THE PRISON INTERVIEW
Who knew then what would emerge
From the quiet calm in a small space?
Slowly questions and truth would surge,
From a quiet voice and placid face.
He was not the man we expected to see
The media concealed it well.
Though unlikely he would ever be free,
Our opinion of justice slowly fell.
By mid-October 1978, pursuant to Ralph Abernathy’s request several months earlier, I was finally ready to meet Ray at the Brushy Mountain prison in Tennessee. Mark Lane agreed to arrange for as long a session as we wished, which we could record in any way we chose. Our group was to include Ralph Abernathy; psychiatrist Howard Berens of Boston, who specialized in interpreting body language; and two photographers.
I had learned as much as possible about our subject’s life. James Earl Ray was born on March 10, 1928, in Alton, Illinois. He and his family, which included his two brothers, Jerry and John, moved some six years later to Ewing, Missouri, where his father gave the family the name of “Rayns” to avoid an association with some of James’s uncle’s petty criminal activities. Ray’s first alias was provided to him by his own father when he was six.
Ray finished elementary school (eighth grade) and promptly dropped out. He moved back to Alton, and at age sixteen he worked at the International Shoe Tannery in East Hartford, Illinois. He enlisted in the army in January 1946. Eventually, he was stationed in West Germany.
In December 1948, he received a general discharge, which cited his “inaptness and lack of adaptability to military service.” He returned to Alton and soon began drifting from job to job.
In September 1949, he left Chicago for California, and in October he was arrested for a minor burglary, a charge he has always denied. He was sentenced to ninety days in prison. After returning to Illinois in 1950, he worked in supermarkets and factories and attempted to earn his high school diploma by going to night school. In May 1952, he robbed a cab driver of eleven dollars. He was sent to the state penitentiary at Joliet and later transferred to the state prison farm in Pontiac, where he remained until he was released on March 12, 1954.
Though he stayed out of trouble for a while, at a bar he met Walter Rife, who persuaded him to sell US postal money orders Rife had stolen. They were caught, and on July 1, 1955, Ray was sentenced to forty-five months at the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. It is interesting to note that Rife, who apparently turned informer, received a lesser sentence even though he had actually stolen the money orders.
Q. Now we are talking about Leavenworth, the federal prison.
A. The federal prison. I was inside the walls and they offered—I could go outside and work in the dormitories and one of the other prisoners told me that people had been getting drug charges out there. If you get—I think the procedures was if you were arrested, if there was marijuana, if you were arrested, you could get two years if you entered a guilty plea. If you went to trial, you got ten years. And their position was that, it seemed to me, the general consensus was most of the blacks smoked marijuana and whites were drinking alcohol. So I didn’t want to go out there under those conditions where everyone was mixed up in the same dormitory room. So I didn’t go out there.
Q. You turned it down?
A. Yes. It had nothing to do with any race issue.
(Deposition of James Earl Ray, Transcript of proceedings, December 6, 1999, Vol. XII pp. 1746–1747)
In a subsequent interview (March 12, 1979) Ray would reflect philosophically on the issue of informing, saying that he didn’t want to end up like Joe Valachi, the mob informant. He felt that if someone else wanted to inform that was their business, but he would neither inform nor assist in the prosecution of anyone. Over the years, I have become impressed with the strength of this commitment. For Ray, this was more than a way to stay alive in prison. He believed it was wrong and would not relent. In this respect Ray was an old-fashioned con, respected wherever he had done time.
He was paroled from Leavenworth in early 1959, only to be tried and convicted for a grocery store robbery in St. Louis in December 1959. In March of 1960, he began serving a twenty-year sentence at the Missouri State Penitentiary.
He was always on the lookout for ways to escape. After two unsuccessful attempts, he succeeded on April 23, 1967, when he began the odyssey that was to end over a year later with his extradition from the United Kingdom. As discussed later, we would eventually learn that after being profiled for use as a scapegoat, his escape was arranged by the warden, who was paid $25,000 that was delivered from Hoover by Clyde Tolson, and taken to the prison by their Dixie Mafia collaborator Russell Adkins Sr. Ray would never become aware of this high-level plot.
