $1.55 tax. Ray nodded his approval. He dug into his pocket and slowly counted out two twenties, a one-dollar bill, two quarters, and, finally, five pennies.4
Equipped with the binoculars, Ray drove back to the rooming house. This time he parked a few doors south, at 424 South Main. He sat in the car for a few moments, scarcely moving, seemingly staring into space. Or so it appeared to Elizabeth Copeland and Frances Thompson, two employees at the Seabrook Wallpaper store across the street. They observed him frozen to the driver’s seat and wondered about this.5 He may have remained in the car until he believed nobody was around and he could exit the car unseen.
When he did exit the Mustang, he opened the trunk and removed a bulging bundle wrapped in a green and brown bedspread. The bedspread most likely cloaked the Remington Gamemaster rifle that Ray had bought in Birmingham, a portable transistor radio etched with his inmate number (00416) from the Missouri State Penitentiary, a pair of men’s undershorts, an undershirt, a hairbrush, various tools and toiletries, and at least two cans of Schlitz beer.6 He wrapped the bundle in his arms and managed at the same time to grip in one hand the York Arms bag containing his new field glasses. He hastened the few steps to the rooming house entrance and climbed the twenty stairs to Room 5B.
It was not long after 5:00 p.m. when he entered the room. Outside it was cool, and the sky was clear. The sun would not set till six twenty-five. As it would turn out, luck was again on his side. He could count on plenty of light for almost an hour and a half.
In his room, Ray hooked the curtain out of the way, raised the window, removed the screen, and canvassed the area. Room 5B was located near the rear of the building on the east side, which stood at a ninety-degree angle from Mulberry Street. By leaning out the window and craning his neck to the left, he could look diagonally across Mulberry. From that angle the Lorraine came into full view. His good luck was holding. Room 5B afforded him a view of the motel.
Yet as a lookout it was not ideal. To see the whole expanse of the Lorraine, Ray had to lean out the window. He would have to expose his head outside as he surveyed the area with binoculars. A vigilant passerby on South Main might have been struck by a man’s head jutting out the window, with binoculars trained toward the Lorraine. A police security detail protecting King at the Lorraine, if there had been one, might have seen the man with the binoculars, been suspicious, and investigated.
Six rooms on the same floor as Ray’s shared a dingy bathroom at the end of a linoleum hallway. The faded green walls were smudged and peeling. The only light was a bulb screwed into a ceiling socket. There was a toilet, a small sink below a pitted mirror, and, off to the left underneath the single window, a bathtub. From Room 5B it was ten steps down the hallway.
The occupants of Room 6B, next to Ray’s, were Charles Stephens and his bedridden, common-law wife, Grace.7 Stephens was forty-six, a heavy equipment operator who had been forced by tuberculosis to retire when he was not yet thirty. He would tell investigators that in the late afternoon he heard the scraping of furniture being moved across the floor of the new lodger’s room. It was the sound of Ray pushing the chest of drawers away from the lone window. He might have heard Ray moving a straight-backed wooden chair and positioning it close to the window.
When Ray sat in the chair and leaned far out the window, the Lorraine came fully into view. But from that vantage point the motel lay at an angle that would complicate firing a bullet in that direction. Still, it afforded him an adequate perch for watching the Lorraine.
As his new neighbor stirred, Stephens continued to listen through the thin walls. He heard footsteps as Ray strode to the end of the hall and entered the bathroom. Stephens would recall that the man entered the bathroom twice, each time staying only a few minutes. One time Ray flushed the toilet. He returned to the bathroom yet a third time, staying what seemed like a long time to Stephens. He listened impatiently for the man to leave because he was anxious to use the toilet. He was not alone. Willie Anschutz, who occupied Room 4B, also needed the toilet. Anschutz knocked on the bathroom door, which was latched. No response.
Before Ray entered the bathroom, he likely had been peering from the window of Room 5B, his eyes glued on the Lorraine. It is probable that he saw King leave Room 201 at about 5:30 and climb the exterior stairway of the motel to the second floor before entering his room. It was another lucky break. The timing coincided with Stephens’s estimate of when Ray padded to the bathroom the third time.8
Fortunate to have the bathroom available at that moment, Ray latched the door and prepared a sniper’s nest. Off to one side next to the only window stood a claw-foot bathtub. It was small and antique, with sides that were rust-stained and chipped. Ray climbed into the tub and crouched next to the window. He must have been elated when he looked out the window. He had an excellent view of the Lorraine. The whole of the motel came into clear focus two hundred and seven feet away.
Ray yanked the window open and shoved its mesh screen outward. The screen clattered into the backyard. Through the binoculars the Lorraine appeared to be thirty feet away. The Redfield scope mounted on his Remington Gamemaster had the same magnification. He unsheathed the rifle from its blue, zippered carrying case and flipped open the box of soft-point ammunition.9
The army had taught Ray to fire a rifle with a degree of accuracy. He knew enough to pose the Gamemaster firmly on the window ledge. He pressed the muzzle down hard enough to dent the ledge slightly. And he waited.