The Visit: October 17, 1978
BY MID-OCTOBER 1978 I was 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. Thus 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 help sell U.S. 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. 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 is more than a way to stay alive in prison. He believes it is wrong and will not relent. In this respect Ray is an old-fashioned con, respected wherever he has 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. After being convicted and eventually incarcerated at Brushy Mountain, Ray again tried to escape. His second attempt there 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.
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. Late 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 Martin’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, 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 down 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 Martin’s grave.