After being convicted and eventually incarcerated at Brushy Mountain, Ray again tried to escape. His second attempt was successful. On June 10, 1977, he went over the wall but was caught and returned in just over two days. At that time it had become clear that the HSCA (the future of which had been in doubt) was going to continue. I was uneasy when I learned that a large number of FBI agents appeared extraordinarily quickly on the scene, and were only dispersed when the governor—at the request of the HSCA Chairman Stokes—went quickly to the prison and ordered them to leave.
On October 16, the day before our meeting was to take place, the members of our small group gathered at a hotel on the outskirts of Knoxville. Later that evening we were joined by Mark Lane and one of his assistants, Barbara Rabbito. For several hours that evening. Ralph and I went over questions I had drafted, preparing for the next day’s interview.
The next morning, we were joined by Ray’s wife, Anna. She had been an NBC courtroom artist sketching scenes at the trial following Ray’s escape attempt in 1976, apparently was smitten with him, and began to visit him regularly. They eventually were married by Dr. King’s old friend, Jim Lawson, who shared Mark Lane’s belief that Ray was not the killer. (In March 1993, James and Anna divorced acrimoniously.)
Around 10:00 that morning we set out for Petros, the remote home of Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. Mark Lane, Ralph Abernathy, Dr. Howard Berens, and I visited with James in a small interview room outside the maximum security area. From what I had read about him I was prepared to meet a racist, a hardened criminal whose tendency for violence lay not far below the surface.
I was very surprised. He seemed serious and shy, almost diffident, and shook hands weakly. He was trim but exceedingly pale, for he had been doing much of his time in solitary “for his own safety” as a result of an escape attempt. By that time he had been in prison for eight years and seven months. He sat at the head of a small table, and after Dr. Berens and I arranged the tape recorders, Abernathy began the session with a prayer.
Ralph’s prayer did little to ease the tension that had been building from the moment we passed through the prison gate. As a result of my research, I leaned toward the belief that Ray had not killed Dr. King; I hoped that he would be able to convince us of his innocence. I suppose that this hope stemmed, at least in part, from an unwillingness to accept that such a singular life and work as Dr. King’s could be snuffed out so unceremoniously by a “lone nut” who was by all appearances a nonentity. I knew, however, that if Ray’s answers didn’t measure up and we came to believe he was guilty, then Ralph would have to declare as much in his statement to the media. To do or say anything else would be like spitting on Dr. King’s grave.
The story we got from James Earl Ray that day, confirmed by him over the years, is significantly different from the one that would be embodied in the conclusions of the HSCA.
When Ray escaped from Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson in 1967, he had escaped by concealing himself in a bread box, being taken out with the delivery to the prison farm. When he left he had approximately $1,250 in cash, a small transistor radio, and a Social Security number in the name of John L. Rayns that his brother John had given him.
No one at the trial had a clue that his escape had been arranged. As previously noted, we would eventually learn that FBI Director Hoover’s number-two would deliver the funds to Russell Adkins Sr., who paid the warden in December 1966 to arrange the escape, which took place in April of 1967.
Ray eventually made his way to Chicago, where he found a job working at the Indian Trail restaurant in Winnetka. Under the Rayns name he obtained some identification papers, bought an old car, and acquired a temporary driver’s license. During this period he was in contact with his brother Jerry.
Concerned about staying too long in the area, Ray left the job after approximately six weeks and decided to go to Canada to get a false passport and then leave the country. He got a pistol from an ex-con he knew, sold his car, bought another, and drove to Montreal. Upon arriving in Canada, Ray began using the name Eric S. Galt (he wasn’t clear as to how he came to choose the name).
In Montreal, he robbed a brothel of $1,700. Soon after, he called a travel agency to find out what documents were necessary to get a Canadian passport. He was told he had to have someone vouch for him who had known him for two years, which he later found not to be true. He intended to travel to a country in Africa or South America from which he could not be extradited. He also started hanging out around the docks and local bars, seeking passage out of Canada on a freighter, or perhaps hoping to find some drunken sailor from whom he might steal merchant marine documents.
One of these waterside taverns was the Neptune Bar at 121 West Commissioner’s Street. Here in August 1967, he met the shadowy character Raul, who Ray insists coordinated and directed his activity from that day through April 4, 1968. The meeting at the Neptune was the first of eight or ten. Eventually, Ray told Raul that he needed identification and passage out of the country. Raul replied that he might be able to help if Ray would help with some smuggling schemes at the US border. Ray had no way of contacting Raul at this time. They simply made arrangements to get together, usually at the Neptune. (Over the years, Ray’s description of Raul has varied slightly, but he has basically described him as being of Latin extraction, weighing between 145 and 150 pounds, about 5 feet 9 inches tall, and having dark hair with reddish tint.)
Eventually discarding the idea of finding a guarantor, Ray resumed meeting with Raul and tentatively agreed to help smuggle some unspecified contraband across the border from Windsor to Detroit. Raul promised him travel papers and money for this service. Ray said he expected to receive only a small payment for the operation, but he never negotiated or even asked about his fee. This was typical of Ray’s behavior throughout. He didn’t believe he was in a position to ask questions—he was being paid to follow instructions.
Ray was told by Raul that if he decided to become further involved he would have to move to Alabama, where Raul would buy him a car, pay his living expenses, and give him a fee. In return, Ray would be expected to help Raul in another smuggling operation, this time across the Mexican border.
Shortly afterward, he met Raul at Windsor, and in two separate trips smuggled two sets of packages across the border to Detroit. He thought the first trip was a dry run to test him. On the second trip he was stopped at customs, but the inspector was interrupted by his superior and sent elsewhere. The second official discontinued the search and simply had him pay the $4.50 duty for a television set he had declared.
When he got to Detroit, Raul nervously asked why he had been delayed; Ray showed him the receipt from the customs officer. Raul gave him about $1,500 and a New Orleans telephone number where a message could be left. He told Ray that if he would continue to cooperate, he would eventually obtain not only travel documents but more money as well.
Raul told Ray to get rid of his old car and go to Mobile, Alabama, where they would meet at a place yet to be decided. Ray said that he convinced Raul to go to Birmingham instead because it was a larger city and Ray thought he’d be more anonymous there. Raul said that he would send a general delivery letter to Birmingham with instructions on where and when to meet.
Sometime after his arrival in Birmingham, Ray picked up a general delivery letter from Raul that instructed him to go to the Starlight Lounge the same evening. There Raul reminded Ray that he was going to need a reliable car. Ray saw an advertisement in the paper for a used Mustang, and Raul gave him $2,000 in cash to buy it.
Raul instructed him to buy some photography equipment. He also gave Ray a new number in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which he could call for instructions as a backup to the New Orleans number. Raul gave him $1,000 for the photography equipment and his living expenses, and at Raul’s request Ray gave him a set of keys to the Mustang. He ordered the photography equipment by mail from a Chicago firm but didn’t understand why Raul wanted it.
Ray had previously received his driver’s license and a set of Alabama tags under the name of Eric S. Galt. He kept the old Rayns license in a rented safe deposit box at a local bank, along with some of the cash Raul had given him and a pistol he had bought through a classified ad two or three weeks after he arrived in Birmingham.
Sometime in late September or early October, Ray received a general delivery letter from Raul asking him to call New Orleans, which he did. This would be the first of several such calls he would make. Raul himself never got on the phone, but Ray instead always talked with a man who knew where Raul was and relayed instructions. Ray never met the man he spoke to on the phone and didn’t think he could now identify his voice, but he had the impression that the contact kept tabs on persons other than Raul. Ray was told to drive to Baton Rouge and make another phone call to receive instructions for a rendezvous in Mexico.
When Ray got to Baton Rouge, Raul was gone, having left instructions for Ray to go directly to a motel in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, just across the border. Ray checked in there on October 7. Raul joined him and they went back across the border to the United States carrying some kind of contraband inside the spare tire. Ray surmised that it was drugs or jewelry. Raul gave him $2,000 and assured him that he would get the travel documents next time, along with enough money for Ray to go into business in another country. Raul gave him a second New Orleans number to replace the first and told him that his next operation would involve transporting guns and accessories. Raul said he would contact him again, when the time came, through general delivery.
After traveling in Mexico for some time, Ray headed for the California border. Before crossing over, however, he went through the car to see if there was anything that might make customs agents suspicious. Down the left side of the front passenger seat he found a cigarette packet with a business card slipped into it. On the front of the card was printed a name that had been inked out, the name of a city (a two-word name that appeared to be New Orleans), and “L.E.A.A.” Written on the back was the name Randy Rosen. There were some additional letters after Rosen that James couldn’t identify (he later came to believe that the name was Rosenson) and an address, 1189 Northwest River Drive, Miami.
Ray wasn’t certain how the card got in the car but believed that somehow it was connected to Raul—perhaps the cigarette packet had slipped out of Raul’s pocket. Ray only threw it away in Los Angeles after copying the information. Subsequently, Ray’s brother Jerry and others spent a fair amount of time and energy trying to find Rosenson.
Ray arrived in Los Angeles on or about November 19, believing he was through with Raul. He had given up hope that Raul would get him the travel documents, and he was determined to try to get merchant seaman’s papers on his own. He lived for a while in an apartment on North Serrano Street. He began looking for papers and a job, and he even placed a classified ad in the Los Angeles Times advertising himself as available for “culinary help.” He didn’t have a Social Security card, and because seaman’s papers required fingerprints he was worried that his efforts could result in his exposure as a fugitive. He enrolled in a bartending course, took dancing lessons, and had psychological and hypnotic counseling for a period of time, spending about $800 on these activities.
He also contacted a number of organizations he thought might help him to emigrate. He sent out photographs that weren’t good likenesses (his face appeared fatter than it was), which later would be used by the media to accuse him of being on amphetamines. He also had plastic surgery on his nose to alter his appearance.
Ray said he became frustrated and uneasy about being kept in Los Angeles for all this time. He said that he did not have a clue about this delay but was just waiting for instructions from Raul through the contact he was given.
By early December, Ray was short of cash. He called the New Orleans number and the contact suggested he go to New Orleans. Marie Martin, a barmaid at the Sultan Club in the St. Francis Hotel, hooked him up with her cousin, Charles Stein, who wanted a ride to New Orleans and back. Before leaving Los Angeles, Ray dropped Marie Martin and Charles and Rita Stein off at the local George Wallace independent presidential campaign headquarters so they could register to vote. Soon after, Ray and the Steins set off. Ray described Stein as a sort of “hippie” type.
In New Orleans, Ray checked into the Provincial Motel in the Latin Quarter at Stein’s suggestion. He met Raul at Le Bunny Lounge. Raul told him that they would be running guns into Mexico and that Ray could end up in Cuba. There he could book himself passage to anywhere in the world. Raul gave him $500 and said that he would contact him in Los Angeles in a few months.
After returning to Los Angeles with Charles Stein around the middle of January, Ray moved into the St. Francis Hotel. On March 17, following instructions from Raul, he left for New Orleans, arriving a day later. He found that Raul had gone to Birmingham, leaving word that he would meet him at the Starlight Lounge the next day. Somehow Ray got lost on the way to Birmingham and wound up in Selma. Since it was dark by that time, he spent the night there.
Ray arrived in Birmingham on the following day, March 23, once again running somewhat behind schedule, and went straight to the Starlight, where he met Raul. Raul seemed to be in a hurry to get to Atlanta, though he didn’t say why. They set out immdediately.
Upon arriving in Atlanta they drove to the Peachtree Avenue and Fourteenth Street area, where Ray rented a room from the very drunk landlord, James Garner. After a meal at a local diner, Raul left, saying he’d be back in the morning.
The next morning Ray took the room for a week. He was able to get his room free because he convinced Garner that he had paid him in advance the night before. Later, on the telephone, Raul told Ray not to go too far away in case he needed him quickly; he might be required to drive to Miami in a few days. Raul wanted to be able to come and go freely from his confederate’s room without being seen by the landlord or anyone else. Ray was unable to duplicate a door key for him (though he had taken a locksmithing course), so he agreed to leave the side door open. This didn’t work too well, however, because the landlord’s sister kept locking it.
Raul apparently left town, telling Ray he’d be back in a couple of days. Six days later he returned, saying he was now ready to put the gunrunning operation into full gear. He instructed Ray to get a large-bore deer rifle fitted with a scope, plus ammunition, and to check on the price of cheap foreign rifles. Raul originally wanted the gun to be bought in Atlanta, but Ray suggested that he could buy a rifle in Alabama more easily, since he had an Alabama ID. Raul agreed.
With that part of the operation set, Ray packed up some of his belongings. He left some things behind at the rooming house: his pistol, some clothes, a television set, and a typewriter. He fully expected to return. Raul and Ray drove together to Birmingham, where Ray rented a room in a Travelodge motel. There Raul briefed him further on the gun purchase and gave him money. They went to a tavern, probably the Starlight Lounge, where Raul told him to go to Aeromarine Supply to buy the rifle.
At Aeromarine Supply, Ray told the clerk he was going hunting with his brother-in-law, looked at a number of rifles, and finally selected one and asked to have a scope mounted on it. He asked the salesman to “throw in” some ammunition. Ray purchased the gun under the alias Harvey Lowmeyer, the name of a former criminal associate in Quincy, Illinois. At the last minute he believed it would be safer to buy the gun under another alias. If the clerk requested identification, he would go elsewhere to purchase the rifle under his verifiable alias, Eric S. Galt.
He purchased the rifle and took it back to the motel and showed it to Raul. To Ray’s surprise Raul said it wouldn’t do. Ray had picked up some brochures in the store, so Raul marked the rifle he wanted and told Ray to try to make an exchange. Ray called Aeromarine Supply, said that his brother-in-law didn’t like the rifle, and asked if he might exchange it for another; the store said the rifle could be exchanged but he would have to wait until the next day.
The next morning, March 30, Ray picked up the new rifle (which we know was a Remington 760 Gamemaster). The salesman threw in some ammunition free of charge. Raul approved. (At the time of our interview, Ray appeared to be genuinely ignorant about the brand, type, and make of the gun bought on the twenty-ninth, as well as the one obtained in exchange on the thirtieth—even now, long after the details have been publicly revealed, Ray seems not to recall these details.) Before leaving the motel, Raul instructed him to check into the New Rebel Motel on Lamar Avenue in Memphis on April 3 and to bring the gun with him.
Ray’s significant ignorance about the rifles led me to seriously question his guilt concerning the shooting. Purchasing the wrong gun and having to return and exchange it clearly established for me the involvement of another who was giving instructions. In deposition, Ray described the scene.
A. I can’t remember all the details. He probably showed me something about it. He probably figured I had sense enough to load the rifle.
Q. Tell us about the rifle, what kind—did it have a lever under it?
A. I don’t have no idea what it was. I just—he showed it to me and it looked like a rifle so I said, you know, wrap it up.
Q. When you first saw it, did it have a scope on it?
A. I don’t know if it did or not.
Q. You didn’t look through the scope to see what kind of sighting or bearing it had?
A. No.
Q. And did the scope have some little rubber tips on the ends—on each end to keep from getting scratched up, do you remember that?
A. No, I don’t remember any of that.
Q. Was it in a box or did he just have it back behind the counter or was it on the glass counter or where did he have the rifle?
A. I can’t recall. He just brought it out and showed me. He said how is this? And I said, okay, wrap it up.
Q. So you walked in and didn’t tell him what kind of rifle you wanted. What brand, what caliber, what anything, you just said I want a deer rifle?
A. Yes. I told him I was going to hunt deer with my brother-in-law and I would like to look at some rifles, and he said, this is what you want. This is probably the best thing out. He said words to that effect. I said, okay, that’s what I want.
Q. And he never showed you how it had to be loaded or what you do to load it or anything.
A. He may have, but I don’t recall it if he did.
Q. Did you specify you wanted one with a scope on it?
A. Yes.
Q. You did?
A. Uh-huh.
Q. All right. And why did you do that? What was the reason for wanting one with a scope on it?
A. Well, he—Raul had asked me to get one with a scope on it.
Q. He had told you that?
A. Yes.
Q. How many guns did Raul tell you to get?
A. He asked me to get one as a display to some buyers and he asked me to check on the prices and the quantity of some foreign-made rifles.
Q. Okay. Well. Mr. Ray, did you ever ask Raul why he wanted you to purchase these in Atlanta or Birmingham, why you didn’t purchase them in New Orleans?
A. No. I didn’t make no inquiries like that.
(Ibid., 1917–1919)
Q. Okay. You got back to the motel. Was he waiting for you?
A. Yes.
Q. Anyone with him?
A. No.
Q. Okay, did you take the gun in?
A. Yes.
Q. What did he say about it?
A. Well, he just said it was—he looked at it briefly and he said it was the wrong kind then.
Q. What did he mean by that?
A. Well. I don’t know what he meant. He just said it was the wrong kind of rifle.
Q. The wrong caliber, wrong brand, wrong what?
A. I think he just said it was—just the wrong type.
Q. Okay. That was his words?
A. Yes.
Q. Okay. Did you ask him what he meant by that or what he really wanted?
A. No. I didn’t. I had a brochure, the salesman give me a brochure. So I just handed him the brochure and told him to pick out what he wanted and I would go back and—
Q. You mean a brochure of several rifles?
A. Yes.
Q. Okay. Had you asked him for that?
A. The salesman?
Q. Yes.
A. I think he just give it to me.
Q. Okay. Well, had he given you this brochure before you bought this rifle?
A. No. I think he give it to me after, when I got ready to leave. He probably just handed it to me.
Q. All right. Did—I gather Raul took the gun out of the box when you got back to the motel?
A. Yes.
Q. Did he look down the scope on it?
A. If he did, I didn’t notice it. He seemed just to look at it and checked it out briefly and said it was wrong type. I think it was the wrong caliber.
Q. Did he put any guns in the—did he put any guns in the clip to see if they fit?
A. No. He didn’t anything with it, no.
Q. He didn’t pull the trigger to see if anything would work on it?
A. No.
Q. Okay. What did he want you to do then?
A. Well. He wanted me to exchange it and I told him, you know, to pick out what he wanted. So I—he picked out one and went down and made a phone call to Arrow Marine and told them that I had purchased the wrong type of rifle and they told me, well, bring it back and they would exchange it. So—
Q. What did you tell them was wrong with it?
A. I don’t think I said anything right then. I just told him I think it was the wrong caliber or something.
Q. And they told you to bring it back?
A. Yes.
Q. And you had this brochure and Raul had picked out another type rifle he wanted you to exchange for it?
A. Yes.
Q. All right. Did he give you any more money?
A. No.
Q. Okay. Did you go on back then to exchange it?
A. Yes.
Q. That same day?
A. I went back to exchange it the same day and the salesman, he may have told me on the phone, he said that he couldn’t do it that day but he could get to me—he could fix it—he didn’t have time the next day, next morning and—
(Ibid., 1925–1928)
Ray set out from Birmingham and proceeded as instructed toward Memphis at a leisurely pace, spending the night at a motel in Decatur. On the thirty-first he stayed at another motel in the Tuscumbia-Florence area. On April 1, he spent the night in a motel in Corinth, Mississippi (which he subsequently identified as the Southern Motel). He spent the night of April 2 in the DeSoto Motel in Mississippi, just south of Memphis. (Harold Weisberg told me some years later that in 1974, while working for attorneys Bud Fensterwald and James Lesar in preparation for an evidentiary hearing for Ray, he spoke to the manager and some cleaning staff, who confirmed that Ray was at the DeSoto Motel as he claimed. The manager claimed that the records had been turned over to FBI agents when they visited shortly after the assassination.)
On April 3, Ray drove across the Mississippi-Tennessee state line and checked into the New Rebel Motel in Memphis. Late in the evening, Raul appeared at the doorway wearing a raincoat, and Ray let him in. Ray didn’t know where he came from or how he got there. Raul told him they were going to rent a room near the river. There they would work the first stage of the gunrunning deal.
At the time, Ray figured that Raul wanted the room in a rundown part of Memphis because they’d be less conspicuous. As usual, he didn’t ask Raul any questions. Raul wanted Ray to rent the room using the Galt alias, but Ray was uncomfortable with this and suggested using an alias he had used previously—John Willard.
Raul then wrote out the address of a tavern named Jim’s Grill and instructed Ray to meet him there at 3:00 the next afternoon.
Earlier in the day, Ray had brought the rifle in its box into the room wrapped in a sheet or bedspread. Just before Raul left, Ray gave him the gun, and Raul left with it under his coat. He had no idea why Raul wanted to take the gun. James Earl Ray has remained adamant that after turning the gun over to Raul at the New Rebel Motel on the evening of April 3 he never saw it again.
After checking out of the New Rebel Motel on April 4, Ray stalled for some time, did some shopping, changed a slowly leaking tire, and then drove downtown. He left the car in a parking lot and proceeded on foot to look for Jim’s Grill. He first went into a tavern on Main Street called Jim’s Club and noticed a fellow in the tavern who looked at him “kind of funny,” then eventually located Jim’s Grill down the street, at 418 South Main Street. Not seeing Raul inside, he retrieved the car and parked it at the curb just outside the Grill around 3:30 p.m. By then Raul had arrived. Ray remembers Raul asking him where the car was. Ray pointed to it.
Ray rented a room in the rooming house above the Grill for a week, using the name John Willard. There Raul told him to get a pair of infrared binoculars; the people who were buying the guns wanted them too, he said. When Ray asked for them at the York Arms Store on South Main Street, he was told they could only be bought at an army surplus store, so instead he bought a pair of regular binoculars.
When he returned, he noticed that the man whom he had first seen at Jim’s Club was inside the Grill. He apparently didn’t notice Ray, who didn’t go inside but went up to the room where Raul was waiting.
Ray tried to tell Raul about the man downstairs, but Raul ignored him and told him he was going to meet a very important gunrunner and that they were going to the outskirts of town to try out the rifle. Raul told him to bring his stuff upstairs, so Ray got his bag out of the Mustang. He also brought a bedspread up in case he had to spend the night there because he didn’t want to sleep on the one in the room. Raul gave him $200 and told him to go to the movies and come back in two or three hours. Ray was instructed to leave the Mustang where it was because Raul said he would probably use it.
Ray went downstairs for the last time around 5:20 p.m. He had talked to Raul for about forty-five minutes. Back in the street, he looked in at Jim’s Grill and didn’t see the man he suspected had been following him. He remembered that the Mustang had a flat spare tire and decided to have it fixed so that Raul wouldn’t have any trouble if he used the car later.
Ray said he was uneasy about the man who he thought had followed him, and concluded that he was either a federal narcotics agent or the “international gunrunner” Raul had mentioned. He drove to a gas station to have the tire repaired, arriving sometime between 5:50 and 6:00 p.m. Since there were a lot of customers, he simply waited, because he was in no hurry. Finally an attendant came over and told him that he didn’t have the time to change his tire. Ray remembered that an ambulance raced by with its siren blaring.
Driving back, he was confronted by a policeman who had blocked off the street about a block away from the rooming house. The policeman motioned to him to turn around. The policeman’s presence told him that something was wrong, and his inclination, as always in such circumstances, was to get out, so he drove south toward Mississippi, intending at first to get to a telephone and call the New Orleans number. It wasn’t until he had almost reached Grenada, Mississippi that he heard on the radio that Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed.
It was when he heard that the police were looking for a white man in a white Mustang that he realized he might have been involved with a man or men who had conspired to kill Dr. King. He took back roads rather than the interstate highway because he was afraid he might be the object of a search. He stopped and threw away the photography equipment and drove straight to Atlanta, where he abandoned the car.
Ray made his way by bus out of the United States into Canada, reaching Toronto on April 6. He went to a local newspaper to check birth announcements of people who would have been slightly younger than him since he thought he looked younger than he was. He picked out some names, including Ramon George Sneyd and Paul E. Bridgeman. He called each to find out whether either had applied for a passport, pretending that it was an official inquiry. Sneyd hadn’t applied for a passport, but Bridgeman had, so Ray decided not to use Bridgeman’s name for the passport, only for local use.
On April 8 he registered as Paul Bridgeman at a rooming house on Ossington Street. He would leave the house every morning at 8:30, returning each evening around 5:30. (He subsequently stated that he took another room in a second rooming house on Dundas Street, where he would spend most of the day, pretending that he had a night job. He registered there under the Sneyd name.)
Ray flew to England on May 8 and from there he made a quick trip to Portugal to try to get to one of the Portuguese overseas territories—Angola or Mozambique. Unsuccessful, he returned to England, planning to go eventually to Belgium to explore the possibilities of taking another route. As we know, he was apprehended at Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968, and extradited to the United States on July 19, 1968.
We asked Ray why he had pleaded guilty. He insisted that he had been greatly pressured and coerced. I would later learn the details of the extent of the pressure on him and the history of his extraordinary legal representation that even involved his lawyer paying him to take a plea (see Appendix C). This is more fully discussed in Chapter 17. We finished our session with Ray around 4:00 p.m., some five hours after we began.
Dr. Berens and I agreed that during the interview Ray displayed a vagueness and apprehensive equivocation relating to any connection with persons or places in Louisiana. There was also a curious general change in tone and manner when we began to probe about why he went for psychological and hypnotic counseling. Only during this experience did he use his real name (for fear of it coming out during hypnosis). He has dismissed that experience as a kind of extracurricular preoccupation that he undertook while awaiting instructions from Raul. The possibility of Ray being subjected to mind control occurred to me.
As for Raul, the extensive details that Ray provided convinced us that such a person did indeed exist, despite the authorities’ consistent public statements to the contrary. Though Ray did not mention it during our interview, I subsequently learned that in early 1978 he said that his brother Jerry had anonymously been sent a photograph of an individual whom Ray positively identified as Raul. This identification was reported by the local media at the time. On the back of the photograph was written the name Carlos Hernandez Rumbaut. James said that he sent the photograph to his brother John in St. Louis and asked him to check it against picture archives at the main library. In particular he asked him to compare it with photographs of alleged drug dealers. John made a copy of the photo and sent the original back in a package with other materials. Ray said that when he opened the package the photo was missing. A few days later federal marshals arrested John Ray on a parole violation. When he was released, he found that his house had been rifled and numerous things taken, including the photograph. (Years later I would learn that Rumbaut was an asset of the Drug Enforcement Administration [DEA] and that he had also been implicated in drug dealing. I obtained his photograph—it was clear that Rumbaut was not the man whom James had identified in 1978 as Raul. In hindsight, it appeared possible that by putting his name on the back of the real Raul’s picture, someone could have been trying to set James up to wrongly identify Rumbaut as Raul.)
Abernathy and I later agreed with Dr. Beren’s assessment that Ray was basically telling the truth. However, I believe that James Earl Ray never revealed all that he knew. He had been the target of at least one murder attempt in prison and has probably decided that to say more was dangerous. We didn’t know what, if any, role he had played, but we thought he was an unlikely candidate for the assassin.
Ralph Abernathy felt that Ray didn’t show any signs of the compulsive hatred of blacks common in the South. Ralph was, like the rest of us, I believe, genuinely surprised at this. We had all heard and read the mass media’s reports about Ray’s motivation for the murder.
As we left the prison, a phalanx of television and print journalists was waiting. Ralph’s statement left no doubt as to his conclusions following the interrogation: “James Earl Ray’s answers to my questions convinced me more than ever that it was a conspiracy that took the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and that James Earl Ray should get a new trial.”
The session left me intrigued and troubled. The James Earl Ray I had read and heard about was not the man I saw in that tiny room. The man I saw was not a nut, nor was he a flaming racist. In fact, there was gentleness about him that I didn’t think could have been feigned. Could an innocent man have spent nearly nine years in prison with the truth never having been revealed?
I decided to continue my investigation.